Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (24 page)

I wanted to remember everything, so I started photographing it. That's my story. Not long ago we buried a friend of mine who'd been there. He died from cancer of the blood. We had a wake, and in the Slavic tradition we drank. And then the conversations began again, until midnight. First about him, the deceased. But after that? Once more about the fate of the country and the design of the universe. Will Russian troops leave Chechnya or not? Will there be a second Caucasian war, or has it already started? Could Zhirinovsky become president? Will Yeltsin be re-elected? About the English royal family and Princess Diana. Aboutthe Russian monarchy. About Chernobyl, the different theories. Some say that aliens knew about the catastrophe and helped us out; others that it was an experiment, and soon kids with incredible talents will start to be born. Or maybe the Belarussians will disappear, like the Scythians. We're metaphysicians. We don't live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversations. Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it. Even when you’re near death.

Viktor Latun, photographer

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The other day my daughter said to me: “Mom, if I give birth to a damaged child, I'm still going to love him." Can you imagine that? She’s in the tenth grade. Her friends, too, they all think about it. Some acquaintances of ours recently gave birth to a son, their first. They’re a young, handsome pair. And their boy has a mouth that stretches to his ears and no eyes. I don’t visit them like I used to, but my daughter doesn't mind, she looks in on them all the time. She wants to go there, maybe just to see, or maybe to try it on.

We could have left, but my husband and I thought about it and decided not to. We were afraid. Here, we’re all Chernobylites. We don’t scare one another, and if someone gives you an apple or a cucumber from their garden, you take it and eat it, you don’t hide it shamefully in your purse, and then throw it out. We all share the same memories. We have the same fate. Anywhere else, we’re foreign, we’re lepers. Everyone is used to the words, “Chernobylites," “Chernobyl children,” “Chernobyl refugees.” But you don’t know anything about us. You’re afraid of us. You probably wouldn’t let us out of here if you had your way, you’d put up a police cordon, that would calm you down.
[Stops.]
Don’t try to tell me it’s not like that. I lived through it. In those first days ... I took my daughter and ran off to Minsk, to my sister. My own sister didn’t let us into the her home, she had a little baby she was breast-feeding. Can you imagine that? We slept at the train station.

I had crazy thoughts. Where should we go? Maybe we should kill ourselves so as not to suffer? That was just in the first days. Everyone started imagining horrible diseases, unimaginable diseases. And I’m a doctor. I can only guess what other people were thinking. Now I look at my kids: wherever they go, they’ll feel like strangers. My daughter spent a summer at pioneer camp, the other kids were afraid to touch her. “She’s a Chernobyl rabbit. She glows in the dark." They made her go into the yard at night so they could see if she was glowing.

People talk about the war, the war generation, they compare us to them. But those people were happy! They won the war! It gave them a very strong life-impulse, as we say now, it gave them a really strong motivation to survive and keep going. They weren’t afraid of anything, they wanted to live, learn, have kids. Whereas us? We’re afraid of everything. We’re afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don’t exist yet. They don’t exist, and we’re already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes, too. Everyone’s depressed. It’s a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it’s changed our everyday life, and our thinking.

Sometimes I think it’d be better if you didn’t write about us. Then people wouldn't be so afraid. No one talks about cancer in the home of a person who’s sick with it. And if someone is in jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either.

Nadezhda Burakova, resident of the village of Khoyniki

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I’m a product of my time. I'm a believing Communist. Now it’s safe to curse us out. It's fashionable. All the Communists are criminals. Now we answer for everything, even the laws of physics.

I was the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party. In the papers they write that it was, you know, the Communists’ fault: they built poor, cheap nuclear power plants, they tried to save money and didn’t care about people's lives. People for them were just sand, the fertilizer of history. They can go to hell! That's where! It’s the cursed questions: What to do and who to blame? These are questions that don’t go away. Everyone is impatient, they want revenge, they want blood. Well they can go to hell!

Others keep quiet, but I'll tell you. You write—well not you personally, but the papers write that the Communists fooled the people, hid the truth from them. But we had to. We got telegrams from the Central Committee, from the Regional Committee, they told us: You must prevent a panic. And it's true, a panic is a frightening thing. Only during the war did they pay so much attention to news from the front as they did then to the news from Chernobyl. There was fear, and there were rumors. People weren't killed by the radiation, but by the events. We had to prevent a panic.

You can't say that we covered everything up right away, we didn't even know the extent of what was happening. We were directed by the highest political strategy. But if you put aside the emotions, and the politics, you have to admit that no one believed in what had happened. Even the scientists couldn’t believe it! Nothing like it had ever happened, not just here but anywhere in the world. The scientists who were there at the plant studied the situation and made immediate decisions. I recently watched the program, “Moment of Truth," where they interviewed Aleksandr Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo, the main ideologue of the Party under Gorbachev. What did he remember? They also, the ones up top, didn’t really see the whole picture. At a meeting of the Politburo one of the generals explained: “What’s radiation? At the testing grounds, after an atomic blast, they drink a bottle of wine and that's that. It’ll be fine." They talked about Chernobyl like it was an accident, an ordinary accident.

