Took these Besarabka pictures while waiting for a friend yesterday:







These are the things I take for granted, never really notice - because, well, this is Besarabka, and the statue of Lenin at Bulvar Shevchenka, and I can walk with my eyes closed here - and I do walk like this most of the time: the goal is to get past it as quickly as possible, on the way home or elsewhere.

You'd think that after 20 years thoughts about Chernobyl would be nothing but routine and memories would fade, but no, there're still things that take me by surprise.

I was literally shaking when I first looked through that girl's semi-fake site - kiddofspeed.com - in spring 2004. And I froze in my steps yesterday during our walk in the park - when I looked at the Dynamo stadium's green football field and suddenly recalled how we walked our new dog, Zosia, there - just days after April 26, 1986, when Zosia became our dog. Suddenly I could see her again, running fast across the field, joyful as hell. And as I was reading about the 14 firefighters at Olexa's blog tonight - the firefighters who arrived in Chernobyl hours after the explosion and died a few weeks later - I got a lump in my throat as I thought of Boris, husband of my mama's friend, a firefighter who would've been there then if he hadn't missed the bus. He was late thanks to the otherwise annoyingly remote, un-central location of their apartment. He did go later, more than once, but he's probably still alive. Dina, his wife, told mama about the accident right after it happened, on the morning of April 26, as they were on their way to play tennis. They found Zosia instead and went back to our place to wash her. There were years when mama wasn't keeping in touch with Dina, but in the summer of 1998, they were friends again for a while, and Zosia died in Dina's arms while my parents were traveling outside Ukraine. And maybe Boris is still alive, but my mama's other friend isn't - Nelya, a scientist who was spending much of her time in Chernobyl following the accident. I still can't believe she's dead. She died of cancer. In the summer of 2000. Mishah and I were leaving for Yaremche on the day I learned about her death. And then there's my high school boyfriend's father, Volodya, a physicist: we used to secretly borrow his car when he was away in Chernobyl - we used to basically steal his car, each time driving his poor wife, Valia, crazy with worry. I talked to Volodya on the phone in January and he sounded very sick, and I don't know if that's because of Chernobyl or maybe he wasn't all that sick but somewhat tipsy - it was his son's 33rd birthday after all. And I was afraid to ask what was wrong with him, and I felt a little guilty for having shared my joy with him, the joy of Marta's birth.

Et cetera.

According to Reuters, Milinkevich has been sentenced to 15 days in jail "for organizing a major rally in Minsk deemed unlawful."

Milinkevich denounced the sentence as blatantly political.

"This is a political action, political sentence," Milinkevich said after the judge read the sentence in court. "Leaders of leading political parties are behind bars."

In the morning, when I was taking Marta to the bathroom to change, mama said this, quite unexpectedly:

"You know, she's now the age I was when the war began and the Germans came."

Marta will be turning 5 months on May 1. My mama's birthday is January 31, 1941.

Gazeta.ru reports (in Russian) that opposition leader Aleksandr Milinkevich has just been detained in Minsk.

***

Below are three of my most recent Belarus items on Global Voices:

LJ users andrews_kovas and eugene_grabkin post their photo reports from Charnobylski Shlyakh, a protest rally that took place in Minsk yesterday.

***

Iryna of TOL's Belarus Blog writes about more arrests and detentions in Belarus, following yesterday's protest rally "Charnobylski Shlyakh." She also quotes Syarhei Kaliakin, an opposition activist: “20 years ago Chernobyl disaster has taken place. 10 years ago a political Chernobyl has happened, when the legally elected parliament was disbanded and people, who rely on violence rather than rule of law, came to power.”

***

David McDuff of A Step At A Time links to an item at Maidan about a young Belarusian facing seven to 12 years in prison for having written "We want something new!" on the wall of a building in Minsk.

Radio Svaboda's photos from Charnobylski Shlyah are here and here (via TOL's Belarus Blog).

I've just translated and posted this on Global Voices...

LJ user wall4 - originally from Lviv, Ukraine, now living in Connecticut - writes about his experience as a soldier forced to serve in Chernobyl 20 years ago (RUS). The piece is accompanied by several black-and-white army pictures.

20 Years Ago. Letters I haven't written.

"Mama, I'll never forget how you were running back and forth outside the locked gates of the conscription center. Don't be upset, everything will turn out fine, I won't be staying there for a long time."

"We are on the train, all became friends quickly. All dead drunk, officers don't stop us, they understand... [...]"

"Kiev is empty, 6 AM, only water trucks are watering the streets constantly. At the checkpoint to the north of the city we pass trucks and buses with refugees. They are from there. We are on the way there. Everyone shudders - from the chill of the dawn and from fearsome anticipation. Everyone's sobered up long ago."

"We've arrived, Polesskiy district, a tent camp in the field. A hot, wonderful day. We are all standing, afraid to sit down on the grass - because of radiation. Here's one who has lost patience and sat down. Another one after him. Ten minutes later, everyone's lying on the grass, sunbathing - and it's not scary at all because radiation's invisible."

