1
Ryzhkov’s eloquent speech, an unprecedented outburst of emotion from such a reserved man, did not stop the dissident clamour. Ryzhkov himself, apparently so decent and reasonable, the very best that the system could provide, was nevertheless a product of the system, a party boss, and damned as such by the new nationalists and democrats in Belorussia and the Ukraine.
Nor did Moscow News let up on its campaign to punish those responsible for Chernobyl. In October 1989, in an article entitled ‘The Big Lie’, it printed the transcript of a round-table discussion on the cover-up held by Yuri Shcherbak and Ales Adamovich, both now people’s deputies; Vladimir Kolinko, the journalist from the Novosti News Agency; Valentin Budko, the first secretary of the Narodici District Communist Party Committee; and two other people’s deputies from the affected regions, Yuri Voronezhtsev from Gomel and Alla Yaroshinskaya from Zhitomir. The latter described the anguish suffered by those still living in the contaminated zone. ‘I heard a woman addressing a meeting. She said: I come home and my little son stands near a cup of milk. On seeing me, he gets frightened that I’ll scold him because he isn’t supposed to drink the milk, so he tells me, Mummy, don’t swear at me, I’ve only dipped a finger into the milk …’
Who was responsible for this cruel state of affairs? ‘The lying started three and a half years ago,’ said Shcherbak, ‘and I believe that we still do not know the most dramatic truth about the accident.’ There must now be a thorough investigation to discover ‘who made the decision not to notify the public about [this] global catastrophe.’ Adamovich wanted to punish those responsible for ‘the crime that started in 1986, continued and is continuing … People who are guilty of these crimes, all these lies and frauds, of concealing the truth … will not be able to change the situation … To conceal their lies, they will have to continue prevaricating and lying. Therefore those who have not yet managed to retire on pension must quit their posts.’
The round-table participants named names. As the head of the commission, Boris Scherbina had signed the order that classified all information about radioactive contamination in the thirty-kilometre zone. But Vladimir Marin, now chief of the Nuclear Power Division of the Bureau of Fuel and Energy, but then responsible for the nuclear power department of the Central Committee, had known of the accident an hour or so after it had happened. There were also the physicists and scientists. ‘How could doctors sign documents hiding the truth from the people, thereby dooming them to suffering?’ asked Adamovich. ‘Our science and medicine,’ answered Shcherbak, ‘have turned into servants of the political system. This is the most horrible thing that can happen to science.’
Most clearly culpable in this respect were Professor Yuri Israel and Academician Leonid Ilyn. The latter had not only corroborated ‘the big lie’ but was also responsible for establishing the permissible dose of thirty-five rems which Velikhov had told Adamovich ‘came out of the blue’. Admittedly the World Health Organization had approved the thirty-five-rem norm after a visit to the affected area in 1989, but when the French atomic specialist Professor Francis Pellerin had been asked why he supported it, he had said that the Soviet Union lacked the resources to make it any lower.
A particular target for Shcherbak was Ilyn’s ally in Kiev, the minister of health, Anatoli Romanenko. ‘In the Ukraine today, at literally every meeting, people demand that Anatoli Romanenko, minister of public health of the Ukrainian SSR, should be called to account.’ Although in the United States at the time of both the accident and the May Day parade, he was now held responsible for the delay in alerting the people of Kiev to the dangers of radiation, and in ascribing the suffering of those living in the contaminated territories to ‘radiophobia’. He had lost the protection of the longserving party leader Vladimir Shcherbitsky, who had retired in September; the last of Brezhnev’s satraps, and a consistent opponent of both Gorbachev and glasnost, Shcherbitsky astounded everyone by surviving for so long. In November, Romanenko followed. His resignation came when the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist party met to discuss Chernobyl. The reason given was the burden imposed by his dual role as minister of health and director of the Centre of Radiation Medicine; he retained the second position, which, as a national appointment, was the gift of Ilyn, not of the local party leaders. He was replaced by his young deputy, Yuri Spizhenko, until then a supporter of his superior’s stand.
