I’m completely fascinated by abandoned places.
The stories are strewn about right there in front of you to silently take in, and I want to experience them. I’m actually old enough to remember when Chernobyl melted down as a kid. I remember seeing The Day After on TV. It was a national event, and my childhood was in the existential shadow of nuclear armageddon. Growing up during the cold war made the former Soviet Union intriguing to me. Who were these people? What was it really like over there, and what were they really like? I’ve always been interested.
Years later, I became a filmmaker and won some international awards for commercials that I’d made. I started to hustle around the world to get directing work after I came out of film school just in time for the great recession of 2008. One of the places that I went for meetings was Kiev, which is less than two hours from Chernobyl and the abandoned Soviet utopian ghost town of Pripyat, which still has a feel like it came straight out of some 1970’s science fiction movie in its aesthetics, even as it silently decays.
I had to go. I had to see this place and shoot it. At this point, it was a good year or two before the now famous TV series about Chernobyl had come out, so there wasn’t a hell of a lot of tourist draw to this place. I found a business that was just a full sized van with a young woman who spoke English as a guide. There were about 7-8 of us in there. The guide showed us a radiation meter reading in Kiev before we left to give us perspective.
After a long drive through the rural Ukrainian countryside, we came upon a military checkpoint, where the guide stopped and got out and went in to talk with the to guys manning the post for about ten minutes. She then came out, and they raised the flimsy wooden gate up for us. This happened twice on the way in. I’m sure there was some sort of business transaction going down there.
On the way in, we stopped at a small abandons village. There were small houses and a small school and town hall still standing. There were wild horses in an adjacent field and wild dogs all around. We were told not to put them because they’re irradiated. It was surreal.
As we approached ground zero, I saw the towers that I remember seeing on the news as a kid peering over the trees. My heart sunk. Somehow, I didn’t think we were going to be that close. We got much closer. We parked near the reactor, and I’m telling you… it’s hard to describe, but this thing felt like a presence. It felt like a monster. It felt alive and very, very dark. That’s all that I can say about it. It loomed and felt conscience. I’ll never forget it.
We went to Pripyat, the utopian town built for the reactor’s workers and their families, where the apartments still stand furnished and time stands still. We had radiation detectors and timers and were only allowed in the school house for a few minutes because of the dangers. (You can hear it in one of the videos here.) Actual school work was still tacked to the wall since 1986. Radiation signs were in the grass, and we were told to stay on the pathways, where it was relatively clean. At one point the guide demonstrated by tossing the detector into the grass right next to us, and it damn near blew up with a loud alarm. All you had to do was trip and fall into the grass, and you would essentially be dead.
We were not supposed to go inside of any buildings, but since we were an unofficial and unsupervised group of people, we went everywhere. I couldn’t help but be struck with how much the dark and drippy interiors reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s, Stalker. It was so surreal to me. At one point, a drip of water dropped down the collar of my shirt and down my back. “Fuck, I’m dead.”, I thought. I still think about that sometimes.
I would wander off on my own with my camera most of the time. This is how I could really feel this place and experience it. The entire forest surrounding the area turned bright red in 1986. You can’t deny the sense of it being haunted by something somehow.
On the way back, we had to stop at both military checkpoints and walk through a radiation detector. If it went off, you’d have to strip naked and they’d give you some shorts and a t-shirt to go with supposedly. None went off. We also stopped at an odd formerly top secret Soviet installation that they would called camp for their version of the boy scouts. I don’t have any photos of it, but it essentially looked like some sort of strange and just massive Tesla-like electric power type of device. It was about a hundred yards across and hundred of feet tall. In some ways, it sort of looked like that weird HARP installation that conspiracy nuts talk so much about up in Alaska. Somebody knows exactly what this thing did. All the guide knew was that it was built to somehow “deter American aggression”. It remains a post cold war mystery. Fucking fascinating.
A year or two later when I saw the Chernobyl special on HBO, I questioned the wisdom ion exposing myself to this, but I just had to. I had to experience it and share it. It turns out, that’s sort of what my life is basically all about. Enjoy.