His frameless glasses bounce in unison with jovial, shifting facial expressions. When he arrives, he is tall and fair, with long stubble and a round face. Having first visited Chernobyl at the age of 21, Kirill has completed over 100 illegal trips to the Zone.
We meet in a bar, awaiting our stalker, Kirill Stepanets. Garrett and Richter are renowned urban explorers the former’s passion for adventure has earned him a PhD, a column for The Guardian, and criminal convictions in four countries, while the latter himself runs tours of post-socialist ruins. Can a subculture that is so tied to deep wells of personal and national loss really offer something of value to an outsider?Īccompanying me on my journey into the Zone are two Americans, Bradley Garrett and Steve Doe (not his real name), and a Brit, Darmon Richter. I joined one such tour in an effort to discover why visitors might chose a stalker over an official guide. Enterprising stalkers have started offering their own “illegal tours” to travellers seeking a less restricted (and therefore more dangerous) experience of the Exclusion Zone. And now there is another side to the practice. The book inspired Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 cult-classic film Stalker.īeyond youthful rebellion, the motivations of the modern stalkers are complex, and speak to the national trauma that resulted from a tragedy whose effects will be felt for generations.
Written by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, it tells the story of contaminated “zones” created on Earth by aliens, in which rogue stalkers roam, hoping to recover valuable alien technology. The name originates from the 1972 Russian science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. Existing in the shadows of this highly commodified industry is the secretive subculture of the “stalkers”: mostly young Ukrainian men who sneak into the Zone illegally to explore the vast wilderness on their own terms.
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