The Russian writer Andrei Platonov wrote of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. Those he observed he called dushevny bednyak, meaning literally “poor souls.” Platonov used it as a descriptive, rather than sympathetic, term. He reasoned that when everything has been taken from the living, all that is left is the soul; the ability to feel and to suffer. “Out of our ugliness,” he writes, “will grow the world’s heart.”[12]
Stand in a darkened corridor of no distinction. Open a door. Each apartment contains its own particular sorrow, washed over with undiluted love.
In one: Igor, twelve, lies contorted on a sofa. In his mouth, his gums overwhelm his tiny teeth. As he’s unable to produce tears, his pupils—despite his mother’s attentiveness with an eyedropper—have the texture of sandpaper.
In another: Kyrill, nine, is missing a chromosome and a father. His right shoulder is implanted under his neck. His condition doesn’t have a name. His father, like many Belarusian men, took his child’s frailty to be a slight on his masculinity. Olga hasn’t seen him in almost a decade.
From 1986 to 1988 in the heavily contaminated Luninets District, 167 children per 1,000 had diagnosed illnesses. From 1992 to 1994 that number had risen to 611 per 1,000.[13]
Another: Ludmilla regularly breaks her conversation with us to vacuum out Nastya’s saliva through the hole left in her neck from a tracheostomy. On the floor beside Nastya’s chair is a large pickle jar two-thirds full with murky green phlegm. In the next room, her elderly parents are bedridden.
In 1998, 68 percent of Belarusian children living in heavily contaminated areas had vascular dystonia and heart syndrome (characterised by dizziness, breathing difficulties, and fatigue). Three years later it was 74 percent. In less contaminated areas that number rose from 40 percent to 53 percent.[14]
Despite everything, Ludmilla’s apartment is neat and clean, scattered with homey touches. A small sprig of white wildflowers in a medicine bottle. Trinkets on a shelf. A decorative dishcloth pinned to the wall. A small holy water font nailed to the doorframe with a fragment of a sponge inside. I compliment her attentiveness. She shrugs. The whisper of a smile. “If you live in a cage, you should make it a nice one.”
Gomel, for a brief few years, was at the forefront of medical research regarding nuclear contamination. In 1990, Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky, a pathologist, moved there with his wife, Galina, a paediatrician. The couple’s relocation to the city was not based on career advancement; rather, they believed it their duty to offer their expertise to those who have no choice but to live with chronic exposure. Upon taking the position of rector at the Gomel Medical Institute, Bandazhevsky observed an alarming pattern of heart problems, strokes, and rare birth defects amongst local children. In light of this, he initiated a series of long-term biological studies on a sample group of victims.
After nine years of systematic data collection and evaluation—which involved the design and manufacture of advanced dosimetric instrumentation—Bandazhevsky presented a lecture on his findings to the Belarusian Parliament and the president, Alexander Lukashenko. After Bandazhevsky’s presentation, Lukashenko had him arrested. Bandazhevsky, while awaiting trial, summarised his research in the study “Radioactive Caesium and the Heart.” He was sentenced to eight years of hard labour and, in his initial months of servitude, was repeatedly tortured. The Belarusian secret police also promptly raided his offices at the Gomel Medical Institute and destroyed his archived slides and samples. Most of Bandazhevsky’s colleagues at the Institute were fired, and many were also prosecuted. A new rector was appointed who denounced Bandazhevsky’s work and closed his research clinics. A few years later, this nefarious activity was extended by the deletion of all medical files holding information on Belarusian Chernobyl victims. By the time of Bandazhevsky’s release, three years later, many of those who had been evacuated after the meltdown were resettled back into highly contaminated lands. Currently Bandazhevsky is in exile.
His key finding was that the regular intake of radioactively contaminated food directly results in abnormal heart rhythms and irreversible damage to heart tissue and other vital organs. These findings alone are important, but more significant is the fact that Bandazhevsky discovered that the body concentrates Caesium-137—one of the most abundant of the radionuclides that were spread into the atmosphere from Chernobyl—in the organs, rather than uniformly distributing it throughout the body. This renders the idea of “acceptable dosages” to be a fallacy.
Just as radioactive matter is randomly distributed throughout a landmass, creating radioactive hotspots, so too the body absorbs radioactivity in uneven ways, processing it through the pancreas, the brain, the thyroid, the adrenal glands, the heart, and the intestinal walls, and no doubt in many other ways which we have yet to identify. Some people can absorb significant dosages to little apparent effect, while others can absorb a miniscule amount internally and develop cancer or severe organ defects. The most vulnerable to long-term damage are children, born and unborn, whose immune systems haven’t reached maturity and whose cells are developing at a much faster rate, so that any changes induced within the structure of a cell (from radiation exposure) are magnified and replicated to much greater degrees than in adults.
Even leaving aside Bandazhevsky’s findings, the pattern of evidence in the regions most affected by Chernobyl has made clear that chronic low-dose exposure leads to diseases of the circulatory systems, the endocrine system, the immune system, the respiratory system; to reproductive disorders; to changes in the composition of bones; to brain damage; to blindness; to congenital malformations and abnormalities; to thyroid cancer; to leukaemia; to intensified infections; to organ failures (especially to foetuses irradiated in utero); to premature aging; to gene mutations; to “Chernobyl AIDS, Chernobyl Heart, Chernobyl Limbs” and “Vegetovascular dystonia.” These latter names are a catchall for a variety of new syndromes that medical specialists have only come across in the post-Chernobyl years. The symptoms are so varied and diverse that doctors are obliged to group them under relatively generic names.[15]
Bandazhevsky’s findings are highly threatening to the nuclear establishment because every nuclear reactor routinely vents radioactive gases into the atmosphere. This “venting” is not an aberration of procedure; instead it is planned, sanctioned, and systematic.
In most cases, about one hundred cubic feet of radioactive gases are released hourly from the condensers at any given reactor. If a reactor is temporarily shut down because of a mechanical malfunction, the ventings increase in frequency and scale.[16]
Though radiation is also a naturally occuring phenomenon, the type of long-lived radionuclides emitted from nuclear reactors—such as Caesium-137—are new to us as a species. They didn’t exist on Earth in any appreciable quantities during the entire evolution of complex life and are millions of times more poisonous than naturally occuring radionuclides.
13
B. K. Voronetsky, N. E. Porada, N. E. Gutkovsky, and T. V. Blet’ko, “Morbidity of Children Inhabiting Territories with Radionuclide Contamination,”
16
Helen Caldicott,