"To my fellow countrymen, those who have died, those living, and those unborn..."
Chernobyl. For every
inhabitant of the world today, this word has come to symbolize a nuclear
nightmare, indeed marking a moment that began a new era for our planet. But before the seventh decade of the last
century, that name merely belonged to a small and ancient town in the Ukrainian
district of Polesye (population 14 thousand); it was bestowed upon one of the
most powerful atomic power stations of the former USSR when a Central Committee
of the CPSU determined Chernobyl to be the town nearest (18 km) to the station
being constructed, and automatically used the name. And that name stuck—despite the later, more
formal naming of the station after V.I. Lenin, and despite the
much larger city
which was immediately constructed in the station’s very shadow: Pripyat.
How many films have been made already, how much written and told about the Chernobyl catastrophe, an inexhaustible subject whose lessons human genius will never fully comprehend! With enough time, certainly. And yet, these mournful lessons could also come to nothing, on account of an international nuclear lobby that is increasingly using the world oil crisis to re-stimulate atomic engineering and expand full-scale to every corner of the earth—including huge construction plans for new nuclear power stations in Chernobyl-devastated Ukraine.
For the sake of a momentary benefit--huge profits for certain individuals and
corporations--nuclear lobbyists have managed to manipulate the international
Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) (4) into
criminally underestimating the consequences of a catastrophic technological
accident, and they would surely like to erase the name Chernobyl from mankind's
historical memory. But it is said that those who do not learn from the
mistakes of the past will be condemned to repeat them--to "step on the
same rake," as we say in Ukraine.
That is why today it remains an urgent task for humanitarians, and all people of good will, to continue to sound the Chernobyl bell so that its reverberation may be felt by every living person on the planet.
Clearly, it is impossible for one article to capture the immensity of the
problem posed by Chernobyl. But at the request of Dr. Natalia Fernandez
Diaz (5), Professor of Intercultural and International
Communications at the Free University of Barcelona, I shall try in this article
to illuminate but one of the unknown facets of this tragedy: the plight, the
unbearable burden, of women "singed" by Chernobyl ...
Except for the unexpected biographical portraits (including the deep, soul-wrenching confession of Lyudmila Ignatenko) contained in "The Chernobyl Prayer" of the Belarussian writer, Svetlana Aleksievich (a deep bow to her from all the Chernobyl victims for this truthful, if brief, chronicle!), it is possible to name only one book devoted to the women of Chernobyl: The Women of the Zone, by the Ukrainian writer and poet, Svetlana Jovenko. In truth, it would be best to devote a whole book to these wonderfully creative women (6), including the noted Ukrainian poet and researcher of history and ethnography, Lina Kostenko, from the Chernobyl Polesye--to the many women whose lives and creativity are intertwined with Chernobyl ... And certainly, women's destiny cannot be separated from universal destiny. Still, among other lessons, the Chernobyl accident confirmed the axiom that the burdens and troubles of life always lie heavier on female shoulders.
How many of these Chernobyl women were there, and how many will there still be? A hundred thousand? In the millions--if each one could be counted? Not only those victims still living (or more accurately, barely surviving), but those who no longer suffer, who have left this world, as well as those born since with insidious genetic defects, and those who on account of this inescapable trouble could not be born at all ...
I think that even many novels cannot suffice to consecrate fully even the female facet of the problem of Chernobyl. And each woman's portion is unique and tragic in its own way.
Thus I shall not now pause upon on the lot of those thousands of women working alongside the Accident Consequences Liquidation team (ACL) at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station (ChAES), women whose functions included providing sanitary, medical and food services for the actual “liquidators,” [those who who dealt directly with constructing the sarcophagus’] In fact, the official data from the Ministry of Emergency Measures of Ukraine lists only military men, 600 000 officers and urgent-service soldiers mobilized to work on the ACL at the ChAES (7); it does not include station workers or regular citizens. But the work of women there – at the very height of the Chernobyl crisis – was no less dangerous and heroic. This important and extensive subject awaits future researchers and writers of the Chernobyl annals...
I shall also refrain from elaborating on the subject of those so-called “visiting women of easy behavior” (prostitutes), who, according to the stories, were quite prevalent in the a zone the year after the Chernobyl accident. The conditions of this zone were surely those of any military campaign; and in its stress, danger and extremity, the Chernobyl accident has even been called a war by its direct participants, who refer to life having been divided along those terms: they speak of life before the war.
Nevertheless it is necessary to note that these women too were subjected to radioactive pollution, and that they have suffered no less than the official ‘liquidators,’ but, as opposed to the liquidators, the data on their illnesses and deaths (as well as the illnesses and deaths of their probable children) will forever remain beyond the Chernobyl statistics. But I'll not write about these "heroines of the invisible front" only because I could not personally meet personally any of them, and describing documentary events on the basis of hearsay is not in my rules …
In this article, I shall try to offer but the contours of the theme of Chernobyl’s impact on women by describing the fates of several women in close proximity to me. A mere few – out of the many thousand stories of my fellow sisters in suffering and my fellow townsfolk of the once young and beautiful city of Pripyat, all of whom have their own mournful statistics of heavy loss. In one entryway alone of the nine story building (or House) in the Kharkov area of Kyiv where some of the Pripyat evacuees reside, not one of the floors does not include someone who has already died of cancer, heart problems, leukemia, or some other Chernobyl-induced illness ..
In these long post-Chernobyl years, we have already become accustomed to the sharp deterioration of health in autumn and spring, and also in autumn and spring, to the especially rich and mournful mortal “crop” of Chernobyl victims (chernobyltzy). Last autumn alone we had to say good bye once again to three neighbors in our entrance, among whom was Valentina Rjabuha, a woman of amazing courage and a fate too tragic—even by Chernobyl standards.
