Lost Places

Habne is a small town. There is such small town which is called Habne, and it has everything that should have small town: a post office, the government rabbi, the river, the synagogue rabbi, a telegraph, a cemetery, the police officer, a school, the Hasidim, two synagogues, plenty of poor men, just a few prosperous, as usually in our small towns.

"The Village of Habne"  

Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich, שלום־עליכם) 

1905  

Note: Habne (Khabnoye) - the name of a small town Poliske (Polesskoye) till 1934. 

These photos are made by me in different years and in different corners of the Chornobyl Zone of Alienation. I was going to make such autumn selection for a long time and always stopped on a choice of a title. I have already prepared photos, I have already seen them infinite quantity of times, in expectation of inspiration... But except trite "Mellow autumn", I had no other "flash of inspirations". After that from memory sad school memoirs at once came up, got tired teacher of primary school mutter: - Children, write down: "The mellow autumn has come". No, just not "mellow". And what is it, this autumn? Yellow, claret, red, wet... Like this is even worse. That’s all, stop. My autumn will be just "Autumn".

For the first time I have made the report not of a real Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, but from the Zone invented, game, virtual. No, it not the review of just published third part of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. "Call of Pripyat", about it, it is already written enough (and it is quite probable that will write more), and I did not play in this game... Neither in the first, nor in the second... And I will not play in the third. I do not love computer games at all. It is the picture story about the first international festival Stalker-Fest 2009 which has passed on October, 3rd this year in the city of Kyiv, in the centre, on the “Maidan Nezalezhnosti". The festival has been dated for an publication of this third part of game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

In this section my photos of the various technics which is being in the Chornobyl Zone of Alienation (ChZA) are collected. 

From the very first days failures on ChNPP in 1986, the question of employment of a robotics arose very sharply. The building site (The erection site) of ChNPP, demolishing of the 4 block, the deaerating stack, the roof of turbine hall - in all these places the person could be only for few minutes... Improvised personal protection equipment from lead pieces which liquidators put on themselves, were absolutely not effective at such high levels of gamma radiation. For works on clearing of  the building site, on gathering of highly active fragments, installation of gauges, dosimetry, television cameras, were required distantly operated mechanisms. They were required urgently, as they say: "on yesterday". Many enterprises of the USSR in an emergency mode were engaged in designing and manufacturing of such technics, alteration of finished technics for specific purpose. Also the foreign robotics was bought.