Life in the zone: elderly returnees to Opachychi feel at home

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

OPACHYCHI, Ukraine - They meet in front of the old abandoned general store every Tuesday and Friday, come rain or shine. Each season their clothes grow more tattered, their shoulders slump a bit lower, and their pace becomes a tad slower.

They wait for the "store on wheels," which comes in from the closest town outside the zone, Ivankiv, to deliver such staples as bread, butter and sugar, as well as the essentials for a Soviet-era diet: vodka, cigarettes and chocolates.

It's been more than nine years since the 52 residents from Opachychi returned home, to the "zone of alienation" (as literally translated from Ukrainian), as the 30-kilometer zone around the Chornobyl nuclear plant is called.

And, although on May 4 it will be 10 years since buses came to evacuate them from their native lands, for most of the pensioners here memories of that day remain vivid. They were not told much as buses came to transport them to clean areas of Kyiv Oblast, but for seven days prior to their evacuation they witnessed convoys of buses passing via the dirtroad that serves as the main thoroughfare of their village - Soviet Street (Radianska Vulytsia) - taking somber-looking men, teary-eyed women, teenagers, boys and girls out of the towns of Prypiat and Chornobyl and neighboring villages.

On April 26, 1986, Ulana Makukha, 60, saw the sky light up through her kitchen window, but knew little about the effect that fire would have on the rest of her life. It was 1:23 a.m. when an explosion at the core of rector No. 4 at the V.I. Lenin Atomic Power Station changed not only the world of the 400 residents of Opachychi, but also the lives of more than 92,000 evacuees from the 30-kilometer zone and millions of residents in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

[According to the CIS Committee of Statistics, more than 82,000 square kilometers of land in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia was contaminated as a result of the explosion. That translates into more than 8 percent of Ukraine's territory, 22 percent of Belarus' territory and 0.3 percent of Russia's territory.]

A few days later, she, her husband, as well as her four children and her neighbors, were taken to the Makarivsky raion of Kyiv Oblast, 54 kilometers southwest of Kyiv, where they were resettled in apartments - two and three people to a nine-square-meter space (a little over 25 square feet).

Most of them spent the winter of 1986 in various villages in the Makarivsky raion, but as soon as a spring breeze hit the air, they became determined to come home to Opachychi. About 100 of the village's original 400 residents did return, despite the fact that this was prohibited by law.

Many Opachychi residents paid off the head of the collective farm near Opachychi - who traveled back and forth to bring feed from the contaminated zone for the livestock transported to clean areas - to sneak the residents of Opachychi back into the zone. Others made their way home through the backwoods, bypassing the control checkpoints set up on the border of the 30-kilometer zone to monitor the traffic into the contaminated area. As a rule, the men came back earlier, to prepare the land for spring planting, while the women followed a few months later.

Still others were never evacuated, according to a recent study conducted by sociologist Yuriy Sayenko, who in December 1995 went through the villages in the zone, talking to resettled residents. In a random sampling of 100 people, about half of them never left the zone.

A total of 485 people are registered to live in the zone, but in reality more than 600 - including 100 or so squatters - reside in the exclusion zone, according to Mykola Urupa, governor of the Ivankiv raion, who is also administratively responsible for the residents of these villages.

"We have given up on trying to resettle these people, because they will just keep coming back," said Mr. Urupa during a recent interview in his Ivankiv office, just 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the zone.

"I was born here, and I will die here," proclaims Maria Shovkuta, 67, who remembers the days in the Makarivsky raion as the worst of her life. "I felt cramped living with two other people in a tiny room. Nothing was familiar to me, I felt trapped," she said, while showing her two-room wooden shack, with a shed in the back and a well in the front yard.

"It would be more traumatic to move these people out of their homes at this point in time than to let them live out the last of their days in their own homes," said Ivan Kirimov, the Parliament deputy who represents the zone of alienation, as well as the young city of Slavutych, where most of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant workers now live.

"Most of the people in the villages are in their 60s and 70s and, given the average life span in the former Soviet Union (74 for women, 64 for men), I think that resettling them outside their native lands will be more devastating than allowing them to live out their lives in the 30-kilometer zone," he added. Their sons and daughters have all gotten married and have been resettled in the Kyiv, Poltava and Zhytomyr oblasts.

Priorities must be reviewed

Volodymyr Kholosha, who chairs the Ministry of Chornobyl set up in May 1991 to deal with the consequences of the nuclear accident, agrees that the priorities established five years ago in developing a list of guidelines related to Chornobyl should be reviewed.

"The residents of contaminated areas who were evacuated have adapted poorly to their new homes, and some have even expressed the desire to move back to the villages they left. More than one-third of the evacuees questioned said they did not consider resettlement a priority. It is also important to take into account that many who live in zones 2 and 3 [zones of "obligatory" and "voluntary" evacuation] have already received 70 percent of their maximum lifetime dose of radiation," he told the Ukrainian Parliament recently.

Yuriy Kostenko, Ukraine's minister of environment and nuclear safety, recently said continuing the evacuation program has become unnecessary because radiation levels had dropped and money allocated for this program would be better spent on medical care and facilities for people affected by the Chornobyl accident.

Dr. Olha Bobelova, the head doctor of the Chornobyl Division at the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, explained:

"Those who wanted to leave have already left and are unlikely to come back, and those who wanted to come back have done so. But after 10 years there should be some kind of conditions set for those who live in the zone. After all, the doses they receive are mainly through the food chain; thus, it is possible to prevent them with modern farming techniques, with finances that will allow them to import food from environmentally clean zones."

