Book Review
Chernobyl: Crime without
Punishment by Alla, A. Yaroshinskaya
The Chernobyl catastrophe was largely forgotten
and dismissed by the world as soon as the smoldering mess was contained in the
famous sarcophagus, but those who have paid attention to the issue since then
have been aware of the strangely divergent views of the human toll of the
disaster. One view claims that a million people have died prematurely, and
millions more have had their health ruined, while the other side says there was
only a small increase in cancer deaths and “generally positive prospects for
the future health of most individuals should prevail.” [1]
If anyone still doubts the more pessimistic
view, they need only read the recently published Chernobyl: Crime
Without Punishment to lay the question to rest. [2] This is a
translation of a book written by Ukrainian journalist, politician and winner of
the 1992 Right Livelihood Award, Alla A. Yaroshinskaya. In this
powerful condemnation of injustices suffered by Chernobyl victims for the past
quarter century, the author provides volumes of evidence about their suffering–and
it is the kind of evidence that should really be emphasized over other types that
serve the interests of the nuclear industry. The experiences of the victims and
witnesses reveal the health effects of what may be the world’s worst
radiological catastrophe (there are other contenders for this prize).
Scientists can debate among themselves whether small
amounts of radiation stimulate genetic repair, or make positive changes to
chromosome telomeres, but anyone who chooses to “remember his humanity, and
forget the rest” (to quote the famous line on this topic pronounced by Albert
Einstein and Bertrand Russell) will be convinced by the corroborating evidence
given by millions of victims. Doubting these accounts is a little like denying
what occurred in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1940s. The evidence may be
dismissed as “anecdotal” by researchers in the hard sciences, but not in the
social sciences where witness testimony is a legitimate and indispensable type
of evidence, and a radiological disaster is something that rightly deserves to
be studied as a sociological phenomenon. Ms. Yaroshinskaya’s writing
demonstrates that it is time to get over the senseless false controversy about
the effects of nuclear accidents and look squarely in the eyes of people
affected.
This is an important book that should be
translated into Japanese so that Japan might be able to reverse the harm that
has been done by successive government failures to deal with the Fukushima
Daiichi meltdowns. This book also clears up some of the misunderstandings about
the Soviet handling of the situation.
Since the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe, many
critics of the Japanese government have pointed to the evacuation of Pripyat in
1986 as a model of effective government response. They ask why a communist government
did so much better than a supposedly advanced and wealthy democracy. This view
would amuse Ms. Yaroshinskaya. The truth is that the Soviet disaster was a much
larger contamination–most of it fell on land; whereas in Fukushima, 70-80% of it
fell on the ocean, and it differed in other ways that make it worse in some
respects. The evacuation of Pripyat came too late, and in Kiev, only 100
kilometers away, the regular May Day parade was held a few days after the
explosion in a cloud of heavy radiation, as if in an x-ray machine, as the
author puts it. While high party officials waved to the crowds, their loved
ones had been spirited away to safer locations. One scientist quoted in the
book estimated that 15,000 dying victims were turned away from Kiev hospitals
in the days after the explosion, never to be officially recognized as radiation
victims.
After the establishment of the permanent
exclusion zone, it became obvious that large parts of Ukraine, Belarus and
southern Russia were of questionable fitness for habitation, but the people on
these lands were ignored and essentially left to their own devices. There would
be no further evacuations. The city of Gomel, Belarus (population 480,000, a
sort of “sister city” of Fukushima City) and the surrounding region are still
dotted with zones of the highest contamination levels, and some scientists
believe the gene pool of the population has been permanently damaged.
Ms. Yaroshinskaya presents the victims’ cases in
their own voices, and what emerges are stories that resemble the experiences of
rape victims. First there is an assault on the body (by radiation) then there
are the insults and humiliation experienced in the pursuit of justice. A
typical letter is this one:
I am not yet 32 years old, but I find myself in a hospital bed several
times a year. And all of my four children (under 12) are also ill most of the
time (they feel weak and listless, they have joint pains in arms and legs,
their hemoglobin is below normal, they have enlarged thyroid and lymph nodes,
headaches, stomach pains, constant colds). And it is the same in every
family. We want to live. We want our kids to live and grow up healthy, and
have a future. But through heartlessness, callousness and cruelty of those on
whom our lives and the lives of our children depend, we are condemned to the
worst possible fate, and we are only too well aware of that... We have had to
eat, drink and breathe radiation for years, waiting for our last day.
