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Although the loudest protests over Chernobyl came from the Kiev Region, only 20 per cent of the radionuclides spewed out of the fourth reactor had in fact fallen on the Ukraine. Ten per cent had settled on parts of the Russian Republic, and the remaining 70 per cent had fallen on Belorussia.
The initial docility of this Soviet republic in the aftermath of the accident sprang partly from the nature of its people and partly from its particular history. In a land largely composed of forests, meadows and swamps, its inhabitants were often dismissed by the supposedly more sophisticated Muscovites and Ukrainians as boulbash, ‘onion eaters’. Living in isolated villages, the peasant population had, even at the best of times, little contact with the outside world. When it did impinge on them, it had only brought suffering: World War I, the Revolution, the collectivization of farms, and finally World War II, in which a quarter of the population had been killed. Even before then many of the ablest Belorussians had either emigrated or had been exterminated. One of the by-products of glasnost was the discovery, in the woods at Kuropaty on the outskirts of Minsk, of the remains of three hundred thousand people shot under Stalin by the NKVD.
At the time of the accident, the general secretary of the Belorussian Communist party was N. Slyunkov. A tough, conservative industrial administrator with a penchant for grandiose projects, he combined contempt for intellectuals with a determination to keep the Kremlin off his back by demonstrating unquestioning loyalty to the Politburo.
Immediately after Chernobyl a Belorussian nuclear physicist had gone to the Central Committee in Minsk to warn of the dangers from fallout, but was only taken seriously when he started to read off measurements in the offices of the Central Committee itself. However, the levels were low; only in the provinces around Mogilev and Gomel were they high, far from the children and grandchildren of the party leaders in Minsk. Consequently, there was none of the anxiety in the Belorussian Politburo that was so apparent among the Ukrainian leaders in Kiev.
Moreover, because Minsk was a smaller city, there were fewer indigenous scientists and intellectuals to question the party line. At the Institute of Nuclear Energetics, a professor of nuclear electronics, Stanislas Shushkievicz, noticed the increase in the levels of radiation and telephoned the authorities in alarm, only to be told that everything was under control. Later his dosimetric equipment was impounded, but he secretly designed and made new instruments. In addition, students at the university were taught how to measure radiation using samples of condensed milk from the Gomel region.
Evacuation had been organized from the Belorussian sector of the thirty-kilometre zone by the area civil defence chief, headquartered in Khoyniki. Twenty-six thousand people and thirty-six thousand head of cattle were removed from contaminated land. In Minsk, a deputy chairman of the Belorussian Council of Ministers headed a committee for the elimination of the consequences of the accident. The Belorussian health minister, Nikolai Savchenko, acknowledging that initially ‘many economic leaders and citizens displayed unconcern and elementary medical incompetence,’ coordinated the efforts of the medical commission in Moscow. By June 1986, sixty thousand children had been sent to holiday camps in a belated attempt to remedy the failure to provide iodine prophylactics on time.
Despite the heavy-handed regime of General Secretary Slyunkov, some protests about inadequate care were possible. In December 1986, the Moscow magazine Argumenti i Fakty published the complaints of four women living in the towns of Bragin and Komarin to the Belorussian Council of Ministers that while local officials had evacuated their own children, no one had bothered about those of the ordinary people. The same suspicion of their local leaders was felt by workers in the October Revolution collective forty kilometres north of the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Alexei and Antonia Dashuk and Fyodor and Olga Tithonenko, all about sixty years old, were told that it was safe to stay in their homes, but they noticed that the inhabitants of the two neighbouring villages were being evacuated and that these happened to be the villages in which the collective bosses lived.
With the departure of the collective, the Dashuks and Tithonenkos were told to join the local state-owned farm at Strelichevko. The Dashuks continued to live in their own home, a spacious wooden house with five rooms, a verandah, a cellar, a barn and half a hectare of land. They were told not to go into the forest, but the state farm continued to produce food, which it sold to the state. They grew and ate their own vegetables and made their own alcohol, but the cows were gone, and they were given an allowance of thirty rubles each to buy milk imported from outside the region.
