Today, the town of Pripyat has been abandoned, but the radioactivity expelled during the ten days following the reactor explosion was dispersed by wind and rain over an immense area, and even 200 kilometres from the town, people are living with levels of radioactivity higher than those we measured in the fairground at Pripyat, which were themselves 36 times higher than normal background radiation.
4. THE CAPTIVES OF POLISKE
In the five years following the accident, WHO never came to Poliske, the town in which Alla Tipiakova was born, where she taught and where she died. WHO did nothing to protect her children. Yet the constitution of this United Nations’ agency stipulates that it must satisfy the following obligations:
• to act as the directing and co-ordinating authority on international health work;
• to furnish appropriate technical assistance and, in emergencies, necessary aid upon the request or acceptance of Governments;
• to provide information, counsel and assistance in the field of health;
• to assist in developing an informed public opinion among all peoples on matters of health.
Today, Poliske has been wiped off the map, abandoned, invaded by brambles and overrun with wild animals. But in 1990, when we were filming, there were still 13,000 people living there. Radioactive dust had been deposited there in irregular patches measuring anything between 5 to 40, 50 and even 300 curies per square kilometre. Like Pripyat, this town should have been evacuated immediately, as Nesterenko had asked. But that would have spelled the end of an agricultural economy and a thriving small scale industry. In particular it would have led to the demise of the local managerial class. The reaction of the authorities was speedy and energetic: between 1986 and 1990, more than 40 million roubles (at that time 0.60 roubles was the equivalent of 1 dollar) was invested in the area to encourage the population to stay. New houses were built, new schools, a swimming pool, a water supply was established, gas and heating in all the flats, salaries doubled…
Eight years later Professor Nesterenko gave me his opinion.
V. Nesterenko—I consider it a crime. The level of radiation permitted for professionals is ten times higher than the level permitted for members of the public and that is not because we are in better health. We were selected because we had a better resistance to radiation and we had been trained in radio-protection. Ordinary members of the public do not know how to protect themselves. Just to give you an example, during my visits to Chernobyl, I happened to see a man on a tractor, happily working his radioactive soil, rolling a cigarette and smoking it without washing his hands.
Today in Minsk there are 31,000 people who were evacuated from the contaminated areas. They are on a medical register and undergo an annual examination. Among this group, cancer of the digestive system and of the lungs is six times higher than the other inhabitants of the town and thyroid cancer is 33.6 times higher. Why? Because they weren’t evacuated until 1992–1993. Up until then they were living in the contaminated zone, working their fields and filling their lungs with radionuclides. Today they are paying the price.
Over a number of years, the Soviet authorities, sanctioned by the complicit UN agencies, transformed Poliske into a radioactive trap. In 1990 agricultural production did not stop; quite the reverse. Despite very high levels of radioactivity in the fields, the village executive committee took pride in maintaining production at the same level as before the disaster. A board of honour was erected in the main square of the village honouring and celebrating the year’s achievements. Accompanied by Rostislav Zatkhei, a doctor and a militant in the Ukrainian Green Party, we visited Vladimirovka, a nearby village that had been evacuated. We found a copy of an old newspaper The Flag of Communism, lying around in the rubble of an abandoned isba (wood cabin). It was dated 18th June 1986. Zatkhei had this to say about it.
R. Zatkhei—Reading this article you can see that the fate of the people was the last thing the authorities were concerned about. The first secretary of the Party, Primachenko, said that all efforts should be concentrated on hay making, on preparing tools for the harvest, and on getting the shops ready to stock all the produce. And all this in 1986, when everything round here was crackling with unusually high radioactivity. The produce was harvested, of course, and in all likelihood, was mixed with uncontaminated produce from clean areas. This mixture is still being distributed all over the Soviet Union. The low dose radiation in these products is exposing all of us to a creeping genocide, a slow death and increasing illness for future generations.
Poliske is quite a large settlement, the district centre, and in order that it remain the administrative centre, it was decided at the time, not to evacuate it, unlike all the villages in the surrounding area. They were little villages, whereas Poliske was preserved as an administrative centre. And despite official approval of the policy of evacuation, the same attitudes remain. Even today, if people from Poliske want to leave and move to a cleaner area, they no longer receive any legal protection. They have no status. They have nothing. Whereas the people who stay receive a great many benefits. They have twice the normal salary, free food, special clothing, they can buy consumer items, when most people have nothing: furniture, television sets, etc. They have a lot of privileges, for instance, they can buy a car without going on a waiting list.
Q.—Why did you come here in 1987, into this contaminated zone?
