To Western eyes the disaster is an abstract thing, fodder for sensationalist documentaries or dinner-party polemics about the terrible price of Communist government. The contemporary world is alien to that which produced the Zone, but for many who lived through or suffered the consequences of the event it remains pregnant with meaning and sorrow. Today the threat of nuclear Armageddon has been supplanted by the neurotic fear of traveling on the wrong airliner at the wrong time, the bearded suicide bomber taking over from the crypto-Red as the great bogeyman of the Western psyche. The vast Soviet Empire crumbled, as all imperial edifices must with it vanished the client states that Moscow used as a defensive bulwark against invasion from the West, thus bringing a new European geopolitical order into being. Those three decades since the disaster inaugurated a period of change perhaps unprecedented in the history of mankind.
In the West, the thirtieth anniversary of the Chernobyl Disaster has passed with the usual photo-galleries and retrospective articles providing for the amusement and education of chattering classes while in Kiev candles were lit in solemn commemoration of an unparalleled national catastrophe.
