Stsiapan Stureika: Lawn will substitute Ignalinskaja NPP, and its staff won’t integrate in Lithuania

photo by EuroBelarus Information Service

By 2036 grass will be growing at the place of Lithuanian NPP. It seems that Russian-speaking Visaginas has stuck in time and shuns Lithuanization, and the plant looks like a grave of USSR spirit.

Lection called “Ignalinskaja NPP: legacy test. Reflections upon the visit” took place in Minsk on April 2. The education and exhibition project “Artes Liberales” served as an organizer of the event.

On the threshold the author of the lection – Stsiapan Stureika, a historian and culture anthropologist, EHU teacher – visited Ignalinskaja nuclear power plant, which opened a new perspective of looking at the city legacy and culture landscape for him.

How will the whole city of Russian-speakers live further, after building and serving for the NPP, but not fitting in Lithuania’s actualities anymore? The scientist, who was there, tells about the experiment on Visaginas’ reorganization.

A small piece of Minsk Malinauka area in Lithuania

I have never worked in nuclear power sphere, but suddenly I got a unique chance to visit Visaginas and take part in EHU’s workshop.

There can be no cities without historical center, i.e. those objects that the local citizens believe to be legacy. And it doesn’t matter what are these objects – a gothic cathedral or something different. And Visaginas gives us a dimension of “different”.

There is a problem of how much the future of the city is defined by its past, how the past controls the future in traditional European cities (such as Minsk and Hrodna), although it might look as if citizens are lords of the city. The analysis of the Visaginas’ situation demonstrates, how the past pressurizes over all strategies of the city – both living and economic.

Visaginas is the only city in modern Lithuania where Slavic population, i.e. Russians and Russian-speakers, prevails. This year the city marks the anniversary of 40 years.

The city was built as an example of soviet urbanism; however, likewise NPP, only half of the city was built. On December 31, 1999 the construction of the plant was stopped, and over the last decade the population of the city declined by 25%.

If we look at Visaginas from above, it looks just like Malinauka area in Minsk, though its architecture fits in the landscape well.

In 2001 Lithuania’s government by EU’s demand ratified the program of stopping and further deactivation of the first block of Ignalinskaja NPP. In late 2004 first block was stopped, and in 2009 – the second. Thus, Lithuania fulfilled its obligations to the EU, according to the conditions for entering the Eurozone.

NPP should be withdrawn from the surface of the Earth

- During the excursion to the NPP I was standing just at the reactor tank. By the way, I could only bring my underwear with me because of the strict control system. We were given all the clothes, including socks.

Now the process of progressive liquidation is going on. The process will be finished before 2036. A lawn will substitute Ignalinskaja NPP, so that nothing reminds that there used to be a plant. The NPP should be razed to the ground – this is the main message of the liquidation. However, nuclear waste will be kept in Visaginas, in a special depository.

Even now 2 thousand people are working at the NPP. However, it doesn’t produce any energy; vice versa, it’s buying it, and quite expensively.

Culture foreignness

I want to share my impressions from what Visaginas and the plant are. When you enter the area of Ignalinskaja NPP, you immediately note that all signs are in Russian, which is non-typical for any place in Lithuania. According to the latest data, Lithuanians make up only 15% of Visaginas’ population; people in the city are Russian-speakers.

So, when the question of NPP’s liquidation was considered, it was Russian-speaking feature of Visaginas and its culture foreignness that played an important role. Of course, apart from economic and ecological considerations.

Destruction of the Soviet grandeur

- Ignalinskaja NPP is an embodiment of the Soviet grandeur Lithuania is getting rid of. Soviet symbols (sickle and hammer) equal fascist symbols in Lithuania. And situation with the NPP can be ascribed to the same context.

Lithuanian sociologists agreed with me, though with certain reservations, that if the plant was constructed by Lithuanian specialists, the attitude to it would be absolutely different.

Stranglehold of the “Russian World” or cream of society?

- Let me note the duality of Visaginas’ image. Lithuanian media depict it as a city with extremely high level of unemployment, with stranglehold of the “Russian World” and all the consequences – political, etc.; the city that lost 25% of its population over the last decade; the embodiment of decline. And there is the image of Visaginas in the eyes of its citizens: the city takes the 1^st place in Lithuania by people with higher education – highly qualified staff of the NPP and their families; the cream of the Soviet science.

Marginalization, dilution, and dissolution

The main problem of Visaginas is that its citizens do not integrate into Lithuania. everyone, who was able to do that, has already left the city. Now gradual marginalization and purposeful dissolution of Visaginas is taking place. There are a number of programs aimed at study of Lithuanian and integration of city citizens to Lithuania, but these programs are not very effective.

The vacancies of the plant’s employees are open to the whole Lithuania; i.e. Lithuanians are drawn in the city, whereas Russians are forced out of it. Conscientious dilution of the Russian-speaking community is taking place. This is happening not only with Russians, but also with Belarusans and Ukrainians.

The city is on the threshold of its fourth anniversary, and its biggest nerve is “how would we live without the NPP?” The only way to save the city is to reinterpret its legacy and its conflicting image, or even raze it to the ground, but give something in exchange. A search for new senses is going on, but they have to be appropriated by Visaginas’ citizens.

Without “anchors”, but with Lithuanian passports

 Klaipeda and Vilnius were built into Lithuanian national discourse. The problem is that the main mechanism of city’s integration is the construction of historical contexts and national canons. But Visaginas doesn’t have any history but for the Soviet history. It doesn’t have any anchors that could integrate the city in Lithuania, although Lithuania is trying to do that.

But my opinion is that the multicultural image of Visaginas that the municipality is talking about is taken from the foreign context and can’t be applied to the local actualities. Multiculturalism is a notion taken from migration vocabulary. In the eyes of Lithuania Visaginas is a city of migrants; but they are not migrants, they are the founders of the city and its first citizens with Lithuanian passports.

There will be no festivals

- What should we do with the NPP? It cannot be transformed into a memorial, as it is dangerous. We cannot organize festivals inside it; it is not merely an industrial legacy; it’s a Soviet legacy.

This plant and the memory about it should become a warning, a lesson for the ancestors, an important technological experience, an example of how NPPs were stopped din the world.

To demolish or to make a museum out of it is not the essence of the question; its essence is to rework its initial meaning and Visaginas’ identity. Its citizens are trying to get away from the dual image: they have created a museum of local lore to show the long history of the city and get rid of “pain spots”; they moved the memorial to liquidators of the Chernobyl NPP from the city center to suburbs to retouch the nuclear fleur; they create museums of Lithuanian and Russian culture…

Depressive agricultural towns

- What should the city do? I don’t know… Probably, continue observations and indicate new key points in the process’ development. That will contribute to the understanding of the concept of city legacy. Thus, the experiment on reorganization of Visaginas continues.

In terms of photography NPP is optical negative, reverse light projection of architectural legacy. We can exemplify it with Belarusan castle in Kreva – a town, population of which decreased twice over the last 20 years. Now it is an agricultural town; a depressive settlement that people are abandoning. The NPP in Visaginas is perceived by its citizens the same way Kreva’s citizens perceive their castle.

But if in Belarus external powers, such as historians and volunteers from Minsk – come to Kreva in order to save the castle, in Lithuania everything is vice versa – external powers want to destroy the legacy of Visaginas and the NPP.