Commemoration of the Chernobyl Disaster: The … · Commemoration of the Chernobyl Disaster: The Human Experience Twenty Years Later OCCASIONAL PAPER #295 KENNAN INSTITUTE Woodrow

Commemoration of the Chernobyl Disaster:The Human Experience Twenty Years Later

O C C A S I O N A L P A P E R # 2 9 5 KENNAN INSTITUTE

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2007 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.www.wilsoncenter.org

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Conference Proceedings

O C C A S I O N A L P A P E R # 2 9 5

Contents

Panelist Biographies

Program Partners

PrefaceBlair A. Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute, Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for Scholars

Introductory RemarksOleh Shamshur, Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States Vladimir I. Rybachenkov, Counselor, Embassy of the RussianFederation to the United StatesDmitry Ponomarev, Counselor, Embassy of Belarus to the United States

Panel 1: An Historian’s PerspectiveChair: Blair A. Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute, Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for ScholarsDavid R. Marples, Professor of History, University of Alberta

Panel 2: The Health PerspectiveChair: Martin Sletzinger, Director, East European Studies, WoodrowWilson International Center for ScholarsDidier Louvat, Head, Waste Safety Section, International AtomicEnergy AgencyMurray Feshbach, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson InternationalCenter for ScholarsLeonard Mazur, Chief Operating Officer, Triax Pharmaceuticals, andMember, Board of Directors, Children of Chornobyl Relief andDevelopment Fund

Luncheon Speaker“Revisiting Congressional Hearings on Chernobyl”Marcy Kaptur, U.S. House of Representatives

Panel 3: The Environmental PerspectiveChair: Geoffrey Dabelko, Director, Environmental Change andSecurity Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsAlla Yaroshinskaya, President, Center for Ecological Study andEducation, Moscow Mary Mycio, author, The Wormwood Forest: A Natural History ofChernobyl D. J. Peterson, Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation

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Panel 4: The Human ExperienceChair: Margaret Paxson, Senior Associate, Kennan Institute,Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsKate Brown, Assistant Professor of History, University ofMaryland, Baltimore CountyIrene Zabytko, author, The Sky Unwashed

Film Screening: The Camera’s Perspective Screening and discussion of Oscar-winning documentaryChernobyl HeartChair: Margaret Paxson, Senior Associate, Kennan Institute,Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsWilliam Novick, pediatric cardiac surgeon; Founder and Director,International Children’s Heart Foundation

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Oleh Shamshur is the ambassador of Ukraineto the United States. He graduated cum laude in1978 from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv University,Department of International Relations andInternational Law, with a specialization in inter-national relations. He received a Ph.D. in historyfrom the same institution in 1982. Prior to hisappointment to his present post, Shamshur servedas deputy minister of foreign affairs of Ukraine;head of the European Union Department of theMinistry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine; ministerat the Embassy of Ukraine to the BeneluxCountries; and first secretary/counselor of thePermanent Mission of Ukraine to the UnitedNations and other international organizations inGeneva. Shamshur was a visiting scholar atUniversity College, London in 1993, and workedat the Institute of Social and Economic Problemsof Foreign Countries, Academy of Sciences ofUkraine from 1984 to 1989.

Vladimir I. Rybachenkov has served since1993 as a counselor in the Ministry of ForeignAffairs of the Russian Federation (Departmentfor Security and Disarmament, Nonproliferationand Nuclear International Cooperation Divi-sion); currently he is also serving as counselor atthe Embassy of the Russian Federation to theUnited States. In this capacity, his sphere ofresponsibilities includes international cooperationin the field of excess weapons fissile materialmanagement, bilateral nuclear cooperation, andIAEA activities. He participated in the NuclearCities Initiative negotiations as well as in thedevelopment of new arrangements for theRussian-U.S. agreement on highly enriched ura-nium and low-enriched uranium. From 1994 to1997, Rybachenkov participated in the develop-ment of Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium(published as an IAEA information document).Further, since 1993 he has been a member ofRussian delegations to the regular sessions of theIAEA Board of Governors and the IAEA GeneralConference. Rybachenkov graduated from theMoscow Institute for Physical Engineering andholds a Ph.D. in computer sciences.

Dmitry Ponomarev has been counselor of theEmbassy of the Republic of Belarus to the UnitedStates since June 2003. Prior to his currentappointment, he served in the Ministry ofForeign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus start-ing in November 1995. During that period heheld several positions, including deputy head ofthe Department of Foreign Policy Analysis. Priorto joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he heldseveral positions in academic and educationalinstitutions in Belarus. He holds candidate’sdegree in history and a degree in interpretationfrom the Minsk State Teachers’ Training Institutefor Foreign Languages.

Blair A. Ruble is director of the KennanInstitute of the Woodrow Wilson InternationalCenter for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He alsoserves as director of the Comparative UrbanStudies Project at the Wilson Center. He receivedhis M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political sciencefrom the University of Toronto (1973, 1977), andan A.B. degree in political science from theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(1971). He has edited more than a dozen volumes.His book length works include a trilogy examin-ing the fate of Russian provincial cities during the20th century: Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City(University of California Press, 1990), MoneySings! The Changing Politics of Urban Space in PostSoviet Yaroslavl (Woodrow Wilson Center Pressand Cambridge University Press, 1995), andSecond Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded AgeChicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka(Woodrow Wilson Center Press and JohnsHopkins University Press, 2001). His latest book,Creating Diversity Capital:Transnational Migrants inMontreal,Washington, and Kyiv, was published bythe Woodrow Wilson Center Press and JohnsHopkins University Press in 2005.

David R. Marples is professor of history anddirector of the Stasiuk Program on Contem-porary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute ofUkrainian Studies, University of Alberta. He haswritten 10 single-author books, including three

1COMMEMORATION OF THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER: THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE TWENTY YEARS LATER

Panelist Biographies

on Chernobyl: Belarus: From Soviet Rule to NuclearCatastrophe (Macmillan Press, St. Martin’s Press,and University of Alberta Press, 1996), The SocialImpact of the Chernobyl Disaster (Macmillan Press,1988), and Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in theUSSR (Macmillan Press, 1987). He also edited the1997 book Nuclear Energy and Security in the FormerSoviet Union with Marilyn J. Young. His articleshave appeared in Slavic Review, Europe-Asia Studies,Nationalities Papers, Eurasian Geography andEconomics, Post-Soviet Affairs, and other publica-tions. He is vice president of the North AmericanAssociation of Belarusian Studies and a boardmember of the Association for the Study ofNationalities and of the Forum for Democracy inBelarus, German Marshall Fund of the UnitedStates. At the University of Alberta, he was award-ed the Faculty of Arts Research Prize for FullProfessors in 1999, the J. Gordin Kaplan Award forExcellence in Research (university research prize)in 2003, and a Killam Annual Professorship for2005–06. Marples received his B.A. from theUniversity of London (1975), an M.A. from theUniversity of Alberta (1980), and a Ph.D. from theUniversity of Sheffield (1985).

Martin Sletzinger is the director of EastEuropean Studies at the Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for Scholars in Washington,D.C. Before coming to the Wilson Center, heserved from 1976 to 1978 as a staff consultant tothe International Relations Committee, U.S.House of Representatives, and to the Commissionon Security and Cooperation in Europe, withareas of expertise including the Balkans, EasternEurope, Russia, NATO, NATO enlargement,and European issues. He received a Ph.D. in gov-ernment from Harvard University in 1977. Healso holds an M.A. in Soviet studies from Harvardand a B.A. in political science from the Universityof Pennsylvania.

Didier Louvat is head of the Waste SafetySection of the Division of Radiation, Transport,and Waste Safety, Department of Nuclear Safetyand Security, International Atomic EnergyAgency (IAEA). He graduated from the Uni-versity of Paris in 1984 with a degree in geologyand an advanced specialization in environmentalapplications. He received a doctorate in isotopic

geochemical sciences from the same university in1987. That year he began his professional career atthe IAEA, working as a technical officer for theapplication of nuclear techniques in resolvingenvironmental problems. In 1992, he joined theNuclear Fuel Cycle Department of the FrenchAtomic Energy Commission (CEA) where hedeveloped programs related to the geological dis-posal of radioactive waste. In 2000 he becamehead of the French Environmental RadioactivityLaboratory for Radiation Protection, at theInstitute for Radiological Protection and NuclearSafety. In 2004, he returned to the IAEA. At pres-ent, in addition to being head of the Waste SafetySection, he leads the IAEA Radioactive WasteManagement Program. Louvat has been a lecturerin the advanced environmental geosciences courseat the University of Marseilles and a member ofthe Scientific Advisory Board of the FrenchResearch Center of Uranium Geology.

Murray Feshbach is a senior scholar at theWoodrow Wilson International Center forScholars, Washington, D.C. He holds a Ph.D. ineconomics from American University. He servedas chief of the USSR Population, Employmentand Research and Development Branch of theForeign Demographic Analysis Division (now theCenter for International Research) of the U.S.Bureau of the Census from 1957 to 1981. After hisretirement from federal service in 1981, heaccepted an appointment as a research professor atGeorgetown University; he is now a research pro-fessor emeritus. During 1979–80 he was a fellowof the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center. Inaddition, at the request of the U.S. Department ofState, he served during 1986–1987 as the firstSovietologist-in-Residence in the Office of theSecretary General of NATO, in Brussels, underLord Peter Carrington. At the Wilson Center,Feshbach is conducting research on the policyimplications of the demographic, health, andenvironmental crises in Russia. He has published anumber of books, including Ecocide in the USSR:Health and Nature under Siege (with Alfred Friendly,Jr.; Basic Books, 1992) and Ecological Disaster:Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime(Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995). He hasalso written more than 115 articles and bookchapters, and has presented papers at numerous

2 THE KENNAN INSTITUTE OCCASIONAL PAPER #295

international and domestic conferences, as well astestimony before the U.S. Congress.

Leonard Mazur is chief operating officer, TriaxPharmaceuticals, and a member of the Board ofDirectors, Children of Chernobyl Relief andDevelopment Fund. He began his business careerwith Cooper Laboratories while completing anM.B.A. at Temple University. Notably, while atCooper he was involved in the creation ofCooper Vision, which ultimately became thelargest eye care company in the United States. In1981, Mazur joined the U.S. PharmaceuticalDivision of BASF as director of marketing. Hewas responsible for introducing into the U.S. mar-ket one of the first calcium channel blockers, abreakthrough medication used to treat hyperten-sion and other heart disorders. He then joinedICN Pharmaceuticals in 1984 as vice president ofsales and marketing. While at ICN, he launchedthe first antiviral drug for treatment of a deadlyrespiratory virus that afflicts infants. In 1995 hefounded Genesis Pharmaceutical, a companyfocused on dermatological products, and, untilrecently, was CEO of Genesis Pharmaceutical.Currently he is establishing Triax Pharm-aceuticals, a new pharmaceutical venture. He ispresident of the New York/New Jersey chapter ofthe Ukrainian-American Professional BusinessPerson Association, and serves on the Board of Trustees of Manor College, Jenkintown,Pennsylvania. Besides an M.B.A., Mazur holds aB.A. from Temple.

Marcy Kaptur represents the Ninth Congres-sional District, which includes the Toledo area inNorthwest Ohio. She is currently serving hertwelfth term in the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives. As the most senior Democratic womanin the House, Kaptur serves on the Appro-priations Committee, as well as two of its sub-committees, Defense and Agriculture. Sheremains dedicated to democratic institution-building across the globe and has spearheaded pri-vate charitable efforts for the people of Ukraineand other countries. As co-chair of theCongressional Ukrainian Caucus, she has leadefforts to establish an exchange program betweenthe U.S. Congress and the Verkhovna Rada,Ukraine’s legislature. She was the key sponsor of

regulatory changes that forced accountability onRussian food aid relief, helping to ensure that $1billion in U.S. resources goes to people in need,not into the black market or the pockets of gov-ernment bureaucrats. As a congressional leader onissues related to international trade and humanand labor rights, Kaptur will continue to assessthe impact of NAFTA and will actively engageon the side of workers in upcoming trade nego-tiations. Trained as a city and regional planner,she practiced 15 years in Toledo and throughoutthe United States before seeking elected office.Appointed an urban advisor to the Carter WhiteHouse, she helped maneuver 17 housing andneighborhood revitalization bills throughCongress at that time. She recently received theDirector’s Award from the Edmund A. WalshSchool of Foreign Service at GeorgetownUniversity for her commitment to increasedunderstanding and appreciation of the peoplesand cultures of Eurasia, Russia, and East Europe.She earned a B.A. in history from the Universityof Wisconsin and a masters degree in urban plan-ning from the University of Michigan.

Geoffrey D. Dabelko is director of the Envir-onmental Change and Security Program (ECSP),a nonpartisan policy forum on environment, pop-ulation, and security issues at the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars,Washington, D.C. For the past 12 years he hashelped facilitate dialogue among policymakers,practitioners, and scholars grappling with thecomplex connections linking the environment,health, population, conflict, and security. Hisrecent research focuses on environmental path-ways to confidence building and peacemaking,with an emphasis on managing freshwaterresources. Dabelko is principal investigator forECSP’s Navigating Peace Water Initiative on con-flict and cooperation regarding water resources,and co–principal investigator for the Envir-onment, Development, and Sustainable Peace ini-tiative, an international effort to bridge the gapbetween Northern and Southern perspectives onthe environment, development, population,poverty, conflict, and peace. He holds an M.A.and a Ph.D. in government and politics from theUniversity of Maryland, and an A.B. in politicalscience from Duke University.

COMMEMORATION OF THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER: THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE TWENTY YEARS LATER 3

Alla Yaroshinskaya is president of the Centerfor Ecological Study and Education in Moscow.She received a degree in journalism from KievUniversity and worked for 13 years as a corre-spondent. At the end of 1986, she began to feeluneasy about the supposed evacuation of areas thathad been contaminated by radiation from theChernobyl accident, and began to investigate. In1989, Yaroshinskaya was nominated for election tothe new Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Whileserving on the Ecology and Glasnost Committeeof the Supreme Soviet, she continued her cam-paign for full disclosure of the extent of theChernobyl contamination. In 1990, she wasappointed to a commission to look into the mat-ter. In April 1992, her article, “Forty SecretProtocols of the Kremlin Wise Men,” was pub-lished by Izvestia and picked up by Western newsmedia. Yaroshinskaya is the author or co-author ofa dozen books and more than 700 articles in sci-entific magazines and the mass media. Her bookChernobyl: The Forbidden Truth (University ofNebraska Press, 1995) was published in five lan-guages. She is also the originator, editor-in-chief,and co-author of the Nuclear Encyclopaedia. In1993, after working as deputy to the minister ofpress and information of the Russian Federation,she became an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin.She has been a member of Russian delegations tothe United Nations to negotiate an extension ofthe Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to par-ticipate in the UN Women’s Conference (1995).Actively engaged in political and public work onhuman rights, press freedom, and nuclear issues,she is president of the Ecological Charity Fund,co-chair of the Russian Ecological Congress,chief of the Federal Council of the All-RussianSocial Democratic Movement, and a member ofother international committees.

Mary Mycio is an American writer based inKyiv and the author of Wormwood Forest:A NaturalHistory of Chernobyl (Joseph Henry Press, 2005),an account of her journeys through the thrivingradioactive wilderness in the “zone of alienation”around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. TheProvidence Journal has called the book “a complete-ly unexpected piece of natural history.” DiscoverMagazine wrote that the book “has a hauntinggrandeur that should appeal to naturalists and fans

of the apocalypse alike.” Mycio holds a B.A. inbiology and a law degree from New YorkUniversity. She has written for the Los AngelesTimes and a variety of other newspapers aroundthe world. She is also director of the IREX U-Media Legal Defense and Education Program forUkrainian journalists.

D. J. Peterson is a senior political scientist at theRAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California.Peterson began his career focusing on environ-mental policy and management in Russia and theformer Soviet Union. His first RAND project wasa book, Troubled Lands:The Legacy of Soviet Enviro-nmental Destruction, published by Westview Pressin 1993. He recently completed a multiyearresearch venture examining the business, social,and political implications of the information rev-olution for Russia. This work was funded by theCarnegie Corporation. For five years he assistedwith the execution of the RAND BusinessLeaders Forum—a biannual meeting of Russian,American, and European business executives todiscuss trends in international commerce, eco-nomics, and politics. In 2003, he helped producestudies of the Russian automotive sector andpolitical and economic risks in Russia. In 2004,he contributed to a study of Russian corporateforeign investment strategies in the Common-wealth of Independent States. His work has beencited by The Wall Street Journal, The New YorkTimes, the Los Angeles Times, the PBS news seriesNOW with Bill Moyers, and in the U.S. Senate.Peterson received a Ph.D. in political science fromUCLA in 1996.

Margaret Paxson has been senior associate atthe Kennan Institute since November 2002. Sheholds a B.A. in anthropology from McGillUniversity (1987) and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. inanthropology from the University of Montreal(1991, 1999). Paxson’s doctoral research was onthe subject of social memory in rural Russia, andwas based on more than 17 months of fieldworkin a single village in the Russian north. In 2005,Paxson published Solovyovo:The Story of Memory ina Russian Village (Indiana University Press andWoodrow Wilson Press). In addition to socialmemory, Paxson’s broader research interestsinclude postsocialist transition, agrarian religion


and traditional healing, and the philosophy of sci-ence. During 1999–2000 she worked with DavidHoffman of The Washington Post conductingresearch for his book The Oligarchs. She has pub-lished academic articles in various venues andjournalistic pieces in The Washington Post SundayMagazine and The Wilson Quarterly. Paxson hasreceived awards and fellowships from the SocialScience Research Council, the InternationalResearch and Exchanges Board, the KennanInstitute, and other organizations. She has alsoworked as a consultant in organizational anthro-pology; a coordinator, designer, and presenter forMayor William A. Johnson’s Biracial Partnershipsfor Community Progress, a race relations initiativein Rochester, NY, and as an instructor in theDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology atConcordia University, Montreal.

Kate Brown is an assistant professor of historyat the University of Maryland, BaltimoreCounty. She is the author of A Biography of NoPlace: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland(Harvard University Press, 2004) which won theAmerican Historical Association’s George LouisBeer Prize for best book in internationalEuropean history, the Heldt Prize from theAssociation of Women in Slavic Studies, and anhonorable mention in 2005 for the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of SlavicStudies’ Wayne C. Vucinich Prize. She holds aPh.D. in history from the University ofWashington and has received fellowships fromthe Social Science Research Council, theInternational Research and Exchanges Board,the Davis Center of Harvard University, theNational Council for East European andEurasian Research, and the Eurasia Foundation.

Irene Zabytko was born and raised in theUkrainian Village section of Chicago. Her firstbook, The Sky Unwashed, a novel aboutChernobyl, was very highly acclaimed and wasselected as a Barnes & Noble Discover GreatNew Writers Book, a Book Sense 76 PickSelection, and a New England BooksellersAssociation Discovery title. She is currently pro-ducing a documentary about the real-lifeChernobyl survivors living in the “exclusionzone”who were the subject of her book. Zabytko

has held fellowships at the Mary AndersonCenter, the Ragdale Foundation, the HeleneWurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the EdnaSt. Vincent Millay Colony, and the Alden B. DowCreativity Center. Most recently, she has been anartist-in-residence at the Leighton Studios at theBanff Centre, Banff, Canada. She holds an M.F.A.in creative writing from Vermont College andteaches an online fiction writing class for theGotham Writers’ Workshop. She is also the liter-ary contributor for the NPR-affiliate arts pro-gram The Arts Connection, heard on WMFE-FM,Orlando, Florida.

William Novick is professor of surgery andpediatrics at the University of Tennessee HealthScience Center (UTHSC), Memphis. Novickcame to UTHSC in September 1993 and becamethe endowed professor of the Paul Nemir Jr.Chair of International Child Health in October1999. Novick is founder and medical director ofthe International Children’s Heart Foundation, anonprofit organization whose primary focus is onimproving the care of children in developingcountries. The foundation has operated on morethan 2,400 children with congenital heart defectsin 19 countries. In 2002, Novick was presentedthe Red Star of Croatia by President Stipe Mesi?for his humanitarian service to the children ofCroatia. In 2004, Novick was awarded theFranskaya Scorina Humanitarian PresidentialMedal for his dedication to the health and wellbeing of Belarusian children with congenital heartdefects. Born, raised, and educated in Alabama,Novick did his undergraduate work at Troy StateUniversity and graduate work in biochemistryand medicine at the University of Alabama atBirmingham. He received his training in generalsurgery at the University of Pennsylvania and car-diac training at the University of Alabama atBirmingham. He is board certified in general andthoracic surgery and is a member of many profes-sional organizations.

Yuriy Kosin is a former nuclear engineer whodevoted about 20 years of his life to seeking out,through the lens of a camera, the human face ofUkraine. He was among the 800,000 “liquida-tors”—the army of mercy that came down to the“hell of Chernobyl.” It was not until later in his


life that he realized the importance of his partici-pation in the response to the national call for help;at that time he was just filming in the “zone ofalienation.” Among his major projects are“Transgressions,” “Ukraine,” and “RevolutionThat Turned Into a Celebration.” Kosin has par-ticipated in more than 40 joint exhibitions inUkraine, Russia, the United Arab Emirates,Germany, Russia, Slovakia, France, and othercountries.

Joseph Sywenkyj began photographingChernobyl in 2000 for the Children ofChernobyl Relief and Development Fund.Subsequently, his work on Chernobyl has

appeared in numerous publications, includingThe New York Times, which did a feature ontourism in the Chernobyl region. Sywenkyj’sability to capture human frailty and the pain ofdisease has led him to photography projects onHIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, and families learningto cope with chemotherapy, remission, andstress. In 2003, Sywenkyj received a Fulbrightfellowship to conduct his photographic studiesof AIDS patients and their families in Ukraine.His work has been exhibited in New York,Washington, Philadelphia, and elsewherethroughout the world, including South Africa,the Netherlands, and Spain.


University of AlbertaOpened in 1908 as a board-governed publicinstitution, the University of Alberta has becomeone of Canada’s foremost research-intensive uni-versities, with external research funding during2004–05 of more than $415 million Canadian($375 million USD). The University of Albertaserves more than 35,500 students in more than200 undergraduate programs and 170 graduateprograms. Students enjoy an exceptional qualityof life on a friendly campus in a city, Edmonton,which values creativity and innovation. The uni-versity’s pioneering spirit inspires faculty and stu-dents to advance knowledge through research,seek innovation in teaching and learning, andfind new ways to serve the people of Alberta andthe world.

Harriman Institute, Columbia UniversitySince its founding in 1946, the Harriman Insti-tute, formerly the Russian Institute, has main-tained its position as a leading center for theadvancement of knowledge in the field ofRussian and Eurasian studies through the researchconducted by its faculty, students, fellows, andvisiting scholars, and the training of scholars andprofessionals.

The Harriman Institute strives to facilitate theeffective use of the unique resources it possessesto further the work of the diverse community ofscholars in residence, students, and the more than60 faculty members who make up the HarrimanInstitute faculty. Taken together, the library col-lections of Columbia University and the NewYork Public Library constitute the single largestconcentration of Russian language materials inthe United States. Moreover, the numerousresources of New York City—the UN missions;the many foundations and societies based in thecity; and the wealth of museums, special collec-tions, and archives, to name just a few—ideallycomplement those of Columbia.

