Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide
by Darmon Richter
(FUEL Publishing, £24.95)

BRITISH writer and photographer Darmon Richter first discovered Chernobyl on an official bus tour more than a decade after the disaster of 1986.

He became so fascinated with this accidental monument to human hubris that he has returned many times since, taking photographs, researching and writing about this atomic graveyard.

His book Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide weaves together strands of history, science and ecology that intersect at the site of the disaster.

The author has spent much of his life exploring and writing about what he calls “ideological architecture.”

Richter’s first trip to Chernobyl was a similar experience to that of nearly all outside visitors to the site, an official bus tour that visited a list of well-known, well-trodden locations within the exclusion zone.

While the tour fired his interest, a look at a map revealed just how much he hadn’t seen and he soon began making return trips via an underground network of “stalkers,” unofficial guides who lead tours of Chernobyl and visit sites well outside the official list of “safe” areas.

Over the decades the town of Pripyat near Chernobyl and the associated infrastructure of the atomic plant have taken on an aura of a post-disaster theme park, with more than 100,000 tourists visiting Chernobyl in 2019 alone. It has become a multimillion-pound industry.

There are hundreds of people who live in the zone and thousands who commute in every day for work — not just power plant employees but people working in construction, forestry, conservation and fire prevention.

Richter’s work encompasses an area the size of a small country and ventures deeper than other previously published accounts.

His poignant photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a model town designed to accommodate the workers at the atomic site, offer a ghostly record of a community and an industrial complex that has been wiped off the map — ruined apartment blocks, rusting symbols of Soviet power, equipment, deserted shops and sports facilities.

Despite the passage of barely three decades, nature has rapidly reconquered much of the terrain.

Highways are now carpeted with grass and flowers, trees are spreading their roots through the concrete and foxes and other animals roam freely in what has become a veritable nature reserve.

This is a ghostly journey through what was once a vibrant community and whose buildings are, like Mayan and Aztec artefacts in the jungles of Central America, now only monuments lost deep in irradiated forests.

Richter has also interviewed a number of those who were involved in Chernobyl from the very beginning and others who still live in or near the exclusion area.

He devotes a fascinating chapter to the depiction of nuclear accidents and apocalyptic scenarios in cinema, from documentaries about Hiroshima to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Peter Watkins’s The War Game and James Bridges’ China Syndrome.

His research is extensive and meticulous, providing the reader with a comprehensive and fascinating depiction of the Chernobyl phenomenon. And he gives detailed scientific background to the disaster and the efforts to deal with the aftermath.

His documentation is somewhat marred by an unconscious paternalism that typifies so much commentary on the Soviet Union by Western journalists, together with a rather blanket dismissal of Soviet goals, achievements and failures, within the context of a history characterised by invasions, devastation and siege.

Richter homes in on depictions of Prometheus, who defied the gods by stealing fire for humanity and who is celebrated in Chernobyl as a metaphor for humanity’s taming of the atom.

He writes about the “Sovietisation of the Prometheus myth” and quotes Marx arguing that Prometheus is “a code for seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie…” 

Yet Marx mentioned Prometheus when he was still a student in Berlin and had not even begun to think about the proletariat or socialism.

Richter also describes the town of Pripyat as “fundamentally a Marxist city” but  I don’t recall Marx writing on architecture or town planning.

But these are minor quibbles — overall this is a very informative book and it is a vital reminder of the continuing dangers of nuclear power and the devastation that can be caused by a simple mistake or miscalculation.

Such was was the case with the disasters at Windscale in Britain, Thee Mile Island in the US and Fukuyama in Japan.

And we are all — even thousands of miles from the site — still suffering from the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.