The Chernobyl Apocalypse

“I haven’t read any books about it. I haven’t seen any films, either…” says one, and the other echoes: “I haven’t read anything like that anywhere.” The collection of tragic recitatives that Svetlana Alexievich recomposed for her Supplication gave form to the dramatic memory of a witness choir in search of meaning after the nuclear disaster of 1986. It articulates the “missed story” of those who (sur)vived at the time in Chernobyl, in order to account for the sensations and feelings of the “individuals who touched the unknown”.

20 years later, while a pharaonic ark has recently confined the remains of the destroyed reactor and a young generation persists in remaining in this enclosure with an extraordinary chronotope, Galia Ackerman returns to her own journey through this contradictory and disconcerting territory. To the eschatological approach of the Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian writer, of whom she is the diligent translator, the Russian-born essayist opposes a modest and anti-spectacular narrative. She plans to confront a historical truth that sometimes contradicts official speeches and images.

Wishing to bear witness and transmit, she tells the story of the immeasurable Chernobyl, “a small country that once flourished” forever “transformed into an uninhabitable ruin”, this forbidden zone of Ukraine where, as Anaïs Tondeur’s photographic herbarium testifies, a deadly life now flourishes.

Exposing the disaster

To write about the nuclear accident and its ecological and economic consequences, as well as its social and moral ones, is to expose it in the triple sense of the word. With the acuity of a benevolent gaze, Crossing Chernobyl traces 20 years spent haunting this inconceivable world with the appearance of an apocalyptic tale.

It is first of all a matter of telling, in order to make known and illuminate this strangely bucolic science fiction universe. The movement of travels and investigations, punctuated by multiple encounters, carries the story that Galina Ackerman punctuates, when relevant, with memorial parentheses that illuminate the socio-culture of this extraordinary place or immerse us in the author’s Soviet youth.

She takes us to Pripyat, a surviving and contaminated city that strikes with its dreamlike spectrality. There, living with the population who guide her around the area, sharing conversations and frugal meals, she discovers an autonomous universe, with its inhabitants and their rituals, its stories and its myths. She is told about young Maria, a child illegally born in the zone. Vladimir offers her nuts grown in the area, delicious poisoned fruits. Old babushkas share their memories with her while sipping local rotgut, called “Chernobyl cognac” (p. 122).

But to expose is also to reveal and, sometimes, to denounce. In this way, she takes stock of the dirty secrets of the zone buried since the Soviet era, its closed cities and its well-structured pyramid of privileges, until today. A protected area, Chernobyl is home to a clandestine life where prowlers and thieves reign supreme. It is a question of trafficking in wood and metals, poaching, of an entire mafia organization at the head of which sits Valéra, self-proclaimed master of Chernobyl, whom Galia Ackerman meets by accident and with whom she cautiously shares a few drinks.

An exegete of the traces collected after the explosion, the journalist also critiques the poignant texts of Svetlana Alexievitch and the photos stolen from the disaster by Igor Kostin. She denounces the “abduction of pain” (p. 177) that the author of The Supplicationeager for sensational testimonies, would have perpetrated. Then she returns in detail to the first photo of the reactor attributed to Kostin, but taken by the photographer employed by the plant Anatoli Rasskazov. Cautiously, she draws a simple conclusion:

This is how the framework of History is constructed, with objective and subjective elements, truths and untruths, where nothing is definitively acquired and everything can be rewritten and reworked. (p. 194)

Measured and aware of the seriousness of the subject, Galina Ackerman sticks rigorously to proven facts, sorting between historical evidence and sometimes extravagant fabrications.

The Palimpsest Zone

All these elements – objects, images, stories – gathered here to tell a story and transform the sensory experience into transmissible knowledge were also used for the 2005 exhibition, Once Upon a Time Chernobylcurated by Galia Ackerman at the Centro de Cultura Contemporania in Barcelona. It was on this occasion that she had to develop a unique vision of the catastrophe and guide the viewer into a paradoxical world.

With a dual culture, both at the heart of the Soviet matrix through her education and distanced by her life of exile in France, Galia Ackerman composes a free text which, acting as a testimony, seeks to return Chernobyl to its history and to reveal some of its hidden facets. Between scholarly readings and family memories, she brings back to life the Jewish town before the revolution.

All these memories of my readings about the history of Chernobyl assail me, as I stand in front of the ruined synagogue, with its rusty red star. (p. 66)

In search of the ancient places of shtetlit unearths a painful memory: pogroms, Stalinist famine and the Shoah.

A complex space, Chernobyl is also depicted as an Atlantis with a submerged cultural heritage. Meeting archaeologists, poets and artists, the essayist is interested in what, from the life of the place, remains alive. She reads in the existence of those who remain there the lives depicted by Kuprin, Gogol or Dostoyevsky and, in this way, strives to inscribe the devastated territory in an ancestral popular and literary culture.

Chernobyl is then traversed by contradictory temporalities. Symbol of the glorious dream of a Soviet future that remained hypothetical, the Zone is now frozen in a ruined past, a past that we visit like an amusement park, in search of new and extreme emotions. At the same time, the wild and peaceful expanse of this place entirely returned to nature – wolves, foxes and horses repopulate the territory – seems to announce the uncertain future after the disaster. Having become a laboratory, the Zone seems to embody the terrible world that awaits us.

A crossing

“Chernobyl is my world” (p. 213). Bringing together memories, texts, interviews and images, Galia Ackerman recounts her immersion in an extraordinary universe and makes this immersion the occasion for confidences that are all the more touching because they are revealed with restraint. The honest self-portrait that she sketches takes shape through emotional reminiscences – there is cousin Nelly and grandmother Olga -, from what she retains from a childhood left in Russia: the childhood of a little girl left to her own devices, an adventurer and an avid reader.

Sober and serious, the childish confidences turn into a confession, that of an indignant dissident whose protesting and committed spirit is at the origin of the journey she depicts. Because it was necessary to cross borders and barriers, to abandon a world and to accept being an orphan to make a passage and give shape to a journey as rare as it is singular. Galia Ackerman says she belongs to the “Fahrenheit 451” species, the one that, despite everything, preserves the memory and culture of peoples.

This is what is recalled in the poignant pages on the murdered journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, or on the trio of scientists who embody the “consciousness of Chernobyl” (p. 159). Writing is “moving across”, knowing how to move the lines and go against the current in order to better understand “that”: the Chernobyl experience.