Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (26 page)

In the civil defense instructions we had then, you were supposed to carry out an iodine prophylaxis for the entire population if there was the threat of a nuclear accident or nuclear attack. That was in the event of a
threat.
Here we had three thousand micro-roentgen per hour. But they’re worried about their authority, not about the people. It was a country of authority, not people. The State always came first, and the value of a human life was zero. Because they might have found ways—without any announcements, without any panic. They could simply have introduced iodine into the freshwater reservoirs, or added it to the milk. The city had 700 kilograms of iodine concentrate for that very purpose—but it just stayed where it was. People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom. Everyone waited for the order, for the call, but no one did anything himself.

I carried a dosimeter in my briefcase. Why? Because they’d

stopped letting me in to see the important people, they were sick of me. So I’d take my dosimeter along and put it up to the thyroids of the secretaries or the personal chauffeurs sitting in the reception rooms. They’d get scared, and sometimes that would help, they’d let me through. And then people would say to me: “Professor, why are you going around scaring everyone? Do you think you're the only one worried about the Belarussian people? And, anyway, people have to die of something, whether it’s smoking, or an auto accident, or suicide.” They laughed at the Ukrainians. They were on their knees at the Kremlin asking for more money, medicine, radiation-measuring equipment (there wasn’t enough). Meanwhile our man, Slyunkov, had taken fifteen minutes to lay out the situation. “Everything’s fine. We’ll handle it ourselves.” They praised him: ‘That’s how it's done, our Belarussian brothers!” How many lives did that bit of praise cost?

I have information indicating that the bosses were taking iodine. When my colleagues at the Institute gave them checkups, their thyroids were clean. Without iodine that’s impossible. And they quietly got their kids out of there, too, just in case. And when they went into the area themselves they had gas masks and special robes—the very things everyone else lacked. And it’s no secret that they had a special herd near Minsk—every cow had a number and was supervised. They had special lands, special seedbeds, special oversight. And the most disgusting thing—no one's ever answered for it.

So they stopped receiving me in their offices. I bombarded them with letters instead. Official reports. I sent around maps, figures, to the entire chain of command. Four folders with 250 pages in each, filled with facts, just facts. I made two copies of everything, just in case—one was in my office at the Institute, the other I hid at home. My wife hid it. Why did I make the copies? That’s the sort of country we live in. Now, I always locked up my office myself, but I came back from one trip, the folders were gone. But I grew up in the Ukraine, my grandfathers were Cossacks, I have a Cossack character. I kept writing. I kept speaking out. You need to save people! They need to be evacuated immediately! We kept making trips out there. Our Institute was the first to put together a map of the contaminated areas. The whole south was red.

This is already history—the history of a crime.

They took away all the Institute's radiation-measuring equipment. They just confiscated it, without any explanations. I began receiving threatening phone calls at home. “Quit scaring people, Professor. You'll end up in a bad place. Want to know how bad? We can tell you all about it.” There was pressure on scientists at the Institute, scare tactics.

I wrote to Moscow.

After that, Platonov, the president of the Academy of Sciences, called me in. “The Belarussian people will remember you someday, you've done a lot for them, but you shouldn't have written to Moscow. That was very bad. They're demanding that I relieve you of your post. Why did you write? Don't you understand who you're going up against?"

Well, I have maps and figures. What do they have? They can put me in a mental hospital. They threatened to. And they could make sure I had a car accident—they warned me about that, also. They could drag me to court for anti-Soviet propaganda. Or for a box of nails missing from the Institute's inventory.

So they dragged me to court.

And they got what they wanted. I had a heart attack. [.
Silent
.]

I wrote everything down. It's all in the folder. It’s facts, only facts.

We’re checking the kids in the villages, the boys and girls. They have fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand micro-roentgen. More than three thousand. These girls—they can’t give birth to anyone. They have genetic mutations. The tractor is plowing. I ask the Party worker who’s with us: “Does the tractor driver at least wear a gas mask?"

“No.”

“What, you didn’t get them?”

