Chernobyl villagers live a shadow of their former lives

By Stefan Korshak Apr 25, 2011, 12:37 GMT

Poliske, Ukraine ­ People living in the swamplands and pine forests of Polesia, a territory now bisected by the Ukrainian- Belarusian border, have long been poor and neglected.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986 made things worse.

This has always been one of Europe's very poorest territories,' said Voldymyr Tarasov, a former resident of Poliske, once a village of some 4,000 people in the heart of Polesia. The soil is bad, the growing season is short, and the roads were always few.'

Chernobyl ruined this place 25 years ago,' he added. And the people still living near the reactor, next to the radiation, they have absolutely nothing; they are destitute.'

In the wake of the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet government banned human settlement in a radius of 30 kilometres from the plants stricken reactor. Radiation made more than two dozen villages and towns uninhabitable, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.

Tarasov, a young man at the time of the disaster, was one of them, transported by government buses and trains away from his home never to return.

Poleske is now a ghost town. The drab, Soviet-era high-rises are gutted, and the collective farms have been abandoned. All of them are overgrown by a young forest that encroaches even on the highway.

The thing is, I am one of the lucky ones. We got out. My family managed to start a new life,' Tarasov said. But there are thousands who haven't been so lucky.'

The 30-kilometre no-mans land surrounding the power plant is known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

The Ukrainian government calls the adjacent territory prichernobylski,' meaning these areas are now safe enough for habitation.

But the boundaries are not as clear as the names would suggest.

Even where you think its safe, sometimes it isn't,' said Ivan Kovalchiuk, a border police captain who commands a unit that monitors the Exclusion Zone. You can have perfectly normal radiation levels, and then you take a step somewhere ~ and your Geiger counter is reading 100 times the safe level.'

There are varying official estimates of the number of people living near Chernobyl. Between two and four dozen people, almost all older retirees, are believed to have a residence inside the Zone itself.

There are very few of them, and they just want to live out the rest of their lives quietly in their homes,' Kovalchiuk said.

A far greater number of people live in districts on the edges of the Zone ­ as many 200,000, according to combined Ukrainian and Belarusian estimates.

Forestry, dairy production and the raising of livestock are unsafe here, officials say.

That means, that the only thing we can do to support ourselves is to raise our own food and eat it ourselves. Its illegal to sell it,' said Vera Afanasievna, a resident of Sokolki. We know it probably isn't healthy, but we have no money.'

A half-dozen villages on the edge of the Chernobyl Zone are rudimentary. Although homes had electricity, the buildings appeared not to have changed since the days of the Russian empire.

One exception is the town of Slavutych, built shortly after the Chernobyl disaster to accommodate plant workers and clean-up crews. Here the buildings are new. The average salary is about 1,000 dollars a month - more than triple the typical monthly pay in Ukraine.

Over the years, the country has received more than a billion dollars in aid to deal with the disaster and its aftermath. But little of that money appears to have been made available to provide for the health and livelihood of those affected.

'Slavutych, where the Chernobyl specialists are, they live well. The world helps them,' Tarasov said. 'But the people on the lands around Chernobyl, all they ever got was radiation.'