Stardate 20040617.1206

(On Screen): Mark wrote:

Hey Fellow Warblogger,

Yeesh...

Okay all kidding aside. I was tooling around my favorite motorcycle website and some of the guys were talking about this site.

What is it? It's this Russian scientist who rides her motorcycle around the Chernobyl area and made a photo journal of one of her trips. It's very interesting. Mostly because it lacks any real editorial comment on the whole matter of communism and atomic energy. What you get when you look at the pictures is a snapshot/time capsule of 1985 Soviet Union Life.

What is interesting about 1985 soviet life? Most of the equipment and "stuff" looks vintage 1960. Even the party pamphlets; especially the baby doll gas mask found in a kindergarten classroom.

Why am I sending it to you? Well, while I was looking at it a little voice in the back of my head said SDB would like to see this. So here you are.

Take it for what its worth... motorcycles, scientists, and nuclear reactors.

I remember seeing that site quite a while ago.

There were others who claimed that it was at least partially a hoax. They said that some of what she claimed she had been doing (riding her motorcycle around in that area) wasn't possible, and that she probably had visited some of those areas and taken the photos as part of organized motor-bus tours instead.

I don't have any idea whether the criticism makes sense, and whether we should consider the story on that site of how the pictures were taken to be a fabrication. What I think is most significant is that the criticism does not in any way claim that the pictures themselves are faked. They actually were shot in that area, and show things as they actually exist there.

It makes that area somewhat similar, in archeological terms, to Pompeii. One problem with studying old ruins in order to try to understand everyday life as it was lived in that place and time, and a problem especially in studying the artifacts found there, is that the artifacts are not a representative sample of the objects they actually owned. If the original inhabitants of the ruins left deliberately and without haste, then they took with them everything they valued, and left behind them things which were broken or which were too heavy and not valuable enough to be worth carrying.

Archeologists have learned a great deal by digging through ancient trash heaps. What people throw away can reveal a lot about them. But it doesn't necessarily reveal as much as you'd like to know about what they had which they did not throw away.

That is why Pompeii was so fascinating for historians: it was destroyed extremely rapidly, without warning. Some people did flee and tried to take cover in nearby caves, where they died anyway. Most of those who fled took nothing with them, or only grabbed items which were small, light and extremely valuable (i.e. they took their babies, their jewelry and gold). A lot of people didn't get away at all, and died inside Pompeii. So when Pompeii was excavated, the artifacts they found were actually a pretty representative sample of the artifacts which were actually owned by people who lived there at the time. The archeologists got to look at the stuff that people would not have thrown away.

When those cities near the Chernobyl power plant were evacuated, it wasn't done with 15 minutes notice; the people did have the ability to pack up their stuff. In that sense it isn't really quite the same thing. But the other reason Pompeii was extraordinarily valuable was because the structures uncovered there represented an instantaneous snapshot in time.

Other similar archeological sites weren't the same. Usually other similar abandoned towns were abandoned slowly, often in a gradual process taking decades, with some parts of the town becoming empty as the declining population clustered in other parts. Then after it was totally abandoned, the structures were exposed to weather and vandalism for up to several centuries, because the process of covering them was slow – if, indeed, they were covered at all. By contrast, Pompeii went from thriving city to totally-buried memory in just a few hours, and that meant that all the structures were contemporaneous, and the overall preservation of those structures was exceptional.

The areas near Chernobyl which were evacuated are very much like Pompeii in that way. They aren't buried, of course, but they have only been exposed to environmental insults for a short time and that has had little effect.The area went from bustling (sort of) urban center to ghost town in no more than a week.

But unlike Pompeii, what caused depopulation did not also cause physical destruction. The most of buildings in Pompeii were seriously damaged by the volcanic ash which buried them, but even though the Chernobyl meltdown forced that part of Ukraine to be evacuated, it didn't cause widespread physical destruction. So as Mark says, it is a unique opportunity to see what everyday life was like for people in a particular time and place.

The organization of the city, and the kinds of buildings whic