Human Neglect
What the website of the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve does not reveal is the harrowing story behind the evacuations – and why this region received so much radioactive fallout. Kate Brown tells this story magisterially in her book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. After reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, the reactor's core continued to burn. On May 6, the Soviet government announced that the fire had been extinguished, but this was not true. Classified Soviet records show that radioactive gases continued to pour from the site Kate Brown, Manual for Survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 8, 27. after the fire had officially been put out, with gases spiking on May 11. The radioactive material from the exploded reactor then mixed with clouds and spread irregularly over the European continent. Of particular concern after a nuclear accident is the environment's radioactive contamination with cesium-137 and strontium-90. Highly hazardous to human health, both substances remain in the soil for many years.
By the time of the Chernobyl accident, large amounts of radionuclides had already been released into the environment during Cold War-era global nuclear weapon tests. Brown,Brown, Manual for Survival, 5, 248, 311–2. , 5, 248, 311–2. (What is perhaps not well known is that the total emissions from these tests were a thousand times greater than emissions from Chernobyl.) Three-quarter of these emissions landed in the Northern Hemisphere. After the Chernobyl accident, northern Ukraine, southern Belarus, and some parts of western Russia close to the Belarusian border received most of the heavy radioactive fallout resulting from the explosion of reactor No. 4. Western European countries were also affected, especially mountainous regions such as the Alps.
Figure 14 shows the cesium-137 deposition in Europe as of May 1, 1986, shortly after the Chernobyl explosion. To my knowledge, this map, which is based on a 2016 study published in the journal Environmental Pollution, is the most accurate one presently available. The regions in red are those that measured the highest levels of cesium-137 concentration; these are the regions that received heavy radioactive fallout following the Chernobyl explosion. What the map cannot show, though, is the amount of cesium-137 that was already present in the topsoil due to global nuclear weapon tests. Only recently have scientists been able to conduct measurements that can differentiate between the radioactive fallout from global nuclear testing, on the one hand, and the 1986 Chernobyl accident, on the other hand. Published in the journal Nature, their study focused on France, Belgium, parts of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. As a result of their research, the scientists were able to create two maps, one showing the cesium-137 deposition in topsoil in these five countries as a result of global nuclear weapons tests, and another one showing the cesium-137 deposition in topsoil in these five countries as a result of the Chernobyl accident. However, a similar study does not yet exist for the entire European continent.
As radioactive clouds travelled over the European continent, the Soviet government tried to cover up the accident. The evacuation of the city of Pripyat, adjacent to the nuclear power plant, began on April 27, 36 hours after the accident, but most of the residents were taken to two regions that had higher levels of radioactivity by the time the evacuated residents of Pripyat arrived there. As the reactor continued to burn, releasing radioactive nuclides into the air, the Soviet authorities did not tell people to stay indoors. On May 1, Labor Day, the Soviet state conducted large public parades in towns and cities across the Belarusian-Ukrainian border region (as elsewhere in the Soviet Union), exposing participants to dangerous radioactive substances. Brown, Manual for Survival, 6, 8, 27. In a recent interview with a Belarusian journalist, a man named Nikolai from the village of Gridni, now inside the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve, recalled the days immediately after the explosion. Quoted from his 2024 interview in: Taras Shiryi, "Stariki radiatsii ne boialis'." Spustia vosem' let pobyvali v chernobyl'skoi derevne, kotoruiu ozhivili samosely." Onliner.by, April 26, 2024. https://people.onliner.by/2024/04/26/chernobylskaya-derevnya. Last accessed June 10, 2024. While visiting his family in Gridni, he was sitting outside in their yard when his aunt came up to him and blurted out: "Chernobyl has exploded." A friend from school who worked in the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MChS) had told her. "To be honest, we didn't believe her at first," recalled Nikolai. The next day, he decided to travel to Pripyat, only about 60 kilometers to the south across the Ukrainian border, to buy meat. "As we were getting ready to leave, we saw ambulances for the first time. We drove 17 kilometers to the village of Teshkov, but the police did not let us go any further. They didn't explain anything to us and we just went back. After that, there was a parade on May 1."