Through its programs, conferences, lectures,and publications, the Harriman Institute seeks tocreate a forum for intellectual exchange and thefurther enhancement of its students’ education.

Woodrow Wilson International Centerfor ScholarsEstablished by an act of Congress in 1968, theWilson Center is the United States’ official livingmemorial to President Woodrow Wilson. As botha distinguished scholar—the only American pres-ident with a Ph.D.—and a national leader, Wilsonfelt strongly that the scholar and the policymakerwere “engaged in a common enterprise.”

The Wilson Center is a nonpartisan institutefor advanced study and a neutral forum for open,serious, and informed dialogue. It brings pre-emi-nent thinkers to Washington for extended periodsof time to interact with policymakers through alarge number of programs and projects. TheCenter seeks to separate the important from theinconsequential and to take a broad, historicalperspective on the issues.

Kennan InstituteThe Kennan Institute was founded as a divisionof the Woodrow Wilson International Centerfor Scholars in December 1974, through thejoint initiative of Ambassador George F.Kennan, then Wilson Center Director JamesBillington, and historian S. Frederick Starr.Named in honor of Ambassador Kennan’s rela-tive, George Kennan “the Elder,” a 19th-centu-ry explorer of Russia and Siberia, the KennanInstitute is committed to improving Americanexpertise and knowledge about Russia and theformer Soviet Union.

The Kennan Institute bridges the gap betweenthe world of ideas and the world of public affairsby bringing scholars and government specialiststogether to discuss political, social, and economicissues affecting Russia and other successor states tothe Soviet Union, seeking always to place theseissues within their historical context.

Environmental Change and Security ProgramPopulation growth. Water scarcity. Degradedecosystems. Forced migration. Resource deple-tion. Pandemic disease. Since 1994, theEnvironmental Change and Security Program


Program Partners

(ECSP) has explored the connections among thesemajor challenges and their links to conflict,human insecurity, and foreign policy. Throughpublications, meetings, and events, ECSP pro-motes dialogue about the environmental, health,and population dynamics that affect both develop-ing and developed nations.

Global Health InitiativeAIDS orphans. Avian flu. Bioterrorism. Childmortality. Gene therapy. In September 2005, theWoodrow Wilson International Center forScholars launched the Global Health Initiative toprovide a forum for an interdisciplinary exami-nation of these and other critical health chal-lenges facing the United States and the world.By leveraging the Wilson Center’s strongregional and cross-cutting programs, the

Initiative seeks to promote dialogue about healthwithin the foreign policy community.

East European StudiesThe East European Studies (EES) program at theWoodrow Wilson International Center forScholars provides fellowship opportunities in aneffort to foster research and training on regionalissues. EES offers a nonpartisan forum for debateon Eastern Europe in the nation’s capital. EESorganizes seminars, conferences, workshops, andbriefings featuring prominent scholars and policy-makers. In this way, EES contributes to the aim ofthe Wilson Center, which is to provide a linkbetween the world of ideas and the world of pol-icy, bringing them into creative contact, enrichingthe work of both, and enabling each to learn fromthe other.


On April 26, 1986, Reactor 4 in the nuclearpower plant in a small city north of Kyiv—in whatwas then the Ukrainian Soviet SocialistRepublic—exploded, making the city ofChernobyl a household word around the world.However, although many people know the basicstory of the Chernobyl disaster, its aftermath andparticularly the human experience of the affectedpopulations in the following years are less wellunderstood.The Kennan Institute, in cooperationwith the University of Alberta and the HarrimanInstitute of Columbia University, convened a two-day program on April 25–26, 2006, not only tocommemorate the 20th anniversary of the disasterbut also to encourage a productive conversationamong people who approach the Chernobyltragedy from different perspectives. Our goal wasthat out of that conversation a fuller appreciationof the disaster and its consequences would eventu-ally emerge.

Twenty years is an awkward length of time forlooking back upon an historic event. Many peo-ple who experienced that event firsthand are stillalive, and yet for many that event is already pasthistory and beyond their life experience.Whether the event is ingrained as an experiencedreality, or learned secondhand from documentsand sources of various types, each form ofknowledge has value.

As the following pages will show, the perspec-tives from different forms of knowledge indeedhighlight different aspects of the same reality. Forthose who approach a historical event throughsources and documentation, what people thinkthey saw and heard is little more than hearsay. Forthose who lived through an event, the question is,can sources and documentation surpass what theyknow they experienced? If you add in a dash ofgenerational politics, the resulting brew oftenleads to some form of “revisionism” and backlashto that revisionism. Unfortunately, disputesbetween both “schools” often get mired down ina pernicious sort of point scoring.

This tendency becomes even more pro-nounced when one tries to grapple with the

human experience and consequences of an event,as this conference has. Yet it is vital that we keepa sustained dialogue on Chernobyl, because theeffects of this disaster will be with us fordecades—if not centuries—to come. It is ourhope that this conference, and this edited tran-script of the conference proceedings held at theWoodrow Wilson Center, will contribute to andsustain this dialogue in a meaningful way.

In closing, I would like to acknowledge thefinancial and institutional support without whichthis conference would not have been possible.Funding for the conference and this publicationcame from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s FederalConference Fund, and from the University ofAlberta. Columbia University’s Harriman Instituteorganized a tremendous associated program heldthe day before our conference. You will find theprogram from this first day listed in this publication.

I would also like to thank the Woodrow WilsonCenter’s Environmental Change and SecurityProgram, Global Health Initiative, and EastEuropean Studies, as well as the Canadian Instituteof Ukrainian Studies Press, the Children ofChernobyl Relief and Development Fund, theEmbassy of Ukraine to the United States, and theEmbassy of the United States to Ukraine for theirhelp in planning and implementing this confer-ence. Alla Rachkov and Diana Howansky atColumbia University’s Harriman Institute havebeen of tremendous help to us, as have been for-mer and present directors Cathy Nepomnyashchyand Mark von Hagen. Finally, I should note thatDavid Marples at the University of Alberta hasbeen involved every step of the way.

I want to single out for special mention formerKennan Institute Deputy Director Nancy Popson.This conference, as well as much of the Institute’sprogramming on Ukraine, arose from her vision.From the Kennan Institute staff, I also would like to acknowledge Renata Kosc-Harmatiy and Joseph Dresen for their work on both theconference and this publication, and MarkianDobczansky and Megan Yasenchak for their workon this publication.


PrefaceBlair A. Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute

OLEH SHAMSHUR: Distinguished participants,dear friends, quite naturally I would like to startby expressing sincere gratitude to all the spon-sors of this event and to take note of the quali-ty of the experts who have congregated in thishall. I have no doubt that today’s discussion willmake a very important and valuable contribu-tion to our deeper understanding of the natureof the greatest technological catastrophe inhuman history, its consequences, and, perhapsmost importantly, what the future holds for allof us within the context of Chernobyl.

Twenty years ago, Chernobyl was a smalltown with an ancient history and barely 50,000inhabitants—a spot of land deep in Ukraine’sheartland. Two decades later, Chernobyl is nowa city buried alive. It has become a warning ofthe dangers posed by human ignorance and themisplaced feeling of supremacy over the forcesof nature. It also stands as a symbol of thehypocrisy, inefficiency, and the incapacity of thecommunist administrative and command sys-tem, with its inherent disregard of the individ-ual’s freedom and life.

In the early stages following the explosion—the most critical from the perspective ofhealth—when the West was sounding the alarm,the Soviet authorities were depriving the citi-zens of true information about the debacle andits real scope. As countless thousands of people,unaware of the danger, were exposed to themassive radiation, the legitimacy of the Soviet

system was tarnished for good. Glasnost did notpass the litmus test of Chernobyl.

At the same time, Chernobyl has become amonument to self-sacrifice and human suffer-ing. We should first and foremost remember thevictims of Chernobyl no matter where theyhave resided—those innocent civilians and35,000 liquidators—unassuming heroes whoput their lives at risk in order to mitigate theconsequences of the accident and prevent atotal meltdown.

The toll of the Chernobyl disaster forUkraine is extensive. By 2004, over 500,000human lives were lost as a result of the healthdeterioration caused by the Chernobyl accident.Among them are almost 7,000 children. As of2006, 2.6 million Ukrainians have the status ofthose affected by the consequences of theChernobyl disaster. More than 160,000


Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsConference Cosponsored by the University of Alberta; the Harriman Institute, Columbia University; and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

April 26, 2006

Commemoration of the Chernobyl Disaster:The Human ExperienceTwenty Years Later

Introductory RemarksOleh Shamshur, Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States

Vladimir I. Rybachenkov, Counselor, Embassy of the Russian Federation to the United States

Dmitry Ponomarev, Counselor, Embassy of Belarus to the United States


Ukrainians were driven away from the landswhere their ancestors had lived for generations.Ten thousand square kilometers of once fertileand flourishing land remain polluted by radia-tion, as well as 2,218 Ukrainian townships andvillages. By 2015, aggregate economic lossesincurred in Ukraine by the Chernobyl disasterwill amount to $170 billion.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply con-vinced that in our assessment of the aftermath ofthe Chernobyl catastrophe, we should neverforget that experts and humankind have yet tocomprehend and to measure the full scale of thenuclear devastation. In this respect, we facenumerous challenges, including the hazardouseffects of continuous exposure to extreme radi-ation, possible genetic mutations, and radiationthreatening the water and other components ofthe food chain that are present in an environ-ment with long-lasting radioactive elements.

The gravest implications of Chernobyl mightwell lie ahead for Ukraine and other nations.They should be vigilant and well prepared toact. This only underscores an urgent need toenhance international cooperation in findingother good solutions to the numerous problemsgenerated by the Chernobyl disaster.

In Ukraine, we have always appreciated thesupport from the international community, inparticular the U.S. government, and fromNGOs that assisted the victims of the disaster,especially the children. I think it would be veryproper today to thank all those concerned forwhat they have done in the course of those 20years to help Ukraine to address the manifoldaspects of the Chernobyl fallout and to alleviatehuman suffering. We count upon continuedinternational assistance in tackling the mosturgent of the current Chernobyl-related prob-lems—that of constructing a new shelter for theill-fated reactor, because the old confinementstructure, which shelters 200 tons of nuclearfuel, has been rapidly deteriorating. The situa-tion is extremely grave and will not stand anyfurther delay. The time that has passed since thattragic day of April 26, 1986, has proved thenecessity of promoting comprehensive interdis-ciplinary study of Chernobyl-related problemsencompassing technological, medical, biologi-cal, environmental, sociological, and historical

aspects. As far as I understand, promoting inter-disciplinary study is what this conference androundtable are all about. I wish you every suc-cess in your discussions. Thank you.

BLAIR A. RUBLE: Counselor VladimirRybachenkov, from the Embassy of the RussianFederation to the United States, is also a veryappropriate speaker for our event today, becausehe combines a distinguished career in diplomacywith a background in the physical sciences. He hasserved as counselor at the Ministry of ForeignAffairs of the Russian Federation, with responsi-bility for issues relating to security and disarma-ment, nonproliferation, and nuclear cooperation.He has participated in the Nuclear Cities Initiativenegotiations, as well as in negotiations relating toother events associated with nuclear proliferation.Between 1994 and 1997 he participated in thedevelopment of Guidelines for the Management ofPlutonium, which was published by the IAEA[International Atomic Energy Agency], and hehas been a member of the Russian delegations tothat body. As his work on these issues might sug-gest, he has a background on the technical side aswell as the diplomatic aspects concerning nuclearcooperation. He is a graduate of the MoscowInstitute for Physical Engineering, and he holds aPh.D. in computer sciences. With that I wouldlike to welcome him here to the Wilson Center.

VLADIMIR I. RYBACHENKOV: Good morning,ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like tocommend the organizers of this conference fortheir initiative to commemorate the 20thanniversary of the Chernobyl accident. Indeed,they offered us an additional opportunity toexpress sympathy to the victims of the greatestman-made disaster of the last century and to paytribute to the emergency and recovery operationworkers, who helped to mitigate the conse-quences of the tragedy. The selflessness andimmense sense of responsibility are really invalu-able. By sacrificing their health and sometimestheir lives, they saved the lives of many thousands.

One has to acknowledge that serious errorswere committed by the leadership of the SovietUnion during the first days after the accident.However, further events testified to the fact thatall possible manpower and material resources

were mobilized to solve the numerous problemsthat were brought to light. These actionsincluded medical examinations, assistance toinhabitants of the contaminated regions, reset-tlement of people from dangerous territories,and decontamination of these territories. Thescope of these efforts is characterized by thefact that 25 Soviet research institutes affiliatedwith the Ministry of Health and the Academyof Sciences were involved in the above-men-tioned activities.

Moreover, new institutions were created, suchas the Institute for Safe Development of NuclearEnergy, which is located in Moscow and was cre-ated in 1988. Also, there is a special medical anddose metering center in Obninsk, in the vicinityof Moscow, which has collected a database onhalf a million irradiation cases and provided assis-tance to a great number of patients.

The Russian Federation took the baton fromthe Soviet Union and continues to pay specialattention to the mitigation of the consequencesof the Chernobyl accident. Yesterday, PresidentPutin pledged $2 million to Ukraine for thedecommissioning of the three remainingChernobyl reactors, including removal of spentfuel and its repatriation in Russian-producedcontainers. He also announced the forthcomingopening of a new international rehabilitationcenter for liquidators.

It would be unfair not to emphasize thatenormous efforts made by the governments ofRussia, Ukraine, and Belarus, which have beensupplemented to a significant degree by theinvolvement of the international community,including organizations of the United Nationssystem, the World Bank, and the EuropeanBank for Reconstruction and Development.International solidarity was also fully demon-strated by a large number of NGOs and privateinitiatives. There is a common understandingthat the main thrust of current efforts should bechanged. Social and economic restoration of theaffected regions, as well as alleviation of the psy-chological burden of the general public andemergency workers, must become a priority.

In conclusion, I would like to touch uponanother lesson that has been drawn from theChernobyl accident, namely, that one cannotblindly rely on advances in technologies in the

absence of clear-cut evidence that their applica-tion is not fraught with catastrophic conse-quences. Clearly, such a conclusion was prede-termined by the tragic explosion of theChernobyl nuclear unit and has led to a longstandstill in the development of nuclear powerin many countries. For example, no newnuclear power plants have been constructed inthis country for almost 15 years. Nowadays, thesituation is drastically changing due to theadvent of the new generation of nuclear powerplants, which posses the quality of so-calledintrinsic safety that is based on the laws ofphysics, and is not dependent on operators’behavior. One may hope that the Chernobylsyndrome is over and will not hamper theimplementation of the initiative recentlyannounced by the presidents of Russia and theUnited States related to the development ofadvanced nuclear reactors in order to effective-ly address issues of energy safety, environmentalsecurity, and nuclear nonproliferation.

Thank you very much for your attention. Ilook forward to listening to the program, whichpromises to be very instructive.

RUBLE: Next, we will hear from CounselorDmitry Ponomarev, from the Embassy of theRepublic of Belarus to the United States. Heheld a number of positions within the Ministryof Foreign Affairs prior to coming to the UnitedStates as counselor of the Belarusian Embassy.

Among his previous positions, he served asdeputy head of the Department of Foreign PolicyAnalysis. He has also worked in several academicinstitutions and educational institutions and holdsgraduate degrees in history and interpretation.

13COMMEMORATION OF THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER: THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE TWENTY YEARS LATER

DMITRY PONOMAREV: Ladies and gentlemen, onbehalf of His Excellency Mikhail Khvostov, theambassador of the Republic of Belarus to theUnited States, I would like to extend thanks andappreciation to the Kennan Institute and to theWoodrow Wilson Center for the opportunity toparticipate in today’s event.

Precisely 20 years ago, the Chernobyl catastro-phe occurred. In Belarus alone it has meant hun-dreds of human deaths, hundreds of thousands ofinternally displaced persons, and thousands of pre-mature deaths of grown-ups and children alike.Consequences of the disaster for the Republic ofBelarus have proved to be acute. They are charac-terized more adequately as a national disaster.Consequences of the Chernobyl disaster continueto adversely affect Belarus. Presently, about 21percent of Belarus is contaminated by radionu-clides. There are about 2,800 settlements locatedin the contaminated areas, with a population ofmore than 1.5 million people, including about420,000 children.

Since 1991, more than $13 billion has beenspent by Belarus alone to implement rehabilitationactivities. The government of the Republic ofBelarus has been conducting systematic activitiesand rehabilitating the affected areas.

On January 11, 2006, the government ofBelarus approved the state program on over-coming the consequences of the Chernobylcatastrophe for 2006–2010. The main areas ofthis program are as follows: production of agri-culture products with radionuclide contentconsiderably below the permissible level, ren-

dering medical assistance to the affected popu-lation, and certifying psychological rehabilita-tion and research activities.

Thanks to the efforts undertaken on thenational level, a number of problems have beensolved. Resettlement of people has been prac-tically completed. A sound radiation monitor-ing system and necessary registration are inplace. Special attention is given to social pro-tection of the affected population. Still,Belarusian experts predict that in the nearestfuture, alongside the growth of thyroid cancercases, there is a high probability of increasedrates of other cancer diseases, as well as cardio-vascular and other noncancer diseases.Therefore, the health problem remains in thefocus of the government’s attention.

International cooperation forms an integralpart of the Chernobyl recovery efforts. Belarusnotes with satisfaction that Chernobyl issues areadequately reflected in the agenda of the UnitedNations, as well as within all 11 United Nationsagencies.

We express gratitude to all those who havetaken close to heart the Chernobyl tragedy, toeveryone who has rendered assistance in over-coming the Chernobyl tragedy. At the same time,Belarus appeals to all foreign governments andinternational and nongovernmental organizationsto promote international cooperation in order toovercome the consequences of Chernobyl, in thespirit of humanism and solidarity.

And just as a small footnote, several days agoin Minsk there was a special international con-ference devoted to Chernobyl consequences.Those of you who might be interested to findthe latest updates from the field about the social,economic, medical, and environmental conse-quences can find material from this conferenceon the website of our embassy (www.belarusembassy.org). Thank you very much.

RUBLE: Please join with me in thanking all ofour diplomatic speakers. We very much appre-ciate their coming here today to join us and toinitiate a good start in what is a very busy dayfor them.


BLAIR A. RUBLE: When we were planning thisevent, there was a very short list of speakers wefelt that we absolutely had to include, and DavidMarples was at the top of that list. I think Davidis well known to anyone who has been con-cerned with Chernobyl. His first two books onthe subject, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in theUSSR and The Social Impact of the ChernobylDisaster, immediately became landmarks in whathas been a burgeoning industry of Chernobyl-related studies. When we approached him, Davidimmediately welcomed the idea and, togetherwith his colleagues at the University of Alberta,has been very helpful to us and to the HarrimanInstitute in bringing together this program.

DAVID R. MARPLES: Thank you. It is a great pleas-ure to be here in Washington for the commemo-ration of Chernobyl. Today I am going to offerthe perspective of a historian. I do not think thatwhen I first started writing on Chernobyl I waswriting from the perspective of a historian,because it was a contemporary event, but it is nowa historical event.

The Chernobyl disaster has given rise tonumerous analyses and reports, many films anddocumentaries. It has been the subject of wide-spread unresolved debate as to the number of vic-tims, the medical effects, and the impact of radi-ation on people’s health. It has led to several seri-ous rifts. While it tends now to be commemorat-ed on significant occasions, particularly anniver-saries, its effects are very much still with us.

Last September, a consortium called theChernobyl Forum, which included a number ofUN organizations headed by the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency, as well as certainbranches of the Russian, Ukrainian, andBelarusian governments, issued a new report thattotaled about 600 pages in length and purported

to give a definite account of the disaster and itsconsequences. The report’s press release gaveseveral main conclusions: First of all, up to 4,000people could eventually die from radiation expo-sure, but by mid-2005 the death toll fromChernobyl-induced radiation stood at less than60. Among 200,000 liquidators working at thesite in 1986–87, 2,200 deaths were expected.Because of the changing pattern of radionuclidebreakdown, the emergency zones that wereoriginally designated for Chernobyl might needredefining. The worst health impact to date hasbeen the outbreak of thyroid gland canceramong 4,000 children, but this has resulted inonly nine deaths.

The Forum report maintains that the greatestenemies to date to those living in areas contam-inated by Chernobyl are poverty and the diffi-culties caused by relocation. In turn, the stresscaused by the events has led to a decline in men-tal health, and the chief dilemma currently isthe psychological toll. The report mentions thefeeling that Chernobyl is the cause of all prob-lems, and suggests that this has led to a depend-ency on the state rather than self-reliance andlocal initiatives. And it has led the Forum tocriticize those Chernobyl-related programs thatit considers to have enhanced, rather thanreduced, this dependency. According tospokesperson Michael Repacholi, the overalleffect and the sum total of the ChernobylForum is “a reassuring message.”

In April 2006, Greenpeace issued an alterna-tive report that disputed virtually all the findingsof the Chernobyl Forum. This report was basedlargely on contributions from scientists at gov-ernment institutions in Ukraine, and to a lesserextent Russia. I noted one contributor fromBelarus. This account focuses exclusively onhealth effects.


Panel 1: An Historian’s Perspective

Chair, Blair A. Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

David R. Marples, Professor of History, University of Alberta

In contrast to the Forum’s total of 4,000 addi-tional deaths from Chernobyl, the Greenpeacereport claims that in Belarus, Russia, and Ukrainealone the accident caused an estimated 200,000additional deaths between 1990 and 2004. It addsthat cancers, including leukemia, are common inthe affected areas and among the liquidators.

In Belarus, it cites a 40 percent rise in cancerbetween 1990 and 2000, but in the contaminat-ed regions, such as Homel’ region, the increasewas over 50 percent.

The incidence of thyroid gland cancer in thehighly radiated Bryansk region of Russia wasdouble that of the federal average. That is overthe decade 1988–1998. By 2004, the incidenceof thyroid gland cancer was triple the Russiannational average.

The Greenpeace report states that there couldbe 90,000 additional cases of cancer in the threemost affected countries, and that children underthe age of four at the time of the accident areparticularly susceptible. It documents the in-creased incidence of diseases of the respiratory,digestive, vascular, and musculoskeletal systems,as well as abnormalities of the immune system,congenital infections, genetic abnormalities, andpremature aging.

The Greenpeace report comments that thereasons for the discrepancies between theChernobyl Forum report and its own should beinvestigated with some urgency and that researchinto the impact of Chernobyl 20 years on needsto be increased. The question, though, is, howcan such discrepancies exist? There is really somedebate over this. Clearly, science is not a mono-lithic discipline, and in the case of Chernobylthere is no single set of correct and simplisticanswers or forecasts.

There is also the question of the differencebetween the two reports, and I think there isquite a significant difference between the pressrelease issued by the Chernobyl Forum and thecontents of the Forum’s report itself. Just to giveone example, the figure of 4,000 deaths is basedon a single table in the Chernobyl Forumreport. If one adds up the figures from that tableit does not even add up to 4,000, it adds up to9,000. In addition, the Chernobyl Forum reportfocused on three republics: Russia, Belarus, andUkraine, whereas Chernobyl affected practically

all of Europe. In other words, it is really takingonly a fraction of the area contaminated andthen projecting long-term cancer effects. In thatway, it might be noted that the differencebetween the two reports is perhaps not somarked as it might seem.