—I studied medicine at Lvov in the West of Ukraine, which was not contaminated. In 1987, after university, we were assigned posts by the state. Initially I was sent to the Odessa province. But I felt, probably instinctively, that the situation here was serious, because there was no information in the press about any problems, so I asked to come to this area. I was assigned to work here, in Poliske. I wanted to come to the Kiev region, where the tragedy had taken place. It’s hard to explain. It was an instinct. I thought I could be useful. A human impulse—to rise to the challenge. But to begin with, when I arrived, it was really hard to get involved because we didn’t know anything. What levels of radioactivity were there? All the sources of information, and the medical establishment repeated “Everything is normal, everything is OK, there’s no problem”. And I couldn’t argue back, we had no data, no measuring instruments. But when we managed to find a dosimeter and made our first measurements, and they were very high, unbelievable and when various changes in the children’s behaviour and in their health began to appear, then we sounded the alert. It was at that point that we were able to step in and to press more and more strongly for action to be taken.
—What were your political views before you began working here? Were you a communist?
—More anti-communist, because my parents had been arrested. My father and my mother died very young in the camps and that really scarred me. My sister and I were adopted by some people who had taken part in the big political struggles in the years 1939–1940, in Western Ukraine.
—What difficulties have you encountered in your struggle today? Do people make it hard for you?
—When my wife was still living here with our child, she often got threatening phone calls. They told her I would be attacked on my way home. They broke the door down, cut off the telephone, things like that. But that’s not the most significant thing. You can deal with that, we’d already experienced it at Lvov. The biggest difficulty, in my opinion, is the fact that people are too slow to realise the gravity of the situation.
—What illnesses are you coming across?
—A general deterioration in health, in children as well as adults. Serious nose bleeds that are very difficult to stop. One in two children has clouding of the crystalline lens in the eye. This leads directly to cataracts and blindness in children. Then there’s leukaemia. When we met in August, I talked to you about a little girl who is no longer with us. She died, Irina Soubota. Diagnosis: leukaemia. Many different changes appeared in the blood. Mono-cellular formations, very large cells: new components in th
e blood and a variety of pathological changes that then lead to changes in the whole organism. An increase in the size of the liver and other similar symptoms.
—Are you able to get results for all these tests despite the censorship?
—I’ve got to say that at the local level, there are doctors who have had the courage to tell the truth right from the start. They did everything possible to tell people the truth. But it was very difficult at the time because of the pressure on them from the Party machine. But at a local level doctors have done their job well.
I started to have health problems after my wife and I visited the heavily contaminated areas. Using a dosimeter we looked for heavily contaminated areas. We visited evacuated villages. I spent a lot of time in these places because we were also studying architecture; we wanted to get a picture of the whole area. I probably accumulated a large quantity of radionuclides during this time. So I get tired, I get haemorrhages: three days ago I had a tooth out and it bled for three days non-stop. I had to take medicines to stop the bleeding. So there we are. My symptoms aren’t acute. It’s there inside me, the poison, just waiting to get me.
At the end of this interview Rostislav Zatkhei took us to Tarassy, a small village close by that has not been evacuated.
R. Zatkhei—Immediately after the accident, they decided to build a new school for the village, a nursery school, a bit further away, public baths, a laundry and other buildings. The same thing happened in many of the other villages in the district and in Poliske itself. It was ridiculous. An enormous new school for 190 children when there were no more than about fifty children of school age in this village. The nursery school was built for 50 children when there are only 12 children of nursery age in the area. When we asked someone to explain the decision, the local authorities said that we should be “looking to the future”, getting a new perspective on things. I suppose they were looking to the future when all that building work went on in Poliske, a second school completely rebuilt, although the decision had already been taken to evacuate the town: there will be no more children here; no one will ever live here again. And yet, the work carries on. They are planning to rebuild the stadium, with three indoor swimming pools. They carry on endlessly investing money simply in order to persuade people that there is no danger, and that you can live here. “Look. We’re investing money, we are competent at what we do, we’re building all this for you, the people of the town, to make life better for you!” It would have been better to build all this in an uncontaminated zone, where people will move to, put all that money into a place where children can go to nursery school and school safely, can swim in the swimming pool, and make use of these stadiums.
There is a travel agent that organises trips to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for well fed Westerners in need of a thrill, while Europe is investing 2 million euros in a programme that recommends “radiological quality” in areas that need “rehabilitation”, ignoring completely the health catastrophe that is hitting the local population. The thesis of this European programme, which refuses to administer a pectin-based prophylactic for children, is that if people obey the experts, they can live a good life in these territories. 8
8 CORE Programme, Part Four, Chapter III.
5. THE NURSERY SCHOOL IN POLISKE
In the documentary Nous de Chernobyl (We of Chernobyl) that we made in 1990, there is a scene showing a group of rather unhappy children, slowly crossing the concrete yard of the nursery towards the exit. The voice-over describes how “for four years, the children here walked across an invisible nuclear furnace, as radioactive as the ghost town of Pripyat. It was only in 1989, after the first political elections in the USSR, that the local councillors reacted to the parents’ protests. But instead of closing the school, they sent in decontamination teams that had to recover the yard three times with a thick layer of concrete, without succeeding in eliminating the radiation. Even today the level of radioactivity is 17 times higher than natural background levels”.
