The last couple weeks have been spent in Kyiv,¹ and I’ve kind of been treating it as the calm before the storm. I’m heading to Berlin to play in a larp,² then traveling with a friend on a whirlwind tour of Europe³ before returning to Berlin for another larp.⁴ So this is my last chance to do nothing for a moderately long amount of time.

Kyiv is different than anyplace else I’ve travelled so far. I’ve felt somewhat alienated here, more aware of the way I’m constantly arriving and leaving places, more aware of neither being a tourist or a resident. Maybe it’s all the Cyrillic. More to the point, it’s the first former Soviet city I’ve ever been to,⁵ and there’s something about that history that gives it a very different vibe than other places. It’s a little hard to pin down.

The city really is beautiful. Like lots of European cities, it’s great to walk through, and much of the city center is breathtaking. I’ve done a little of the touristy stuff here, visiting the art museum and the World War II museum,⁶ but otherwise I’ve just been hanging out, heading to restaurants or bars in the evenings, sitting around and talking with friends.

Kyiv turns out to be in the throes of that same high-end cocktail revival that hit everywhere about a decade ago, so a lot of that evening time has been spent at speakeasies. During the day I mostly spend time on my computer. It’s a placid life.

At the recommendation of a friend I signed up for a tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on the weekend. I hadn’t even realized it was so close to Kyiv. The entire tour was astonishing. I knew vaguely about the whole thing — I did a fair amount of reading on the accident and the immediate aftermath a couple years ago for a trivia question — but I misunderstood a lot of the details.

To start with, there are people living there. The permanent residents are generally evacuees who returned or refused to leave in the first place.⁷ They’re mostly elderly, and their population has steadily dwindled over time,⁸ now estimated at less than 200. Larger is the population of workers who rotate on and off the site, which numbers about 3,000. Until 2000 the power plant continued to be operated, producing power from the reactors which hadn’t melted down. Now the workers are mostly involved in security, monitoring, decommissioning the reactors, and continued cleanup from the fallout.

The zone covers an area roughly the size of Luxembourg, and encompasses what were once more than 180 small villages, as well as the cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat.⁹ There’s a good argument that the government went overboard in relocating people; the reduced life expectancy from living in proximity to the expected radiation, especially on the outskirts of the zone, is likely less than the reduced life expectancy from living in the air pollution in central Kyiv.

It’s about a 2½ hour drive from Kyiv, so you leave from Kyiv around 8am, arriving at the outskirts late morning. It then takes a while to get through the military checkpoint — you get your passport checked going in and out — and then you’re in the zone. Once you’re in there’s a surprising amount of freedom in where you go and what you see; with the exception of the contained reactor, there’s not a lot of oversight. I have little doubt someone on one of the less scrupulous tour groups is going to die on one of the tours, not from radiation, but by having one of the increasingly disintegrating buildings collapse on them.

The tour company I used¹⁰ started with the memorial and its Wormwood statue, a suitably creepy angel blowing a trumpet constructed from rebar.¹¹ From there we saw the Duga-1 radar range, visited a few abandoned villages, then had lunch in the same canteen in Chernobyl that serves the workers. After that we drove to the reactor, then spent the rest of the time wandering around Pripyat.

Pripyat is fascinating, because it represents what the Soviet Union in the 1970s thought a modern showcase city should look like. You can tell how much design and effort was put into the place, from the massive gymnasium to the sprawling grade school to the fairgrounds with ferris wheel to the supermarket¹² (which still has carts and signs and freezer cases). There was a lot of effort put into this place.

And now the forest is reclaiming all of it. The symbol of Pripyat was Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and delivered it to humanity. Turns out the founding myth should have been Pandora. You’ll occasionally see people attacking protestors against nuclear energy (or GMOs, or some other newfangled science thing) as being anti-progress luddites who just don’t get it. And sure, there’s a reactionary element to a lot of that. But it’s hard not to wander around the eerie desolation surrounding Reactor Number 4 and find plenty of reasons to oppose these sorts of science projects. It has nothing to do with distrusting the science, and everything to do with distrusting the scientists.

Back in Kyiv, I was walking with a friend and mentioned something about the parks. They pointed out how bad the Soviets were at designing them. They’d clear out these huge boxy spaces and then have no idea what to do with them. You end up with greenery that manages to feel cavernous. There’d be monumental statues or sculptures jammed here and there, and otherwise this kind of empty vastness.

