There are areas within the Semipalatinsk district where 85 per cent of the population have severe anaemia. Out of 412,000 inhabitants in the entire district, 175,000 suffer from it.
From 1949 to 1989, 469 nuclear explosions were carried out in the Semipalatinsk nuclear Polygon. Seventy-three were on the ground and eighty-seven in the atmosphere, the rest underground.
‘Now there’s no doubt at all that the authorities were treating the local population like laboratory rats’, says Professor Murat Urazalin, deputy vice-chancellor of the Medical Academy. ‘Unfortunately doctors took part in these experiments too. They researched the results of the explosions, the effect of radiation on the human organism. 1.2 million people were exposed to radiation in the Semipalatinsk and Karaganda districts in Kazakhstan, between which the Polygon was located, and also hundreds of kilometres from here, in the Altai Krai in Russia. After one of the big explosions there was tremendous radioactive fallout there.’
However, the population of the Semipalatinsk district were the most badly harmed, suffering from diseases of the cardiovascular system, blood, blood-producing organs, nervous system, endocrine, sensory organs, lowered immunity and cancer.
In eleven out of fourteen regions in the district, 70 per cent of people were proved to have chromosomal aberrations. In women of the second generation to be exposed to radiation, there were twice as many incidents of gynaecological, pregnancy and birth abnormalities. The mortality rate for infants in the district is three times higher than in the rest of the country – 64.6 for every 1000 births (in Poland it is 13.6). One child in fifty is born mentally handicapped.
One person in ten in the district has received a one-off dose of radiation exceeding 100 roentgens – which is the admissible norm, but for an entire lifetime.
In 1993 a law was passed in Kazakhstan concerning those injured in the course of nuclear research. These people were supposed to receive compensation, but there wasn’t enough money. The victims were going to be given a pension, but the authorities backtracked, and it ended with some minor tax concessions for cancer sufferers. However, they still had to prove that the tumour was not ‘natural’ but a result of the Polygon.
Professor Urazalin is one of those injured himself, because he was living in the city during the experiments.
‘From 1959 to 1963 I was a student at the local medical academy. In that period they were doing the final nuclear tests here in the atmosphere. I was doing practical studies at a clinic in the city centre. Before the explosions we were warned to take the patients outside into the courtyard, and everyone came out of their houses too. This was just in case the buildings collapsed on their heads. They told us that apart from causing a slight earthquake the tests were completely safe. Some of the experiments were done fifty kilometres from the city.’
THE FIRST CIRCLE – THE STUDY AIDS STORE
Professor Urazalin leads me down some long corridors to the study aids store.
‘Do you know how happy we were about the bomb?’ he says on the way. ‘We needed it. America was threatening the Soviet Union, but even we medics didn’t realize what the effects of the experiments were, because the research and statistics were all inaccessible.’
We’re there. He opens a door, lets me in and goes back to his consulting room. He says he doesn’t like this place, and that here I’ll find those ‘effects’.
They’re standing in a corner by the window in several dozen large jars filled with formalin. They’re labelled anencephaly, exencephaly, hydrocephaly, osteochondrodisplasia, sirenomelia . . .
Exencephaly is lying on its stomach. On the back of its head there’s a huge growth, like a second torso, but more in the shape of a brain.
Anancephaly has huge eyes like a frog’s. It has no neck at all. It looks as if it is shrugging in surprise.
The only bit of osteochodrondisplasia that looks vaguely human is its head. Otherwise it’s like a large walrus abdomen ending in a human foot.
Sirenomelia has its eyes shut. It looks as if it has no bones at all. It is suspended in the jar by tapes.
Iniencephaly is just a lump that doesn’t look like anything.
‘As a student I wanted to specialize in obstetrics’, recalls Professor Urazalin, when I go back to him, ‘but when in my practical studies I came across births of this kind, I quickly dropped the idea. But I still had to complete the practical studies. Even though I was a committed communist, at every birth I prayed for it to be a normal human being. I’m a doctor, dammit, and it upsets me to this day. So I became a dermatologist.’
