The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  1. FIRST INTERVIEW WITH BANDAZHEVSKY IN MINSK

  We met Bandazhevsky at Professor Nesterenko’s home in April 2000. Nesterenko showed us the official publication recently issued by the government about the consequences of the disaster at Chernobyl. It contained eighteen reports written by scientists, academics, government ministers, specialists and medical doctors, all highly qualified people, in positions of responsibility, including the two taking part in this interview. We talked about the Belarusian paradox: the publication contains Bandazhevsky’s critical report to the government and President Lukashenko about the way the Ministry of Health had squandered public funds.

  V. Nesterenko.—For a long time, I wasn’t sure if they would publish it at all. They delayed it for a long time and then I heard by chance that it was about to come out. These are the official reports that were published on 21st April 1999. On the 5th or 7th January this year, the book was officially presented to the Belarusian Press Club. The president of the Commission on Chernobyl dedicated the book to Yury and myself. The indictment has still not been lifted. Yury is still being prosecuted, and even his movements are limited so that he cannot, for instance, visit Gomel for fear of destabilising the situation at the institute where he worked.

  All the reasons for Yury’s arrest can be found in this book. They reprinted his report in its entirety. It is a unique event. Contained within it are the results of his research under the title “Pathological processes in the body in the presence of incorporated radionuclides”.

  Bandazhevsky.—Read the conclusion: “Any amount… ”

  V. Nesterenko—“Any amount of incorporated radioactive caesium triggers pathological processes in the body. This contradicts radically the conclusions of the Republic of Belarus’ National Commission on Radiation Protection according to which people can safely consume tens and hundreds of becquerels in their daily meals. On the basis of the information presented here, it is clearly necessary to develop a coherent programme of measures to protect those people whose bodies have been subjected to the action of these radioactive elements over a long period, and to organise restorative cures immediately.”

  Q.—The State publishes his report officially while continuing to persecute him. It is a country of paradoxes.

  V. Nesterenko.—Yury is a public servant. He works at the heart of a government institution, and it’s the government that he’s criticising. I work in an independent institute and make constructive criticisms of Ministry of Health policies. I often criticise them severely. At the moment they are forced to tolerate these criticisms because I am a Member of the Academy and in the past, I had a high level post. Tomorrow they could start treating me differently. Yury began to obtain this information and was able to show that for all these years the government has been misusing the money that was destined to address the problems caused by Chernobyl and that the medical establishment in Belarus is misleading the government, stating that everything is good, everything is fine apparently, and there is no need to spend any more money. In reality the damage caused by Chernobyl has cost 235 billion dollars, about the equivalent of 70 annual budgets of the Republic in 1986. What should the government of Belarus have done? Demand reparations from the Ukraine, from Russia? Gone to the United Nations, set up an insurance fund to compensate the victims? Because the accident we had will not be the last, there will be others. But they prefer to deny the problem. They don’t want to quarrel with Russia. So they say nothing. The government wants to reduce expenditure, and is quite happy when the doctors at the Ministry of Health say that everything’s fine, they don’t need to do anything, that everything’s OK. That’s their position. And then Yury comes along and upsets all that! He claims that an accumulation in the body of 50 becquerels/kg poses a danger to children.

  Q.—How long have you been working on this problem?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—I was rector for a little over nine years. Here are the books that we published with Nesterenko that contradict the official position of the Ministry of Health. Look at this one67. It contains photomicrography of the pathological changes and the processes that occur in the organism. Look at the lesions on the glomeruli of the kidney, and, in particular, at this myocardium—it’s terrifying. If a specialist saw that, he would say that it is no longer a heart. But it is. A man’s heart. I don’t know how it could possibly have functioned. It’s unbelievable. This was our first publication. There is also a version in English. It was my wife, Galina, who first suspected there might be a link between heart disease and the contamination revealed in cardiograms of children. The discovery caused us a lot of anxiety, and my wife tried to dissuade me from following up this line of research. She knew it would cause us problems.

  67 Pathologie du rayonnement radioactive incorporé. (Pathology of incorporated radiation) Minsk, 1999.

  Here’s how it happened. My wife had left a great pile of children’s cardiograms on the table for her research project. I was a professor and she was still an assistant, and that evening I wondered how we could begin. It was quite late in the evening. She went to bed and I was left alone to think. Then I had the idea of noting on each child’s ECG, the amount of incorporated radionuclides in the body. I had these results for the children because our institute had measured each child using a human radiation spectrometer or HRS. I wrote the results of the HRS on each ECG. And I started to sort the ECG’s into piles according to the amount of incorporated radionuclides, and the degree of alteration in the heart. It was like a game of solitaire.

  I ended up with four groups:

  1) children with between 11 and 26 becquerels per kilo of body weight—64% of them had altered ECG patterns;

  2) those with between 26 to 37 Bq/kg–67% of them had altered ECG patterns;

  3) those with between 37 and 74 Bq/kg–78% had altered ECG patterns and

  4) those with between 74 and 100 Bq/kg in their body—88% of this last group had altered ECG patterns.

