Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (20 page)

The dosimetrists—they were gods. All the village people would push to get near them. “Tell me, son, what's my radiation?" One enterprising soldier figured it out: he took an ordinary stick, wrapped some wiring to it, knocks on some old lady's door and starts waving his stick at the wall. “Well, son, tell me how it is." “That’s a military secret, grandma." “But you can tell me, son. I'll give you a glass of vodka." “All right." He drinks it down. “Ah, everything’s all right here, grandma. Don’t worry." And leaves.

In the middle of our time there they finally gave us dosimeters. These little boxes, with a crystal inside. Some of the guys started figuring, they should take them over to the burial site in the morning and let them catch radiation all day, that way they’ll get released sooner. Or maybe they'll pay them more. So you had guys attaching them to their boots, there was a loop there, so that they'd be closer to the ground. It was theater of the absurd. These counters weren’t even going, they needed to be set in motion by an initial dose of radiation. In other words, these were little toys they’d picked out of the warehouse from fifty years ago. It was just psychotherapy for us. At the end of our time there we all got the same thing written on our medical cards: they multiplied the average radiation by the number of days we were there. And they got that initial average from our tents, not from where we worked.

We got two hours to rest. I’d lie down under some bush, and see that the cherries are in bloom, big, juicy cherries, you wipe them down and eat them. Mulberry—it was the first time I’d seen it. When we didn’t have work, they’d march us around. We watched Indian films about love, until three, four in the morning. Sometimes after that the cook would oversleep and we’d have undercooked buckwheat. They brought us newspapers—they wrote that we were heroes. Volunteers! There were photographs. If only we’d met that photographer . . .

The international units were nearby. There were Tatars from Kazan. I saw their internal court-martial. They chased a guy in front of the unit, if he stopped or went off to the side they’d start kicking him. He’d been cleaning houses and they'd found a bag full of stuff on him, he’d been stealing. The Lithuanians were nearby, too. After two months they rebelled and demanded to be sent back home.

One time we got a special order: immediately wash this one house in an empty village. Incredible! “What for?” ‘They’re filming a wedding there tomorrow." So we got some hoses and doused the roof, trees, scraped off the ground. We mowed down the potato patch, the whole garden, all the grass in the yard. All around, emptiness. The next day they bring the bride and groom, and a busload of guests. They had music. And they were a real bride and groom, they weren’t actors—they’d already been evacuated, they were living in another place, but someone convinced them to come back and film the wedding here, for history. Our propaganda in motion. A whole factory of daydreams. Even here our myths were at work, defending us: see, we can survive anything, even on dead earth.

Right before I went home the commander called me in. “What were you writing?" “Letters to my young wife." “All right. Be careful."

What do I remember from those days? A shadow of madness. How we dug. And dug.

Ivan Zhykhov, chemical engineer

___

Already by the end of May, about a month after the accident, we began receiving, for testing, products from the thirty-kilometer zone. The institute worked round the clock, like a military institute. At the time we were the only ones in Belarus with the specialists and the equipment for the job.

They brought us the insides of domesticated and undomesticated animals. We checked the milk. After the first tests it became clear that what we were receiving couldn’t properly be called meat—it was a radioactive byproduct. Within the Zone the herds were taken care of in shifts—the shepherds would come and go, the milkmaids were brought in for milking only. The milk factories carried out the government plan. We checked the milk. It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive byproduct.

For a long time after that we used dry milk powder and cans of condensed and concentrated milk from the Rogachev milk factory in our lectures as examples of a standard radiation source. And in the meantime, they were being sold in the stores. When people saw that the milk was from Rogachev and stopped buying it, there suddenly appeared cans of milk without labels. I don't think it was because they ran out of paper.

On my first trip to the Zone I measured a background radiation level in the forest five to six times higher than on the roads or the fields. But high doses were everywhere. The tractors were running, the farmers were digging on their plots. In a few villages we measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred, sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. There was a woman in our group, a radiologist. She became hysterical when she saw that children were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We checked breast milk—it was radioactive. We went into the stores—as in a lot of village stores, they had the clothes and the food right next to each other: suits and dresses, and nearby salami and margarine. They're lying there in the open, they're not even covered with cellophane. We take the salami, we take an egg—we make a roentgen image—this isn't food, it’s a radioactive byproduct.

