The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  Q.—Isn’t it dangerous to be eating all that?

  The widow.—Dangerous to eat it? Well, we eat it any way.

  The retired woman.—Immediately after Chernobyl they gave us imported food. Everything was imported…There were no cows or pigs, everything had been destroyed. Then they said the danger from Chernobyl had lessened. They allowed us to keep cows again, otherwise we would not have had any.

  Q.—Do the cows have leukaemia?

  The retired woman.—Look at mine. Last year we exchanged the cow at the collective farm because she had leukaemia. We were given another, a younger cow. They examined her, and there you are, she has leukaemia too. I think it’s because of the contami… something… from Chernobyl. And the children are so skinny, they aren’t growing properly, look at that one.

  I won’t live much longer, I’m ill; I had a stroke two years ago. I am 78 years old. Old age, illness…If I die tomorrow, what will my children live off? This is the reality of our lives. Things are really bad here. I don’t know what the government is doing. The old people like us, we can die. We’re reaching the end. But the young people? How are they going to live, the young people?

  Q.—For anyone who comes from outside the area and sees how beautiful it is, it seems like a paradise.

  The retired woman.—It’s like that at Msteslavl’. That’s where my other daughter lives. She writes to me and telephones: “Mum, come, we need help”. She has not even got the money to plant potatoes, nothing to plant in her vegetable garden. It’s three years now since they harvested anything. And this year everything is dead. The people here aren’t lazy, they work as hard as they can but they just can’t do it. It’s a very hard life. How will they carry on? Lukashenko came to a meeting in Slavgorod. He spoke and then he left. A commission came. They looked. Then what? They had a discussion and then they left. (She goes off).

  7. THE PEASANT WOMAN WEARING THE BLUE SCARF

  The peasant in the blue scarf.—We live on a kind of island. Around Korma it’s the same, everyone was evacuated. To get to Volyntsi you need a guide. There are three roads. One goes through… Bachovna, we go there to make hay… Before, there were so many people! So many young people! So many workers! They all left ... And on this side, this is the back road to Pezakovka. It’s covered in bushes… You wouldn’t get through. You’d have to take a saw to cut through all the branches… to clear the road. It’s impossible to get through. There’s no-one there any more… The people from Volyntsi come through. So, you have to go to Korma along the other bank, beyond the Sozh, it’s big, like a town, like Slavgorod. And there, there is a pontoon bridge, like the one at Slavgorod. And from there it isn’t far. But from here, I don’t know. First, you have to cross a stream, and the bridge has been demolished. Can you see how our streams are overgrown with bushes? There, it’s the same but worse. There’s nothing left around there. No-one lives there. All the houses have been burned down. They buried the houses, it’s like Khatyn, it’s a real massacre. They burned everything and… buried it all. Buried! They dug ditches and demolished the houses. All they said to us was that we should leave… No-one wanted to go. They told us the radioactivity wasn’t all that high, so we stayed. But five families did leave, even so. They were young…

  Chapter IX

  GAISHIN

  225 km from Chernobyl, 5–15 Ci/km²; about 12 km

  from an area with contamination levels above 40 Ci/km².

  Before plunging into the wilderness surrounding the deserted villages to reach Kliapin and Volyntsy, we accompany a group of men and women, squashed in with the milk containers on the back of a trailer wobbling to and fro as the tractor pulls it along. They are going to pick apples at the collective farm at Gaishin. There, in the orchard, thanks to one woman’s sincerity, we witnessed the discomfort felt by inhabitants who had benefited, unintentionally, from the plundering of their neighbours’ possessions.

  Q.—You’re from Gaishin?

  The woman.—I was born in Gaishin and I’ve lived here for fifty years. (She laughs a little at having inadvertently revealed her age). And you know, as far back as I remember, there were always lots of people here before Chernobyl. We built little houses, and we were all quite happy here. But since Chernobyl it’s all finished.

  —How was it that the collective farm of Staraya Kamenka was transferred over to you?

  —For the same reason. (She lowers her voice). Beyond the Sozh, at Staraya Kamenka, the radioactivity was very high. They decided to sack all the people at the collective farm, and bring them here. We took them into our collective.

  —But they should have been completely evacuated?

  —It wasn’t possible to evacuate all of them. Most of them were evacuated. Those who stayed came here.

  —Why wasn’t there a complete evacuation?

  —I don’t know. Lack of money, probably. They needed housing. And anyway, some people wanted to go, but others didn’t. Most of them left Gaishin, especially the young people. But I was born here and I can’t leave. I can’t! Whatever the radiation. Most of it, we ingested long ago.

  —Do you have children?

  —Three sons.

  —Already grown up?

  —Nearly.

  —Grandchildren?

  —A grandson.

  —How is his health?

  —It seems to be normal.

  —Do they live here?

  —Yes, they live here. Apparently things are OK. They are still young. But later, of course, all that will make itself felt. It’s certain... Of my three sons, one is doing his military service, the other is still at school, and the third works for the collective farm. We live…

  —Do you remember when the accident happened?