Turning back to the beginning of the Sovietnuclear program, the Soviets focused on twomain reactor types. The favored choice was theRBMK, a graphite and water-moderated reactorthat had been diverted from use during theatomic weapons program from the mid-1950s;hence the predominance, in the early accidentdays, of the ministry dealing with atomicweapons, the USSR Ministry of MediumMachine Building. The RBMK can be refueledonline, thus saving valuable time, but it suffersfrom numerous defects. According to the KGBreports released in 2003 from Ukraine, there areat least 30 serious defects in the RBMK. Theseinclude a positive void coefficient, meaning thatit becomes unstable if operated at low power,and the lack of significant containment over thereactor, which, for example, the Canadiangraphite-moderated CANDU reactors claim tohave. The RBMK’s prototype was the station atSosnovy Bor near the then-city of Leningrad.Stations were also constructed at Kursk andChernobyl. A new generation of RBMKs wereconstructed in Ignalina, Lithuania, and construc-tion also began at Smolensk, in western Russia.

The alternative reactor, and the one used forexport as well as domestic production, was thewater-pressurized VVER, which can be foundacross eastern Europe as well as in countries suchas Mongolia, Finland, and Cuba. The Soviet pro-totype for the VVER was the reactor site atNovovoronezh.

The site for Chernobyl itself was chosen in1970 on the left bank of the Prypiat River, andthe first reactor came online in October 1977.There were frequent problems in the building ofthe first two reactors, partly as a result of thehaste of the program and its adoption of a rigidtimetable. In the year 1978 alone, the time whenUnit 2 came into operation, 170 workers wereinjured in accidents at that site. From 1981 to1985, there were over 1,000 emergency shut-downs, including 381 at RBMKs and over 100 atthe Chernobyl station itself.


At the Rivne station in western Ukraine therewas said to be no adequate disposal site for low-level nuclear waste. Although it was a VVERreactor, the containment over the reactor was stillinsufficient to contain the release of radioactivesubstances in the event of an accident.

In general, most of these problems wereblamed on the factories manufacturing theequipment. At Chernobyl, four reactors—eachone 1,000 megawatts in size—were in service by1984, with two others at different stages ofcompletion. Unit 5 had been the subject ofheightened anxiety in the Ukrainian media,particularly by the Prypiat journalist LiubovKovalevska in Literaturna Ukriana. Units 5 and 6were twin units built some distance from themain reactor site.

On September 9, 1982 a serious accidentoccurred at Chernobyl Unit 1 prior to a sched-uled shutdown. The exact causes are not known,but one of the reactor channels ruptured whenpower was raised to 20 percent. At first, theauthorities in Moscow saw no cause for panic.The accident was said to have been contained,and no one had been affected. Within several daysthe reports became more alarming, and it wasrevealed that significant amounts of radiation hadescaped from the plant’s confines. A top-secretreport from the KGB noted that areas at least 14kilometers to the northeast of the plant and 5kilometers to the southwest had been contami-nated. Among the settlements that were badlyaffected by this accident was Chystahalivka,which was one of the villages evacuated immedi-ately after the 1986 disaster just four years later. Inother words, it was contaminated twice. Thedocument trail on this accident soon went cold.A government commission was appointed toinvestigate, but its conclusions—or even whetherit actually met—are not known. Neither theSoviet public nor the international communitywas ever informed about this 1982 accident.

In 1982 the Soviet Union was a member ofthe International Atomic Energy Agency, butsecrecy was in any case ingrained. The 1982 acci-dent set the precedent for the government’sbehavior and actions for the one in April 1986.

Chernobyl is about 10 miles south of the bor-der with Belarus and is at the very north end ofa complex water system involving the Kyiv

Reservoir and several river systems that eventual-ly lead into the Dnipro River.

The intricate details of the accident are toocomplex to be elaborated here, but it is wellknown that operators performed an experimentduring a scheduled reactor shutdown to see howlong a disengaged spinning turbine could con-tinue to generate power to the plant’s coolingpumps before emergency turbines came intooperation. The safety tests had been conductedby two operators under the jurisdiction of thedeputy chief engineer. Altogether, about 17 shiftworkers had been present for this test, but theplant manger and the chief engineer were bothabsent. Inexperienced operators had turned offmany safety systems, and the experiment led toa power surge within the reactor that blew theroof off Unit 4 around 1:23 in the morning ofApril 26. The resulting radioactive debrisreached a height of around one kilometer, andfor the next two weeks radiation continued toescape through the gaping hole. An estimated260 million curies entered the atmospherebefore the hole was plugged on May 10.

The initial explosion released only a few hun-dred kilograms of particles, but the resultinggraphite fire within the reactor released addi-tional material. The total release was initiallybelieved to be 3 percent of the contents of thecore, but that figure is somewhat in dispute. Theradiation cloud that formed was transported bywind in a northwestern direction, so that majorfallout occurred on the territory of Belarus. Theinitial danger was the spread of the graphite fireto the roof of the third reactor unit.

The process of informing both the public andthe outside world about the disaster occurredvery slowly. The first announcement publiclycame on April 28 from Radio Moscow, but itonly came after nuclear plant workers in Swedendetected high levels of radiation on their shoesbefore they went in to work at their own station.The Swedes thus realized an accident hadoccurred somewhere in the Soviet Union. ThePolitburo set up an operative group underMikhail Gorbachev’s two key associates, YegorLigachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, and these lead-ers then set up links with several ministries ofkey importance for a nuclear accident, particu-larly the union and republican ministries of


health and the State Committee for Hydro-Meteorology and Environmental Control.

The first detailed reports were printed by themedia on April 29, three days after the disaster—repeating a figure of two dead from the accident,but giving no other details. In Belarus, the firstreports in the local media occurred about a weekafter the disaster.

The graphite fire continued to burn, elicitingthe arrival of fire crews from Prypiat and fromKyiv about 80 miles to the south that had tocome along a single narrow road northward.Helicopters began to drop lead, boron, and sandonto the reactor to quash the fire. Initially, anevacuation area was designated at a 10-kilometerradius around the reactor—meaning that Prypiat,the town housing reactor workers, with a popu-lation of 45,000, and the village of Chernobyl,population 10,000, were the main settlements tobe evacuated.

Up to that point, particularly in the city ofPrypiat and on the morning of April 26, lifecontinued virtually as normal. Men were fishingand at least two weddings were held outdoorsthat day. Farmers reported sometimes burningtheir feet on the soil. No health warnings or evenadvice to stay indoors was offered to local resi-dents. A government commission was establishedunder Borys Shcherbyna, deputy chairman ofthe USSR Council of Ministers, which tookcontrol of the Chernobyl site.

On May 2, Ligachev and Ryzhkov flew toChernobyl and promptly expanded the evacua-tion zone to 30 kilometers. It is reported thatabout 60,000 people were evacuated betweenMay 2 and 4. The early and most seriously affect-ed victims were transported to the specializedMoscow Clinic No. 6, while others were takento hospitals in Kyiv. By May 4 it was reported bythe Politburo that 1,882 people had been hospi-talized, including 204 seriously afflicted withradiation sickness. These totals soon began toincrease substantially. On May 1, radiation levelsover the reactor were reportedly 80 roentgens perhour, and in Prypiat 200 microroentgens perhour. Three days later, a change in the directionof the wind led to a dramatic rise in the radiationbackground of the city of Kyiv, with a popula-tion 2.5 million. By May 8, radiation levels at thereactor site were still rising, reaching 1,000

roentgens per hour, which was 77,000 times thebackground norm.

The KGB accounts report two explosions, thesecond of which was the most powerful and,among other things, destroyed all the fire-extin-guishing equipment. As the radiation cloudformed over the reactor, the lack of Geiger coun-ters made it impossible to take accurate readings ofradiation levels. The KGB’s role was to investigatethe causes and assign responsibility for the acci-dent, but it also concentrated on things like theneed to control traffic in and out of the zone andon the busy road from Kyiv.

By late May the key priority was the construc-tion of a temporary roof, the so-called sarcopha-gus over the destroyed fourth reactor unit, and theconstruction of a cable pathway for the delivery ofbuilding materials. A key concern was that drop-ping materials on the graphite fire had served topush the reactor downward toward the watertable. Coal miners were brought in to construct aconcrete shelf underneath the reactor, whichmight otherwise contaminate the Prypiat River,which linked to the Dnipro, as well as the KyivReservoir, the main water supply for theUkrainian capital.

Other priorities were the collection and bur-ial of radioactive deposits, starting with the roofof Units 3 and 4 and the removal of the so-calledRed Forest close to the site that was criticallyirradiated. The contaminated zone was dividedby the government commission, based mainly onthe fallout of the long-term radionuclidecesium-137, and altogether there were four dif-ferent zones. The evacuated area, called the“zone of alienation,” was projected to remainempty for several decades and had over 40 curiesof cesium-137 per square kilometer [137Cs/km2]in the soil. The zone of compulsory evacuationhad a level of between 15 and 40 137Cs/km2.There was a zone of permanent control at 5 to15 137Cs/km2, and all territories with more thanone curie per square kilometer of cesium-137had to be monitored constantly.

In the early period, about 118,415 peoplewere evacuated from the various zones, althoughoften evacuations were to areas that were alreadyin the path of the radiation cloud so that some-times people had to be moved again. The zoneswere inevitably somewhat arbitrary, since a single


farmer’s field could fall into all four categoriesdepending on where the measurement was made.By the year 2000 some 350,400 people had beenevacuated, the largest portion moved between1991 and 2000. Of those numbers, about163,000 were from Ukraine, 135,000 were fromBelarus, and over 52,000 were from Russia.

These events constituted a response to anuclear emergency, and they might be consid-ered a normal response. In many ways the SovietUnion was not a normal society, and in severalrespects the reaction to Chernobyl leads to ques-tions. The cleanup operation, which eventuallyinvolved over 600,000 people, according to theKGB documents, was conducted in appallingconditions. While tours in the zone extended,often without warning, lifetime radiation levelswere exceeded, there was overexposure to radia-tion—particularly on the reactor roof— andthere was a lack of facilities. This could have beenalleviated with a better response to offers of assis-tance from abroad. It was reported that manyGeiger counters did not work beyond the level of25 rem, but once this level was reached, workerscontinued to stay in the zone.

Initially, volunteers from all parts of theSoviet Union, who remained in the zones forthe first weeks, carried out the main cleanupoperation. They were eventually replaced bymilitary reservists, but the reservists were notmonitored, and many of them simply disap-peared and do not appear later on any register.That many subsequently died seems a foregoneconclusion. They were in the zone at the veryheight of the tragedy, and the Ukrainian filmdirector Volodymyr Shevchenko, who did go tothe zone immediately after the accident, diedafter filming in the area. Health data in any casewere soon officially classified. Once the reservistsarrived from the military, casualties were closelyguarded by the USSR Ministry of Defense.When deaths occurred, they could be attributedto various illnesses. In fact, no one who fell illand died in this period officially died as a resultof Chernobyl radiation.

By the spring of 1989, as a result of glasnost,maps appeared in the Soviet media indicating thatthe area of radiation fallout was much broaderthan first reported. Hundreds of Soviet familiesthus suddenly discovered that they were living in

a radioactive zone, particularly in westernUkraine and large areas of Belarus.

This map [Map 1] indicates clearly the path ofthe radiation cloud over Belarus in late April. Youcan see the cloud moving to different [areas] ofthe republic: first to the west, then into centralareas of the republic; finally, the change in thewind direction pushes it to the south. The redareas in the southeastern part of Belarus were themost heavily contaminated.

The reaction to this new information on fall-out levels can only be imagined, and it led todemands for additional and quite controversialfuture evacuations. Essentially, the damage hadalready been done: radioactive food had beenconsumed, delivered locally and nationally, andeven exported for the previous three years.

The combination of secrecy and distortions ata time when the Politburo knew many detailsabout the impact of the disaster, but chose not todisclose them, has been termed by AllaYaroshinskaya, former Soviet deputy and aide toBoris Yeltsin, as the “Big Lie.” Alla managed torescue many of these documents for posterity inlate 1991 [see her presentation at Panel 3—Ed.].

The acclaimed Soviet report to the IAEA inVienna in August 1986 about the causes of theaccident went no further than human error,ignoring the well-known defects in the RBMKreactor. In fact, the isolation of all decision mak-ing for the nuclear industry in Moscow andGorbachev’s decision to use Chernobyl as a formof state propaganda for a campaign to remove allnuclear weapons from the Earth by the year 2000led to a virtual paralysis among the authorities inKyiv and Minsk. It was reported incidentally atChernobyl that 72 party workers were on the runand no one knew their whereabouts. And whocan blame them?

By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union faced afinancial and political crisis that undermined itsefforts to deal adequately with the aftermath ofChernobyl.

In addition to Soviet culpability for many ofthe problems that emerged, one should add thatthere was also wild speculation about the real con-sequences of Chernobyl. Reports in the Westclaimed that there could be as many as 15,000people dead. There was also at least one docu-mentary film showing genetic abnormalities in


livestock as early as 1988. These have been definedunder the general heading of “radiophobia” andled to many uncorroborated reports—the mostnotorious being that red wine and vodka were thebest cures for radiation sickness.

Such beliefs were a result of official silenceand the lack of information from authorities.There were very few political victims ofChernobyl—surprising given an accident of thismagnitude. The minister for medium machinebuilding was retired, but he was already 88 yearsof age. In the summer of 1987, the plant direc-tor, Viktor Brykhanov, along with the chiefengineer and several operators were put on trialin the town of Chernobyl. Brykhanov receiveda sentence of 10 years of hard labor, which wasrather harsh given his powerless role as a plantmanager and his absence during the majorevents. It was said at the trial that he had misledthe public about the true level of radiation at thesite by dozens of times.

Glasnost also spurred political opposition inUkraine. Most notably, the nascent environmen-tal movement Zelenyi Svit, led by the medicaldoctor Yuri Shcherbak, initially formed in late1987. By early 1989, Ukraine, like the Balticstates, had its own popular movement for pere-stroika, called Rukh, with a founding congressheld in September of that year. Rukh soonbegan to demand an end to the nuclear powerprogram in Ukraine, as well as Ukrainian sover-eignty over its industrial installations and itseconomy, which was in fact achieved by thesummer of 1990.

The antinuclear movement developed rightacross the former Soviet Union, stopping large-scale nuclear power construction in variousplaces. Yuri Shcherbak is well known—he laterbecame the ambassador of Ukraine to theUnited States, and then later to Canada.

After Chernobyl, several measures were takento try to keep the nuclear power program inplace. Although the fourth reactor was perma-nently shut down, the three remaining reactorswere all back online by December of 1987.Units 5 and 6 were never completed. Due to theevacuation of the town of Prypiat, a new townwas constructed for plant workers, calledSlavutych, in the oblast of Chernihiv, about 40miles to the northeast of the Chernobyl station.

The International Atomic Energy Agency,which signed an agreement with the SovietUnion in 1985 on the application of safeguardsat nuclear facilities, basically took control interms of supervising technical improvements tothe RBMK reactors. These improvementsincluded things like raising the uranium enrich-ment, making sure that no experiments, safetyor otherwise, could be conducted in the absenceof the plant director, and ensuring that no onecould shut down reactor safety mechanisms.Seven such mechanisms had been switched offduring the tragic 1986 experiment. Eight yearslater—and one may wonder about why it tookso long—the IAEA declared that the ChernobylRBMK reactor was inherently unsafe and thatthe station should be closed down. As we know,it was closed down much later.

Chernobyl devastated Ukraine and Belarus,contaminating 8 and 22 percent of the landmassof those republics, respectively. In Belarus, 25percent of the forest area was contaminated.While only about 0.5 percent of its total territo-ry, a very large area of Russia was contaminated,including Smolensk and Bryansk oblasts in par-ticular. Over five million people currently residein areas with more than one curie per squarekilometer of cesium in the soil.

In Ukraine, the long-term impact of cesium,strontium, and, to a lesser extent, plutoniumwill continue in perpetuity in regions such asKyiv, Zhytomyr, and Chernihiv, as well as partsof western Ukraine including Rivne and Volynoblasts.

In Belarus, the main affected regions are inHomel, Mahileu, and Brest oblasts. Many vil-lages in the Homel region are depopulated,while others subsist in poverty, but virtually noyoung people remain there.

When the sarcophagus covering the fourthreactor unit was completed, by the fall of 1986,it began to erode naturally. It was only meant tobe a short-term building, and initially aGerman-French consortium designed a roof ofmore permanent construction. Later theUkrainian government reopened the project forbids, and now a rival bid has emerged from aU.S.-Ukrainian consortium for the so-calledshelter implementation plan over the destroyedfourth reactor.


Both Ukraine and Belarus have introducedmoratoria on the construction of new reactors.In Ukraine’s case, it was declared in 1990 for 5years, and in the case of Belarus it was declaredin 1998 for 10 years.

The last topic I want to look at in detail isthe question of health effects of Chernobyl inthe different regions. As it has already beenmentioned, this has become a very controver-sial subject. The figure of 31 initial deaths andless than 60 deaths to date is under reviewbecause of the number of deaths at the reactorsite in the summer of 1986. The percentage ofhealthy children in the contaminated zones wasreported at around 80 percent in the mid 1980s;today, it is said to be less than 20 percent.

In Belarus, as a result of Chernobyl, 1.5 mil-lion people are under medical observation.That is over 15 percent of the population,including over 330,000 children. The cleanupcrews, or liquidators, have suffered a variety ofailments. Many have committed suicide. Atleast 5,000 were dead by 1990. At least twosources reported 10,000 dead within a decadeof the accident. As noted, the Greenpeacereport lists just under 34,000 deaths among liq-uidators in Ukraine.

The difficulty here is corroborating theresults. A central register is lacking, and there isa plethora of often conflicting medical studiesand an incomplete source base. What does seemplain is that liquidators, evacuees, and currentzone residents face a variety of health problemsthat have resulted from Chernobyl—but alsofrom falling living standards, a lack of nutrition,and a sort of psychological stress cited in theChernobyl Forum report.

Overall, the number of people declared tobe suffering from the Chernobyl accident inthe territories of the former Soviet Union inDecember of 2000 is 7.1 million. Of that fig-ure, 4.5 million were living in contaminatedregions and over 500,000 were liquidators, whowere on the scene in 1988 to 1989. Breakingdown these figures among the republics, thenumber of victims in Ukraine was just over 3million, just over 2 million in Russia, and anestimated 1.82 million in Belarus.

Thyroid gland cancer began to surfaceamong children staring in 1989. It was practi-

cally unknown in that age group before thatyear, and it has been directly related to therelease of radioactive iodine from Chernobyl.In Belarus, 19 deaths have been reportedamong those on whom thyroid surgery hasbeen performed in recent years.

Levels of leukemia have risen throughoutthe contaminated zone, though the levelsremain within the upper limits of Europeannorms.

One also has the onset of new diseases notformerly attributed to radiation, such as child-hood diabetes, and this possible impact of low-level radiation is a matter for sustained debate.In Belarus, Dr. Yuri Bandazheuski, a nuclearspecialist and former rector of the Homel’Medical Institute, conducted a study of theincidents of cardiovascular sickness among chil-dren in that region, and concluded that rela-tively low subjection to cesium-137 couldcause cataracts, heart disease, and other mal-adies. He was also critical of the sale of radioac-tive vegetables, and maintained that the con-taminated region around Chernobyl andBelarus had actually worsened over time. We donot know the final results of these studiesbecause he was sent to jail for about eight yearsshortly after his study appeared.

The serious health dilemmas that haveresulted from Chernobyl have led local scien-tists to question figures from the IAEA-ledChernobyl Forum report.

The surprising thing about radiation is thatit kills some people outright, but others that ittheoretically ought to kill go on to recover.

I cited one report from Belarus by a scien-tist, Alexander Yablokov, who reports that thenumber of thyroid cancers among children inBelarus is over 10,000 today, rather than the4,000 cited in the Chernobyl Forum report,which has implications for the long-term mor-tality rate. Though the report acknowledges asignificant rise in the various types of canceramong liquidators and breast cancer amongwomen living in the zone, it has been criti-cized for saying nothing about the lack ofimmunity to diseases generally characterized as“Chernobyl AIDS.” There is informationabout an apparent link between radiation andthe increase of newborn children with abnor-


malities like Down syndrome. Yablokov andothers take issue with a number of other con-clusions by the Forum. They note, for example,that the report declares that the final death tollfrom Chernobyl will never be known precisely.Just a little later on, it is stated that in Russiathere will be an additional 4,726 deaths. Howprecise could one get? Yablokov in particularbelieves it is incorrect to say that the rise inmortality cannot be attributed to Chernobylsince there has been a rise in mortality in all for-mer regions of the Soviet Union. While this istrue, the first significant rise in morbidityoccurred specifically in the Chernobyl-affectedregions. Yablokov also objects to what he callsthe nebulous language in the Forum report,with frequent use of phrases like “not altogeth-er clearly,” “it is possible,” “not definitively,” and“not corroborated by statistical data.” Hebelieves they are deployed essentially to concealdata that are statistically credible.

He cites studies that indicate a direct linkbetween radiation and increased stress, particu-larly in Europe—in fact, the report fails to notethe impact of Chernobyl outside the threemajor countries of concern: Belarus, Ukraine,and Russia. He could have added that the reportdoes not take into account the intricacies of theSoviet system, which had already concealed amajor nuclear disaster at a weapon site inKyshtym in the 1950s, and also the 1982 acci-dent cited at Chernobyl.

In the year 2000, the Ukrainian governmentof Leonid Kuchma closed the Chernobyl plantpermanently in the hope that the output of thetwo remaining reactors could be offset by thecommissioning of Western aid for two newreactors at the Khmelnytsky and Rivne stations,both VVER 1000s. There are over 100 radioac-tive waste burial sites in the zone today, many ofwhich cannot be described as safe or permanent.

As described recently in the book by MaryMycio [The Wormwood Forest:A Natural History ofChernobyl], the zone has effectively becomedepopulated and a virtual wildlife park, asidefrom about 1,000 elderly so-called samosely whohave returned to their homes.

After 20 years there is no consensus onhealth effects of the accident, and there is anotable rift between the scientific establishment

represented by the IAEA and the popular mediaon what are the real results of Chernobyl. It isactually one of the most protracted and unfor-tunate elements of the disaster, inasmuch as ithinders an open discussion.

As I said at the beginning, there is theChernobyl Forum report, there is the Green-peace report, but really there is nothing inbetween. If the Chernobyl Forum report is ledby the IAEA, an agency whose goal is to pro-mote the development of nuclear power, onecould equally well say that Greenpeace is anorganization that is dedicated to the end ofnuclear power. Why is there nothing in the mid-dle of these two reports? Of course, these twoagencies do not communicate with each other.

The accident had a profound impact on thenational development of the republics, particu-larly in Ukraine, raising national consciousnessand, concomitantly, sentiment that was notablyanti-Moscow—where the nuclear ministrieswere all located.