It’s a problem that runs through most of their aesthetic choices; their “celebration” of the people seems to be obsessed with building spaces everyone can fit into all at once.¹³ It’s about size, about impressing people with these mammoth statues and boulevards and atriums. And in the hands of a brilliant architect, it can be spectacular. But brilliant architects can be hard to come by. There’s a lot of buildings that are just these austere fortresses of concrete and marble. Build a big enough room and you can pretty easily awe anybody.¹⁴

But people don’t live in opera houses and Olympic stadiums. The Soviets were building cities for masses, not people. It can be inspiring or glorious or overwhelming or oppressive, but at the end of the day most people go find smaller, comfortable spaces to make their own — cozy and soft, warm and welcoming. It’s not surprising that speakeasies are so popular here; they’re tiny secret spaces hidden away where people can evade the eyes of the authorities.

One of the villages we toured in Chernobyl was a kindergarten. All of the buildings were made of wood except for the local school, so when the cleaning crews arrived they found they could wash the school but had to destroy all the other buildings. You can decontaminate stone. You can’t decontaminate wood. The state fucked up, and the end result was to destroy everything the state hadn’t built.

And that’s what I’m thinking about, as this visit in Kyiv is coming to an end. Authoritarians everywhere (whether corporate committees or government entities) seem to always want to build these grand edifices, to remake the city in their imagined image. Dictators gonna dictate. This usually involves tearing down places where people actually live and putting up places where people don’t.¹⁵

Maybe it’s just a byproduct of my travel, or a side-effect of current United States politics, but I’m very attuned to how little control we have over the environments we live in. The Powers-That-Be are going to always be remaking cities and remaking society with only the vaguest idea of what the effects are going to be. Sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes good things will come of it. And sometimes your home will disappear as the result of decisions made far, far away.

Next: Berlin to Leśna
Prev: London (LGW) to Kyiv (KBP)

Footnotes

¹ The politics surrounding the spelling of the city (Kiev vs. Kyiv), incidentally, are fascinating. It’s been officially Kyiv (from the Ukrainian Київ) roughly since independence, since Kiev is derived from the Russian Киев, although there are arguments over whether Kiev is actually derived from the same proto-language that both Russian and Ukrainian came from (and thus is closer to the original name) and there are further arguments over what turning linguistic quirks into political debates does and even further arguments over the value of changing a widely used, if vaguely incorrect, name in English. Rome isn’t Roma, after all.

I figure it’s roughly the same as Beijing/Peking and Mumbai/Bombay. You get to control the Anglicization of your name. And if the Romans decide to start agitating for Roma, well, more power to them.

² College of Wizardry 19. I’m playing a professor, which has me crazily freaking out.

³ Well, Britain with a tiny bit of Germany, really.

⁴ This time The Forbidden History, in the same castle as College of Wizardry.

⁵ I’ve obviously been to Eastern Bloc countries before; I spent some time in Warsaw a few years ago. But I was in a different place in my life, and I was only there for the weekend. So there were some familial resemblances, but it wasn’t the same.

⁶ The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II was closed for renovations, but it sits directly under the Motherland Memorial, a gigantic statue (larger than the Statue of Liberty) of a woman with her arms raised, holding a sword and a shield with the state emblem of the Soviet Union. I figured it was worth seeing anyway.

Like pretty much every statue the Soviets threw up, it’s now controversial. The state emblem is banned, except for World War II memorials, although there remain calls to remove the emblem or even tear down the statue.

⁷ They’re called самосели in Ukrainian, samosely in English. It means “self-settlers.”

⁸ Not obviously because of the radiation, although these things are notoriously hard to track.

⁹ The city of Chernobyl predates the nuclear power plant, and is twice as far away as Pripyat, which was founded to house all the workers on the reactor. The distance and the prevailing winds at the time of the disaster resulted in Pripyat being far worse.

¹⁰ Radioactive Team, which I’d recommend. They seemed to know what they were doing.

¹¹ “The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water — the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.”

Чорнобиль, or “chornobyl”, translates as “wormwood.” You can imagine the freakout among the eschatologists.

I didn’t make the connection between wormwood and vermouth until our tour guide mentioned it. Ushering in the apocalypse, one martini at a time.

¹² Famously, Yeltsin toured a supermarket in the United States in 1989 and realized Communism had failed. Pripyat, as a model city, apparently had a ridiculous selection of goods compared to most supermarkets across the country, which suggests the planners of the Soviet Union were aware of the difference and embarrassed by it.

¹³ If the Communists and the Fascists agreed on anything in the ’30s and ’40s, it’s in a particular kind of architectural scale. Not that the United States was entirely immune — consider all the skyscrapers being thrown up at this point in New York City — although even at that the warren of streets in New York and economic considerations managed to rein in the more grandiose excesses.

¹⁴ The planned Nazi Volkshalle would have been large enough to have its own weather systems inside.

¹⁵ I’m calling out Robert Moses here, the psychopath.