But in the early spring of 1986, she was still living happily in her beloved city of Pripyat, where she had moved with her husband Yuri and their first-born son, Dmitri, from a small Ukrainian town with the radiant name of Happiness. And by 1981, already in Pripyat, their second son, Oleg, was born…
But then came the night of April 25, and by the 26th, everything had changed catastrophically: the ChAES accident, close to two days of uncertainty and horrendous worry over her husband, who was then at work at the station, evacuation… In fact, she, too, was an employee of the ChAES, and had wanted to remain in the city with her husband. But Yuri categorically commended her to be evacuated on April 27, along with their sons, telling her in surprisingly prophetic works: “One of us should stay with the children!”…
And although the station workers—as opposed to thousands of other former inhabitants of Pripyat who repeatedly and often hopelessly knocked on various official cabinet doors—were given places to live in Kyiv, and although Yuri himself, who continued to work on the LCA at the ChAES, was bringing home more money than most in those times, life was nevertheless broken …
The chronic illnesses of Valentina and her children began. But even more terrible was that Yuri soon began to die away before her very eyes, quickly … For a while, he was able to hide the pain from him wife, but then it became continuous and intolerable… His sufferings broke her heart (although the courage with which he bore the tortures of his pain taught her the stoicism with which she was to bear her own compounding tortures). Nevertheless, while he was with her, life continued, because for her he was not only her beloved husband, her friend and supporter, but the very heart of the family, its light …
Yuri Rjabuha died in December of 1991 from intestinal cancer. He was almost 42. With his death, the light in Valentina’s life was extinguished. She could never reconcile herself to this loss. But she had to go on for the children, and now more than ever she recollected Jurij’s words: “One of us should stay with the children!” So she, a “second-degree invalid” of the ChAES, continued to struggle with her own progressive illnesses for the sake of her children. She tried to do it all: the apartment was always clean and cozy, and on the table was always something freshly cooked for her beloved sons, who (as often happens with teenagers having their own problems at an awkward age) seemed almost not to notice their mother’s pain and suffering …
Then in 2003, both her kidneys suddenly stopped working. Doctors managed to resuscitate her, but she was then doomed to have a most unpleasant treatment three times a week: hemodialysis. This vital treatment required an artificial kidney procured for her with great difficulty by Yuri’s former friends from the LCA (even now, the treatment is as scarce as almost everything else used to be in the USSR). How difficult it was for her to reach to the urology hospital on the other side of the city! Especially in the winter, when the hilly footpaths in the vicinity of the hospital became covered with a sheet of ice that even healthy legs could not navigate easily—let alone the legs of one so sick. Here she often slipped and fell, cried silently, and waited, sometimes hours, for some passerby to help her reach the hospital clinic…
Unfortunately, I could not help her when she went. I could only support her by offering some needed medicine if I had it at the right moment, or by getting occasional help from foreign friends or from the Kiev society of former Pripyat residents, the “Fellow Townspeople”, or most of all, by simply listening. For she often made a neighborly visit, came by to unburden her heart. And more than once I witnessed the tears of sorrow and despair that she always hid from others …
And how could she not despair? When her Chernobyl pension (now that of a “first-degree invalid”) amounted to 180 grivnas a month (about $35), almost all of which went for medicine and treatment? Often Valentina did not have enough not only for her children’s food and needs, but for the 100g of meat and other nutritional needs her own body needed following the “wash-out” from her hemodialysis treatments.
Once I met her in the yard of our apartment building as she returned from one of her treatments, hardly able to move her legs. She uttered the terrible words: “How much more can we suffer? They should poison our drinking water and stop this torture forever!” I could only reply with a joke, saying that we were already so full of radiation, medicine, and other chemicals that no poison could now do us in …
Fortunately, these attacks of despair lessened in Valentina, and gradually she learned to overcome even her fear of death…
It happened that, due to an increase in my own treatments, I did not learn immediately about a critical deterioration in Valentina’s health, and about a horrible new trial: gangrene, and the amputation of her leg. I learned of it only when the superintendent of my entryway asked me to help collect money to give to her sons for her treatment following this operation. But the very next day, the inhabitants of our “Pripyat House” were gathering money for her funeral… And, two days later, in accordance with tradition, at the third entryway, we all gathered together to say good-bye to her. And we asked forgiveness—some of us silently, and others aloud—for not having been able to take onto our own shoulders more of her unbearable burden. And although it sounds terrible to say so, in this sorrowful parting, but for the grief of our own loss, there was a joyful insight that she had finally ceased being tortured… May the kingdom of Heaven now be hers!
And as a neighbor, she also would always come to the aid of Valentina and her husband. Once, after Yuri’s death, Larissa said to me that this Pripyat man had an unbelievably strong strength of will—at times almost superhuman … Even in his last days, despite hellish pain, he would refuse medication, and she managed to prick him but once, attempting to anesthetize him when it was already useless …
At that point, she did not yet know that within six months she too would pass through an intolerable trial through sore affliction. On May 18, 1992, Larissa suddenly lost her son Vladimir (affectionately known as Volodya, and born on March 21, 1975) when he had a heart attack sitting at his desk at school only days before the end of the school year. Surely only someone who has lost a dearest loved one can imagine what this mother must have felt to have gotten the call from the school, and then to have struggled for eight hours with her colleagues at the cardiology hospital for the life of her son, and in vain! And what must his sister, Natasha, have felt at suddenly losing her wise and gentle big brother, her trustworthy protector? And what must his father, Alexander, have felt? He, an ChAES engineer who was still working on the LCA, who had already seen a lot, but who went completely gray in a matter of days? The death shook us neighbors as well—we who also had seen a lot! So almost all of the residents of the House, together with the students of Kiev school No. 261, filled the schoolyard to say goodbye to Vladimir Kovaljov, tenth grade graduate, before the procession of his final ‘graduation’ … That day, everyone cried upon his coffin—large and small, and many heartbroken speeches were spoken, and the school bell was rung just for him … Even his true friend, his collie, rushed with a silent howl through the crowd, unable to find a place to escape from sorrow …
That day, doctors were already there on duty for Voldya’s mother and father, and the first aid vehicle accompanied the funeral procession (as it does all Chernobyl funeral processions)…
Even months later, it was painful to see Larissa swollen from tears and antidepressants … But, thank God, she had her husband and daughter, and now even a grandson—those who make it necessary to struggle for life. Thus, over the course of time, and despite her own Chernobyl-caused physical disabilities, her vital optimism and charming smile have returned to Larissa … In any event, Larissa prefers not to speak with strangers about her problems, and especially not about the death of her son …
And then there is Valentina Korzh, from the seventh entryway of our House. Right after her husband’s death from stomach cancer on April 6, 1993 (he was born January 16, 1955), she was ready to scream out to the world how unscrupulously and cruelly official medicine had treated her husband.
What happened was that in 1992-3, the “radiation therapy” clinic of the Kiev Hospital No. 25—where Michael was frequently treated for a basic diagnosis of “acute radiation sickness,” as well as a host of other diagnoses—repeatedly tried to smooth over statistics on the serious decline in the health of Chernobyl accident victims. As chronic patients of the clinic have told me (for I, too, have received medical treatment there several times), this trend began after a visit to the hospital by Angelina Gus’kova, a professor from the Moscow Hospital No. 6, and a notorious follower of the academician L.A. Il’in (8).
After this visit, almost all the patients of the clinic [add “who spoke to me” ?] complained that their doctors wanted to retract not only the diagnosis of “acute radiation sickness,” but diagnoses of other related chronic diseases, a different set of which had emerged for each Chernobyl victim. I could only answer them with the advice that they should request—in exchange for removing these diagnoses—certificates declaring them “absolutely healthy” and “ready for work” and for “new heroic actions” (since they would have had no right [or better, “would not have had the gall”?] to issue such certificates to those so truly ill.
