The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  The milk collector—I collect the milk and take it to the cart and empty it into the milk cans…Yes, yes, I collect it and take it there. I am helping my husband. My husband works and I help him. Then we take it to the stable…At the state farm… We give it to the young calves to drink.

  We go with her. We meet two peasant women returning to the village. One of them gives the collector a milk can and she empties it. Another appears with a full bucket.

  Q.—Do you measure the radioactivity in the milk? Do you know what the levels are?

  The peasant.—We know what they are. There is a family over there with high levels of radioactivity. Above the norm. That’s what it’s like there. The cow grazes in the wood. There was more fallout there.

  Q.—The cows graze there?

  The peasant.—Probably.

  Q.—And this milk here, do you know if it is clean?

  The peasant.—We collect it to give to the calves.

  The milk collector.—This herd is more or less alright, but the other herd over there, the milk is bad. Our herd, it’s alright.

  Q.—What do they do with the milk that is bad?

  The milk collector.—The same thing. They give it to the cattle.

  The sun rises a little above the horizon. The village is getting busier. The milk collector goes off with her milk, passing women who are coming out of a side road, leading their cows towards the herd. Others arrive from the opposite direction.

  Three milk cans in front of a house, a wayward cow passes in front of us. A man on his own greets us. A peasant woman with a stick returns to her house. An artisan, his bag on his shoulder, crosses the path of two women leading three cows towards the herd.

  Q.—The milk you are collecting, is it clean, no radioactivity?

  The milk collector.—Who knows?

  Mrs Kokhan’s father, an elderly man, passes on his horse and says hello. He is wearing a rather eccentric papakha143 on his head to protect him from the morning cold, one ear flap up and the other down. He smiles at us, with a proud and slightly mocking regard. A group of women return to the house. Laughter and bantering from the men and women who are walking in front of us. They walk away to the fields. From the end of the road comes the milk collector on her bicycle with full buckets. She empties them into the milk can and puts them down in the garden. A man leads a horse out and leaves. Other houses. Two women who were standing with the herd approach the village. Others come back including the smiling woman and elderly woman.

  143 Called an Astrakhan hat in English. Worn by men, made of wool, fur or sheepskin, sometimes with ear flaps.

  The elderly woman.—Hello. What are you doing?

  Q.—We are watching how you…how you…

  The smiling woman.—How we work! (She smiles.)

  Q.—What is the radioactivity like here?

  The old woman.—Oh we’re full of radioactivity.

  The smiling woman.—My cow measured 890 Bq/l.

  Q.—Who do you give the milk to afterwards?

  The smiling woman.—We put it in the milk can.

  Q.—Yes, of course, you empty it into the milk can but who drinks it afterwards?

  The old woman.—It’s taken to Elsk…They use it to make butter.

  The smiling woman.—Here, before the explosion at Chernobyl, it was so clean! We were so strong, so healthy! And now we walk… Just look at me… If they measured me I bet they’d find 300 of these things! I can feel it, when I walk; I feel it in my eyes. I can’t look up and then down, everything starts to turn. I feel very ill. The heart, it thumps, it hurts. I can’t sleep on this side. My heart beats. I had my blood pressure taken. It was more than 200. That was about three years ago. I can’t go on much longer.

  Life has changed. Oh! It’s changed so much, oh! ... Before, relatives would come from Leningrad. Now it’s St Petersburg, but before it was Leningrad. They came here, they took deep breaths. It was so pure, especially after the rain. And now when they come, they get ulcers round the mouth. Around the mouth, ulcers. Our lives have been contaminated. Before, we used kerosene. The lamps did us no harm. And now, this electricity, we could have done without it… . What do you think? We were used to the light how it was, it suited us. We didn’t know anything else. We had good eyesight. But now, I can’t see anything any more, I can’t read any more. Nothing… The light is too faint unless I’m wearing glasses. It’s not like it was for our ancestors…

  Q.—Your ancestors have always lived here, have they?