Vasyl Herashchenko, 69, when asked if he worried about the effects of radiation sickness, said "How can you be afraid of what you can't see?"

"You should see the mushrooms I pick in our forest. I've never tasted better mushrooms than those that grow wild here. I tell you, we were resettled in areas where the ground was like clay. I couldn't grow anything there. (The land in the Makarivsky raion, located in the forest-steppe region of Ukraine, is known for its black soil, "chornozem," while the Chornobyl region is located in the sandy soils of the Polissia, the forest streak of northern Ukraine.)

Despite the fact that bread and butter is brought in for the residents of Opachychi, most of them live off of what they grow, including potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, beets. Some keep dairy cows and raise pigs for slaughter, to have a supply of fresh meat and homemade sausage.

"My kids often come to pick freshly grown vegetables in our garden," explained Mrs. Makukha. "After all, what's a mother for?" she said, speaking affectionately of her four children and eight grandchildren, who are now scattered throughout Ukraine - in Kyiv, Mykolayiv, Makariv and Dytiatky, just outside the 30-kilometer zone.

"Our cow gives us fresh milk; what we don't use we give to our neighbors," says Mrs. Makukha, who lives in the village with her husband, Ivan, 67.

Treating her guests to fresh milk, marinated mushrooms, varenyky and fried fish, dosed down with home brew, Mrs. Makukha recalled the B.C. (before Chornobyl) days:

"There was a bus that traveled to Chornobyl from Opachychi four times a day (about a 20-minute ride), and we could get on a hydrofoil on the Prypiat River, just a few kilometers away, and go to Kyiv. But why go to Kyiv, when in Chornobyl you could get anything you wanted if you had the money?"

She continued, "But now we feel isolated and, worst of all, unwanted. Who needs us?"

Although her pension is only 2.6 million karbovantsi ($15) a month as of this year, Mrs. Makukha has received additional Chornobyl funds, which brings her monthly wages to 10 million kbv (more than $50 a month). She, like all the people who live and work in the zone, were allocated additional subsidies last month by the Parliament, but they say they have not yet seen the money.

A tour of Opachychi

Mr. Herashchenko offers visitors a tour of the village, strolling past the skeletal remains of a once-flourishing mid-sized village in Polissia. He points out abandoned houses, remembering those who died before the disaster, those whose children moved to the city to escape the dead-end existence of life on the collective farm, those who have died since the evacuees returned in 1986-1987, and those who have moved away forever.

Fate has not been kind to the residents of Opachychi. Soon after the evacuees moved back, in the spring of 1992, a fire raged through the village, burning down about half of the houses. Those who became homeless laid stakes on the abandoned dwellings; others moved away for good.

They compare their lives favorably to those of their friends who lived in the villages of Yampil, Cherepach or Kopachi. Although the first two were totally abandoned, the third, adjacent to the nuclear plant, was so irradiated that it was leveled its remains buried in the ground.

Of the 70 villages in the 30-kilometer zone, only 10 have been resettled, 10 have been buried, and 50 have been abandoned according to Mykola Lebakh, the 45-year-old chief of the Chornobylinform agency, which runs a research lab and a newspaper called Visnyk Chornobyla (Chornobyl Herald) in the zone.

12,000 workers in zone

Besides the 600 or so residents in the village, there are about 12,000 people who work in the zone, including more than 5,000 plant workers. The plant employees all live in the town of Slavutych, commuting daily into the zone, while other workers who do clean-up maintenance or lab research work on a 15-days-on/15-days-off basis, or a four-days-on/three-days-off schedule, while others stick to the traditional five-day work week.

Driving down the main road of the 30-kilometer zone, observing the first buds on the oaks and sensing the scent of the approaching spring, there are no obvious signs that the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster occurred here 10 years ago.

Along the road there are ironic reminders of the pride of the region - the forests. Signs such as "The Forest - Wellspring of Health," "The Forest - Lungs of the Planet," dot the landscape. Deeper into the zone, however, abandoned schools, streams poisoned with radioactivity, neglected gardens and empty playgrounds reflect the bitter reality that the aging pensioners refuse to acknowledge.

"Sometimes the grandchildren come back during school and summer holidays. Then you hear the young voices again, and it reminds me of Opachychi in the early 1980s. Why, last summer, there were so many kids riding their bikes through the village, that it caused a traffic jam," Mr. Herashchenko joked, adding that if the area had a school, he is sure that quite a few kids would live here.

Today, 6-year-old Vanya Kovalchuk is visiting his grandmother. Both he and his sister often come to Opachychi from Kyiv to visit, because they have the freedom to run around abandoned houses and thick forests.

Mr. Urupa contends that kids do not stay in the 30-kilometer zone for any length of time, but if they have grandparents in the villages, there is little the police can do to stop them from visiting their families.

On this sunny March afternoon, as the pensioners wait for the mobile store to deliver supplies, there is still a chill in the air, but the sun's angle is predicting that spring is on its way. The women - mostly widows - sit on a decaying bench outside waiting for the shipment, while just a few men keep warm nipping at some homemade brew, or "samohon," leaning against a faded red sign that boasts of the victories of the party of Lenin. Inside the abandoned store, with its musty scent and empty shelves, another group of women sits huddled together, gossiping in front of a fire to keep warm.

They may be the last people to live here, for once they die, so will the village of Opachychi.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 21, 1996, No. 16, Vol. LXIV

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