  —No-one even talked about it, at the time. Later, some time after, they began to tell us that there had been an accident and that a cloud had passed overhead. So then we knew. But what could we do?

  —Three, four years later?

  —Yes, about that. Two or three years later.

  —At the time, you weren’t given sufficient protection?

  —But how could we have been protected, from a cloud passing over us? (She points to the sky)

  —They give out iodine tablets for the thyroid, they should have done it as soon as possible.

  —It took a couple of years... But now the children, the schoolchildren go abroad each year for cures in sanatoriums, in holiday camps, abroad. But what will that do, if they have already been irradiated?

  —It’s possible to purify the body.

  —Is it?

  —The body purifies itself, as always, of anything that is not natural to it. But you can help to purify it more thoroughly and more rapidly. By taking pectin, for example, and by decontamination in a clean environment.

  —The countryside is still beautiful. Have you been down to the banks of the Sozh? It’s only now that it’s all covered in bushes. But before! The students from Minsk used to come on holiday every summer, to the banks of the river. They came from all the universities. It’s incredible how it used to be here! And now it’s all overgrown. It’s finished. All because of Chernobyl.

  Before visiting two other villages to the east of the Sozh, we visited the sanatorium, “Serebrennye Kliuchi” (Silver springs), at Svetlogorsk, where Galina Bandazhevskaya was examining some children from these villages.

  Chapter X

  A FIRST FOR GALINA BANDAZHEVSKAYA

  In September 2002, Galina Bandazhevskaya undertook a clinical study at the sanatorium, “Serebrennya Kliuchi” (Silver springs), with Professor Nesterenko and his team. The study investigated two hypotheses: on the one hand, the correlation between caesium-137 load in the body and symptoms of cardio-vascular disease in children, taking into account the origin and the nature of their diet; on the other hand, the therapeutic effects of an apple pectin cure, which could correct the cardi
ovascular disorders caused by incorporated caesium-137. The results were published in the journal Swiss Medical Weekly. 151

  151 Swiss Medical Weekly, 2004, No 134, p.725–729; www.smw.ch.

  Important significant data were obtained following the standard double-blind protocol. It was established that children who consume food grown at home or gathered in the forest in the villages in contaminated regions accumulated a lot of caesium-137 in the organism. They present with functional alterations in the cardio-vascular system, manifesting as complaints, heart murmur at the apex of the heart, high blood pressure and alterations to the electrocardiogram. The study showed that blood pressure and alterations to the electrocardiogram were correlated to the levels of accumulated caesium-137 in the organism. One important fact—the pathologies observed are reversible: a pectin cure administered as a food additive leads to a reduction in the concentration of radionuclides in the organism—this had already been shown before by Professsor Nesterenko’s work—and a new discovery—the electrocardiogram could be normalised. No-one had yet demonstrated the reversibility of heart problems in children contaminated by caesium-137 with a pectin-based cure.

  This study, which was completed at very little cost, contradicts the WHO and IAEA theses, that attributes the somatic illnesses experienced by people living in the contaminated territories of Chernobyl to stress or radiophobia, and it poses an unavoidable moral and political problem: national and international institutions responsible for the health of thousands of children contaminated by the accident at Chernobyl, can no longer justify their lack of medical intervention. The experiment proves that children affected by internal low dose radiological poisoning can be protected, and, in certain cases, cured by a simple and inexpensive cure. Continuing to refuse to finance these cures is inadmissible from the point of view of medical ethics and of institutional responsibility. Their negligence in this matter has already gone on for twenty-nine years, and during this time, children have suffered and died. Those who opposed the pectin cure all these years, without giving any valid scientific reasons carry a heavy responsibility that could lead to criminal prosecution.

  We posed the following questions to Galina Bandazhevskaya before continuing with our investigation with the families of some of these children.

  —Do you lack equipment?

  —Yes, of course. Using an ECG is a crude method: it only shows electro-physiological alterations in the heart at a particular moment, and this could be influenced by different factors. For example, a child who is being examined may be nervous: a pulse of 120 per minute, and their blood pressure has increased. We could examine them at lunch, when the child is calm, and their blood pressure would have stabilised. With only one ECG measurement… we don’t get very accurate data.

  —What do you need?

  —We would need a Holter monitor that can be attached to the patient to monitor them over a twenty four hour period; a good ergonomic bicycle and an echocardiogram. All that is expensive.

  —Did you have those machines at the institute, at Gomel?

  —No, no. We worked with the same equipment as we have now.

  —Not very accurate, as you say?

  —Yes. But we are dealing with a large group of children. And we also duplicated all these clinical examinations with laboratory tests and autopsy reports. So the illness we were diagnosing in the clinic could be confirmed by the pathologist. Bandazhevsky confirmed our observations in his experimental work. What we have done is only the first step towards a more in-depth study.

  —You have had to work in the conditions you describe through a lack of funds?

  —Of course. We have no money.

