The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  34 See Glossary, p. 599 “Ionising radiation α, β, γ”.

  With the scientist Ilyin’s seal of approval (he is a medical doctor!), the threshold of 35 rem, which was only allowed for workers in the nuclear industry who in principle were protected, became the acceptable level of radiation for everyone: children, pregnant women, the old, and the infirm. In reality, the permissible level for the general public recommended by international radiation protection authorities is five times lower. Given the soviet system of “internal passports” which restricts people to residence in the same area for the whole of their lives, the principle of 35 rem lifetime dose, established a veritable radioactive gulag, in which 9 million people, according to Kofi Annan, were condemned to struggle every day with levels of radioactivity up to 5 times higher than natural background radiation, with terrible “proximity effects” on organ tissues, through the incorporation of radionuclides and “hot particles”.

  This measure was presented as if it conformed to international recommendations and was contested by a group of Belarusian scientists from the Academy of Sciences. Yury Shcherbak recounted how the combination of glasnost and the silence and lies about the Chernobyl disaster was transforming society. Instead of 35 rem, these scientists demanded a 7 rem over 70 years, which corresponded in fact to the limit that was internationally recommended by the ICRP since 1985 (the Paris declaration): an annual dose of 0.1 rem.

  March-July 1989: political tension in the USSR. The disaster is recognised and denied.

  Disagreement between the Moscow experts and the Belarusian scientists—in other words between the central powers and the academicians supported by public opinion—emerged during debates in the Belarus Soviet in March 1989, right in the middle of the electoral campaign for the first democratically elected Soviet of deputies of the people of the USSR held on 26th March 1989. A special session was devoted to the “35 rem in a seventy year life-span”, in June at the Academy of Sciences of Belarus in Minsk.

  Meanwhile the totalitarian system is reaching crisis point both at the top and at the periphery of the empire. The nationalist aspirations of non-Russian Republics are awakening, fuelled by the citizens’ desire to break free and claim their rights. But unrest is also being fomented and manipulated by forces hostile to the idea of perestroika in order to justify repression of the growing democracy. In the interval that separates the election of the USSR parliament on 26th March and the session of Congress fixed for the 26th May, there is a massacre, on 9th April 1989 on Boulevard Roustaveli, of Georgian demonstrators at prayer in front of the government palace at Tbilisi, in Georgia. The massacre is prepared and decided on in Moscow, by the Conservative Ligachev, the Minister of Defence, Yazov and by the head of the KGB, Chebrikov, while Gorbachev is visiting Great Britain.

  But this Soviet-style Tiananmen Square has the opposite effect of the events in Peking. The institutional reforms introduced by Gorbachev allow people to express themselves in a legitimate forum, a few weeks later at the first Congress of Deputies. During twelve days of televised debates, the repression in Tbilisi and the lies and crimes of the State are denounced—morally and politically—before a television audience of 300 million people. At last, the accident at Chernobyl begins to appear in the eyes of the world for what it really is: a catastrophe, the dimensions of which can no longer be kept secret on grounds of national defence. Nevertheless, its effects on the environment and on the health of the population will be denied authoritatively by UN Agencies, a few months later.

  In May 1989, during a debate at the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, deputies accuse the political office of the Communist Party (the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and the government of the country of covering up the real situation after the accident at the Chernobyl power station, and of failing to implement adequate protective measures at the time of the accident and thereafter. Those in power defend themselves saying they did not known anything about the contamination in certain regions and that the scientists had not put forward any proposals to protect the inhabitants. It is at that moment, during a conversation on the telephone with Andrei Sakharov, that Nesterenko tells him that in his archives, he has copies of letters and reports, dating from the first few days after the accident and covering a whole year (a thousand letters and notes), that he had sent to the authorities in which he reported radiation levels in all the contaminated areas, called for the evacuation of all inhabitants within a 100 kilometre radius around the nuclear power station, and for the mass distribution of stable iodine to children to protect their thyroid gland. Naturally, Sakharov suggests that he publish these documents. Nesterenko reminds him that all material concerning Chernobyl is a state secret and that publishing them without authorisation would be suicide, but on the other hand, the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR could get them declassified. “Declassify information about Chernobyl and I will publish them” says Nesterenko. Sakharov organises the declassification. A selection are then published in Nos 5,6 and 7 of the newspaper Rodnik (The spring) in 1990.

