Our interlocutor today is called Farhad. He asked not to give his last name. The fact is, Farhad is a real stalker. And stalkers do not really like to "light up" and give interviews, talk about their, sometimes not entirely legal, campaigns.
We persuaded Farhad to give an interview to our newspaper for almost a year. And only this year he agreed.
Perhaps the fact that in April the world celebrated a sad date - the 30th anniversary of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - played a role. But it is to the Zone that Farhad carries out his sorties.
- What attracts you to the Zone?
- It can be said hereditary. In 1986 my parents lived in Gomel, it is 130 kilometers from Chernobyl - if in a straight line. Father was a liquidator, a driver. This, of course, is not the most dangerous thing, as, for example, with the firefighters or the builders of the sarcophagus, but he also told a lot.
Then people were not told the truth, the firemen were generally told: “Oh, it's just a fire,” and then they burned down in the literal sense in a few months.
A friend of my father's was a guide on the railway, so the guides were forced to wash the carriages themselves at the exit from the Zone. Without anything - without chemical protection suits, they wouldn't even give out gloves.
Well, about the May Day parade in Kiev, to which they drove schoolchildren, and so everyone knows, about forced business trips to eliminate the consequences - too.
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All my life I grew up in an atmosphere of memories. And the consequences, because Belarus suffered from the explosion much more than Ukraine. Including Gomel, where I was born the next year after the events.
When I was a boy, I was not drawn there absolutely - fear interfered. Before unknown radiation. They say that what is not visible does not frighten.
Not true. Scares. Sometimes even stronger than what is seen. The zone has interested me very much in the last ten years.
Forays were made there more and more often. Those who came told amazing things, showed pictures, videos, said that it was "dirty" before 1996 … And I decided: I will go.
- But daredevils have gone to the Zone before?
- Are they brave or crazy? Yes, we did.
- Do you remember your first trip to the Zone?
- Yes of course. I was part of an illegal group of stalkers. The head of the group knew all the moves and exits, so we reached Pripyat without incident. It is very difficult to convey my feelings at that moment. You need to be a writer for that. We got on a time machine in the 80s, in Soviet times, which I personally found as a kid. We entered an abandoned school.
Then we went into houses, apartments, but this school will never fade from my memory. It was terrible!!! Broken glass, peeling plaster, abandoned open textbooks and notebooks with faded ink, broken and whole globes, portraits of writers on the walls, some broken flasks and retorts, geographical maps, yellowed and shabby, desks, chairs …
Somewhere the furniture was piled up in a heap, and in one class all the desks were almost on a ruler, as if the schoolchildren came out from behind them just yesterday. One would think so, if not for dust and dirt, scraps of paper and other debris. It was dust, desolation, death.
And at the same time, the life that was, was, and suddenly it was rudely interrupted and everything was abandoned. Half sigh, half step. It's very scary.
There was one thought that everything was in vain: when I saw a room, the floor of which was strewn with gas masks without a gap. Not saved … No one.
We were all silent. We walked silently from class to class, entered the dining room. There, on the tables, dishes, glasses, on some plates even lay something - dusty and petrified.
Then they went outside in the same silence. It was as if we were knocked down by something. One girl walked away and cried softly.
And then I decided: I will take people there, show them all this. Let them experience the same thing that I experienced.
- Don't you think this is immoral tourism? After all, so many deaths are associated with this place!
- This is not tourism! At least, in the understanding that is now put into this word. This is an opportunity that is given to people to see with their own eyes what a person can do with nature and others like himself, if he treats everything with the same ease with which he has treated until now. I assure you: a person who sees everything that visitors to the Zone see will come out of it completely different.
After such an "excursion" you begin to appreciate life better. One should just visit only one school N1 in Pripyat - and a turn of consciousness is guaranteed. And hardly anyone who has been there will treat their work carelessly, especially if someone's life depends on his work.
And hardly anyone will ever press the notorious red button - provided that he will be able to press such a button.
Of course, there are reinforced concrete curiosities who are “just interested” or who want to tickle their nerves and get a shot of adrenaline. I see them at first sight and never take them to my group.