For this reason—for the terrible death of her husband without medicines and medical support, Valentina Korzh was ready to scream to the world just after his death. But no one heard her then. No one wanted to hear… She, who had managed in those difficult “years of reorganization” to bring up her small daughter, Tatiana, became isolated, having had to remain alone with her sorrow and constant grief. And even now, she does not want to speak with strangers about what she has gone through, does not want to recollect … After several attempts, I have stopped trying to arrange interviews for her with foreign journalists, whom she was refused each time, plaintively asking my pardon…
Valentina’s entryway neighbor, also a former Pripyat inhabitant (pripyatchanka), is Natalia Lihoshapka, who buried her own husband Leonid, a former worker of the ChAES, in 2000. She herself has gone through a series of hospitalizations, surgeries, and x-ray therapies for her lactic gland cancer, but has still kept a fighting spirit. For the sake of her future little grandson, and her son, for whose lives Natalia now struggles, she is ready to tell everyone who can bear the truth about Chernobyl—and about the long and agonizing suffering of her husband, now dying from complicated meningitis without the necessary medical aid, and about her own powerless diligence in trying to heal or just to alleviate his terrible torments… The pain of repeated losses... Over the course of time, it dulls. And those of us who survived Chernobyl are no longer shocked by house yards more often than not draped in funeral colors, and now almost emotionlessly hand over money for the next neighbor’s funeral… as though new trouble will not be knocking on our own doors…
In 1984, Katya (Katerina) was only 20 when she fell in love and married the quiet musician with the very kind eyes. She had known him for a while, since he was the expert accordionist who always accompanied the children’s performances, whether on school mornings or evenings, or at other city events.
Those eyes did not deceive her. He enveloped his “Katen’ka” with warmth, care and kisses, especially after the birth of their son, Kostya, on July 12, 1985. The three of them joyfully met the new year of 1986, and made great plans for the future—which the Chernobyl accident decided to amend in its own way… They endured those first trials: two days and nights of uncertainty, in a city filled with radiation and rumors about an accident at the nuclear station (while a government commission debated over what to do with the inhabitants of Pripyat); then, evacuation, homelessness, pennilessness… At last, they were able to find a place to live in Kiev, on account of Victor having remained to work in the Chernobyl zone. And despite the warnings of doctors and acquaintances, they even ventured to give birth to a second child. So on June 1, 1988, another son appeared in their family, Yaroslav…
During the course of caring for the children, and masked by her other diseases (those so common to all the former Pripyat inhabitants), Katerina did not even notice the fatal illness creeping upon her. Her stomach cancer was discovered only in its terminal stage… So when Katerina was admitted for a long and exhausting regimen of treatment to one the Kiev clinics specializing in treating Chernobyl victims, she knew that any therapy was already useless. Moreover (as was often the case) since the facility did not even have the strong anesthetic needed to lessen her pain, she asked to go home with the excuse of celebrating her son’s birthday.
And she managed to make Yaroslav’s birthday into a real holiday. Katerina mobilized all of her strength to hide all of her unbearable pain, and managed to be joyful until after the boys had gone to bed. So as not to sadden the birthday of her son for his whole life, she even managed to hold on until the beginning of a new calendar day … Katerina Ponomarenko died on the night of June 2, 1995…
Victor told me all of his through his sobbing, having visited our place a month after her funeral to share with us his sorrow. He came to us with Kostya and Yaroslav—nice, inquisitive boys, each of whom had had his own childhood dream before the death of his mum. Kostya had dreamed to become a musician like his father, and Yaroslav an English translator—and his English was already not bad for his seven years. But now they proclaimed to me with eager ambition that they wanted to become doctors “to avenge Mom.” In this way, with their childlike innocence, they expressed their despair at not having been able to ease their mother’s suffering, or to save her…
Now, whenever he left his shift, Victor searched for someone who could look after his sons in his absence. He could not give up his job in the zone, because to find a comparably paying job in Kyiv was impossible. This situation could not last long, and so he married again in a few years. Even now, though, he still brings white flowers home from Pripyat for his Katen’ka—to put them before the large portrait of her occupies the most visible spot in their Kyiv apartment…
When the horribly fatal nuclear accident occurred, Olenka was not yet five years old. Certainly, she did not understand the heightened alarm and anxiety of her parents on that 26th day of April, nor into the evening, when her dad—as he always did on Saturday evenings—played at another wedding. She did not understand why someone woke them in the middle of that night, nor why they had to stand for so long on the 27th in a long corridor with their bags packed, until finally the children could stand it no longer and ran off into the yard, followed by the adults who ran after them…
The municipal housing officials who had woken the residents of the hostel had warned them of the radioactive danger, telling them not to venture out of the building into the street. So the adults had thrown on some clothes and converged in small groups next to hastily packed suitcases, boxes and backpacks, discussing events of the previous day—speculating, analyzing and arguing what now awaited all of them… The children ran around playing tag and war. And the smallest kids, as always, sought out their favorite sandbox, which was only a few meters from the road to the power station, along which—on this second day—various emergency vehicles were rushing back and forth, including fire trucks and ambulances, but silently, without their sirens on…
So as not to repeat the story of Olya’s illness and death which Ivan Chemezov has already told—to me at the time, and to our mutual friend and colleague, the journalist Lyubov Kovalevskaya (who herself has suffered many health problems and the illnesses of her daughter)—I shall simply quote his own words from her wonderful article, “Help the Child to Die” (9):
“… In April, something fatal… A small tumor appeared on the back below our daughter’s neck. We began to worry and asked a doctor. He assured us that it was an ordinary lipoma which should be removed, but which should not cause worry. We believed him… And time began to work against us, against our daughter—the tumor began to grow and to become more concentrated. When doctors did surgery, they discovered that it had metastasized all over her body. Olya asked: “Did I become ill because we lived in Pripyat?” “Was it because of the Chernobyl catastrophe?” “Will I recover?” Only to the last question could we answer, “Yes!”