According to a survey in Ukraine by theRazumkov Center, Chernobyl today is an issuestill preoccupying residents of Ukraine.According to this survey, it ranks fourth on thelist of concerns for Ukrainians after low income,unemployment, and crime. According to thissame poll, over 64 percent of people in Ukrainebelieve nuclear power to be a dangerous or avery dangerous form of energy production, andalmost 55 percent oppose any expansion ofUkraine’s nuclear program, which is certainlynow an increasing possibility given the war overgas prices with Russia.

In Belarus, Chernobyl increasingly is identi-fied with campaigns of the political opposition.For example, an event that draws crowds willtake place in Minsk: the Chernobyl March. Thistime, it follows several protests over the nature ofthe presidential election and the way in which itwas held.

Independent studies of the disaster in Belarusare rather difficult to produce. The governmenthas also criticized programs abroad forChernobyl children that it says do not necessar-ily bring benefits.

In most cases, families have lived on the con-taminated land for the past 20 years. The healthcrisis in Belarus elicited the convocation of the


first Congress of Doctors in 1998, which notedan overall rise in the incidence of sickness of 32percent and a 50-fold rise in the number ofchildren with thyroid gland cancer.

Twenty years later, the legacy of Chernobylcontinues in Ukraine and Belarus in particular.Newly independent states succeeded the Sovietrepublics, but faced overwhelming economicproblems by the year 2000. Ukraine had an esti-mated total cost from Chernobyl of $128 bil-lion, and in Belarus the estimated costs havebeen around $235 billion. For Belarus, that sumwas actually equivalent to 32 total annual budg-ets of the year 1985. This gives some idea of thescale of the problem. Twenty years later, over10,000 young people have cancer. Thousands ofliquidators are dead from causes that may ormay not be linked to Chernobyl, but theirdeaths are nonetheless premature since theywere mostly men in their forties.

Even the populations of the two republics,as is that of Russia, are in steep decline. Belarushas “lost” over 500,000 people since 1985. TheUkrainian population has declined by 4.5 mil-lion in that same period. The lack of fertilityamong these populations, as well as mass migra-tion from the contaminated regions, are bothlinked directly to the Chernobyl disaster.

The world, of course, has moved on to newcrises: the war in Iraq, famine in Africa, thedanger of nuclear weapons being manufacturedin Iran. But there is no closure yet onChernobyl. There is no foreseeable end to thedebate, and there is no relief from the profoundmedical, social, and psychological burdenplaced on seven million people living with theseeffects in the soil and in the food chain today.

QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD

QUESTION: Mr. Marples, first of all I would liketo thank you very much for your overwhelmingpresentation. Nonetheless, I would like to makesome corrections. I think you are very much mis-taken in stating the period of membership of theUSSR in the IAEA. It became a member of theIAEA at the beginning of its activities in 1958.The first representative to the IAEA from theSoviet Union was the famous Russian minister offoreign affairs, Mr. Vyacheslav Molotov, so it is

not 1985 but 1958. I think my colleague from theIAEA who is present here can confirm that.

MARPLES: Let me make a correction. 1985 wasthe first year that the IAEA was allowed into the Soviet Union to a civilian nuclear powerstation.

QUESTION: Yes, but you were speaking in termsof membership. You were saying that the SovietUnion was not a member of the IAEA in 1985,which is not true.

My question is concerning the figures thatwere given by you referring to ProfessorYablokov. With all my respect to ProfessorYablokov and the figures that he is presenting, Iam not sure that we can take all these figures forgranted without any discussion. You know, onlythree days ago in Moscow a commemorative con-ference was held marking the 20th anniversary ofChernobyl, and the director of the Institute forSafe Development of Nuclear Energy spokethere. He referred to the statement of ProfessorYablokov some time ago that he was trying tocorroborate AIDS disease here in the UnitedStates, saying that after Chernobyl and maybebecause of Chernobyl, it was augmented by 15percent. Thank you.

MARPLES: I do not see how the comment onYablokov really contradicts anything I said. I citedYablokov, one of his articles, as criticizing theChernobyl Forum report, and that report hascome under criticism from a number of differentpeople, in all fairness.

QUESTION: I was just wondering if you wereaware of any studies that might have been donein relation to your comment at the end linkingthe demographics and the fall in the populationof Ukraine and Belarus to Chernobyl?

MARPLES: Yes, dozens of them. I have traveledto Belarus specifically to go through some ofthose studies. I would say the numbers are prob-ably close to 50 or 60 major studies, includingdifferent regions in Belarus. They examine notjust the radiation effects but generally why thepopulation is declining so rapidly, and why thedeath rate is so much higher than the birthrate.


Chernobyl is regarded as a factor—not necessar-ily the only factor, but definitely a factor. It isnot the only factor, because population isdeclining in Vitebsk Region, which was alsocontaminated by iodine before it was contami-nated by Chernobyl fallout.

Migration is a factor. Young people tend toleave the villages and move to the towns. The fearof living on irradiated land is also a key factor.Women not being clearly confident in havingchildren is another factor.

So the population decline is obviously notsomething that is new to the government; it is wellknown. It is regarded as a priority, and the gov-ernment of Belarus has also talked about repopu-lating those regions either with new migrants orby encouraging people to go and live there.Ukraine is similar in many regards.

It is also fair to say that over the past 10 to 15years the demographic problems in all those threecountries have been a cause of great concern. It ishappening all over Europe of course, but the rateof decline is higher in these countries than theEuropean average.

QUESTION: In your presentation you made a lot ofcomparisons among Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia,and you placed Belarus in first place. Is it becauseyou believe that Belarus suffered most from thisevent, or is it because you paid more attention inyour research to Belarus? In my belief—and I havewritten a book on demographic consequences ofthe Chernobyl disaster for Ukraine’s populationdevelopment—I believe that Ukraine sufferedmore in this story.

QUESTION: Do you have any data present on thelong-term effects outside those three countries,for example, in northern Europe and westernEurope?

MARPLES: I gave some figures on the number ofpeople evacuated and the total area contaminat-

ed. It is a simplistic thing to do, but if you justlook at the total area contaminated byChernobyl—by total area, with one curie ofcesium alone—Russia received the most con-tamination. If you look in terms of high levels ofcontamination—over 15 curies per square kilo-meter—then Belarus received the most. That isa fact; there is no question about it. The worst-affected regions of Ukraine were around theChernobyl reactor and, to a lesser extent, inthree northern regions and the western region.It is really a matter of where the radiation cloudwent, and because of the way the wind wasblowing, Belarus got a massive dose. That is notto say that the problems are not very serious inUkraine, and I am not in any way belittlingthem. But an additional factor to consider forBelarus is that it has a population of only 10 or9.7 million today. Therefore, we are talkingabout nearly a quarter of the population. Ninetypercent of the republic was contaminated byradioactive iodine. So it is the scale, rather thananything else, that defines the terms of how dif-ferent republics were affected by Chernobyl.

The question about Europe is absolutely rel-evant and extremely important. I have not donestudies on the fallout of Chernobyl in Europe,but they have been done—particularly in south-ern Germany, where there was a major problem.Chernobyl also affected large areas of Poland,Slovakia, Greece, and Turkey. It extended as farnorth as Scandinavia, Lapland, affecting thereindeer population. The mountainous regionsof the British Isles, Snowdonia National Park,the Lake District—all these areas got large doses.It is for those reasons that the figure of 4,000dead is not relevant. It cannot really be takenseriously because Europe—and the wholeworld—is affected by Chernobyl. In terms oflong-term effects, Europe was affected.However, vast areas of Europe, and even largeareas of Russia, are not normally considered tobe in the contaminated zone.



Panel 2: The Health PerspectiveChair, Martin Sletzinger, Director, East European Studies, Woodrow Wilson International Center forScholars

Didier Louvat, Head, Waste Safety Section, International Atomic Energy Agency

Murray Feshbach, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Leonard Mazur, Chief Operating Officer, Triax Pharmaceuticals, and Member, Board of Directors,Children of Chernobyl Relief and Development Fund

DIDIER LOUVAT: I am here today not represent-ing the IAEA, but the Chernobyl Forum. Wewere asked by the Kennan Institute to give somehighlights about findings and recommendationsof the Chernobyl Forum. First of all, I wouldlike to briefly describe the process of how theChernobyl Forum operated. The ChernobylForum was initiated by Mohamed ElBaradei,the director general of the IAEA, at the end of2002. It was initiated because of the discrepan-cies existing between the UN agencies dealingwith or talking about the Chernobyl disaster,and also at the request of the affected memberstates, primarily Belarus. Its formation wasannounced during the visit of MohamedElBaradei to Belarus.

What was the primary objective of the Forum?It was to build a common UN position to supportthe UN Development Program strategy that wasproposed at the time, and was still under discus-sion with the three affected countries—Belarus,Russia, and Ukraine. This is the objective of theChernobyl Forum, and nothing else.

It was composed of eight UN organizationsinvolved in the treatment of the fallout fromthe Chernobyl disaster: the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the WorldHealth Organization (WHO), the Food andAgriculture Organization (FAO), the UnitedNational Development Program (UNDP), theUnited Nations Environment Program(UNEP), the United Nations Office for theCoordination of Humanitarian Affairs(UNOCHA), the United Nations ScientificCommittee on the Effects of AtomicRadiation (UNSCEAR), and the World Bank,

plus representatives and experts from the threeaffected countries that were under investiga-tion. The results of the Chernobyl Forum werereported to the 60th UN General Assembly,which approved a resolution supporting theForum’s results.

How the Forum operated: We had a steeringcommittee made up of senior representatives ofthe eight UN organizations and representativesof the governments of the three affected coun-tries. We had also two expert groups: one onhealth (coordinated by WHO) and one on envi-ronment (coordinated by the IAEA), plus wehad a report to refer to that was prepared by theUNDP on the strategy for recovery. Participantsin the expert groups were selected on the basis oftheir involvement and scientific work related toChernobyl over the previous 16 years.

Each group met several times to examinehealth consequences and environmental conse-quences. Every year, from 2003 to 2005, we hada steering committee meeting, where the workof the different groups was reviewed. If a con-sensus existed, then the group would move for-ward; if no consensus existed on a portion ofany of the reports, then the group would reex-amine the issue. That means that all of theForum reports on health and environment—andlater on social and economic consequences—were reviewed and approved at each step oftheir development by each UN organizationand by the governments of the three affectedcountries. The final report was approved inApril 2005 by the entire group and was thenpresented at a conference in September 2005. Iwill come back to that later.

The objective of each expert group was toprovide a consensus statement, both on healtheffects and environmental consequences, to serveas a scientific basis for the UNDP’s strategyfocusing on Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.Nothing more, nothing less. We were also askedfor our opinions on recommendations on radia-tion, health care programs, and remediation pro-grams, and on the gaps that remained in theknowledge that we had on the disaster.

I am going to present three types of conclu-sions—general conclusions, health conclusions,and environmental conclusions—and we can dis-cuss these conclusions whenever you wish duringthe day. There is no doubt that the Chernobylcatastrophe was the most severe accident in thehistory of the nuclear industry. It was by far thefirst radiological accident of such magnitude.Figures have already been given by previousspeakers. It also became evident for the Forum’sparticipants over the course of the years that themost significant problems were the resulting civil,social, and economic depressions, which affectedBelarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian regions afterthe catastrophe and later during the 1990s.

The Forum participants also noted a seriousproblem for the general public in the affectedregions. In considering the average dose for thepeople living at the time of the accident in theaffected regions of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine,we have split them into four groups of people.These people were split with respect to the taskthey performed during and after the catastropheof the accident, and also by the dose theyreceived. One group is the liquidators, whichrepresents the group of workers who participat-ed in emergency and remediation operations

from 1986 to 1989: we included the 600,000people who were registered as liquidators at thetime, and some of them received more than 100millisieverts (mSv) as an average dose.

Next we have the people evacuated just afterthe accident from the exclusion zone, 116,000people, who received a mean figure of 33 mSv.These people were carefully monitored at thetime of the evacuation, but there is also uncer-tainty concerning the average doses, and I cancomment later on that.

Next we have the residents of the strictly con-trolled zone (SCZ), who are a corps of 270,000people who received less than 50 mSv. Thisgroup is less precise because not all these peoplewere carefully monitored from the time of theaccident up until now.

Finally, we have the residents who resided inthe contaminated area at the moment of theaccident, a corps of five million people who havereceived a mean between 10 and 20 mSv fromthe year of the accident until now.

Just for understanding, the mean naturalbackground dose received by any human bodyduring 20 years is 50 mSv, and that varies on thebasis of the place where you live.

Regarding the aftereffects: the corps of sever-al hundred emergency workers received radiationdoses. We know for sure that around 50 diedfrom actual radiation syndrome—bodies thatwere diagnosed with severe sickness due to radi-ation. Then the Forum made a biostatistical fore-cast on the core group who received more than100 mSv. According to these biostatistical fore-casts, the radiation received at the time by theliquidators has caused or will cause the prematuredeath of around 4,000 people from a corps of


Population category Number Average dose(mSv)

Liquidators (1986–1989) 600 000 ~100

Evacuees from highly-contaminated zone (1986)

116 000 33

Residents of “strict-control” zones(1986–2005)

270 000 >50

Residents of other ‘contaminated’ areas(1986–2005)

5 000 000 10–20

Summary of average accumulated doses to affected populations from Chernobyl fallout

600,000. This is already verified in a corps thathas been well monitored by a Russian physician,and Ivan Ivanov and colleagues produced a bookwith this data.

Ivanov noticed a doubling of the lack of mor-bidity in workers who received more than 200mSv. He noted some increase of mortality ofaround 5 percent caused by solid cancers, and henoticed something that is new in radiation pro-tection. He was able to link cardiovascular dis-ease with high radiation exposure. He also notedan increase in cataract frequency, but this is stillvery tiny and needs to be investigated further.

The Forum also pointed out that it is only 20years after the accident, and certainly for thiscorps we do not have all the effects appearingright now. The message of the Forum is that thiscorps of liquidators should be monitored and pro-vided health care. There is no doubt about that.

Another corps that was well identified is thecorps of children and adolescents who receivedsubstantial radiation doses in the Chernobylregion due to the consumption of milk. From1992 to 2002 in the three countries of the affect-ed region, about 4,000 thyroid cancer cases weredetected in this corps. More than 99 percent ofthe children affected were successfully treated.Some died because they were diagnosed verylate. When the Forum said they were successful-ly treated, that means they did not die. It doesnot mean that these people have a normal life;they still suffer from the sickness. It is somethingyou suffer from your entire life.

Now if we extend the observation to the fivemillion residents of the contaminated area, up tonow we have no reliable data on increased inci-dence of any somatic disease except for thyroidcancer in children and adolescents. And theWHO group spent a lot of time looking at allthe data provided from all sources. It worked tosort out what was reliable information, and whatwas unreliable information. There was a debatein this group over how to extend the biostatisti-cal forecast. Everybody agreed that a dose above100 mSv is related to effect, and an effect can bea cancer. Below 100 mSv, nobody knows exact-ly what is happening.

There was a discussion within the group, andit was decided to make the calculation but to sayit was highly speculative. So the calculation was

made and this is the discrepancy, which wasaddressed by Mr. Marples and was not indicated inthe press release. A biostatistical forecast, if imple-mented as it has been for the corps of liquidators,would predict a small radiation-induced somaticmorbidity in the future. I indicated differences ofless than 1 percent in cancer mortality, and this iswhat we put in this booklet. Actually, if you takethe numbers that were calculated, the difference isless than one per million.

We would never be able to observe thisbecause the statistical population will never belarge enough. We would need around one bil-lion people to see an effect, and we have onlyfive million people affected. Then the uncertain-ty attached to this predication is not only large,it is completely uncertain.

I will maybe insist on this next point, becausenot only the Forum but also several other groupsand reports have come to the conclusion thatthere is no prevalence of malformation at birthat the moment in the affected countries. A lot ofphysiological consequences have been trauma-tized by the relocation, breakdown in social con-tact, fear and anxiety about radiation, and unex-plained physical disorders. There is a tendency torelate any physical-systems disorders to radiation.We have to differentiate what is directly radia-tion-induced—and therefore will be used by theradiation protection community to improve thesystem of radiation protection and the system ofemergency preparedness—and what is secondar-ily related. Fear is an effect of the accident; but iffear is giving psychological trauma, it is not aradiation-induced trauma. Or, if you want, youcan call it is “secondarily induced.” The UNDPpointed out that victims of the “Chernobyl syn-drome” consider themselves invalids rather thanpeople who are lucky survivors of a terriblecatastrophe.

Regarding the environment, both naturalprocesses and the early and the timely and effi-cient efforts of remediation that were imple-mented in agricultural lands have reduced theradiation level in the environment several hun-dred times, and the majority of land now is safefor life and economic activities. That means wehave identified which portions of the territoryshould still remain restricted to public access,and these portions, mainly forests, will be


restricted for decades to come because the reme-diation process is not effective in this type ofenvironment. In addition, the exclusion zoneremains and should remain restricted.

Regarding the effect of the accident on non-human biota: radiation caused a number of acuteadverse effects on the nonhuman biota, and thiswas noticeable. The Red Forest is one example.But after a few years the environment recoveredand, as has been mentioned previously, it is nowa wildlife paradise. Why? Simply because weremoved the main stress on the environment—men. We have no comparison of any type ofzone that was not contaminated and was free ofmen that could have developed at the same timein the same way. So we cannot compare to deter-mine whether this wildlife development is com-pletely natural or not.

The main message of the Chernobyl Forum isfocused on decommissioning, rehabilitation, andproper radioactive waste management in theexclusion zone. This is a big burden on theshoulders of Ukraine, and the international com-munity will help Ukraine—or at least the UNwill help Ukraine in this task.

These are the social and economic repercus-sions that were developed by the UNDP. I will notexpand on that because the previous speaker illus-trated this very well.

Regarding the recommendations: of coursetargeted research on health and social conse-quences should be continued for a long time. Theknowledge that was gained during the accidentand after the accident in overcoming all the con-sequences has to be preserved, and has to beincluded in the radiation protection system.

There are detailed recommendations, forwhich there is not time to go through, but ifattention has to be paid in terms of health, itshould be paid to the liquidators and to the screen-ing of the people who were children and adoles-cents at that time, as well as their children. In theenvironment, again I repeat, the big task is theremediation of the exclusion zone and thedecommissioning of the four units, including thedamaged one.

This was reported at the InternationalConference on Chernobyl in September of thisyear. You can access all the documents producedby the Forum through UNDP’s website, the

WHO website, and the IAEA website: the high-lights, the health report, the environmental report,and the UNDP report on social and economicconsequences. You can access the presentations,which were made at the Forum [www.iaea.org].Everybody was invited to the Forum, and I can-not agree with Mr. Marples when he says we didnot invite people to address this. Greenpeace wasthere. Greenpeace expressed itself as much as itwanted. Its proposed resolution was not acceptedby all of the Forum participants. Again, everybodywas invited; everybody got a chance to commenton the Forum results. And again, this wasapproved by the United Nations GeneralAssembly in the 60th session. Thank you.

MURRAY FESHBACH: The IAEA report, if youread it, is much more assertive than the gentle-man, Dr. Louvat said about two minutes ago.There is a lot of uncertainty. In the WorldHealth Organization’s separate report, it is veryclear about the uncertainty, including the factthat instead of using 4,000 predicted deaths,they restore the 5,000 that was in the IAEAreport of 1996, and say the probable numberwill be 9,300—but then, who really knows? Iagree—who really knows? I think that we canchoose any number we want and you can find asource for it. If you ask me, I will give youbetween 30,000 to 200,000 or more, and Ibelieve neither the lower figure nor the upperone. I am not trying to be eclectic, I believefully we do not know.

I think there are some issues that we can bringup at this point, such as why they don’t includethe other republics. Of the liquidators, 93 percentcame from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, butthere were a number from outside those three, andI think that they have to also include them in theirmortality estimates.

On the issue of congenital malformation, letme mention what an Israeli survey found: “Ofone hundred children of liquidators who hademigrated to Israel, the rate of genetic mutationsamong those born after the accident was 700%higher than among those children who wereborn before 1986.”This is from Der Spiegel onlineon 17 April of this year.

There are other problems. I will not go upand down all the tables, but there are other issues,


like the Lithuanians. They sent 5,400 liquidators,volunteers or otherwise. Some of them may havebeen Russians, not necessarily only Lithuanians.Of those, 264 have died and 260 are perma-nently disabled (according to the Lithuanianhealth officials). Disabled means you probablywill die prematurely, as was brought up, butagain they are not included.

In Estonia 4,800 liquidators were involved,and 144 deaths were attributed to Chernobyl by1997, 28 of which were suicides. Now you cansay suicide should not be included because it isnot due to high doses of radiation. But there is awhole psychological issue, or psychosomatic ill-ness, which leads to stress and heart complica-tions. Alcoholism, lifestyle issues, and behaviorpatterns also are not included in this kind ofreview, as I understand it. Now, I may be wrong.

Now, as to the issue of leukemia: leukemia isa very difficult issue in Soviet statistics and con-tinues to be so in Russian health statistics. Theyuse the term “hemoblastosis,” and I have asked anumber of American physician friends of mine,what is “hemoblastosis”? I have sort of an under-standing, but if you go into the gory details ofthe ICD, the International Classification ofDiseases, as used in Russia, some 80 to 90 per-cent of these are leukemia cases, but you neversee a direct figure for leukemia. It is extremelyrare that you will find an open citation. But ifyou look into the detailed materials of theCancer Institute in Russia, you will find thisinformation in various limited-distributionhandbooks which I acquire. I did research on theleukemia cases a long time ago, and I have notdone anything lately, so I am not making anyassertions for any total numbers now. But youhave to be very careful because the leukemia fig-ures do not appear as such.

There is also the issue of experts used by theIAEA, by Greenpeace, by WHO. It is the case of“I have my experts and you have your experts;maybe never the twain will meet.” Here we obvi-ously have a potential for conflict.

One of the experts they do not use—or at leastmy research assistant and I could not find a singlereference in the footnotes to the IAEA report—isKeith Baverstock. Baverstock used to be the headof the team from the U.K. that went to Belarus 10years ago. They checked 104 slides that were thy-

roid cancer related, and they found that 102 wereaccurately measured. He also found that the can-cer was an aggressive type. He has recently comeout against this IAEA report saying they pay noattention to his findings. Maybe they are correctnot to, but I doubt it.

Besides the Lithuanians and Estonians, againthere is the question of other causes of deaths.The IAEA itself in 1996 or 1997 said that therewere about 100 to 200 thousand induced abor-tions as a consequence of Chernobyl. Now if youwant to call it psychological—but these are fetallosses, and fetal losses are deaths, and in that sensewhy exclude them?

What about the people from Uzbekistan?What about the people from other areas? TheSwiss consider that they have lost people; theSwedes do too, and so on. If you want to limityourself to the three republics, that is oneapproach, no question. But it should not be lim-ited to considering acute radiation sickness orthyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer takes 20 to 25years to fully come forth, and we are just aboutat that point.

You also have the question of breast cancer,which is considered to be developing, and it willbe shortly again. The same thing happens withlung cancer. I asked Academician AleksandrChuchalin, the chief pulmonologist of theMinistry of Health and head of an institute andmany other things, and he believes these cancersare going to be showing up shortly.