The professor shows me a map of radioactive contamination in the district. One of the mightiest clouds came out of the Polygon on 12 August 1953 after the first thermonuclear explosion conducted by the Russians. The explosion had a force of 400 kilotons (twenty times more than the one at Hiroshima).
THE SECOND CIRCLE – KEEPERS OF THE PEACE
‘We lay on the ground, facing the epicentre of the explosion, which was thirty-five kilometres away’, wrote Academician Andrei Sakharov in his memoirs, creator of the Soviet thermonuclear bomb, in those days known as the hydrogen bomb. ‘Then the agonizing wait began. A loudspeaker next to us gave the countdown: ten minutes left. Five minutes. Two minutes.’
We put on our protective goggles. Sixty seconds, fifty, forty, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. At that moment something flashed on the horizon.
Then a violently growing white sphere appeared – its brightness engulfed the entire line of the horizon.
I took off my goggles, and though dazzled by the change from dark to light, I managed to see the expanding, vast cloud . . . After a few minutes the cloud went black-and-blue, ominously filling half the horizon. I could see that the mountain wind was gradually carrying it south towards the mountains, steppes and Kazakh settlements. Half an hour later the cloud had disappeared from view.
Out of the shelter came Vyacheslav Alexandrovich Malyshev, deputy to Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Malenkov, who observed the explosion and in the name of the Soviet government hugged and kissed Sakharov ‘for his huge contribution to preserving peace’.
Then they changed into protective overalls and went to look at the effects of the explosion.
‘Suddenly the cars braked abruptly’, recalls Sakharov. ‘There was an eagle lying on the ground with burned wings. It was trying to take off, but it couldn’t. It was staring with cloudy, blinded eyes. One of the officers got out of the car and finished off the unfortunate bird with a powerful kick.’
It was 1953. The Americans called the test Joe-4, after Stalin, who had died five months earlier, and because it was the fourth Soviet nuclear test in a row.
Sakharov wrote his memoirs a good thirty years later, and he did it from memory, because the KGB had stolen his notes. But he made a serious mistake. The cloud did not go south. In this part of Kazakhstan, for twenty-seven days a month on average the wind blows from west to east. The cloud went straight towards Semipalatinsk, then a city of a 250,000 people.
There was a big problem with the cloud in general. Quite simply, no-one had thought about it earlier. Only two days before the test did someone finally slap their forehead and say out loud that a radioactive mark would appear on the earth’s surface at the site of the explosion. It was clear that with the anticipated explosion (400 kilotons, which is equivalent to 400 million kilograms of TNT), the contamination would go far beyond the borders of the Polygon, which was half the size of Belgium.
The scientists who had gone there for the test gathered at their hotel and conferred. Marshal Vasilevsky, deputy to Minister of Defence Zhukov and military commander for the experiment, was furious.
‘What are you making such a fuss about, comrade scientists?’ he shouted. ‘All military manoeuvres involve a few victims.’
As Sakharov noted in his memoirs:We assumed that a dose of 100 roentgens sometimes leads to serious paralysis in children and weak persons, while 600 causes the death of half of all hea
lthy adults (that was the belief at the time). So we regarded a dose of 200 roentgens as the limit. A decision was taken to evacuate people from the leeward side of the sector, which would get a dose exceeding 200 roentgens.
Nowadays we know that a dose of either 100 or 200 roentgens means radiation sickness for adults, and for children 200 can mean death. The genetic effects are unequivocal.
1955 came. Thanks to the efforts of the NKVD and its agents, the Soviet Union had caught up with the United States in nuclear weapons production. Regular military manoeuvres were being held using nuclear warheads, which foreign correspondents were invited to attend.
On 22 November 1955 Andrei Sakharov was once again at the testing site at the Semipalatinsk nuclear Polygon. The first Soviet triphase warhead was going to be tested. The anticipated force of the explosion was 1.6 megatons.
