The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  (His wife greets us at the door)

  Q.—We telephoned a little while ago…

  His wife.—Yes, come in please!

  Q.—Has the boy run off?

  Ermakov.—He took his bike and disappeared.

  Q.—How is his health? He had anaemia, if I remember rightly.

  The woman.—We were told…

  Ermakov.—Once he reached…before he was 16… I don’t know how to explain. The doctors told us… that before he had known a woman… (He makes a circular gesture with his hands on his chest as if to indicate a hormonal change in the body).

  Q.—It would get better? Is that what they are saying?

  Ermakov.—He could get over the illness. There he is, he’s come back.

  Q.—Hello, do you remember? Three years ago…at the pond?

  The boy.—Oh yes!

  Q.—What is your name?

  The boy.—Kolia.

  The woman.—You know, at the beginning, I didn’t know he was ill. Specialists came from Gomel. I was teaching at the school. They came and they did a blood test, then they wanted to see me. They called me while I was teaching. I came to the laboratory and they told me: “Your son’s haemoglobin level is too low. If you agree, we will refer him for further tests”.

  Ermakov.—He would play with a ball. He got bruises…We hadn’t paid any attention: well, he was playing football and he got bruises! Then he said his legs were hurting him. He began to get tired. He would come back to the house and lay down to sleep. He felt weak like that. Then they tested him again at school… the haemoglobin levels had fallen.

  Q.—Tell me, is it hard to study, or do you feel normal?

  Kolia.—I feel normal.

  Q.—Because they told me that at school he is very good…

  Ermakov.—In mathematics. He is very good at mathematics. If he could…carry on with mathematics…he’s better than me.

  The woman.—Mathematics and physics, he is very good at these subjects. He solves his sister Ina’s problems by himself. Even though Ina is in a class above him.

  Q.—Do you like going to school?

  Kolia.—Yes.

  Q.—Are you interested in your studies?

  Kolia.—Yes.

  Ermakov.—It looks as if Kolia is on the way to recovery, but two children…have died.

  The woman.—In front of Kolia, while they were in resuscitation, right in front of us.

  Q.—Did they have a different illness?

  Ermakov.—The same.

  The woman.—The same. Aplastic anaemia.

  Ermakov.—The doctor who treats him says the illness may disappear in a few years. When he is 16. He could get over it by himself.

  Q.—In about two years then. Have you had enough of hospitals?

  Kolia.—Pretty much, yes.

  Q.—And what about your health, the parents, do you feel any effects from the radioactivity?

  Ermakov.—Headaches.

  The woman.—When I go in the forest, for example… At the moment, we are collecting girolle mushrooms, because we’re short of money. We need money. We go and collect girolle mushrooms. When we come out of the forest, we have terrible headaches, I can’t tell you what they’re like. And we get a fever. Immediately. We get back to the house and take pills… Then it goes back to normal.

  Q.—And you sell the mushrooms?

  The woman.—Yes, we sell them.

  Ermakov.—We sell them. We need the money.

  Q.—Where do they go after, these mushrooms? Do you know?

  Ermakov.—Probably to Brest (She smiles) Do you know, it’s through Brest that you get into Poland. You get higher prices there.141 Last year, we collected mushrooms and then we tested them for radioactivity. Kolia really likes mushrooms… girolles. Well, we had to stop collecting them for us to eat. Because, if we prepare them for us, he wants them too. So, we stopped collecting them. We threw them away. Apart from the girolles, which we collect to sell. But the others, that we call babka, krasniutchok, belyi, we don’t collect them at all…so that he doesn’t have any. How can I explain?… he sees us cooking them on the stove and he wants some. So, we don’t collect them any more.

  141 From Brest, they will go further afield, to the West.

  Q.—To protect him?

  Ermakov.—Yes, of course!

  Q.—We saw each other three years ago. Has your health changed in any way since then?

  Ermakov.—I can tell you just one thing: fever. In the evening I have a fever.

  The woman.—You didn’t have that before.

  Ermakov.—And now I always have a temperature.

  The woman.—He has a temperature every evening.

  Ermakov.—Three years ago, I could talk normally with you… I spoke normally… Now I have this fever… And headaches.

  Q.—Have you seen a doctor for an examination?

  The woman.—But what doctor? Tell us about them! At Borovliany, at Aleinikova, they only treat children. Kolia is the first to… respond to the treatment.

  Ermakov.—…who responded to this… they gave him some German medicine and he responded to the treatment. And there was one boy there…it was Puzanski, Kolia?

  The woman.—Puzanski.

  Ermakov.—He didn’t respond at all. Kolia followed this treatment and he improved.

  6. SKORODNOIE’S OLDEST INHABITANT

  Before leaving the village, we revisited areas that we had been to three years before. We wanted to find the elderly peasant woman that we had filmed discreetly without speaking a word to her.