- But you do not deny that there are such?
- It is foolish to deny the obvious! There are plenty of them. And these, as a rule, go to travel agencies. They don't just want a shot of adrenaline. They want to get that portion as safely as possible.
If you bring these farther into the Zone and throw them there, tantrums will be up to wet pants. In principle, I would like to see such a sight! Better yet, record it on video and show it to other curious people.
- Is there really official tourism to the Zone ?!
- How many do you want! This is mainly done by Ukrainian travel agencies. There are routes for one day, there are for two. Through the only official checkpoint, at which documents are asked, the route is negotiated (which then cannot be changed), instructions and other formalities are carried out.
On the websites of such travel agencies, everything is a plane tree: a list of "attractions", a schedule of excursions. "The standard program includes visiting such and such villages, walking along the streets of Pripyat with visiting such and such objects, visiting the observation deck of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, viewing this and that …"
Cheekbones reduce from such tourist words applied to Pripyat and the Zone! This area is called "Extreme Tourism". It turns out that you can do anything with tourism, even a trip to the Zone!
- Then what is the difference between stalkers' hikes with groups of people who wish from tourism with the help of travel agencies?
- Well, I already said! These tourists go there for impressions and adrenaline, and the groups are gathered from ideological people. Those who are not indifferent, who care what will happen to their house tomorrow. And these are immediately visible. Many stalkers don't even take money for their services. For example, I don’t.
I am far from idealism and I understand that not all stalkers are the same. There are those who themselves do not have enough thrills, there are simply gambling addicts who arose on the wave of computer games and the series of fantastic books "STALKER", there are those who specifically make money on hiking trips.
But there are also correct ones. Ideological. There are completely moved ones - like the stalker Tarkovsky. They live in the Zone, they hear it, they cannot exist without it.
Another difference between our sorties is the smack of mystery, something forbidden. If we are caught by the police, a fine and other troubles are guaranteed.
Yes, this is also a kind of adrenaline, but it is akin to a child's adventure, when without the permission of adults they ran to the river to swim. It is possible with permission, but without permission it is more interesting!
Another last difference, perhaps the most important. It will be very easy to understand for those who were involved in tourism in Soviet times. Tourism - not lying on the beach and bus excursions "through the cities of Europe."
When took a backpack, bowler hat, sleeping bag, compass, tent, etc. - and the group went on foot or in kayaks to conquer either mountains, or taiga, or mountain rivers, or even nearby forests.
This is tourism, and not what travel agencies offer with their five-stars on the seashore! And then everything became clear about everyone: who is the leader, who is the follower, who is a whiner, who can be relied on, and who is not.
Existing offline in the Zone even for a couple of days is not as easy as it seems. Both from a psychological and household point of view: you need to take at least five liters of water with you.
Another analogy. When I visit an unfamiliar city, I, of course, visit “must-see sights” like the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. But it gives me much greater pleasure to wander the streets myself, to find something interesting, something that is not indicated in tourist guides.
And from such discoveries it becomes very warm in the soul. And when suddenly there is an opportunity to share your little discovery with someone, it becomes doubly pleasant.
In Pripyat and in general in the Zone, the soul does not get warm, but I think you understand me. Our sorties - they are not on the beaten track, they are more intimate, or something … And more grasping for the soul.
A small example. A playground has been preserved in one courtyard in Pripyat. Virtually no destruction. The paint, of course, peeled off, but everything remained as it was. You can swing on a swing, ride a small carousel. But nobody does that. Everyone usually comes and just stares.
Travel agencies will not show this site. Here is an abandoned amusement park - yes, they will show it. And why this yard? However, in my opinion, this playground is enough for the soul so that it will not seem a little. A playground where there are no and never will be children. What could be more unnatural ?!
- You said that you do not take money for your hikes. Why? After all, you work hard, organize trips …
- It's like paid medicine. A man comes to the doctor and says: "I have appendicitis", and the doctor: "Until you give money, I will not cut it out!" People who have a sore soul go to the Zone. How can you charge money for treatment?