At the meeting of the Politburo, the first secretary of the Kiev Regional Committee, Grigori Revenko, who had been deeply involved in the Chernobyl crisis from the beginning, blamed both RUKH and Green World for fomenting fear among the population by spreading unscientific rumours. However, by February of the following year, Spizhenko admitted to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet that there was indeed a medical crisis in the controlled regions; the thyroid glands of fifty-eight hundred children and seven thousand adults had been adversely affected by radiation, and a large number of the two hundred thousand liquidators living in the Ukraine required careful medical attention. He blamed the past failure of his ministry in appreciating the magnitude of the crisis on the classification of the data by the ‘so-called Third Division of the USSR Ministry of Health’.
2
Although the loudest protests over Chernobyl came from the Kiev Region, only 20 per cent of the radionuclides spewed out of the fourth reactor had in fact fallen on the Ukraine. Ten per cent had settled on parts of the Russian Republic, and the remaining 70 per cent had fallen on Belorussia.
The initial docility of this Soviet republic in the aftermath of the accident sprang partly from the nature of its people and partly from its particular history. In a land largely composed of forests, meadows and swamps, its inhabitants were often dismissed by the supposedly more sophisticated Muscovites and Ukrainians as boulbash, ‘onion eaters’. Living in isolated villages, the peasant population had, even at the best of times, little contact with the outside world. When it did impinge on them, it had only brought suffering: World War I, the Revolution, the collectivization of farms, and finally World War II, in which a quarter of the population had been killed. Even before then many of the ablest Belorussians had either emigrated or had been exterminated. One of the by-products of glasnost was the discovery, in the woods at Kuropaty on the outskirts of Minsk, of the remains of three hundred thousand people shot under Stalin by the NKVD.
At the time of the accident, the general secretary of the Belorussian Communist party was N. Slyunkov. A tough, conservative industrial administrator with a penchant for grandiose projects, he combined contempt for intellectuals with a determination to keep the Kremlin off his back by demonstrating unquestioning loyalty to the Politburo.
Immediately after Chernobyl a Belorussian nuclear physicist had gone to the Central Committee in Minsk to warn of the dangers from fallout, but was only taken seriously when he started to read off measurements in the offices of the Central Committee itself. However, the levels were low; only in the provinces around Mogilev and Gomel were they high, far from the children and grandchildren of the party leaders in Minsk. Consequently, there was none of the anxiety in the Belorussian Politburo that was so apparent among the Ukrainian leaders in Kiev.
Moreover, because Minsk was a smaller city, there were fewer indigenous scientists and intellectuals to question the party line. At the Institute of Nuclear Energetics, a professor of nuclear electronics, Stanislas Shushkievicz, noticed the increase in the levels of radiation and telephoned the authorities in alarm, only to be told that everything was under control. Later his dosimetric equipment was impounded, but he secretly designed and made new instruments. In addition, students at the university were taught how to measure radiation using samples of condensed milk from the Gomel region.
Evacuation had been organized from the Belorussian sector of the thirty-kilometre zone by the area civil defence chief, headquartered in Khoyniki. Twenty-six thousand people and thirty-six thousand head of cattle were removed from contaminated land. In Minsk, a deputy chairman of the Belorussian Council of Ministers headed a committee for the elimination of the consequences of the accident. The Belorussian health minister, Nikolai Savchenko, acknowledging that initially ‘many economic leaders and citizens displayed unconcern and elementary medical incompetence,’ coordinated the efforts of the medical commission in Moscow. By June 1986, sixty thousand children had been sent to holiday camps in a belated attempt to remedy the failure to provide iodine prophylactics on time.
Despite the heavy-handed regime of General Secretary Slyunkov, some protests about inadequate care were possible. In December 1986, the Moscow magazine Argumenti i Fakty published the complaints of four women living in the towns of Bragin and Komarin to the Belorussian Council of Ministers that while local officials had evacuated their own children, no one had bothered about those of the ordinary people. The same suspicion of their local leaders was felt by workers in the October Revolution collective forty kilometres north of the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Alexei and Antonia Dashuk and Fyodor and Olga Tithonenko, all about sixty years old, were told that it was safe to stay in their homes, but they noticed that the inhabitants of the two neighbouring villages were being evacuated and that these happened to be the villages in which the collective bosses lived.