…The struggle for the life of our daughter began. We rushed to various Chernobyl organizations and funds, clinics and institutes. But it was a useless waste of forces and nerves: the circle was not opened. We had not asked for anything supernatural—only the usual questions: what to do, how to help her, how to ease her suffering, what medicines would be necessary … Olechka’s legs became paralyzed, her kidneys stopped working, her liver swelled, her back began to hurt. What could we do? We were not doctors, not experts… I then began to understand a terrible thing: the more heartbroken a person is, the more shamelessly and ruthlessly doctors will extort money from him, imply they have “something up their sleeves” when in fact they know they can do nothing. But they also know another thing: parents will sell the shirts off their own backs to save their children. I have encountered dozens of similar parents, who won’t give up hope until the end, who pay exorbitant prices for the services of doctors and nurses, who pay every fee for any trifle, for any movement the doctor makes… this doctor who has a duty, who has taken the Hippocratic Oath… On our terrible path, there were only two exceptions to this vicious rule!…
The doctors discharged us from the hospital… to die at home. But our daughter had such agonizing pain that she screamed with an inhuman voice. She constantly needed anesthesia, but this was available only at clinics. And she was only 13, undergoing such terrible trials which even an adult could not have withstood. Through the efforts of some kind people, we were able to get into the Ministry of Health, and we were able to procure even a small room for ourselves. We did everything ourselves: we cleaned her liver and stomach, we healed the decubituses. We re-read the mountains of medical books and directories in search of answers to our questions, which we had asked the doctors in vain. And no one in the hospital, not even the main doctor, could insert a catheter! My wife went to the trauma unit, where they showed her how to do it—and she could do it from the first. In one week, she learned everything. And I ran all over the city in search of medicine, cotton wool, needles, dropper systems… All these things needed to be found and bought, since in the hospital there was almost nothing… They told us that they had injected her with morphine to anesthetize her, but she had no relief and screamed continuously… the girl had not one moment of rest; her eyes had not closed for a week… We figured out that they were injecting her with analginum with dimedrol. When the honest doctor injected her with morphine, the child slept for five hours…”
As you recall, dear reader, the Korzh family, the Lihoshapka family, the Ponomarenko family, and many thousands of other Chernobyl families who have lost their relatives, encountered a similar situation. Like Olenka, little Oksana Chechko, born in Pripyat half a year before the Chernobyl accident, died horribly in 1993 from a retinoblastoma of the eye; and little Lyubochka Shvydka, who was born in Pripyat in 1985, lived for only about two years with her evacuated parents in Kyiv, where she died from leukemia in February on 1987, and so on, and so on. It is not possible to describe each of these tragedies, some of which happened even close to us…
Some people think that it is not necessary to depict or describe the suffering of those doomed to die, especially that of children. That it is cruel to recall and recount their pain and torments… Yes, of course it is hard to read about it, and hard to look at it…
Even I—when I heard not just the stories of the tragedies, but the heart-breaking crying and monstrous screams of dying children themselves, at the premiere of my friend, Rollan Sergienko’s (10) new film, “Chernobyl; Funeral Feast”—even I thought, maybe this really is too cruel?! But there and then I decided that it was justified cruelty—and moreover, a necessity!…
How else can one convey all of the pain and suffering which the unhappy mothers of these dying children see every day? How else can one show the true face of this tragedy to those who are “safe”? How else can one shake people’s hearts—even the indifferent ones—including the hearts of officials and those in positions of authority, and the hearts of those who deliberately or inadvertently plan and prepare for new Chernobyls?
So I shall continue the story of Olenka Chemezova with one more excerpt from the article by Lyubov Kovalevskaya, where Olya talks about her last, terrible trials to Zhuenya Dudarova (11), her best friend in Pripyat and then in Kyiv:
“… I visited her in the hospital, sat near her bed and stroked her back where the tumor was, as she had asked me to do. She felt a little better after that. Olya suffered from terrible pain and cried almost all the time. She prayed for help… We could not help… The doctors refused to inject her with more morphine, they said that they didn’t have enough and could not use it all up on one dying person. But up to the end, I hoped! For a miracle, too!... But this pain… Any sound, even a rustle, caused Olya pain… But she did not lose consciousness…
I had been friends with Olya since we were very young children—possibly, from the cradle. We went to the same kindergarten in Pripyat, the same school, the same teacher, had the same hobby and general passion for music—we wanted to go to a conservatory together. Olya was extraordinarily talented. In 1993, she placed second in the Ukraine. She played Mozart … We were like sisters. Like a single whole. Each of us could not be without the other.
After her surgery, she felt better, but only for three days. It was hard for her to play the piano, but she played all the same, even though it upset her. She wanted so much to recover faster so she could celebrate her 14th birthday on September 23. But she ceased being on August 3. And it was so hard for me to believe Olya had died. in the last days, she probably guessed or felt that she was dying… wanted to die faster to get rid of the pain. And there and then, she said that she wanted to live, that she was worried, that I would go on living in the world without her… I don’t know how I shall live without her now. I know that I could never find another such friend. I have lost half of my life, half of myself, half of the world. Why did adults create such a disaster? We did nothing wrong. My friend and I were only three years old when they exploded the reactor…”
It is difficult to add anything to the intimate recollections of this slight girl from Pripyat. Except that even now I cannot recall Olenka without tears and without a bitter lump in my throat… Thus I wrote these verses for her:
Touch the wounded heart
of the city still holding the warmth
of your lost childhood,
of the ghost of an echo of your laughter …
One touch of your radiant fingers
on the dusty keys of the city’s soul,
and she will regain consciousness, will stir,
will escape from illusory silence, --
will start singing, begin to cry, begin to laugh,
a polyphonic civic organ.
The screen of inexhaustible memory
will be lit in the opened heavens.
The dark eye sockets of dead buildings
will once again be filled with the heat of human beings …
The city will hold its breath for a moment
as you are lowered into your house …
And again the polyphony of voices from the street
will begin to be heard in the routine of busy life …
as though everyone were alive, and all had returned,
as though the city were still alive…
Touch! Pripyat is waiting for the effortless touch
of those already in a higher world…
Lovely angel, one of many
similar pure angels of his.
Despite a death so early and so awful, Olenka Chemezova still gives light to everyone who knew her, and who now learns about her. Olya’s photos with her parents, the video recordings of the concerts in which she played, as well as home videos in which she still plays upon the piano—by herself, and giving piano lessons to her young sister, Katya (born January 3, 1989), and singing with her and her parents… For the first year following her death, they could not look at all these without pain and despair, but soon after they received a sort of enlightenment – as though Olya had given them a sign that there she is well, and that for her sake, and for the sake of her memory, they should live brightly and joyfully. And so the three of them together try to live a dynamically creative life… The memory of Olya gives them strength…
Perhaps her younger sister will become an accomplished pianist or actress. Still, she will never be able to fill the lost part of that unique microcosm of a web of human destiny in which the loss of even one talented child is irreplaceable—not only for a family, or for a country, but for the whole world …
And how many unknown Mozarts, Shakespeares, Rembrandts, Copernicuses and Einsteins has this grim harvest taken away—and continues to take away? … Indeed, what numbers should be included by those who want to tell the truth about the Chernobyl catastrophe, and by those, even now, twenty years later, who want to ignore or underestimate it? Full and accurate statistics are still unavailable. But even if it were possible to trace and identify each victim, such statistics would not be exhaustive since the grim harvest, unfortunately, continues, and will continue into the distant future.
And how many mothers of a future Chernobyl still await their fate, in which the happiness of motherhood will suddenly be overshadowed by the most horrible tragedy? For there has not come to light any greater sorrow than that of a mother who has survived her own children—especially if the child has died suffering, and at an early age. Indeed, for any mother, her own child is always the dearest, most unique thing, and although time might deaden the pain of the loss, and tighten the wound, it cannot cure it for the sorrow is incurable and unforgettable …
And how are we to measure the sorrow, as well, of a woman who could not become a mother, whose child was never born and will never be born, ever? For Chernobyl is guilty of this, too. Even in my own vicinity, there are many such women—those who in the spring of 1988 were forced to agree to a c-section or abortion, even in the last months of pregnancy. Doctors had been told from above to locate and warn the population about the undesirable effects of radiation exposure. And they were very diligent…
Once, I witnessed the performance of such instruction. During May of 1986, some of us including Lyubov Kovalevskaya, were returning from the Chernobyl zone (where we, Pripyat journalists, went frequently enough in order to talk to people who confided in us, but who otherwise did not trust the official media, which at the time was covering only “the Pripyal nightingales”) We were returning to “Culture House,” in Irpin, near Kyiv, where the Ukrainian Writers’ Union was temporarily—and almost illegally—lodging us young writers, first alone and then with our children; and we shall always feel immense gratitude to them for these few months not in the streets.
