A road trip to southern Belarus reveals the hidden impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

PHOTO: The abandoned village of Bely Berag with a sign warning of radiation hazard. By the author.

“What is this?” I asked my traveling companion. We were about to leave Naroŭliia, a small town in the Homel region in southeastern Belarus, and I was looking at the map, trying to decide which road to take into the Polesian marshes. To the south-east of Naroŭliia on the map, I saw an enclosed area marked with the words “Polesski gosudarstvennyi radiatsionno-ekologicheskii zapovednik,” or Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve.

What was a radiation-ecological reserve? Was it connected to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986? I knew that when reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine, it had affected southern and eastern Belarus as well. Pripyat is only 12 miles from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. But I had never thought to locate these areas on a map.

By the time I travelled to Naroŭliia, I had lived in Belarus for several months. I was researching World War II and its aftermath, mainly in Minsk, but I also traveled by train or bus to other cities such as Hrodna, Maladzechna and Mahilioŭ, to visit archives and conduct oral history interviews. As part of my research, I came across mentions of towns in Polesia, an almost mystical, sparsely settled region that stretches along the Belarusian-Ukrainian border.

Polesia, the largest wetlands in Europe, were heavily marked by the war. Belarus came under German control in June 1941, and the ensuing years brought tremendous death and destruction. As elsewhere in the German-occupied territories, the Belarusian-Ukrainian border region became the site of mass killings and atrocities against civilians: First during the Holocaust, when German units shot Polesia’s Jewish communities on the outskirts of the small towns where they lived, and later during so-called anti-partisan operations, when the German military and its allies burned down villages thought to be supporting Soviet partisans.

**Wooden one-family homes, typical for Polesia and the wider region, lining a street in Davyd-Haradok, a small town in southwestern Belarus. Photo by the author.**

When the Red Army liberated the Soviet western regions in 1944, the population was overjoyed to see the Nazi occupation end. But many were also apprehensive about the return of Soviet power. In the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities had carried out the forced collectivization of agriculture, which fundamentally changed the economic and social structures of village communities. The Great Terror of 1937-38, directed against alleged enemies, also brought intense violence. In the fall of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded and then annexed eastern Poland. This westward shift of the Soviet Union’s border meant that Polesia, which prior to 1939 had been split between Poland and the Soviet Union, was now almost entirely in the Soviet Union.

**The Polesian marshes, southern Belarus, in early spring when the snow melts and vast wetlands form. Photo by the author.**

Polesia, then, had been on my mind for a while. But I had never been to the border region in person. Sitting in the reading room of an archive in Minsk, leafing through one document after another, I felt the urge to see for myself the places mentioned in the files and to search for remnants of the past: to locate the house where a Holocaust survivor whose memoirs I was reading had grown up; to visit the small, local memorials at the execution sites; and to locate one of the many villages that were burned down and never rebuilt. So, together with a traveling companion, I rented a car and we began our journey south. Preoccupied with the history of World War II and its immediate aftermath, I had given almost no thought to Polesia’s history as a radioactively contaminated region.

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“Shall we just go there,” I asked my traveling companion, “to see what the Polesian Radiation-Ecological Reserve is?” He agreed, and we drove south from Naroŭliia on road 37 toward the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. After a short drive we came to the small settlement of Verbavichy. People were clearly still living here; in the distance, we saw small wooden houses. A man crossed the road and made his way into the woods. Not far from where he disappeared, on the edge of the forest, I saw two signs, both in Russian. One read: “Protect the Forest, the Beauty of the Earth.” The other one read: “Radiation Hazard. No Entry.”

The two signs marking the western border of the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve. The sign on the left reads: “Protect the Forest, the Beauty of the Earth.” The one on the right reads: “Radiation Hazard. No Entry.” Photo by the author.

The two signs marked the western border of the Polesian Radiation-Ecological Reserve; Verbavichy was located just outside of it. There were no fences or barriers, just the danger sign. We continued to drive south, along the edge of the forest, until we came to a bridge crossing a river. A large sign warned us that this was the start of the Belarusian-Ukrainian border zone. Entry was only allowed with a special pass. Not wanting to get into trouble, we turned the car around and headed back.

The scene was beginning to feel eerie. There was no one around, although the tracks of a car suggested that someone had driven up the road recently.

Not long after, I noticed a small dirt road to the right, just inside the Radiation-Ecological Reserve. Looking at our map, it seemed to be the road leading to the village of Bely Berag (White Shore). We stopped and got out. The road curved upward and slightly to the right. We followed it.

Walking up the road, we could make out the remains of a small wooden house on the left, partially hidden behind trees. A tree had fallen across its entrance; shrubs covered much of the side that was facing the road. We saw another empty house, and then another, this one painted in yellow and blue. The color had faded, but it still stood out against the silvery gray trees and shrubs. At second glance, the exterior seemed remarkably intact. The corner posts of the house bore delicate wooden carvings. In front, next to the power line, was a well. In the distance, barely visible behind the trees, we could make out another house.

