Portraits of imprisoned ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko are fly-posted on the facades of the neoclassical buildings on Khreshatkyk Street, her distinctive peasant braid reproduced in graphic black and white. Black-clad ultra-nationalist Cossacks (riding boots, wool hats, facial hair, swords) are banging huge kettledrums at the base of an equestrian statue of their culture hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led a seventeenth-century uprising against the Poles. The atmosphere is brittle, crackling with new money and potential violence. You can shop at Dior or Zara, but GUM, the Soviet-era department store, has closed its doors. At Murakami Sushi you can try ten kinds of Philadelphia roll, unless you’re across the street at Tarantino’s, eating pizza. Big black SUVs pull up outside private views at the art centre opened by Viktor Pinchuk, the billionaire steel magnate, who also owns four TV stations and is married to the ex-president’s daughter.
Ten-year-old gold-domed churches dominate the skyline, exact replicas of those destroyed by Stalin in the thirties. Have you just learnt of a disaster from the News and want to get out there and see it for yourself? Get in touch and we’ll make it happen. We guarantee your holiday will be a complete disaster and leave you wanting more. It is very emotional to think of the little children.’ĭisaster Tourism offers a unique experience for those who have exhausted the normal mundane package holiday. Then one of the Germans steps in front of me, crouching down to get his own shot. I photograph the doll, its hair bleached grey, the rubbery plastic of its head weathered to a sort of sickly puce. The level is 7.71, about seventy times the background level this morning in Kiev. Nearby, at the base of a tree, lies a plastic doll, missing one leg and both its arms, half buried in yellow leaves like a little murder victim.
On the ground outside the nursery school is a rusty toy truck. A few paces further on the level is 2.89. If I stood by the soldier for an hour, my body would absorb 0.59 microsieverts of radiation. As I walk down the path behind him, the dosimeter begins to beep. A fresh wreath has been laid at the feet of the youthful bronze soldier, who wears a pensive expression, as if he’s aware that the world has become more complex since the heroic days of the Great Patriotic War.
The village war memorial stands in a grove of maple trees.
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