“It is therefore a study of Chernobyl not as a dead zone where history was suddenly halted in 1986, but as a new Eden populated by scientists, settlers and scrap-metal thieves where hordes of tourists come by day to explore a living memorial to the fragility of civilisation and where ‘stalkers’ conduct their own nocturnal quests: rites of passage born from a blend of post-Soviet counter-culturalism, sci-fi escapism, and perhaps a yearning for spiritualistic self-discovery.” “This is a book about a mythopoetic landscape that authors, artists and filmmakers had been dreaming of long before the Chernobyl disaster itself had happened,” he writes. In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, he journeys into the contemporary Exclusion Zone, venturing deeper than any previously published account, documenting the findings of his exploration through arresting photography and a story-teller’s account of the communities that have, and continue to, exist within it.

It is worth observing that where propaganda and crisis collide there will always be a notable pause – a reluctance to act – in which a regime will decide whether to save itself or its people.Īs Richter states in the opening line of his new book, “There are two Chernobyls: a place, and an event”. The gaping chasm between Pripyat: the Soviet Union’s ninth atomgrad and Pripyat: Ukrainian ghost city was momentarily sealed by the delay between the occurrence of a deadly nuclear incident and those in charge deciding what to do next. Aware only of an undisclosed incident at the power plant, and not of its unprecedented and still unrivalled severity, the people of a doomed city carried on as normal until they were eventually given just two hours to evacuate, with the promise that they would return just three days later, but they never did.įounded on February 4, 1970, Pripyat was what the Soviets called an ‘atomgrad’ – an atomic city, dedicated to nuclear power – and for a few hours in April 1986, its past and present existed in parallel. As researcher and author Darmon Richter writes in FUEL’s latest book Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, at precisely 01:23:40 that morning, what should have been a routine test of Chernobyl Power Station’s Reactor 4 went seriously wrong, and the resulting catastrophe tore a hole in the fabric of the Soviet Union so large that the regime would fray away to nothing just five years later. All five of the city’s schools were open and children played in puddles in the street once dismissed from their classes. On April 26, 1986, six weddings took place in Pripyat, Ukraine.

Art predicting chernobyl aftermath