With the departure of the collective, the Dashuks and Tithonenkos were told to join the local state-owned farm at Strelichevko. The Dashuks continued to live in their own home, a spacious wooden house with five rooms, a verandah, a cellar, a barn and half a hectare of land. They were told not to go into the forest, but the state farm continued to produce food, which it sold to the state. They grew and ate their own vegetables and made their own alcohol, but the cows were gone, and they were given an allowance of thirty rubles each to buy milk imported from outside the region.
3
Despite the liquidation of the Belorussian intelligentsia by first the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis, there were some survivors whose children took advantage of glasnost to promote cautiously the interests of their country. Zyanon Poznyak, an archaeologist, the grandson of an early nationalist leader, began the excavations at Kuropaty that uncovered the remains of the Bolsheviks’ victims and, following the example of the Baltic states, founded a national front. Stanislas Shushkievicz, the scientist at the Institute of Nuclear Energetics, whose father had been sent to the gulag by Stalin for writing children’s stories in the Belorussian language, ran for the Supreme Soviet and was elected a people’s deputy. However, the man who was most outspoken in his criticism of the way his compatriots were treated after Chernobyl was not the child of an intellectual, but a man who had been born in a village in central Belorussia and had started fighting the Germans at the age of fourteen.
Even before the accident, Ales Adamovich had been a critic of nuclear power. Never considered ideologically sound, he had nonetheless established himself as a writer, critic and filmmaker, expounding a form of humanism that diverged from the party line. With the advent of glasnost, he had been among the first to insist on naming Stalin as the perpetrator of some of history’s most atrocious crimes, accusing him of deliberately organizing the famine of 1930–31 and referring to him and his henchmen as ‘butchers’. To orthodox Communists this was blasphemy, and in September 1988, outraged by the failure of the authorities to punish Adamovich for this slander, a retired public prosecutor brought a charge of defamation against him in the courts. It was dismissed.
In the same month, there was a further triumph for Adamovich when it was announced that the nuclear power station being constructed near Minsk was to be converted to fossil fuel. His reputation rose both in his native Belorussia and among his colleagues in Moscow. After the failure of Ligachev’s coup and the triumph of Yakovlev’s liberal interpretation of glasnost, it was the Cinematographers’ Union that had first swung behind the new party line, and it was by the Cinematographers’ Union, not the Belorussian people, that Adamovich was sent as a delegate to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989.
To Adamovich, the campaign against Stalinism and nuclear power were one and the same; Chernobyl and Kuropaty were both aspects of the same historical phenomenon. The cruelty that had led the Bolsheviks to liquidate Belorussian patriots or to starve the Ukrainian kulaks in the 1930s was the equivalent of their successors’ condemning the Belorussian people to a lingering death from the effects of radiation and hiding the truth of what they had done with the same lies and false propaganda. Like Shcherbak in the Ukraine, Adamovich was determined to expose those responsible for ‘the big lie’ and to remove them from power.
Just as in neighbouring Lithuania, where mass protests against the regime had begun by demonstrating against the dangers of the Ignalina nuclear power station, so in Belorussia outrage over Chernobyl was at the forefront of the democratic campaign. A movement called Chernobyl Shlyaka – Chernobyl Way – organized demonstrations in the streets of Minsk with banners advertising the levels of contamination in the different areas of the republic. In the wide boulevards of the sombre, neoclassical city, people in the milling crowd exchanged stories about illness in their region, while the democratic candidates running for election promised to fight for compensation and a Chernobyl law.
Once elected, the new deputies continued their agitation. The president of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Plotonov, expressed doubts about the safety of the thirty-five-rem threshold. He was a mathematician and admitted his ignorance of nuclear science, but the remarks of the French scientist Francis Pellerin seemed to suggest that the Soviet government had left people in hazardous areas simply to save money. Of course there were experts in Belorussia. One, Professor Konoplia, like Grodzinski in Kiev arguing that no dose of radiation could be considered safe, became a national hero.
Another, Professor Vladimir Matuchin, a Russian who directed the Institute of Radiological Medicine in Minsk, supported the government’s point of view and, together with ninety-one other scientists on the State Commission for Radiation Safety, signed a letter supporting the thirty-five-rem control limit and the measures that had been taken for the protection of the population. Some months later, visiting Ilyn at the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow, Matuchin broke down in tears. He had been harassed and threatened by anonymous callers who said that if he continued to publish data in defence of the government, his family would be killed. Victor Knijnikov, the head of the laboratory at the Institute of Biophysics who had laid down the criteria for acceptable levels of contamination in food, was summoned to Minsk to give evidence at a session of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet along with two of his colleagues, one of whom had prepared a paper describing how no notable changes in the health of children in the contaminated zones had been found. But after the threatening speeches of the Belorussian deputies, the paper’s author declined to take the floor, leaving it to Knijnikov, a Jew, to face the charge of genocide.