- Valentina Nikolaevna Okhremchuk,
mother of four little boys, speaking for all the
mothers of Olevshchina
One might say that one letter like this would
prove nothing, but the fact is that there were hundreds of them signed by
thousands of petitioners sharing the same experiences, so the narrative becomes
impossible to deny.
As a victim herself who was living in an area of
heavy fallout, the author pursued the story as a journalist immediately after
the disaster. She made unauthorized and clandestine trips to the villages where
people were living on contaminated soil, and there she collected their stories.
At a time when photocopiers were scarce, and accessible only with official
approval, she spread the word via hand-typed copies through a network of
sympathetic supporters–a way of evading the censorship of the era known as samizdat.
When the glasnost period advanced, she was elected to the The Congress of
People’s Deputies, the first democratically elected body that was created during
Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika (openness, reform) period. During her work
as a journalist and a politician, she collected the letters that her readers
and constituents sent to her. They begged for justice and relief from living in
a radioactive environment.
These letters are heart-wrenching testimony to
the contemptuous neglect that victims suffered at the hands of their
governments, as well as the scientists and doctors who defended the official
view that claims of declining health were caused by “radiophobia” and the social
factors that came with the decline of the Soviet Union.
In the aftermath of the disaster, residents in
contaminated zones were quickly relocated, and there were hasty decisions made
about where to rebuild. Money flowed to construction projects, new villages
sprang up, and only then they discovered that this land too was almost as
contaminated as the towns that had been evacuated. This was in the days before
one could buy a cheap, hand-held Geiger counter. Even qualified scientists
needed government permission to take measurements, so these villagers were at
the mercy of a government that wished they didn’t exist.
The one saving grace of the Fukushima disaster
is that it happened in the age of the Internet and inexpensive radiation detectors.
Some Japanese legislators made vain calls to make it illegal for citizens to
measure radiation, but nothing came of it.
One subgroup of relocated citizens was the staff
of the Chernobyl power plant itself. Incredibly, two other reactors on the site
remained in operation until the year 2000, and staff commuted to the plant
every day to work in the radioactive environment. The former company town of
Pripyat was evacuated and a new town was built in Slavutich, but it too was on
contaminated land and not fit for normal life. Outdoor recreation was not
possible, and workers felt sick and demoralized.
By late 1980s, the Soviet Union was unraveling,
money for relocation had been exhausted, and no one in official positions
wanted to admit to past mistakes and fix them. In addition, promises of “clean”
food supplies were broken. During periods of shortages and inflation, the
allowances given for buying this clean food became an insult to the recipients.
There was no clean food to buy, and if there had been, it would have been
unaffordable. The food allowance became known as a pittance of “coffin money.”
Another category of victim was made up of the
800,000 liquidators who battled the reactor fire and built the structure that
sealed off the danger from the environment. Chernobyl is regarded now as a war,
and the liquidators are rightly referred to as veterans of an epic struggle
against a new kind of enemy. They are undoubtedly responsible for saving all of
the Eurasian landmass from becoming uninhabitable. These young men and women
answered the call to save their country without hesitation (but they were
conscripted and didn’t have a choice anyway), and one would think that the just
reward would have been guaranteed hero status, disability pension, and health
care with special provisions for the effects of radiation that they would
suffer. Such benefits were promised, but in reality the Chernobyl veterans were
for the most part betrayed. A population of this size, exposed to high levels
of radiation, could have provided valuable knowledge about the effects of
nuclear accidents, but the veterans were ignored by official studies inside and
outside of the former Soviet Union.
The common understanding of radiation effects
predicted that the Chernobyl liquidators would get cancer at some time decades
later, but instead the most common observation was generalized premature aging.
Men who went into battle in the prime of their youth were dying ten years later
from heart attacks and strokes. They suffered from immune and digestive
disorders–a general decline in every aspect of biological function. Since these
disorders could be classified as health conditions normally found in the
general population, the official stance was that they were not related to
radiation exposure. Complaints were dismissed as “radiophobia,” and declines in
health were linked to the social upheaval and economic decline of the times.
One victim quoted in the book snarled sarcastically that yes, he was getting “radiophobia.”
He was afraid to turn on the radio and listen to the nonsense spouted from
official media sources.
The truth is something that is known by people
who have a theory of human nature that says all people want dignity, health and
the chance to contribute to society. These victims and veterans, like all
people, did not want to live life as moochers. They wanted to work with the
same vigor they put into working the land, or (in the case of the liquidators)
into resolving the crisis at the reactor. Rather than having a fear of
radiation, they waved it off with bravado until it was too late to save their
health.