The experiment was a complete success. The glass blew out of the windows up to 100 kilometres from the explosion site. At a meat processing plant in Semipalatinsk the windowpanes shattered into some sausage meat. Ten tons of sausages went to hell.
That evening the entire scientific, military and political cream who had come for the experiment gathered for a banquet at Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin’s invitation.
The marshal was the commander-in-chief of missile forces. He asked Sakharov, as the designer of the bomb and guest of honour at the reception, to raise the first toast.
‘I propose a toast’, said the academician, raising his glass of neat vodka, ‘to the wish that our products will always explode with the same result, but only over testing grounds, never over cities.’
All round the table a deathly silence fell. Everyone froze on the spot.
‘That’s not your concern’, said Marshal Nedelin and raised his glass.
‘I drank my vodka’, recalls Sakharov, ‘and kept my mouth shut for the rest of the evening. Many years passed, and to this day I still feel as if I’d been lashed with a whip. The marshal had decided to defy my unacceptable pacifism.We scientists had constructed the most terrible weapon in the history of mankind, but its use would remain out of our control. They would make the decisions.’
Yet the academician was awarded another medal, his third Gold Star of the Hero of Socialist Labour, so by law he was due a bronze statue in the capital as a gift from the Soviet authorities. He got another Lenin Prize (the previous one was a Stalin Prize), worth half a million roubles (a fairytale fortune equal to his similarly fairytale, twenty-year earnings). He was also given a house outside Moscow, a personal bodyguard consisting of two KGB colonels and frequent invitations to sessions of the Politburo. He was a Soviet god. The Soviets had just invaded Budapest.
‘In the 1950s I thought nuclear tests in the atmosphere were a crime against humanity’, he wrote, ‘no different from secretly releasing disease-carrying micro-organisms into the water pipes.’
In 1961, after the most powerful explosion on record was detonated in Novaya Zemlya, Sakharov started insisting that the authorities must stop nuclear weapons tests. A year later he proposed the idea of an international moratorium on tests on land, water and in the air. The authorities rejected this plan and Sakharov fell into disfavour, though in 1963 the superpowers did sign an agreement to this effect.
At the Polygon near Semipalatinsk the era of underground explosions began. There were 309 of them.
THE THIRD CIRCLE – GOLD FEVER
Daniar Zaskalykov lives on the edge of the Polygon in the village of Sarzhal, which in Kazakh means Yellow Mane. Like everyone there, he was originally given a home by the collective farm. He was a shepherd. In its final years the collective farm hardly paid any money, yet the meat, milk, flour and coal paid in lieu of wages were enough to keep the family going somehow, and whenever guests came, Daniar butchered the first sheep to hand, and told the foreman wolves had taken it.
The tragedy began when the collective farm was closed down. The management divided it up in a criminal way. Each worker got sixty-three hectares of land (there is plenty of that around here) and something else as well. Daniar was given sixty sheep, but they made deductions for fuel used while mowing his field. So instead of sixty he got ten, but he sold them when his son went to business school in Semipalatinsk. A year’s study there costs 300 dollars. Then one of their cows died, they ate the other one, and finally gave away the land because they had nothing to pay the land tax. They aren’t yet eating boiled grass like their neighbours, but they’re going hungry.
‘When they first established the collective farms we were starving, and now they’ve closed them we’re dying of hunger too’, says Daniar.
In 1932 the Bolsheviks took away all the nomads’ animals and told them to cultivate the land. Of course no-one knew how to do that, so most of the people died of starvation.
Now Daniar’s family is eating up the remains of what they have managed to rip out of the mountain.
The mountain is called Degelen. It isn’t all that large, 1085 metres above sea level, but it rises suddenly from the dead flat steppe, so you can see it from anywhere in the village, even though it’s fifty kilometres away. Degelen is at the centre of the Polygon, and is the place where, starting from 1961, 209 nuclear explosions of a force of up to 140 kilotons were detonated.