4
The campaign against the government’s experts on radiation was not confined to Minsk. In Leningrad, the director of the Institute of Radiological Hygiene, Professor P. V. Ramzayev, one of the foremost experts in Russia on the question, wrote an article that undertook an objective analysis of the radioactive danger in the affected zones. After its publication, he was told by an anonymous caller that if he continued he would end up with a hole in his head. Meeting Ilyn in Vienna, he said he would write no more on the subject of Chernobyl. ‘Leonid Andreevich,’ he said, ‘I have a wife and children. I must think of them.’
In Kiev, the director of the Institute of General and Communal Hygiene, Academician Mikhail Shandala, had in the wake of the accident led a team into the contaminated zone to do exhaustive research on the nutrition of the inhabitants and had found it dangerously deficient. However, when a proposal was put forward by Belorussian politicians to resettle up to a million people from land he considered safe, he had added his name to the ninety-one others from the State Commission for Radiation Safety.
After Romanenko’s removal as minister of health in the Ukraine, Shandala was quietly advised that he too should go. He not only had signed the letter but had given interviews ‘simplifying a complex situation’. ‘You are a clever man, Professor,’ he was told, ‘but the tide of public opinion is running against you.’ Afraid not just for his professional position but for the safety of himself and his wife, Shandala moved to Moscow, where he was nominated for the post of director of the Institute of Preventive Toxicology.
To the democrats and nationalists of RUKH and Green World, this was all to the good. Shandala, Matuchin, Ramzayev, Israel, Ilyn, Romanenko and Knijnikov were the heirs of Beria’s evil empire, which would only end when they fell from power. Their standing as scientists was no protection. Ilyn and Israel were threatened with prosecution, and now lived in fear of arrest and imprisonment. To have been in any way associated with the military-industrial complex; to have worked for an institute that was part of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building or the Third Division of the Ministry of Health or to have held notional rank in the KGB meant that they had collaborated with the crimes of the Stalinist state.
Just as the scientific issues were complex and open to different interpretations, so were the motives of many of those who joined battle in the aftermath of Chernobyl. On one side were the Soviet patriots – people like Ilyn, Romanenko and Guskova, who, unlike Alexandrov and Dollezhal, had no memories of life before the Revolution. Communism was the religion of Russia, and to love one’s country was to uphold its faith. With direct lines to the Politburo, there was no divergence in outlook between these men and their leaders; to Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, as well, Mother Russia was the Soviet state.
Behind these commanders came the troops, the scientists like Knijnikov and the doctors like Baranov. Inevitably, given the nature of their expertise, they had been employed by the defensive and coercive organs of the state, one which itself had a military structure and tradition going back long before the Bolshevik Revolution. To the democrats, nationalists and Greens, the subordination of the scientists to their superiors and the subordination of their superiors to the ideological imperatives of the state were proof enough that the scientists could not be trusted, and the wretched populace of the controlled zones was easily persuaded to agree.
However, the legacy of Stalin and Beria had also affected their victims. There was the simmering loathing of those like Professor Andrei Vorobyov, Lubov Kovalevskaya and Volodomyr Shovkovshytny, whose parents or grandparents had suffered from the Bolshevik terror, and also the self-disgust of those who in order to get a good job or to see their books published had gone along with the party line. Among the doctors who most vigorously condemned Ilyn was one who had watched without protest when dissidents were committed as lunatics in the institute where he worked. There had not been many such inmates – few had dared to dissent before glasnost – but when it had become apparent in 1988 that criticism would not only go unpunished but was actually encouraged and might well be a good qualification for the future, many seized upon the issue of Chernobyl to establish their democratic credentials.