- How and when did tourism to the Zone appear?
- After easing the access control regime. A powerful surge in tourism (and stalking too) was given by the already mentioned games and books, as well as the good Russian TV series “Chernobyl.
Exclusion Zone . There is nothing that is in the film in the Zone, but I watched the film with great pleasure. And the tourists decided that everything from the film was there and waiting for them. (Laughs)
Tourists, however, are also all different. There are those that I have already mentioned. There are those who want to try, test themselves. Understand what kind of person you are. There are fans of role-playing games, there are fans of computer games. There are bloggers who are not fed with bread - let me post another photo report about penetration into some outrageous places.
Sometimes I get the feeling that most people now travel not for the sake of the trip itself, not for the sake of impressions, but for the sake of the notorious photo report. And it becomes disgusting … Before it was "I am against the background of the Eiffel Tower", and now "I am against the background of the fourth power unit".
However, be that as it may, but extreme tourism every year is becoming more and more popular. Well-fed citizens are no longer satisfied with the Canaries, Seychelles and other Maldives.
They want to tickle their nerves, and the tourism industry, responsive to demand, offers them more and more new routes. Some stalkers don't lag behind either.
- How many stalkers are there?
- Well, who counted us? (Laughs) I can only say approximately. Ideological - no more than three dozen. There are many more gamers. And those who lead groups for money - those who are generally impossible to count - they do not advertise themselves especially.
- Are there any loners too?
- There are loners in any business. I know a couple of them. These are the very ones who “hear the Zone” and communicate with it. Perhaps this is to some extent a diagnosis. There are other loners - adrenaline lovers. These guys are crazy, they won't end well.
There are also "ghost hunters". The zone gave birth to its own subculture, its own mythology, its own folklore. And your other world.
- By the way, do you believe in all that?
- A person should believe (well, or not believe) only in God. And about any otherworldly, I personally can say that I admit its existence. Anything else I admit? Because no one has proven the opposite - that it does not exist. But this is not subject to proof. It is realistic to prove only the presence of something.
As for any otherworldly, I have seen something, heard something, but I will not expand on this topic. There is nothing to draw too much attention to the Zone. And so everyone who is not lazy is now running there. After them destroyed houses, garbage and other nasty things.
After tourists and brainless curious, by the way, too. Not from everyone, of course - only from the ill-mannered. But I noticed a trend long ago: bad manners and mindlessness always go hand in hand.
- How do you get into the Zone?
- Each stalker has his own route. Due to the increasing popularity of the Zone, we all keep our moves secret.
- Who else enters the Zone - except for tourists and stalkers?
- Marauders, for example. And a lot. Especially at first. They remind me in some way of the Strugatsky stalkers who dragged artifacts from the Zone, “swag” - to sell it for money.
It is scary to imagine how many household items stolen from Pripyat and fondes spread across the CIS! How many fluorescent berries, mushrooms, fruits, vegetables are collected and sold in the markets …
There, after all, everything is growing by leaps and bounds! Radiation causes powerful mutations, all the fruits are huge and tasty. At one time, there was a joke in Moscow that the giant potatoes from the fast food "Kroshka-potato" were grown in the Zone.
Residents of the adjacent territories are also penetrating. You can understand these - they have nothing in the literal sense of the word. And in the Zone there is always something to profit from.
- They say that porcini mushrooms do not miraculously "absorb" radiation. It's true?
- Not true. According to their ability to accumulate radionuclides, mushrooms are divided into three groups. The white mushroom is in the second, it accumulates radiation in medium doses. In small doses, radionuclides are accumulated by champignons, oyster mushrooms, stitches, winter mushrooms, whole russula and some other mushrooms.
Those that would not accumulate radionuclides at all do not exist. Just as non-radioactive milk from Chernobyl cows does not exist. These are all myths, stories, fakes and so on.
- Are five-meter catfish in Pripyat and other rivers also fake?
- No, giant catfish exist. The Internet is full of videos of these catfish: how they are fed, how they splash in the rivers and the cooling pond. A visit to this pond and feeding the catfish is even included in some excursions.
