Kiev is a beautiful city, a true Paris of the East, a charming metropolis whose forests of horse-chestnut trees set off the city’s ancient churches and classic apartment buildings like jewels on a bed of crumpled green velvet. The trick is to come in the summertime, when a warm breeze blows across the Dniepr River, and bars and cafes spill out into the gentle evening. At dusk, sitting with a crowd of young people drinking beer at picnic tables by a wooded park, you can almost ignore the haunted stare Kievers get when they talk about winter.
There’s a lot to do in Kiev. You can stroll down the Andriyivskyy Descent, lined with cafes and shops; or explore the mysterious catacombs of the Pechersk Lavra, and its menagerie of dead monks. Or you can dive into the city’s pulsing downtown nightlife.
But I wasn’t interested in any of that crap. I went straight for the Chernobyl Museum.
There’s a special blend of horror and civic pride on display at a museum dedicated to a local industrial disaster. The Chernobyl Museum has that and more, incorporating history, memorial, commentary, art, religion, and even fashion. Clearly, it is the mutant offspring of several divergent curatorial aesthetics. I found the main exhibit upstairs: a wide, marble-floored hall that doubles back on itself at its midpoint. The walls and display cabinets were crammed with every imaginable kind of Chernobyl paraphernalia: photographs, newspaper articles, objects, books (both foreign and domestic), letters, dioramas, videos, a full-sized set of helicopter rotors… The organizing principle seemed to be: if it had any relationship to the accident, it belonged in this gallery.
A tall aluminum scaffold leaned out to the left of the gallery entrance. It was, I suspect, some kind of homage to the liquidators, the army of military and civil personnel whose job it had been to clean, raze, bury, and otherwise attempt to contain and control the appalling contamination of the Chernobyl zone. Dangling from the structure were half a dozen mannequins of the kind you might find in a department store. Each wore a different kind of contamination suit, and they were arranged in a formation that suggested a bizarre squad of flying superheroes. The top mannequin, especially, looked as if it had been frozen mid-bungee-jump. It modeled a black firefighting suit with large, white stripes running sideways across it, a wide leather belt, and a metal backpack connected to a gas mask and respirator. The mask and respirator were thrown jauntily forward, hanging down the chest. A white helmet perched on the mannequin’s head, and through the plastic bubble of the faceguard, I could just make out the painted lips and full lashes of its plastic, female head. I stood mesmerized by its cool, department-store gaze.
The scaffold also bristled with scores of small photographs of men in uniform, early responders to the accident, who had received overwhelming doses of radiation as they combated the fire and its effects. The images clustered around a clock, its hands frozen at the time of the accident—1:26.
Underneath the scaffold was a model in cross-section of the reactor building in its pre-accident state. As I peered into it to get a view of the reactor’s inner workings, my interest was noticed by two middle-aged women who had been lurking by the door. They were docents, I think, but they moved with the curt authority of guards. They rushed forward to turn the model on, groping at a control panel attached to the base. At the flip of a switch, the model reactor glowed, showing the normal circulation of water in the core. But the women were unsatisfied. Fussing in Ukranian, they began flipping the switch back and forth, wiggling and slapping the little control panel with increasing fervor. I struggled not to see any symbolism in this, and failed. Finally, they jiggled the switch just right, and the rest of the reactors systems—water and steam pipes, cooling systems and boilers—flickered to life.
Running up and out of the aluminum scaffold were several fire hoses, limp tentacles that draped from the ceiling and led me onward down the exhibit hall. My two companions ignored my interest in the cases of documents and photographs, shuttling me instead to a series of video kiosks. They would start each video and explain its significance briefly in Ukrainian, eyeing me hopefully for glimmers of understanding. One of the videos showed a group of men shoveling debris off the roof of the reactor. You could look at this video in any other circumstance and think it the most pedestrian thing in the world. A bunch of guys shoveling. They walk back and forth. They shovel some more. The entire group, cameraman included, was probably receiving crippling doses of radiation.