In 1989, when the military carried out the final test, peace and quiet reigned, until all of a sudden, five years later, someone found treasure hidden in the mountain. Great seams of . . . copper wire. Everyone living in the neighbouring villages immediately set off for Degelen.There was real gold fever in the air, as people left their homes, families and flocks to go and dig copper wire out of the mountain. The dealers would pay a dollar for one kilo of copper – big money. The locals had to compete with people from Semipalatinsk, and the individual copper hunters soon lost out to organizations. Once organized groups, companies and mafiosi had appeared and driven them out, the shepherds got together and formed brigades, just as they used to at the collective farm.
Like most of the men from his village, Daniar went to get wire too. In a group of five, they had earned almost 6000 dollars. Today he’s coming with me to show me the tunnels cut into the mountainside, where the nuclear tests were carried out. It was from these tunnels that they pulled the wire.
Our driver is called Kulanysh Makashov. He is a man who did extremely well for himself in the Soviet era, and who now belongs to the village aristocracy. Naturally, he drives a Volga. He was the bookkeeper, in other words Number Three at the local collective farm.
First we go to get fuel. Of course there isn’t any, so we go to the little office at the petrol station, pay a bribe and are handed a canister. Then we drive to the shop for vodka.We buy one-and-a-half litres of pure wheat vodka.
‘That’s against the malady’, says Daniar.
‘Against radiation?’ I ask.
‘Yes.We’re used to this.’
‘So do you have to drink it before or after?’
‘After coming out. And you have to wash your hands. We all did that.We lugged whole caseloads of vodka to the mountain. Otherwise it’d be bad for us.’
However, we haven’t gone ten kilometres before they open the first bottle. We have to drink to our friendship. First Kulanysh, then Daniar, and finally me.
‘Careful’, warns Daniar, ‘my lip’s cracked.’
There’s a trace of blood on the glass. We’re all drinking out of the same one. I wipe it on my trousers and take a swig.
I’m familiar with this Soviet faith in vodka – that it cures everything, any infection at all, even radiation sickness. Here half the alcoholics drink ‘for health reasons’, and the other half ‘for spiritual pain’.
‘People go into the tunnels and they die’, says Daniar, wiping his bleeding mouth on his sleeve. ‘Every few days someone disappears. Recently four people went in and never came back. Some others went after them to rescue them, but three of those men died in the tunnel and a fourth one has something wrong with his head, so they sent him to the madhouse, and two weeks ag
o the fifth one cut his own throat, though they were only in that passage for an hour. Hell knows what was in there: gas, or maybe exhaust fumes, because they were clearing water out of the corridor with a combustion pump. But I think it was the malady, because the one who killed himself had all his hair fall out, his eyebrows, eyelashes, and even the hair on his privates, because when I dressed him for the coffin I saw it.’
‘So you drink this vodka out of fear, not for your health?’
‘How can you fail to drink it, when they say anyone who’s seen the Polygon won’t die a natural death?’ says the collective-farm worker.
‘Everyone in Sarzhal has seen the Polygon, because it starts right outside the village’, I say.
‘Yes, and who dies a normal death in our place? The usual thing for us is to suffer from cancer.’
We drink up. Daniar leaves a bloody stain on the edge of the glass again.
From the steppe we drive down into a mountain valley. At close quarters it turns out that Degelen is not just a single hill, but a small chain of mountains, about thirty-five kilometres long, similar to Poland’s Western Tatras, but without any forest cover. Once all the valleys were inhabited, but when the experiments began, the people were resettled.Yet this place is a Kazakh spiritual Mecca. Somewhere round here Abay, the national bard, was born and lived. He must have died somewhere near here too, but it’s is hard to point out the exact place, because like all Kazakhs he was a nomad. However, this valley is where he bedded down for the winter with his flock, because there’s good grass here and water in the valley. Nowadays people don’t bring their flocks here because it’s too far, but they still come to mow the hay.
White Fever Page 13