Tourists are shown catfish and other fish that are not at all afraid of humans, they tell terrible stories about mutant catfish, about how they grew to such a size after the Chernobyl disaster that there were allegedly cases of an attack of man-eating catfish on humans, that catfish feed on human corpses etc.
But here's the thing … Yes, radiation, of course, affected the growth of this fish. The abundant amount of food also affected - other fish that no one catches, i.e. the ecosystem is developing rapidly, everything is growing, other fish are also increasing in size.
And the fact that catfish is a predatory fish that feeds on mammals and waterfowl besides fish is also true. And the fact that the corpses of catfish could have eaten, I also admit.
But that the gigantic size of catfish is solely a matter of radiation, this is not true. In other rivers in other regions of the CIS, where radiation is in full norm, catfish also reach gigantic sizes, sometimes two human heights. And as a person's height - there are so many of them.
Therefore, it is not worth saying that giant catfish are the "prerogative" of the Zone. Such information is just a way to draw attention to the Zone, to release all sorts of horror stories to attract tourists, and, therefore, money. I think this is unscrupulous PR.
- And about catfish cannibalism - is it true?
- Under the video on the Internet about the Chernobyl catfish, the author of one of the comments told the case of how, in front of his eyes, a giant catfish in a completely different place swallowed a large swimming dog. Perhaps the catfish can attack the child.
It is unlikely for an adult. Although if he is much larger than a person, this is not excluded. So there is only one conclusion: it is not the Chernobyl catfish that are terrible, the giant catfish that can be found everywhere are terrible. So if you see such a "fish" - swim away from it.
- Can I eat catfish and other fish from the Zone?
- For a person from outside, this is a death sentence. But what is surprising … Self-settlers quietly eat Chernobyl fish, eat berries and mushrooms, vegetables and fruits grown in their gardens, drink milk from their cows and nothing happens to them!
- By the way, about the self-settlers. What is this phenomenon?
- According to official statistics, there are about two thousand people living in the Zone who did not want to evacuate. In fact, there are more of them. They live in various settlements of the thirty-kilometer exclusion zone and in the city of Chernobyl.
Also in Chernobyl live so-called shift workers - workers of the Zone's enterprises. There are more than three thousand of them, they work for fifteen days, then leave for fifteen days.
There are a lot of enterprises: the Administration of the Exclusion Zone (AZO), Ecocenter, Technocenter, Institute for NPP Safety Issues, Police Department, Chernobyl Water Operations, hospital and other institutions such as shops, libraries, gymnasiums, etc.
Self-settlers are mostly elderly people. They live by household plots, gathering. Tours are led to them, they are shown as a miracle, as unknown animals in a cage. In fact, these are ordinary people, often working together with shift workers.
They live without any signs of radiation sickness, and even a healthy girl was born in 1999, although it is strictly forbidden to give birth in the Zone. (She was taken away later - there are no other children, there is no one to communicate with.) Moreover, even those diseases that they suffered from before the disaster disappear among the self-settlers and shift workers. Of course, I'm not talking about everyone without exception, only about the majority.
I have always been very interested in this phenomenon. I think that a person is able to adapt to everything. Even to radiation. The body is somehow rebuilt, begins to function in a new regime.
It is clear that there is simply no statistics of the consequences yet, and it is not known what will happen to those children who are born in the Zone. Will they be healthy?
Will their children be healthy and will those children be human in the sense in which a human is human. Maybe they will have some other properties that ordinary people do not have. Maybe they will have some unusual abilities.
Perhaps they will be immune to serious diseases such as oncology and others, but they will be ruined by a common runny nose. All this requires serious study.
There is a very interesting fact. They tried to take many of the self-settlers out of the Zone and settle in uninfected areas. And they started to get sick there. Someone had constant malaise, someone was covered with some strange rash, someone even died.
But when some were returned, while others themselves fled to the Zone, their health was restored. Another interesting fact. Of those who evacuated, many died, and the squatters are still alive.
