Standing on a rooftop in her underwear, staring into space, rows of dark windows in the blurry background, basically a standard Insta-diva photo. However, the geotag is odd: the city of Pripyat, Chernobyl. The girl is a Ukrainian playboy-tier model and doesn't seem to be interested in social issues. Why does she have a catastrophe-site photo, among her other naked photoshoots? That's a good question because this photo is not the only one. There are much more explicit ones.
Chernobyl has become trendy after the much-talked-about series. Now, not only daredevils do selfies here. However, each photo gets a lot of outraged comments saying that glamorizing a mass grave is disrespectful. There's a more radical reaction to the wave of smiling photos in front of the radioactive ruins. Here's a proposal to get as many influencers in Chernobyl as possible and take the cover off the fourth reactor for a few hours.
Jokes aside, this phenomenon requires closer inspection. Varvara Nevskaya did exactly that.
- Greetings, Varvara.
- Greetings.
- Erotica in Chernobyl, huh?
- They say a porn movie was shot in Chernobyl at some point. Back then, it remained unnoticed. Now, we're basically dealing with the second wave.
The typical "stalker" image has fundamentally changed over time. Thick camo uniform, tall boots, and breathing masks are in the past. Instead, we get nearly transparent polypropylene coats and underwear, that's about it. Tempting shapes and seductive poses, the scene of action is Pripyat. A culture of sex and post-apocalypse.
Both things sell quite well separately, but perhaps this model from Yekaterinburg, who preferred to remain unnamed, expected to get a double-effect. She succeeded; even the creators of the famous series approved of her photos.
"It's wonderful that the Chernobyl series has inspired a wave of tourism to the Zone of Exclusion. But yes, I've seen the photos going around. If you visit, please remember that a terrible tragedy occurred there. Comfort yourselves with respect for all who suffered and sacrificed".
The photos of other tourists sitting in a liquidator bus, standing with an r-meter at the monument, or wearing a gas mask near the Sarcophagus seem harmless, though inappropriate, compared to the photos released by the model from Yekaterinburg and Tom the photographer from Leipzig. But Angelina from Novosibirsk went beyond rock bottom.
"Commercial break".
The girl doesn't hide her simple goal to get attention. It's not about the memory of the tragedy or respect for the dead. She didn't just shoot the video but also naked photos. Angelina is proud of her works by the way. We made our friend into a world-class influencer with a single photo. It's time to open our own profile-promoting company. We'll probably see a lot of such companies because, in the minds of the youth, Chernobyl is primarily a pop culture image, rather than a real and terrifying event.
Nikolay Grigoryev, marketologist: "It fits the extremely popular post-apocalypse genre and is consumed by pop culture. Against this background, such phenomenons begin to appear. Young people who look at all that get a different idea of the situation. It gets obscured by the haze of the past. They have a different view of those events within the framework of their subcultures".
What about the view of the soldiers, guarding the Zone and the guides who hold excursions? According to the seasoned stalkers, the employees' opinion on the sacredness of Chernobyl highly depends on the sum of money they get from the tourists.
Yuri Tomashevsky, stalker: "We had people shooting films, even porn films, on the territory of the Chernobyl Zone. They show the Sarcophagus and the city in close-up. That's undoubtedly a violation of safety procedures because, according to safety procedures, revealing clothes like shorts or tank tops are not allowed in there. Ideally, one should be wearing a gas mask there".
The lack of proper protection is the last thing those who got offended by the explicit photos are worried about. The places those beautiful models choose as backgrounds to get more likes were recently the places where people were receiving critical doses of radiation and losing their health and lives.
Nikolay Tarakanov, chief liquidator: "I'm disgusted by them. Young women shouldn't be doing that. They're basically desecrating this tragedy and the memory of the heroes of Chernobyl. 500,000 people worked there, in Chernobyl. 50,000 people lost their lives in a five-year period in Chernobyl. How dare those young girls to desecrate their memory?"
In the final scene of Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker, which was released seven years before the Chernobyl catastrophe, the main character, Stalker, tells his wife: "God, have you seen those people? They have empty eyes. They always think about getting the best deal, selling themselves at the highest price".
Now, we realize that stalkers have changed over the years.
- Varvara Nevskaya on radioactive glamor.