At the time, we returned at any opportunity. That day in Poliske, an acquaintance of ours from the Pripyat Civic Executive Committee who had been re-located in this small town just after the evacuation, put us in a car shuttle—a black Volga, which in the USSR at the time was used only by bigwigs. And so, when we had almost gotten to Teteriv, and had reached a checkpoint (there were many such checkpoints along the road from the Zone), patrolmen in white uniforms (the standard outfit for all those working then in the Zone) stopped the car. They asked the driver to leave. And while two patrolmen talked to him, a third glanced inside the car.
He presented himself as a doctor, and then asked the question—which stunned us: were we pregnant? In the face of our indignant bewilderment—that it was none of his business—he quietly explained that he needed to warn us that on account of the radiation, a pregnancy would be most undesirable, and that if we were pregnant, it would be better to have an abortion sooner that later, and so forth.
Note that this “doctor” did not know that we were not relatives of CPSU bosses, but ordinary citizens traveling in a government car … So the interruption of pregnancies in the months after Chernobyl was not a mere fable …
This happened to several women—to Pripyat friends and colleagues of mine, among whom was Olga Snegir. And this event, so serious and distressing for many, was for Olya the biggest tragedy of her life. In May of 1986, she not only lost her unborn daughter, but also the chance and hope for ever having children … And this misfortune has weighed heavily upon the rest of her life…
Also, she also met here her destiny, a young engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear station, Victor Lunkov… So she—loved by all, especially by her young pupils and their parents—lived eight years of full creative energy in Pripyat, down to the fatal day of April 26, 1986 …
The Chernobyl catastrophe found her in the sixth month of her long-awaited pregnancy … After artificially removing the fetus, the doctors allowed her to bury the almost perfectly formed baby … Even now, Olya cannot forget her own tiny daughter, whom she had the chance to hold in her hands, dead.
For the first years after the evacuation, she unconsciously tried to communicate less with her former townsfolk, who now lived beside her in Kyiv. She would have liked to flee, to escape, to leave behind everything that reminded her of this travesty. To forget—not to know, not to see, not to hear anything about Chernobyl … Thus, in 1993, Olga seized with pleasure an opportunity that had been unexpectedly presented to her husband: to move to Germany—first for temporary residence, and then for permanent residence—where she herself was able to resume working at her favorite activity, dance, working as a children’s choreographer…
Here again, just as in Pripyat, she very quickly became the favorite teacher of her pupils and their parents … In addition, destiny presented her with the acquaintance of an old German woman who became a sort of fairy godmother for her and her husband. this woman not only immediately loved Olga, and welcomed her into her home as a daughter, but even officially adopted her, giving her a second surname—Wagner. In this way, Olya’s life in Germany proceeded almost like the fairy tale about Cinderella…
But Chernobyl has a long hand. The illnesses which had constantly undermined Olga’s health with time took away her ability not only to dance, but to work with children… And once again the heavy memories began to pursue her, especially those of the daughter who would have been almost a young woman.
In Germany in 2002, she exhibited her work publicly for the first time. Soon afterwards, Olga Lunkova-Wagner became a member of the Art Forum ’99 in Rejnbah, and then she went on to participate in several other prestigious art exhibitions in Germany. Her works were first exhibited in Ukraine from April to July of 2006. in the National Chernobyl Museum, where visitors could see nineteen of her sculptures from four of her series, “Chernobyl,” “Movement,” “Music,” and “Miniatures”…
The assistant director of the National Chernobyl Museum, Anna Korolevskaya, wrote of Olga’s works: “I think that anyone who, even once, has admired their perfection and grace cannot ever forget this stone miracle, unexpectedly brightly lit by the soul of this former pripyatchanka [Pripyat woman] .
During her visit to Kyiv, Olga had the chance to visit the now-dead Pripyat, to go into her abandoned building, into her former apartment … But even thinking about it gave her pain. As Olya then told me, for the first three months of her exhibition, she could not even go into the Chernobyl Museum, because she would have an asthma attack on the steps of even this abstract territory of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and her heart would skip … Before this, she had not even known that the Chernobyl wound, which had left such a keep scar on her heart, was still so fresh and its pain still so sharp. She spoke about her unborn daughter with such love and tenderness, and with such bottomless grief in her eyes, as though she had lost the baby not 20 years before, but several days ago … From everything, it is evident that her work with stone brings Olga not so much rest, as a sort of oblivion from her own pain. The exhibition of her works in the Chernobyl Museum was named “Scars in Stone”…
And how many scars from Chernobyl remain in the souls, hearts, and fates of millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Russian, and other countries of the world?
And Anatoly, on duty with the chemical military unit that he commanded, began working on the ChAES LCA on May 7, 1986. He worked for almost a year and a half, with only one brief break, directing 24 settlements. Under his orders, twenty-four contaminated areas were cleared of their radiation pollution.
Often, not caring about repercussions from regional authorities, he forced the chairmen of state farms to bury tons of radioactive hay which had already been prepared for cattle. Sometimes, Anatoly also went to Pripyat, since his military unit was stationed nearby, in the settlement of Krasnoe (so later he would ask us in all earnestness exactly which parts of Pripyat my son and I had been on April 26-27, and and how many times.
In addition, Anatoly and his soldiers worked on deactivating the destroyed fourth block of the ChAES and, together with Management Group 605, they erected a wall between the third and fourth blocks of the station. During this process, he always went ahead of his soldiers with a dosimeter so that they would be exposed to less radiation…
They were exposed to a lot of radiation then—sometimes only one run up to the roof would expose them to 100 BER (the biological equivalent of aroentgen) or more, although, of course, all of these readings are approximate… They could not know the exact amount, since the highest reading on the scale of the disposable store-bought dosimeter was 50 BER! As they put it then: “The most dangerous sites just blew the dosimeter away”… So they would end up writing down the amount as 25 BER: and so some of these men died almost immediately after returning home, while others lingered longer and painfully, such as Anatoly himself (who, before Chernobyl was perfectly healthy, but upon returning home several times had to be practically pulled out of death by Nadezhda, their daughters, and the doctors …
In the last years of his life, when he could hardly go on, when he was already so choked that he could hardly sleep, and only when sitting up, he suddenly began to become active in schools and on the radio, and in other venues, on Chernobyl Day—in order to speak about the situation at Chernobyl, as though he felt he was running out of time to tell people the truth. Anatoly was convinced that it was necessary to close the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant immediately, instead of continuing the work which was seventy percent useless and absurdly burning up young lives (14).
To the end of his own days, “Nash Batya” – “Our Dad,” as the soldiers had affectionately named their thirty-six year old commander – tormented himself with the faults of others, the faults of those who had sent him and his subordinates there, of those who in time would receive awards and medals for “Chernobyl heroism.” Meanwhile, many of the true heroes of Chernobyl, who years before should have been recognized as such, had to go begging, and lay in hospital beds for yours, exhausted and unheard … And even after the deaths of these true heroes, their mothers and widows frequently could not manage to prove that their illnesses were a consequence of their work on the liquidation of consequences of Chernobyl catastrophe. As these truly courageous and truly injured people a medical officials often made stamped with the insulting diagnosis of “radiophobia” (15) while the make y themselves made off with Chernobyl pensions and privileges… By the way, without the corresponding documents.