- I know what I just can't understand … After all, there is radiation! And official excursions are organized there, stalkers go there … Isn't it dangerous ?!
- Life is generally dangerous! (Laughs) In fact, the situation is as follows. When the explosion occurred, about three dozen radioactive isotopes with a half-life of several seconds to millions of years were released into the environment.
Three or four years later, six isotopes remained in the Zone: strontium-90 (half-life 28 and a half years), cesium-137 (a little over 30 years) and others.
Cesium-137 is used to judge the pollution of the territory, it serves as an indicator: heavier isotopes were not transported through the air and remained at the epicenter of the disaster.
In the first years after the accident at the fourth power unit, the radiation background throughout the entire territory of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (as it is, by the way, officially called - do not confuse with the city of Chernobyl) was very high - up to 300 roentgens per hour. Not a micro-roentgen, but an X-ray.
But over time, due to the natural decay of radionuclides, the background in some places of the Zone has significantly decreased and in some places does not even exceed the norm. Only 30 microroentgen can be collected per day. The upper limit of the norm is 50.
For comparison: with fluorography or radiography, the patient receives 15-40 micro-roentgen.
Of course, the indicators of the sarcophagus are very high, but we do not take anyone there. Even if they wanted to, there is such a security that they cannot approach. Large areas of contaminated forests and water bodies remained. We know about these places and we don't take anyone there either.
But here's what is strange … For some reason, radiation only destroys people, it does not affect animals and even more so plants. You should have seen how wildly everything grows and blooms there!
- I would like to make a bitter joke: like in a cemetery …
- Yes … Besides, there are certain rules of conduct. I will not talk about all of them - so as not to provoke reckless daredevils. I will only say that the speed of traffic in the Zone has been reduced to 40 kilometers per hour - so as not to raise radioactive dust with the wheels.
So there is no danger for either tourists or stalkers. Don't worry! In those places, of course, where we go.
- Then another thing is even more incomprehensible to me! If the background radiation is within the normal range, if squatters and shift workers live and do nothing for them, why not lift the restrictions and populate the Zone? After all, so many lands and settlements are lost!
- Talks about the partial rehabilitation of the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the return of land to economic circulation are already underway. But there are many complications. For example, in Chernobyl itself, the background is almost normal, but residents are unlikely to be returned there - it is too expensive to service a city surrounded by contaminated territories.
Everything really comes down to money. And profitability: it's easier to leave everything as it is than to decontaminate the land.
With Pripyat it is even more difficult. It's easier to build a new city than to bring an old one back to life. In addition, Pripyat was practically swallowed up by nature.
It makes it clear that man on our planet is secondary, nature is primary. There will be no man - she will conquer the space left after his departure.
- You said that you would not share safety rules. But can you tell us about the danger that awaits beginners and loners?
- With pleasure! First of all, ignorance of dangerous and safe places. In dangerous ones, you can grab a good dose. Then the animals. Of the predators capable of attacking humans, only I have seen the wolf, lynx and bear.
In addition to these, there are also poisonous insects, such as hornets, and snakes. And how they mutated - it's better not to check on your own skin.
People are a great danger. Law enforcement agencies include the police, border guards, forest guards, operational groups of non-departmental security and various special services. So the seeming desertion in the Zone is just apparent.
But the greatest danger is represented by other people: homeless people, poachers, marauders and all kinds of rabble.
Nature itself is also dangerous. Swamps, bogs, invisible ravines, numerous pits, including trap pits left over from hunters. Traps and snares of self-settlers and poachers.
Abandoned dwellings are also a danger. Rotten wood, rusted metal, etc. may lie in wait for you. All this can fall under you or on you. In addition to the "bouquet" - cesspools, abandoned wells, etc.
Therefore, it is worth thinking forty times before going to the Zone.
- Finally, a philosophical question: is the Zone necessary at all?
- Needed. Necessarily! This is a monument. Memorial. Memorial in honor of those killed and as a reminder of human stupidity, laxity and greed. If you wanted to tame the atom - get it and sign for the consequences.
O. BULANOVA