Hello Stalkers!
It's time for another portion of real life stories that we smuggled into the game. Today we will start with anecdotes about the local flora. One of them is presented to us by Olga - who is the walking encyclopedia when it comes to facts about the Red Forest. During the conversation, she mentions that a few years ago she was showing a forest to a group of American researchers, who noticed something interesting. “I showed them around the Red Forest and everything. They were taking measurements and one guy told me that the trees had barely changed since the Incident. I hadn't really thought about it until now. But it really does feel like this whole place is a snapshot of the past. Like a butterfly caught in amber. That's probably due to the radiation. It almost wiped out the microorganisms living on the forest floor. There's almost no decay, so the trees don't rot like they normally would. I mean, they are decaying, but extremely slowly."
That's true. The microbes that naturally break down vegetation have almost become extinct due to radiation. Their lack caused the forest to “freeze over time”, taking on a red color for many, many years. A fascinating biological phenomenon with a hint of romanticism.
Next up is the extraordinary Mikhail, who will always give us a lot of history. For example, how he collected radioactive berries and mushrooms and sold them in the European Union. A customs officer even told him how he once searched the truck that triggered radioactivity detectors. He was sure he was going to find some kind of dirty bomb, but to his surprise the cargo containted berries harvested in Pripyat.
Journalist Kate Brown described the smuggling of blueberries from the Zone in her book, “Chernobyl. Survival Manual”. In one of the chapters, she describes how she and a Ukrainian friend decided to check the turnover of undergrowth fruits 30 years after the disaster. Officially, radioactive berries are used as dyes. Sellers claim that they are mixed with the "good" ones (although most of them are still contaminated to some extent), so that they pass inspection and are sent to Poland to processing plants. From there, in the form of finished products, they go to fairs and store shelves all over Europe. The same is the case with mushrooms.
“The Poles have been consuming radioactive products from the local forests since 1986. Thanks to the lifting of trade restrictions, they send the fleece contaminated after Chernobyl to European markets, to wealthy buyers from abroad. From Europe, the berries travel on. A nuclear safety specialist told me that a truck with a "radiant mass" in a trailer was stopped at the US-Canadian border. Fearing that it was a "dirty bomb", border guards checked what it was. They were relieved to find berries from Ukraine. Because they were within the acceptable standard, the border guards allowed the truck to enter the States."
We go back to Olga again, who in conversation with Igor recollects the times when she worked in the Chernobyl power plant. There she heard a rumor that the KGB was trying to... breed fish in the cooling tanks of a nuclear power plant. Serhia Plokha took a closer look at this rumor. In his book, “Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy”, he reported that two months before the accident, “Soviet Life” - an English-language magazine filled with propaganda for foreigners - quoted in an article by the chief engineer of Chernobyl, who boasted that the plant's cooling pond was used for fish farming.
Since we are on the subject of fish, it is worth mentioning one more rumor that circulates around the Zone. Well, contaminated water is believed to be a nutrient medium for overgrown catfish and other fish with radioactive mutations. This makes the rivers and lakes near Chernobyl one of the most popular fishing spots in the world.
The last but extremely interesting anecdote comes from the reliable Mikhail (how many stories does he have?). He mentions how, as a child, he and his aunt went to Slavutych (a city near Chernobyl built after the disaster) to see how Anatoly Kashpirovsky tried to heal radiation liquidators using hypnosis.
Kashpirovsky is a Russian psychiatrist and psychotherapist who gained widespread fame in the late 1980s. At that time, he conducted hypnosis sessions (teletherapy) on state television, which were very popular. Many viewers believed that TV broadcasting did help combat many diseases and ailments, from hair loss to cancer. However, as it turned out, hypnosis had nothing to do with it. In an official statement, the USSR Ministry of Health called this phenomenon "collective psychosis" - some of the allegedly healed people were sent to hospitals with symptoms of mental illness.
After he was banned from teletherapy, Kashpirovsky continued his "career" promoting his controversial methods of treating people. In 1990, he worked all summer with the inhabitants of Sławutycze and Pripyat to help the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. For this purpose, he used hypnosis to cure, among others, liquidators from the effects of radiation. If you want to read more about the case, we refer you to the book by Kate Brown we mentioned.
That's it for today!
Take care, Stalkers!
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