Thus, you have potential for changes in thesenumbers. It is more the assertiveness that bothersme. It is one estimate with its own definition—perhaps correct, perhaps not. But you have toinclude other people as well. That’s another kindof approach.

On the genetic mutation issue, I definitely donot agree with the IAEA. There are a lot of localreports about many-percentage-point increases indifficulties of children. A book on demographyand health in Ukraine written for the nationalsecurity institute of that country documents thisevidence as well.

So I am not sure that I think that the cover-age was as thorough as I would like. But I wantto make one last point. In Alla Yaroshinskaya’sreport, you read about secret protocols. I did notspot any reference to the secret protocols of the


Politburo Operational Group in either the IAEAor WHO reports; these were very importantevents. Testifying before the ConstitutionalCourt of Russia in 1992, Yegor Ligachev said inparticular that he did not feel any personal guiltfor concealing the truth about Chernobyl fromthe people. He called the Politburo directive onthe procedure for covering events in theChernobyl nuclear power station in the press andthe trials of those responsible for the accident nota restriction, but a regulation, of information.Well, you call it what you want, and I’ll call itwhat I want to call it.

Further, it emerged that some two weeks afterthe “event,” on 8 May 1986, at a session of thePolitburo Operational Group on the nuclearpower station, the maximum acceptable radiationlevels for the population had been increased ten-fold, from 3.5 rem to 35 rem. So that made itpossible to count hundreds of thousands of peo-ple as not having suffered from the accident. Also,it was revealed that a note from Yuri Israel whowas the hydrometeorological service director atthe time of the accident, declared that the con-tamination zone was actually much wider thanthe designated 30-kilometer area, but that notehad been ignored.

Thank you very much.

LEONARD MAZUR: As a member of the board ofdirectors for the Children of Chernobyl Reliefand Development Fund, I am very grateful forthis opportunity to address this distinguishedpanel. I would like to share some of the latestinformation we have obtained on the long-termconsequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.What you are going to hear from me today isgoing to be diametrically opposed to what youheard from Mr. Louvat.

I also want to share some of the success that ourfoundation has had in improving the quality oftreatment for children who suffer from thyroidcancer, birth defects, leukemia, and immune defi-ciencies. In the past 16 sixteen years, our organi-zation has worked tirelessly and zealously to giveUkrainian children a fighting chance to overcomea host of life-threatening diseases. Through anintegrated program of physician training, human-itarian aid, and the infusion of state-of-the-artmedical equipment, we have given local doctors

the tools they need to combat these illnesses, toreduce infant mortality, and to enable children tofully recover and lead a normal life. Through thatprocess, we have gained a lot of insight into whatis actually happening in Ukraine. In the process,we have learned a great deal about the potentialimpact of radiation exposure on young lives. It iswell known that children and unborn infants areparticularly sensitive to the influence of ionizingradiation, even in very small doses. The NationalAcademy of Sciences, in its report, repeatedly stat-ed that there is no safe dose of radiation, contraryto what we heard earlier. Even a tiny particle ofplutonium, if injected into a lung, can cause can-cer over time. The amounts of radiation releasedby Chernobyl were anything but tiny. Chernobylunleashed over 260 million curies of radiationover a vast area of Ukraine, Belarus, and much ofeastern and northern Europe.

Dr. Marples reminded us that the first reportsof abnormally high radiation levels came fromSweden, over 1,000 miles north of the disastersite. Indeed, recent studies have shown that cancerrates have risen even in those remote areas. Evenas far away as Wales, Ireland, and southern France,health authorities have been forced to imposerestrictions on dairy products, mushrooms,berries, and other foodstuffs that were found withhigh concentrations of radiation as late as 1998.

If you did not see it, last week in The New YorkTimes the headline read, “In Throats of Émigrés,Doctors Find a Legacy of Chernobyl.”What theyfound is that there is a rise in the incidence ofthyroid cancer here in the United States. There isa sharper rise in New York State, however, andthat sharper rise is directly attributable to the pres-ence of émigrés from the former Soviet republicswho brought a gift with them from theChernobyl accident.

Even 20 years after Reactor 4 exploded andafter it was entombed, Chernobyl continues topose a very significant risk to children and adults.There is a lot of data available from a lot ofsources. Much of it comes from the research insti-tutes and the various state governmental agenciesin Ukraine, but there are also numerous articlespublished in prestigious peer-reviewed journals onthe impact of this catastrophe. We also have inter-national teams that have gone into Ukraine andstudied this extensively. They have found all sorts


of serious short- and long-term consequences as aresult of the Chernobyl accident. Everyone nowacknowledges that the mass release of radioactiveiodine-131 caused an epidemic in thyroid cancerin both children and adults. We have learned thatanother 9,000 children in Ukraine suffer fromprecancerous conditions.

But thyroid cancer is by no means the onlydetectable effect of Chernobyl. Over the pastfour years, a team of American and Ukrainiangeneticists have tracked the condition of 104,000newborn children in the provinces of Rivne andVolyn. These provinces in northwestern Ukrainereceived a significant amount of nuclear falloutfrom Chernobyl. In the first stage of their study,the researchers found a fourfold increase in spinabifida in children. What is especially telling is thatthe rate of spina bifida and neural tube defects iseven higher among newborns in the contaminat-ed northern districts of Rivne known as Polisia.If the national average in Ukraine for spina bifi-da is 12 cases per 10,000, the rate in Polisia is 28per 1,000, or nine times higher than the interna-tional norm of 3 per 1,000. The March of Dimeswas sufficiently disturbed by the spina bifida epi-demic that it launched a special campaign inUkraine to introduce more folic acid into the dietof pregnant women.

Under the supervision of Dr. WladimirWertelecki, chairman of medical genetics at theUniversity of South Alabama, the research teamin Volyn and Rivne also discovered many rareand unusual birth defects such as polydactylism(infants born with extra fingers and toes),cataracts, deformed or missing limbs, anddeformed or missing critical organs. They doc-umented and photographed these cases and setup the first birth defects registry in Ukraine.With the support of the United States Agencyfor International Development (USAID), theywere able to expand their research into threemore provinces and to create omnicenters thatprovide computer access and support for fami-lies of children who suffer from these abnor-malities. We very much would like to seeUSAID and other international agencies con-tinue the funding for this program.

The Institute of Genetics in Kyiv has founda steep increase in the rate of birth defectsaffecting the eyes, including cataracts and blind-

ness. Over 2,500 newborn children were regis-tered with cataracts in recent years, but last yearalone, 423 infants were registered with eyecataracts. In 2001, the rate of cataracts was twiceas high as in 1993. This goes well beyond anec-dotal evidence, and it flies in the face of lastyear’s IAEA report claiming that there was nogenetic impact from the Chernobyl accident. Asearly as 1994, Japanese scientists from theUniversity of Hiroshima found very similarbirth defects in Belarus. They studied 30,000newborn infants and stillborn fetuses and foundtwice the rate of deformities such as cleftpalates, cataracts, polydactylism, missing anddeformed limbs, and spina bifida. In 1994, itwas documented that an unusually high numberof children were suffering from stunted torsos,dwarfed limbs, and abnormally-sized heads withnormal or superior mental faculties. There isgrowing suspicion that their limbs and extremi-ties are underdeveloped because their fetusesabsorbed radioactive particles instead of calci-um. Since radiation has a profound effect on theendocrine system, which regulates humangrowth and development, there could be acombined effect on the fetus during the mostvulnerable early stages of development.

There is other strong evidence that Chernobylexposure is the key culprit in the emergence ofmany diseases and birth defects. A few years ago,a team of researchers from Israel and Ukrainestudied tissue samples from the children ofChernobyl liquidators—the 600,000 emergencyworkers who rushed to the scene of the reactorexplosion to remove debris and to build theemergency shelter around the damaged core.These liquidators suffered very high doses of radi-ation. Among their children, researchers found asevenfold increase in chromosome damage ascompared to their siblings born prior to the disas-ter. Researchers in Italy and Moldova, as well asother cities in Ukraine have documented similarchromosome damage. This chromosome damageis very foreboding, as it may affect not only thisgeneration but also its descendants, the so-calledgrandchildren of Chernobyl. Extensive researchby Belarusian doctors under the leadership of Drs.Petrova and Dainiak of Yale Medical Schoolshowed that women living in radiation-contami-nated zones have twice the rate of pregnancy


complications and birth defects as their counter-parts living in relatively clean zones.

Birth defects are only one of the factors thatdamaged these children’s health. A HarvardUniversity study found that children in Greecewho were in utero at the time of Chernobyl hada higher chance of developing leukemia thanunexposed children. Another case-controlledstudy funded by the U.S. Office of NavalResearch found a statistically significant increasedrisk of leukemia—especially acute lymphoblasticleukemia—in children in the radiation-contami-nated regions of Rivne and Zhytomyr. These rateswere found to be twice as high as the rates for theregion of Poltava, which had the highest rates ofchildhood leukemia prior to 1986.

Although the IAEA report from last fallclaims there has been no increase in cancer,there is ample evidence to the contrary. The rateof breast cancer in contaminated areas is sub-stantially higher than in the country as a whole.Chernobyl liquidators are also dying of cancerand leukemia at a rate 2.7 times higher than thatfor other Ukrainian working-age males. Wehave to remember that most of the liquidatorswere young men in their twenties and thirties atthe time of the accident. Of the 344,000 liq-uidators living in Ukraine, over 34,000, or 10percent, have already died. Of this number, 25percent have died of oncological illnesses, whilethe rate of cancer deaths for other working-agemales is only 9 percent. These are figures com-ing directly from the Institute of RadiationMedicine at the Division of DemographicStudies in Ukraine. If that extra increment ofcancer death is attributed to Chernobyl, thenthe death toll among liquidators is already8,600—more than twice the total number ofcancer deaths predicted by the IAEA. This doesnot include the death toll among the more than200,000 liquidators who were scattered amongother republics of the former Soviet Union. Itdoes not include emergency workers who arestill battling cancer or those who are likely to bestricken after the 20-year latency period formany other forms of cancer.

Completely arbitrarily, the IAEA and theWorld Health Organization dismissed cardiovas-cular illnesses as being unrelated to radiationexposure. Yet studies of the Japanese population

following the bombing of Hiroshima found thatmany survivors developed cardiomyopathy, orweakening of the heart muscle. Even amongyoung children in contaminated villages, there isevidence of cardiovascular illnesses that couldshorten their lives or lead to early disability.According to a screening program conducted inthe contaminated village of Ivanka, in northernKyiv province, nearly 75 percent of all childrensuffer from high blood pressure. This is highlyunusual, and stress is probably not a major factorfor children living in this bucolic rural area. It isa purely physiological condition. Radiationtends to weaken the blood vessels and makethem more susceptible to the incorporation ofharmful agents.

Congenital heart defects are also a major prob-lem in Ukraine and Belarus. Those of you whosaw the Oscar-winning documentary ChernobylHeart know about the excellent work of Dr. BillNovick in trying to repair these conditions. Over6,000 babies are born each year in Ukraine withlife-threatening defects. Two thousand infants diewithin the first year of life, and only 680 receivetimely operations that can repair these conditions.The rest become cardiac invalids.

Since the year 2000, our organization hasbeen devoting a great deal of effort to expand-ing Ukraine’s capacity for early diagnosis andsurgical corrections of these conditions. I ampleased to report that just this year we deliverednew cardiac ultrasound and surgical equipmentto our partner hospitals in Lviv, Kherson,Chernivtsi, and Dnipropetrovsk. Thanks to theice-skating galas we organized featuringOlympic champions Viktor Petrenko, SashaCohen, and Grushina and Goncharov, we wereable to support a new open-heart surgery pro-gram at the Odesa Regional Children’s Hospital.Contrary to the impression created by last year’sUN report, the radioactive contaminationspread across 50,500 square miles of Ukrainianterritory is not dissipating anytime soon. Studiesat the Institute of Pediatrics, Obstetrics, andGynecology in Kyiv have found evidence ofradioactive strontium and cesium in placenta andbreast milk among women exposed toChernobyl radiation, as well as in the baby teethand bone tissue of stillborn infants. There is alsoevidence that young children are absorbing


cesium and strontium into their bones instead ofcalcium and potassium, which is leading to con-ditions such as osteomalacia and osteofibrosis,the embrittlement and fusion of bone tissue inabnormal growth patterns.

At the Children of Chernobyl Relief andDevelopment Fund, we are hoping that a newwave of cancers does not occur, because Ukraineis ill-prepared to handle such an epidemic. At thesame time, we are anticipating the worst andworking very hard to rebuild Ukraine’s medicalinfrastructure, which was terribly neglected dur-ing the Soviet era.

In conclusion, we would like to offer severalrecommendations that we think would go along way to strengthen the medical infrastruc-ture of Ukraine and help develop a more accu-rate assessment of Chernobyl’s human toll. First,we urge the United Nations to provide contin-ued funding for a second stage of a historic sur-vey by the Ukrainian Alliance for thePrevention of Birth Defects that is tracking over104,000 newborns in those contaminatedregions and expanding that monitoring to otherregions as well.

Second, in addition to tracking thyroid can-cer and thyroid tumors in children and adults,the World Health Organization and other healthagencies must expand the scope of their researchto include other forms of cancers that have alonger latency period.

Third, the United Nations could make a veryimportant contribution to public health inUkraine and Belarus by providing the technologyand training to combat the large number of con-genital heart defects in the children’s populations.

Fourth, beyond cardiac monitoring, there isa critical need to improve prenatal care in gen-eral: to identify problem pregnancies and totrain mothers in healthy life styles and dietarychanges.

Fifth, although the IAEA has denied anyincrease in leukemia, Ukrainian, Greek, andSwedish doctors have reported increases in radi-ation-exposed populations. We need to braceourselves for the possibility—if not the likeli-hood—that long-term exposure to strontium-90 and cesium-137 could result in bone tumorsand leukemia in the coming decade. We havenow seen how modest financial investments can

dramatically improve survival rates and pediatriconcology centers.

Finally, we need to remember that the IAEAcompletely misjudged the latency period forthyroid cancer and denied that there was a thy-roid cancer epidemic in children until well intothe 1990s. We urge the international communi-ty to remain vigilant for other unforeseen healthproblems that may appear in the next 20 years,even if they are being ignored by variousresearch establishments.

I would like to close with a Ukrainian proverbthat states, “You don’t see the world if you lookthrough your own window.” Thank you.


QUESTION: To me, the comments on the IAEAreports that we just heard—from pretty well-respected experts—are very compelling andpretty scathing. I’m just curious, particularlygiven Murray Feshbach’s remarks, if there issome reconsideration that maybe the IAEA wasa little bit too definitive in its numbers, and ifso, will there be any effort to make it knownthat the situation might be a little bit moreuncertain than it was presented as being?

LOUVAT: Thank you. First of all, the IAEAreport details environmental consequences.Everything related to health should be referredto as the WHO report. The IAEA had no part inthe WHO report. We were attending the WHOgroup as observers. We never intervened, wenever commented. Everything related to healthin the Chernobyl Forum was coordinated, writ-ten, or decided by the WHO. This should beclear. Even in the WHO there were two co-chairs in the group. One was a well-known U.S.physician, Fred Mettler, and the other wasElizabeth Cardis, who is the head of theRadiation Unit of the International Center forCancer Research, which is a WHO center.

The WHO people have already started tocomplement what has been done to support theUNDP strategy. For example, Cardis just pub-lished a paper on Chernobyl’s impact on Europe,which had not been the aim of the ChernobylForum, but which served as the impetus. In thefigures released today or yesterday, Cardis made an


estimation of the effects of low doses below 100mSv. I never said that there is no effect below 100mSv. I said there is no consensus on what thiseffect is. Regarding plutonium, I agree with youthat the ingestion of any microgram of plutoniumcan lead to cancer. Nobody can challenge that.

Again, you have to keep in mind that theChernobyl Forum existed to try to put a scientif-ic basis on all the existing peer-reviewed literature.All the existing peer-reviewed literature was tohelp the UNDP to discuss with the govern-ments—mainly of Belarus and Ukraine—abouthow to redirect the UN support to develop theseterritories socially and economically.

MAZUR: I think the concern that we have is thatthe report generated headlines and created animpression and a perception that minimizedwhat happened at Chernobyl in terms of thelong-term effect. As a result of that, there isgoing to be a certain segment of the worldwidepopulation that is going to have one point ofview based on headline news. But those of uswho are in the know are going to have anotherpoint of view. As a result, we may have battlesfor the next 10 years to try and override whatwas created as a result of that report.

QUESTION: I was looking at the ChernobylForum report here, and on page 47, in thehealth-related actions that were recommended,point 8 out of 9 says that “programs targeting theminimization of the psycho-social impact onchildren and those who were children at the timeof the accident should be encouraged and sup-ported.” That seems to be a recommendationwithout a lot of teeth. And yet, based on yourreview of the Forum’s report, you said that thepsychological consequences of Chernobyl are themost serious outcome. That may be making someassumptions. That worries me a bit because, con-sciously or not, people in health know that men-tal health is always given the backseat. So it lookslike all the consequences have been reduced tomaking them a mental health issue, and then giv-ing a very low-level recommendation. Do youhave a response to that?

LOUVAT: I don’t feel that the WHO group hasreduced any of the consequences. It has really

revisited all the existing data. All the issuesmentioned by Mr. Mazur were also carefullylooked at by my colleagues. What was impor-tant for the WHO group was really to see whatcan be attributed to radiation as a health effect,and what can be attributed to a secondaryeffect—as was mentioned by Mr. Mazur thistime, because this could impact the way thepublic health system will be developed in thefuture in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Thiswas the primary interest of the UNDP: how tobetter address the public health problem inBelarus and Ukraine. So, one way to look at itis to see what is directly attributable to radia-tion—for the liquidators, for example. And if itis a secondary effect, maybe it involves otherparameters that are worth looking at as well. Itwas said this morning by Mr. Marples thatthough we are all born equal, we do not haveequal exposure to radiation. Basically, cancer isin us. What will make it appear is a conjunctionof parameters and the type of exposure weencounter. But then, among low-level causes ofexposure—sunburn, the fact that you are eatingmeat with charcoal, the fact that you are drink-ing or smoking—you have plenty of parame-ters, and this is very difficult to disaggregate inthe Chernobyl data. I am glad, really glad—andI think other countries, other institutions, andthe UN are, too—that your institution is pro-viding proper detection material to Ukraine.Because what we need more than anything elseis reliable data. The report did not say that datadoes not exist. It says there is no evidence. Alack of evidence does not demonstrate a lack ofrelation, and then we have to look for the evi-dence. But when there is evidence—possibly,there is—this should be tackled. But then wefind rates of malformation at birth in this coun-try, which are higher in noncontaminated ter-ritories than in contaminated territories. Thenwe cannot clearly say that there is a linkbetween contamination and malformation.Take any bottle of any alcohol in this country,and it is written that consumption of alcoholby pregnant women—even at a very low rate—will cause birth defects. This is known.

MAZUR: I would like to just comment that there isdata available. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of


data, there is a plethora of data. I just received bye-mail in the last 48 hours—it is not a total, com-plete report yet—a statistical compilation of theimpact of Chernobyl in cases of neoplasms, thy-roid cancers, etc. This actually compares statisti-cally the rate of sickness among certain popula-tions in the exposed areas to the rate for those inthe unexposed areas, and the evidence is dramat-ic in terms of the effect.

QUESTION: My concern is the monitoring to getthe data. The Japanese have done an extraordinaryjob of following up on Hiroshima. Every twoyears, my Japanese friend—who was six years oldwhen the bomb was dropped—has to reporteither to a consulate general or to a Japaneseresearch team. We are getting continuity, and thisis critical to this type of monitoring.

Now Russia has had at least three nuclearevents that we know about, of whichChernobyl is the most public. Two of the threebig ones were kept secret. Do we have a recordof systematic follow-up? What is the position ofyour organization on insisting that this is a long-term project, that there is genetic damage to betraced, and so on? The Japanese model shouldbe the one to pursue. Do you feel they are firm-ly committed? Did your organization pushproper monitoring so that we can get the dataon what is a long-term problem?

LOUVAT: You are perfectly right. My organiza-tion, the IAEA, as well as the French-Germaninitiative for the environment, will continue tosupport the International Chernobyl Center inmonitoring the environment. We have oftenbeen accused of intervening in the health prob-lem, but we have been very careful not to jumpinto the health problem. But I agree with you. Ithink in Chernobyl we also deserve an interna-tional health center like the one existing for theenvironment. There is no doubt about that. Butagain, this can be seen as a Forum result. I hopethis will be discussed this week in Kyiv.However, I certainly doubt that the IAEA willbe proactive in this section.

Again, remember that everybody is accusingthe IAEA of manipulating data, and of trying todiminish the consequences of the accident. Wetried to be as passive as possible regarding health.

If I am here today, it is because the UNDP askedus to be here, since the UNDP is in Kyiv, WHOis in Kyiv, my people are in Kyiv. I was the onlyone available. I am trying to represent the Forum.I am defending a health report on which I havebeen an observer, but I believe this report wasdone honestly by a group of independent expertswho were all specialists on the issues.

QUESTION: I study nuclear cities professionallyas a sociologist. It is well known that many peo-ple from Chernobyl were settled into nuclearcities in Russia, because these cities were underthe control of the Ministry of Nuclear Energy.Many people still live there. I tried to studysome environmental and health problems inSosnovy Bor near St. Petersburg, which iswhere the Leningrad nuclear power station issituated. In the previous year, I had receiveddata that the incidence of Down syndrome inthis city was three times higher than in othercities of the Leningrad region. My colleaguesfrom the Genetic Centrum and I tried to inves-tigate this case, but all of us immediatelyreceived a strict order from the Federal SecurityService to stop this investigation. My colleaguesfrom the Genetic Centrum stopped their activ-ities. I tried to investigate, because I have a stateregistration on my subject, but I could not getany data on these people in order to investigate.What are the reasons for their kind of situation?Maybe it is a consequence of Chernobyl.Maybe it is a consequence of the accident in1965 at the Leningrad nuclear power station.Maybe there are other reasons, but we cannotinvestigate. It seems to me that it is not the onlycase in which it is impossible to investigate, andto get the full picture of the consequences ofthe Chernobyl accident. Could you commenton this case? Thank you.

QUESTION: I was a member of the ChernobylForum, expert group “Health.” There were threecommittees: thyroid cancer, leukemia, and non-cancer effects. I was on thyroid cancer andleukemia. I can tell you that we made the decisionto consider only peer-reviewed journal articles.Much of the new information that you have beenpresenting here today, Mr. Mazur, may not havecome before the group.


The noncancer health effects group clearly hada wide range of conditions to evaluate, and theydid something on premature mortality that drew alot of attention. Today, this avenue seems to drawthe most interest. As I said, it may be that theyconfined themselves to the very few articles thatwere actually published in journals. So it is impor-tant to feel that this is valid information if one isto try to get it published.

LOUVAT: This illustrates how the groups worked.Among themselves, they decided independentlyup to what point they were considering data.Regarding the data—which does not exist forwhatever reason—clearly it was not used by thegroup. But we are the United Nations—we existto serve our member states, and we depend onthe information that the member states provideto us. Clearly, if the case you report exists, thenthis data is probably missing, and this lack wasnoticed by the group. We, the group on envi-ronment and health, only assessed existing datapublished at the time.

