In March, Borissevich was removed from his post as president. He said to me: “You’ll be next”. I was seriously ill in hospital; I had lost a lot of weight. It was my heart, of course, and my stomach. I was called in… An official from the Central Committee came in and said: “Your absence at the institute is causing problems; you need to go to Moscow, sort out some financial questions. You need to take an exeat and fly to Moscow”. In our legal system, there is this rule. As long as I was in hospital, they could not sack me or make any administrative changes. I came out of hospital, I went to the meeting—the academician Platonov was there, he had been made president of the Academy. Up till then, he used to tell me: “The people of Belarus will always remember what you did. You warned us of the danger; it’s just a pity that you wrote to Moscow. You should never wash your dirty linen in public”. I told him that I had written to the Central Committee here and had never had any response. That’s why I had written to them. So I went to the meeting and they removed me from my post “for failure to complete experimental work on the Pamir nuclear reactor on time”. I didn’t finish on time, because we were conducting very detailed tests, but they wanted to hurry things along. Secondly, for having created, as they expressed it, a bad atmosphere among the staff. Because some of the staff had begun to write to various authorities, including Moscow, when they saw how unjustly I was being criticised. For example, Devoino and others wrote to Moscow to defend me. There weren’t many, most of them betrayed me actually…This is how they saw the situation: my institute was the most dynamic in the Academy and they thought that whoever took over as director would keep all the funding and the accommodation. But these things were not there for my pleasure. Behind it all was the project, and it was the project that got all the money so that we could pay the staff good salaries, build them houses, a school, a nursery.
—We in the West always thought that the people of the USSR were still afraid to make independent choices against the wishes of the Party and that you paid dearly for it.
—I would say that many terrible things happened at that time, including my hair turning white, because after all, they accused me of having caused panic, and the Party punished me. That affected me very badly. A kind of negative force field developed around me: I was a wicked person. A faulty personality, an alarmist, etc. But in reality people’s reactions were not so clear-cut. There was one Party member called Kusmin; he was secretary of the Central Committee. He said: “Why do you take it so seriously? These punishments handed out to you, during this so-called perestroika, the Academy’s blame, you should think of them as medals: you should think of it as “the Red Medal for Work”, the regional committee of the Party blames you; think of it as the Order of Friendship of the people. The Central Committee blames you, think of it as the medal of the Order of Lenin. So you have lots of decorations, don’t let them get you down”. Perestroika was challenging all the values that we had held before. He made me see the idiocy of this cult of decorations and ritual recognition. I often remember Brezhnev, who loved to display all his medals on his chest. I understood the vanity behind all these honours and rewards. He said: “Don’t worry, do your work as if nothing had happened! All these reprimands are as meaningless as an array of medals pinned to your chest. Really, you should think of them as marks of distinction. Your work was so good that they had to punish you”. That was how he saw it. He was a very interesting man. He’s still alive; he fought in the war. Whereas I fretted about it. I believed in the Party. I belonged to that era. I had become an outcast in society where before I had received all the honours. Because it’s very important for a scientist that people say that your work is useful. That was the general opinion. Then, suddenly, what I did was of no interest to anyone. That was what really upset me. Later I realised also that the government could not give 100% help to the people—the economic costs were calculated later. That’s the reason that the government needed to prove that the negative effects of the radiation were insignificant. That hasn’t only just started. It started under Gorbachev.
Q.—Were you disappointed in the Party?
Nesterenko.—Yes, when there was the putsch, to get rid of Gorbachev, in 1991, I realised that it just a power struggle, they didn’t care about the people. When I realised that, I sent my card back to the Party. That was when we went to Germany, myself, Ilsa and Aliosha, I had already left the Party. When I was there I faced a crisis of conscience: I was asked to stay. But I had already set up Belrad, it was already ongoing. I told them that I and my staff were working on a number of projects, and that I couldn’t do that to them, I had to go back. And I went back.
Q.—Before, you believed in the Party?
Nesterenko.—Yes, absolutely. Our information about the West was limited and we were convinced that our system was more just. Take my case. In my family, my father was an electrician and my mother was illiterate. I think that in another system, I would never have received this further education and become part of the elite. You can criticise it as much as you like but if you had a brain, in this system you would receive further education and achieve your potential. That’s already disappearing now. I myself never had any problems. By the seventh grade I already knew that I was good at maths and physics. I wanted to study at the Faculty of Missile Technology. They didn’t let me, because when I was 7, I lived in an area that had been occupied by the Nazis. I regretted it very much, but today I’m really glad that I chose nuclear technology and not rockets.
2. INDEPENDENCE
Nesterenko.—During this period when I was being persecuted and obstacles were being put in the way of my radioprotection work, the writer Ales Adamovich suggested that I set up an independent institute. Material about Chernobyl was no longer a state secret. Nobody believed the official information any more. The Prime Minister of Belarus at the time was someone called Kebich. He said the same thing to me. “Do it”. For instance there had been the incident at Narovlia, where the workers in a factory had decided to go on strike. Kebich said “Go and talk to them, evaluate the situation”. I took agronomists, physicists, doctors, forestry workers with me; it was a multi-disciplinary expedition. We went there. The government thought we were going there to reassure the people. I came back and I said “We need to evacuate another 7 or 8 villages there”. We didn’t only visit Narovlia, but the whole district. This is the sort of work I began to do. At the same time, we began making equipment, dosimeters.
