Chernobyl 1986 - Jorge Volpi, Season of Ash, p.10

Chernobyl 1986 - Jorge Volpi, Season of Ash, p.10

Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranski, with intense grey eyes, had just joined the Armada. Held back in school because of mathematics and spelling, and prone to bullying his brothers, he celebrated his recruitment: He was seventeen years old, and the only things that mattered to him were money and women. When a sergeant suggested he join the special labour force that was working in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and promised him extra rubbles every week, he abandoned the wide-cheeked girl whose bed he shared and went off in search of adventure.

Transported in obscure military trains, he reached his objective after three days: an improvised encampment on the Ukrainian plain. By then, hundreds of volunteers were dreaming of long hours of combat. A tall, thin sergeant explained the mission to his squad. At 5:00 A.M., an army truck drove him and four of his comrades to a spot seven kilometres from Pripiat. The moon was shining through the trees. Their orders were blunt: They were to kill every animal and clear the land – that’s right, the whole place – to free it from the plague. They were no longer soldiers but butchers. The local peasants called them liquidators.

Speranski almost wept when he shot his first deer, a doe only a few months old, but after a few weeks of constantly emptying his rifle, he barely took note of his victims. The corpses of sheep, cows, cats, goats, chickens, ducks and hounds carpeted the meadows before being doused with gasoline and burned like heretics. The liquidators had to eradicate everything the monster hadn’t devoured. Within a radius of ten kilometres, all cities and town were demolished, the trees cut down, the animal life decimated, the grass taken away. The only way to guarantee the survival of the human race was to make the plain into a desert. Mikhail Mikhailovich went about his task with the same blankness as the executioners who put his grandparents to death in the Kolyma camps. After contributing so faithfully to the massacre, Speranski found life less than attractive. Soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, he would be executed for armed robbery.