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Despite the liquidation of the Belorussian intelligentsia by first the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis, there were some survivors whose children took advantage of glasnost to promote cautiously the interests of their country. Zyanon Poznyak, an archaeologist, the grandson of an early nationalist leader, began the excavations at Kuropaty that uncovered the remains of the Bolsheviks’ victims and, following the example of the Baltic states, founded a national front. Stanislas Shushkievicz, the scientist at the Institute of Nuclear Energetics, whose father had been sent to the gulag by Stalin for writing children’s stories in the Belorussian language, ran for the Supreme Soviet and was elected a people’s deputy. However, the man who was most outspoken in his criticism of the way his compatriots were treated after Chernobyl was not the child of an intellectual, but a man who had been born in a village in central Belorussia and had started fighting the Germans at the age of fourteen.
Even before the accident, Ales Adamovich had been a critic of nuclear power. Never considered ideologically sound, he had nonetheless established himself as a writer, critic and filmmaker, expounding a form of humanism that diverged from the party line. With the advent of glasnost, he had been among the first to insist on naming Stalin as the perpetrator of some of history’s most atrocious crimes, accusing him of deliberately organizing the famine of 1930–31 and referring to him and his henchmen as ‘butchers’. To orthodox Communists this was blasphemy, and in September 1988, outraged by the failure of the authorities to punish Adamovich for this slander, a retired public prosecutor brought a charge of defamation against him in the courts. It was dismissed.
In the same month, there was a further triumph for Adamovich when it was announced that the nuclear power station being constructed near Minsk was to be converted to fossil fuel. His reputation rose both in his native Belorussia and among his colleagues in Moscow. After the failure of Ligachev’s coup and the triumph of Yakovlev’s liberal interpretation of glasnost, it was the Cinematographers’ Union that had first swung behind the new party line, and it was by the Cinematographers’ Union, not the Belorussian people, that Adamovich was sent as a delegate to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989.
To Adamovich, the campaign against Stalinism and nuclear power were one and the same; Chernobyl and Kuropaty were both aspects of the same historical phenomenon. The cruelty that had led the Bolsheviks to liquidate Belorussian patriots or to starve the Ukrainian kulaks in the 1930s was the equivalent of their successors’ condemning the Belorussian people to a lingering death from the effects of radiation and hiding the truth of what they had done with the same lies and false propaganda. Like Shcherbak in the Ukraine, Adamovich was determined to expose those responsible for ‘the big lie’ and to remove them from power.
Just as in neighbouring Lithuania, where mass protests against the regime had begun by demonstrating against the dangers of the Ignalina nuclear power station, so in Belorussia outrage over Chernobyl was at the forefront of the democratic campaign. A movement called Chernobyl Shlyaka – Chernobyl Way – organized demonstrations in the streets of Minsk with banners advertising the levels of contamination in the different areas of the republic. In the wide boulevards of the sombre, neoclassical city, people in the milling crowd exchanged stories about illness in their region, while the democratic candidates running for election promised to fight for compensation and a Chernobyl law.
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Once elected, the new deputies continued their agitation. The president of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Plotonov, expressed doubts about the safety of the thirty-five-rem threshold. He was a mathematician and admitted his ignorance of nuclear science, but the remarks of the French scientist Francis Pellerin seemed to suggest that the Soviet government had left people in hazardous areas simply to save money. Of course there were experts in Belorussia. One, Professor Konoplia, like Grodzinski in Kiev arguing that no dose of radiation could be considered safe, became a national hero.
