Just a few metres from the central Kontraktova Ploshcha metro station and close to the River Dnieper in the old district of Podil, the Ukrainian National Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv is hardly understandable by the Western foreigners who visit it. And not just because of its old appearance and lack of explanations in English. Created in 1992 and funded by the Chernobyl Recovery and Development Programme, the museum looks old but is able to instil the solemnity of the tragedy.
While anyone would expect a documentation of the disaster and the destruction that took place and is still threatening the northern part of Ukraine and Belarus, the installations in the museum’s four rooms looks more like an impressive memorial, where memories of the tragic events that injured this part of Ukraine are collected and preserved, to give the deserved dignity to this human tragedy.
No pictures of the brutal effects of the radiation are shown, neither a celebration of the heroism of the emergency workers who participated in the very first containment of the disaster as soldiers and fire-fighters, who were not completely aware of the dangers. The “liquidators”, an army of volunteers, both military and civilian, who took part in the operation, were recruited with great promises, but nowadays almost forgotten by their post-Soviet government. As a memorial, however, the museum seems to thank these people, many of whom lost their lives in the years after the disaster, and their families, on whom the effects of the destruction took its toll.
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