  The smiling woman.—Yes…Are you surprised by my face?

  Q.—No.

  The smiling woman.—My hair has gone grey. I had dark hair but I’ve already gone grey… Someone who didn’t know me said I was from… Asia.

  Q.—Maybe. The Tartars came as far as here didn’t they? 144 Take care of yourself.

  144 The Golden Mongol Horde in the 12th century.

  The smiling woman.—Thank you! You too. Thank you!

  She goes off. The husband of the milk collector loads the milk cans onto his cart which is drawn by a horse. He goes off to collect the next milk can.

  Q.—Is it given only to animals, or do people drink it too?

  The milk collector.—People have to drink it at home; it’s impossible not to. We give away any that’s left over.

  Q.—Do you know how many becquerels per litre it contains?

  The milk collector.—The radioactivity? ...Wait a minute… It depends on the farm. One farm, for example, had 106… Too much, yes too much. The admissible level is something like 96; there were already some with more. In another farm, for example, it was 70. But when you give fodder that contains adsorbents—I’ve experimented with it at home, when my cow calved and I gave her some—well, then it was about 30, 50; it was very little.

  She goes off one way and her husband the other, with his horse. We start talking to the peasant in the house next door.

  Q.—Has life changed since Chernobyl?

  The peasant.—Of course! People are more ill… Some suffer very badly with their joints, their liver, heart problems. It affects children’s eyes, their thyroid. Many of the children are ill; they weren’t ill like that before. This radioactivity can’t be detected; it has no smell, no taste. And we’re paid a pittance in compensation for Chernobyl. It measures 15 curies round here.

  —Here, where you live?

  —Yes. As high as 15 Ci/km2, it’s considered a radioactive zone.

  —And do you grow vegetables in your garden?

  —We grow everything!

  —And it accumulates?

  —Probably. Who’s going to check? The onions, the garlic. We grow cucumbers, cabbages. Who’s going to check them? We get ourselves checked but that’s all. Nothing else is checked. Look at our village, Valavsk. It’s big; it has a lot of potential. Before, when I was younger, when I left technical college, I became manager straight away—there were five agricultural teams here: Shia, Glazki, Novy Khutor, these are the names of the big farms. Then there was the village of Dubrovka, of Korma, dead villages… Well, Shia no longer exists, nor does Glazki… There were so many fields! There were lots of people, lots of cows, there were beef cattle and now there are no cattle there any more. There are only the ones we’ve got here. There are even villages that have been buried, like Kusmichi. You would never know that there had ever been a village there. Completely buried.

  It was in those fields belonging to that village, Kuzmichi, where contamination levels were between 15–40 Ci/km2, that Ermakov and his friend Yury drove the combine harvester up until 1991.

  Chapter VII

  EAST OF THE RIVER SOZH

  2002

  In September 2002, following Nesterenko’ s suggestion, we went to an area east of the river Sozh, a natural paradise that has metamorphosed into a kind of cursed no man’s land between the river and the border
with Russia which runs parallel to it. Nesterenko had told us of his discovery of a completely abandoned population, living in villages cut off from the world because of the Belarusian government’s policy, supported by United Nations agencies, of minimizing the effects of radiation.