In this time of rapid historical transition, there were also men and women who bestrode the two worlds. At the time of the accident at Chernobyl, Yuri Shcherbak, the leader of Green World in the Ukraine, had been a figure of sufficient standing in the party to be a member of the Writers’ Union. He had even formed part of the entourage surrounding Armand Hammer and Dr Gale on their visit to Kiev and Chernobyl in the summer of 1986. Although Gale’s later account of his two visits made no mention of him – the American named Romanenko and Shandala as his hosts – Shcherbak nonetheless recorded several conversations with this by now illustrious American, which he later included in his book.
Still referring to Lenin as ‘Our Leader’, Shcherbak nonetheless revealed a perplexed respect for the American doctor in his clogs and blazer, and a certain awe at the luxurious fittings of Hammer’s private Boeing. He also made a public confession of his cowardice in the pre-glasnost era:
For long years before April 1986 I had been pursued by a feeling of guilt … because I, a native of Kiev, a writer, a doctor, had passed by on the other side of the tragedy of my native town … which had occurred at the beginning of the sixties: the damp sand and water accumulated in Babi Yar, which the authorities wanted to make into a recreation area, broke through a dike and poured into Kurenivka, causing … destruction and … death.… And why did I remain silent? I could have collected facts, the testimony of witnesses, I could have found out and named those guilty of this calamity.… But I didn’t.
Chernobyl offered Shcherbak the chance to make amends.
5
In contrast to Shcherbak was Volodomyr Shovkovshytny, the president of the Chernobyl Union, who before the accident had been a man of no standing at all. Only moderately talented as a poet and unexceptional as a nuclear technician, he would undoubtedly have remained, like the Ukraine, in undistinguished obscurity had not Chernobyl reignited his national pride. Raised in a house with a shrine not to Marx or Christ but to his people’s patriotic poet, Taras Shevchenko, it was not so much radiophobia as Russophobia that led Shovkovshytny to champion Chernobyl’s victims. The ‘Czars and princelings’ who had been the objects of Shevchenko’s loathing were now, for him, the party bosses and Soviet officials who had been indifferent at the time of Chernobyl to the fate of the ordinary Ukrainian people:
So fly, my fledgling falcons, fly
To far Ukraine, my lads—
At least, if there you hardship find,
’Twon’t be in foreign lands.
Good-hearted folks will rally ’round
And they won’t let you die.
‘Good-hearted folks will rally ’round / and they won’t let you die’ was the principle behind the Chernobyl Union, which from its inception in 1987 sought both to help and to represent the interests of those who had suffered as a result of the accident. In 1990, a second organization, Chernobyl Help, was set up in Moscow by Robert Tilles, the engineer who had constructed the ‘biological wall’ in front of the ruined reactor. By means of telethons and other charitable drives, millions of rubles were raised to help the victims. Appeals were made abroad for medicine, as well as for help for the children of Chernobyl. Groups of children were sent on holidays abroad, to western Europe, Australia, and Cuba. Haunting pictures of children suffering from leukaemia brought a generous response, particularly from West Germany; the Bavarian Red Cross sent large consignments of medical aid, which was then distributed by the Chernobyl Union.
Both these charities had their critics. Some, like Professor Vorobyov, argued that when children had suffered from radiation, it hardly helped them to increase their dose by sending them on long flights to sunny countries. Others felt that a taste of life in the West only lowered the children’s morale when they returned to their villages in the Ukraine or Belorussia. The Chernobyl Union complained that Chernobyl Help hoarded its funds, keeping ninety million rubles on deposit in the bank; some of the former operators from the Chernobyl power station felt that some of those who worked for the Chernobyl Union had had nothing to do with Chernobyl and used the charity principally to arrange trips abroad for themselves and their friends.
However, the aim of the Chernobyl Union was not simply to solicit help from abroad or voluntary contributions from the Soviet people. At a meeting in the new town of Slavutich, built to replace Pripyat, Shovkovshytny described the law he and Yavorivsky had introduced in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, which would compensate all those who had suffered. The ‘safe’ dose would be reduced from thirty-five rems to seven. Women who had lived in Pripyat would be permitted to retire on full pension at the age of forty-five, men at the age of fifty. Special passes would be issued to all the liquidators, who would be entitled to special rights: free travel on public transport, going to the front of any queues, and extra holidays up to eighty days. There would be financial compensation for all invalids among the liquidators, and the money would be paid from the Union budget. Moscow was responsible, so Moscow must pay; if it did not, the Ukraine would withhold the six or seven billion rubles that it contributed to the Union budget.
