Khoyniki

Khoyniki is presented as a regional center near the Chernobyl disaster zone where the crisis became tangible through evacuation, hazardous cleanup, and the uneven flow of information. The accounts place it between the distant authority of the state and the everyday lives of residents: a town with a plaque honoring its exemplary citizens, but also a place where an alcoholic cab driver took children from a kindergarten into the radioactive zone. Its significance lies in that contrast, and in the way ordinary routines continued alongside danger that people could neither see nor reliably measure.

Regional center at the edge of the disaster

A worker recalled being summoned after returning from Afghanistan, given little information, and sent first to Khoyniki. People there did not know what the arriving crew had been assigned to do. The crew was taken onward to a village, where a wedding was underway: young people danced, music played, and vodka was being served. The workers, meanwhile, were ordered to strip away the topsoil to the depth of one spade. The ordinary celebration and the abrupt imposition of hazardous work occupy the same scene; the disaster did not arrive in a landscape emptied of daily life, but in the midst of it.

Khoyniki also figures in accounts of the wider geography around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. On April 27, a scientist traveled through the Gomel Region to towns including Bragin, Khoyniki, and Narovlya, all described as roughly twenty to thirty kilometers from the station, carrying instruments to measure background radiation. The account gives readings for Bragin and Narovlya, not Khoyniki, and describes people in the towns continuing to sow, mow, and prepare for Easter because no orders had reached them. From above, the questions arriving were about the harvest and its progress. Radiation measurements and agricultural schedules belonged to different systems of knowledge, and residents were left to live inside that disconnect.

Cleanup work and the limits of protection

The crew sent toward Khoyniki was assigned soil removal without being told the radiation levels it would face. On Victory Day, a general visited and congratulated the workers. When one man asked what doses they were receiving, a brigadier later rebuked him as an alarmist. Gas masks arrived only days afterward; the men did not use them. Dosimeters were shown to them on a few occasions but were not handed over. Their periodic leave was brief, and the remembered object of those trips home was vodka: one worker returned carrying two backpacks full of bottles, to the other men’s cheers. These details show a work force expected to obey without being equipped with the information or protection that could make obedience meaningful.

The local hunters faced a related demand. Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovskiy, chairman of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fishermen, recalled being called in by regional officials and instructed to exterminate household dogs and cats left in the Zone of Exclusion, on the grounds that their contaminated fur might carry radiation beyond it. He gathered two brigades of twenty hunters each, with a veterinarian and a representative of the epidemic center accompanying each brigade. Civil defense had no respirators to provide. Verzhikovskiy obtained thin masks from a cement factory instead, while soldiers in the zone had masks, gloves, and armored personnel carriers. The hunters returned to their families in the same shirts and boots they had worn on the assignment. The difference in equipment made the hierarchy of protection visible even as the danger itself remained invisible.

Evacuation, memory, and ordinary courage

A cameraman’s account of Khoyniki centers on the town’s plaque of achievement, which displayed the names of the region’s supposedly best people. Yet, in the moment that mattered, it was an alcoholic cab driver—not one of the honored figures—who entered the radioactive zone to collect children from kindergarten. The children were evacuated first, loaded onto large buses. The cameraman recognized the gestures of departure from familiar war films: brief farewells, a lone tear, a child trying to reassure a mother. He understood that people were reaching for a remembered form of behavior, trying to meet an unfamiliar emergency through scenes they already knew. Khoyniki thus becomes a place where inherited stories of war shaped how evacuation looked and how people attempted to endure it.

The same account notes that residents and evacuees could appear to repeat the conduct of actors in The Cranes Are Flying. The resemblance was not evidence that the crisis was understood; it revealed how people borrowed recognizable gestures when faced with circumstances for which they had no established language. The town’s plaque and the cab driver’s action sharpen the contrast between public honor and actual conduct. In the emergency, character was disclosed through what someone did, not through the official list of exemplary citizens.

Contamination beyond the visible boundary

Khoyniki is part of a landscape where radiation measurements challenged familiar distinctions between safe and unsafe places. A field team found forest background levels five to six times those on roads or fields, and recorded thyroid activity among adults and children in some villages at one hundred, and sometimes two or three hundred, times the allowable level. Children continued playing in sandboxes; people farmed their plots; stores displayed clothing beside uncovered food. The account does not assign those measurements specifically to Khoyniki, but it places the town within the affected region where everyday activity proceeded despite evidence of contamination. Its surrounding communities were not simply abandoned at once: work, food distribution, and the effort to maintain production continued amid uncertain exposure.

The damage also reached beyond the immediate work of cleanup. In a later recollection, an evacuee described being looked at differently after becoming a person from Chernobyl, treated as an object of curiosity and uncertainty. Another family’s son, after settling in Mogilev, was called radioactive by classmates and nicknamed Shiny. Such testimony does not describe a single episode confined to Khoyniki; it helps explain the wider human consequences of the evacuation that the town’s accounts place in motion. Khoyniki’s role in the book is therefore both geographic and narrative: it anchors the emergency in a specific regional center, while opening onto the labor, displacement, stigma, and uncertain knowledge that extended far beyond its streets.