What if I’d declared then that people shouldn’t go outside? They would have said: “You want to disrupt May Day?” It was a political matter. They’d have asked for my Party card!
[Calms down a little
.] Here's something that happened, I think, it wasn't just a story. The chairman of the Government Commission,
[Boris]
Scherbina, comes to the plant in the first days after the explosion and demands that they take him to the reactor. They say, No, there are chunks of graphite, insane radiation, high temperature, the laws of physics, you can't go. “What laws of physics! I need to see everything with my own eyes. I need to give a report tonight to the Politburo.” It was the military way of dealing with things. They didn’t know any other way. They didn’t understand that there really is such a thing as physics. There is a chain reaction. And no orders or government resolutions can change that chain reaction. The world is built on physics, not on the ideas of Marx. But if I’d said that then? Tried to call off the May Day parade?
[Gets upset again.]
In the papers they write that the people were out in the street while we were in underground bunkers? I stood on the tribune for two hours in that sun, without a hat, without a raincoat. And on May 9, the Day of Victory, I walked with the veterans. They played the harmonica, people danced, drank. We were all part of that system. We believed! We believed in the high ideals, in victory! We’ll defeat Chernobyl! We read about the heroic battle to put down the reactor that had gotten out from under man’s control. A Russian without a high ideal? Without a great dream ? That's also scary.

But that’s what’s happening now. Everything's falling apart. No government. Stalin.
Gulag Archipelago.
They pronounced a verdict on the past, on our whole life. But think of the great films! The happy songs! Explain those to me. Why don’t we have such films anymore? And such songs? Man needs to be uplifted, inspired. He needs ideals. Only then will you have a strong nation. Shining ideals—we had those!

In the papers—on the radio and television they were yelling, Truth! Truth! At all the meetings they demanded: Truth! Well, it’s bad, it's very bad. We're all going to die! But who needs that kind of truth? When the mob tore into the convent and demanded the execution of Robespierre, were they right? You can't listen to the mob, you can't become the mob. Look around. What’s happening now? [
Silent
.] If I’m a criminal, why is my granddaughter, my little child, also sick. My daughter had her that spring, she brought her to us in Slavgorod in diapers. In a baby carriage. It was just a few weeks after the explosion at the plant. There were helicopters flying, military vehicles on the roads. My wife said: “They should go to our relatives. They need to get out of here.” I was the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party. I said absolutely not. “What will people think if I take my daughter with her baby out of here? Their children have to stay.” Those who tried to leave, to save their own skins, I'd call them into the regional committee. “Are you a Communist or not?” It was a test for people. If I’m a criminal, then why was I killing my own grandchild?
[Goes on for some time but it is impossible to understand what he’s saying.]

You asked me to tell you about the first days. In the Ukraine they had an alarm, but here in Belarus it’s all calm. It’s planting season. I didn't hide, I didn't sit in my office, I ran around the fields and meadows. People were planting and digging. Everyone forgets that before Chernobyl everyone called the atom the “peaceful worker,” everyone was proud to live in the atomic age. I don’t remember any fear of the atom.

After all, what is the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party? An ordinary person with an ordinary college diploma, most often in engineering or agronomics. Some of us had also gone to the Higher Party School. I knew as much about the atom as they’d told me during courses on civil defense. I didn’t hear a word about cesium in milk, or about strontium. We shipped milk with cesium to the milk plants. We gave meat to the meat plants. We harvested wheat. We carried out the plan. I didn't beat it out of them. No one called off the plans for us.

Here's a story about how we were then. During those first days, people felt fear, but also they were excited. I’m a person who lacks the instinct of self-preservation.
[Considers this.]
But people have a strong sense of duty. I had dozens of letters on my desk by people asking to be sent to Chernobyl. Volunteers. No matter what they write now, there was such a thing as a Soviet person, with a Soviet character. No matter what they write about it now.

Scientists came, they'd argue until they were yelling, until they were hoarse. I came up to one of them: “Are our kids playing in radioactive sand?" And he says: “They’re alarmists! Dilettantes! What do you know about radiation? I’m a nuclear physicist. I’ve seen atomic explosions. Twenty minutes later I can drive up to the epicenter in a truck, on the melted earth. So why are you all raising a panic?" I believed them. I called people into my office. “Brothers! If I run away, and you run away, what will people think of us? They’ll say the Communists are deserters." If I couldn’t convince them with words, with emotions, I did it in other ways. “Are you a patriot or not? If not, then put your Party card on the table. Throw it down!" Some did.

I began to suspect something, though. We had a contract with the Institute for Nuclear Physics to run tests on the earth samples we sent them. They took grass, and then layers of black earth and brought them back to Minsk. They ran their analyses. And then they called me: “Please organize a transport to bring your soil back from here.” “Are you kidding?” The receiver almost fell out of my hand. “It's four hundred kilometers to Minsk. Take the earth back here?” They answer: “No, we're not kidding. According to our instructions these samples are to be buried in special containers, in an underground concrete-and-metal bunker. But we get them from all over Belarus. We filled up all the space we had in a month.” Do you hear that? And we harvest and plant on this land. Our kids play on it. We're supposed to fulfill the plans for milk and meat. We make vodka out of the wheat. Then apples, pears, cherries go for juices.

The evacuation—if anyone had seen it from above, they would have thought that Word War III had begun. They evacuate one village, and then they tell the other village: your evacuation is in one week. The whole week they stack straw, mow the grass, dig in their gardens, chop wood. Just go about their lives, not understanding what's happening. And then a week later they all get taken out in military vehicles. For me there were meetings, business trips, tension, sleepless nights. So much was going on. I remember a guy standing next to the City Committee of the Party in Minsk with a sign: “Give the people iodine.” It's hot, but he’s wearing a raincoat.

You forget—people used to think nuclear power plants were our future. I spoke many times, I propagandized. I went to one nuclear plant—it was quiet, very celebratory, clean. In the corner a red flag, the slogan, “Winner of the Socialist Competition." Our future.

I’m a product of my time. I'm not a criminal.

Vladimir Ivanov, 
former First Secretary of the Stavgorod Regional Party Committee

___

What're you writing there? Who gave you permission? And taking pictures. Put that away. Put the camera away or I'll break it. How do you like that, coming here, writing things down. We live here. And you come around putting ideas in people's heads. Saying things. You’re talking about the wrong things. There's no order now! How do you like that, coming around with their microphones.