  A village in the distance beyond the fields. A man crossing the vegetable gardens carrying a scythe. A stork winging its way over the trees and disappearing. The pond at Skorodnoie. The rotting wooden platform where the pond had dried out is still there. Wooden houses close by. The electricity lines looking like a musical score running from an old wooden pylon from a bygone age. Kolia and his friend paddling through the water. An older boy crosses over the platform to join them. A courtyard behind a fence. Maria Kirilovna is scything the grass in the field behind the vegetable garden. She comes towards us. We stay on the road in front of the fence that surrounds her yard, just as we had last time, without going in. This is where we stand and talk, in front of these fence posts, washed a grey-green with age.

  Maria Kirilovna is a sprightly woman, in spite of her advanced years. She has a steady voice, a lively mind, a twinkle in her eye, sometimes ironic, sometimes serious, as she recounts her life, as an escapee from Stalin’s deportations to the Great North (Siberia).

  Q.—Do you remember us? We were here three years ago?

  Maria Kirilovna.—You filmed me that time.

  —Yes.

  —That was a long time ago. There have been others. They came last year…Well, we cut the hay; we work. I have goats in the stable…

  —How is your health?

  —Well, thank you for asking. What health can a person like me have? It’s finished. It’s time to go. When God decides… (She gives the chickens something to eat) I’ve got goats… For the moment, I look after them.

  —The radioactivity doesn’t bother you?

  —Ah well, we can’t see it, it’s invisible.

  —But how do you feel?

  —Bah, I feel like everyone else: My legs hurt, my hands hurt, my fingers are deformed.

  —Your heart?

  —The heart too. When the weather changes, straight away, I have to take Carvolon, Validol. There’s no cure any more. (She laughs)

  —Don’t you ever get your food products measured to find out if they’re radioactive?

  —The milk in the village is tested.

  —And is it radioactive?

  —Some of the cows are, some are not. Everyone drinks it. I drink my goats’ milk too.

  —Ha
ve you measured the goat’s milk?

  —No…The radio said it was OK.

  —The radio?

  —Yes, it seems that the white…the white goats’ milk is completely clean. The white ones are, but the grey or piebald, they are radioactive.

  —What are yours?

  They are white. Shall I show you them? If I get them out, they will start to run. They are beautiful, my goats.

  She goes to the stable. The dog attached to the fence begins to bark. The goats come out. She gives them some leaves from the trees. We can hear the goats bleating and the frogs croaking. She comes towards us. A white goat trots behind her.

  Maria Kirilovna.—This is my Pasha following me.

  Q.—Do you live here by yourself?

  —By myself.

  —Have you any family, any children?

  —I have five, and they’ve all left. There’s no-one. They’ve all gone. There’s one in the Kaliningrad area…And here, in Belarus…

  —You cut the hay by yourself?

  —All by myself! I scythe the hay.… And I’m over 80 years old!

  —Really! And you scythe the hay!

  —The children don’t want to scythe hay any more. I’ve got two grandchildren—no, I’ve got a lot more, but here, in this village, I’ve got two—and they work. One is a doctor in a hospital, the other is here. And one son is a forest warden who lives quite close.

  —And you are 90 years old, is that it?

  —Not quite, I’m nearing it.

  —You’re nearly 90 and you are scything. Radioactivity must be good for health.

  —(She laughs). For old people, maybe. That’s what they say actually, it’s the middle aged people who are dying at the moment. As for the old people, they are living. Only, when the weather changes, I can’t get to the shops. Yesterday I went, another old woman came with me; My God, I was tired, I nearly died.

  —So you have grandsons?

  —I’ve already got five great-grandsons.

  —And how is the health of these children? Is the radioactivity having any effect on them?

  —One is being treated for something. He’s got something here. (She points to the throat). He has monthly examinations. He needs clean food products, vitamins. But there are no vitamins.

  —They say the children here are tired.

  —Yes, in this street there were a dozen children. The street used to ring out with the sound of their cries. That was before the radiation. Here, the neighbours had eight children. But now, they’re all the same, sleepy. Basically, they’re not how they should be… I would say these are children who no longer have anything about them that resembles childhood. They used to run about happily, went sledging in the winter, here on the ice. But now, they lie down all the time, sleep or stay sitting down. They are not well… And where you live, is there any radiation?

  —No, not at this level. A little… a little.

  —It hasn’t spread to where you are?

  —It isn’t at the same level as you have here.

  —We measure it here, but only in certain places, whereas at the place where it exploded, it disappeared into the air. The planes dispersed it. They say that the planes dispersed it far away from the towns. They dispersed it towards the villages. Then it fell down again on the villages. The land, we sow it, we work it and we swallow all that… With the air, in the dust, in everything.

  —They damaged the natural environment. It is beautiful.

  —Oh it’s so beautiful here, near the river! In summer, in June and July, my God! Everyone used to go to the river, to sunbathe. Now that’s all over. No-one comes any more. A few people, very few, come for a day or two then they leave. No-one sunbathes near the river, the way they used to. That’s life. (She addresses the camera for the first time) You‘ve already taken enough photographs of me to make a whole film…

  —My name is Wladimir Sergeivitch. What is your name?

