Seriozha—Tolik rang me up to tell me about this initiative. We were studying at the same institute. Vera was with us too. I came round to Svetlana’s house…and we had to leave the next day. We had to leave straight away. For me, it was seeing the children, their faces, how they behaved, when I heard them express themselves, when they told us what they thought, that I began to understand what the Chernobyl catastrophe really was. I understood it better. It was probably the direct contact with these children. I saw what the real consequences of Chernobyl were. This is a wonderful project also because it really helps us to understand ourselves. It’s the sort of thing that we really don’t meet in our day to day lives. It’s completely different from the normal every day grind, with meetings that no-one really needs. The “system” is entirely absent, ideology has no role any more. It’s a different world, more natural. And you feel better.
S. Savrasova—I know loads of people who never think about Chernobyl. Just like me actually, at the beginning. I never thought about it in the first three years following the accident. I only went into the zone three years later. I was completely uninvolved. Hearing about it upset me. I never read anything about it, not plays, books, newspaper articles. It was only later, when my own child was directly affected that I had to open my eyes. At the beginning the desire to think that everything was alright was so strong that despite the allergies and the other problems she had, I didn’t want to make the connection. The shock we had all experienced made us lie even to ourselves. Today I have no more illusions, and that makes me unhappy sometimes. We’d been told so many times that we were the best, we were the happiest. That helped us to live. It may not have been true but it made life easier.
However, immediately after Chernobyl the order was given to persuade pregnant women to have abortions. It wasn’t said openly but I know because I went to the clinic for consultation because I was pregnant. It was like a mowing machine—everyone passed through it. Their arguments were unbelievable. “If you want to give birth to a two headed baby, go ahead”. The women were given this message right from the start. They had to just accept it. I had a friend who had just gone through a seven month sterility treatment. She got pregnant and they made her have an abortion. She still hasn’t got any children.
First we got Chernobyl, then the men in white coats. There are things that go on in this country that can’t be explained by normal logic. The decision was probably made “to be on the safe side” by some civil servant at the Ministry of Health. To avoid the thing they feared, that millions of monsters would be born. They had no idea how things were going to turn out. The authorities take decisions without taking any scientific data into account, I think Chernobyl has shown this very well.
For the first year after the accident, it was officially forbidden to leave the area so as not to create panic. You have to remember that in the USSR we had interior passports and if you wanted to go somewhere else, you had to have a travel permit, authorisation. People who left areas that were too contaminated could not obtain the legal right to settle anywhere else, they were fined, a child would not be accepted in school or nursery, a mother could not join the library, a grandmother could not buy her medicines because she was not registered at the dispensary. They were pariahs. Today, you are allowed to leave, but wherever you go, attitudes are the same, you’ll be shunned like the plague, your child will have to sit away from the others in the refectory or in the crèche, he’ll have to sleep separately from the others. I’ve known several families from the area who left and came back after two years, because they were rejected everywhere they went, hounded out. They heard all these ludicrous stories about how people from the contaminated zone glow at night. Ordinary people are naïve, it’s how they react to things. When the children go to Russia to the pioneer camps, they come back with better blood results, but they all came back in an anxious state because of the way they are marginalised.
Q.—Did you feel that people wanted to go and live somewhere else?
S. Savrasova—Yes, but now we’re seeing different reactions in people. In the first year, everyone would have left. Now everyone talks about international aid. When someone has lived all their life in one house and has accumulated belongings and only receives 500 or 300 roubles compensation for the family, when at Bhopal, in India, they know each victim gets 25,000 dollars, they start to fight, not for a new house in the uncontaminated zone any more but for social justice and that has a negative aspect. People would rather their child receive a certain amount of radiation if it gets them a little compensation money. And then on top of all that, there is a big psychological problem. People start developing a kind of begging mentality. It can lead to situations where someone expects a subsidy while their child is dying.
Q.—In what spirit do you organise children’s travel abroad?
S. Savrasova—Going abroad really does help their health. For me as a woman that’s the important thing. A month in Poland, for instance, prevents them falling ill for three months, once they return to the contaminated zone. And I want the people who look after the children in Europe to realise that Chernobyl is not our problem, yesterday’s problem, but their problem, tomorrow. Radioactivity doesn’t stay in one place. It takes no notice of borders. Today it affects our children, tomorrow it could be yours.
