“MY MOTHERLAND is the Soviet Union,” reads a sentence written in cursive script in one of the exercise books scattered on the floor of an abandoned school in Pripyat, a Soviet ghost town next to the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which blew up thirty years ago today. The town, built in the 1970s for the plant’s workers, was evacuated on the afternoon of April 27th 1986, some 36 hours after the worst nuclear-power disaster in history.
Today Pripyat is being reclaimed by nature and tourists. What were once streets have become forest paths; concrete blocks of flats decorated with Soviet slogans and symbols are barely visible through the trees. Some 200 pensioners eventually returned to villages in the area, but Pripyat itself remains dead, a Soviet Pompeii. Tourists and journalists stroll through silent alleys dotted with rusting propaganda stands, taking photographs of scattered gas masks, clothes, toys and textbooks in abandoned schoolrooms. Some may have been positioned there deliberately by tour organisers.
Chernobyl is also a monument to the extinction of Soviet civilisation. As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader,...Continue reading
Souce: Europe http://ift.tt/1pC49e2
EmoticonEmoticon