  —Maria Kirilovna.

  —It was a pleasure talking to you.

  —Oh, if I told you everything!

  —You have more to tell?

  —What I have endured!

  —Tell us then.

  —Oh! We’ve only lived here since 1948. We were expelled from a village 12 km from here.

  —Expelled where and by whom?

  —(In a very low voice) By Stalin. It was Stalin.

  —Where were you sent?

  —To the Perm region.

  —How long were you expelled for?

  —Oh…maybe even for ever, I don’t know for how long.

  —And after, you came back?

  —Mum…Dad was in prison in Mosyr. Afterwards, he was freed and later he joined us. He came after. As for us, we lived there. We did not die. People died on the way there. Children and adults died. But the rest of us, we carried on. We survived. We spent nineteen years there. And after we came back. Then after the war…I don’t remember which year… was it in 1935?… we didn’t have the right to vote. They took 25% of our wages.

  —But why were you punished like that?

  —Why? Because we had a lot of cows. Pigs and sheep.

  —The so-called kulaks?

  —Yes. There were the podkulachniki and there were the kulaks. But we… my father built a mill, he got together with three other men, he was the fourth, and they built a steam mill. Down at Rudnia. And it served the local community. So that was what displeased someone.

  —Someone denounced him and said you were kulaks and that you needed to be got rid of?

  —Yes: “You need to get rid of them, we don’t need people like that”. And we suffered for nineteen years there. That’s where we grew up. And when we came back here, I already had two children. There, we worked in the forests. We improved the soil, we worked in the mines. On the Kama. The big river is the Kama, and the little river is called the Kossa. There were several little rivers… That’s where we spent our youth. And we came here for our old age. I stayed here alone. I live here. That’s how it is. Life… Do you know the North… Have you never been to the North?

  —No.

  —Ah… it’s not everyone that can live up there! The cold, the taiga, snow storms…Oh it was a constant battle. It was very hard. They took all the men for five years. The women lived there alone in the kolkhozes. We did everything ourselves. Summers were short, three months at most. The first year, we hadn’t cut the hay so there was nothing to feed the horses. They died of starvation. So what did we do? When it rained, we broke the branches. We made them into bundles and hung them all along the fence. And when the weather was good, we cut hay, and collected it…We got used to it, doing it like that, waiting. When a man appeared, who had lost an arm or was wounded… he would help us. Apart from that, all the work was done by women. They brought up the children too. The winters were hard. There were empty houses, like this one, with two entrances. We cleared snow from one house, we went into the forest with snow up to here, we cleared the roads. We cut small wood for burning… We kept the children’s nursery warm, the school, the town hall and our houses too, our flats. We lived like that for five years, till the end of the war. When the war ended in 1947, the evacuees were allowed to leave, even to go to Moscow to live… But we came here, in 1948, just when the financial reforms took place.

  —And did you find the other villagers, when you got here?

  —Some people had already returned. My father got here before us. He stopped here, in this village.

  —Little Father Stalin142 tormented you?

  142 The Tzar was known to the Russian people as “Little Father”.

  —Who knows who tormented whom? He tormented us and we tormented him and he tormented us as well. In 1937, they took all the men, the young adults, and they never came back. They still haven’t come back; we don’t know where they are. Some were in prison for
ten years… those ones came back. Some were in prison for a year… they let them go. But the first ones to be arrested in 1939… no, in autumn 1938… and in 1937, none of them came back. All those young men who were married. Oh, there was plenty of suffering! One person is guilty and all the rest pay… Those who worked over there stayed alive, they survived. But those who did not want to, who said “Let’s go. Let’s go back home”, etc, well, they may have escaped, but then they were killed in the war. (People go by on the path) Such was our joy! We really suffered. And now, an old woman alone, carry on as best you can. You want to live? Then work, keep yourself fit and eat well…There’s no milk at the shop. We only get crème fraîche… But if not, I’ve got the milk from my goats. I milk them and I drink it. Warm milk.

  —Can you manage on your pension, with your vegetable garden and your goats?

  —Yes, you can manage. It’s my children who are short of money. Yes… I’ve told you enough to write a book!

  (Some hens, the goat… Someone arrives to make a telephone call… She goes to the back of the farmyard, puts the goat in the stable. We leave.)

  Chapter III

  ROSA LUXEMBURG

  2.2 mSv/y, 5–15 Ci/km², 72 km from Chernobyl

  1. A HEADTEACHER LAMENTS THE SITUATION IN WHICH HE AND HIS PUPILS FIND THEMSELVES

  After forty-six years teaching, the head teacher at the school in this village, named after the famous revolutionary, feels as if he is running a hospital.

  The head teacher.—All of the children in our school are ill. They seem continually exhausted. They’re lethargic… almost half asleep. I think it’s the effect of the radioactivity. I’ve been a teacher since 1954. So it’s easy to compare how the children were before the radioactivity and how they are now. Before, they were lively, they were happy.