I was walking through the village of Khoiniki. A woman came running over to me. “Did you take some of the milk?” I didn’t understand. “If you took some, throw it away!” According to the existing norms, each child should receive half a litre of clean milk every day. The milk is delivered once or twice a week. Sometimes the milk that was thought to be clean is replaced by radioactive milk. And the women were running from one yard to the next warning people not to give it to the children. Imagine the state of mind of those mothers who have just given some milk to their child! The farms in the zone are still in production. The cows look quite healthy. When someone asked a minister why these farms were still working, he said “In our socialist system, there should not be any unemployment. After all we can’t pay people to do nothing!” So the authorities would prefer us to produce radioactive milk and meat. If clean milk, meat and other food products can be brought in to the people living in these dangerous areas, why not wood from forests near Moscow or Leningrad? I can well imagine a woman in these peasant villages stocking her fire with these radioactive logs. The wood burns, a bit of ash falls into the soup. Instead of bacon flavoured bortch she makes…I don’t know…strontium flavoured bortch. With the radioactivity inside these stoves, it’s like having a reactor in the house. The stoves have been transformed into household reactors. The woman empties the ash into a bucket and then spreads it all over her vegetable plot. That’s what everyone does, her mother and grandmother before her. No-one will ever have told her that she should bury the radioactive waste. And then the hens come along and forage among all this radioactive waste and then they lay radioactive eggs. This is how the contamination perpetuates in the zone, the process never stops. And they’re doing it all with their own hands, these poor wretches living in these villages like guinea pigs.
Q.—Do people understand the whole truth today?
S. Savrasova—I don’t think so. Where I live, I know people don’t understand it. And anyway, what is the truth? All of us have our own truth. The children are growing up and every one of them has their own version of the truth. A girl of 14 wrote to me: “I go out in the garden and I see my sister and her friend splashing around in the slush. Two little girls playing around in radioactive mud. I’m so frightened for them! We’ve already had a life, but they’ve got their life in front of them! How is it possible that they are there playing around in this radiation?” This is a girl of 14 who writes that she has “already had a life”. This is one more “truth” about Chernobyl. There are many destinies and many truths. Some want information, others don’t. You can give every possible explanation to one person, but if they’re only interested in their vegetable
plot, it’s a waste of time. A different person will insist on finding out more and eventually will understand something. Take me for example. I don’t really know the full extent of the disaster. When I was studying at the Institute of Radio Engineering the government was putting out an enormous amount of propaganda about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Now most days the disinformation makes me feel as if I am falling down a well and life drifts by, leaving us suspended and anxious. I’m not sure that even with the information I get, with my training and through the contacts I have with scientists and with the children, that I understand the true scale of the tragedy. I don’t think so.
This year, I was able to send 1500 children on holiday to Poland. We wanted to take blood samples from all the children, but many of them refused because they really couldn’t face it again. But when it came to filling out their medical records, it turned out that there was nothing to fill in. The hospital gave them a certificate to say they didn’t need any medical treatment, they were doing fine, they were in good health. When I said that all the children should be examined in the hospital and the results written into their records, I was told that there weren’t enough doctors to do this, that half of them had left and the other half were so overworked that they couldn’t take that on as well. But doctors arrive from Moscow all the time; they take samples of blood from these children and do not report the results of their analyses. They do loads of tests on people but no-one tells us anything. I make enormous efforts to resist the thought that the whole area is an immense human laboratory. It’s a terrifying thought. Our own National Front of Belarus9 has stated that there is an agreement at international level that includes organisations for the development of the nuclear industry. An enormous experiment could be going on here right now.
9 Independence Party
Svetlana Savrasova was the first person we filmed in the Chernobyl territories. Naturally I did not believe this hypothesis to be real, a hypothesis that she herself tried hard not to believe. I interpreted her remark as a “rumour”, a kind of collective psychosis among a population traumatised by the accident and deprived of reliable information by a totalitarian state. I had already come across the phenomenon in Armenia in 1988, when the country was devastated by an earthquake. Glasnost had awakened in the citizens the desire for national sovereignty and the possibility of escape from under the Soviet yoke. The earthquake of Leninakan was perceived by many Armenians as a deliberate attack from Moscow to sabotage the move towards independence. The mainstream Soviet media had no credibility with the people, and some quite extraordinary stories began to circulate, including the idea that the Soviets had deliberately set off underground explosions. On the other hand, Svetlana’s hypothesis about an enormous laboratory experiment, however unbelievable, did remind me of an unpleasant conversation I had had the week before in a restaurant on the top floor of the hotel in Minsk. A German guest, obviously recognising a fellow Westerner had installed himself at my table and we began a kind of “foreigners abroad” conversation. He wasn’t actually a journalist. He described himself as an economic advisor for the area. We ended up having a heated argument. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to lecture me about the real consequences of the Chernobyl accident: the effects of radiation on health were exaggerated, lies told by a poverty stricken population to elicit sympathy and maybe even funds. The stress caused by the economic situation, alcoholism and the cover up by the communist authorities had not helped their state of health, he acknowledged, but it had nothing to do with Chernobyl. I was struck by the contempt and categorical assurance of this well-dressed Westerner, well fed with uncontaminated food, who felt able to deny what had not yet been studied. “Coloniser, occupier, an official on mission”, these were the words that came to mind. I would meet many others like him in the next few years. This set me thinking. An official working for whom and for what? Had he been sent in a professional capacity, like an agent in a war situation? Unlikely. More plausible, a well paid official, with a certain approach to reality, whose ideology corresponded to his superiors. I was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s concept regarding Eichmann of “the banality of evil”. The notion of some nuclear experimental lager (concentration camp) still seemed far fetched, but it chimed with the categorical arrogance of my Western dinner guest. The interview with Yury Shcherbak in Kiev that I conducted soon after finally cleared the matter up for me. He too surprised me with a quote, that I had not heard before, from a French professor and I was reminded of Hannah Arendt again.