Mixed with these promises of concrete benefits were lofty thoughts on the human condition. ‘Remember,’ Shovkovshytny told the workers at the power station, ‘that our role on this planet is to create beauty and kindness so that the apocalypse will not happen. People must live and work in harmony together, and imitate God almighty. Christianity taught “What is mine is yours.” Communism taught “What is yours is mine.” If we can’t keep all the commandments, we can at least keep one: love one another.’
Then this preacher-politician took up his guitar and entertained his audience with some songs of his own composition.
6
The Chernobyl Law was passed, not just in the Ukraine but in Belorussia and the Russian Federation: however, its implementation had to await funds from the central government in Moscow. There had been no such delay in the appointment of a Chernobyl Commission, headed by Yavorivsky, to frame the Chernobyl Law, which employed a permanent staff in spacious offices in the middle of Kiev. Shovkovshytny served on the commission, as did Grodzinski. Later the Supreme Soviet established a Ministry for Chernobyl with Georgi Gotovchits as the minister. The Russians and Belorussians did likewise, so there were three ministers for Chernobyl, each with his staff of civil servants.
Ordinary people were not slow to appreciate that the radioactive cloud might have a silver lining. As soon as it became apparent that a liquidator’s card would entitle its holder to certain benefits, there was a dramatic increase in the number of those who claimed to have worked in the thirty-kilometre zone. Those who were unable to claim the card envied the privileges given those who did. In Kiev there had already been considerable resentment that the evacuees from Pripyat and the thirty-kilometre zone had been allocated flats in the city ahead of those who had been waiting for many years. Now it was claimed that others had suffered from severe radioactive contamination – in the Urals, for example, after the accidents at Mayak. Nor was radiation the only form of pollution that had damaged the health of the population. Chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers had all seeped into the food chain, often causing more tangible harm than that claimed for radiation.
Even those who were in sympathy with the victims of Chernobyl asked whether the billions that were to be given in compensation would not be better spent on improving the health and nutrition of the population in general. The same applied to the vast cost of resettling up to a million people from areas where the levels of caesium and strontium would give them a lifetime dose of more than seven rems. In many cases the hazards of chemical pollution in the areas to which they were sent were greater than the dangers from radiation. What was the chemical equivalent of a rem?
Equally unquantifiable was the effect of the stress caused to those who were removed from their homes. Whereas actuaries in the West estimate that a person’s life expectancy is reduced by a year each time he or she moves house, Knijnikov estimated that the obligatory evacuation of a Ukrainian or Belorussian peasant from his ancestral village was the equivalent of a dose of more than one hundred rems.
However, the charges of genocide, once made, could not be withdrawn; and the fears, once they had arisen, had to be addressed. In Belorussia, Alexei and Antonia Dashuk, the sixty-year-old couple who had been left in their village forty kilometres north of Chernobyl, were finally moved from their large wooden house with its verandah, barn and cellar in 1989. Their dog and cat were left behind to run wild in the woods. They went first to Dubrovica, fifty kilometres further north, where they lived with Alexei’s sister, who had earlier been evacuated from a village nearer to Chernobyl. There Antonia developed trouble with her liver and Alexei had a stroke and spent six weeks in the hospital.
They would have liked to stay in Dubrovica, where at least they could sit on a bench in front of the house and talk to passersby, but under the new, more stringent definitions enshrined in the Chernobyl Law, it too was considered unsafe for human habitation. They asked to be sent to another village, but the houses belonging to the collective were reserved for the working population. They might have bought a house, but it would have cost them twenty-five thousand rubles, and they had been given only fifteen thousand in compensation.
In 1990 the Dashuks were allocated a one-room flat in the suburbs of Minsk, with a certificate to establish their status:
Alexei Mikhailovich Dashuk is from the settlement Rudiya of the Honicke region of the Gomel region, which is part of the zone of continuous control and zone of limited consumption of local foodstuffs as well as local plots of land, and this is to certify that they are evacuated according to the obligatory resettlement law to Minsk … in accordance with the decree No. 60b of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia and the Council of Ministers on 21 March 1990.