On May 2, 1986, the Soviet authorities extended the original ten-kilometer evacuation zone around the reactor to 30 kilometers, now encompassing southern Belarus as well, and two days later, evacuations began from here, too. The best protection against radiation is time and distance. But the evacuations came late. In the weeks it took the authorities to organize resettlement from heavily contaminated areas, which stretched from spring into summer and then into the early fall, residents inhaled radioactive iodine and drank it in milk. Children, because their bodies are smaller, took in three to five times more radioactive iodine than adults. Evacuations were also too few. The first emergency measures were focused mostly on Ukraine. Brown, Manual for Survival, 28, 30–1. Of the 120,000 people resettled in the first weeks after the explosion, 93,000 came from Ukraine. But of all the Soviet republics, Belarus – and in particular the Homel' and the Mahilioŭ region in the south-east of the country – had received most of the heavy radioactive fallout. In southeastern Belarus, especially in regions further away from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, several hundred thousand people continued to live and farm in heavily contaminated Brown, Manual for Survival, 75–6. areas.
The Soviet Union was a centralized dictatorship, and the political leaders of the individual republics (such as Ukraine and Belarus) were subordinate to the Politburo in Moscow, the leadership of the Soviet Union. The decision to hold the May 1 parades Brown, Manual for Survival, 6. despite a burning reactor, to withhold information from the population on the real scale of the accident, to delay evacuations – these decisions were taken in Moscow. Similarly, Moscow-based Soviet scientists based in elite institutions and high government positions routinely downplayed Brown, Manual for Survival, 61-2. the disaster and dismissed the data collected by local scientists in Ukraine and Belarus, which pointed to large areas of contamination and signs of widespread radiation illness among the population in the worst-affected areas. Members of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, who visited Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia in the summer of 1990 and who had a low opinion of Soviet medicine, also dismissed the data Brown, Manual for Survival, 232–9. collected by local scientists in Ukraine and Belarus.
At first, the Ukrainian party leadership followed Moscow's orders, but by mid-May 1986, it began to take the initiative, sending children from northern Ukraine to the south, away from the heavily contaminated areas. Soviet authorities in Ukraine continued to (falsely) assure locals that everything was under control. Still, the leadership in Kyiv refused Moscow's order Brown, Manual for Survival, 63, 74–5. to return some residents to their homes inside the 30-kilometer evacuation zone. The Belarusian leadership, however, did not resist Moscow's pressure. At the end of the summer of 1986, party leaders in Minsk complied with Moscow's order and returned some 1,400 villagers Brown, Manual for Survival, 74. to their radioactive homes in southeastern Belarus. These were probably the inhabitants of the 15 settlements in Bragin, Khoiniki, and Naroŭliia districts in Homel' region who, according to the Polesian State Radiation-Ecological Reserve, As written on the website of the reserve: https://zapovednik.by/o-zapovednike/istoriya-zapovednika. Last accessed July 24, 2024. were "re-evacuated" by 1987. For years, no one was evacuated from the Mahilioŭ region in southeastern Belarus, which was as heavily contaminated as Brown, Manual for Survival, 189. parts of the Homel' region.
As I was reading A Manual for Survival, one of the most shocking pieces of information concerned the location of the fallout – and why it had landed where it did. On April 27, 1986, the day after the accident, the wind pushed radioactive clouds north, across the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. The world, let alone the Soviet population outside Pripyat, still knew nothing about the accident. But the Soviet State Committee of Hydrometeorology in Moscow was monitoring the radioactivity blowing from reactor No. 4. When it became clear that the clouds were threatening major cities such as Moscow, Voronezh, and Leningrad, the head of the committee decided to make it rain. From Moscow, Soviet air force pilots were sent to southeastern Belarus to shoot silver iodine into the clouds to make it rain. Operation Cyclone Brown, Manual for Survival, 40-5. was successful. In the evening of April 27, unknown to the local population, radioactive rain fell over the districts of Bragin, Khoiniki, and Naroŭliia. The pilots then followed the clouds over the city of Homel', northeast of Naroŭliia, into the Mahilioŭ region. Once the clouds had passed this large city, the pilots again shot silver iodine into the clouds, and radioactive rain contaminated much of this region, too.
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