2. YURY SHCHERBAK
Yury Shcherbak, doctor, writer, leader of the Green movement in Ukraine in 1990, and elected deputy in the first “democratic” Supreme Soviet of the USSR, was one of the first to unmask the lies and fraudulent information concerning the accident at Chernobyl. Twenty-five years have gone by since this interview. It remains a valuable historical document revealing not only the hopes raised during this brief period of democratisation but also the convergence, that began in the first weeks after the accident, between Western experts and the Kremlin, that Bella Belbéoch had so clearly predicted.
Y. Shcherbak—1986 was a huge shock to the whole of our society, and it was only in 1987 that we began to realise what the explosion at Chernobyl had done to our people and to our country. It was at this point that opposition began to form. At the beginning the opposition wasn’t specifically political but, let’s say, ecological. We made a series of key demands, a series of principles that could be reduced to this: they needed to tell the whole truth about the extent of the accident and of its potential consequences; they needed to tell people the truth about the degree of contamination of the environment and of food products; they needed to tell the truth about the possible health effects both now, and in the future, over a long period, twenty to thirty years from now; and they needed to ask for help from the international community. And there was another series of demands made by the opposition. The system ignored them totally. Because they had no intention of telling the truth to their citizens, and they were not going to transform the Chernobyl accident into a subject of international discussion. They organised a good number of conferences, but they never gave any concrete figures. Western specialists came here, but our people told them lies. The Ministry of Health lied cynically to the people whose lives it was supposed to protect. This situation lasted for years. But the problem of Chernobyl grew; it was no longer possible to contain it. The situation in the country was changing. The number of people who were willing to speak freely was increasing. Political organisations were multiplying. Then finally, after three or four years, the State and the Communist Party began to realise they were losing ground. Of course, Chernobyl was being used by the opposition forces in the fight against the Communist Party. So, because they were the ruling party, the Communists understood that this was a very serious issue. They had lost their seats in many regions in the elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in the USSR. In the Ukrainian Parliament a third of the deputies elected to serve belong to the opposition parties. So the Communists also began to meet the demands of society, and revealed a series of facts and figures, and called for international aid.
Today, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the disaster, we know much more about its consequences than in the earlier years when there was total secrecy. Government policy has changed in that regard. Furthermore, the government has acknowledged that it was a global accident of enormous proportions, the most serious accident of the twentieth century. They have also acknowledged something that they previously denied—that they cannot deal with the problem by themselves and have now appealed to the international community for help. The appeal was made at the UN forum by Ukraine, Belarus, members of the UN and the Soviet Union. So today, the problem of Chernobyl is out in the open. It has been presented to the international community, which had already begun to forget about it, in a completely different light. In the early years, especially in 1986, Soviet propaganda had claimed that we had dealt succ
essfully with all the consequences of the accident, that everything was fine, there was no tragedy. This policy was maintained for three and a half years. People in the West were even surprised to see the issue back on the table. Why have you started to talk about Chernobyl again today? Why ask for help suddenly after three, four years? You didn’t need help before? We had to explain that there had been a change in government policy. Thanks to the pressure from the political opposition.
Q.—Is the whole truth being told now?
—No. We still do not know who it was in the first three days that gave the order not to talk about the accident to the international community. Exactly who was it? Was it Gorbachev? Ryzhkov? The Politburo? The Council of Ministers? Who? We don’t know. We don’t know the circumstances that prevailed during those days.
—Maybe it wasn’t anyone?
—You’re right...
—Maybe it was just the system.
—It’s possible that it was just the system. It’s anonymous, it functions all by itself, it’s a self-regulating system. It’s perfectly possible. We set up a commission within the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to investigate all the circumstances of the accident. A similar commission was created in the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine. Ukrainian MPs have access to documents in Ukraine, but we will have access to even more crucial materials. I think some things will become clearer although some key witnesses, who knew everything, are no longer with us. For instance Shcherbina, Legasov...
—Who is Professor Ilyin?
—Professor Leonid Ilyin is the former vice-president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, director of the Institute of Biophysics at the Academy of Medicine, a very secretive organisation, and he chaired the USSR’s Committee on Radiological Protection. So he is a scientist, a radiologist, and a medical doctor. Where is he from? He belongs to the military-industrial complex that produces atomic weapons. These doctors are sworn to secrecy in the same way as the engineers, physicists and chemists working in this area. They study the effects of nuclear explosions. They study the diseases of people working in these enterprises. All of them are covered by official secrets legislation. And Dr. Leonid Ilyin is a very brilliant representative of the military industrial complex, working on the medical side. He is a nuclear scientist in a white coat. Over the issue of Chernobyl, he proved to be extremely reactionary. There is evidence—entirely convincing—I saw the secret documents myself—that Leonid Ilyin and Professor Israel advised the Government of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Politburo against evacuating children during the first days of May.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 5