Surviving in the Red Forest: The Story of Baba Hanya and Life Around Chernobyl NPP

Deep in the forest around the Chernobyl NPP is the wooden house where Baba Hanya lives. She has lived in the place for as long as she can remember, making homemade wine and cooking pancakes for visitors. To date, it has survived World War II, a nuclear disaster, and the Russian invasion.

She is 90 years old and is not afraid of anything, except, perhaps, loneliness.

Reactor No. 4 of the power plant exploded 37 years ago on April 26, 1986. Many people died of thyroid cancer and suicide, and the disaster became one of the main factors behind Mikhail Gorbachev’s desperate efforts to reform the Soviet Union, which unleashed forces out of control of the leader. Less than six years later, the USSR collapsed. But grandmother Hanya, whose real name is Hanna Zavorotnia, although no one calls her that, survives.

A little over a year ago, Chernobyl was full of life. Hundreds of people, tourists and thrill seekers came every day, often gathering at Baba Hanya’s house for a glass of wine to take pictures and hear her stories. Stories of how she came back after the disaster, how she didn’t leave her cottage, how she ate the tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden when everyone told her they were poisoned.

Then on February 24, 2022, the first day of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians crossed into the area from Belarus. They stayed for five weeks, camping in some of the most contaminated land around the site of the worst nuclear accident in history.

The Russians dug defensive positions in the Red Forest, within a six-mile radius of Reactor No. 4, where they lived for two weeks. No one can figure out why.

“Don’t try to find logic,” said Oksana Pishna, 30, a tour guide turned State Department official in charge of the no-go zone, who took a team from The Times into the zone. “It’s stupid.”

The place is called the Red Forest because that is the color of the trees after the disaster, when the cloud of poison spread through Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, to the Baltic and Scandinavia. In 1986 and the years since, teams of men dug up the topsoil and buried it: below the surface, it’s far more toxic.

“Digging trenches there was a terrible idea,” Pishna explains. “This is the most dangerous area in the special zone because we have nuclear waste underground.”

Perhaps the Russians felt safer there because they knew that the Ukrainians would not shell the area around the nuclear plant. Perhaps the beauty of the forest distracted them from the danger. Catfish crowd the reactor’s cooling duct, deer dart through the silver birch trees as visitors pass by. There seem to be bears in the woods; wolves too, wild ponies. In autumn the trees hang heavy with the most perfect apples, green and pink. But their grains may contain radioactive isotopes: cesium-137 or strontium-90.

Some Russian soldiers stationed in the forest have contracted radiation sickness, diplomats have confirmed. Kicking up dust or walking on moss can poison you. Mining is much worse. Several dozen local residents, with an average age of 86, who remained here after the disaster became indescribably angry about the risks of radiation. Even they were shocked.

When Russian soldiers first descend on the path of Galina Voloshnya, a 74-year-old former kindergarten principal and mother of two, she runs outside and begins cursing at them, and they point their rifles at her, stunned.

“I started shouting at them,” she told The Times. “I tried to give them political information, explaining what was happening in their country. . . . I’m a Russian speaker. I asked what they were doing there, who they thought they were freeing.”

Voloshnia’s youngest son fought in Bakhmut with the Ukrainian army. She cries when she talks about him.

She despised the Russians camped in the Red Forest. “I think they understand the risks, but just stupid,” she said. The Russians were fishing in the cooling channel of the reactor. They shot animals and left them dead on the roads. “They collected sand from the Red Forest and made checkpoints out of it.”

Finally, on April 1, when Ukrainian troops launched counterattacks from Kiev, 90 miles to the south, the last occupiers withdrew, leaving piles of trash behind.

In 1986, the area around the plant was dotted with busy towns and villages. The town of Pripyat had a population of nearly 50,000 people – with an average age of 26. It had a cinema, swimming pools and a concert hall. Now the pools are empty, their tiles cracked. An amusement park that was supposed to open days after the disaster, on May 1, 1986, lies overgrown and rusted.

After the disaster, over 300,000 people were evacuated from the area. Liquidators, often young men, were sent to the roof of the burning reactor to contain the debris from the explosion. Clouds of nuclear waste rose into the atmosphere: the rain turned black. The disaster happened because safety standards were ignored.

Entire villages were subsequently destroyed and buried underground. Marauders rushed in and out as fast as they dared. The Soviet state said everything was under control, but proved unable to conceal its mistaken response.

People like Baba Hanya were evacuated, then returned, to a place of silence, of rich nature without human life.

Chernobyl is quiet again today. The ice cream stand and gift shop are closed; the only people flying between the budding trees and rose bushes are the Ukrainian soldiers. There are thousands of them located in the 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone — all of them in safe zones, officials say.

Grandma Hanya is starting to forget. Names and dates slip from her mind. She remembers that she loved to cook for people, as she did for her husband and son before they died.

When The Times team enters her yard, her eyes fill with tears. “I thought you wouldn’t come,” she said. She will not sit down and talk to them unless they drink her home wine, first a glass, then another. Bata Chania even prepares more food than they can eat.

Grandma Hanya is not afraid of radiation, she barely remembers what it is. When the reactor exploded, she knew nothing about ions and isotopes, she just lived in the area, made wine, tended her garden. Everyone around her died or fled, but she survived. When she was evacuated during the Russian occupation, she cried every day until she returned home.

Today, soldiers, firefighters, and civil servants help her. But the tour groups and camaraderie are gone.

“I’m not afraid,” she says. “It will be what it will be.”