But when I made the decision—because I was still at the institute—to stop working on atomic energy and to work only on radioprotection, I came up against the same problem I had encountered in 1986. You can say “Halva! Halva!” 49 a hundred times but you can’t taste the sugar in your mouth. Because we have no sensory organs to detect radiation, we needed to give the people a machine to do this for them. So we had developed, and tested a dosimeter called Sosna (the Pine). It was at this point that the obstacles began to be put in our way. I was told that this research was not fundamentally a worthy academic subject, that it should be left to the Ministry of Health and that I should be working on something more serious. But I think we have a duty towards the victims of radiation, we have the expertise and we must help them. This is when Sakharov, Adamovich and Karpov suggested that I set up an independent institute. As I could not leave on my own, I put the proposal to some of the people I worked with: there was Devoino, my assistant deputy, and my brother Volodia. I asked the people in the select group who were working on this machine. Actually there were many people who asked to come. They preferred to come with me probably because they were interested in my ideas and they shared my point of view.
49 Oriental dessert made from flour, sesame oil, honey, fruit and almonds.
—They weren’t afraid of compromising their careers?
—They were Soviet citizens, all used to the idea that the government provides the money. Whereas I proposed “Come on lads, but I’m warning you: we won’t get anything from the government
, you’ll be living off only what you can earn. It might work but it might go very badly”. About thirty people came with me.
Returning to the subject of the dosimeters—in 1989, I went to Kiev to see two scientists: Paton, who was president of the Academy, and Trefilov, who was working on Chernobyl. They were convinced of the need to produce an affordable dosimeter for the public. We already had one, it was ready in 1986, developed by my colleagues. But we hadn’t been allowed to produce it. Gorbachev had come and we talked to him about this dosimeter and he said “Yes, we need to produce a people’s dosimeter”. That was what he called it. The Belarusian government placed an order and we set up this temporary work collective. I was the director, my brother Volodia was the production manager… That was when we decided to get out, to leave the institute. I went into town. I looked for some premises. I managed to find 180 square metres in Plekhanov Street. That was where we set up production. We had it tested by the State in 1990. Since 1991, the three factories in Belarus, at Borissov, Gomel and Rechitsa, have produced about 100,000 dosimeters.
My analysis of the government’s monitoring system had shown that it worked in the capital and the towns, but in the villages, where people ate food that they grew themselves—if not what is the point of living in a village?—only a few families were monitored on the rare occasions when a doctor made a visit. There was no systematic monitoring of radiation in food products, and a severe shortage of radiometers for measuring. Only the veterinary services had them, and yet there were 3,200 contaminated villages that needed one. Our institute made 50 of them for the collective farms producing meat. But it was a drop in the ocean.
The whole system for radiological monitoring of food products, that had been created long before, for a state with a planned economy, no longer corresponded with decentralised production and the post-accident situation. The location of radiometric laboratories in district centres or in food processing plants, their remoteness from the villages (15–20 km), the administrative orientation of their work, the crisis in transport, the particularities of diet among villagers with local food products made effective monitoring impossible.
That was when we created our own system of local radiological monitoring centres (LRMC) for food products. It was Adamovich again who suggested it to me. He said: “Let’s talk to Anatoli Karpov, the chess champion, about it, he’ll help us”. A Telethon had been held for Chernobyl around that time and some of the money collected was given to us, half a million roubles, which was a considerable sum.
I approached Ivan Smoliar, a good man, president of the permanent commission of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus for Chernobyl. At a meeting of the Joint Regional Soviets of Gomel, Mogilev and Brest, he put forward our idea to create 15 to 20 centres, as a start. The idea was approved.
We came to an agreement with them, received the first amount of money, and then Karpov gave us money from the Peace Foundation that he directed. And we started this work. We attracted teachers and nurses into the centres and we trained them. Fairly quickly we were able to gather together data. We found that the levels of contamination were between 5 and 10 times higher than those reported by the Minister of Health.
We measured contamination in milk and in the main food products containing the highest levels of radioactivity. More than 60% of the radioactivity was coming from the milk. The results do not vary: between 15% and 25% of the milk brought to us by local people for testing cannot be consumed. It is not fit for children, or even for adults.