Another, Professor Vladimir Matuchin, a Russian who directed the Institute of Radiological Medicine in Minsk, supported the government’s point of view and, together with ninety-one other scientists on the State Commission for Radiation Safety, signed a letter supporting the thirty-five-rem control limit and the measures that had been taken for the protection of the population. Some months later, visiting Ilyn at the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow, Matuchin broke down in tears. He had been harassed and threatened by anonymous callers who said that if he continued to publish data in defence of the government, his family would be killed. Victor Knijnikov, the head of the laboratory at the Institute of Biophysics who had laid down the criteria for acceptable levels of contamination in food, was summoned to Minsk to give evidence at a session of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet along with two of his colleagues, one of whom had prepared a paper describing how no notable changes in the health of children in the contaminated zones had been found. But after the threatening speeches of the Belorussian deputies, the paper’s author declined to take the floor, leaving it to Knijnikov, a Jew, to face the charge of genocide.
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The campaign against the government’s experts on radiation was not confined to Minsk. In Leningrad, the director of the Institute of Radiological Hygiene, Professor P. V. Ramzayev, one of the foremost experts in Russia on the question, wrote an article that undertook an objective analysis of the radioactive danger in the affected zones. After its publication, he was told by an anonymous caller that if he continued he would end up with a hole in his head. Meeting Ilyn in Vienna, he said he would write no more on the subject of Chernobyl. ‘Leonid Andreevich,’ he said, ‘I have a wife and children. I must think of them.’
In Kiev, the director of the Institute of General and Communal Hygiene, Academician Mikhail Shandala, had in the wake of the accident led a team into the contaminated zone to do exhaustive research on the nutrition of the inhabitants and had found it dangerously deficient. However, when a proposal was put forward by Belorussian politicians to resettle up to a million people from land he considered safe, he had added his name to the ninety-one others from the State Commission for Radiation Safety.
After Romanenko’s removal as minister of health in the Ukraine, Shandala was quietly advised that he too should go. He not only had signed the letter but had given interviews ‘simplifying a complex situation’. ‘You are a clever man, Professor,’ he was told, ‘but the tide of public opinion is running against you.’ Afraid not just for his professional position but for the safety of himself and his wife, Shandala moved to Moscow, where he was nominated for the post of director of the Institute of Preventive Toxicology.
To the democrats and nationalists of RUKH and Green World, this was all to the good. Shandala, Matuchin, Ramzayev, Israel, Ilyn, Romanenko and Knijnikov were the heirs of Beria’s evil empire, which would only end when they fell from power. Their standing as scientists was no protection. Ilyn and Israel were threatened with prosecution, and now lived in fear of arrest and imprisonment. To have been in any way associated with the military-industrial complex; to have worked for an institute that was part of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building or the Third Division of the Ministry of Health or to have held notional rank in the KGB meant that they had collaborated with the crimes of the Stalinist state.
Just as the scientific issues were complex and open to different interpretations, so were the motives of many of those who joined battle in the aftermath of Chernobyl. On one side were the Soviet patriots – people like Ilyn, Romanenko and Guskova, who, unlike Alexandrov and Dollezhal, had no memories of life before the Revolution. Communism was the religion of Russia, and to love one’s country was to uphold its faith. With direct lines to the Politburo, there was no divergence in outlook between these men and their leaders; to Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, as well, Mother Russia was the Soviet state.
Behind these commanders came the troops, the scientists like Knijnikov and the doctors like Baranov. Inevitably, given the nature of their expertise, they had been employed by the defensive and coercive organs of the state, one which itself had a military structure and tradition going back long before the Bolshevik Revolution. To the democrats, nationalists and Greens, the subordination of the scientists to their superiors and the subordination of their superiors to the ideological imperatives of the state were proof enough that the scientists could not be trusted, and the wretched populace of the controlled zones was easily persuaded to agree.
However, the legacy of Stalin and Beria had also affected their victims. There was the simmering loathing of those like Professor Andrei Vorobyov, Lubov Kovalevskaya and Volodomyr Shovkovshytny, whose parents or grandparents had suffered from the Bolshevik terror, and also the self-disgust of those who in order to get a good job or to see their books published had gone along with the party line. Among the doctors who most vigorously condemned Ilyn was one who had watched without protest when dissidents were committed as lunatics in the institute where he worked. There had not been many such inmates – few had dared to dissent before glasnost – but when it had become apparent in 1988 that criticism would not only go unpunished but was actually encouraged and might well be a good qualification for the future, many seized upon the issue of Chernobyl to establish their democratic credentials.
