Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl by Piers Paul Read
The meeting in Kiev in May 1988 was altogether different. Ilyn was present, along with Guskova and Baranov, but now the Soviet delegates were on their home ground, and much had happened in the meantime to give substance to glasnost. Gone were the Communist rhetoric and Cold War jibes. It was a meeting of scientists and professionals. In greeting the delegates, the chairman of the city soviet spoke of a remarkable centenary, ‘the millennium of Russian Christianity, the symbol of centuries-old development of our history and culture.’ Only Anatoli Romanenko, the Ukrainian minister of health, in admitting the ‘sociopsychological processes that accompany any accident’ – that is, the panic – could not resist a dig at the Americans: ‘We couldn’t avoid it in the Chernobyl situation, just as it had not been avoided during the Three Mile Island accident.’
Otherwise, the papers presented by the Soviet scientists were strictly professional in tone, giving detailed statistics on the exposure to radiation of the population in the different republics. The gigantic scale of the problem was admitted for the first time: 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously affected regions of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine; 135,000 had been evacuated from Pripyat and the thirty-kilometre zone. Pregnant women and as many as 350,000 children had been sent to sanatoriums, rest homes and Pioneer holiday camps.
There were some limits to the candour: it was said that iodine had been given to the whole population of Pripyat within twelve hours of the accident, and later to 5.4 million people, including 1.69 million children. However, Ilyn and his colleagues admitted that ‘large territories with an increased contamination density by radiocaesium existed outside the thirty-kilometre zone. Located in these territories were about six hundred populated areas where people continued to live but lived in conditions of rigid control over locally produced food, including its withdrawal and replacement by clean food brought in from other parts of the country. These territories were called zones of rigid control.’
On the whole, the tone of the conference was one of measured self-congratulation. ‘The Soviet Union,’ said Health Minister Chazov in his opening speech, ‘has sufficient potential to solve without assistance the problems emerging from the Chernobyl accident.’ Romanenko described how 2,000 teams of medical personnel had been mobilized to care for the affected populace, including 7,000 doctors, 2,000 scientists, 1,250 medical students and over 12,000 ancillary workers. By the end of 1986, 696,000 people had been examined, 215,000 of them children. Of these, 37,500 had been sent to hospitals for further investigation, 12,600 of them children.
The number of casualties remained unchanged. Thirty-one had died; a further 209 had suffered from varying degrees of radiation sickness and remained under observation. Of these, 88 per cent were able to return to work, but more than 30 per cent still suffered from some forms of disablement: heart trouble, gastric disease, respiratory difficulties, sexual dysfunction and disorders of the nervous system. However, all showed signs of gradual recovery, and their disabilities were due to the massive doses they had received.
As to the general population in the affected area, analysis of the radiation situation, and the protective measures taken, ‘allows us to state with confidence that not a single case of radiation injury has been found in the population exposed to irradiation.’ Indeed, concluded Chazov, ‘One must say definitely that we can today be certain that there are no effects of the Chernobyl accident on human health, and that this is due to a great extent to the selfless work of medical specialists, 399 of whom have been given government awards.’
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Among those present at the conference was a scientist named Victor Knijnikov, who, though in no way as prominent as Leonid Ilyn, was foremost among those back-room boys whose research, under the Soviet system, brought honours and renown to the directors of the institutes for which they worked.
Knijnikov was the head of the laboratory at the Institute of Biophysics and was the Soviet Union’s foremost authority on the effect of radioactivity in the food chain. Indeed, given the unparalleled facilities for research that had been available to him after the disaster at Mayak in 1957, he was probably more knowledgeable on the subject than any of his colleagues in the West. But if he was less well known than his director, Ilyn, or, for that matter, a man like Legasov, there was little doubt in his own mind that it was because he was a Jew.
Born the son of civil servants in Moscow, Knijnikov had graduated from his secondary school with top marks, but knew that as a Jew it would be futile to apply to a prestigious school of higher education like the Institute of International Relations. Thinking that a doctor could always be useful, he had enrolled in the Moscow medical school and after graduation was obliged to go to Kazakhstan for eight years as part of Khrushchev’s drive to cultivate the virgin lands.
There Knijnikov did extensive research on the aftermath of the nuclear explosions around the nuclear testing ground at Semipalatinsk, and later in the contaminated territory around Mayak. In the course of this work, he received a considerable dose of radioactivity but became the country’s foremost authority on the absorption of strontium and caesium radionuclides into the body via the food chain, which because of nuclear testing was a matter of acute concern. Knijnikov also did epidemiological research, of great interest to the Americans, on which he reported to an international symposium on strontium held at Chapelcross, Scotland, in 1966. By the time Knijnikov returned to Moscow to work at the Institute of Biophysics, he had twenty-five published articles to his name. When he was appointed head of the laboratory, he joined the Communist party, as was expected. Since he worked in a department of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, his work was coordinated with the needs of the military-industrial complex and was supervised by the KGB.
