Nuclear Borders: Informally Negotiating the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Abstract

Borders have been a part of Viktor’s life for most of his adulthood. Until the ‘anthropological shock’ (Beck, 1987) of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Viktor was doing national service as a border guard on the western edge of the Soviet Union. He showed me photographs of his former self: uniformed, proud and young. They were stuck carefully into a velvet-clad scrap book of a previous life. He patrolled the barbed wire fence that separated the USSR from the Socialist Republic of Romania, miles away from his home near a power station in northern Ukraine, where we now sat: ‘After Chernobyl it all changed’ he said. He shows me a pile of ‘liquidator’ passes which he held until 2008, each one signed and stamped with a nuclear warning symbol next to a photograph of his face. A different, more serious man stared back, his face the embodiment of life on the margins. These passes let him enter the 30 km ‘Zone of Alienation’ which surrounds the exploded reactor, and contains some of the highest levels of nuclear contamination on earth. A contamination that is a constant threat, but remains completely invisible. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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