Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (25 page)

That's right, I'm defending the Soviet government! Our government! The people's government! Under the Soviets we were strong, everyone was afraid of us. The whole world was watching us! Some were scared shitless, some were jealous. Fuck! And now what? What do we have now under democracy? They send us Snickers bars and some old margarine, old jeans, like we’re savages who just climbed out of the trees. The palm trees. We had a great empire! And now how do you like that, coming around here. A great empire! Fuck!

I'm not a drunk, I'm a Communist! They were for us, for the simple people. Don't feed me fairy tales about democracy and freedom. Fuck! This free person dies, there's nothing to bury him with. Old lady died not long ago. She was lonely, no children. She lay in her house for two days, in her old house shirt, under her icons. They couldn’t afford a coffin. She was a hard worker, a Stakhanovite. We refused to go out to the fields for two days. We had meetings. Fuck! We met together until the chairman of the collective farm came out and promised that every person who died on the collective farm got a free coffin, and then a calf or a pig and two cases of vodka for the wake. Under the democrats—two cases of vodka—free! Half a bottle is medicine, for us, from the radiation, but a whole bottle a man is a party.

Why aren’t you writing this down? What I’m saying? You only write down what you want to hear. Giving people ideas. Saying things. You need political capital, is that it? Stuff your pockets with dollars? We live here, we survive here. No one’s guilty! Show me the guilty ones! I’m for the Communists. They'll come back and they’ll find the guilty ones. Fuck! Coming around here, writing things down.

No name given

___

I have a lot of material, I’ve been collecting it now for seven years—newspaper clippings, my own comments. I have numbers. I’ll give you all of it. I’ll never leave this subject now, but I can’t write it myself. I can fight—organize demonstrations, pickets, get medicine, visit sick kids—but I can’t write about it. You should, though. I just have so many feelings, I’ll never be able to deal with them, they'll paralyze me. Chernobyl already has its own obsessives, its own writers. But I don’t want to become one of the people who exploits this subject.

But if I were to write honestly?
[Thinks.]
That warm April rain. Seven years now I’ve thought about that rain. The raindrops rolled up like quicksilver. They say that radiation is colorless, but the puddles that day were green and bright yellow. My neighbor told me in a whisper that Radio Free Europe had reported an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I didn't pay her any mind. I was absolutely certain that if anything serious happened, they'd tell us. They have all kinds of special equipment—special warning signals, bomb shelters—they'll warn us. We were sure of it!

We’d all taken civil defense courses, I’d even taught them. But that evening another neighbor brought me some powders. A relative had given them to her and explained how to take them, he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Physics, but he made her promise to keep quiet. As quiet as a fish! As a rock! He was especially worried about talking on the phone.

My nephew was living with me then, he was little. And me? I still didn't believe it. I don't think any of us drank those powders. We were very trusting—not just the older generation, but the younger one, too.

I'm remembering those first impressions, those first rumors, and I go from this time to that, from this condition to that one. It's difficult, from here—as a writer, I've thought about this, how it's as if there are two people inside me, the pre-Chernobyl one and the post-Chernobyl one. And it's very hard now to recall with any certainty what that “pre-” me was like. My vision has changed since then.

I started going to the Zone from the very first days. I remember stopping in some village, and I was shocked by how silent it was. No birds, nothing. You're walking down the street and there's—nothing. Silence. I mean, all right, the houses are empty, the people have all left, but all around everything’s just shut down, there's not a single bird.

We got to the village of Chudyany—they have 149 curies. Then the village of Malinovka—59 curies. The people were absorbing doses that were a hundred times those of soldiers who patrol areas where nuclear testing takes place. Nuclear testing grounds. A thousand times! The dosimeter is shaking, it's gone to its limit, but the collective farm offices have posted signs from the regional radiologists saying that it's all right to eat salad: lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers—all of it. Everything’s growing and everyone’s eating. What do those radiologists say now? And the regional Party secretaries? How do they justify themselves?

In the villages we met a lot of drunk people. They were wandering around on benders, even the women, especially the milkmaids.

