Chernobyl village

Radiation. Chernobyl. These two terrible words came into life of USSR residents so long ago that now ex-soviet people almost forgot about the nuclear disaster hiding behind those words. People in my native Belarusian village do not care about them too… And they did not care even 5 years since the accident.

The first time after the catastrophe I visited my native village Kyselyevka (Belarus, Mogilev region, Kostukovichskiy district) in 1990. Nothing has changed in the rural way: people raise children, plow fields, and young people have fun in the evening around campfire. But near the gardens appeared signs "Radioactivity. Danger zone!"

- Now we know there is a little radiation in our region, - said my neighbor. - But what level of radiation was after the accident in 1986, no one knows. If we knew earlier about all the troubles that Chernobyl disaster causes, we left, maybe, and now it's late...

- We have got some truth many years later after we were relocated by force, - added my uncle Victor. - New houses was built in thirty kilometers away the village. We have been told there is less radiation, but it's hard to believe. We had two options: to live as we did before, or lie down and die...

Three decades the villagers were holding on, healing themselves by a hooch and gradually dying for different reasons.

It is difficult to say what was more difficult for me: to overcome the internal discomfort (a few days I was shooting at 40 curies radiation) or to accept my impossibility to help my relatives to leave the village. And if they could leave their land, houses and farms, where to go?

By my photo series "Chernobyl village" I want to depict not my family's or the village's tragedy, but the drama of the entire USSR.

P.S. Last houses of Kyselyevka, my forefathers's home land, were demolished and buried in the summer of 2015... Our native village were located between three cemeteries, and now it is nothing but a large cemetery.

More information about photoseries "Chernobyl village"

The photos were taken in 1979 - 1982, 1990, 2000, 2006, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2023, 2025.