In the 69 years of its existence the Soviet Union, or USSR, became an industrial and technological behemoth. The communist union of republics (many of which were unwilling members that were kept behind the iron curtain by force), sent the first man into space, was the catalyst behind the defeat of the Nazis and had a list of rather impressive achievements in its short history, despite obvious flaws in the makeup of its society.
Image credits: openrussia.org
Image credits: metroblog.ru
In some countries today, Russia and Belarus in particular, citizens of a certain age look back at Soviet times with a certain degree of nostalgia. Life was tough, freedoms were severely limited and foreign travel was all but impossible save for the privileged elites, but there was a certain degree of safety and security that doesn’t exist anymore.
Image credits: Wikipedia
Image credits: andrianov.ru
From the ashes of the USSR there has grown a thriving subculture of retro Soviet nostalgia, with the distinctive fashion, architecture, abandoned industry and iconography of the times lending itself well to the hipster culture of today. Youth who never had to experience the often brutal reality of life in Soviet times sip lattes in cafes dotted with posters of Lenin, Trotsky and Yuri Gagarin, oblivious to the pain and suffering that entire nations sent to the gulags had to endure. Of course, it differs from country to country. While the hammer and sickle can be seen displayed openly in Russia today, all communist symbols are illegal in Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Poland, amongst others.
Image credits: republic.ru
Image credits: crimea.ria.ru
One thing we can all appreciate, however, is the strange beauty of these Soviet-era control rooms. Before digitization, things like power plants, railway systems, space programs and nuclear weapons had to be monitored by huge banks of buttons, switches, gauges and dials that looking back, seem like something out of classic science fiction.
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These kind of control rooms conjure up images, for me anyway, of the day when it all went wrong. On 25th April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, had a catastrophic explosion and fire, caused by human error, that resulted in the world’s worst nuclear accident.
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Image credits: gazprom.ru
According to Reuters, facility operators, in violation of safety regulations, had switched off important control systems at the plant’s reactor number four and allowed it to reach unstable, low-power conditions. A power surge led to a series of blasts, at 1.24 a.m., which blew off the reactor’s heavy steel and concrete lid and sent a cloud of radioactive dust billowing across northern and western Europe, reaching as far as the eastern United States. The cloud of radioactive strontium, caesium and plutonium affected mainly Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, as well as parts of Russia and Europe.
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The Chernobyl Forum, a group of eight U.N. agencies, and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, have estimated the death toll at only a few thousand as a result of the explosion. U.N. agencies have said some 4,000 people will die in total because of radiation exposure. However, the environmental group Greenpeace puts the eventual death toll far higher than official estimates, with up to 93,000 extra cancer deaths worldwide, while the Chernobyl Union of Ukraine, a non-government body, estimates the present death toll from the disaster at almost 734,000.
Image credits: museum.rao-esv.ru
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The disaster was the object of a cover-up by secretive Soviet authorities who did not immediately admit to the explosion. Eventually, a make-shift cover — the ‘Sarcophagus’ — was built, in the six months after the explosion. It covers the stricken reactor to protect the environment from radiation for at least 30 years. This has now developed cracks, triggering an international effort to fund a new encasement. Radioactive nuclear fuel is still being removed from the plant today.
Image credits: echo.msk.ru
Image credits: echo.msk.ru
Image credits: blog.presentandcorrect
A 30-km (19-mile) exclusion zone is in place around the disaster site, where wildlife has made a comeback and there are said to be more than 60 different types of mammals living there including wild boar and elk. Wolves are doing especially well, with a population that is seven times the size of wolf populations in neighboring reserves.
Image credits: blog.presentandcorrect
Far from becoming the barren wasteland that many predicted after the catastrophic event the area has, in the absence of humans, become host to a great biodiversity. It really shows the power of nature to recover when left alone, without us around to get in the way of things.
Image credits: echo.msk.ru
Image credits: echo.msk.ru
One can imagine the panic in Chernobyl’s control room, pictured below, as a chain reaction sent the nuclear reactor out of control. The dials and alarms going off the charts as workers were urged to evacuate before the huge explosion.
Image credits: BBC
You can now visit the Chernobyl exclusion zone on day tours from Kyiv, taking in the spooky and tragic scenes for yourself to appreciate the true scale of the disaster. All areas safe from excessive radiation are accessible, and visitors report a profound and educational experience. Would you visit Pripyat and the Chernobyl exclusion zone? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Image credits: sovietologist
Because stanley kubrik remembered those pictures when he composed and executed his movies :)
Load More Replies...I just started watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and ...wow. Yes it's been *glamourized" by Hollywood, yet the sheer size of the catastrophe gotten from the superb actors is very palpable, horrific and ....sad. Yay Mother Nature!!
Just checked the trailer & looks awesome. Thank you for the tip! :-)
Load More Replies...All that just to play solitary. Seriously, amazing how far we've come. Most of us will never understand the technology we use these days.
I had a cobol class and played star trek on a keypunch machine with an IBM 360 and greenbar paper was the "radar screen".
Load More Replies...Radiation rates are still high. I would never visit that zone, but journalists did it few days ago to test the risk. I remember that in 1986 we were warned not to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and to stay at home as long as possible. A lot of people died from unexpected cancer, probably related to that accident.