Here are the testimonies of three teachers at the school:
—They wore masks while they worked. On the roof and in the yard, they wore masks, while the children were playing there.
—They re-did the roof ten times, replaced the fencing, they covered the ground several times with asphalt, but in any case it never went away and we are still here.
—There are places here that are so radioactive nobody should be allowed to enter. Here, for example, behind the shed…..where the children play. Over there, near the oak tree, the level of radioactivity is terrifying. And the children play there too…Where can they go?
—In summer, it’s full of dust, sand. The children breathe it all in. They got us to take up all the carpets in the school because they are contaminated. The children have to sit on the bare floor. We took all the fluffy toys away because they absorb radioactivity. But how can we live like this? The children need to run around, to play. We’re treating them like prisoners. We’re not living any more, we are prisoners.
—They often have nose bleeds. They all get headaches. Pains in their armpits. Their eyesight is deteriorating. They complain about being tired all the time, of having no energy. They are often sick. They have countless problems.
Chapter IV
THREE ENCOUNTERS
1. SVETLANA SAVRASOVA
Before leaving for Chernobyl in November 1990, I asked Irina Ilovaiskaya-Alberti, who was director at the time of Pensée Russe (Russian Thought), a newspaper set up during the first wave of Russian emigration to Paris, and first published in 1947, to recommend someone who could be useful in my investigation. She suggested that I meet Svetlana Savrasova, a young journalist from Belarus that she liked and respected. We arranged a meeting over the telephone and arrived at Svetlana’s apartment in Minsk, where she had brought together a group of people wanting to share in her venture: an association of 25 young people that had only just come together, at her instigation, to accompany children when they travelled abroad for their decontamination.
Q.—Did you all know each other before you formed this association together?
S. Savrasova.—No, none of us knew each other. My husband was the only one I knew.
Q.—How long have you been meeting together?
S. Savrasova—For four months, since July 1990.
Q.—How did it come about?
S. Savrasova—We all came here through a chance event.
Q.—Came where?
Tolik—Here, at Sveta’s house. It was Sveta who began the action. She is a journalist. One of her articles, which was turned down by her own newspaper, was published in Poland. The Polish readers reacted very warmly.
S. Savrasova—When my editor asked me to write an article about the children of Chernobyl, I wanted to avoid turning it into something sensationalist about the new monsters that could appear on Earth. I went to a school in Khoiniki, met the children and asked them to write me a letter as if they were writing to an old friend. We chatted for quite a long time and they trusted me. I found these letters very moving. In my article I emphasised the seriousness with which the children had set about the task. You could see from their letters how deeply they had thought about the subject. While they were writing, I noticed one girl wiping away a tear, another who was searching for her handkerchief, a boy in the front row whose chin was trembling. “They are reliving the evacuation”, explained the head teacher, as she also took her handkerchief from her bag. “It was a week after the accident. The coaches were waiting in the square. They separated children from their parents. They were about 12. Crying, screaming… They had to drag the mothers from the coaches by force. They were banging on the windows, holding on to the wheels…”
One boy of 16 wrote a letter that I can’t forget: “I am 16. I live in the Poliske region. This is my country. I don’t want to leave here for any other place in the world. I know that because of the 3 roentgens that I received on 30th
May I will soon die. But I have discovered the wonderful world of literature. I want to stay in this world, right to the end of my days. It’s my Mum’s death that hurt me the most. She died a year after. I felt hurt by the doctors who looked after her and did not seem to care… On 30th May, the whole school went out into the fields to harvest the potatoes. Among the potatoes we found families of rats with dead babies. We wondered what could have happened. Why had the baby rats died? Overhead the clouds were passing”. At the end, he wrote, “I forgive all the adults responsible for this tragedy. I forgive the technicians at the power station, because like me, they are dying of leukaemia”. For me this letter is like a Lord’s Prayer, something I can’t turn my back on. You can ignore a newspaper article, but not this boy.
Q.—So, that is what started it all off?
S. Savrasova—Yes. I think the Polish people reacted, not to my work as a journalist, but to these letters written by adolescents. Because it is impossible to express pain the way a child can. No adult finds such simple words. It is pure living emotion.
Q.—Is that when they began to invite children to come and stay with them?
S. Savrasova—One day I came back to the house, opened the letter box and found seven letters. Polish stamps, written in Polish, this was all new to me. I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t even know the article had been published. I got Larissa, who works as an interpreter here, to translate the letters. I found out they needed people urgently to accompany groups of children. These were among the very first. And we came, Gianna and I. We had to leave that same day. It was a terribly difficult journey. I remember coming back in tears. But you couldn’t refuse... Something had happened inside me. It’s impossible to describe it in words.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 4