  To understand the extent to which the people of this territory have been severed from the rest of the country you need to look at the map showing the contamination of Belarus, published in 2001 by ComChernobyl. There are fifteen large areas marked in a dark colour on the map within a narrow band of land, about 30 kilometres wide, which from South to North—from Gomel up to the Mogilev region—stretches for 150 km between the river Sozh and the Russian frontier, bordering the Bryansk region. They say that the radioactive clouds were seeded chemically from helicopters precisely on these areas so as not to contaminate Moscow145. The darkly coloured areas are concentrated in the eastern part of a much larger contaminated territory, covering about 15,000 square kilometres, that extends west beyond the river; on the map, the territory is marked in differing shades of colour depending on the number of curies per square kilometre. Within the shaded areas, of which six lie either side of the Russian border, the dark grey indicates contamination at a level higher than 40 Ci/km², similar to the levels found in the immediate vicinity of the exploded reactor. It is extremely dangerous to cross the area or to visit it on a regular basis. Also as radioactive strontium and caesium, plutonium (half-life of 24,000 years) has been detected. The government, which does not have the money to evacuate all the inhabitants from this stretch of territory, simply ignores them, to the extent of cutting off all aid and of dismantling the state and collective farms that used to provide them with food, transferring those farms to areas west of the river, that are scarcely less contaminated. In reality it is an incitement to flee individually or to disappear in silence, to become extinct in a kind of accelerated “natural” selection process. As Yury Bandazhevsky described in his report, it is “everyone for himself”. The recordings we made in this highly contaminated area, 200 km from Chernobyl, reveal a people who have been left entirely without means, protection or information, utterly abandoned.

  145 Urban myth? People who live there talk about it. Alla Yaroshinskaya quotes it in Tchernobyl, verité interdite, (Chernobyl, the forbidden truth), Arte-Editions de l’Aube, 1993.

  The joint communiqué from WHO/IAEA/UNDP, published on 5th September 2005 for the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl, is more than a little optimistic.

  As for environmental impact, the scientific reports are equally reassuring, as their evaluations show that, with the exception of the highly contaminated zone in a 30 km radius of the reactor, to which access is still forbidden, and certain enclosed lakes and forests with limited access, radiation has mostly returned to acceptable levels. “In most areas the problems are economic and psychological, not health or environmental”, claims Balonov, the scientific secretary of the Chernobyl Forum who has been involved with initiatives to restore normality since the disaster occurred.

  The inaccuracies, the falsifications and the omissions within this text, that manages in seven lines to brush aside questions of such gravity, are astonishing in view of the supposed expertise of the authors. The first falsification concerns the highly contaminated 30 km zone. These circles and half circles with a radius of 5, 30, 60, 100 km…around the reactor, have no meaning, because there are areas equally contaminated with caesium-137, as far away as 420 km from Chernobyl, northwest of Minsk, with 1–5 Ci/km². The “forbidden” zone around Chernobyl itself extends far beyond the area defined by the 30 km radius. There is a “finger” of contaminated land that extends 60 km northwest of the exploded reactor, and, as a result, is forgotten and not included in the so called “forbidden access” zone.

  Secondly, the fifteen “leopard spots” with similar levels of contamination referred to above, situated 150 to 260 km north east of Chernobyl, are totally ignored by the United Nations. It is not just a question of “forests with limited access”. There are hundreds of villages in this area, with contamination levels that vary between 5 and 40 Ci/km².

  Finally, knowing that hundreds of thousands of peasants are emprisoned in this radioactive territory, disinformed, without health protection and condemned to eat highly contaminated food, the inadequacy of the words they choose to minimise the danger of contamination—“radiation has mostly returned to acceptable levels”— would be scandalously superficial from the point of view of scientific precision, if it were not wilfully criminal, given the authority and influence that the report’s authors have over governments146. What does “acceptable” mean when we are talking about caesium, strontium or even plutonium lodged in the internal organs of a person who ingests these radionuclides on a daily basis? The most serious lacuna, as always with these authors, is their ignorance about low level internal contamination by radionuclides incorporated into the body through food. They continue to describe Chernobyl using the parameters defined by Hiroshima. They talk about exposure to external radiation, that has returned to acceptable levels, when, apart from in the immediate vicinity of the exploded reactor in the first weeks following the accident, the radiation has always been “low level”. None of the three words—“radiation”, “returned”, “acceptable”- correspond to the reality of the phenomenon that occurred at Chernobyl: external radiation has never been the main threat. So it cannot “return” to acceptable levels. As for the term “mostly”, it is perfectly in tune with their style: it means everything and nothing. This text is a soothing, deceitful, public relations exercise, containing nothing scientific. The ignorance, “duly sanctioned” by these people, who preach the need for “precise information”, finds its equal in cynicism only in the policy they support.

