-As I understand, there were many former
Pripyat residents among your colleagues?
-Yes, right.
-What is your personal opinion:
how those people felt about the fact
that they're working in their native city,
which they were forced
to leave not long before
and which had been florishing
and then became deserted?
-Everybody regretted
about leaving the city.
I cannot say for sure about
those people's inmost feelings.
But all of them showed their
regret about leaving Pripyat,
nobody was glad about that.
-It's very telling, as the city
was quite heterogeneous,
people came here from
all over the Soviet Union.
-More pointedly, the specialists came here.
-Yes, the specialists, first of all.
The official statistics
proves, that the population
growth in Pripyat was
1,500 people a year,
of which 800 were
newborns, and the rest were
people who came from
other cities to work here.
-Is there any statistic data about
the intellectual level of the population?
-Well, it's easy to assume: nuclear power
engineering was a cutting edge industry.
-To become an ordinary
mechanic at a nuclear power plant,
one had to study for three years,
and then another three - to work under the
supervision of an experienced specialist.
This was the proficiency level: only
the qualified people could work here.
They were intelligent and
everyone had good background.
It was a real pleasure
for me to work with people,
who lived in Pripyat
initially, it was interesting.
The work was organized
on a rotational basis,
specialists from all over
the Soviet Union came here:
from, say, Belogorsk city to
Polyarnye Zori on the Kola Peninsula;
and, of course, from the cities
in the European part of Russia.
-So, there are many, who
came to Pripyat from Polyarnye
Zori, Kurchatov and other
so-called "atom cities"?
-Yes, representatives from all nuclear
power plants worked here, in Pripyat.
-As I understand, the leaders
of the accident recovery
process also came from
all over the Soviet Union?
-Yes, that's right.
-Where did Yurij Samoylenko come from?
-Samoylenko, Golubev and
others - they came from Smolensk.
-What their positions
were before the accident?
-If I'm not mistaken, Samoylenko
was a chief engineer of a workshop,
I don't remember, which exactly.
-And Golubev was at his command?
-Yes, right.
-There were many talks after
the accident in the sense that
something had been done
incorrectly or improperly and so on.
My personal opinion is:
an explosion of a
nuclear power plant unit is
fortunately not something
that happens every day.
It's not right to say that
someone did something wrong,
or it was necessary to
do something differently, -
- hindsight is a wonderful thing.
What was your and
your colleagues' attitude,
when you heard someone
talking in the sense of criticizm:
say, it should be done like this
and shouldn't be like this and so on?
Moreover, there were totally crazy stories,
as though Samoylenko said to
shoot the pieces of the graphite
on the roof of the third unit
from an auto-machine gun...
-Yes, also Pripyat was
said to be full of corpses,
the stuff from Pripyat houses
was thought to be stolen
immediately in 1986 and
kept at home by some insiders;
to make things worse, the two-headed
dogs were running everywhere in the Zone.
Silly myths, not more.
It's quite easy to play smart
sitting on a sofa at home.
It's like now, when there are a
lot of virusology "experts" around,
or, say, experts in
politics, or, for example,
those who know the
best how to play fooltball.
-Armchair warriors, I understand.
-Then it was necessary to make decisions:
now for now. Or even - now for yesterday.
-What about the usual bureaucracy?
-No bureaucracy was seen at that time.
Any question might be
solved with just one phone call.
Bureaucracy began later - in 1988
and even more in the following years:
every single decision
had to be put on paper and
receive official approvals
from several authorities.
It turned to a mess.
Formalism killed the working system.
-I watched an interview
with Golubev, where he
complained that at first
the work was going well,
but in 1987-1988 it became impossible.
-Yes, moreover: they could ask you afterwards:
why did you make this or that decision?
-Really?
-Yes, nobody took into
account, that in that moment a
person had the opportunity
to make only one decision,
without the ability to make sure how correct
it was - actions had to be immediate.
You're right: indsight
is a wonderful thing.
-So, any critic, who is now
telling what was right and wrong,
can be safely sent away
with a flea in his ear?
-I wonder, what they themselves would
do, being at that moment in that place?
-And in that time pressure.
-It was a unprecedented time pressure.
-No doubt. At that time,
the accident that happened
was the only one with
the seventh hazard level;
now there are only two of this kind.
-Even considering accidents with a
lower hazard level - it was beyond compare.
By the way, in Japan
they did not cope with the
situation so effectively as
we did in the Soveit Union.
-I cannot say anything
about that questionable
matter, as I'm not sure
I can judge their work.
-If we just take what
is visible from outside:
further explosions took place
there after the accident itself.
And here, in ChNPP, there
were no more explosions.
However, here the whole problem
was solved by human bravery.
*insert* -Luba told me, that
she personally brought the
first emergency dosemeters
to Chernobyl only on May 6;
there were no single device
of this kind in Chernobyl before.
-Our resque team was assigned to
Spitak, where the earthquake was in 1988.
Also we had to go to the place of
that accident, when two trains crushed -
the team was already aboard,
when the order was canceled.
-How did it come that your
resque team, which was arranged
especially for working in the
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,
was also assigned to take
care of the other accidents?
-One reason was that they needed
a powerful Liebherr hoisting crane -
- and only had one of that kind.
Actually there were two
or three of them in Ukraine.
Later I saw one crane of that
kind at the exhibition in Kyiv, in IEC,
and one more - in Gadyach town.
-Do you recognize this place?
-The swimming-pool! I wouldn't
be able to find it by myself.
I would get lost in these woods.
-But it's easy: here is the third
school and the swimming-pool is nearby.
Or you've lost the third school too, right?
So, why we're here.
You probably know,
but if not, then I'll tell you:
the pool has recently appeared to be the
"Mecca" of the so-called Chernobyl tourism.
The public is eager to
see the swimming-pool.
While being a tour guide, I was asked
many times to lead the group here -
- as if there are no more
places of interest in Pripyat.
This is my experience that I do
not impose on anyone, of course.
Please tell me, what you think
about Chernobyl tourism in itself?
-I have a positive attitude
towards tourism in general -
- not least because of my first profession,
which was connected with tourism.
It's interesting to visit the Zone!
Plunge into the domain
of Nature, to see what can
happen when Nature is spared
from the human influence.
To observe, how a city can
turn into a jungle with the time.
In some sense, it's a paradize.
-So, you think that it is better
for Pripyat to be open for visiting,
than if it were a
completely closed, fenced
city, which nobody
would be allowed to enter?
-I think that anything that is closed,
would see someone, who'd open it.
It may be legal, if you arrange
it - or it will be illegal, if not.
As Pavel Vereshchagin
in the famous movie said:
"If there's a border - there
are smugglers". That's it.
-What do you think about
the "stalkers" movement?
-To my mind, it's a kind of a
kicker or something like that.
Some people try to catch the
hype - or what is it called now?
-Well, in a sort.
-In comparison - I used to
like the parashute jumping.
Another person may like, say, digging.
There are people interested in
climbing the mountains - mountaineering,
and there are those who like to
get underground - cave exploring.
If people like it - let it be so.
But in case of "stalkers" -
it's smuggling, not tourism.