The block was inhabited mostly by people who worked in the city. When it became known that the Dashuks had been evacuated from the contaminated zone, their neighbours regarded them with suspicion. When Antonia made friendly overtures to the woman next door, she shied away, saying apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got children.’ Despite their insistence that everything they had brought from their homes had been checked for contamination, the people who lived around them were afraid to enter their flat.
7
South of the thirty-kilometre zone, in the towns of Narodici and Polesskoe, the communities disintegrated as people waited to be moved from their homes. By the autumn of 1991, families with young children had already left, but in Polesskoe twelve thousand remained to be resettled. Eight hundred children remained in the school, which the year before had had over a thousand pupils. Asked at random, the children said they felt fine, but the local doctors reported that everyone’s blood was affected by the radiation, leading to a decreased resistance to disease.
There were some changes for the better. The church had been reopened and was now used for baptism and marriages, even by the local party leaders, as it had been before the Revolution. There was also the extra allowance to buy clean food brought in from outside, but there was never enough; the shops were always empty, so people ate what they grew on their own plots of land. Radiation might be unhealthy, but so was starvation.
Worse than the material conditions, however, was the demoralization that had taken place among the inhabitants of Narodici and Polesskoe, who felt that they had been abandoned to their fate. In the autumn of 1991, a team of doctors from the Moscow Centre for Intellectual and Humane Technologies went to the towns and villages in the contaminated zone. Headed by Dr Adolf Kharash and including Dr Vladimir Lupandin, the group visited not just Narodici and Polesskoe but also Bryansk, Novozybkov and Vetka in Belorussia.
The conditions they found were appalling. There was some evidence of an increase of specific ailments that could be ascribed to radiation – seven children in Narodici with cataracts, for example – but far more serious was the moral degradation, which they ascribed to stress. People had become grasping and materialistic, indifferent to the fate of their neighbours. With only four thousand remaining from a population of 6,500 inhabitants, there seemed no future whatsoever. The extra allowance paid for the purchase of clean food was spent entirely on drink – on vodka when they could get it, on wine when they could not. Wine cost 3.5 rubles a bottle, vodka ten rubles, but thanks to the ‘coffin money’, everyone could afford it. When the woman who ran the only liquor store received a consignment of Vodka, she had to call on the militia to keep order.
Dr Lupandin estimated that most of the inhabitants were now alcoholics. It was so widely believed that vodka washed out radionuclides that even the children drank. However, despite their anxiety about radiation, they continued to grow and eat their own food. Nor were the people deterred from having children. There had been no cases of congenital deformities, nor had any more malformed animals been born. The women continued to get pregnant and have babies, and when there were miscarriages, they were as likely to have been caused by alcoholism as by radiation. One of the best ways to help these people, Dr Lupandin decided, was to build cafés serving soft drinks.
One of the principal reasons for the populace’s demoralization was their sense of grievance against the local leaders, who they felt were exploiting the situation to their own advantage. There was a brisk black market in liquidators’ cards and places at the top of the waiting list for new homes. Obliged by law to leave their old homes, ordinary families had been given insufficient compensation to buy new ones; only the party bosses received twice the real value of their homes. The medical supplies that came into the zone were resold to doctors from the big cities. Televisions and refrigerators, sent to Narodici to improve morale, were sequestered by the bosses and allocated to their friends. Everyone knew what was going on but could do nothing about it; anyone who protested would be charged by the militia with disorderly conduct.
All this might have been tolerable if the people had felt that they were going to have a better life, but the conditions where they were resettled were dire. The people of Narodici were allocated 950 flats in different towns, some as far away as Odessa, and 150 houses in a new settlement called Brosilovka, sixty kilometres south of Narodici. For the unproductive old people, who were given the flats, it meant losing contact with their families and their rural way of life. Like the Dashuks in Belorussia, they had been used to a community where everyone was known to everyone else, and where they could sit out on their verandahs and watch the world go by. The prospect of incarceration in a tower block was often worse than remaining in an area of radioactive contamination.
