Gomel Region stands at the center of the book’s account of how the Chernobyl disaster became a national catastrophe for Belarus: radiation transformed not only the land but also the conditions of ordinary life, the movement of people, and the treatment of other living things. The region’s experience emerges through stark measurements and administrative failures, but also through intimate testimony about abandoned homes, animals left behind, and people who could not make themselves leave.

Geographic and national setting

Belarus had no nuclear power stations of its own. The nearest operating stations in the former Soviet Union were older Soviet-designed RBMK facilities: Ignalinsk to the north, Smolensk to the east, and Chernobyl to the south. On April 26, 1986, explosions destroyed the reactor in Energy Block 4 at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe that followed fell especially heavily on Gomel Region and neighboring Mogilev Region.

The scale of the national loss is conveyed through comparisons with wartime destruction. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarusian villages along with their inhabitants; following Chernobyl, Belarus lost 485 villages and settlements, 70 of them buried permanently. One in five Belarusians lived on contaminated land, including 700,000 children. In Gomel Region and Mogilev Region, mortality exceeded births by 20 percent. These figures make the disaster more than a story of a damaged reactor: they describe a changed geography of habitation and a demographic crisis measured across generations.

Contamination across land and water

The explosion released 50 million curies of radionuclides into the atmosphere, and 70 percent descended on Belarus. Cesium-137 contamination above one curie per square kilometer covered 23 percent of the country, compared with 4.8 percent of Ukraine and 0.5 percent of Russia. More than 18 million hectares of arable land exceeded that contamination density, while 2,400 hectares were removed from agricultural use. The radioactive zone also included 26 percent of Belarusian forests and extensive marshland near the Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh rivers.

This contamination was difficult to apprehend because it did not always announce itself in a visible form. The book sets technical measurements beside the continuing presence of forests, rivers, gardens, and animals. One account begins with strangled moles appearing in a yard; another records a son asking whether May bugs had emerged, only to hear that there were no bugs, not even maggots. Such observations do not explain radiation scientifically, but they show how people encountered a damaged environment through absences and disturbances in familiar seasonal life. The reported rise over time in cancer, mental and neurological disorders, and genetic mutations gives those small signs a longer, less visible horizon.

Measurements, warnings, and disrupted services

On April 27, a scientist traveled through Gomel Region, taking instruments to measure background radiation in towns near the station. The readings were 30,000 micro-roentgens per hour in Bragin and 28,000 in Narovlya, yet people were sowing and mowing in the fields and preparing for Easter. Residents had received no evacuation or safety orders; instructions from above concerned the progress of the harvest. To those at work, the language of roentgens and micro-roentgens seemed to belong to another world, while ordinary agricultural routines continued around them.

The later account of field work in Krasnopolsk Region shows how little the official plans adapted to the danger. The prescribed method for preventing radionuclides from washing from fields into rivers involved repeated double furrows and inspection along small waterways. But planting and harvesting plans remained unchanged, even though peas and beans were known to absorb radiation and some places registered 40 curies or more. Local services were already failing: kindergarten cooks and nurses had left, children were hungry, and patients needing an appendectomy had to travel 60 kilometers over a badly rutted road because surgeons had gone.

Military personnel supplied an armored exploratory vehicle for the fieldwork. Its presence frightened women watching from their fences, who had seen nothing like it since the war and feared that another war had begun. Meanwhile, a tractor driver took a break outside the supposedly sealed, protected cab, relying on a sweatshirt over his head. The contrast between elaborate procedures and improvised behavior shows how instructions could exist on paper without becoming practical understanding or protection.

Evacuation, return, and the social life of place

Evacuation reached into homes and disrupted people’s attachments to both possessions and animals. One rural resident recalled low-flying planes heading toward the reactor as soldiers went from house to house asking whether people had packed. Livestock moaned, children cried, and old women were carried to vehicles after pleading outside their homes. The witness stayed indoors that first day; later, she heard that people and livestock had traveled in separate columns. Her refusal to leave and her continuing life in an empty village stand beside the deaths of some younger people who had moved elsewhere. In the account, the deserted settlement is not simply vacant: birds and elk have become conspicuous presences, while the absent human community remains palpable.

Other testimonies show the material hardship that could follow displacement. One woman said she walked for two weeks with her cow and slept in the forest after being refused entry to a house. In another account, a displaced family’s possessions became sources of fear and anger: a blanket developed a spot that glowed, and it had to be cut out; the family could no longer sleep under the blanket or wear the coat. In Minsk, a conductor who had served tea to other passengers asked the family for their cups after learning they came from Chernobyl. The stigma attached to the place traveled with its residents, turning an origin into a reason for avoidance.

The region’s human geography also includes those removed without a clear route back. Anna Petrovna Badaeva pleaded for news of Anna Sushko, a mute, illiterate sixty-year-old from Kozhushki who had been taken away by ambulance during the transfer. The village had cared for her by chopping wood, bringing milk, and keeping her stove warm; after two years away, its residents returned and wanted to bring her home. Their appeal preserves the difference between evacuation as an administrative act and displacement as an individual fate: a person could be transported to safety and still disappear from the network of neighbors who knew how to care for her.

Animals and the altered meaning of the zone

Animals appear in the region’s testimony as fellow inhabitants, casualties, and measures of human responsibility. In Khoyniki, Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovskiy, chairman of the local Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fishermen, recalled that after killing a doe as a child he swore never to kill another, struck by the expressiveness of its eyes. His reflection contrasts human claims to understanding with the animal’s simpler condition of living. In a different account, a filmmaker remembered an old woman who would not leave without her cat, and an apple tree whose fruit had no smell; these experiences led him to film animals. When children later asked why no one had helped them, he could not answer. He had found no way to make human-centered art account for all the lives affected.

The evacuation of people therefore exposes an unresolved question about what, or whom, emergency measures were designed to protect. A proposal to evacuate animals had been considered, but resettling creatures underground, in the sky, or across different habitats posed problems for which there was no workable answer. The book presents Gomel Region not as a passive backdrop to human history but as a landscape where contamination and removal rearranged relations among people, animals, plants, and place. Its significance lies in the conjunction of measurable pollution with slower losses: abandoned villages, broken care networks, social exclusion, and the diminished presence of living things that had once made the countryside familiar.