  I soon noticed that the percentage of children suffering from heart problems increased with the amount of incorporated radionuclides. The difference between the first and the third group was striking. From that point on, we examined the hearts of people who had been contaminated, as a matter of course. I involved health professionals in the work and a number of doctorates were devoted to the subject. We began to make a closer study of other organs. On the basis of this research, we put forward a series of proposals, about how to proceed, and this is described in Study of medical and biological effects in relation to the quantity of radionuclides incorporated into the body. It was a completely new approach. It showed that you could live in an area that was contaminated by radionuclides without being affected or live in a clean area and be very badly affected by radionuclides. Illness resulted from the amount of radioactive elements incorporated into the body, not from the low level external radiation. It’s very significant. When we started, no-one had ever talked about this. I had never found any reference to this correlation in any scientific publication before. Then having understood that it was necessary to deal not only with the contamination in food, mushrooms and berries, but above all in the human body, Nesterenko began to measure the population very thoroughly using an HRS at his institute. This engendered a whole line of research. It was really important, you see, quite crucial.

  We have been interested for a long time—since 1992—in the incorporation of various elements. In general, I had chosen to do research on quantifiable phenomena. My preferred methodology was experimental simulation of the pathological processes under study. And this was totally new to us as well. Before, no-one did this. In our country, you were either a research scientist or a pathologist. Whereas we had set up models of the situation, where we were feeding animals with contaminated grain to simulate the food humans were eating. We had a group of rats who were eating wheat and bread, contaminated at 400 Bq/kg, which was the admissible level in 1996! And a control group with 40 Bq/kg. Absolute z
ero was impossible, unfortunately, given the situation. The results of this experiment are in my book Clinical and experimental aspects of the effect of incorporated radionuclides on the organism, published in Gomel in 1995. It contains a lot of data. For example, the metabolic effects of incorporated radionuclides, showing alterations in the biogenic amines in the brain structure. The study shows for example, that after ten days of eating this kind of bread, the animals accumulate 60 Bq/kg and their neurological mediating processes are abruptly disrupted. In other words, their behaviour is modified. After ten to twenty days of the diet, the radionuclides cause a slowing down of the serotonin system, and premature reactivation of other important biological systems. To cause such alterations, the animals would have had to be subjected to enormous levels of external radiation. This is the mistake that radiobiologists make, whether consciously or not, regarding external radiation. They bombard the animal with ionising radiation and they study its metabolism. Whereas we only give the animal a very small quantity of radioactive caesium but it is incorporated into the body and causes absolutely astonishing effects.

  Q.—Could someone object that the effect on animals might not be the same as on humans?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—That’s why Vassili Nesterenko and I began to look at the internal contamination of humans…

  Q.—The dose in food that you gave to the animals to simulate the food being consumed by humans could perhaps have a different effect on a rat—which is a very small animal—than on a human being?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.— Concentration...concentration. We calculate our quantities in proportion to mass. Though there is something very interesting here. This is emphasised by Vassili in our research. I am very grateful to him, as a great scientist, for understanding the significance. Our experimental research, on animals, white rats, rabbits etc, showed that the different organs accumulate caesium in different quantities. So, for example, if the overall load within the body is about 100 Bq/kg, the heart will contain about 2,500 Bq/kg, the kidneys about 1,500 Bq/kg. There is a little less in the spleen and in the liver. This shows that caesium penetrates selectively the cells of the most important, the most active of the vital organs. The changes in the metabolic processes in the central nervous system in animals with such a low level of accumulation signal a catastrophe developing within the organism.

  Q.—Can you explain why these radionuclides behave in this selective way within the organs?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—Based on what I have observed, given that caesium penetrates intensively in the most highly energetic cells, in other words in cells that have a higher metabolic rate, and concentrate there, I am supposing that what traps the caesium are the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cells. Although it’s difficult to demonstrate this at present, but we’ll get there. Electromagnetic photography shows that it is the mitochondria that react first. They undergo important alterations even though it is still very difficult to talk about apparent symptoms. In heart cells, they are more vulnerable to attack than anywhere else. These are organelles that provide potential energy for the work of the cell. They consume a lot of potassium, an element that plays an important role in high energy metabolic processes. And potassium and caesium are very close chemically; they belong to the same family.

  V. Nesterenko.—The cardiac muscle contains 20 times as much potassium as any other muscle in the body. The body cannot distinguish between caesium and potassium. If it needs potassium, it will incorporate the radioactive caesium that has been spread so abundantly in the contaminated territories.

