However, the aim of the Chernobyl Union was not simply to solicit help from abroad or voluntary contributions from the Soviet people. At a meeting in the new town of Slavutich, built to replace Pripyat, Shovkovshytny described the law he and Yavorivsky had introduced in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, which would compensate all those who had suffered. The ‘safe’ dose would be reduced from thirty-five rems to seven. Women who had lived in Pripyat would be permitted to retire on full pension at the age of forty-five, men at the age of fifty. Special passes would be issued to all the liquidators, who would be entitled to special rights: free travel on public transport, going to the front of any queues, and extra holidays up to eighty days. There would be financial compensation for all invalids among the liquidators, and the money would be paid from the Union budget. Moscow was responsible, so Moscow must pay; if it did not, the Ukraine would withhold the six or seven billion rubles that it contributed to the Union budget.
Mixed with these promises of concrete benefits were lofty thoughts on the human condition. ‘Remember,’ Shovkovshytny told the workers at the power station, ‘that our role on this planet is to create beauty and kindness so that the apocalypse will not happen. People must live and work in harmony together, and imitate God almighty. Christianity taught “What is mine is yours.” Communism taught “What is yours is mine.” If we can’t keep all the commandments, we can at least keep one: love one another.’
Then this preacher-politician took up his guitar and entertained his audience with some songs of his own composition.
6
The Chernobyl Law was passed, not just in the Ukraine but in Belorussia and the Russian Federation: however, its implementation had to await funds from the central government in Moscow. There had been no such delay in the appointment of a Chernobyl Commission, headed by Yavorivsky, to frame the Chernobyl Law, which employed a permanent staff in spacious offices in the middle of Kiev. Shovkovshytny served on the commission, as did Grodzinski. Later the Supreme Soviet established a Ministry for Chernobyl with Georgi Gotovchits as the minister. The Russians and Belorussians did likewise, so there were three ministers for Chernobyl, each with his staff of civil servants.
Ordinary people were not slow to appreciate that the radioactive cloud might have a silver lining. As soon as it became apparent that a liquidator’s card would entitle its holder to certain benefits, there was a dramatic increase in the number of those who claimed to have worked in the thirty-kilometre zone. Those who were unable to claim the card envied the privileges given those who did. In Kiev there had already been considerable resentment that the evacuees from Pripyat and the thirty-kilometre zone had been allocated flats in the city ahead of those who had been waiting for many years. Now it was claimed that others had suffered from severe radioactive contamination – in the Urals, for example, after the accidents at Mayak. Nor was radiation the only form of pollution that had damaged the health of the population. Chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers had all seeped into the food chain, often causing more tangible harm than that claimed for radiation.
Even those who were in sympathy with the victims of Chernobyl asked whether the billions that were to be given in compensation would not be better spent on improving the health and nutrition of the population in general. The same applied to the vast cost of resettling up to a million people from areas where the levels of caesium and strontium would give them a lifetime dose of more than seven rems. In many cases the hazards of chemical pollution in the areas to which they were sent were greater than the dangers from radiation. What was the chemical equivalent of a rem?
Equally unquantifiable was the effect of the stress caused to those who were removed from their homes. Whereas actuaries in the West estimate that a person’s life expectancy is reduced by a year each time he or she moves house, Knijnikov estimated that the obligatory evacuation of a Ukrainian or Belorussian peasant from his ancestral village was the equivalent of a dose of more than one hundred rems.
However, the charges of genocide, once made, could not be withdrawn; and the fears, once they had arisen, had to be addressed. In Belorussia, Alexei and Antonia Dashuk, the sixty-year-old couple who had been left in their village forty kilometres north of Chernobyl, were finally moved from their large wooden house with its verandah, barn and cellar in 1989. Their dog and cat were left behind to run wild in the woods. They went first to Dubrovica, fifty kilometres further north, where they lived with Alexei’s sister, who had earlier been evacuated from a village nearer to Chernobyl. There Antonia developed trouble with her liver and Alexei had a stroke and spent six weeks in the hospital.
They would have liked to stay in Dubrovica, where at least they could sit on a bench in front of the house and talk to passersby, but under the new, more stringent definitions enshrined in the Chernobyl Law, it too was considered unsafe for human habitation. They asked to be sent to another village, but the houses belonging to the collective were reserved for the working population. They might have bought a house, but it would have cost them twenty-five thousand rubles, and they had been given only fifteen thousand in compensation.
In 1990 the Dashuks were allocated a one-room flat in the suburbs of Minsk, with a certificate to establish their status:
Alexei Mikhailovich Dashuk is from the settlement Rudiya of the Honicke region of the Gomel region, which is part of the zone of continuous control and zone of limited consumption of local foodstuffs as well as local plots of land, and this is to certify that they are evacuated according to the obligatory resettlement law to Minsk … in accordance with the decree No. 60b of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia and the Council of Ministers on 21 March 1990.
