This did not trouble him then and does not concern him now. "It was dark when we got into a small boat to cross a river that would take us into the zone and I didn’t understand what I was seeing, only that there were many buildings without lights." "I was only told that we would go to a place where there were a lot of animals," he said. Radiation is especially dangerous for children because their bodies are still developing. He accompanied his father and a few friends on a hunting trip. Shalashov’s first visit to Chernobyl was illegal.
"It had a tank on one side and the stick-figure of a man on the other," he said. One of his first drawings he remembers making at school was of the so-called sarcophagus, the cover built over the plant’s damaged reactor to minimize the spread of radiation into the air. Shalashov's connection to the zone runs deep.īoth of his parents and an aunt had jobs connected to the power plant. "We pretended to be in the army and made sure we were quieter than the grass or the wind. "It was just a few people at first, but by the time I was doing it we were breaking in with a crew of about 10-15 people, depending on the day," he said. But my friends and I, we were only interested in the adventure of being there and seeing something new," Shalashov said. "In the early days, the first stalkers in the zone were murderers and other criminals escaping the police, stealing things, this was somewhere they could go to hide. Shalashov used to be what Ukrainians call a stalker, someone who defies the official government prohibitions and secretly enters the zone in the spirit of exploration, romance, bravado, desperation or simply because they found a way to get in undetected. He spends weekends in Chernobyl as a government guide. "Where I go to relax," he said.ĭuring the week at the economics ministry, he promotes Ukraine as a tourist destination, a tough sell when a war with Russian separatists raging in the east has killed more than 9,000 people. On a recent Sunday, Shalashov was in Ukraine’s zone legally. Three decades after the catastrophe, a key part of the Chernobyl experience remains essentially the same: You effortlessly leave one world and enter another. Radiation has no taste or odor, and it can't be seen or heard.
This hazard trefoil symbol is small, almost comically so.
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