One self-settler depicted in the documentary Babushkas of Chernobyl, Hanna Zavorotnya, explained how she snuck through the bushes back to her village in the summer of 1986. “Shoot us and dig the grave,” she told the soldiers who tried to evacuate her and other family members, “otherwise we’re staying.”
Why did she choose to live on this deadly land? Is she unaware of the risks, or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? When asked about radiation, Zavorotnya replied: “Radiation doesn’t scare me. Starvation does.”
Zavorotnya and the other women lived through Stalin’s Holodomor – the genocide-by-famine of the 1930s that wiped out millions of Ukrainians – and then the Nazis in the 1940s. When the Chernobyl accident happened a few decades into Soviet rule, many were simply unwilling to flee an enemy that was invisible.



Other babushkas have said: “If you leave you die”; “Those who left are worse off now. They are all dying of sadness”; “Motherland is Motherland. I will never leave.”

Chernobyl's babushkas – the women who refused to leave the exclusion zone