It is impossible to list all the other similar uncontrollable circumstances that would have polluted other territories and the people living there, and which cannot be counted among the official Chernobyl statistics. Also not counted would be my sister, who could not stand being apart from her husband, and who, at the end of May 1986 came to visit him in the Zone for several days. And she did not come alone, but brought both daughters—Irina (born in 1975) and Olena (born in 1979)—in the spirit of the wives of the Decembrists… Indeed, this thoughtless step complicated their fates, since both she and the girls soon began to have more health problems, which wors, one cannot officially connect all these diseases and deaths with Chernobyl itself—and this fact has affected thousands of people—many of whom do not realize that their own health problems (or the deaths of their relatives) are a result of the accident. Consider, for example, those residents of Kiev who went to work via Bus Route 46, the route taken by that long caravan of buses which carried us from Pripyat on April 27, 1986; I have noticed that that plenty of buses regularly took this route, since I had often taken it from Pripyat when I went to visit the homes of my friends who lived in the Voskresenka neighborhood of Kyiv. And how much radioactive dirt was tracked all over the USSR by the inhabitants of Pripyat who had been happy owners of cars—the “zhiguli” and “zaporozhec”—since the authorities, in a second announcement about the evacuation, allowed them to leave independently and to go wherever they wanted? …en each year. In addition to a set of chronic problems that suddenly appeared, each of them has had surgical operations, as well—Nadezhda has had several … She now needs to have her thyroid removed because of a tumor which could become fatal at any time, as the doctors tell her … But she is so tired of hospitals and doctors, on account of the long years of Anatoly’s illness, that even her daughters cannot convince her to take even a short course of the vital therapy she needs …
For their sake, and for three grandsons, she continues her struggle for life. Nadezhda (which means Hope) no longer has the strength to believe in a fine future, but she still wants to hope that her daughters and grandsons will have any future at all! …
And Irina has also had the luck meet kind people who have supported her family in critical moments, both morally and financially …
Her family—and about two dozen Pripyat families—will always remember and bless with special gratitude two remarkable Bavarian women, Johanna Schuhmeir and Suzanne Henning. They personally, and with the help of their female friends from the ecological organization “Mutter Gegen Atomkraft,” and from the Ukrainian Diaspora of Germany (including Olga Tkachenko, Irina Kozak, and others), during the most complicated years of the post-Soviet period, offered periodic financial aid, and annually sent many a Christmas parcel, which not only enriched in those days a very poor Christmas table, but which literally dressed all members of the family …
Thank God in this cold, pragmatic world, we still have people with warm and not indifferent hearts (usually women), who palpably understand the golden rule and the mutual responsibility of kindness! By the way, among other things, Chernobyl has also revealed very brightly this human faculty of disinterested compassion and mercy. I think that it would be necessary to write a separate book about such people, who have helped many Chernobyl victims to escape from gloomy despair and loneliness, to revive the belief in God in their souls, and their hope for Kindness and Understanding (16).
Unfortunately, most of the doomed victims of Chernobyl must now rely for concrete help more from these kind sorts of people than from any state or international programs and funds … And certainly, they must rely upon God! …
Inna Matkovskaya still hopes for God and kind people—she is a young mother from a family of former Pripyat residents who now lives in our House. Her daughter, Katya, was born in the summer of 2005 with a very rare syndrome: Mac-Gune-Olbrajt syndrome. Even modern hormone treatments can only hold off the process of accelerated aging for three years—after that, a fatal outcome … Our doctors calm the unhappy mother by telling her that in some countries, there are surgical operations that can help the baby, but only during the period when the hormone therapy is still effective. All of Katya’s family, and even their friends and neighbors, knocked on every door … And now it seems that even if it were possible to raise the financial resources, there would be no official of any ministry capable of placing the child in the needed hospital. The time has almost run out, and with it, the last hope for the life of the child leaves this family ..
In 2006, the peak of this family’s despair coincided with the next falsely optimistic official report of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident by so-called experts of the IAEA … Oh, I would like each one of them—especially their chief Moscow expert—to glance for one moment into the suffering eyes of this poor child’s mother, into the eyes of a still living Valentina Ryabuha, into the eyes of the young pianist Olenka Chemezova dying in agony, and into the eyes of thousands of people with such a tragic destiny … whether after having done so, their hands, not having trembled, could truly write such false conclusions … . And whether the already screaming statistics on the victims of Chernobyl – even the official ones – might not increase exponentially by taking into account these individual statistics of truly injured people... Instead, however, these experts are satisfied and pleased with themselves, writing their dissertations and going to their various conferences and symposiums; they feed in safety parasitically upon the Chernobyl catastrophe, while the simple victims of the disaster either die in pain or barely survive because of chronically insufficient funding of Chernobyl policies and programs; these experts, in their own comfort, often overlook the fact that with tragedies like Chernobyl, not all the millions in the bank, nor the thickest bunkers, nor the richest country houses or high State cabinets, will be able to protect themselves – for the long hand of Chernobyl’s effect can reach them, too, or their children, or their grandchildren …
However, I think that many such officials, having looked into the eyes of the victims, would say that as human beings they could understand the horrors of all the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, but that as representatives of their respective ministries and departments, they would have to say that ‘there were no essentially harmful effects upon the people evacuated from the zone,” and so forth. Just as in the winter of 1988, when we interviewed certain “competent people” for our film Threshold (17), one of them stated that “as a regular human being” he agreed with our conclusions and shared our alarm, but that “as a representative of his ministry, he had to tell us that…” – at which point the usual lies poured from his lips
Similar actions are typical of those who support inhumane technologies, programs, and political systems. For example, in military circles and among those who support human cloning, there are those who try to convince the world that it is absolutely safe and can be useful! … Moreover, there are even people (or more accurately, non-people?) who assert that the Earth could actually sustain a Chernobyl accident every year!... That is the equivalent of saying that the Earth could sustain five hundred nuclear bombs set off each year without harmful effects. After all, the radiation emitted from Chernobyl amounted to 50 million curies—that is, the equivalent of five hundred nuclear bombs the size of which were dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 …
And if all this is so safe, why have the WHO and the IAE accepted an “Agreement” (4) on the non-disclosure of information about consequences of nuclear accidents and testing? Why did the USSR authorities withhold information about Chernobyl (4) and its consequences (4)? Why even now do the main dissemblers of false information about Chernobyl happen to be leading experts of the IAEA? And why has the IAEA—in the face of the current situation, and numerous protests by high ranking world-class scientists and their organizations—once again compelled the United Nations to pass, putting it mildly, untrue resolutions about Chernobyl? The answer is simple: they had, and have, something to hide! Or perhaps they are panicking that revealing the truth would cause mass panic … and they themselves in fact suffer from an extreme case of “radiophobia”? No, they aren’t afraid of mass panic, nor do they suffer from that notorious “radiophobia.” What they do fear, however, is losing massive profits, since nuclear stations are directly connected with manufacturing military plutonium. Nuclear stations are the mere flip side of manufacturing nuclear bombs, and thus provide a fig leaf for those military industries and corporations lobbying to develop nuclear power all over the world. Just imagine how much progress could already have made, how much cleaner and safer the world would be, if all of this enormous effort had been channeled instead into developing ecologically safe means of alternative power! …
In the years immediately following the Chernobyl catastrophe, many of us struggled alongside various ecological organizations to try to combat the lies and falsehoods, the corruption, arbitrariness, and double standards, that permeated the Soviet regime. And although I remain convinced that this indefatigable struggle remains necessary, and that indeed it can change governments and political systems, I have also come to understand that always and everywhere greedy and unscrupulous people are attracted to positions of authority. Unfortunately, human nature has not changed much since the Stone Age—except that now, humans hold in their hands not stone axes and cudgels, but modern technology and the unfathomable destructive power of its weapons For this reason, truly improving the situation and saving our world requires first that one change oneself, that is, human psychology. And you can read more about that in my article, “Modelling of the future – a reality” (18).