  —Where did the money come from to do all that?

  To start with, we were doing routine clinical work. We began with simple things, like electrocardiograms of children who were in good health. We knew these children were apparently in good health. They weren’t ill, they were in nursery. We had no idea what we were going to find... But when we found a large percentage of alterations in the electrocardiograms, we began to think: “Could this be linked to what they are eating, to caesium, etc?” That was when we began to compare the results obtained from the spectrometer and on the ECG, and we found a correlation. That is what led us to test our hypothesis through experiments and from the results of anatomopathological examination. But the institute could not afford the machines that we needed. We were only able to do this research through the support of our fellow professionals in the region, who worked voluntarily. This research was done without any funding…

  —Despite the lack of equipment, you still feel that you have shown a correlation between illness and Cs-137 in a sufficiently scientific manner?

  —It is very well founded. Solid. Because all this data is not the fruit of our imagination. We have shown the correlation through matching up our data according to three research methods. And we have shown that this problem exists, particularly in cardiology, and that this study needs to be followed up. In our work as clinical cardiologists, we are coming across cases of death from acute heart failure in young men of 32, 42, 45 years old: a man comes home from work, he lies down and he does not wake up again. Or else he goes into the kitchen to drink a cup of coffee, suddenly he collapses, he is dead—we had this case recently. It is a problem that really demands investigation. And certainly, the connection with Cs-137 needs to be studied. Why is this happening to young men?

  —Do you conduct autopsies?

  —Yes. Anatomopathologists, in particular Bandazhevsky, have described the alterations in cardiac muscle and the correlation with radioactive caesium. So what we are saying is that material of this sort, for a scientific study, is there. All we are waiting for is the order to study it in more depth.

  —You say the material exists?

  —Yes.

  —It could disappear?

  —It could be forgotten, not disappear. It has already been published, it’s in print. The slides that confirm the study are there.

  —Who has the slides?

  —These are Bandazhevsky’s scientific results. The evidence exists. It needs to be confirmed or disproved. In other words, undertake the in-depth research ourselves, we must do that. Our cardiologists, in collaboration with pathologists, morphologists, etc.

  —When they stopped your work, this material was not confiscated?

  —No, no. We have all that. The histological material. We have the slides, we have photographs of the histological preparations. If anyone is interested, we can make them available. These studies have been published in monographs, they can be consulted. But unfortunately no-one wants to do it. Because they are closing their eyes to it all. I know our scientific research institute. They say there is no problem with low-dose radiation: that there is the problem of stress, “The psychological state of the inhabitants, the evacuations, the stress, all these are having an indirect effect on people’s health, in particular on the cardiovascular system. But low-level radiation has no effect”. They’re not allowed to have an effect.

  Using two cameras, we filmed the first phase of the work being done at the “Silver springs” sanatorium: on the one hand, the technicians from Belrad who were measuring, using an armchair spectrometer, the amount of Cs-137 accumulated in the children’s bodies, and in another room, Galina Bandazhevskaya, with the help of a nurse, listens to their heart, notes down their complaints, what pain they have and records their ECG. Galina had no knowledge of the data from the spectrometer, which was recorded on the technicians’ computer. The children did not know what levels of caesium they had accumulated. On their side, the technicians did not know the health status of the children, when they presented themselves to be measured. At the end of sixteen days, during which the children ate uncontaminated food and had a daily dose of pectin, the procedure was repeated in order to record any changes that had occurred either in the Cs-137 load in the organism, and
any alteration in cardiac symptoms. This “double blind” process, in which neither side of the operation knows the results of the other, is essential to establish, without subjective interference, a quantitative correlation between levels of contamination and illness.

  At the moment that we left to research the families of some of these children in the last two villages that we visited, the Belrad technicians gave us a copy of the measures they had recorded. So we knew the contamination levels at the start of the experiment but we did not know yet if the pectin had reduced, and if so by how much, the Cs-137 load, nor whether there had been any benefit to their health. At the end of the experiment, the Belrad institute sent us the results that had been validated by the ethics committee. I reproduce in summary the data along with Galina Bandazhevskaya’s conclusions, at the end of each meeting with the families152. It should be noted that in certain children who presented with two symptoms on the ECG, one of the two symptoms disappeared after only sixteen days of treatment with pectin (In its place I have put a line of dots). 153

  152 The names have been replaced with pseudonyms in order to respect the confidential character of the diagnoses.

  153 This study was published in the Swiss Medical Weekly, 2004, No 134, p.725–729; www.smw.ch.

  I need also to specify that our journalistic enquiry is independent of the educational work provided by the teams from Belrad for the families of these children. In any case, the villages of Kliapin and Volyntsy that we were to visit are not monitored by Nesterenko. Due to lack of financial means, Belrad is only able to monitor a small proportion of the 1,100 villages in Belarus, where the milk is contaminated above 50 Bq/l according to the official figures published in 2000. Some of these villages are monitored by the German rehabilitation institute Julich.