As protest movements gathered strength in the 1990s,
governments were forced to listen to complaints of victims and veterans, but
still they gained little. At one time, a cynical move was made to monetize the
meager benefits that these groups received. Instead of guaranteeing them defined
benefits such as free transportation, free medical exams and so on, the value
of these benefits would be pegged to a monetary value and paid out on a regular
schedule. In a time of high inflation and rapid economic change, the ruse was
obvious. Without a guaranteed index that defined benefits, the monetizaton
scheme was just a way to get beneficiaries off the government ledgers.
Ms. Yaroshinskaya concludes that the victims in
the villages and the Chernobyl veterans were totally marginalized and abandoned
by successive governments. She condemns the villains, and has a willingness to
name names and describe them with the vitriol she thinks they deserve. She
points out the essential fact that what little the victims managed to gain was
won only when the movement grew strong enough to turn into solidarity strikes
all over Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. One has to wonder if Japan, the
apparently prosperous, developed democracy, would be capable of mounting a
solidarity strike to support the families in Fukushima who want to evacuate.
As I write this after having watched Japan in
the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe, Ms. Yaroshinskaya’s book
reads like a manual of how a society reacts to a large-scale nuclear accident.
So much is unfolding in Japan exactly as it did in the Soviet Union. I have the
feeling that she has described a situation that will play out wherever there is
a nuclear accident in the future, so readers can learn from this and know what
to expect if it strikes close to home.
With four hundred nuclear reactors still in
service on the planet, most of them nearing the end of their lifespans, and few
countries following Germany’s lead to shut down nuclear power, it’s a safe bet
to say that somewhere in the next decades there will be one or more major
accidents. What’s it going to take to make people understand we can’t manage
this technology? Chernobyl and Fukushima (as well as numerous lesser accidents
at mines, processing facilities and military and experimental reactors) should
have been enough, but it seems like an accident will have to happen near a
place that counts for global power holders: Los Angeles, Chicago, New York,
London, Paris. Note to Japan, content to have bought into enriched uranium
technology and General Electric reactor design: In case you haven’t figured it
out, you still don’t matter in this sense.
The list below shows some of the parallels
between the Soviet and Japanese responses to their nuclear disasters:
1. In
the initial days there is lying, misinformation, and a deliberate attempt to
avoid causing a panic.
2. Data
on fallout, wind direction and so on is gathered but kept secret. Government
claims to have experienced breakdowns and chaotic conditions that made data
collection impossible.
3. Reports
go out that potassium iodide has been given to the population at risk, but in
fact most people who need it don’t get it.
4. The
legal tolerance level for radiation is increased.
5. Leadership
is surprisingly ignorant about the science and the pre-existing state of the
nation’s reactors. Government seems impotent, incompetent, paralyzed and unable
to direct resources to the problem.
6. Evacuation
is delayed, then months or years later residents are pressured to return to
contaminated land. Officials go into deep denial about the extent of the damage
and pour resources into hopeless efforts at decontamination and remediation.
7. National
wealth is invested in restoring communities in contaminated areas, then when this
mistake is realized, governments cannot acknowledge it.
8. The
solution to pollution is dilution. Radioactive debris and food are diluted and
spread far and wide to all corners of the country.
9. There
is no large-sum settlement fee offered to those who want to resettle far away. Surviving
family members of the victims of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New
York received million-dollar settlements that allowed them to restart their lives,
but there is no such compensation after a nuclear disaster. Instead, various
cynical schemes like vouchers and monthly allotments are slowly dripped out in
such a way as to tie impoverished people to the land that the government wants
to declare “remediated.”
10. Funds
donated by individuals are misappropriated and used in ways that would outrage
the donors. The funds raised by the first public charity ever allowed in the
USSR were redirected away from victims then put toward funding visits by
foreign scientists who were ushered through the disaster zones by officially
appointed obfuscators. In Fukushima, funds from the German Red Cross are being
used to build a kindergarten in one of the highly contaminated towns just
outside the exclusion zone. [3]
11. Reactor
designers, electrical utility management and regulators will attempt to escape
liability and prosecution, usually with success. In the case of Chernobyl,
station staff were scapegoated and sent to jail, but no one else was prosecuted
for the ultimate causes of the accident or the failure afterwards to protect
citizens.
