Maybe it was not hard to guess that this would be the first place I wanted to visit.
It's a biker thing.
No motorcycle shop could survive a catastrophe like this.
This is a sales sticker for a Chezet, 26hp, 343cc, motorcycle. Price = 1050 rubles. For the non-bikers reading this, Chezet was the ultimate dream machine for all young bikers in the Soviet Union. I remember being a school girl in a crowd of bad boys hanging outside and drooling on the showcase window of the cycle shop......dreaming of what we could do with 26 hp bike, because Grandpa's crippled dinosaur had only 15 ponnies but how the HELL could we ever afford it in this lifetime????? The average monthly wage was only 180 rubbles then.
When the town siren went off on Sunday morning, mass panic ensued. With the police evacuting along with everyone else, banks and even jewelry stores went relatively unnoticed, but looters emptied this shop out in minutes. The police began shooting looters in May, when radioactive TV sets began to appear in the pawn shops of Kiev.