In one village we visited a kindergarten. The kids were running around, playing in the sandbox. The director told us they got new sand every month. It was brought in from somewhere. You can probably guess where from. The kids are all sad. We make jokes, they don’t smile. Their teacher says, “Don’t even try. Our kids don’t smile. And when they’re sleeping they cry." We met a woman on the street who’d just given birth. “Who let you give birth here?" I said. “It’s 59 curies outside." “The doctor-radiologist came. She said I shouldn’t dry the baby clothes outside." They tried to convince people to stay. Even when they evacuated a village, they still brought people back in to do the farming, harvest the potatoes.

What do they say now, the secretaries of the regional committees? How do they justify it? Whose fault do they say it is?

I’ve kept a lot of instructions—top-secret instructions, I’ll give them all to you, you need to write an honest book. There are instructions for what to do with contaminated chickens. You were to wear protective gear just as you would if handling any radioactive materials: rubber gloves and rubber robes and boots. If there are a certain number of curies, you need to boil the chicken in salt water, pour the water down the toilet, and use the meat for pate or salami. If there’s more curie than that, then you put it into bone flour, for livestock feed. That’s how they fulfilled the plans for meat. They were sold cheaply from the contaminated areas—into clean areas. The drivers taking them told me the calves were strange, they had fur down to the ground, and they were so hungry they'd eat anything—rags, paper. They were easy to feed. They'd sell them to the collective farm, but if the drivers wanted one, they could take it for themselves, into their own farm. This was criminal! Criminal!

We met a small truck on the road. It was going so slowly, like it was driving to a funeral and there was a body in back. We stopped the car, I thought the driver was drunk, and there was a young guy at the wheel. “Are you all right?” I said. “Yes, I’m just carrying contaminated earth.” In that heat! With all the dust! “Are you crazy? You still have to get married, raise kids!" “Where else am I going to get fifty rubles for a single trip?” Fifty rubles back then could get you a nice suit. And people talked more about the rubles than the radiation. They got these tiny bonuses. Or tiny anyway compared with the value of a human life.

It was funny and tragic at the same time.

Irina Kiseleva, journalist

___

I'm not a literary person, I'm a physicist, so I'm going to give you the facts, only facts.

Someone's eventually going to have to answer for Chernobyl. The time will come when they’ll have to answer for it, just like for 1937. It might be in fifty years, everyone might be old, they might be dead. They're criminals!
[Quiet.]
We need to leave facts behind us. They’ll need them.

On that day, April 26, I was in Moscow on business. That's where I learned about the accident.

I called Nikolai Slyunkov, the general secretary of the Central Committee Belarussian Communist Party, in Minsk. I called once, twice, three times, but they wouldn’t connect me. I reached his assistant, he knew me well.

‘‘I'm calling from Moscow. Get me Slyunkov, I have information he needs to hear right away. Emergency information."

I’m calling over a government line, but they're already blocking things. As soon as you start talking about the accident, the line goes dead. So they're listening, obviously! I hope it's clear who's listening—the appropriate agency. The government within the government. And this is despite the fact that I’m calling the First Secretaryofthe Central Committee. And me? I’m the director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences. Professor, member-correspondent of the Academy. But even I was blocked.

It took me about two hours to finally reach Slyunkov. I tell him: “It’s a serious accident. According to my calculations"— and I'd had a chance by then to talk with some people in Moscow and figure some things out—“the radioactive cloud is moving toward us, toward Belarus. We need to immediately perform an iodine prophylaxis of the population and evacuate everyone near the station. No man or animal should be within 100 kilometers of the place."

“I’ve already received reports," says Slyunkov. “There was a fire, but they’ve put it out."

I can't hold it in. “That's a lie! It’s a blatant lie! Any physicist will tell you that graphite burns at something like five tons per hour. Think of how long it's going to burn!"