A friend of mine runs tours in Chernobyl regularly. He also does off grid tours of Iran. If you dig Brutalist architecture and Soviet era design check his website dudes! Yomadic.com He has actually been inside a nuclear station and as it's not live he was allowed to "push the button" and the photos are crazy. (He's one of my best friends in this world so I always support him, not an advert here). Tell him I said "G'day". :)
Crazy to think that most of us have more commuting power than that in our phones.
And better bandwidth for communication. Also... the Apollo program put people on the moon, with a room full of computers that had less computational power than my first computer. (a Pentium 486. with a whopping 128kb ram and a 100meg hard disk. It's only redeeming quality is that it ran Red Hat. not Windoze.)
Load More Replies...I'm in Ukraine at this very moment, visiting Pripyat and Chernobyl tomorrow. Won't see any control rooms though, I guess.
Look man, I just ordered a burger and fries. This ain't rocket science.
The best (or maybe worst) part of Soviet design, and fabrication, was that, even on the day it was taken out of the box and installed, it already looked old.
I half expect Ernst Stavro Blofeld to come around the corner with his white cat and discover that James Bond somehow snuck into the control room to sabotage his evil plans.
The thing about these control rooms is that they give a feeling of control. That is part of the hybris of running things that are not fully controlable. The future holds another hybris: control rooms with much less space, limiting the really relevant information to be pre-selected by AI and thus disburdening humans of information overload.
Um, the exact opposite is true. In a system like these, an out-of-range value requires an attentive human to notice it and take corrective action in a timely manner. Automated systems reduce hazards and eliminate tedious jobs.
Load More Replies...Actually disaster in Chernobyl, took "only" 30 lives. Wasn't that much from the perspective how much thus accident was exaggerated by the government. I read lots of books and articles about Chernobyl and for example in Poland - government was giving a lugola liquid, to prevent the absorption of radioactivity by humans. And in fact, this liquid makes more 'damages' to the people, than radiation. Prypec is located 3 km from Nuclear Plant and now is completely safe for humans.
are you kidding?? 30 was just a number of soviet propaganda, it was much higher. With aftermath we can talk about thousands. Impact od radiation has been affecting people till today. And Pripjat is definitely not safe completely. There are still many dangerous places as basement of hospital full of firefighters clothes.
Load More Replies...It's the complete lack of joy in those places; they reek of an inhuman era in the country's past.
Because stanley kubrik remembered those pictures when he composed and executed his movies :)
Load More Replies...I just started watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and ...wow. Yes it's been *glamourized" by Hollywood, yet the sheer size of the catastrophe gotten from the superb actors is very palpable, horrific and ....sad. Yay Mother Nature!!
Just checked the trailer & looks awesome. Thank you for the tip! :-)
Load More Replies...All that just to play solitary. Seriously, amazing how far we've come. Most of us will never understand the technology we use these days.
I had a cobol class and played star trek on a keypunch machine with an IBM 360 and greenbar paper was the "radar screen".
Load More Replies...Radiation rates are still high. I would never visit that zone, but journalists did it few days ago to test the risk. I remember that in 1986 we were warned not to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and to stay at home as long as possible. A lot of people died from unexpected cancer, probably related to that accident.
A friend of mine runs tours in Chernobyl regularly. He also does off grid tours of Iran. If you dig Brutalist architecture and Soviet era design check his website dudes! Yomadic.com He has actually been inside a nuclear station and as it's not live he was allowed to "push the button" and the photos are crazy. (He's one of my best friends in this world so I always support him, not an advert here). Tell him I said "G'day". :)
Crazy to think that most of us have more commuting power than that in our phones.
And better bandwidth for communication. Also... the Apollo program put people on the moon, with a room full of computers that had less computational power than my first computer. (a Pentium 486. with a whopping 128kb ram and a 100meg hard disk. It's only redeeming quality is that it ran Red Hat. not Windoze.)
Load More Replies...I'm in Ukraine at this very moment, visiting Pripyat and Chernobyl tomorrow. Won't see any control rooms though, I guess.
Look man, I just ordered a burger and fries. This ain't rocket science.
The best (or maybe worst) part of Soviet design, and fabrication, was that, even on the day it was taken out of the box and installed, it already looked old.
I half expect Ernst Stavro Blofeld to come around the corner with his white cat and discover that James Bond somehow snuck into the control room to sabotage his evil plans.
The thing about these control rooms is that they give a feeling of control. That is part of the hybris of running things that are not fully controlable. The future holds another hybris: control rooms with much less space, limiting the really relevant information to be pre-selected by AI and thus disburdening humans of information overload.
Um, the exact opposite is true. In a system like these, an out-of-range value requires an attentive human to notice it and take corrective action in a timely manner. Automated systems reduce hazards and eliminate tedious jobs.
Load More Replies...Actually disaster in Chernobyl, took "only" 30 lives. Wasn't that much from the perspective how much thus accident was exaggerated by the government. I read lots of books and articles about Chernobyl and for example in Poland - government was giving a lugola liquid, to prevent the absorption of radioactivity by humans. And in fact, this liquid makes more 'damages' to the people, than radiation. Prypec is located 3 km from Nuclear Plant and now is completely safe for humans.
are you kidding?? 30 was just a number of soviet propaganda, it was much higher. With aftermath we can talk about thousands. Impact od radiation has been affecting people till today. And Pripjat is definitely not safe completely. There are still many dangerous places as basement of hospital full of firefighters clothes.
Load More Replies...It's the complete lack of joy in those places; they reek of an inhuman era in the country's past.
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