We see a woman on a bench near her house, breastfeeding her child—her milk has cesium in it—she's the Chernobyl Madonna.

We asked our supervisors, What do we do? How should we be? They said: “Take your measurements. Watch television.” On television Gorbachev was calming the people: “We've taken immediate measures.” I believed it. I'd worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well-acquainted with the laws of physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only for a while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television. We were used to believing. I'm from the postwar generation, I grew up with this belief, this faith. Where did it come from? We’d won that terrible war. The whole world was grateful to us then.

So here’s the answer to your question: Why did we keep silent knowing what we knew? Why didn’t we go out onto the square and yell the truth? We compiled our reports, we put together explanatory notes. But we kept quiet and carried out our orders without a murmur because of Party discipline. I was a Communist. I don’t remember that any of our colleagues refused to go work in the Zone. Not because they were afraid of losing their Party membership, but because they had faith. They had faith that we lived well and fairly, that for us man was the highest thing, the measure of all things. The collapse of this faith in a lot of people eventually led to heart attacks and suicides. A bullet to the heart, as in the case of Professor
[Valery]
Legasov
[head of the commissioned Chernobyl investigation who actually hanged himself in 1988, on the two-year anniversary of the explosion],
because when you lose that faith, you are no longer a participant, you're an also-ran, you have no reason to exist. That’s how I understood his suicide, as a sort of sign.

Marat Kokhanov, former chief engineer of the Institutefor Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences

____

From the very beginning—we heard that something had happened somewhere. I didn’t even hear the name of the place, but it was somewhere far from our Mogilev. Then my brother came running home from school, he said all the kids were getting pills. So apparently something really had happened.

And still we had a great time on May I. We came home late at night, and my window had been blown open by the wind. I would remember that later on.

I worked at the inspection center for environmental defense. We were waiting for instructions, but we didn’t receive any. There were very few professionals on our staff, especially among the directors: they were retired colonels, former Party workers, retirees or other undesirables. If you messed up somewhere else, they’d send you to us. Then you sat there shuffling papers. They only started making noise after our Belarussian writer Aleksei Adamovich spoke out in Moscow, raising the alarm. How they hated him! It was unreal. Their children live here, and their grandchildren, but instead of them it’s a writer calling to the world: Save us! You’d think some sort of self-preservation mechanism would kick in. Instead, at all the Party meetings, and during smoke breaks, all you heard about was “those writers." “Why are they sticking their noses where they don’t belong? They’ve really let themselves go! We have instructions! We need to follow orders! What does he know? He’s not a physicist! We have the Central Committee, we have the General Secretary!" I think I understood then, for the first time, a bit of what it was like in 1937. How that felt.

At that time my notions of nuclear power stations were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we’d been taught that this was a magical factory that made “energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren’t prepared. And also there wasn’t any information. We got stacks of paper marked “Top Secret." “Reports on the accident: secret"; “Results of medical observations: secret"; “Reports about the radioactive exposure of personnel involved in the liquidation of the accident: secret." And so on. There were rumors: someone read in some paper, someone heard, someone said . . . Some people listened to what was being said in the West, they were the only ones talking about what pills to take and how to take them. But most often the reaction was: Our enemies are celebrating, but we still have it better. On May 9 the veterans will still go out on their victory parade. Even those who were fighting the fire at the reactor, as it later turned out, were living among rumors. “I think it's dangerous to take the graphite in your hands. I think . . ."

This crazy woman appeared in town suddenly. She’d walk around the market saying, “I’ve seen the radiation. It's blue as blue, it spills over everything." People stopped buying milk and cottage cheese at the market. An old lady would be standing with her milk, no one’s buying it. “Don't worry," she’d say, “I don't let my cow out into the field, I bring her her grass myself." If you drove out of town you’d see these scarecrows: a cow all wrapped in cellophane, and then an old farmer woman next to her, also wrapped in cellophane. You could cry, you could laugh.