The block was inhabited mostly by people who worked in the city. When it became known that the Dashuks had been evacuated from the contaminated zone, their neighbours regarded them with suspicion. When Antonia made friendly overtures to the woman next door, she shied away, saying apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got children.’ Despite their insistence that everything they had brought from their homes had been checked for contamination, the people who lived around them were afraid to enter their flat.
7
South of the thirty-kilometre zone, in the towns of Narodici and Polesskoe, the communities disintegrated as people waited to be moved from their homes. By the autumn of 1991, families with young children had already left, but in Polesskoe twelve thousand remained to be resettled. Eight hundred children remained in the school, which the year before had had over a thousand pupils. Asked at random, the children said they felt fine, but the local doctors reported that everyone’s blood was affected by the radiation, leading to a decreased resistance to disease.
There were some changes for the better. The church had been reopened and was now used for baptism and marriages, even by the local party leaders, as it had been before the Revolution. There was also the extra allowance to buy clean food brought in from outside, but there was never enough; the shops were always empty, so people ate what they grew on their own plots of land. Radiation might be unhealthy, but so was starvation.
Worse than the material conditions, however, was the demoralization that had taken place among the inhabitants of Narodici and Polesskoe, who felt that they had been abandoned to their fate. In the autumn of 1991, a team of doctors from the Moscow Centre for Intellectual and Humane Technologies went to the towns and villages in the contaminated zone. Headed by Dr Adolf Kharash and including Dr Vladimir Lupandin, the group visited not just Narodici and Polesskoe but also Bryansk, Novozybkov and Vetka in Belorussia.
The conditions they found were appalling. There was some evidence of an increase of specific ailments that could be ascribed to radiation – seven children in Narodici with cataracts, for example – but far more serious was the moral degradation, which they ascribed to stress. People had become grasping and materialistic, indifferent to the fate of their neighbours. With only four thousand remaining from a population of 6,500 inhabitants, there seemed no future
whatsoever. The extra allowance paid for the purchase of clean food was spent entirely on drink – on vodka when they could get it, on wine when they could not. Wine cost 3.5 rubles a bottle, vodka ten rubles, but thanks to the ‘coffin money’, everyone could afford it. When the woman who ran the only liquor store received a consignment of Vodka, she had to call on the militia to keep order.
Dr Lupandin estimated that most of the inhabitants were now alcoholics. It was so widely believed that vodka washed out radionuclides that even the children drank. However, despite their anxiety about radiation, they continued to grow and eat their own food. Nor were the people deterred from having children. There had been no cases of congenital deformities, nor had any more malformed animals been born. The women continued to get pregnant and have babies, and when there were miscarriages, they were as likely to have been caused by alcoholism as by radiation. One of the best ways to help these people, Dr Lupandin decided, was to build cafés serving soft drinks.
One of the principal reasons for the populace’s demoralization was their sense of grievance against the local leaders, who they felt were exploiting the situation to their own advantage. There was a brisk black market in liquidators’ cards and places at the top of the waiting list for new homes. Obliged by law to leave their old homes, ordinary families had been given insufficient compensation to buy new ones; only the party bosses received twice the real value of their homes. The medical supplies that came into the zone were resold to doctors from the big cities. Televisions and refrigerators, sent to Narodici to improve morale, were sequestered by the bosses and allocated to their friends. Everyone knew what was going on but could do nothing about it; anyone who protested would be charged by the militia with disorderly conduct.
All this might have been tolerable if the people had felt that they were going to have a better life, but the conditions where they were resettled were dire. The people of Narodici were allocated 950 flats in different towns, some as far away as Odessa, and 150 houses in a new settlement called Brosilovka, sixty kilometres south of Narodici. For the unproductive old people, who were given the flats, it meant losing contact with their families and their rural way of life. Like the Dashuks in Belorussia, they had been used to a community where everyone was known to everyone else, and where they could sit out on their verandahs and watch the world go by. The prospect of incarceration in a tower block was often worse than remaining in an area of radioactive contamination.
For the working population, the move to Brosilovka seemed little better. The land they were given to farm was swampy, infertile and five kilometres from the village. The school and kindergarten were not much closer. They complained that the new houses had been built in a hurry, with substandard furnishings and crumbling concrete floors. The ancillary services were bad; the only shop was a small trailer that sold barley coffee, pickles, tea and meat at ten rubles a jar. The bread came from Zhitomir, fifty kilometres away, and milk was delivered every day, but other items were in short supply. It was hard to get grain for their chickens. There was no wood for their stoves; some brought it from Narodici, even though it was contaminated; there was coal but it gave off a filthy smoke. They had been promised gas to heat their homes, but it had only been connected to the houses belonging to the party leaders. The latter also had wooden floors to their houses and could get hold of furniture, whereas some of the children of the state-farm workers had to sleep on camp beds. There was no doctor because the house allocated for one had been given by a party boss to his chauffeur.
