Burial of evacuated villages

The burial of evacuated villages was a state-directed effort to contain radioactive contamination by burying entire settlements beneath earth. One child’s account gives the procedure its starkest physical detail: houses were washed, hauled into five-meter pits, and covered with sand and clay until a village became an empty field sown with corn. The operation was meant to bury radioactive dust, but it also swallowed homes, possessions, and familiar ground, without resolving the losses of those forced to leave or the fate of other living things.

Preparation and procedure

At the beginning of the school year, the child recalls, there were no flowers: they were radioactive. Workers who had once been masons were soldiers, mowing the flowers, stripping away soil, and carrying it off in trucks and trailers. A year later, the residents had all been evacuated and the village was being buried. The child had not witnessed the demolition directly; the account came from a father who drove there and described what he saw.

The work proceeded in a sequence designed to keep contaminated dust from rising. First, workers dug a pit five meters deep. Firefighters then washed each house with hoses, from roof to foundation, including its windows and doors. A crane pulled the cleaned house from its site and lowered it into the pit. Dolls, books, and cans remained scattered around; an excavator gathered them before the hole was covered with sand and clay and leveled. Corn was planted over the resulting field. The account names what lay beneath it: the family’s house, the school, and the village council office.

Homes, possessions, and enforced departure

The burial followed an evacuation that residents had been told was temporary. In another testimony, a departing resident says that people wrote their names on houses, fences, and asphalt, and that some took soil from a mother’s grave in a small sack. These gestures preserved attachments that the official operation could not accommodate: a house was not merely contaminated material, and departure did not make its occupants feel they had left forever.

Soldiers and roadblocks enforced the boundary around evacuated villages. A soldier assigned to keep former residents out describes farmers being prevented from taking even a bucket, pitcher, saw, or axe from their yards, and from harvesting crops. The contradiction was visible on the same road: soldiers kept people away while cows grazed, harvesters worked, and grain was shipped. Women pleaded to enter their own houses and land; some brought eggs, bacon, or homemade vodka. In a related account, a woman milked her cow beside a soldier who had to ensure that she poured the milk onto the ground, while another watched an old woman bury a basket of eggs. The ban made ordinary acts of care and harvest part of the contamination-control regime.

After evacuation, the loss could persist as absence without a known destination. Anna Sushko, a mute and illiterate sixty-year-old, was put into an ambulance during the transfer and taken away. Her neighbors later did not know where she was. They remembered the community’s care for her and wanted to bring her back to the house they said was still standing. Her story is not a report of the burial procedure itself, but it shows how removal could separate people from the homes and networks that might otherwise have remained points of return.

The buried world and its other inhabitants

The procedure’s boundary between what could be saved and what had to be abandoned was not limited to buildings. One witness remembers an apparently empty house where a real cat had survived, eating the geraniums. Notes left on doors asked visitors not to damage the house; a child’s message warned others not to kill the family cat. Those domestic instructions outlasted the household, but could not guarantee the animal’s safety. A separate account records a soldier telling an old woman that she could not take her cat because its fur was radioactive. She refused to leave without it, calling it family.

The scale of burial also reached below and beyond the visible village. A witness describes fruit left on the snow and says that not all of it had been buried. The work included soil and creatures living in it—bugs, spiders, and leeches—so that burial could mean not only removing a contaminated surface but entombing a world of small lives. A filmmaker’s recollection of showing children his Chernobyl films turns that absence into a question from a boy: “Why couldn’t anyone help the animals?” The question exposes a limit in the evacuation scheme: people and buildings could be moved or buried by command, but the birds, insects, worms, and other life of the place did not fit neatly into either response.

Aftermath and significance

The village described by the child did not reappear as a settlement. It became a field whose new surface concealed the old one: the house and school remained underground, along with plants and personal possessions the family had hoped to retrieve. The child singles out two stamp albums and a bicycle among the things left behind. Such details make the procedure legible not only as decontamination but as the conversion of lived space into buried contents and agricultural land.

The testimonies do not present one uniform ending for every displaced resident. Some accounts describe people returning to their houses after time away; others describe guards keeping former inhabitants out, homes sealed beneath earth, or residents left alone after everyone else had gone. Taken together, they show burial as both a material intervention and a rupture in ordinary relations to place. The pits and the leveled field could cover contaminated houses; they could not settle the human grief of leaving, restore the missing, or answer what responsibility extended to the life that could not be evacuated.