ELENA FILATOVA

'Elena (Lena) Filatova' (Russian: Елена Филатова, born 1974) is a Ukrainian motorcyclist who gained Internet fame in 2004 under the nickname KiddOfSpeed after her website was mentioned at Slashdot^[1] and other online news sources.
On her website, she posted photographs of her alleged motorcycle trips in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 18 years after the nuclear disaster there. She mainly visited the virtually abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine.
Filatova took a large number of photographs of buildings, cottages, rusting carnival equipment, the interiors or schools and homes, and even a couple people who had since returned to the area. The photos are arranged in the form of a story presented as an account of a trip by a biker who got a permit to travel alone in the radiation zone. However, Chernobyl tour guides and tourists to Chernobyl have claimed that Filatova visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone only as part of an organized tour.^[2] Chernobyl tour guide Yuriy Tatarchuk recalls that Filatova "booked a tour, wore a leather biker jacket and posed for pictures." Her website appeared soon after.^[3]
Around May 16, 2004, Filatova posted to her website that she was "being accused that it was more poetry in this story then reality. I partly accept this accusation, it still was more reality then poetry"; by May 24 she had removed the note.^[4]
Among her more recent projects is a photo-journal about the Serpent's Wall near the city of Kiev, her home. The journal contains photos of Filatova's exploration of an ancient wall and more modern World War II fortifications built amongst its remains. Her website also contains a photo journal of the day of the Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Additionally, in March 2007, she posted more photos of the surrounding Chernobyl area that had been taken more recently.

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References

Bibliography

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References

1. The site was mentioned twice in March 2004, and again in May 2004 when questions about its veracity were raised.

★ Chernobyl...18 Years Later

★ Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos

★ Slashback: Fairness, Radioactivity, Recovery
2. chernobyl motorcycling fake!
3. Pripyat Journal; New Sight in Chernobyl's Dead Zone: Tourists C.J. Chivers
4. Wayback archive for http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

Bibliography

★ TJERNOBYL Photographs of Chernobyl by Elena Filatova, with foreword.

External links

★ Filatova's homepage

★ older KiddOfSpeed homepage

★ Filatova's documentation of the Serpent's Wall

★ La zone de Tchernobyl aujourd'hui, la ville fantôme de Pripyat, la terre des loups... Photos de Elena Filatova