A Giant Festival Happened In Kyiv
Five days after the explosion, on May 1, a May Day festival occurred 95 miles away from Chernobyl, in the city of Kyiv. The celebration occurred outdoors and went on as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, the trees of Kyiv had absorbed so much radiation from the explosion that in the autumn, when the leaves fell, they had to be handled as radioactive waste.
The people of Kyiv who participated in the May Day festival were poisoned by massive amounts of radiation that had blown in from Chernobyl. However, the Soviet authorities were acting as if nothing was amiss. They wanted to pretend that the explosion had not even happened.