Arkady Filin

Arkady Filin is a liquidator whose testimony turns the work of cleanup into an account of burial: gardens, houses, forests, and the creatures within them are treated as contaminated matter to be removed. A history teacher sent to work twenty kilometers from the reactor, he rejects a heroic version of the operation. What remains instead is a fragmented witness’s record of coercion, fear, habit, compromised choices, and a living world that the cleanup could not fully account for.

Identity and Assignment

Filin identifies himself as a history teacher, one of a group of men between twenty-five and forty who were called up for military training and sent to live in tents in the forest. He compares their conditions to those of partisans, but their tools were shovels rather than machine guns. Wearing gloves, respirators, and surgical robes under the sun, the workers went into village yards to bury garbage heaps and gardens. The contrast between their protective clothing and the ordinary appearance of the plants they destroyed made the operation bewildering to the residents watching them.

Their work was organized under unequal and uncertain conditions. Each unit had one dosimeter, although radiation levels differed from one location to another: one worker might be in a place registering two roentgen while another was exposed to ten. Filin describes the workers as having no rights, like prisoners, yet also as frightened people operating without a clear grasp of the danger. He says that he himself watched events from the side rather than presenting himself as a fearless protagonist.

The Work of Burial

Filin’s account repeatedly returns to the physical acts of the cleanup. The workers buried trash heaps and gardens, uprooted garlic and cabbage that looked ordinary, and encountered villagers who crossed themselves at the sight of them. In one especially stark scene, he saw a man watching his house being buried. The work extended beyond buildings: houses, wells, and trees were buried, and material was cut down, rolled into large plastic sheets, and disposed of. The landscape was not simply abandoned; it was dismantled and covered over.

The forest required its own grim procedure. Trees were sawed into lengths of a meter and a half, packed in cellophane, and thrown into graves. Filin says he could not sleep afterward. With his eyes closed, he saw dark shapes turning over, as though the buried tracts of land were alive. His memory settles on the insects and other small creatures in that soil—bugs, spiders, ants, worms—whose names he did not know. He recalls killing them by the tens, hundreds, and thousands, destroying their homes and secrets before burying them. The repetition of burial makes the labor sound both practical and immeasurable: the workers could count the operations, but not fully know what kinds of life they were ending.

The seasons mark the limits of that labor. When Filin arrived, birds were in their nests; when he left, apples lay on the snow. The workers had not managed to bury everything. His most powerful impression of the place is not a machine or a radiation reading, but the bugs and the other life entombed with the earth. In his account, the cleanup’s incompleteness is not a minor administrative failure: it exposes how little the operation could encompass, even as it reached into the ground and altered whole habitats.

Fear, Routine, and Compromise

The contaminated village was also a place where people tried to resume ordinary life. Residents invited the workers to sit at their tables and drink; Filin describes a dosimeter placed near food on a stove and the discovery that an apparently familiar meal was highly radioactive. The workers could not explain everything they knew—or did not know—to people who wanted to be friendly and understand what was happening. In another account, an old woman confronted a scientist dressed in rubber protection, tall boots, and goggles, demanding to know what such protection meant for the villagers and going after him with a stick. Filin’s recollection places the protected expert and the exposed resident in the same scene without making the difference between them disappear.

Fear did not define every hour. Filin says that people cannot live constantly in terror, and that normal routines returned: men drank vodka, played cards, pursued relationships, had children, and talked about money. Their reasons for working varied. Some came because they had been ordered to work; some hoped for better careers or the promised benefits of an apartment, kindergarten place, or car. Others volunteered, including women who had been told their services were not needed but insisted on coming. Volunteers also guarded storehouses, while students formed work units and people donated blood and bone marrow. Filin’s account holds these actions alongside exploitation and opportunism rather than reducing the workers to a single moral category.

The system’s practical disorder was equally visible. A village official might bring vodka to radiation specialists in order to have a village removed from evacuation lists, or to have it added because a three-room apartment in Minsk had already been promised. Filin says no one checked the radiation reports. He also recalls a man refusing to leave his tent and sleeping in his plastic suit, then being expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after shouting that he wanted to live. Such episodes complicate the idea of collective heroism: orders, incentives, fear, generosity, theft, and resistance coexist in the same emergency.

Witness, Memory, and Narrative Role

Filin openly resists the expectation that his experience should furnish a story of heroes. He remembers having questioned why he had to risk himself while others did not, and says the medals and awards came because he was not afraid of dying—not because he had embraced a noble purpose. He describes himself and others as people who could act recklessly, but insists that recklessness was not necessary. This refusal does not erase what the workers did; it challenges the conversion of dangerous labor into a reassuring legend.

To describe what the disaster did to a witness, Filin invokes a parable by Leonid Andreev about Lazarus, who looked into the abyss and could never again be like other people, even after being resurrected. He then tells another parable: a man sees Christ fall while carrying the cross, but stays inside because his tooth hurts. When the pain passes, he learns that Christ has risen and realizes he could have witnessed the event. Filin uses this story to question what historical witnessing means. His own father defended Moscow in 1942, but learned only much later, from books and films, that he had been part of a great event. His memory was not a grand historical account, but a trench, a rifle shot, an explosion, and being dug out half-alive. Filin adds that his wife left him during that period. The testimony ends not with a resolution, but with the limits and private costs that historical narratives can leave out.

The book’s arrangement places Filin’s testimony amid other accounts that widen its attention beyond human survival: a village’s plea for a missing, mute woman; the image of an abandoned cat and children’s notes left on houses; and later reflections on animals and the possibility of evacuating them. These are distinct voices, not episodes Filin claims as his own. Together with his account of buried insects and forests, they make his central question harder to evade: a cleanup directed at protecting people could also erase the homes and lives of beings who had no way to understand, consent, or leave.