“Oh, we got plenty! We have enough to last until the year 2000. We just don’t give them out, otherwise there’d be a panic. Everyone would run off, they'd leave.”

“How can you do that?”

“Easy for you to say, Professor. If you lose your job, you’ll find another one. Where am I going to go?”

What power! This limitless power that one person could have over another. This isn’t a trick or lie anymore, it’s just a war against the innocent.

Like when we're driving along the Pripyat. People have set up tents, they’re camping out with their families. They’re swimming, tanning. They don’t know that for several weeks now they’ve been swimming and tanning underneath a nuclear cloud. Talking to them was strictly forbidden. But I see children, and I go over and start explaining. They don’t believe me. “How come the radio and television haven’t said anything?” My escort—someone from the local Party office was always with us—he doesn't say anything. I can read his thoughts on his face: Should he report this or not? But at the same time he feels for these people! He’s a normal guy, after all. But I don't know what’s going to win out when we get back. Will he report it or not? Everyone made his own choice.
[Extended silence.
]

What do we do with this truth now? How do we handle it?

If i t blows up again, the same thing will happen again. We’re still Stalin’s country. We’re still Stalin’s people.

Vasily Nesterenko, former director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences

___

It was 1986—what were we like, then? How did this technological version of the end of the world find us? We were the local intelligentsia, we had our own circle. We lived our own lives, staying far away from everything around us. It was the form our protest took. We had our own rules: we didn’t read
Pravda,
but the magazine
Ogonyok
went from hand to hand. They had just loosened the reins a little, and we were drinking it all in. We read Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, went to each other’s houses, had endless talks in the kitchen. We wanted something more from life. What? Somewhere there were movie actors— Catherine Deneuve—wearing berets. We wanted freedom. Some people from our circle fell apart, drank themselves away, some people made careers for themselves, joined the Party. No one thought this regime could crumble. And if that’s how it was, we thought, if it was going to last forever, then to hell with everyone. We'll just live here in our own little world.

Chernobyl happened, and at first we had the same kind of reaction. What’s it to us? Let the authorities worry about it. That’s their problem—Chernobyl. And it’s far away. We didn’t even look on the map. We didn’t even need to know the truth, at that point.

But when they put labels on the milk that said, “For children," and “For adults"—that was a different story. That was a bit closer to home. All right, I’m not a member of the Party, but I still live here. And we became afraid. “Why are the radish leaves this year so much like beet leaves?” You turned on the television, they were saying, “Don’t listen to the provocations of the West!” and that’s when you knew for sure.

And the May Day parade? No one forced us to go—no one forced me to go there. We all had a choice and we failed to make it. I don’t remember a more crowded, cheerful May Day parade. Everyone was worried, they wanted to become part of the herd—to be with others. People wanted to curse someone, the authorities, the government, the Communists. Now I think back, looking for the break. Where was it? But it was before that. We didn’t even want to know the truth. We just wanted to know if we should eat the radishes.

I was an engineer at the Khimvolokno factory. There was a group of East German specialists there at the time, putting in new equipment. I saw how other people, from another culture, behaved. When they learned about the accident, they immediately demanded medical attention, dosimeters, and a controlled food supply. They listened to German radio and knew what to do. Of course, they were denied all their requests. So they immediately packed their bags and got ready to leave. Buy us tickets! Send us home! If you can’t keep us safe, we’re leaving. They protested, sent telegrams to their government. They were fighting for their wives, their kids, they had come here with their families, they were fighting for their lives! And us? How did we behave? Oh, those Germans, they’re all so nicely taken care of, they’re all so arrogant—they’re hysterical! They’re cowards! They’re measuring the radiation in the borscht, in the ground meat. What a joke! Now, our men, they’re real men. Real Russian men. Desperate men. They’re fighting the reactor. They’re not worried about their lives. They get up on that melting roof with their bare hands, in their canvas gloves (we’d already seen this on television). And our kids go with their flags to the demonstrations. As do the war veterans, the old guard.
[Thinks.]
But that’s also a form of barbarism, the absence of fear for oneself. We always say “we," and never “I." “We’ll show them Soviet heroism," “we'll show them what the Soviet character is made of." We'll show the whole world! But this is me, this is I. I don't want to die. I'm afraid.

