Devastation under Moscow
Vacant Tunnels
During the May holidays those Muscovites who didn’t go to country houses and stayed in the city could see a street art work paraphrasing famous Banksy’s graffiti “Sweep It Under The Carpet”. The Moscow piece in ArtPlay design center depicts a “liquidator” (an emergency worker who fought the blaze at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor) trying to sweep the memory for the Chernobyl disaster “under the carpet”.
The message says, ‘the scariest radiation is the one that is forgotten #CHERNOBYL30’.
Russian authorities seemed to be fairly unwilling to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Chernobyl. The only official ceremony in Moscow was held at the Mitino cemetery. Nevertheless, some mass media didn’t hesitate to remind what had happened 30 years ago.
Kommersant released a special project devoted to Chernobyl today. Takie Dela published an eyewitness account by Russian photographer Victoria Ivleva. Although the materials are in Russian, they are full of powerful images. But the strongest reminder of the disaster was given by the Moscow City Hall…
‘It looks like Pripyat’, one man said to another going through Moscow underground walkway in April of 2016. There was a row of devastated stalls and kiosks to the right of them.
It seemed like you had wandered onto a post-apocalyptic film set. Underpasses that used to be packed with small shops, newsagents and clothes vendors now were abandoned. People had gone.
Only display torsos and legs were left in the kiosks. Resemblance to Pripyat, a ghost town in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, was apparent because of the same feeling of desolation and devastation.
Had people relocated even deeper underground in search of refuge after a nuclear accident (as it once had been suggested by a science fiction novel “Metro-2033”)?
No. As it was said, it’s all about the City Hall. After the large-scale kiosk demolition in February the authorities decided to purge Moscow’s web of pedestrian tunnels from staffed stalls and shops. The latter will be substituted by vending machines with snacks and beverages, as it was announced in 2015.
Now Moscow underground walkways are going through their purgatory stage to reemerge either with vending machines or with blankness and sterility. As some examples show, the second way is quite feasible.