12. Scientific
and medical opinion is controlled through state support to such an extent that
the official conclusions become unassailable. The disaster is declared to have
had overall minimal effects on public health, and this becomes the consensus
view accepted throughout the world, including by United Nations agencies. Numerous
Japanese “experts” on Chernobyl visited the area repeatedly, but their
interpretations of the catastrophe were shaped by the state-sponsored
scientific and medical community that filtered their interpretations. When
disaster struck Fukushima, these misinformed experts repeated the
insulting references to radiophobia, and they were put in charge of managing
the public health crisis and leading the government’s public relations
campaign. [4]
13. In the
absence of efficient measures to protect the public and compensate all losses,
citizens are left to fight among themselves over their rights. Mothers claim
the right to compensated evacuation, while farmers, bankers and businesses demand
that everyone should stay, buy the local food and support the local economy.
Husbands and wives split up over disputes about the risks. The old want to stay
and the young want to leave. Senior citizens complain that their grandchildren
don’t want to visit anymore. The pressure to keep children (the most vulnerable
people to radiation) on the land is particularly cruel, but essential for those
who want to revive the economy of the area. They know that without children
communities will decline.
14. There is
a deep, widespread denial of the nuclear disaster’s ability to destroy the
environment and the social fabric, and society is helped along in this delusion
by the global nuclear industry and the United Nations. (Ironically, the Japanese
state media, NHK, actually covered this in a 1996 report condemning
the IAEA adoption of the official Soviet lie.) [5]
15. The market
talks and bullshit walks. Capitalism is all about freedom and free markets
after all. The post-Soviet republics became capitalist and Japan is supposedly
capitalist, too. In spite of hypocritical efforts by the government to be a
command economy in this instance, forcing people to live on contaminated land,
people are free to move away, and they do. Despite efforts to restore the area,
it develops a stigma that lasts for a long, long time. Economic decline is
inevitable, and it is recognized too late that the money spent on restoration
should have been spent on helping people relocate.
16. Just as
Chernobyl was a major cause of the collapse of the Soviet system, the meltdowns
in Fukushima may play a part, or be a symptom of, fundamental problems with
modern capitalism.
Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment is an essential, powerful wake-up call to
the human race to pull out of its state of denial over global nuclear hazards.
Chernobyl was supposed to have been “the final warning,” but we’ll have to say
this now about Fukushima. One line that stuck with me after putting the book
down was a Russian proverb that Ms. Yaroshinskaya uses to comment on the
neglect of Chernobyl victims: Deception
can take you wherever you want to go, but it can’t bring you back. It
applies equally to self-deception. Keep that in mind if you think the nuclear waste
scattered over the planet–some of it “safely” contained in temporary storage,
some of it in the soil and water, some in your bones–is an issue we can afford
to ignore once again.
In 2008, the
United Nations report on the Chernobyl disaster confirmed the findings of its
own 2000 report. It denies contrary reports that Chernobyl had serious health
consequences for millions of people living in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. At
one point the authors acknowledge studies showing that liquidators suffered
increased rates of cardiovascular and neurological diseases, but they dismiss
such findings simply because they contradict previous research. By such logic,
Einstein was wrong because he contradicted Newton. The report concludes with these
words: “The vast majority of the
population were exposed to low levels of radiation comparable, at most, to few
times the annual natural background radiation levels and need not live in fear
of serious health consequences [As usual with UN reports, the
complaints of internal radiation damage are completely ignored]. This is true for the populations of the
three countries most affected by the Chernobyl accident, Belarus, the Russian
Federation and Ukraine… Lives have been disrupted by the Chernobyl accident,
but from the radiological point of view, generally positive prospects for the
future health of most individuals should prevail.”
[2] Alla, A. Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl:
Crime without Punishment (London: Transaction Publishers, 2011).
[3] “Donation via
German Red Cross Used to Build Library, Nursery School for Evacuees in Koriyama
City in Fukushima,” EXSKF, January
12, 2012,
This blog post
includes a translation of an article published by Kyodo News which is no longer
online. The article gave this information about the use of the donated funds
from Germany: “A facility with the library room and the nursery school opened
on January 6 in the temporary housing in Koriyama City in Fukushima Prefecture
where the residents from Kawauchi-mura live after having evacuated from their
home after the nuclear accident. The facility was built with the money of about
40 million yen (about 408,000 euro, US$520,000) donated via the German Red
Cross.
[4] Cordula Meyer,
“Studying the Fukushima Aftermath ‘People Are Suffering from Radiophobia,’” Der
Spiegel, August 19, 2011,