Underneath the helicopter rotors, there was another scale model. I was beginning to suspect a Ukrainian affinity for models and dioramas. This one was of the landscape surrounding the accident site, and showed the location of Pripyat in relation to the reactor complex. A city of over 40,000, Pripyat had been evacuated on the 27th of April, thirty-six hours after the accident. The model also showed many of the smaller towns and villages that had been abandoned. I studied the model carefully, parsing the landscapes for promising picnic spots. But my time in the exhibit hall was limited. The two docents, fervid in the pursuit of their craft, shooed me into an adjoining hall; evidently another video had started, and they didn’t want to have to start it twice.
The second hall was some kind of memorial, equal parts altar and art gallery, and one of the most opaquely bizarre spaces I had ever set foot in. Just inside the door was a large altar screen, seemingly transplanted intact from an Orthodox church, but strung with barbed wire. On its left side hung a life-size painting of the Archangel Gabriel, on the right an empty contamination suit holding a pair of wire clippers. This was only the entryway, but symbolism-wise, I was already in over my head. Coming around the screen, I entered a moody, auditorium-sized chamber with a vaulted ceiling. Soothing Russian choral music played in the background. The somber lighting cycled slowly from red through blue to green and back. Dominating the center of the room was another model: a life-sized replica of the top of the reactor core. Its thick, metal tiles lay on the floor, arranged in a rough octagon about forty-five feet on each side. I hesitated before stepping onto it, imagining the gigantic nuclear core that, in a real reactor, would have extended several stories below this surface.
At the center of the replica reactor shield, a section of tiles had been removed, and in the recessed area, arranged on a backdrop of black velvet, was—naturally—an assortment of old bibles and Christian icons painted on small wooden panels. Above this, suspended from the ceiling, was a cupola of sorts, decorated with embroidered white banners. And hanging from the hovering cupola by four heavy chains was, you know, just what you would expect at the Chernobyl Museum: a long dugout canoe. Filled with dolls and stuffed animal toys.
The baffling mix of nuclear, Christian, and childhood symbolism was starting to creep me out. It was like stumbling onto the huge art installation that your crazy backwoods neighbor had been secretly working on for decades in his tumbledown garage, complete with its own invented mythology and intended cosmic significance, and now you’re wondering what’s he’s got buried in the back yard. The central reactor area of the exhibit was surrounded by curtains of mesh webbing that hung from the ceiling. The netted surface was decorated with dozens of small photographic portraits of little children. The victims of Chernobyl? They stared out blandly in all directions. Backing up slowly, I was surprised by a trio of mannequins lurking behind a fold of webbing. Like their compatriots on the scaffold in the first gallery, these too were posed in contamination suits. Two of them were leaning towards me, hands outstretched, as if to ask me what I was doing there. The third stood to the side, carefree and cocky, hands on its hips.
I walked to the front of the hall, following the cloth banners that led from the cupola and the hanging canoe to the front of the room. There, on the front wall, hung four large mosaics of child portraits, the pictures arranged in the same octagonal matrix as the reactor head. Pedestals stood at either end, supporting sculptures of stylized dancing figures, and in the middle of it all a video of the Chernobyl landscape played on a large television. Facing all this, mounted on rods that protruded from the metal tiles of the reactor head, was an array of small round stools. I sat down next to a Ukrainian family watching the video. The choral music swelled. It was impossible not to imagine that our stools were control rods, and we, sitting there, were trying to use our weight to force them down into the core just a little faster.
But also we were in church. Above the television, a spotlight shone on a large photograph of a young child’s face, his hairless head resting one hand. Large scars arced over his scalp. Or were they surgical markings? Was this all a temple to children whose birth defects were attributed to the accident? A visitor from another era would have thought this was the cathedral of a religion that worshipped nuclear power and small children, and that this central image was the plutonium baby Jesus. Lurking in the darkness above him was another member of this strange pantheon: the framed icon of a Russian Orthodox saint. Above the saint, the wall was painted with a blue sky and crude little clouds, and near the ceiling, his back glued to the wall, floated a lone teddy bear. Dirty and almost invisible in the gloom, the forlorn bear surveyed the hall, its face downcast, taking in the strange memorial spread out below, inscrutable behind its little button eyes.