MAZUR: There have been journal articles that haveappeared in Ukrainian medical journals. I guessthe question I have is, were those submitted andreviewed?

QUESTION: I was not on the committee thatinterests you the most, so I cannot tell you whattheir decision was. In our case, I think all of thedata of interest eventually made it into theinternational English literature. But we mayhave included some Ukrainian: the InternationalJournal of Radiation Medicine, for instance, whichis Ukrainian and English.

QUESTION: If you speak about data, it is a well-known fact that during the Soviet period, afterthe Chernobyl catastrophe happened, theMinistry of Health gave strong top-secret rec-ommendations to doctors in the regions of theChernobyl catastrophe not to show real data inthe cases of victims and liquidators of the catas-trophe. So my question is, if you have this dif-ferent data, much of which is wrong—becausethere is a lot of evidence that this data iswrong—how can you provide real and trueconclusions? Thank you.

LOUVAT: We are speaking on two different lev-els: what was the actual number of casualties,and what has been the predicted number ofcasualties. As I said, what has been predicted forthe liquidators is a pretty good estimate. So thatmeans that the people who were affected at thattime—we will never know which names wehad, but they are included in this group ofcasualties. This is the dilemma of this biostatis-tical exercise. But again, the groups wentthrough all the data they had. They couldn’tmake any conclusion with the data they didn’thave. If data exists somewhere or if you knowthat there is some data, I encourage every oneof you to publish this in a clear manner as soonas possible.

The WHO group did not base its conclusionson real cases of death, but made a statistical fore-cast with respect to doses received. The doseswere pretty well assessed. So the fact that youhave observed death just confirms what is in thereport. Yes, casualties will have already happened.

QUESTION: I spend most of my time doing thesort of risk protections that we have spokenabout today, but normally for diagnostic X-raysrather than nuclear power. I’m not a fan of radi-ation, but on the other hand I think that thereare some new estimates of the projections of can-cer deaths that should be considered by thegroup here today. They are the updates byElizabeth Cardis that were just mentioned. The4,000 projected deaths that we have been talkingabout today were mostly based on ElizabethCardis’s original report.

LOUVAT: Exactly.

QUESTION: She is independent. She spends a lotof her time also assessing risks to workers in thenuclear power industry, and believes that thereare excess risks there as well. Her new estimates,which were published in the International Journalof Cancer, suggest that there will be about 25,000premature cancer deaths in Belarus, Russia, andUkraine, and also including the rest of Europe—the 500 million population in the rest of Europe.This time she wanted to make it very clear thatthere is a lot of uncertainty around these figures.They are just projections. They are based on risk


models primarily from the Japanese atomicbomb survivors, but that is the best we can dounder the current circumstances. The uncertain-ty interval she gives is between 10,000 and60,000. I personally think that these are the bestestimates currently available. They update theprevious estimate of 4,000 specifically for thehighly exposed Belarusian, Russian, andUkrainian populations, and they are based onmuch more validated scientific methods than theGreenpeace estimate of 200,000.

MAZUR: I would like to comment on thatbecause that methodology has been criticizedby others with a different point of view. TheJapanese data from that time frame is incom-plete and not terribly accurate, and to use thatas a projection factor is very questionable. Itreminds me of what happened with the AIDSepidemic in the mid-1980s. Since I come fromthe pharmaceutical industry, I am very familiarwith the forecasts that were developed here inthe United States by public health officials.They forecasted catastrophic penetration of thatdisease throughout the population, and theirmodels were all based on The Kinsey Report,which said that 10 percent of all males had hada suspected homosexual encounter. They usedthat in their projection factors, and it nevercame true. Just the opposite.

LOUVAT: This is a bit of a caricature. The workof Cardis is very respectable, although it is dis-cussed. At the beginning of the month here inWashington, it was discussed at the annualmeeting of the National Radiation ProtectionCouncil. I was not there, but I talked toElizabeth just after. She said it was evenly dis-cussed. It is not clear whether we can extendthese biostatistical analyses below 100 mSv ornot. I think the work done on radiation work-ers is a good step, a good way forward. But eventhere, we are talking at least to 30 or 40 mSv,not to 10 or 20. And again, even if this protec-tion system is based on survival of the detona-tion of an atomic bomb, it has worked for 40years. It has been efficiently protecting the peo-ple and the worker for the last 40 years. I can tellyou that I have been presenting the ChernobylForum results to different audiences. This is anaudience today that is very much inclined topublic protection, but I also presented this samepresentation in February to the Waste Manag-ement Symposium in Tucson. There, the firstreaction I got was, “Oh, good, then we canrelax the system of radiation protection.” I said,“No, not at all. It is very much too early tomake any decisions on the radiation protectionsystem.” Maybe it is based on high exposureover a short time, but it has worked for the last40 years. We have to keep that in mind.


BLAIR A. RUBLE: It is a great pleasure to be able towelcome to the Wilson Center and to introduceCongresswoman Marcy Kaptur. She has been agreat friend of Ukraine and a friend of othercountries in the region as well. RepresentativeKaptur is the most senior Democratic woman inthe House, and she holds seats on theAppropriations Committee, as well as on theDefense and Agricultural subcommittees.Everybody in Washington’s ears will perk upwhen they hear “Appropriations Committee,” Iam sure. She is also co-chair of the CongressionalUkrainian Caucus and one of the leaders in effortsto establish a Congress–Rada exchange program.She has been an opponent of waste in interna-tional aid, and she has played a particularly signif-icant role in regulatory changes that have forcedaccountability on Russian food aid relief andother technical assistance programs. She has beena leader in issues pertaining to international tradeas well as human rights and labor rights.

She represents Toledo and northwest Ohio,and is serving her 12th term in the House ofRepresentatives. She won her seat during therecession of 1982 as an outspoken advocate forworking people, and she has remained an advo-cate for working people throughout her career.Prior to being elected to Congress, Marcy Kapturworked as a city and regional planner in Toledoand surrounding areas. She earned her master’sdegree in urban planning from the University ofMichigan, after completing her undergraduatework at the University of Wisconsin.

Representative Kaptur then served as an urbanadviser to the Carter administration, and, interest-ingly, we have not talked about this, but we bothbecame interested in urban studies at more or lessthe same time. So it is with a little note of sadnessthat I mention Jane Jacobs, who passed away yes-terday. The story of Jane will nonetheless help meproperly introduce Marcy Kaptur. Jane Jacobsactually revolutionized how we all live now, and

was particularly influential on those of us enteringthe field of urban planning back then. She wrotea book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities[1961], which grew out of her communityactivism and totally transformed the approach tourban planning, not just in the United States, buteventually worldwide. Jane studied in Ukraineand in Russia very actively, and I think this is agood way of introducing CongresswomanKaptur: This is a story of someone who in a waymay be seen as starting out on the fringes ofwhere real power is. But, through a concern overwhat is happening to her community—and whatshe sees happening in her professional life—isactivated, and really begins to have an effect ondecisions that are made. This is a model that, Ithink, speaks to her career. I think that Jane Jacobswould probably be thinking about communitiesand this whole discussion on how societyresponds to catastrophes. Surely Jane Jacobs’sapproach to cities and to the economy would bevery helpful in our discussion of the effects ofChernobyl on society. So it is very fitting thattoday in particular we have an urban planner, aswell as a friend of Ukraine, speaking. And withthat I welcome Congresswoman Kaptur.

MARCY KAPTUR: Thank you so very much forthat kind introduction. I love the atmosphere


Luncheon SpeakerRevisiting Congressional Hearings on Chernobyl

Marcy Kaptur, U.S. House of Representatives

here. This feels—you can tell when you walk intoa group—this is a very learned audience, and Iwant to thank our guests from the RussianEmbassy and the Belarusian Embassy and perhapsother nations that are here, and give us a chancejust to get to know one another better. Theambassador of Ukraine has been with us for a por-tion of today. Thank you so much, AmbassadorShamshur, for being here and spending so muchof your day with us. We value it greatly.

I was just saying to [Wilson Center Director]Lee Hamilton that I first traveled to Ukraine in1973, before a lot of you were probably born. Wedrove in from what was then Soviet-occupiedPoland, and we were the only car on the street. Iwent with our mom. I was driving, and I canremember being held at the border for five hours.Actually, I remember crossing what was then theCzechoslovak border. We had our American pass-ports and we entered the no-man’s land area, ifyou are old enough to remember that. And Ipaused. I put the brakes on and we looked at oneanother and thought, will we ever come out?Because the men who were walking on the otherside of the no-man zone had rifles with bayonetson the end. I can remember entering a world, andit transformed my life. We were looking for ourfamily. We had been cut off from them since priorto the First World War. I can remember drivingacross that zone and then entering another world,a world that I have had a deep interest in my entirelife, long before I was in the Congress.

And as I travel back there today and I remem-ber—I was just sharing with one of the brilliantphotographers who was traveling with us—wefound Lviv, and there were no cars. We were theonly car. Our car was confiscated and placed inwhat is now the opera house in Lviv, behind oldgates that had not been cleaned in what lookedlike a hundred years, and now the opera house iscompletely refurbished. We stayed in this placethat is now called the George Hotel but then wasthe Intourist Hotel. I remember them stationing avery large woman outside our door who had awater bottle just in case we got thirsty. All theexperiences that we had and the great joy we hadin being escorted by people we did not know tofind a long-lost great uncle who had survived 20years in the concentration camps in Siberia andhearing his story. Oh, my God. It was unbelievable

because my grandmother was not able to knowher own family’s history. She had died in 1970,and I felt like sort of a resurrection at that point,being able to put together the other half of ourfamily’s story.

So I feel very blessed by the life that I have livedand the opportunity I now have to serve in theCongress of the United States, and particularly tocontinue a lifelong interest in Ukraine, and thepeople of that region of the world and to holddeep respect for their perseverance, and to be ableto talk to people from Ukraine, from Russia, fromBelarus, from Poland, from Hungary, in such adifferent way than was possible when I was in mytwenties. So I just even feel honored to be heretoday on this very historic occasion this weekcommemorating the 20th anniversary ofChernobyl and to remember and to work togeth-er as a world community. What better place thanat the Wilson Center to think how each of us cancontribute to the betterment of humankind as aresult of the understanding that we developtogether about what happened, to try to be scien-tifically accurate as a world community and topresent this to the future in the same way as I wasable to present the history of our family to ourfuture generations and our family. We, as a worldcommunity, need to embrace the Chernobyltragedy with scientific rigor and to leave for thefuture a much better record than we have today.The work is incomplete. It is an unfinished pieceof art, really.

Now, from the community that I represent,which is the longest coastal district in Ohio, thatstretches between Toledo and Cleveland alongLake Erie embracing the Lake Erie Islands—I callit the crown jewels of Ohio, that is really what Irepresent—why would I hold an interest beyondour family history and my love of open societiesand the future that I see in Russia and in Ukraine,in Poland and Hungary and Belarus, and so manyother places that I never thought I would live tosee? I just feel so gifted living at this point in ourworld history.

I happen to represent the worst nuclear powerplant in America. It is called Davis-Besse, and inmy career I have had to divert time from otherconcerns to be very belligerent as a member ofCongress and to point out terrible, terriblemishaps and failures of management and engi-


neering that have occurred in the Davis-Besseplant, which sits right on Lake Erie. In fact, justthis past year they were assessed the largest finethat the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in ourcountry has ever imposed on a private plant. Theyalso have had to invest half a billion dollars to fixthe last mess that occurred inside that plant. AndI have to tell you it has moved me to a placewhere many Americans are not, and that is to alegislative position where I oppose all futurenuclear power construction in this country, andsupport other forms of power.

I have a legislative record that takes me in thatdirection, but it is because I lived through andhave seen situations that endanger the people ofour community and our Great Lakes freshwatersystem. And I am angry. I am angry as anAmerican. I am angry that our private sector hasfailed my community twice in my career in theenergy sector, and that I had faith when I cameto Congress in the Nuclear RegulatoryCommission (and I am sorry if there is anybodyin the audience from the Nuclear RegulatoryCommission and its staff), but they have twicefailed my community. I cannot trust them any-more. We do not have a third time to be fooledin our community. So I am driven partly byinterest in nuclear power, safety, proper manage-ment, and proper construction by having livedthrough what has happened in the plant in ourregion. Why should I, as a member of Congress,have to devote this much time to a plant that hasbeen so poorly constructed and so poorly man-aged? Were it not for the workers, the plumbers,the pipe fitters, the boilermakers in our regionwho saved the lives of the people in ourregion—only through their valor and knowledgedid we not have nuclear radiation released intothe atmosphere. But it should not have been thatkind of tense situation. I just want to bring youright up to the edge of this country’s unad-dressed nuclear issues. I want to start there so youunderstand the motivation, a deeply historicalbut also terribly current motivation in terms ofwhat is happening in my region.

Twenty years ago today, a human error trig-gered the explosion at the Chernobyl powerplant’s Reactor 4, causing the worst civiliannuclear catastrophe in the history of humankind.It transcended geographic boundaries. The power

of what happened was 90 times the force of thebomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. That issomething to think about in and of itself.Immediately after the explosion, increased levelsof radiation were registered as far as Japan and theUnited States. And this morning we heard veryeloquent testimony from the ambassador ofNorway and representatives from Sweden andBelarus about what happened in adjoining coun-tries. The hardest hit obviously were the people incommunities of Ukraine, Belarus, westernRussia, and northern Europe.

I think one of the most powerful stories I haveever heard from some of the humanitarian groupsand nongovernmental organizations working inthe region was about some of the villages inBelarus that had been evacuated or were evacuat-ed because it was not safe to plant seeds or to har-vest crops. In some of those places, because ofunrest in other countries such as Afghanistan,people have begun to filter back and live in thosevillages under very unsafe conditions.

One man from Afghanistan was asked, “Whywould you be here? It is very unsafe, you coulddie. You could die from cancer.”

And his answer was, “Well, it is safer thanbeing shot in Afghanistan today.”

What a life choice.The scope of the devastation that followed

Chernobyl was unprecedented. More than600,000 emergency workers, who were calledliquidators, risked their lives putting out the reac-tor’s inferno that raged for 10 days while exposingthemselves to extremely high and deadly doses ofradiation. I have a book that is written inUkrainian, and I cannot read Ukrainian, butlooking at the pictures, looking at men going intothe affected area with little gauze hats and masksand gloves, it is unbelievable that people would beexposed in that way to deadly doses of radiation.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forcedto leave their homes because of radioactive con-tamination, and more than five million people inUkraine, Belarus, and western Russia foundthemselves coping with life in towns and villagescontaminated by radiation. The ambassador fromNorway said this morning that when the incidenthappened he was vacationing somewhere, I thinkhe said in Africa or he was assigned to Africa, andhe came back home to Norway. He said, usually


we go to the beaches and you have the tempera-ture [gauge] that tells you whether the water iswarm enough for you to go in, but all of a suddenthere was another meter that became common inNorway, and that was the radiation meter todetect what was actually happening in areas inwhich people had formerly resided.

Twenty years after the initial fallout,Chernobyl has not been relegated to the historybooks. Twenty years later, it continues to causehuman suffering as well as environmental andeconomic hardship. If any of you have time thisafternoon, if you come up to the RayburnBuilding, you will see photographs and a videopresentation showing how individual people incommunities have been impacted by theChernobyl explosion, the lingering healtheffects, and the incredible cancers and bone con-ditions that are affecting people. And we do notknow as a world what human form will evolvebased on what happened there one generation,two generations, three generations out. I havenever, ever seen human beings who looked likethose I have seen now from these affected areas.

It is critical that we do not allow ourselves toforget the looming consequences of Chernobyl,lest the tragedy repeat itself, and therefore I thankyou for being here today, for being concernedcitizens of our world. We must remind our fellowAmericans and the world that those problemscontinue to exist and the countries that wereaffected by Chernobyl require assistance inresolving them. In order to achieve these goals,of course, there is the Congressional UkrainianCaucus, and I have to give credit to our otherco-chairs, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett ofMaryland, Congressman Curt Weldon ofPennsylvania, Congressman Sander Levin ofMichigan, and literally dozens of other membersof Congress who have been a part of helping usto move legislation, and [to generate] concernabout Chernobyl and other issues in that regionof the world.

This week we are having special events. Wethank the Kennan Institute and the WoodrowWilson Center for what is occurring here to tryto direct worldwide attention to Chernobyl andthe resultant issues that challenge us all.Tomorrow in the Congress we will be havinghearings from 2 until 6 p.m. in Room HC6 of

the Capitol itself. There will be hearings onChernobyl and briefings, and there will be many,many speakers talking about the human dimen-sion of the Chernobyl catastrophe—the long-term effects of radiation on health, environment,and agriculture—with many, many preeminentscientists [speaking]; and then the responses ofgovernments around the world to the Chernobylcatastrophe, involving many ambassadors, formerambassadors, and current government officials [asspeakers]. We will record this. It will be open tothe public. Following that there will be a recep-tion on Capitol Hill tomorrow night in RoomB369 between 6 and 8 p.m. involving many ofthe humanitarian groups and nongovernmentalorganizations that continue to be engaged inreaching out to those affected. This will be donein conjunction with our CongressionalUkrainian Caucus, so you are all warmly, warm-ly invited.

The Kennan Institute did ask me to talk a littlebit about this, and I will be brief and then open itup for questions if that is your format. They askedme to talk a little bit about what is happening inCongress. Again, I thank the Kennan Institute fororganizing a major conference on Chernobyl andhelping us lift this up to the world because 20years is a very short time. It has been more than 20years since I first traveled to Ukraine, and 20 yearspasses very quickly. And we know that there aregenerational issues and intergenerational issuesinvolved in the study of this event.

I should mention to you that it is also veryappropriate that the Woodrow WilsonInternational Center’s founder was SenatorDaniel Moynihan, who was chairman of thesubcommittee in the Senate at that time onnuclear regulation, which was part of theSenate’s Committee on Environment and PublicWorks. He held the first hearing on Chernobylin 1992. He did so many firsts. He was a greatsenator from New York and a great scholar. Andso it is very appropriate that this center host thisparticular event.

Also, this particular week the HelsinkiCommission, which is the U.S. Commission onSecurity and Cooperation in Europe, held a hear-ing on the 20th anniversary of the Chernobylincident under the leadership of Senator SamBrownback [of Kansas], its chairman, and


Congressman Christopher Smith of New Jersey,its co-chair. But they followed up on a similarhearing that was held in 1996 on the 10thanniversary of Chernobyl, so there has been a bitof repetition here, a bit of follow-up.

I should tell you that the resolution we passedlast evening, House Resolution 703, recognizedthe 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nucleardisaster and supported continuing efforts to con-trol radiation and mitigate the adverse health con-sequences related to the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant. The resolution was sponsored byCongressman [Henry] Hyde [of Illinois],Congressman [Tom] Lantos [of California],Congressman [Elton] Gallegly [of California], andCongressman [Robert] Wexler [of Florida], alongwith our entire Congressional Ukrainian Caucusand members of that caucus, and it was unani-mously passed, which was a very good sign.

So we had planned this week of activities totry to help to inform the world and to betterunderstand, ourselves, what we can do as aworld community. And [as] I said this morning,[if] you think about the world, there are somethings that belong to all of us. Certainly thewaters of the world belong to all of us. Certainlythe air of the world belongs to all of us. I believethat in the future Ukraine and the United Stateswill feed the world once the Ukrainian econo-my gains full steam. And I just heard about aproject in Russia that gives me great confidencethat some of the areas that had been underplant-ed and underused are being developed now, andthey will move Russian agriculture beyondwhere it has ever been before.

If we look at the relationships that will be there50 years from now, I think if we look atChernobyl, Chernobyl really belongs to theworld. It is something we should work on togeth-er and understand environmentally, scientifically,and politically. Chernobyl should be a magnet forthe world community to develop working rela-tionships and closer ties on every level: politically,diplomatically, scientifically, educationally, andmedically. It provides us that opportunity if webut open our eyes to see it.

So I thank you for having that willingness byyour being here today and to say that we have alot of education to do, in our country as well asin the eastern and central parts of Europe. What I

had experienced in going to the village of ourgrandparents, for example, in the heart ofUkraine—I tried to encourage people there tobegin small businesses drying mushrooms anddrying berries. The first reaction I was given was,“Oh, we cannot do that. They are radioactive.”

But I said, “But on the map your area is notreally affected,”but they do not believe it.They donot believe it.

So the challenge to all of us is to understandtogether, to learn together, to be open together,and to use this as a great organizing tool. Youknow, we always read in some of the Westernpress about the competition between Russia andUkraine and who will get into NATO first, orwho will do this first, or who is related to Polandor Hungary better. And I keep saying forget thecompetition. Let us figure out how to cooperate,and let us cooperate on projects like

Chernobyl that have world merit and are chal-lenges worthy of our life effort.

So I am just thrilled to be here today. I amthrilled you are all here today. I did not knowthere would be this many people. We welcomeyour engagement. We thank these incrediblerepresentatives from the affected countries andknow that for this congresswoman anyway, evento be able to have this conversation with peoplewhom, 30, 40, or 50 years ago, we would neverhave been given the opportunity to meet in thisway, puts me in a different place. It puts me in avery reflective mood, one that is very reinforc-ing. Thank you so very much for being heretoday. I am very pleased to take any questionsyou may have, and I will call on the ambassadorand our representatives from the other nations aswell if there are questions that come up thatwould benefit from their great talent and intel-lect. Thank you so very much for your attention.


QUESTION: I am a medical director of an organi-zation called Jewish Health Care International.We have multiple programs in the former SovietUnion, primarily in Ukraine and also in Belarus.We go into different communities and help thembuild their infrastructure in terms of providingimproved services, enhanced services to the peo-ple, specifically in Belarus and in Minsk. We have


seen very complicated cases of advanced cancerproblems like we have never seen before, based onour education.

My question is, is there any primary address, orare there any resources available to address some ofthese complicated issues? When we saw thesepatients, these people, they basically had nowhereto go—they were out at sea. We could not provideor enhance an infrastructure. We did not have thecapability, not because Belarus or Ukraine did nothave the expertise or the education, but [because]they did not have the resources to provide the levelof expert care to take care of these complicatedcases. My question is, what do we do with them?Is there a primary address where we can referpatients? Is there a resource to address some ofthese issues? And if there is not, perhaps we shouldlook at it.

KAPTUR: I do not know if you are participatingin the Hill hearings tomorrow at all, but I thinkthat members like myself are looking for a clearpath forward. I do not think there is broadunderstanding in the Congress of what needs tobe done basically, in terms of the sarcophagusand the improvements to it. We know it will costover a billion dollars. The United States has beenthe largest contributor, giving $200 million forthe improvement of the sarcophagus. But interms of the health systems, my mind is open.There may be others who have a magic solution,but I do not think the Congressional UkrainianCaucus has an agenda related to health.