  146 What is being formulated here, in this injunction to obey in the name of the “international community”, constitutes scarcely veiled economic blackmail: “The governments of the three countries most affected realised that they must define the route to be followed clearly and go ahead only on the basis of a firm consensus as to the environmental, health and economic consequences, taking advantage of judicious advice and support from the international community”. Judicious advice! But more to the point, who is the “international community”, which promises the carrot... and the stick?

  Accompanied by Lisa, from Moscow, who translates our urgent exchanges with our Belarusian friends, the irreplaceable Romano with his camera, and Emanuela who edited all the films we made about Chernobyl, we camped for eight days in an abandoned house in Staraya Kamenka and we filmed and recorded the inhabitants of four of the villages in this strip of condemned land.

  Gaishin, 225 km from Chernobyl, 5–15 Ci/km²; 12 km from an area where contamination exceeds 40 Ci/km²;

  Staraya Kamenka, 225 km from Chernobyl, 5–15 Ci/km²; 7 km from an area where contamination exceeds 40 Ci/km²;

  Volyntsy, 210 km from Chernobyl, 5–15 Ci/km²; 5 km from an area where contamination exceeds 40 Ci/km²;

  Kliapin, 205 km from Chernobyl, 5–15 Ci/km²; 7 km from an area where contamination exceeds 40 Ci/km².

  Chapter VIII

  STARAYA KAMENKA

  225 km from Chernobyl, 5–15 Ci/km2; 7 km from an area an area with contamination levels above 40 Ci/km2.

  1. THE ABANDONED SACRED SPRING

  Nesterenko and Lisa chat as they lead us towards the sacred spring. He tells her the history of Kliny, the buried village.

  Nesterenko.—This stream, with its wonderful water, ran alongside the village of Kliny and all the vegetable gardens backed on to it. The people here put their milk and meat in a barrel and put it in the stream, to preserve it. With a temperature of 7 degrees C, the running water acted as a refrigerator. In this area, it measures more than 15 Ci/km². Everything they were growing exceeded the admissible levels. There was no choice, the decision to evacuate everyone was right. It was dangerous because all the houses were contaminated. To pre
vent anyone coming back to live there, they brought bulldozers, dug huge trenches, and tractors pushed the houses in and buried them. You can see, all that is left are the electricity poles, because the village had electricity. Now, there is no life here. There were thirty houses and about seventy to eighty people. It was monitored continually: not a single product grown here could be eaten. Up till then, what was known about this village was that its inhabitants were never ill, because drinking this water, bathing in it, guaranteed that they would live to one hundred.

  Lisa.—Heaven and hell.

  Nesterenko.—Yes, heaven and hell met here: the sacred spring and radioactivity. This water is amazing. It never becomes stagnant, in other words, it does not contain any bacteria, it keeps for between three to five years, it is aseptic, rich in trace elements, and chemical analysis shows that it contains a lot of silver. I’m told that the water comes from a depth of 2,800 metres.

  Lisa.—How many villages like this should have been evacuated?

  Nesterenko.—I think they would have needed to evacuate more than 140,000 people. They needed to eliminate a few hundred villages, where no matter what agricultural measures were taken, clean food could not be produced. If the inhabitants here could not produce clean food, given that 80 to 90% of the contamination comes from food, there is no sense in living here even though the surroundings are magnificent. The earth needs to purify itself. Within a number of decades the contamination will have sunk down deeper and it might be possible to live here again. If it was possible to evacuate Staraya Kamenka, it could only be of benefit to the inhabitants…

  Lisa.—But caesium only disappears after three hundred years!

  Nesterenko.—For its complete disintegration. But fortunately it sinks down in the soil. I would say in this village that is very contaminated, in sixty to eighty years the caesium would have sunk down through the soil to a level below which the roots grow. The soluble caesium will have left the superficial layers of soil, and migrated down deeper, and food grown in the soil will become clean again.