**The abandoned village of Bely Berag. Photo by the author.**

The scene was beginning to feel eerie. There was no one around, although the tracks of a car suggested that someone had driven up the road recently. We turned around and walked back. On the way, we spotted another sign warning of radioactivity. Feeling uneasy, we got into the car and drove back north to Naroŭliia.

Of course, we were naive, just walking around in an area marked as radioactive. We shouldn’t have been there in the first place — entering the reserve is forbidden without special authorization. But there were no fences or other barriers, so we had taken a chance and walked around the abandoned village. As I found out much later, Bely Berag was one of the Belarusian villages whose inhabitants were evacuated after the Chernobyl accident. Before the evacuation, the village was part of the collective farm Uskhod (East). Most of the inhabitants worked in forestry and agriculture. Following the Chernobyl disaster, they were resettled within Polesia to two different villages, Skrygalaŭ, about 50 miles northwest of Bely Berag, and Skarodnae, about 30 miles southwest.

The website of the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve gives only a brief overview of the history of the reserve. The reserve today covers parts of the Bragin, Khoiniki and Naroŭliia districts of the Homel region. The first evacuations from these three districts took place on May 4, 1986. From then until September, 24,700 people from 108 settlements and villages were evacuated.

The initial 30-kilometer (18.6-mile) evacuation zone around the nuclear power plant was later expanded. In Belarus, the government created the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve in 1988, which now covers 534,760 acres of land. To the south, the reserve borders the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation in Ukraine.

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What the website of the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve does not reveal is the harrowing story behind the evacuations — and why southeastern Belarus was so affected in the first place.

As Kate Brown recounts in her book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, after reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, the reactor’s core continued to burn. On May 6, the Soviet government announced that the fire had been extinguished, but this was not true. Classified Soviet records show that radioactive gases continued to pour from the site after the fire had officially been put out, with gases spiking on May 11. The radioactive material from the exploded reactor then mixed with clouds and spread irregularly over the European continent.

The best protection against radiation is time and distance. But in the weeks and months it took the authorities to organize resettlement from heavily contaminated areas, residents inhaled radioactive iodine and drank it in milk.

After the Chernobyl accident, northern Ukraine, southern Belarus and some parts of western Russia close to the Belarusian border received most of the heavy radioactive fallout resulting from the explosion of reactor No. 4. Western European countries were also affected, especially mountainous regions such as the Alps.

As radioactive clouds traveled over the European continent, the Soviet government tried to cover up the accident. The evacuation of the city of Pripyat, adjacent to the nuclear power plant, began on April 27, 36 hours after the accident. But most of the residents were taken to two regions that had higher levels of radioactivity from the Chernobyl disaster by the time they arrived. As the reactor continued to burn, releasing radioactive nuclides into the air, the Soviet authorities did not tell people to stay indoors. On May 1, Labor Day, the Soviet state conducted large public parades in towns and cities across the Belarusian-Ukrainian border region (as elsewhere in the Soviet Union), exposing participants to dangerous radioactive substances. It wasn’t until May 2 that Soviet authorities extended the original 10-km (6.2-mile) evacuation zone around the reactor to 30 km, now encompassing southern Belarus as well. Two days later, evacuations began from there, too.

The best protection against radiation is time and distance. But in the weeks and months it took the authorities to organize resettlement from heavily contaminated areas, residents inhaled radioactive iodine and drank it in milk. The first emergency measures were focused mostly on Soviet Ukraine. But of all the Soviet republics, Belarus — and in particular the southeastern regions of Homel and Mahilioŭ — had received most of the heavy radioactive fallout. Especially in regions further away from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, several hundred thousand people continued to live and farm in heavily contaminated areas.

The Soviet Union was a centralized dictatorship, and the political leaders of Ukraine and Belarus were subordinate to the Politburo in Moscow. The decisions to hold the May 1 parades, to withhold information from the population on the real scale of the accident, and to delay evacuations were taken in Moscow. Similarly, Moscow-based Soviet scientists routinely downplayed the disaster, dismissing data collected by experts in Ukraine and Belarus.

Over the years, some former residents, most of them elderly, have returned to their homes in the reserve, although they are technically prohibited from doing so. They grow their own produce, vegetables and fruit, as is common in rural households in Belarus.

In Ukraine, the Soviet authorities continued to (falsely) assure locals that everything was under control. But they refused Moscow’s order to return some residents to their homes inside the 30-km evacuation zone. The Soviet Belarusian leadership, meanwhile, did not resist Moscow’s pressure. At the end of the summer of 1986, party leaders in Minsk complied with Moscow’s order and returned some 1,400 villagers to their radioactive homes in southeastern Belarus. By 1987, inhabitants of the 15 settlements in the Bragin, Khoiniki, and Naroŭliia districts in the Homel region had to be “re-evacuated.”

