The Radioactive Babushka

Resilience & Reclusivity

By Cara Shelton | February 18, 2025

To know me is to know that I sort of have a proclivity for running away.

This gives the title of my essay a specific and significant irony, given that the namesake “radioactive babushkas” of the Chernobyl exclusion zone did not run away. Or did they? Well, maybe, but not for long at least - and also not in a completely straightforward sense.

Things are complicated sometimes.

If you don’t know this story, you should. It’s fascinating. I’ll do my best to offer a summary (you can learn more in this documentary) and hopefully you’ll find it relevant.

The gist is this:

At the time of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, entire villages within a certain radius of the incident were evacuated because of the radiation levels. It has been said that it may take 20,000 years for the radioactivity to diminish enough for the area to become safely habitable again. Very, very soon after the incident in Chernobyl, however, a tiny population of the evacuated women decided to run away from the safe haven cities - ran away from fearful family members, the convenient city life, and the low-maintenance khrushchevka - so that they could return home.

Why do something so impossibly dangerous? In short, these ladies didn’t know life outside of their quaint forest villages and they didn’t want to, radiation be damned. They wanted their gardens, their little candy-colored houses, their mushroom-hunting, their berry-picking, their fishing poles, their gilded icons, their family cemeteries, the dirt under their fingernails, and to be left the hell alone (unless maybe you’d have a glass of wine and commiserate).

I, for one, don’t blame them.

They felt flatly defiant about the warnings and threats regarding any civilian’s return to the villages in the exclusion zone. They’d become saturated with radiation and would immediately fall ill. They would suffer and die. It was idiocy! It was forbidden! It simply wasn’t worth it! That’s what Those-Who-Know-Best said.

Regardless, in the cover of night or of rain or of nothing at all, one-by-one these women carried their few belongings on foot through the fields and forests away from the cities, snuck under the barbed-wire fence that demarcated their very sanctuary as a den of death and danger, and they went home. They reclaimed their former lives, albeit mostly alone, but perhaps most importantly they reclaimed themselves. Permanently.

They were undeterred and decisive. And ignorant, many might say. Yes, something horrible had happened - they were hugely and eternally affected by the loss of those they loved in Chernobyl - but uprooting over it was needless and absurd, they thought. They had faith. They were strong. They had built a life already and abandoning it was not their answer to tragedy; staying the course was.

Stay the course.

I was absolutely charmed to find that I share a specific instinct with the babushkas, and I do not just mean covering one’s whole house in floral prints. No, it is that sometimes you must run away to stay on-course, even if it means looking crazed and charging directly into danger. Modernly I think we tend to conflate danger for ostracism almost constantly, and although relevant, that’s something I can harp on ad nauseam another time. Anyway, as an INFJ and enneagram type 1 (i.e. an insufferably principled introvert), the colorful headscarves of these old Ukrainian women are more like little superhero capes to me. They overcame the singular greatest hurdle of our shared temperament: people-pleasing.

Speaking of, before we move on dearest, please know I do realize that not everyone will align with me here. (That’s sort of the point.) I’m sure I (we) sound kind of unhinged to the multitudes of Those-Who-Know-Best who’d be disappointed in this “reckless disregard” of something or another. There are probably many more of Those-Who-Know-Best now than in 1986, to be sure. The times have demanded it. There is a grave need for facts.

Radiation poisoning = suffering and death.
“Have a little self-preservation,” you suggest.
“Ever heard of Darwin?” some quip.

I hear that. It’s reasonable. It’s safe. Science! I get it.

So a few of us will be accused of ignorance because we will have silently complicated things with this extra step at a seemingly terrible time: we will discern whether people-pleasing within a larger framework (compliance, in other words) can be reconciled with our rigid individualistic and antiquated principles. As a result, respectfully and as stupid as it sounds, there are some of us who simply are not always going to fall in line when the circumstance at large demands it. While we do, in fact, know perfectly well the outlined dangers at-hand, our fears lie elsewhere.

You must understand that self-preservation doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. That doesn’t make us wrong; that makes us different. (And maybe a pain in the ass, but I digress…)

Let’s get something straight: to be a radioactive babushka is not necessarily to be unreasonable, it is to prioritize being resolute. Being a radioactive babushka is not necessarily to welcome ostracism, it is simply to not give a shit. It is to see clearly the path before you, and to fight like hell to stay on it even if 1. your purpose in this world is absolutely minuscule, and 2. it might kill you. In short, the goal is to never sell-out.

The radioactive babushkas are not movers and shakers. They are petite old women who cure their ails with stems of heather, have the Theotokos on speed dial, and shrug their shoulders at modern revelations. The most groundbreaking thing they ever did was go home.

Their contribution to the world, if society must know, is a lot of moonshine and being 100% true to who they are regardless of who is watching, but also whilst almost no one can see them doing it. That’s because they do not live to be seen. They live to be alive… understanding and respecting that someday, without their input, it will come to an end.

Modernity is a land of cmd + c, cmd + v participation in rapidly evolving trends and fears, so let’s please take a break from that and be real for a second:

The mere virtue of stubbornly staying the course, even and especially in a village of one, is a massive contribution. You see, where this commitment bubbles up and asserts itself, there inevitably comes a ripple that interrupts a carefully executed, but fragile system hellbent on keeping up with the times - whatever they may be. It creates a moment that will either be patently ignored as a weird inconvenience, or a reevaluation of what’s being innovated, and why.

What is being feared, and why?

It provokes a necessary confusion to muse Those-Who-Know-Best-Who-Are-Open-To-Pondering, for they are the ones who usually decide what comes next for us all (in the worldly sense, anyway).

The babushkas didn’t do what they did to have any influence on those around them, though. I’ll reiterate that what they did - what they’re doing - is in near-total reclusivity. The real story here is that it doesn’t take an audience or a bullhorn to have integrity. It takes courage. And in the smallest women in the smallest villages in the most toxic place on earth, courage counts for a lot.

After all, here I am 6,000 miles away, writing about the 40-year-old news that a hundred Ukrainian women decided they’d rather be irradiated in their indigent villages than masquerade as stuffy city-dwellers in the name of safety.

For the rest of us who are “foolish,” “reckless,” “ignorant,” “strange,” “stubborn,” and ever-standing on the edge of ostracism for fear of simply being exactly who we are, the radioactive babushkas give us permission to take the plunge — right into the mud, under the barbed-wire, and then walking upright to the interior recesses, the comfort, of ourselves. There we are free and safe to dwell no matter how dangerous anyone says it is.

The babushkas of Chernobyl persist in their dangerous dwellings - picking berries in “Wormwood Forest,” eating radioactive fish, and hitching rides to church. They humor the occasional lab-rat experiments inflicted on them by Those-Who-Know-Best, now trying to figure out how they beat the odds - both saturated in radioactivity and completely self-sufficient at 90 years old.

Is it a fluke?
Is it their faith?

The point is, they made it. They’re drinking horilka. And they’re laughing at you.