And although it sounds strange to say, in this sense the Chernobyl catastrophe has actually led to some positive glimmers, including an awakened consciousness and reassessed values of the majority of the residents of the former USSR—which led to the disintegration of this huge regime of lies and double standards. Unfortunately, enduring lies still prevent mankind from learning all its lessons, beginning with the necessity for each person in the world to undergo a spiritual regeneration—what Al Gore expressed so well (while he was still US Vice President) in a speech at the National Chernobyl Museum in the summer of 1998, after he had visited dead Pripyat and the Chernobyl Zone. And I am confident that anyone who acquires this Chernobyl lesson will never allow anyone to muffle the bell of Chernobyl! The modern world demands that each person understand, from an early age, that we all live—in one bundle, as it were—in a very fragile world where all of us must feel our responsibility for everyone else. And in order not to repeat fatal mistakes, we who live in the present, and who think of the future, are obliged to remember the past…
Unfortunately, with each year that passes, fewer chances remain to record on paper or film, the living memory of these events, as more and more heroes, victims and eye-witnesses of the Chernobyl catastrophe pass away to the “the other world.” But since it is still not too late, I would be good to issue a book of collected memories, like the hefty edition on the Great Famine and genocide of 1932-33 (19) in the Soviet Ukraine (the Holodomor) This book by Radjankij Pismennyk, entitled The Famine of 33; National Book – Memorial, was issued published in Kiev in 1991, and collected thousands of living testimonies.[i] Of course, one such book will not be enough to make diehard apologists for the communist ideology and so-called Soviet well-being admit (you mean “it won’t cause them to admit”; they are quite happy to ‘deny’!) the fact of this monstrous crime against a whole people. Unfortunately, official institutions around the world, frequently invested in developing nuclear technology, are often not interested in preserving the memory of Chernobyl. And our descendents will reap the fruit of this forgetfulness …
Thank God, I still have the hope that our children will preserve the memory of the Chernobyl catastrophe and the beloved city of their childhood and youth: Pripyat. Several years ago, I was pleasantly surprised, to the point of tears, when I first saw the web site Pripyat.com (20), whose young organizers had collected together with such affectionate tenderness so much relating to Chernobyl. Even more unexpectedly pleasant for me was the fact that two years ago, my own son, Alexander Sirota, joined them, and now he is the editor-in-chief of the Russian internet edition of it. Young enthusiasts of the site have had so many ideas, plans, and projects for virtually preserving the accurate historical memory of Chernobyl, including the idea of obtaining an international designation for Pripyat and the zone around it as the biggest technological accident of the twentieth-century. To this end, about a year ago, Pripyat.com and the newpaper “Literary Ukraine” together generated a petition to save the city of Pripyat (21). On the web site, there is also a virtual memory book, where eyewitnesses continue to contribute their memories and testimonies. Perhaps, in time, enough such testimonies will have been collected to issue a hefty volume, and a sponsor to realize the project will be found …
A people without memory, humanity that forgets, has no future—because repeating the mistakes of the past again and again can only lead to a fatal outcome. Therefore, for the sake of our planet’s future, we have no right to forget the Chernobyl tragedy “lest our descendents say, despite any grateful words, not only that we left them Chernobyl and a spoiled environment, but that we left them without Hope …” (22)
EPILOGUE
As I was finishing this article, Tamara Golovchak called me to tell me that her husband, Yuri, died on November 7 (2007). May the kingdom of heaven be his!
He died of a stroke, and although he was plagued by a cluster of Chernobyl diseases, his main trouble before he died was polycystosis of the lungs. Note that he was not a smoker, but he did inhale a lot of radioactive dust while laying pipes beneath the destroyed ChAES Reactor No. 4 in May of 1986.
Then, some days later, a new dose of poison for all of us Chernobyl victims emanated from the channels of our television sets: the new United Nations Resolution on Chernobyl (on November 19, 2007).
In this article, I had originally hoped to outline the fates of a mere handful of women and their relatives, in order to show the human face of the problem, and not to focus on the bigger issue of Chernobyl, the great lie—reminding readers of it only in the Notes. However, while speaking about individual fates of Chernobyl victims, it is still necessary to pause and consider this, the most obvious continuing psychological effects
I shall not here comment on the Resolution itself, whose wording is logical enough, as is its decision, which has sounded in the mass media, to cease all financial support to the injured countries. For that matter, over the last two decades, most Chernobyl victims saw practically nothing of any of this support anyhow—these mythical millions of sponsors’ help (23).
But my fellow countrymen and I are offended by another aspect of it—namely, by the categorization of Chernobyl victims in this lofty UN document, and by the head of the UN Program Development for CIS countries, Louise Vinton, who was interviewed by RIA News. For they have again offered us “psychological help” to overcome the so-called “radiophobia,” which I have already mentioned (4). I can assure them that many victims of Chernobyl would willingly—and free of charge!—share with officials their twenty years’ plus experience of survival (as would our colleagues in Japan, the hibakusi who survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). And note—it has been heroic survival under permanent and extreme conditions (24), including the sort of stoic endurance of agonizing suffering that you have seen in this article… And how far would these officials (or even the less paid ones) get on the monthly pension of a “second-class” Chernobyl victim, which has now been ‘raised,’ as it were, to 515 grivnas (about $100 US)…
In this light, it is simply blasphemous that in the Resolution they suggest that we limit ourselves to healthy, inspected, certifiably radioactive-free food. In fact, a lot of real Chernobyl victims would be glad to get even the bare minimum of any food at all (recall the plight of the late Valentin Rjabuha, who before she died was a “first-class” ChAEs invalid)…
I very much regret that my poem “Radiophobia” is still pertinent (15) twenty years after the Chernobyl accident:
Is this only – a fear of radiation?
Perhaps rather – a fear of wars?
Perhaps – the dread of betrayal,
cowardice, stupidity, lawlessness?
The time has come to sort out
what is – radiophobia.