For the working population, the move to Brosilovka seemed little better. The land they were given to farm was swampy, infertile and five kilometres from the village. The school and kindergarten were not much closer. They complained that the new houses had been built in a hurry, with substandard furnishings and crumbling concrete floors. The ancillary services were bad; the only shop was a small trailer that sold barley coffee, pickles, tea and meat at ten rubles a jar. The bread came from Zhitomir, fifty kilometres away, and milk was delivered every day, but other items were in short supply. It was hard to get grain for their chickens. There was no wood for their stoves; some brought it from Narodici, even though it was contaminated; there was coal but it gave off a filthy smoke. They had been promised gas to heat their homes, but it had only been connected to the houses belonging to the party leaders. The latter also had wooden floors to their houses and could get hold of furniture, whereas some of the children of the state-farm workers had to sleep on camp beds. There was no doctor because the house allocated for one had been given by a party boss to his chauffeur.
Listening to this long lament from the former inhabitants of Narodici, the team from the Moscow Centre for Intellectual and Humane Technologies was taken aback. Gentle men, who might have stepped out of a story by Chekhov, they had carefully recorded the complaints of a crowd of angry peasant women; the men were either absent or silent. Retreating to the home (with wooden floor and colour television) of the former secretary of the District Party Committee, they had to match the evident dissatisfaction of these victims with the relatively sumptuous conditions in which they lived. Even with concrete floors, the new houses were lavish by Soviet standards. To a Moscow academic who could never hope for anything better than a small flat, it seemed enviable to have a detached house with two storeys, five rooms, a bathroom and a garden. To complain that the central heating was fuelled by coal rather than the gas they had been promised seemed to be looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The conclusion reached by Dr Kharash was that the inhabitants’ distress had little to do with their living conditions but came from the trauma of the resettlement. In Narodici their main anxiety had been the danger from radiation; now that this danger had been removed, they were left with the misery of having been uprooted. Although the women admitted that their children seemed healthier now and that their husbands had stopped drinking since going back to work, they still felt that no one cared about their suffering, and that they had been forgotten by the outside world.
Back at Narodici, a new wave of resettlement had started. On a bluff of land outside a beautiful wooden cottage with views of damp green meadows, slow-flowing rivulets and copses of birch trees, a woman and her crippled son waited to be picked up. Her husband had already left with the furniture for a village two hundred kilometres away in the Zhitomir region. She wept as she waited; her home was so beautiful that she would have liked to stay. No one liked the new village, and the compensation they had been offered was only a third of the cost of a new house. ‘Thirteen thousand rubles? What can one buy for thirteen thousand rubles? Even new furniture cannot be bought for that kind of money.’ If they had been paid proper compensation, she would have gone to live near her daughter; as it was, they had to go where they were sent and surrender any right to return. ‘They’ll put us in that rat hole and leave us to rot.’ There were more tears. ‘Don’t cry, Mama,’ said her crippled son. ‘Please don’t cry.’
Fifty kilometres away, well within the thirty-kilometre zone, Ivan and Irina Avramenko had never left their home. After hiding from the militia in the weeks following the accident, they had come out into the open and continued to live as before in the years that followed. Seven of their neighbours had done likewise, and within a couple of years another fifty people had returned to the village. In nearby Ilincy, there were as many as four hundred people. They were largely self-sufficient, living on their own cucumbers and potatoes, with mushrooms from the forests. Every now and then, officials came to try to persuade them to leave, but they countered by asking if there was any place in the whole Soviet Union that was unpolluted.
‘If you really want to help us,’ said Irina to visitors from Kiev, ‘reconnect the electricity, organize deliveries of tobacco and bread, and of sugar to make vodka.’ When a people’s deputy told them that the new Chernobyl Law would pay them compensation, they replied that in their experience people’s deputies always cheated and told lies. ‘Soviet power is built on lies,’ shouted old Irina with a toothless cackle. ‘What have we known in our lives? Only war and famine. Isn’t life just a vale of tears, as the Pope says? What do we need, anyway, but half a hectare of land while we’re living and two square metres when we’re dead? Do we worry about our children? Of course we worry about our children, for deserting the villages where their families have lived for hundreds of years. And if it’s really so dangerous, why are party officials returning to their dachas? And building new roads to reach them? Why are they felling trees and taking them from the zone?’ A further toothless cackle; then, Ivan in boots, Irina in slippers, they shuffled away.
‘It’s strange,’ a French journalist was heard to remark. ‘For the first time since I’ve come to the Soviet Union, I’ve met people who seem relaxed and happy.’