  June 1989.To shore up the breach opened by the Belarusian scientists who are demanding a lifetime dose of 7 rem instead of Ilyin’s 35, the same three members of WHO, will be sent to the Minsk Academy of Sciences in June, to attend a special session devoted to “35 rem over seventy years”. P. Waight is director of WHO’s working group on Radioprotection; Dan Beninson, president of the ICRP; Professor Pellerin was head of SCPRI—Service Central de Protection contre les Rayonnements Ionisants, attached to the French Ministry of Health. These heavyweights, with the institutions behind them, tip the balance and regally announce their conclusion. On the 28th May 1998, nine years later, Professor Nesterenko recounts these events to me:

  The experts from the ICRP arrived in Belarus in June 1989. A meeting took place that day at the Academy of Sciences. There were many contributions. I intervened to describe the situation and put forward my arguments. One member of the ICRP retorted: “Should the 3 million inhabitants of Madhya Pradesh in India (where the disaster at Bhopal took place) have been evacuated? I replied that the Indian Government had not asked for my opinion and I had no lessons to teach them but that it was my duty to advise my government: we must evacuate the inhabitants of all areas where an uncontaminated food supply cannot be guaranteed. Because today, 80–90 % of the radioactivity comes through the food supply. I was told: “In any case, you haven’t got the money to evacuate all those people, so you will have to put up with 70 to 100 rem rather than the recommended 35”. They kept saying things like that. The only explanation I could find for this kind of behaviour was that these people were only interested in obtaining experimental data on the health impact of low dose radiation. It is the scientific data that they are interested in, not the health of the people. It is cynical, but that’s how it is. They treat us like guinea pigs. I consider it a crime35.

  35 Le piège atomique, Film TSI, May 1999.

  The report of the three Western experts was published in Sovietskaya Bieloroussia on 11th July 1989 under the title “The experts’ point of view”. The report disparaged those scientists who opposed the life-time dose limit supported by Soviet authorities: “Scientists who are not well versed in the health effects of radiation have attributed all observed biological and medical disorders to radiation exposure. These disorders cannot be caused by ionising radiation” (WHO, 1989). They added that “If they had been asked to fix a limit on the lifetime cumulative dose they would have chosen dose-limits two or three times higher than 35 rem”. The legal immunity enjoyed by the “experts” from WHO and from ICRP allowed them to say anything with impunity. These “experts” invoked psychological factors and stress to explain these biological disturbances.

  Bella Belbéoch comments “It is frightening the way these experts deny to the Chernobyl disaster the sad privilege of being a new phenomenon in medical experience and close the door on the only possible approach to understanding this new phenome
non; first, record all biological and medical information36”. This is what Anatoli Volkov was asking for and what Vassili Nesterenko and Yury Bandazhevsky, among others, would undertake, in a systematic and global fashion, refusing to submit to the official dogma.

  36 Bella Belbéoch op. cit.

  At the end of July 1989, during the session of the Supreme Soviet of the Socialist Republic of Belarus, the health and political authorities make use of the report by Waight, Beninson and Pellerin, that appeared in June, to override the objections of academicians from their own country, who were considered ignorant about radiological questions by the professors named above.

  But the rebellion still worries the powers that be, both in Moscow and in Vienna. It needs to be discredited by the Soviets themselves.

  On 14th September 1989, a group of 92 “scientists working in medicine and radioprotection in relation to the situation created by the Chernobyl accident” write a joint letter to Mikhail Gorbachev. Among the signatories was Ilyin of course, but also S. Yarmonenko—at the top of the list, A. Gouskava, M. Savkin and the Ukrainian, V. Bebechko. Twelve years later, in June 2001, we would film them at the international conference in Kiev, aggressive, and still obstinately anchored in negationism37.

  37 Cf. Part Six, Chapter II, p. 417

  The “92” defend their decision to impose a dose-life of 35 rem: “At every stage of its development, this limit has been established through systematic consultation using the rigorous expertise of different competent international organisations such as the IAEA, WHO, UNSCEAR which have examined it from all angles and given their approval”.

  Models for the calculation of dose limits and for radioprotection criteria used by the international nuclear lobby are all based on a single, fallacious scientific argument, as set out below:

  The justification for setting a limit of 35 rem as a life-time dose is reinforced by the findings of the long term monitoring of the health of the population exposed to very high levels of radiation—inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were victims of the atomic bombs […] It has been shown that increases in solid tumours in Japan only occurred with doses of radiation (an instantaneous massive exposure) above 100 rem, and in leukaemia and myeloma, above 50 rem. No increased level of genetic alteration was observed following irradiation.

  Some of the arguments used by the signatories to counter a life-time dose of 7 or 10 rem are very important, [as Bella Belbéoch notes.] The authors invoke the deep psychological stress and damage to health that would be caused by “the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people (up to 1 million) […] If the life-time dose of 7–10 rem were to be accepted as a criterion for being re-housed, this would affect the inhabitants of several large towns and regional centres”. Further on, doubts were expressed about the quality of medical care that could be guaranteed “in a plan to evacuate a million people”.

  One thing is clear. If a life-time dose limit of 7–10 rem had been adopted in September 1989, hundreds of thousands of people, possibly a million, would have had to be evacuated. If we compare these estimates with the official figures of inhabitants living in areas subject to radiological control, we see that it includes all of them (contamination exceeding 5 curies/km2)38.

