Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
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.
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.