I know that in general, in the hospitals that Ihave visited—for example in Russia, one of theprojects I personally am working on through mycommunity—I think part of the answer is to linkmedical facilities globally if we can identify themwith specific places, as you are saying. I do notknow whether those places have been identified.Maybe some expert from USAID or someplaceelse knows something I do not know. But forexample, we found in Russia, in Moscow, in aplace called Balashikha, where we were trying tolink resources for maternal health and the birthof children, [that] there were very, very intelli-gent doctors [and] nurses, very willing to helpbut underequipped. And we found the necessityto help, to bring equipment, and to try to cre-ate a training center, and then bring doctors

from throughout Russia and nurses fromthroughout Russia, and relate it to a very specif-ic place. So just personally through my ownwork, rather than try to help every place, wecould identify places—if [resources] did notalready exist—where we could develop thosekinds of relationships. We know that they haveto be continuing. We know that training has tobe involved, and we know that the provision ofequipment has to be involved. So I would hopethat the creation of those types of places, if theydo not exist, could be a part of what results fromthis week’s activities. I certainly am not a doctor,I am not a scientist, but if intelligent people talkto me and give me ideas politically, maybe I canhelp make them happen. And so we would lookto the scientists and the medical doctors who arehere this week to help lead us in that direction.This is an international medical challenge thatwe all need to rise to.

QUESTION: Thank you very much, Congress-woman, for your heartfelt speech. I know aboutyou and your activities in Ukrainian issues formaybe more than 10 years, but I see you here forthe first time, and I am so glad. I know that thereare many funds and organizations involved in theconsequences of the Chernobyl disaster, relief inUkraine and aid to Ukraine or other countries,Russia and Belarus. But there are newer organi-zations and they raise a lot of money, but theydo not have a really scientific basis for how tospend it, which direction to go. And sometimesthey spend money all in one direction, and somedirections are underfunded financially. Is thereany chance to coordinate their activities? Areyou going to do this? Or maybe it is a role or atask for other organizations, to coordinate thistechnical assistance and aid to nongovernmentalorganizations?

KAPTUR: That is really a good question. Just thismorning I had a chat with the former U.S. ambas-sador to Russia, James Collins. You are talkingabout NGOs and so forth. He is on the board ofsomething called the Open World LeadershipCenter in our country, which is an independentfederal agency administered through the Libraryof Congress, which participates in exchanges ofindividuals from Russia and from Ukraine. They


have thousands, literally thousands and thousands,of these exchanges.

I said, “Mr. Ambassador, I attended a recep-tion in Kyiv of 150 exchangees.” And I said, “Butyou know what, that is all it was—a reception.”This is in the area of agriculture. But I said,“Would it not be great to assemble those folks andfigure out how to build something on that?” So Ithink that cooperation, even between govern-mental programs, does not always happen.

In the NGO community, of course, it is end-less what can be done. And my only suggestionwould be that if you are working in a country,try to find others who are working there andmaybe form a little coalition, an umbrella groupof NGOs that are dedicated to a particular cause,and then share your experience. But, again, peo-ple tend to be competitive: “Well, I am doingthis.” But it is important to use your diplomaticskills to try not to duplicate and to try to reallystrengthen your efforts by mutual cooperation.

I suppose that the new ambassador toUkraine—I understand Mr. Bill Taylor has beennominated for that position—would be a verygood person to help work with the Ukrainianambassador or work with the Russian ambassadoror with Belarus in calling together all of thosegroups either in our country or in the givencountry, and at least to have that discussion. So ifyou have suggestions in that regard, I would be

happy to pass them on to them, and I think at thatlevel it would get the kind of priority that mightbe very beneficial to those involved.

RUBLE: I think we are out of time. I will proba-bly be in trouble for what I am about to say. Ilearned long ago that whenever Jim Collins sayssomething, to follow his lead. I will point outthat in the past several years embassy budgets tosupport programming for alumni of U.S. gov-ernment programs in the region have beenreduced dramatically. If the State Departmentwere more receptive to programming, and,more importantly, the people who control thefinancial strings in the State Department under-stood exactly the point that Jim Collins wasmaking, I think a number of NGOs and alsoagencies that work with U.S. government pro-grams would be able to accomplish a lot more. Ithas been very frustrating to see people comethrough institutions like our program, likeIREX [the International Research andExchanges Board], the Corcoran program, theFulbright program, and then go back and notreally have a support network in place, becausethe people in the State Department who makethe decisions do not really value those programs.I hope that one benefit that will come out of thisevent will be to take a look at this broader set ofissues as well. Thank you very much.



Panel 3: The Environmental PerspectiveChair, Geoffrey Dabelko, Director, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for Scholars

Alla Yaroshinskaya, President, Center for Ecological Study and Education, Moscow

Mary Mycio, author, The Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl

D. J. Peterson, Senor Political Scientist, RAND Corporation

ALLA YAROSHINSKAYA: This is a very painfultopic for me and I have prepared a paper, butafter this morning’s discussion, I have decided tosay something not written because I would liketo share my own experience. At the time of theaccident, I lived close to Chernobyl with myfamily—two children, including a younger son,two years old. I want both to share my personalChernobyl story and to stress how many secretdocuments were produced at that time. If theyhad not been revealed, nobody would reallyknow what happened at Chernobyl.

At that time I lived in Zhytomyr, which is130 kilometers away from the Chernobylnuclear power plant. I worked as a journalist forthe only newspaper in the Zhytomyr region, aCommunist newspaper called the SovietZhytomyrshchyna. I have to say that it was reallyvery painful for us, because we did not knowwhat was really happening at that time. Only afew days after the accident we heard the newsover a Stockholm radio station, that something“not very pleasant” had happened at the nuclearpower plant at Chernobyl. This plant was closeto us, but we did not actually realize that it wasa very dangerous situation at that time.

Because I was a journalist, the people calledon me to go to the northern part of Zhytomyrregion, which was contaminated by theChernobyl accident. Many asked me to writehonestly about what really was going on there,because they had children and did not knowwhat was happening or what they should bedoing. Maybe evacuation might be in order? SoI decided to go there, because I was a journalist.Although I thought it would be easy to just goto the editor-in-chief, ask for a business trip to

this contaminated area, collect materials, andwrite an article, it was not so simple.

The editor-in-chief told me very seriously,“Well, it is impossible to go there. This is not ourbusiness.” Because I was a journalist, however, Irealized that, yes, in this case it really was mybusiness, and I must go. So how could I get therewithout permission? Since I worked for theindustrial department at the newspaper, I decid-ed to go to another region close to the northernpart of our Zhytomyr oblast. Because I could notgo to Narodychi District, which was very con-taminated, I asked for a business trip to MalinoDistrict, which borders Narodychi District. Ispent one day there, and the next day I went toNarodychi District because it was very close.

I met many people there. Many of thewomen told me about the soldiers who came toclean their houses, removed the soil, and toldthem nothing about what was really going on.They were afraid for their children first of all,but also about their health. I understood that Imust visit more of those places to collect mate-rials for articles, because people had to knowwhat was going on.

I spent some weekends traveling in our carwith my husband. We went to those contami-nated areas, and although I wrote the articles, itwas not possible to publish them. I want to pointout that this was already the beginning of pere-stroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union duringthe Gorbachev period. However, although it wasperestroika and glasnost in the Kremlin and inMoscow, unfortunately these reforms did notapply to our region, especially after Chernobyl.

I also went secretly to Moscow, because per-estroika was there, and maybe I could publish my

article in a Moscow newspaper. But this too wasabsolutely impossible. I went to Pravda,Literaturnaya Gazeta, and Ogonyok, which wasvery progressive at that time, but they did notpublish it either, explaining to me the taboo, andtelling me that it was just impossible to publish it.

At that time, Gorbachev announced a newelection for the Soviet parliament, and the peoplewanted to vote for me as a member of this parlia-ment in Moscow. This was a real battle, becausethe local authorities did not wish to see a candi-date like me from Zhytomyr come to Moscow.But people supported me, and in 1989 more than20,000 people went into the street in order to sup-port me and my program. It was a very specialtime in my life.

So finally, I was elected to the Gorbachev par-liament with 90.4 percent of the votes. This wasthe highest percentage in the Soviet Union; for-mer President Yeltsin received the second-highestpercentage at that time. The first thing I wanted todo, of course, was to have the floor in order to tellthis congress in Moscow what was going on in theChernobyl zones. Day after day went by, butnobody was going to give me the floor, and I real-ized on the last day that I could not go back toZhytomyr without saying something aboutChernobyl. People were waiting for my speech,because a live broadcast was airing from theKremlin, and many at home were paying attentionto what was going on. There was a big wave ofglasnost at that time. Again, glasnost for every-thing, except Chernobyl.

At last I understood that nobody would giveme the floor, so I had to take an important step.Backed by 20,000 voters, and in front of thedeputies of the Soviet Union, I went directly tothe president, to Gorbachev, and said, “Please, Iam Yaroshinskaya from Zhytomyr. Please give methe floor. I want to talk about Chernobyl.” I toldhim that if he would not give me the floor, Iwould take it for myself, and I needed to talkabout Chernobyl “because nobody knows howpeople live there, how people suffer there, andhow people die there.”

“Well,” he told me, “OK, sit down here andyou will have the floor.” They gave me just threeminutes, which is a very short time to say some-thing about Chernobyl. I had a videotape from theNarodychi District of Zhytomyr Region, and I

publicly handed Gorbachev the tape, and request-ed that he show it. I asked for their attention anddeclared that the Chernobyl victims needed help.This was one of the first public forums where Icould say something about Chernobyl freely. I wasreally happy. Then, sometime after my speech, 12villages of the Narodychi District were resettled toa safer place.

I continued my investigation as a deputy, andjoined the Committee on Glasnost, where wecreated a special commission on Chernobyl. Weasked the Ministry of Health, the Ministry ofDefense, and the Politburo of the CommunistParty to give us large documents categorized“secret” and “top secret,” but we ran intoextreme difficulty. When we finally received thedocuments from the ministries, we saw that theSoviet government had ordered all data relatingto the accident at the Chernobyl plant—espe-cially data related to the health of the populationaffected by the accident—to be marked “topsecret.” Further instructions from the SovietMinistries of Health and Defense were to classi-fy radiation doses accumulated by the popula-tion, the liquidators, and the military personnel.Medical staff was also ordered not to make adiagnosis of acute radiation syndrome in the casesof the military liquidators, but replace it withsomething else. Thus, it is clear to me that therecent report of the Chernobyl Forum has thewrong data, because I found and read many doc-uments on the topic.

By the end of the Soviet Union, we hadreceived more top-secret documents: 40 secretprotocols from the Politburo of the CommunistParty. During these last days of the Soviet Union,I went to the building housing our commissionon Chernobyl, and I noticed that a big truck hadpulled up to that building. Workers were justloading documents and materials from the Sovietparliament onto this truck. So I realized immedi-ately that we had no time. Although we hadreceived these top-secret protocols, we had notime to even look through them. I realized thatsomebody could take this document, put it in atruck, and send it to some unknown archive.

I went to the commission, opened the safe, andtook these 600 pages of secret documents. I lookat them very briefly and saw that they were veryimportant documents. I wanted to make copies of


them, and had to go to the only copy bureau orcopy office in the Soviet parliament. So with these600 pages, I went to the copy bureau and askedthat the copies be made. When I returned thenext morning I found that no copies had beenmade, and the staff of this copy bureau explainedto me that there was a person who had looked at[the documents] and did not give permission tomake the copies.

I went to this person and I said, “Look, theSoviet Union is already almost dead, but we arestill Soviet deputies. We will still exist for twomore months and I still have the right to copy anydocument because I am a deputy, and over200,000 people sent me to parliament.

And he responded, “Look, this is a top-secretdocument. You must go to the organization thatclassified this document, and ask them for permis-sion to disclose this document. After that, you willhave permission to make a copy.”

By this time, however, President Yeltsin hadalready banned the Communist Party, and someof the party leaders were sent to prison. So whowould give me permission to make a copy? Itwas strange. I called the new chief of the KGB,Vadim Bakatin, who was appointed byGorbachev to replace the former KGB chief.When I asked for his help, Vadim Bakatin toldme, “Well, I’m so sorry. I cannot do that becausethis is not our organization.”

But this was very interesting and strange,because this meant that the man at the copybureau who did not give me permission to makecopies was not from the secret service. This justmeant that some other organization was insidethe Soviet parliament monitoring the copiesdeputies were making.

I finally made the copies, and there was real-ly important information inside of those docu-ments. It was really interesting to know that bythe middle of May 1986, already more than10,000 people were hospitalized. The Politburothen made a decision to change the acceptablelevel of doses, and confirmed new norms ofacceptable radiation levels 10 times higher thanthe old norms, and in specific cases increases ofthose norms to levels 50 times higher than pre-viously. What does this mean? It means that10,000 people became “healthy” immediately.So imagine that tomorrow President Bush

announced that the normal temperature of thehuman body is not 36.6 but 40 degrees [Celsius].Suddenly nobody is ill here. This is what hap-pened with norms.

A second example in these documents alsoaffected me. As a deputy, I had sent a letter to theprosecutor general of the Soviet Union, andreceived a reply on questions regardingChernobyl-related contaminated meat. They sentme a reply that about 50,000 tons of contaminat-ed meat were produced at that time, and weresent to refrigerators. This was waste, radioactivenuclear waste, but the authorities just sent thismeat to refrigerators around the contaminatedarea. Eight refrigerators in the Zhytomyr Regionwere full of contaminated meat. And what did thePolitburo do? It gave a special recipe to localauthorities to use with this meat: mix one part ofthe contaminated meat and nine parts of the non-contaminated meat, and send it around to thecountry, not only to Moscow. This was in thesecret documents.

Here is a third example, which affected mevery much. There was a special decision made bythe Politburo that in the two months when theyresettled 160,000 people, pregnant women andchildren were resettled back to 30 kilometers fromthe contaminated area. This was to resettle morethan 200 villages. The question is why they madesuch decisions, such strange decisions. From mypoint of view, pregnant women are better off liv-ing in a healthy environment, and not back in acontaminated area. They wrote that these womencould receive 10 rem per year after they returnedto that place. Well, I do not think that was a veryreasonable decision.

I want to add that some months ago I foundone more protocol. This protocol [concerns] ameeting of the Politburo held three days afterChernobyl and headed by Mikhail Gorbachev.What affected me was that they did not discuss thequestion of how to help people; nor did they dis-cuss the question about the health of children orwomen or the population. Instead, they discussedthe question of what precise information theyshould deliver to people inside the Soviet Union,to people in the “socialist camp,” and to people in“capitalist countries.” It was very strange for me,because—as we know today—900,000 peoplewere living in the contaminated area.


A fifth document I wanted to mention is oneof the first reports made by Academician LeonidIlyin, who was the primary individual coveringup the truth about Chernobyl. (My statementcarries great responsibility, but I found thisreport, which was signed by 19 scientists.) It wasmade three years after Chernobyl, and he wrotein this report that 75 million people in the for-mer Soviet Union were affected by radiationafter Chernobyl. The first time I came across thisfigure of 75 million people was in reply from theprosecutor general to my letter when I was a par-liament deputy. But I could not release this fig-ure, because I thought the prosecutor generalhad just made a mistake! Now I realize that theprosecutor general of the USSR probably tookthis figure from Academician Ilyin’s report, ormaybe from some group of people who knowabout this number.

Finally, I want to mention one more secretdocument about the reactors, in which thePolitburo discussed the question of the quality ofreactors in the USSR. This is another interestingtopic. But what affected me very much as a per-son—as a human—was that they discussedbetween themselves this topic of a nuclear catas-trophe, and they compared the nuclear catastro-phe to a little nuclear war in the center ofEurope. But what did they tell us? “Don’t worry,be happy!”

I wrote some books about the Chernobylnuclear catastrophe. My last book has recentlybeen published in Moscow, titled ChernobylTwenty Years Later: Crime without Punishment.

In conclusion, I think the international com-munity should decide to organize an interna-tional committee, in order to review the wholesituation around the people who covered up theChernobyl catastrophe, because there are stillnine million people who live under radiationand suffer.

MARY MYCIO: First of all, I am not sure where AllaYaroshinskaya gets her numbers about nine mil-lion people living in contaminated areas. I am alsonot sure about the 75 million who are affected byradiation in the Soviet Union. My understandingis that 75 million people lived in the Europeanpart of the Soviet Union, and might have beenaffected by radiation. But to make them the same

kind of victims as people who were really subject-ed to high doses is really diluting the very conceptor definition of what a Chernobyl victim is.

I would like to talk about the environment,and I would like to make a perhaps controversialstatement about what effect Chernobyl had on theenvironment in the areas immediately surround-ing the reactor. It is usually said that Chernobylwas the greatest environmental disaster in history.I think that may need some rethinking. Chernobylwas a great humanitarian disaster, it was a hugesocial disaster, and it was a huge economic disas-ter. The ironic and perhaps paradoxical result ofwhat Chernobyl did is that by forcing about350,000 people from their homes—not all in acontiguous area around the reactor, but, say,200,000 people in an area that is equivalent to thesize of two Rhode Islands or two Luxembourgs,depending on what your point of reference is—ithas created a nature reserve that is thriving in spiteof the radiation. Most scientists who study thezone and who study the environment would arguethat radiation has paradoxically allowed nature tothrive by getting rid of people because the great-est danger to wildlife is not radiation, it is humanactivity. Thank you. I am open to questions.

D. J. PETERSON: I wanted to give you some high-er-level questions or put some higher-level ideasout there. A lot of information has been conveyedtoday. There are three themes or three levels ofanalysis that I want to explore very briefly.

The first one is the local level. The second isthe national and regional level, so Russia,Ukraine, and Belarus. Finally, I want to look at theenvironmental impact at the international level. Iwant to take a little bit of liberty here with thepanel theme and really talk about how the envi-ronment and political, social, and economicdevelopment are all tied together.

Let us focus on the local level. We have heard alot of discussion about the impact of the accident,the radiation, dislocation, evacuation, alien-ation—basically, a review of the history. Now, 20years later, the discussion is really starting to turnfrom what went wrong or how the situation canbe controlled to what we do in the future. I thinkthe future has been put on the agenda in two waysby two people—Alexander Lukashenko, the pres-ident of Belarus; and Viktor Yushchenko, the


president of Ukraine. Both are asking how we canredevelop the area, how can we make use of thearea, how can we revitalize it. Lukashenko, as faras I understand, is doing it somewhat surrepti-tiously. It is not an open process. There arereports, for instance, of encouraging agriculture,redeveloping dairying and forestry operations, andencouraging people either to resettle or to moveinto contaminated areas.

Mary and I were on CNN International dur-ing a news program with an interview withPresident Yushchenko, and he talked about theneed to invest in the area and in particular to pro-mote forestry and agriculture as ways to redevel-op the highly contaminated areas aroundChernobyl. I think it is an interesting theme. Howdo we look forward? How do we make use of it?But I think there are several things that need to bedone first. As we heard in David [Marples]’s pres-entation early this morning, you need to first sta-bilize the Chernobyl plant and get ahold of theradiation situation a little bit better.

One of the questions that the CNN inter-viewer was asking was, “What needs to be doneto get to this vision of a revitalized region?” Forme, one of the first things is stabilizing the reac-tor itself, putting a cover over it. There have beendiscussions and proposals put forward and it is notfinalized, but people are hoping that constructionwill go forward in the next year or so to put acover over the sarcophagus so that its deteriora-tion will slow down and perhaps be stabilized.

The second big step that needs to be taken interms of the environment concerns the materialand the reactor itself. The long-term issue is whatyou do with the material inside the reactor—themolten reactor and machinery parts as well as thelarge amounts of fuel that are still there on thefloor. Again there are discussions, and there areproposals put forth on ways that you can stabilizeit and perhaps even remove it and then dispose ofit. It is a long-term issue, but an important onethat needs to be addressed if you are going to tryand stabilize this region and perhaps remediate it.

Finally there is the issue of the radioactivematerial around the region, whether it was thedirt that we heard was scraped off from aroundpeople’s homes or the material that was contam-inated—helicopters, the heavy equipment, vehi-cles. We know that a lot of this has been disposed

of hastily, or just dumped and left there. Thatmaterial has to be more permanently and safelydisposed of. So before you can even talk aboutany long-term solution or approach for theregion, one of the things that needs to be doneis that the contamination needs to be stabilizedand better isolated.

I think the issue of economic development isvery interesting. Ideas have been put forward forthings like eco-tourism. You could say it is to seethe beautiful animals that have revived there thatMary Mycio has written about and documented.Or perhaps it could be this kind of macabre inves-tigation—looking at what went wrong. It is akinto the people who are going to New Orleans nowto see the damage.

So eco-tourism is a theme. But does anythingmore than just brief visits to the region makesense? Do you really want to have forestry andagriculture in the region as an industry as it devel-ops beyond the subsistence level? The idea thatpeople would want to knowingly buy wood andbuild their house with wood that was grown inthe Chernobyl area, even if it was clean, is far-fetched. There is a really serious branding issuehere, especially with food. We talk about buyingcoffee from sustainable rainforests. Do we reallywant to buy food from the Chernobyl-contami-nated areas? It’s a good question. It might be well-meaning, but I think there is a huge perceptionproblem. The idea of revitalizing the region isvery problematic. To do that you also need tobuild roads and infrastructure, and you need tohave governance structures. Does it really makesense to try and bring all that back in at this point,especially if you have not stabilized the reactorand the facility itself?

Going forward, another big issue is: Youmight be able to spend money and restabilizeand perhaps rehabilitate the physical damagearound the reactor, and perhaps you can improvethe economic conditions of people who live inthe region in various ways. But I think the realintractable problem is, how do you repair thepsychological damage—the trust issue? I thinkAlla Yaroshinskaya’s presentation and her com-ments really call out the questions we have aboutgovernment and officials. I think the debates thatwe have heard all day about information andnumbers really call into question our trust in the


system and in information. So how can we pos-sibly have faith about anything they do in thefuture? I do not see the trend getting better.

Dr. Yaroshinskaya called for an internationalcommission to look at and perhaps identifyblame. Well, you have had this internationalcommission—very high level—under the aus-pices of the UN looking at the health and theenvironmental impacts. It was a two-year effort,it had a huge participation across a number ofagencies, and I do not think it has really reducedor made us any clearer or more comfortablewith the situation there. If you read the presen-tation, if you read those documents, it makesyou wonder more, because I think—as Davidpointed out—there are very elemental mistakesmade in the document. If they could not getthese numbers right, if they could not match upthe data right, or if they could not convey it ina very clear and concise manner, you have to askyourself, what is going on here? I think eventhough there is a lot of good information inthose documents, and even if it probably is veryreliable on many fronts—the way the informa-tion is conveyed, the way that some people didor did not participate—it just still raises ques-tions. At the end of the day, I do not know howmuch more research, analysis, and data compila-tion we can do. I do not think anything is reallygoing to solve the problem. Again, maybe thisidea of just letting the region lie there perhaps isthe best solution.

Let us look at the regional/national level. Iwanted to quickly point out some themes. Forme, looking at Chernobyl and its impact on theSoviet regime, I think for the Soviet officialsthere was the secrecy—we had this cover-up,these Politburo memos, and so on. At the sametime, I think Chernobyl was a real wake-up call.I think for a lot of officials it really pointed outhow rotten the system was. My book opens upwith this classic discussion during a walk in thewoods between [Foreign Minister Eduard]Shevardnadze and Gorbachev. I cannot underes-timate the role Chernobyl played in causingpolitical change, even as you had this suppressionof information and this cover-up. It drove glas-nost, as we heard.