Listening to this long lament from the former inhabitants of Narodici, the team from the Moscow Centre for Intellectual and Humane Technologies was taken aback. Gentle men, who might have stepped out of a story by Chekhov, they had carefully recorded the complaints of a crowd of angry peasant women; the men were either absent or silent. Retreating to the home (with wooden floor and colour television) of the former secretary of the District Party Committee, they had to match the evident dissatisfaction of these victims with the relatively sumptuous conditions in which they lived. Even with concrete floors, the new houses were lavish by Soviet standards. To a Moscow academic who could never hope for anything better than a small flat, it seemed enviable to have a detached house with two storeys, five rooms, a bathroom and a garden. To complain that the central heating was fuelled by coal rather than the gas they had been promised seemed to be looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The conclusion reached by Dr Kharash was that the inhabitants’ distress had little to do with their living conditions but came from the trauma of the resettlement. In Narodici their main anxiety had been the danger from radiation; now that this danger had been removed, they were left with the misery of having been uprooted. Although the women admitted that their children seemed healthier now and that their husbands had stopped drinking since going back to work, they still felt that no one cared about their suffering, and that they had been forgotten by the outside world.
Back at Narodici, a new wave of resettlement had started. On a bluff of land outside a beautiful wooden cottage with views of damp green meadows, slow-flowing rivulets and copses of birch trees, a woman and her crippled son waited to be picked up. Her husband had already left with the furniture for a village two hundred kilometres away in the Zhitomir region. She wept as she waited; her home was so beautiful that she would have liked to stay. No one liked the new village, and the compensation they had been offered was only a third of the cost of a new house. ‘Thirteen thousand rubles? What can one buy for thirteen thousand rubles? Even new furniture cannot be bought for that kind of money.’ If they had been paid proper compensation, she would have gone to live near her daughter; as it was, they had to go where they were sent and surrender any right to return. ‘They’ll put us in that rat hole and leave us to rot.’ There were more tears. ‘Don’t cry, Mama,’ said her crippled son. ‘Please don’t cry.’
Fifty kilometres away, well within the thirty-kilometre zone, Ivan and Irina Avramenko had never left their home. After hiding from the militia in the weeks following the accident, they had come out into the open and continued to live as before in the years that followed. Seven of their neighbours had done likewise, and within a couple of years another fifty people had returned to the village. In nearby Ilincy, there were as many as four hundred people. They were largely self-sufficient, living on their own cucumbers and potatoes, with mushrooms from the forests. Every now and then, officials came to try to persuade them to leave, but they countered by asking if there was any place in the whole Soviet Union that was unpolluted.
‘If you really want to help us,’ said Irina to visitors from Kiev, ‘reconnect the electricity, organize deliveries of tobacco and bread, and of sugar to make vodka.’ When a people’s deputy told them that the new Chernobyl Law would pay them compensation, they replied that in their experience people’s deputies always cheated and told lies. ‘Soviet power is built on lies,’ shouted old Irina with a toothless cackle. ‘What have we known in our lives? Only war and famine. Isn’t life just a vale of tears, as the Pope says? What do we need, anyway, but half a hectare of land while we’re living and two square metres when we’re dead? Do we worry about our children? Of course we worry about our children, for deserting the villages where their families have lived for hundreds of years. And if it’s really so dangerous, why are party officials returning to their dachas? And building new roads to reach them? Why are they felling trees and taking them from the zone?’ A further toothless cackle; then, Ivan in boots, Irina in slippers, they shuffled away.
‘It’s strange,’ a French journalist was heard to remark. ‘For the first time since I’ve come to the Soviet Union, I’ve met people who seem relaxed and happy.’
XIII
1
By the autumn of 1989, it had become clear to the Soviet leaders that on the question of Chernobyl they no longer enjoyed the trust of their own people. In the elections that year, not only the radical environmentalists of Green World but also the Communist candidates
ran on an antinuclear ticket. The eminence and experience of the nation’s leading scientists counted for nothing. The reckoning now had to be paid for decades of ideologically inspired distortions and outright lies.
The demands of the nationalists and environmentalists for the resettlement of everyone living in contaminated territory had grave implications for the Soviet economy. From the start it had been understood that the accident would cost the state considerable sums of money. In September 1986, Soviet Finance Minister Gostev estimated the cost at two billion rubles. Included in his figure were the loss of electricity from the fourth unit; the fourth unit itself (four hundred million rubles); the partially built fifth and sixth units; other enterprises around the power station; and the whole town of Pripyat. There were also the collectives and state-owned farms whose land had been taken out of production, the crops and livestock that had to be destroyed, compensation for evacuees, new houses and the open-ended expense entailed in cleaning the contaminated zones.
By March 1990, this estimate had been increased by a factor of two hundred. Yuri Koryakin, the chief economist of the All-Union Research, Design and Development Institute of Power Engineering, calculated that by the end of the century the accident will have cost the Soviet state between 170 and 215 billion rubles. The single largest item was the loss of produce from the fields and forests of the contaminated zones. Next came the loss of electricity production, not just from the fourth reactor at Chernobyl but also from the thirty-two other nuclear reactors that had been closed down or abandoned in the wake of the accident. Safety measures taken in the nuclear reactors that remained on line had cost from four to five billion rubles, leading to a 9 per cent increase in their charges. Koryakin estimated the cost of cleaning the zone at between thirty-five and forty-five billion rubles.