Despite his seniority and expertise, it was four days before Knijnikov was told about the accident at Chernobyl; he later suspected that this was to reserve the opportunity to win awards through heroic action for the gentile nomenklatura. Colleagues telephoned him from all over the Soviet Union asking for data that he was unable to supply. It was only at the beginning of May that the Ministry of Health turned to him for advice on contaminated produce, and on 15 May he was summoned to Chernobyl.
Here Knijnikov differed openly with his boss, Ilyn, at a meeting of the government commission. A significant dose of radiation had been received by a village near Bragin in the Gomel region of Belorussia. Children and pregnant women had been evacuated, but the rest of the adult population was overlooked. A month later the question arose as to whether the village should now be resettled. The limit for a single year’s dose had been set at ten rems, and it was estimated that the villagers had received nine. Ilyn recommended evacuation, but Knijnikov opposed it. The dose they had already received was from short-lived radioisotopes; the dose they were likely to receive in the future from the long-lived radioisotopes would be in the order of one to two rems, and the trauma of evacuation would do more harm than the extra dose. Knijnikov was overruled. The villagers were evacuated to areas that were later found to be equally contaminated, so they had to be moved again.
The situation facing the experts was vast and complex. Twenty-five thousand square kilometres of land and 2,225 towns and villages were affected – 1,845 in Belorussia alone. Their inhabitants, mostly employed in the state-owned and collective farms but also teachers, doctors and local officials, had already been subjected to direct radiation from the cloud of radionuclides that had been spewed out of the reactor. They remained vulnerable to a further dose from the contamination of the soil – through inhaling radioactive dust or eating food that was contaminated by radioactivity on its surface or absorbed from the soil – unless provided with ‘clean’ supplies. Particularly hazardous were mushrooms growing in the forests and the milk from cows that had eaten radioactive grass.
The contamination of the soil was measured in curies per square kilometre, and there was no exact correlation between this and a rad or a rem. Out
Nothing could be done about the initial, substantial dose of radioactive iodine that had been absorbed by the affected populace other than to administer stable iodine when it became available – in theory as a prophylactic, in practice as a placebo. It had been too late to be effective; examination of the children from Pripyat revealed that some had received doses to the thyroid of 1,500 rads. In the Gomel region, too, the children’s thyroids had been affected, but because of the short half-life of iodine 131 there was little that could be done other than to keep the affected children under observation.
Once emissions from the reactor had virtually ceased, eleven days after the accident, the principal danger to the populace had been the ingestion of radioactive iodine 131 through milk from cows pastured on contaminated grass. About twenty-five thousand square kilometres of land were contaminated beyond five curies per square kilometre. On 10 May the government commission was given estimates that seventy thousand tons of dried milk would be required to make up for the contaminated supplies. After three months, when the level of iodine had diminished, the danger came from caesium, also ingested by drinking milk. In Kiev, Gomel and other larger towns in the affected area, a ban on the sale of milk could be enforced; in smaller villages where the inhabitants were used to drinking milk from their own cows, such a prohibition was more difficult to enforce. Nor was it easy to prevent them from eating their own vegetables, which were also contaminated, particularly where there were difficulties in importing clean supplies.
If the milk was churned into butter and stored, the iodine 131 content would have decayed by the time it was eaten. It was more difficult to deal with radioactive meat. About eighty-six thousand head of cattle had to be evacuated from the contaminated zone, but because of the shortage of fodder, many had to be killed and buried. The standards imposed were compatible with international norms; the limit for caesium was half the West European norm. In Belorussia Knijnikov himself had to supervise the slaughter of two hundred thousand contaminated chickens. Later the radioactive meat was put into storage to await the decline of the short-lived radioisotopes, and some was eventually distributed to different parts of the Soviet Union, where it was mixed with uncontaminated meat to make a salami-style sausage. Because such sausage was expensive, the theory was that people would only eat small portions, and therefore it would have no perceptible effect on their health. At a time of food shortages, this was considered better than simply burying the meat in the ground. The public was not informed.
By the beginning of June 1986, temporary norms had been established for an acceptable level of radioactive contamination in twenty-four types of food, water and herbs. Teams of radiologists formed by the Ministry of Health carried out hundreds of thousands of checks on milk, meat, fruit and berries, potatoes, vegetables, fish, mushrooms and bread. Where the contamination was over the permitted norms, the food was declared unfit for human consumption. During 1986, up to 10 per cent of the fruit and 30 per cent of the berries and vegetables were rejected in the affected areas. Milk was often contaminated; only potatoes remained clean.