One of the most shocking pieces of information in Manual for Survival concerns why the fallout landed where it did. On April 27, 1986, the day after the accident, the wind pushed radioactive clouds north, across the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. The Soviet population outside Pripyat, let alone the rest of the world, still knew nothing about the accident. But the Soviet State Committee of Hydrometeorology in Moscow was monitoring the radioactivity blowing from reactor No. 4. When it became clear that the radioactive clouds were threatening major cities such as Moscow, Voronezh and Leningrad, Soviet air force pilots were sent to southeastern Belarus to shoot silver iodine into the clouds to make it rain. In the evening of April 27, unknown to the local population, radioactive rain fell over the districts of Bragin, Khoiniki and Naroŭliia. The pilots then followed the clouds over the city of Homel, northeast of Naroŭliia, into the Mahilioŭ region. Once the clouds had passed this large city, the pilots again shot silver iodine into the clouds, and radioactive rain contaminated much of this region, too. To the Soviet state, the lives and the health of the local population in these remote areas were dispensable.

Fast forward 15 years. In 2021, the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant in Belarus goes into operation. The plant is located near the country’s border with Lithuania, about 35 miles east of Vilnius. Planning for the plant began in the 1980s, but was temporarily halted after the Chernobyl accident in 1986. The government, led since 1994 by the authoritarian ruler Aleksandr Lukashenko, has cracked down on opposition to the plant, trying to silence those who point to technical problems and raise concerns about the plant's safety. Official news media continue to publish articles about Lukashenko’s visits to areas affected by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident, including the Polesian State-Ecological Reserve, which he toured in 2021. They present an upbeat story of recovery and growth, showing pictures of schoolchildren, dairy farms and new construction in what are still contaminated areas.

Over the years, some former residents, most of them elderly, have returned to their homes in the reserve, although they are technically prohibited from doing so. They grow their own produce, vegetables and fruit, as is common in rural households in Belarus. The inhabitants of the abandoned villages also keep their own livestock, chicken, some pigs and cows, and produce and consume their own meat and milk.

Almost 40 years have passed since the Chernobyl accident. But radioisotopes decay more slowly in the Polesian marshes than elsewhere; the marshes’ mix of marshy, sandy, and clay soils provides almost perfect conditions for radioactive fallout to pass from the soil into plants. Since 2014, wild blueberries, cranberries and mushrooms — among the most radioactive foods after the Chernobyl accident — from the Ukrainian part of Polesia are being shipped for processing to Poland before entering the EU market.

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Radioactivity released by the Chernobyl accident continues to threaten human life and the environment. In the spring of 2020, forest fires broke out in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Trees store radioactive isotopes and when they burn, the radioactivity is released into the air. In the early days of the fires, the wind blew north, toward rural areas of Russia and Belarus. Then it shifted south, blowing toward Kyiv.

Radioactivity from contaminated regions is also released into the air by digging up the ground. Before Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the governments of Belarus, Ukraine and Poland were considering plans to build a 1,200-mile waterway. It would extend from Gdańsk at the Baltic Sea to Kherson at the Black Sea, passing through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. The waterway would deepen the Pripyat riverbed, straighten its course and create dykes and dams.

The construction of the waterway — a section of which would pass only 1.5 miles away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant — threatens to release large quantities of radioactivity into the air, as radioactive substances sank to the bottom of the Pripyat River after the Chernobyl disaster. Nuclear fallout also contaminated the Kyiv reservoir, a large artificial water reservoir located between Chernobyl and Kyiv. That means constructing the waterway would not only disturb radiological hotspots but also expose construction workers to dangerous levels of radiation and threaten to contaminate the drinking water of millions of people.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, construction has come to a halt. But the project as such has not been abandoned. In Poland, planning is underway for the construction of several dams along the Vistula River. Environmental groups fear that dividing the project into smaller sections will make it easier for the respective governments to bypass environmental legislations and concerns.

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On the night in February 2022 that Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian authorities responsible for environmental monitoring in the Chernobyl exclusion zone recorded a drastic increase in radiation levels there. Russian ground troops and helicopters were temporarily stationed in the small towns of Bragin, Khoiniki and Naroŭliia, which border the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve. As military vehicles drove along the ground roads and soldiers started digging trenches, their activities stirred up the radioactive dust in the upper layer of the soil.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was under Russian control for just over a month, until March 21, 2022, when Ukraine reclaimed the territory. However, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, is still under Russian control. Located on the eastern banks of the Dnipro River, it is also currently on the frontline of a war zone. This is the first time in history that a nuclear power plant has been occupied by a foreign army, with unpredictable consequences. Although all six reactors have been shut down, they still need energy to power critical safety systems. The plant also needs water to cool the reactors and their spent fuel rods to prevent a meltdown. In June 2023, an explosion destroyed the nearby Kakhovka dam, threatening the plant’s main source of water. In April 2024, at least three drones hit the plant, increasing the risk of a major nuclear accident.

When I was traveling through Polesia, I was so focused on finding remnants and reminders of World War II that it took a radioactive sign by the side of the road and an abandoned village to alert me to the region’s more recent past — and the way it still reverberates. Although I knew about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, I was unaware of its full environmental impact — and the repercussions that the explosion of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl continues to have.

The village of Bely Berag we discovered along our route is a reminder of yet another human-made disaster. But it no longer exists, at least not officially. Several months after our visit, by decision No. 73, taken by the Naroŭliia District Council of Deputies, Bely Berag was formally abolished.

A version of this essay was originally published on Visualizing Climate and Loss, a project by the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University.