I get on the first train to Minsk. I don't sleep the whole night there. In the morning I'm home. I measure my son’s thyroid— that was the ideal dosimeter then—it's at 180 micro-roentgen per hour. He needed potassium iodine. This was ordinary iodine. A child needed two to three drops in half a glass of solvent, an adult needed three to four. The reactor burned for ten days, and this should have been done for ten days. But no one listened to us! No one listened to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did! We shouldn’t forget the background to this, what we were like then, what we were like ten years ago. The KGB was working, making secret searches. “Western voices” were being shut out. There were a thousand taboos, Party and military secrets. And in addition everyone was raised to think that the peaceful Soviet atom was as safe as peat or coal. We were people chained by fear and prejudice. We had the superstition of our faith.

But, all right, the facts. That next day, April 27, I decided to go to the Gomel region at the border with the Ukraine. I went to the major towns—Bragin, Khoyniki, Narovlya, they’re all just twenty, thirty kilometers from the station. I needed more information, I took all the instruments to measure the background radiation. The background was this: in Bragin, 30,000 micro-roentgen per hour; in Narovlya: 28,000. But people are out in the fields sowing, mowing, getting ready for Easter. They're coloring eggs, baking Easter cakes. They say, What radiation? What’s that? We haven’t received any orders. The only thing we’re getting from above is: How is the harvest, what’s the pace now? They look at me like I'm crazy. “What do you mean, Professor?” Roentgen, micro-roentgen—this is the language of someone from another planet.

So we come back to Minsk. Everyone’s out on the streets, people are selling pies, ice cream, sandwiches, pastries. And overhead there’s a radioactive cloud.

On April 29—I remember everything exactly, by the dates—at 8 A.M. I was already sitting in Slyunkov’s reception area. I’m trying to get in, and trying. They don’t let me in. I sit there until half past five. At half past five, a famous poet walks out of Siyunkov’s office. I know him. He says to me, “Comrade Slyunkov and I discussed Belarussian culture.”

I explode: “There won’t be any Belarussian culture, there won’t be anyone to read your books, if we don’t evacuate everyone from Chernobyl right away! If we don’t save them!”

“What do you mean? They’ve already put it out.”

I finally get in to see Slyunkov. I tell him what I saw the day before. We have to save these people! In the Ukraine—I’d called there—they’re already evacuating.

“Why are your men” (from the Institute) “running around town with their dosimeters, scaring everyone? I’ve already consulted with Moscow, with Professor [
Leonid
] Ilyin, chairman of the Soviet Radiological Protection Board. He says everything’s normal. And there’s a Government commission at the station, and the prosecutor’s office is there. We’ve thrown the army, all our military equipment, into the breach.”

We already had thousands of tons of cesium, iodine, lead, circonium, cadmium, berillium, borium, an unknown amount of plutonium (the uranium-graphite reactors of the Chernobyl variety also produced weapons-grade plutonium, for nuclear bombs)—450 types of radionuclides in all. It was the equivalent of 350 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. They needed to talk about physics, about the laws of physics, but instead they talked about enemies, about looking for enemies.

Sooner or later, someone will have to answer for this. “You’re going to say that you’re a tractor specialist,” I said to Slyunkov, he'd been a director of a tractor factory, “and that you didn't understand what radiation could do, but I’m a physicist, I know what the consequences are." But from his point of view, what was this? Some professor, a bunch of physicists, were going to tell the Central Committee what to do? No, they weren't a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience. The principle of their lives, the one thing the Party machine had taught them, was never to stick their necks out. Better to keep everyone happy. Slyunkov was just then being called to Moscow for a promotion. He was so close! I’d bet there'd been a call from the Kremlin, right from Gorbachev, saying, you know, I hope you Belarussians can keep from starting a panic, the West is already making all kinds of noises. And of course if you didn’t please your higher-ups, you didn’t get that promotion, that trip abroad, that dacha. If we were still a closed system, behind the Iron Curtain, people would still be living next to the station. They’d have covered it up! Remember— Kyshtym Semipalatinsk
[a city in the Southern Urals near the Mayak weapons facility, contaminated and largely evacuated after a nuclear waste tank exploded in
1957 ] —we’re still Stalin’s country, you know.