It's interesting to watch oneself from here, watch one’s feelings. How did they develop and change? I pay more attention to the world around me. After Chernobyl, that's a natural reaction. We're beginning to learn to say “1.” I don't want to die!
I’m
afraid.

That great empire crumbled and fell apart. First, Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When it fell apart, we found ourselves all alone. I'm afraid to say it, but we love Chernobyl. It’s become the meaning of our lives. The meaning of our suffering. Like a war. The world found out about our existence after Chernobyl. It was our window to Europe. We’re its victims, but also its priests. I’m afraid to say it, but there it is.

Now it's my work. I go there, and look. In the Zone the people still live in fear in their crumbling cottages. They want Communism again. At all the elections they vote for the firm hand, they dream of the Stalin era, the military era. And they live there in a military situation: police posts, people in uniform, a pass system, rationing, and bureaucrats distributing the humanitarian aid. It says on the boxes in German and Russian: “Cannot be sold or exchanged." But it’s sold and exchanged right next door, in every little kiosk.

And it's like a game, like a show. I'm with a caravan of humanitarian aid and some foreigners who've brought it, whether in the name of Christ or something else. And outside, in the puddles and the mud in their coats and mittens is my tribe. In their cheap boots. “We don’t need anything,” their eyes seem to be saying, “it’s all going to get stolen anyway.” But also the wish to grab a bit of something, a box or crate, something from abroad. We know where all the old ladies live by now. And suddenly I have this outrageous, disgusting wish. ‘‘I'll show you something!” I say. “You'll never see this in Africa! You won't see it anywhere. 200 curie, 300 curie.” I've noticed how the old ladies have changed, too—some of them are real actresses. They know their monologues by heart, and they cry in all the right spots. When the first foreigners came, the grandmas wouldn’t say anything, they'd just stand there crying. Now they know how to talk. Maybe they’ll get some extra gum for the kids, or a box of clothes. And this is right next to a profound philosophy—their relationship with death, with time. It's not for some gum and German chocolate that they refuse to leave these peasant huts they've been living in their whole lives.

On the way back, the sun is setting, I say, “Look at how beautiful this land is!” The sun is illuminating the forest and the fields, bidding us farewell. “Yes,” one of the Germans who speaks Russian answers, “it’s pretty, but it's contaminated.” He has a dosimeter in his hand. And then I understand that the sunset is only for me. This is my land. I'm the one who lives here.

Natalya Roslova, head of the Mogilev Women's Committee for the Children of Chernobyl

___

Alyosha Belskiy, 9; Anya Bog;ush, 10; Natasha Dvoretskaya, 16; Lena Zhudro, 15; Yura Zhuk, 15; Olya Zvonak, 10; Snezhana

Zinevich, 16; Ira Kudryacheva, 14; Ylya Kasko, 11; Vanya Kovarov, 12; Vadim Karsnosolnyshko, 9; Vasya Mikulich, 15; Anton Nashivankin, 14; Marat Tatartsev, 16; Yulia Taraskina, 15; Katya Shevchuk, 15; Boris Shkiirmankov, 16.

There was a black cloud, and hard rain. The puddles were yellow and green, like someone had poured paint into them. They said it was dust from the flowers. Grandma made us stay in the cellar. She got down on her knees and prayed. And she taught us, too. “Pray! It’s the end of the world. It’s God’s punishment for our sins.” My brother was eight and I was six. We started remembering our sins. He broke the glass can with the raspberry jam, and I didn't tell my mom that I got my new dress caught on a fence and it ripped. I hid it in the closet.

*

Soldiers came for us in cars. I thought the war had started. They were saying these things: “deactivation,” “isotopes.” One soldier was chasing after a cat. The dosimeter was working on the cat like an automatic: click, click. A boy and a girl were chasing the cat, too. The boy was all right, but the girl kept crying, “I won’t give him up!” She was yelling: “Run away, run little girl!" But the soldier had a big plastic bag.