And by this point they started sending us out on inspections. I was sent to a timber processing plant. They weren’t receiving any less timber—the plan hadn’t been altered, so they kept to it. I turned on my instrument at the warehouse and it started going nuts. The boards were okay, but if I turned it on near the brooms, it went off the chart. “Where are the brooms from?" “Krasnopol." And Krasnopol as it later turned out was the most contaminated place in the Mogilev region. “We have one shipment left. The others went out already." And how are you going to find them in all the towns they were sent to?

There was something else I was afraid of leaving out ... Oh, right! Chernobyl happened, and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren’t used to it, that each person’s life was completely separate from everyone else’s. But now you had to think: What are you eating, what are you feeding your kids? What’s dangerous, what isn’t? Should you move to another place, or should you stay? Everyone had to make her own decisions. And we were used to living—how? As an entire village, as a collective—a factory, a collective farm. We were Soviet people, we were collectivized. I was a Soviet person, for example. Very Soviet. When I was in college, I went every summer with the Student Communist youth group. We’d go work for a summer, and the money was transferred to some Latin American CP. Our unit was working at least partially for Uruguay’s.

Then we changed. Everything changed. It takes a lot of work to understand this. And also there's our inability to speak out.

I’m a biologist. My dissertation was on the behavior of bees. I spent two months on an uninhabited island. I had my own bee’s nest there. They took me into their family after I’d spent a week hanging around. They wouldn’t let anyone closer than three meters, but they were letting me walk up next to them after a week. I fed them jam off a match right into the nest. Our teacher used to say: “Don’t destroy an anthill, it’s a good form of alien life.” A bee’s nest is connected to the entire forest, and I gradually also became part of the landscape. A little mouse would come running up and sit on my sneakers—he was a wild forest mouse but he already thought I was part of the scene, I was here yesterday, I'd be there the next day.

After Chernobyl—there was an exhibit of children’s drawings, one of them had a stork walking through a field, and then under it, “No one told the stork.” Those were my feelings, too. But I had to work. We went around the region collecting samples of water, earth, and taking them to Minsk. Our assistants were grumbling: “We're carrying hotcakes.” We had no defense, no special clothing. You'd be sitting in the front seat, and behind you the samples were just glowing.

They had protocols written up for burying radioactive earth. We buried earth in earth—such a strange human activity. According to the instructions, we were supposed to conduct a geological survey before burying anything to determine that there was no ground water within four to six meters of the burial site, and that the depth of the pit wasn't very great, and also that the walls and bottom of the pit be lined with polyethylene film. That’s what the instructions said. In real life it was different. As always. There was no geological survey. They’d point their fingers and say, “Dig here.” The excavator digs. “How deep did you go?” “Who the hell knows? I stopped when I hit water." They were digging right into the water.

They’re always saying: It's a holy people, and a criminal government. Well I’ll tell you a bit later what I think about that, about our people, and about myself.

My longest assignment was in the Krasnopolsk region, which as I said was the worst. In order to keep the radionuclides from washing off the fields into the rivers, we needed to follow instructions again. You had to plow double furrows, leave a gap, and then again put in double furrows, and so on, with the same intervals. You had to drive along all the small rivers and check. So I get to the regional center on a bus, and then obviously I need a car. I go to the chairman of the regional executive committee. He's sitting in his office with his head in his hands: no one changed the plan, no one changed the harvesting operations, just as they’d planted the peas, so they were harvesting them, even though everyone knows that peas take in radiation the most, as do all beans. And there are places out there with 40 curies or more. So he has no time for me at all. All the cooks and nurses have run off from the kindergartens. The kids are hungry. In order to take someone's appendix out, you need to put them on an ambulance to the next region, sixty kilometers on a road that’s as bumpy as a washboard—all the surgeons have taken off. What car? What double furrows? He has no time for me.