"We are in the no-go zone. Patrolling a village, guarding it from looters. Suddenly, there's rustling in the grass. [...] A stooped old woman emerges: "Dear sons, let me get into the house and take a blanket and a pan. They chased us out, didn't let us take anything..." We turn our eyes away, there are tears of shame and grief in them..."

"Mushrooms are huge and there are plenty of them. The locals pick them along the forest road. They squeeze themselves through the fences, get into the Zone and pick mushrooms. We tell them: "What are you doing, people. You'll get poisoned!" - and they laugh in a friendly way in response, with peasant's slyness: "Nothing'll happen to us, look how beautiful the mushrooms are..."

"Mama, we've almost got caught in a serious shower today. Sasha Tatarchuk and I are walking at the side of the road, and suddenly hear great, scary noise. We raise our heads, turn around - a helicopter is over us, watering the road with a mix of iodine and lysol, to beat the radioactive dust down. We barely managed to run off the road's side, almost got sprayed by this stinking crap."

"World Cup in Mexico. Maradona scores with his hand. [...] USSR-Hungary 6:0. We are watching it all in the village of Osipovichi, Narovlyanskiy district of Gomel region, in the village school. On the blackboard are the words "28 krasavika 1986 goda" [April 28, 1986 - BEL]. It means that 12 km away from Pripyat children had classes two days after the accident."

"Mama, I've seen the Red forest and the power plant far away. And the crimson sunset over it. It's incredibly beautiful here - forests, lakes and silence... In villages, cats and dogs come to our checkpoints and eat buckwheat with canned stew from the same plate. Sometimes they don't manage to share it and the dog barks at the cat, and the cat straightens out whiskers and responds with hissing. Cats win more often (as in real life). Horses, having gathered into herds, dropping foam, are running around fields and gardens covered with meter-tall grass. Sometimes an armored personnel carrier flies by at great speed."

"Mama, soldiers guarding the perimeter of the power plant are given Swedish grape juice in cartons with straws, and chocolate. They are wearing small gauze respirators and rubbered protection suits. 19-year-old boys. Next to them I feel like a wise, experienced, brave warrior. I'm 22 already."

"Going home. At last. The train passes the suburbs, approaches the train station. We are packed by the window, our cheeks and noses pressed to the windows. Home."

To my friends Sasha Tatarchuk, Pavlik Fedorich, Vova Gamazin, Vitya Mostovets, Lyokha, Aristarkhushka, Ivan-Shayba, Zaliznyak. Be healthy. Let you children grow up healthy, this is very relevant for us all...

Many of those who used to live in Pripyat now live in Kyiv's Troyeshchyna. Faraway, so close: Chernobyl is 120 km (75 miles) away from Kyiv.

Vitrenko says Ukraine's court system is controlled by NATO...

Kyiv, April 22, 2006
Volodymyrska Gorka

These girls are like birds - or mermaids.

(I'm off to bed now, good night!)

I doubt I'll have anything to say about the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl. By now, I'm so tired of all this collective masochism: "oh, these pictures are so gloomy, so depressing... let's see some more!" I used to get pretty drunk on this day, but I haven't done that in a few years. We have Marta now, thank God.

I wrote this here, in my April 12 parking post:

A few months ago, we saw cars with their wheels locked - an equivalent of having your car towed away, I guess - but someone sued the company that was doing it and won, and they had to stop.

The cop who told me about the lawsuit was pretty hopeful about the new mayor, Leonid Chernovetsky.

Well. Guess who filed that lawsuit?

Right. Chernovetsky.

Bastard.

(Ukrainska Pravda piece about it, in Ukrainian.)

The results of the March 26 election will probably become official very soon: Vitrenko, Karmazin and Bogoslovskaya have finally lost their court appeal.

Who knows, maybe we'll get the news of the coalition soon, too.

Most people have probably forgotten that there ever was an election: it's been exactly one month.

The Pushkinskaya attack story looks totally different now. And confusing.

(Sources: Kommersant, Gazeta.ru, something else, I guess - I've been reading it throughout the day but couldn't find time to post anything here, and now that I do have time, I'm too tired to think clearly...)

According to investigation officials, Abramyants and Kulagin had commmon friends - among Lokomotiv and Spartak fans - but didn't know each other. Abramyants said something rude to Zhanna Nefedova, Kulagin's 15-year-old girlfriend, and Kulagin stabbed and killed him. Video cameras installed at the station didn't record the killing, nor are there any records of skinheads getting off a Vyhino-bound train. Kulagin's mother says her son's interrogation lasted four hours and there was no lawyer present. Then the interrogators invited her into the room and announced Kulagin's choices: either he admits to killing Abramyants out of jealousy and gets a minimal sentence, or he faces 15 years in jail for ethnically motivated murder. Kulagin's mother told her son to choose the former, but he later retracted his confession. The Abramyants family lawyer insists on the skinhead version: they spent some time walking around the station before picking their victim; Abramyants was stabbed in the heart, which may mean the attacker wasn't an amateur; Abramyants was a nice, hardworking boy from a good family, not some violent football fan; two more guys were wounded, which possibly means there were several attackers.

One of the joys of blogging is that I don't have to explain what Chernobyl is every time I mention it. The need to state all those basic facts and figures is, to me, the horror of journalism.