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A New Elena Story
SwiftBoy writes "Elena, of motorcycling through Chernobyl fame has gone riding again, this time to dig up the history of Kiev's fortifications. Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there."
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Previousely discussed back in March/2004
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
What was supposedly fake about it anyway?
Supposedly the areas that she was motorcycling in and out of aren't actually open to the public. What was allegedly fake about it was that she'd just taken some pictures of herself on a motorcycle on the highway and then interspersed them with file photos of Cheronobyl's abandoned areas, then presented them as a photo diary of a trip that never happened.
Shame that can't be done automatically for all postings...
Now watch - someone else will probably have posted this link at the same time...
Coral Link
Meh? Last i heard, Chernobyl was in Ukraine. What happepened, did they move it to another country or sell it or something?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
About Makhno army:
"The anarchists on the photo, they kept in terror all this region" (Makhno in the center) It was other way around. Makhno anarhist army was composed of local peasants and small core of anarchists. Makhno was hugely pouplar among the locals, mostly because he defended them again devastating communists "food tax". Later soviet propaganda tried to make a common bandit out of Mahno, but havn't succeded much.
I totally agree with you, and this is especially prevalent in the eastern and central, post-Soviet Bloc, parts of Europe. To this day - and it's been almost 60 years since the end of hostilities in Europe - you can find bullet holes in buildings in the poorer parts of Warsaw. It's also not uncommon to see bomb squads called in when a construction crew finds an unexploded bomb or artillery shell buried in the ground. Or to hear about some kid getting their hand blown off after finding an unexploded grenade while playing in the woods.
World War II also left us with a lot of burial grounds and mass graves, both the Nazis and the Soviets were fast and lose with mass murders. In 1940 the Soviets slaughtered 25 thousand members of Poland's intelectual elite, then blamed it on the Nazis. Their remains weren't exhumed until the mid 1990s, and if it hadn't been for people actively working to find out the truth and getting the bodies exhumed and properly buried, they remains would still be in the ground, buried under a couple of feed of dirt in the middle of a forest.
There is one factual error in your post - while Belarus did recieve a huge part of the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, the reactor itself is in the Ukraine.
Only it's Ukrainian.
The area is heavily guarded, apparently. Someone stirred up a ruckus when they saw her story on the net and took it up against the guards. Eventually it turned out that she had taken a helmet with her on one of the usual (legal) tours and took pictures with that. She also changed her story after the allegations of fraud surfaced (at first, she claimed that her dad was a worker in the zone, and that she routinely biked there)
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
I haven't played the game, but from what i've read about it, some elements of the game do bear some resemblance to Tarkovsky's movie and/or the book it was based on ("Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers). The idea behind the game -- "stalkers" retrieving strange artifacts from a guarded Zone filled with dangers and anomalies -- is most probably borrowed from that book.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Actually there really is stuff just lying around all over the place in Europe (probably depending on exactly where you are).
Goddamnit, how I hate it when some people speak of "Europe" and "Europeans" as if it were a city or something, with a common culture or people or language.
It's a rather vast continent, with many countries, many cultures, many languages, and diverse history. "We" generally don't refer to ourselves like I just did: "we Europeans". "We" are Swedes, Ukrainians, German, French, Greek...
If you're talking about what you've seen in Germany, then please say Germany, or even better which part of or city in Germany. No "European" would refer to Normandy as a part of Europe. It's a part of northern France.
And Tjornobyl (Chernobyl) is a city in Ukraine, not Belarus. Then again, why do people speak of "the Chernobyl nuclear disaster" at all, when "the European nuclear disaster" apparently would suffice?
Too bad Chernobyl is not in Russia. Perhaps you should look up a map before making gross generalizations about an entire culture.
A close friend of mine knows a few people who work for them in Vienna, and when he showed them the website, they were manically laughing and stating that if it was really true, she would die in about 2 years.
Your friend was either taking the piss or didn't know much about the effects of radiation exposure.
To simplify a complicated subject, either you become ill within a few days of being exposed to a high dose or radiation, or if you are below the threshold dose, you live the rest of your life with an increased probability of suffering from some sort of cancer. In either case, the timespan of "2 years" is wrong.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The area isn't totally deserted, nor is it that hazardous for short vists with suitable precautions. Some old residents moved back into the area. Two of the Chernoybl power reactors were operated until 2000. Hundreds of cleanup workers still go in and out. A few vehicles are driven in the area.
So it's not that tightly closed an area.
It's not clear exactly how far Elena was able to take her bike. From the pictures, you see her bike in pictures up to the Dytyatky checkpoint, but not thereafter. Her pictures within the exclusion zone are very similar to those taken by others who've taken that tour. She appears in some of those pictures. So the most likely thing is that she rode her bike to the checkpoint and took the tour bus into Chernoybl.