In this time of rapid historical transition, there were also men and women who bestrode the two worlds. At the time of the accident at Chernobyl, Yuri Shcherbak, the leader of Green World in the Ukraine, had been a figure of sufficient standing in the party to be a member of the Writers’ Union. He had even formed part of the entourage surrounding Armand Hammer and Dr Gale on their visit to Kiev and Chernobyl in the summer of 1986. Although Gale’s later account of his two visits made no mention of him – the American named Romanenko and Shandala as his hosts – Shcherbak nonetheless recorded several conversations with this by now illustrious American, which he later included in his book.
Still referring to Lenin as ‘Our Leader’, Shcherbak nonetheless revealed a perplexed respect for the American doctor in his clogs and blazer, and a certain awe at the luxurious fittings of Hammer’s private Boeing. He also made a public confession of his cowardice in the pre-glasnost era:
For long years before April 1986 I had been pursued by a feeling of guilt … because I, a native of Kiev, a writer, a doctor, had passed by on the other side of the tragedy of my native town … which had occurred at the beginning of the sixties: the damp sand and water accumulated in Babi Yar, which the authorities wanted to make into a recreation area, broke through a dike and poured into Kurenivka, causing … destruction and … death.… And why did I remain silent? I could have collected facts, the testimony of witnesses, I could have found out and named those guilty of this calamity.… But I didn’t.
Chernobyl offered Shcherbak the chance to make amends.
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In contrast to Shcherbak was Volodomyr Shovkovshytny, the president of the Chernobyl Union, who before the accident had been a man of no standing at all. Only moderately talented as a poet and unexceptional as a nuclear technician, he would undoubtedly have remained, like the Ukraine, in undistinguished obscurity had not Chernobyl reignited his national pride. Raised in a house with a shrine not to Marx or Christ but to his people’s patriotic poet, Taras Shevchenko, it was not so much radiophobia as Russophobia that led Shovkovshytny to champion Chernobyl’s victims. The ‘Czars and princelings’ who had been the objects of
Shevchenko’s loathing were now, for him, the party bosses and Soviet officials who had been indifferent at the time of Chernobyl to the fate of the ordinary Ukrainian people:
So fly, my fledgling falcons, fly
To far Ukraine, my lads—
At least, if there you hardship find,
’Twon’t be in foreign lands.
Good-hearted folks will rally ’round
And they won’t let you die.
‘Good-hearted folks will rally ’round / and they won’t let you die’ was the principle behind the Chernobyl Union, which from its inception in 1987 sought both to help and to represent the interests of those who had suffered as a result of the accident. In 1990, a second organization, Chernobyl Help, was set up in Moscow by Robert Tilles, the engineer who had constructed the ‘biological wall’ in front of the ruined reactor. By means of telethons and other charitable drives, millions of rubles were raised to help the victims. Appeals were made abroad for medicine, as well as for help for the children of Chernobyl. Groups of children were sent on holidays abroad, to western Europe, Australia, and Cuba. Haunting pictures of children suffering from leukaemia brought a generous response, particularly from West Germany; the Bavarian Red Cross sent large consignments of medical aid, which was then distributed by the Chernobyl Union.
Both these charities had their critics. Some, like Professor Vorobyov, argued that when children had suffered from radiation, it hardly helped them to increase their dose by sending them on long flights to sunny countries. Others felt that a taste of life in the West only lowered the children’s morale when they returned to their villages in the Ukraine or Belorussia. The Chernobyl Union complained that Chernobyl Help hoarded its funds, keeping ninety million rubles on deposit in the bank; some of the former operators from the Chernobyl power station felt that some of those who worked for the Chernobyl Union had had nothing to do with Chernobyl and used the charity principally to arrange trips abroad for themselves and their friends.