But when the Ministry began to say that this level of contamination of food was not dangerous, and that children had very active metabolisms, we thought we had better start measuring the level of accumulated caesium in the bodies of the inhabitants. Because there was a direct link and it was clear that the inhabitants were going to be eating contaminated food over a number of decades. So the idea came to me that we should buy a spectrometer for the radiation emanating from the contaminated human body. It is a machine, an armchair, in which the person sits, and it has a receptor in the back (a counter that registers radiation and elementary particles). After three minutes, you can see the level of radiation in the body. It is, in fact, the most objective way to test the effectiveness of the protective measures put in place by the government or by the individual himself. The effectiveness can only really be evaluated on the basis of the radionuclides contained within the organism. We began to measure the inhabitants in 1994–1995. This is when I went to Gomel, which is the most contaminated region. And it was here that I met Yury Bandazhevsky. The first time our work brought us together, was in a little town called Vetka. This was in the years 1995, 1996, 1997. We gave him our results with the names next to them and he examined alterations in the health of those with the highest accumulated levels. This is when he discovered, with his wife Galina—he is an anatomopathologist and she is a paediatric cardiologist—that there was a correlation between dose and the alterations detected in the heart by an electrocardiogram.
Speaking as a specialist, I consider the most important scientific information is coming from Gomel, unfortunately not from Minsk and, not from the institute of the Ministry of Health in charge of radiological medicine. Bandazhevsky is the first, not just here but in the world, to have said that once caesium has penetrated the organism, it accumulates unevenly. His measurements of organs during autopsy showed that for an average of 100 Bq/kg incorporated in the organism, there were 2,500 Bq/kg in the heart, 1,000 Bq/kg in the kidneys…He said that a dose of 30–50 Bq/kg in a child will result in pathologies in the vital organs and systems. This is extremely significant in my view. I was then able, thanks to our 4 mobile spectrometry laboratories (eventually I hope we will have 12) to begin to inform the inhabitants. There are 1,100 villages where the conditions of life are dangerous for children.
—How much higher is 30–50 Bq/kg than normal radiation levels?
—Normally there shouldn’t be any at all.
—But normally we receive 0.114 microsievert/hour (0.114 μSv/h) from natural background radiation from the cosmos, rocks etc.
—You’re talking about external radiation. I’m talking only about internal radiation ingested through food. Obviously I’m taking into account the radiation we get from the cosmos, and from the external pollution that was created by Chernobyl, but today, if we exclude natural background radiation, and include only the radiation from Chernobyl, it’s worth remembering that 70–80% and in some cases up to 90% of the radiation dose to the body is coming from food. That is why I put such emphasis on food products and on internal radiation. Another important point: if adults and children eat the same food—and that is the case here in Belarus with the levels of poverty today—the children will receive a dose 4–5 times larger than the adults. So, the most vulnerable group, the critical group, is made up of children, pregnant women, and women who are breastfeeding. Children have less body weight and their metabolism works 20 to 30 times faster than an adult’s; that’s why the irradiation is so high.
The information given to doctors should not be obtained on the basis of indirect deductions, because today we determine the danger from milk and potatoes on the basis of their supposed consumption by children. An official register of dose has just been set up. In the previous register, as I said, there were 1,100 villages where we needed to intervene. They cheated with the milk: by fixing the admissible level at 100 Bq/litre, it was impossible to keep below the annual admissible level of 1 millisievert per year, so it was decided that children should only drink half a litre per day. This is how they established the dose in the new register. In reality, to establish norms in radioprotection, as a specialist in the subject, I would say that you need first to identify the most contaminated group. To do that you need to proscribe the indirect method. You arrive in the village, you measure the children in nursery, you measure the whole school and about fifty adults. You select the 15 most contaminated subjects from these 200–300 people and you have your critic
al group. You don’t need to work it out mathematically.
For instance, we have already investigated Vetka, which is about 80 km from Gomel on the Russian border. The accumulation threshold of 30–50 Bq/kg in the body observed by Bandazhevsky—above which he found alterations in the different vital organs and system in the child, represents, for me, a safety test: the contamination should not exceed this limit.
Chapter 4
THE CAPTIVES OF KRASNOPOLIE
However, from the mental health point of view, the most satisfactory solution for the future peaceful use of atomic energy would be to see a new generation of people who would have learnt to accommodate ignorance and uncertainty…
Technical Report No 151, WHO,
Geneva, 1958, page 59.
The beginning of the 1990’s corresponded to the brief “democratic springtime” introduced under perestroika. People had great hopes that a historical and scientific investigation into Chernobyl might take place. But the collapse of the Soviet state and the institutional crisis that removed everything that civil society had built up during perestroika, worked to the advantage of the nuclear agencies and their lackeys, who occupied key posts at the Ministries of Health and in scientific institutes, and they were able to regain control of a situation that had looked for a time as if it had escaped them. However, under pressure from society, certain partial measures to help the population were taken. They would be withdrawn over the next few years during ‘normalisation’. All the same, some truths were beginning to emerge, and serious research into radiological medicine was being undertaken on the margins of official science. Yury Bandazhevsky, a brilliant young Belarusian anatomopathologist, was making huge progress in the field. He would soon describe the correlation between low dose radiation incorporated into the body and the pathologies in the contaminated territories. He would end up in prison for revealing these findings and for denouncing the policies of the Ministry of Health in his own country.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 16