There were shortcomings in the implementation of such a vast undertaking. Dosimetric instruments were in short supply; teams were inadequately trained, and often there was inadequate coordination between the different services. It was sometimes difficult to impress upon officials and the rural inhabitants the danger of something imperceptible to their senses. Younger men and women, particularly those with children, were quick to grasp the danger and often left the affected zones before they were evacuated. Their parents and grandparents, however, were sometimes reluctant to leave. The hypothetical risks to their health did not impress those who in any case had only ten or fifteen years to live. Some, as mentioned, like Ivan and Irina Avramenko, from the village of Opachichi in the thirty-kilometre zone, hid from the militia and continued to live on the food grown in the private plots behind their homes. Others, having been evacuated, found their own way back along elk paths through the forests. Even families with children eventually returned; often the young ones had been shunned in the villages to which they had been evacuated, treated as radioactive pariahs in their new schools.
Where it could, the militia at first forcibly evacuated even the old, but soon a mixture of compassion and inertia led the local authorities to let them alone. Even in the inhabited zones of strict control, imposing the regulations was a thankless task. It was demoralizing to work in the fields knowing that the food, once grown, would be discarded, and depressing to adhere to guidelines that destroyed the rural way of life. Gathering berries and mushrooms in the forest and pickling tomatoes and cucumbers had been the peasants’ pastime in the summer months from time immemorial. How could they be expected to stop doing so now? In winter, cutting down trees, chopping up logs and burning them in their stoves had also been part of the daily routine, but now each stove that burned the contaminated wood became a small version of Chernobyl’s fourth reactor. Nor was it easy for the peasants to throw away milk from their own cows and drink instead the powdered product, if they could even find it in the state store. Some herdsmen continued to drink contaminated milk, and on examination were discovered to have accumulated high doses of radiation.
In short, there were innumerable infringements of the regulations and prosecutions of the officials who failed to enforce them. In 1986 and 1987, 23,000 people were fined, 5,500 officials were dismissed and administrative measures were taken against 2,000 more. But the region’s inhabitants were demoralized, and some local party bosses used their connections to move out of the zone. So, in time, did some of the resident doctors, themselves ill-nourished and underpaid. In this way many of the villages that had not been evacuated lost not merely the families with children but the few professionals who might have counselled the inhabitants.
Medical teams from Kiev and Minsk appeared from time to time to take blood tests and check these inhabitants’ health, and what they discovered was a general level of debility that had nothing to do with radiation. In December of 1986 two of Knijnikov’s colleagues reported to the Central Committee and the KGB that the thyroids of children in the Gomel region seemed to be seriously affected. A team of sixty specialists was dispatched from Moscow with orders to investigate the problem and report back in twenty-four hours. It was discovered that there were indeed problems with the children’s thyroids, but that these were caused by a lack of stable iodine in the soil, not radioactive contamination.
More pervasive was the evidence of a poor diet for the general populace, and also of chemical contamination far more serious than that caused by radiation. In the summer of 1987 Alexandrov sent a team headed by Sivintsev from the Kurchatov Institute to investigate reports by local scientists that the meat sold in Minsk was radioactive. There they cut a suspect carcass into four and tested it in four different labs, all of which found that the reading came from the natural radioactivity emanating from the potassium in the meat. The level of contamination by nitrates, on the other hand, exceeded the permitted limits by a factor of three hundred.
The brief of the scientific team, however, was not to tackle the question of chemical pollution but to ensure that the food supplied to the people of the controlled zones was free of radioactive contamination. To replace the condemned produce, supplies had to be provided from uncontaminated areas, a considerable logistic undertaking often beyond the capacity of existing channels of distribution. To pay for what they would hitherto have had free from their own plots of land, the inhabitants of the affected areas were give
A considerable effort was mounted to explain the situation by debates, lectures and articles in the local press. To reassure the populace, Knijnikov brought his wife and daughter to a holiday camp in Belorussia in June 1986. The local people brought him small gifts of fruit and fish, ostensibly as a sign of respect for the distinguished professor but in reality to find out whether he would practise what he preached.
Primitive as it was, this testing of Knijnikov’s sincerity was not only the best way but the only way for the people in the controlled territories to verify what they were told. True to the tradition of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and the KGB, all the data on the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident were classified. Not only were readings made by the government’s own dosimetrists to remain secret, but the instruments for measuring radiation belonging to the Botanical Institute in Kiev and the Institute of Nuclear Energetics in Minsk were locked away by the KGB, and all the medical records from the controlled zones were taken to the closed atomic city of Obninsk.
The same desire to manage the dissemination of information about the accident was evident in the first days after the accident, when the government medical commission not only released false statistics about the numbers seeking medical treatment but also proposed that imprecise symptoms in the wake of the accident should be ascribed to low blood pressure. Orders were given that all medical information had to be cleared by the government’s medical commission before it was printed in the Soviet press. On 27 June 1986 a directive was issued by Shulzhenko, the head of the Third Division of the Ministry of Health, which came under the auspices of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and the KGB.