  38 Bella Belbéoch op. cit.

  The journalist N. Matukovsky (Izvestia 26th March 1990) interviewed E. Petryaev, Doctor in chemical sciences at the faculty of Radiochemistry at the V. I. Lenin State University of Belarus, who told him:

  It is impossible to set a threshold over a lifetime for the following reason: to establish dose limits they only take into account caesium-137. But the affected areas were also contaminated with strontium, plutonium and a great bouquet of transuranian elements which, in the form of micro-dispersed aerosols, can penetrate the human body through respiration. The worst are the hot particles measuring a micron or more. In the Southern areas, in the Gomel region, there are between one and ten per square centimetre of soil. And all of these are in addition to the 35 rem!

  Quite honestly, the scientific controversy isn’t about curies or rem, it is about the numbers of inhabitants and which areas need to be evacuated. To be even more precise, it’s about money, about how many billions of roubles they are prepared to spend on the evacuation—10, 15 or 20 billion? What hypocrisy! And we preach that human life has no price…

  The USSR Congress of Deputies sets up a commission to analyse the causes of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station and to assess the responsibility of the government for failing to implement effective protective measures in the post-accident period. A standing group of experts, rebels against Moscow’s authoritarian and non-scientific stance, including around 200 specialists from the three Republics affected by the disaster, representing different scientific and technical domains, work at the heart of this commission. In the group are about twenty deputies, including Yury Shcherbak, Alla Yaroshinskaya, and the writer Ales Adamovich, who along with Andrei Sakharov will support the creation of Vassili Nesterenko’s independent institute Belrad. Nesterenko will direct the work of the commission in Belarus and then, from 1991, the independent Committee that brings together 200 specialists from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia that took over from the Commission of the Supreme Soviet, on the dissolution of the USSR.

  In October 1989, the Soviet nucleocrats ask their colleagues in the West for help once again. To regain legitimacy in the eyes of their people who are protesting through their elected representatives, the Kremlin asks the IAEA to put together a team of international experts to evaluate the consequences of the accident and the effectiveness of the counter measures undertaken by the authorities. Since the discussion that took place behind closed doors in August 1986 in Vienna, where Legasov’s Annexe 7 had been thrown into the bin, the central soviet power has rejoined the ranks. It has silenced the dissident scientists and is now asking for something in return. The IAEA sets up an international consultative committee, the International Chernobyl Project, headed by Doctor Itzuro Shigematsu, the representative of RERF—Radiation Effects Research Foundation39—an organisation financed by the American and Japanese governments to study the consequences of radiation on the victims of the atomic bombs in Japan. In accordance with the plan approved by the International Consultative Committee, between March 1990 and January 1991, around fifty missions visit the USSR, including, apart from the Soviets, 200 experts from 25 countries representing among others the IAEA, UNSCEAR, WHO, FAO and the Commission of the European Community. Their final report will be presented at the IAEA Conference in Vienna, 21st-24th May 1991. The message from the scientists is that radiation from Chernobyl has had no ill effects on the health of the population.

  39 See note 15, p. 53.

  On 21st May 1991, the IAEA unveils a 57 page summary of its report, presenting the scientists’ basic conclusions (IAEA 1991a). The publication of the report itself is delayed; neither the press nor independent experts have access to it before October 1991 (IAEA 1991b). In the meantime, the summary of the report and its accompanying press release inspire the following headlines in the newspapers. “UN Committee blames psychological stress not radiation for the problems around Chernobyl” (Washington Post 22nd May 1991), “Consequences of Chernobyl are psychological not physical” (Associated Press, 21st May 1991). The newspaper publishes this quote: “Of course, the inhabitants of the contaminated areas think they are ill”, declares Lynn R. Anspaugh, who was responsible for the medical section of this study. “All that comes, not from the radiation, but from the fear that it inspires…” For its part, Associated Press does not tell us anywhere that L. R. Anspaugh works for the US Department of Energy, to which the former Atomic Energy Commission is now attached. He is one of the principal authors of the “zero risk model” for the evaluation of the consequences of accidents at nuclear energy installations.40

  40 John W. Gofman—Chernobyl accident, Radiation Consequences for this and Future Generations,
1993.

  PART two

  KNOWLEDGE

  Chapter I

  VASSILI NESTERENKO:

  A PHYSICIST LOYAL TO HIS PEOPLE

  Galia Ackerman, the translator of Svetlana Alexievich’s book, “Voices from Chernobyl: The oral history of a nuclear disaster”41, remarks on the similarity between Vassili Nesterenko and Andrei Sakharov, the inventor of the Soviet H-bomb and winner of the Nobel peace prize. “Like Sakharov, Vassili Nesterenko worked for the Soviet Army in the nuclear domain ... But the time came when the regime that he had served so faithfully appeared to him (as it had to Sakharov) in a different light: after Chernobyl. At that point, he did something quite unheard of in what was still a totalitarian state... he decided, without any approval from his superiors, to stop the work he was engaged in at the Belarus Institute of Nuclear Energy ... Instead, he called on his staff to study the consequences of Chernobyl and to develop aid programmes to help the victims”.42 Dismissed from his post, he lives a precarious life financially, unlike other academics in Belarus, and fights tirelessly on behalf of the nearly 500,000 Belarusian children still living in the contaminated territories.