Chernobyl’s 40-year legacy: haunting photographs from the radiation zone

‘Are you taking a Geiger counter?” That was the rather unwelcome question the faculty panel asked me as a junior doctoral student heading for the Soviet Union, writes Mark Galeotti. It was 1988, two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and while I was not travelling anywhere near Pripyat in northern Ukraine, where the most serious radiological event in history unfolded, the winds had scattered radioactive particles across the Soviet Union and beyond. The concern was that even in Moscow, more than 500 miles to the northeast, any piece of fruit from the market, any water from the tap, any…