Inside the Russian Occupation of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Chernobyl Roulette: War in the Nuclear Disaster Zone, by Serhii Plokhy, W.W. Norton & Company, 240 pages, $29.99
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is the closest we have to a real-life postapocalyptic wasteland. After the infamous 1986 meltdown of a Soviet nuclear reactor, around 1,000 square miles in northern Ukraine were evacuated due to radioactive contamination. Video games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Call of Duty imagine the zone as a lawless wasteland, with bandits and spies fighting in Soviet-era ghost towns while dodging radiation patches.
In reality, Chernobyl is less abandoned than outsiders might imagine. The ill-fated nuclear reactor and the containment shell around it require ongoing maintenance. The area as a whole is monitored constantly for levels of contamination. A legion of Ukrainian workers regularly commutes into the exclusion zone from the nearby city of Slavutych, built after the meltdown for evacuated Chernobyl staff.
And in February 2022, there were soldiers. Chernobyl, sandwiched between Kyiv and the Belarusian border, was directly in the path of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For a little more than a month, Russian troops occupied the exclusion zone, where they found themselves prisoners of their own occupation. Although the Russians had all the firepower, they had to rely on the Ukrainian staff to protect them from radiological danger, which gave the Ukrainians leverage in the bizarre power struggle that went on there.
Chernobyl Roulette, by the Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, is a good first draft of this history. Along with the wild chronology of events, Plokhy provides brief yet vivid sketches of the people involved, from the Russian commanders and Ukrainian caretakers to the infantrymen, janitors, tour guides, and squatters in the exclusion zone. Plokhy can be heavy-handed in pressing his belief that the international community abandoned Ukraine, but he is more fair-minded about the dilemmas between collaboration and resistance that Ukrainians faced.
Much of the story is told through the eyes of Valentyn Heiko, the Ukrainian foreman on duty when the invasion began. Heiko neither welcomed his new Russian overlords nor resisted them. Instead he treated the foreign soldiers as unexpected visitors to his plant. Heiko explained to Col. Andrei Frolenkov and Gen. Sergei Burakov that their troops would have to wear guest badges and follow safety instructions, just like any other delegation of outsiders. The officers had no choice but to comply, since they needed Heiko’s expertise to stay safe.
The staff often played on the so
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