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—And caesium can block the channels for potassium in the cells. But going back to what we were discussing, if we had only conducted experimental research, we would not have obtained these results. If we had only conducted clinical examinations of the children, we would not have obtained these results. But, when we started to put the two aspects together, and also the study of organs during autopsy, dissection…Can you believe I had 25 senior academics working on the same subject, each with his own specialty? You asked me: “How do you prepare a thesis?” Well, this is how people did it. And it didn’t require enormous amounts of money. It was quite simply a matter of organisation. We had a Human Radiation Spectrometer. Later, Vassili Nesterenko devoted himself to the anthropogammametric measurements of children and we made use of his data. The specialists had everything they needed. I had paediatric professors, professors of cardiology, anatomopathologists who dealt professionally with the histology, and I am a professor myself. No-one can say that my research lacks good specialists or has not been undertaken with sufficient rigour. I also had opthalmologists…Anyway, here are the facts: from 20% to 25% of the children in Vetka have an accumulation of 50 Bq/kg…That may seem nothing, 50 Bq/kg, it’s very little…But these children have cataracts! An alteration of the crystalline lens…

  Q.—You could say that what you had in your hands was a unique instrument…

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—Yes, a unique instrument, in a unique situation; you’re right. They’re in the process of destroying it. I try not to think about it. They are destroying something that has taken me ten years to create, with virtually no funding. I would never have got there if I had not been so obstinate. A government official advised me to avoid use of the word “radiation” in my scientific programmes, and to devote my time to any other subject if I wanted funding. Completely cynical. But I did not come to Gomel, to the contaminated zone, brought my family here, where they are exposed to enormous risk, to work on some other subject.

  Q.—You chose deliberately to work at Gomel?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—To tell you the truth I was always passionate about medicine from a very young age, probably because of my father, who had a huge admiration for doctors even though he could never have become one because of the war. But it’s possible he fulfilled his vocation through me. When I was 16, I began to study theoretical medicine and at the same time to breed guinea pigs. I bred my own laboratory animals. I completed my studies at the institute of medicine and received high marks, but I chose anatomical pathology as my speciality, which was the least prestigious and the least popular here. I was actually really interested in it. I really wanted to understand the mechanisms of disease. After a year and a half, my thesis was ready. In 1988, at the age of 26, I applied to do a doctorate in science, and after five years, I presented my doctorate on a completely different subject, but still linked to my experiments on animals. Then in 1990, out of the blue, I was offered the post of rector at the institute of medicine at Gomel, which did not yet exist—it needed to be set up. I was already a professor and had been awarded the Lenin prize from Komsomol.

  V. Nesterenko.—This area was contaminated and people had fled. Doctors and educated people had already left and the government tried to send people here from Minsk and Grodno. But no-one stayed long, they left quite quickly. They needed to train professional staff on the spot and so they decided to set up a medical school, or, as we call it here, an institute of medicine.

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—It was a good idea, but none of the government officials had much faith in my proposals. They did not need what I was proposing at all. From 1988 to 1989, I sent these proposals to the president of the Academy of Sciences and to the Minister of Health. I was proposing medical research programmes to help with Chernobyl. The response was always the same: “We’re already doing everything necessary”. Of course, they were doing nothing. Then suddenly they made a decision. They even joked about it at some banquet: they were going to set up an institute specially for that crank, Bandazhevsky, who wants to work in the contaminated territories. But they never provided any serious funding. The Soviet Union was collapsing; the Party that had promised to support us no longer existed. We took advantage of this, in fact, to occupy the regional Party committee building. I could tell you about the struggle we had to take it over, but that’s another story. But it’s true that I received several threatening phone calls saying things like “We’r
e going to get you”. After that the Ministry of Health tried again and again, directly or indirectly, to shut the institute down, “given that it is serving no purpose”. They argued that it was difficult to cater for the needs of the institute in an area where no-one wanted to work and where trained personnel were lacking. So I developed a scientific programme myself and started to train personnel to put it into practice. Of 37 candidates who applied for doctorates during this period, 30 were my pupils. I trained them personally one by one. I didn’t just sign the forms. In any case, we had recognition from Moscow. All the medical schools in the Russian capital, all the pathologists, without exception, supported the work we were doing. Even now, they support me and defend my case.

  Q.—How many people were working with you before your arrest?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—There were 200 lecturers, 1,500 students, and about 300 ancillary workers. It really was a good university.

  Q.—And all that is about to disappear?

  Y. Bandazhevsky.—It exists formally but the research programmes linked to Chernobyl have been cancelled. They are destroying the laboratories, they have abolished chairs. The young people I brought here are leaving, saying: “There is nothing for me to do here anymore”

  Our work always irritated the authorities and they spent years trying to find legal reasons to close us down. Even so, we managed to achieve a lot. We showed how important it was to offer radioprotection not only to the inhabitants of Chernobyl but to anyone living in areas of the Republic that had been contaminated, by preventing them from ingesting radionuclides through food. I could serve you mushrooms today that would make you very ill tomorrow. And thanks to the enormous amount of work we did, scientific knowledge has increased. It was pioneering work. In time, people will smile about it, and perhaps they’ll find that it lacked rigour and precision. But we grasped the principles that underlie the effects of radiation. It’s very important. Thanks to our experimental methodology, we were able to show also that caesium-137, even in small quantities, has a very toxic effect on the body apart from its radiological effect. I could put a small concentration of radioactive caesium in this glass, for example, and within a few days you would experience some toxic effects.