It is –
when those who've gone through the Chernobyl drama
refuse to submit
to the truth meted out by government ministers
("Here, you swallow exactly this much today!")
We will not be resigned
to falsified ciphers,
base thoughts,
however you brand us!
We don't wish – and don't you suggest it! –
to view the world through bureaucratic glasses!
We're too suspicious!
And, understand, we remember
each victim just like a brother!..
Now we look out at a fragile Earth
through the panes of abandoned buildings.
These glasses no longer deceive us! –
These glasses show us more clearly –
believe me –
the shrinking rivers,
poisoned forests,
children born not to survive…
Mighty uncles, what have you dished out
beyond bravado on television?
How marvelously the children have absorbed
radiation, once believed so hazardous!..
(It's adults who suffer radiophobia –
for kids is it still adaptation?)
What has become of the world
if the most humane of professions
has also turned bureaucratic?
Radiophobia
may you be omnipresent!
Not waiting until additional jolts,
new tragedies,
have transformed more thousands
who survived the inferno
into seers –
Radiophobia might cure
the world
of carelessness, satiety, greed,
bureaucratism and lack of spirituality,
so that we don't, through someone's good will
mutate into non-humankind.
And today, I address this poem to Louise Vinton and all of the
authors of the Resolution, and the “experts” of the WHO and the IAEA who most
likely generated the erroneousness. And yet, they are probably deeply
indifferent to the fates of the victims of this accident; if they were not so,
surely they would be more humane, and not issue statements which actually kill
injured people – for I am sure that many have already suffered fatal heart
attacks and strokes after receiving this official offer of “psychological help” from official
institutions to the victims of Chernobyl.
Let me cite only two of the many other negative consequences of such statements. First, do these high-ranking officials really not know that every such word from such a high-ranking body ends up instructing officials on all the other levels? So in Ukraine (and also in Russia and Byelorussia), the Chernobyl programs that are already being reduced each year, might end up being eliminated altogether? In this way, the Resolution will have the effect of taking away not only the abstract so-called help to Chernobyl victims, but also—by jeopardizing real programs for people who already can hardly make ends meet—forcing them into the barest struggle for survival, which will surely hasten their death rate. Second, there is the real psychological factor. Those who make such statements do not understand their devastating on real victims, who are in fact less afraid of radiation and life’s stresses than most people. That is because for all these years, these survivors have practiced all possible means of rehabilitation—from “a healthy way of life” (25), including both traditional and non-traditional therapies, to seeking to perfect the spirit (by the way, in the midst of the atheistic USSR, many “chernobylcy” became devout believers). And note that this all occurred without the so-called “psychological help” from high-ranking experts, to whom, I expect, any money from the UN resolution will once again be directed—that is, it will go to their own programs and accounts, and not to really helping the victims themselves…
But the worst effect of the Resolution, its assessment and statement, is that it will once again block the way for simple human compassion, for even those crumbs of concrete help sent to victims from the kind and merciful individuals of the world who, believing its lie, might be persuaded not to respond to any new concrete calls for help (such as Katya Matkovskaya’s …) So these poor souls, barely surviving, if not dying, once again get branded with the label “radiophobia,” and thus, once again, must remain alone in their trouble.
Let me emphasize once again, official gentlemen of the United Nations, the victims of Chernobyl do not need your so-called sponsored help, which they never did see, and never will see. They do not even hope for your compassion.
But they do demand your elementary respect for their suffering and trouble, which your thoughtless assessment and statement only aggravate …
Moreover, the victims of Chernobyl would be very grateful if international organization as respected as the United Nations would pass a Resolution condemning—indeed, holding criminally responsible—anyone who dares to brand another with the unreasonable and humiliating term, “radiophobia”!
It is necessary to add that the articles of the Resolution about the decade of rehabilitation and steady development of the areas hurt by the Chernobyl accident, even within the limits of the 30 km “zone of alienation” around the ChAES, are surely correct. But this assessment should also be more specific and verified by radiation levels in each particular community (because even in some villages quite a distance from the station, we found places and stains with high radiation levels, whereas near the 10 km zone, there were places with more or less normal readings). However, the main point to notice (and admitted by the Resolution itself) is the stipulation that no one should occupy the 10 km zone around the station, which remains most dangerous for people to live in, and which will remain so for hundreds, even thousands, of years (26).
Regarding the city of Pripyat, however, and its absence in the Resolution, it seems that someone would like to wipe its name from the map—perhaps so that mankind might forget Chernobyl, and so that nuclear magnates might continue constructing the most dangerous objects on the planet!
To conclude this article, then, let me once again remind all people of good will, including those in such a high-ranking organization as the United Nations, of the very important initiative—so important for ecological, social, cultural, political, and psychological reasons—introduced by the organizers of Pripyat.com and the editors of “Literary Ukraine”: that Pripyat be granted international status as a City, Museum, or Monument to the world’s most devastating technological accident of the twentieth century (21). And we would be most grateful if the UN General Assembly could add it as an article to the Resolution on Chernobyl so that our Pripyat might continue for years and years to be a Reminder, to prevent other such tragedies and catastrophes from happening again the in future.
2007, Kyiv, Ukraine
[i] Robert Conquest’s landmark
1986 study Harvest of Sorrow:Soviet
Collectivization and the Terror-Famine published by Oxford University Press
is the authoritative account of this event.
Notes:
1. “Chernobyl, – byl'nik m., byl' (bylina); byl'ec.; byl'njak`; koniki; budyl'nik`(alarm clock), – the kind of the large wormwood (polun)” (Vladimir Dal’).
*** About great Ukrainian poetess and the known keeperof the Chernobyl memory and Chernobyl traditions Lina Kostenko see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Kostenko.
radionuclide
|
period of half-disintegration T(l/2), day
|
Power output , МэВ/of disintegration
|
Activity absolute, МКи
|
239Np
|
2,35
|
0,16
|
720
|
99Mо
|
2,75
|
0,28
|
160
|
132Tе
|
3,25
|
0,24
|
73
|
132I
|
(3,25)
|
1,84
| |
131I
|
8,04
|
0,39
|
86
|
140Ва
|
12,8
|
0,18
|
135
|
140La
|
(12,8)
|
2,30
| |
141Cе
|
32,5
|
0,80
|
150
|
103Ru
|
39,4
|
0,49
|
130
|
89Sr
|
52
|
0
|
63
|
91Y
|
58
|
0
|
70
|
95Zr
|
64
|
0,74
|
130
|
95Nb
|
(64)
|
0,76
|
130
|
110mAg
|
250
|
2,84
|
0,5
|
144Ce
|
284
|
0,02
|
90
|
106Ru
|
367
|
0,20
|
60
|
134Cs
|
2,06
|
1,55
|
4,0
|
125Sb
|
2,77
|
0,44
|
0,7
|
90Sr
|
28,8
|
0
|
6
|
137Cs
|
30,2
|
0,57
|
8
|
238Pu
|
87,7
|
0
|
0,02
|
239Pu
|
24380
|
0
|
0,02
|
240Pu
|
6537
|
0
|
0,03
|
242Cm
|
163
|
0
|
0,49
|