Alla Yaroshinskaya is a prime example of howChernobyl was used to get information out and

to bring out independent voices and informa-tion. She was at the forefront of a movement, andI think very quickly you saw in politics that onceshe made this first step, people were really will-ing to go out and address other environmentalissues. Then they moved on to the broader polit-ical and social issues.

Chernobyl started a political revolution. Itstarted an environmental revolution, becausepeople started looking at their own neighbor-hoods and looking at the problems. It also start-ed an anti-nuclear revolution. What we sawshortly after Chernobyl was that the Sovietnuclear power plant construction program wascompletely frozen for many years because oflocal opposition to plants being built in neigh-borhoods around the country.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, thingschanged. Where people in Lithuania had beenprotesting against the Chernobyl-type reactors inthat country, suddenly their reactors became asymbol of national power. So from nationalismemerged national security concerns. We see thosereactors still as a very important part of Lithuania’seconomic transition and economic growth todayas a member of the European Union.

Another prime example is Armenia. After theearthquakes its two reactors were shut down. Butas Armenia plunged into deep economic depres-sion, the reactors became an important symbol ofindependence and the lights coming back on. Sohowever dangerous and old those reactors were,they have been a symbol of national power andnational revival.

What we are seeing now in Russia is thatnuclear power is on the upswing. Whereas in1999 nuclear power accounted for about 13 per-cent of electricity produced, that figure climbedto 16 percent in 2003. That number is going upbecause new reactors are being brought online,and projects that were frozen have been broughtback into construction. Now the RussianAtomic Energy Ministry has a huge nuclearpower development program underway, and theywant to have nuclear power account for 25 per-cent of Russian electricity production by 2030.They are projecting that they would like to startcommissioning two new reactors every yearstarting in 2011. This is a real reconsideration ofthe role of nuclear power in Russia.


Nuclear power is also being embraced inUkraine again. Even with the long-awaiteddecommissioning of the Chernobyl facility in2000—the ending of power production—nuclear power today still accounts for 45 percentof electricity production in Ukraine. So nuclearpower is a critical player in Ukraine’s economicturnaround today, and it has become even morecritical since the beginning of the year becauseof this “Gas war.” Officials and individuals arereally reconsidering the role of nuclear power intheir lives.

Looking at the international level, finally,again I think Chernobyl played a very big role,along with Three Mile Island in the UnitedStates and nuclear accidents in Japan, in reallyforcing European countries and American com-munities to rethink nuclear power. In Germany,after the “natural gas war” that took place thiswinter, people are starting to rethink their gov-ernment’s commitment to phase out nuclearpower. They are considering extending the livesof reactors, or at least continuing to rely onnuclear power for a longer period.

Finally, I think the whole nuclear debate isbeing subsumed by concerns about global cli-mate change and thinking differently about theworld and environmental risk in general. I thinkthis is fascinating. Because where nuclear powerand nuclear waste were seen as the ultimatelong-term threat that you can’t get rid of, peo-ple now are looking at global climate change,and many people are starting to think that per-haps that is the greater threat. We are seeing anuclear power discussion and the prospect ofnew nuclear power facilities here in the UnitedStates. Nuclear power accounts for almost 20percent of the U.S. electricity supply, so we arevery dependent on nuclear power.

I was just at San Onofre State Beach inSouthern California, which is in north SanDiego County. It is an amazing beach, very wild.It is just north of Camp Pendleton, which is akind of off-limits area. But right there on thenorth side of San Onofre State Beach is the SanOnofre nuclear power generation station. Thereare these two nuclear reactors right there on thebeach. You can see them from Route 5 if you areever driving to San Diego. I looked at themmuch differently this time because I thought,

“Wow! That is clean energy.” With all the con-cern about global climate change now, we reallythink differently about Chernobyl and the risksassociated with nuclear power.

Finally, we come to this issue of alienation,which was raised by David this morning. Todaythere are other issues competing for our attention.Of course, today we have got Iran, and Iraq, andthe United States, but there are also a lot of envi-ronmental issues that are competing for attention.The issue we are focusing on, this notion of alien-ation, is very interesting. Chernobyl is a no-gozone that is not for people anymore. Maybe at thetime it was somewhat unique, but today in theworld we are facing a lot of these situations. Weare seeing desertification increasing in Africa andChina, for instance, and of course in Central Asiaas well. We are well acquainted with the loss ofthe Aral Sea. We are losing the Antarctic, we arelosing the ice caps at the North Pole, and peopleare saying that those regions are basically going todisappear and become water, if predictions areaccurate. The United States just lost a significantpart of the Mississippi Delta from HurricaneKatrina, but that was also a longer-term trend thathas been going on for decades. The problemsbrought about by Katrina have highlighted againthis real sudden loss of an ecosystem or a region.So today, around the world, Chernobyl is com-peting with a lot of these losses.

The interesting point that I think Mary Myciobrings to the table is that we have lost Chernobylfrom a human perspective, but perhaps are gettingit back from a natural perspective. That, to me, isa very interesting and perhaps hopeful way tothink about one of the legacies of Chernobyl.Thank you.


QUESTION: I consider myself a child ofChernobyl, even if it is in a more diluted sensethan Mary referred to. I was in Belarus, and I wastwo at the time of the Chernobyl disaster.Granted, I am not sick right now, but I do notknow what awaits me in 20 to 30 years. My fatherdid have cancer, and luckily, because of Americanmedical intervention, he is fine and he is alive.

But the question that I want to pose is toMary: when we are looking at the environmen-


tal factors, in what way should we consider thehuman perspective? I have seen pictures of hors-es with the background of the Chernobyl powerplant. It is great that we can look at nature and atthe way that it is thriving. If for nothing else, itis a provocative and very interesting image. Butcan you please tell me, have you met with thepeople who have been directly affected by this?In looking at the nature and at what is happen-ing in this developing environmental perspective,have you also met with those who are directlyaffected? Because I am a little troubled by theperspective of allowing the environment to bethe positive aspect of this. Thank you.

MYCIO: Thank you very much for that question.It is a very good one. I think that my book is alittle more comprehensive on this point than mystatement earlier. I do not in any way underesti-mate the cost and pain that Chernobyl caused tohuman lives. The only point that I was trying tomake is that there are costs that are tolerable inan animal population that are not tolerable in ahuman one. My only point was that by gettingrid of people, Chernobyl allowed the wildlife torebound. That does not mean that individualanimals may not be suffering. They very wellmight be. But in wildlife biology we measure thehealth of an animal population by its numbers,not by the health of its individual members,which we cannot know anyway. There is noteven enough money to study that.

In terms of dealing with people who werevictims of Chernobyl, yes, I talked to manypeople. I talked to people who believe they arevictims of Chernobyl and I have talked to peo-ple who are victims of Chernobyl. I want topoint out a study that was recently done inUkraine in which they talked to people who livein contaminated regions—where there is nodoubt that they are contaminated—and talked topeople who live in regions that were almostunaffected by Chernobyl. All of them considerChernobyl to be their number one health prob-lem. How do you tease out the effects of somany public health issues that exist in the formerSoviet Union, not only in regions that are con-taminated by Chernobyl but because of the psy-chological effect? How do you tease out thehealth effects of Chernobyl from the general

decline of public health in this part of the world?It is almost impossible.

I want to point out one thing. In the UNreport and in many other reports at the humani-tarian forum that was held in Kyiv yesterday,there were talks about the declining lifeexpectancy of men. Men in Ukraine die at—Idon’t remember the exact figure—but it isaround 57 or 59 years old. This is a huge publichealth crisis. Nobody talks about that. Theymention that men are dying, but all of the pub-lic health information and efforts are directed atwomen and children. I am not saying that is notan important thing, but it is the men who aredying, so that is another issue that is not gettingenough attention. It is mentioned just sort of asa sideline. I am not really sure what to do aboutit, but it also deserves attention.

In terms of the horses in the background ofthe Chernobyl power plant, I want to point outthat recently I have learned that those horses arepoached massively. One third of the populationis missing. That is one reason why I have beencalling for declaring the Chernobyl zone awildlife refuge. The wild animals that are there asa result of human error and horrible human mis-calculation should at least get protection frompeople who are exploiting their trust of people.Thank you.

DABELKO: As someone who is not focused onthis area of the former Soviet Union but some-one who looks at the intersections between envi-ronment and security institutions, I would like tomention a parallel to this kind of ironic twist. Onmilitary bases around the world, including in theUnited States, we have this kind of almost eerieparallel between wildlife biodiversity richnessand the absence of human beings. Many say thatmilitary test ranges in this country are some ofthe most biodiversity-rich areas of the country.

QUESTION: I retired from the EnvironmentalProtection Agency at the end of March. I wantedto follow up with Mary on the wildlife issue in thesense that it is another natural experiment just likethe one in Hiroshima. But have studies been doneon whether the radiation is affecting that wildlifepopulation, whether it is a real ecological systemas you would expect, or whether it is skewed in


some way? I could image that different animalsmay be differently sensitive to radiation. Then Irealized it is an exclusion zone, and presumablythe ecologists who might be allowed in there ifthey wanted to go might not have had an oppor-tunity to study it.

MYCIO: Thank you for that question, and it is alsoa very good one. Unfortunately, one of the prob-lems with Chernobyl’s wildlife and with its statusas an exclusion zone is that there is not really verymuch money for studying the wild animals.There is a very good reason for this, given limit-ed budgetary funding, not only in Ukraine andBelarus, but internationally. Most of that isdevoted to studies of human health, and I thinkthat is the right thing to do. That means very lit-tle money is left for wild animal studies. They dostudies of rodents, and we all know how interest-ing rats are, or birds that live in very radioactiveareas. But in terms of the large animals, there isalmost no money for that, because studying wildanimal populations is very expensive. First of allyou need to travel, you need jeeps, you needgasoline, you need hunters who are going tohunt them. Contrast that to studying mice, forexample, where you need maybe 25 mousetraps,some cheese, and a few days. So there is nomoney to study them. In fact, there is very littlemoney to monitor their populations, and that isone reason why I think that declaring theChernobyl zone a wildlife sanctuary would bevery beneficial. It would at least provide somelimited funding for a range of services and at leastcounting the number of animals. Right now theanimals are counted unofficially by the forestrangers, who do it as a sideline.

In terms of a balanced ecological system, it isvery balanced. In fact, a few years ago, wolf hunt-ing was banned in Ukraine. Years ago there werecalls to do wolf hunts. All the wildlife biologistssaid that that is a bad idea, because the number ofwolves is perfectly balanced to the number ofprey. I should also add that there are lynx, andlynx are a rare species in this part of the countryand in this part of the world. So in general, it is avery balanced ecological situation, and I wouldhope that it would remain that way. Thank you.QUESTION: I have a question for AllaYaroshinskaya. I was wondering if you noticed

any shift in official attitudes toward Chernobyllately, maybe toward these documents that youhave been talking about, for example. There havebeen some changes in the openness and the acces-sibility of archives lately, and I was wondering ifyou had any impressions that this was affectingyour work now as well.

YAROSHINSKAYA: Thank you. I have to tell youthat three years after Chernobyl we did not haveany glasnost on Chernobyl questions, and onlywhen the first Congress of People’s Deputiesbegan to work could we say something as I said.Then later, it was too difficult to get some infor-mation from officials. People living in 16 regionsof the Russian Federation know they lived incontaminated area six years after Chernobyl.This is the only fact they know. This tells youabout glasnost and the possibility of knowingsomething that is wrong or that is good in thiscontaminated area.

I think that today it is not a problem to go tothis contaminated area, to speak with people, towrite articles.

But today there is another problem. I wantedto get back to the data of international organiza-tions. I spoke with many scientists—from Japan,from Ukraine, for example—and they all askedme, could you please help us find the originalmaterials at the institute headed by AcademicianIlyin. They did not have permission to go thereand look at original data. The people who workin this institute said they just put out a special issueon that topic, and they would look at their dataand print a special newsletter or magazine, andsend it to us. But this is not original data. This isjust a special scientific magazine. So the scientistswho work in this area actually told me they can-not go and see the original data that this institutehas had since the time Chernobyl happened.Original data is a really big question. When wehave no original data, how can we have originalresults? How can we be sure about conclusionswhen we do not even know if this data is right?

MYCIO: I just wanted to add that I agree withAlla on the issue of original data. One exampleof original data would be what the radiationdoses were to the firemen and the people whoworked on the night of the explosion. The fact


is that at the time they did not have Geiger coun-ters or radiation meters at the plant that couldmeasure radiation levels as high as those at thetime the accident happened. So basically the sortof official or original data on this issue is 200rem. The 200 rem figure exists only because thatis the maximum that these meters could measure.And so in terms of original data, there is so muchthat is not known. As Donald Rumsfeld oncesaid, “There are things that are not knownbecause they can’t be known, or they’re notknown because they’re not known.” This is anexample of missing data and original data, whichwe will never know.

YAROSHINSKAYA: I wanted to add something. Iagree with you that a lot of the time we will neverknow the original data, because the peopleresponsible for it would not like this original datato be known. We have now a scientific method bywhich people can get to original data—if officialswant to know it—but this is very expensive. Wehave a very good scientific method that can beused to review the doses received by firemen orliquidators. But who will give money to do that?This is first.

And the second: I have a very interesting doc-ument in my personal Chernobyl archive. I havethe correspondence between the Minister ofHealth Protection of Ukraine AnatoliyRomanenko in Kyiv, and an official in Moscow.It was in one year after Chernobyl, and he wrotea confidential letter from Kyiv to Moscow statingthat there were two and a half thousand affectedchildren in just this one region of Ukraine. Thesechildren had levels of radiation at 500 rem. Perchild this is cancer, real cancer. What did thisofficial person in Moscow do? He sent a letter tothe Central Committee of the Communist Partyaddressing this same topic of exposure of chil-dren, but he wrote in his letter that in contami-nated areas in Ukraine no one person’s illnessescould be connected to Chernobyl. This after theletter from Romanenko? So what can we sayabout the data now?

QUESTION: I would like to leave the issue ofnumbers aside for a moment, because when youhear a range from 4,000 to 200,000, it is anincomprehensible gap. But it does seem to me

that one of the issues that underlies this gap issomething that the representative this morningfrom IAEA and D. J. Peterson have pointed to.That has to do with the perspective with whichone comes to the problem today, 20 years after,leaving aside everything that went wrong, all thedishonesty of the Soviet regime, and so on andso forth. The question becomes development.Obviously the health issues are very important tothat, and you cannot begin to talk about thedevelopment of the region unless you have somehandle on the public health of the region. Thatactually gets to larger issues, I think, of publichealth in these societies, which transcend theissue of why men are dying in Ukraine. It is notjust Chernobyl. It has to do with alcoholism andtrauma and all sorts of things. So one thing thathas to happen is, if we are going to talk aboutdevelopment, clearly we need to begin to getserious about public health, and Chernobylneeds to be part of that discussion.

But then that leads to another question. Wheredoes this region go from here? Does it just becomea nature reserve? Lukashenko might have an inter-esting ad campaign: Buy used Chernobyl lumberand reduce your electrical bill. But seriously, D. J.,maybe you are the best person to start this discus-sion off. What can the future of this region be?Because it seems to me that the core of some ofthe dispute with the IAEA approach is that it is aneffort to begin to look forward at trying to figureout what useful function this region could play inthe economies and life of the societies of theregion. D. J., where do you see the openings for apossible healthier economic and social develop-ment of this region?

PETERSON: As we see on the maps, there are dif-ferent degradations of contamination. To say thatwe are not going to do anything in theChernobyl-contaminated areas of course does notmake sense, because large parts of western, cen-tral, and eastern Europe are also contaminated,and obviously economic activity thrives there, andof course to the east, to the Urals. So one of thethings we can do going forward is to continue themonitoring. There is a fairly good understandingalready of the gradations of contamination.Obviously, you can grade economic activity orhuman activity by these regions.


It is about drawing circles; it is about contin-uing to monitor; it is improving access to infor-mation about current radiation levels. It isimproving access to information about theimplications of that radiation for public health orother types of activities. In the smallest circle, Ithink it just makes sense to have a zone of exclu-sion. You do declare it a wildlife area. You dokeep it off-limits to people. I am assuming thatthe poaching that Mary is talking about is peo-ple poaching the horses for meat or to sell them,but it is poaching and they are being used forsome kind of economic purpose. So you want toenforce the fencing off of that area and theexclusion of people.

I do not know if I have a good argumentabout how you deal with the land in between—the very, very low-contamination areas and themoderately contaminated areas. But again, a lotof this area has been depopulated because ofeconomic issues, namely the fact that cities arewhere the economic development is, where theinteresting jobs are, where young people want togo. About encouraging broad economic devel-opment in these moderately contaminatedareas—I am not sure. Maybe you just leave themfallow also or allow limited agriculture.

I think there needs to be a comprehensiveland-use plan or something that actually sayswhat you want to do with these areas. I do notthink anybody has really said how we shouldtreat these areas and how we should use them inthe future. It is more than about providing short-term assistance to the people who live there. Ithink there needs to be a constructive issue. Aswe know, one fifth of Belarus is contaminated tosome extent, so what is the land-use plan for thatarea? I hope whatever develops in the future isdeveloped in a public way so people have choic-es and input into those decisions, too.

DABELKO: D. J., can I comment on top of that?You are somebody who does a lot of risk analysisand risk assessments for both public and privateentities. If you are looking forward and beingasked what are the possibilities for incidents likethis to occur in the future, what kind of risklevel—whether it is a specific area that you focuson where you are suggesting that it might bemore or less likely to happen—what do you say?

What do you tell people who ask you if this isgoing to happen somewhere else in the formerSoviet Union in the next 10 years and ask how itis going to affect their investments?

PETERSON: That is a really good question. Iguess the easy answer is that there are a lot ofplaces in the world you can go. There are a lot ofplaces in Russia and in Ukraine in which youcan go and invest and be a lot safer than rightaround Chernobyl. There are a lot of placeswhere you can avoid the nuclear risk. You cangrade it by reactor type—that is one way. TheEuropean community has demanded that theLithuanians decommission their Chernobyl-typereactor. That should hopefully happen in thecoming years. But I am not in a position to real-ly rate nuclear facilities in Russia. Clearly, per-ceptions of risk at Soviet-type reactors are muchhigher within the international community thanamong Russian or Ukrainian engineers, physi-cists, and regulators. Even on this anniversary,the Russian government is putting out a nicedrumbeat of information about how wellRussian reactors are being run these days andhow important changes have been made. Andclearly there have been some significantimprovements in safety in Russian reactors.

But I guess my easy answer will be that thereare a lot of places you can invest away from thenuclear-contaminated areas or reactors and befairly confident.

YAROSHINSKAYA: I want to add something. Youare speaking about the possibility of working oncontaminated land. This is a very funny questionfor me, because I live in Russia. Russia is a verybig country. If you drive one kilometer awayfrom Moscow, you will see huge fields andnobody working on these fields. Many peoplelived there in the Soviet period while workingfor so-called collective farms, but we do nothave collective farms today. There is a lot of landeven around Moscow that is free, and nobodyworks there. Why do we need to invest moneyin contaminated land, plant something, grow it,and then eat it? This is a strange question. Wehave a lot of very good soil in Russia, and wecan use this soil. What do we need to put moneyinto contaminated land for?


QUESTION: Dr. Peterson, you raised the pointthat nuclear power now accounts for 20 percentof energy use in the U.S. Representative Kaptursaid she opposes all forms of nuclear power inthe U.S. So could you comment on what wouldhappen if her perspective would gain popularityin the U.S.?

You also mentioned global warming. So whatwould our options be if her policy choice to shutdown nuclear reactors here was followed? Wherewould we go from here?

PETERSON: It is 20 percent of our electricityproduction, not our total energy demand.Where would we go? I do not know. A lot ofthe new electric power generation in the UnitedStates—for instance, in California—is naturalgas. But the United States is extremely con-strained on natural gas and on the amount thatwe can import into this country. If you look atwho controls natural gas in the world, it is threecountries: Russia, Qatar, and Iran. At least oneof them is a very questionable supplier. Thengetting it here is a big challenge.

We can go to coal. The United States has lotsof coal, but you have both the urban air qualityissue, with sulfur and mercury, and the climatechange impact. A lot of people would advocate ahuge conservation program over renewables. I amnot quite sure. I do not know how RepresentativeKaptur’s view could be implemented in the nearfuture, where we could get rid of nuclear power.We could certainly let it wither, because a lot ofnuclear facilities are aging and will be need to bedecommissioned, although we are always findingways to extend their lives, just like they are inRussia right now.

I frankly do think that we are going to see arenaissance of nuclear power in the United States.There are already plans to start the commissioningin the entitlement process for new reactors in theSouth. Again, different countries, France forinstance, have made a commitment to nuclearenergy because they see that as a better optionthan global climate change, [or for] other reasons.Europeans see diesel as fuel they are willing to usein automobiles, because it has a climate benefitover gasoline. We traditionally do not like diesel,because we see the air particles in our lungs. Butperhaps that is going to change. I really do think

that we are at a sea change right now on the cli-mate issue, and it really could swing people infavor of nuclear power. Perhaps Chernobyl will beconsidered as something Soviet, different, and inthe past, just like we look at Three Mile Island assomething in the past.

QUESTION: Dr. Peterson talked about reactors ofthe Chernobyl type in Russia. Short comment.There are three nuclear power stations in Russiathat have this kind of reactor: Leningrad,Smolensk, and Kursk. Two of the Leningrad-typereactors and one of the Kursk reactors have alreadyexhausted their resources. Their resources go for30 years, and now the government has made thedecision to prolong the terms of their activityanother 15 years. It is a very interesting fact that 5years ago in the nuclear strategy of Russia, theterm of increase was 10 years, and 2 years ago theterms changed to 15 years.

I was a participant in a public hearing on thequestion of the Leningrad nuclear power station.It was an absolutely unserious event, and all ruleswere violated. In accordance with the law, it isnecessary to announce this kind of event for threedays, but the announcement was issued only oneday in advance. It was a weekend in July, andeveryone was out of the city. The public hearingwas in St. Petersburg, although the nuclear powerstation is situated in Sosnovy Bor, three hours out-side of St. Petersburg.There were about a hundredofficials from the nuclear power agency inMoscow and from the nuclear power station inSosnovy Bor, and only 10 people from the public:three journalists, three participants from knowngovernment organizations, me, and about threevery old ladies, who could not understand whatwas going on.

There was a lot of caviar, expensive food, andchampagne, and there was no discussion at thetime. But the officials issued the decision that therewas a public hearing on this question, and thisvery, very serious question was decided in thiskind of absolutely discouraging way.

What do you think about it? It is a very, veryserious decision. It means 15 new years of use forChernobyl-type reactors.

One more question, I am sorry. Is this type ofdecision possible in the United States, to prolonga reactor’s life?


PETERSON: It is an interesting issue. First of all,the decisions to prolong a reactor’s life, whatthey call the nameplate life of a facility, that hap-pens a lot in a lot of different industries. It hap-pens a lot in the U.S. power industry. It happenswith aircraft. If you look at the B-52 bomber, itis a prime example where the life is continuallyextended, in part because of our knowledge ofthe facility. A lot of U.S. power plants—coalplants, for instance, or refineries—are mucholder than they were expected to be when theywere designed, because we have gotten so muchbetter at managing them. At a very superficiallevel, this is a common practice in many indus-tries. The United States has gotten much betterat running its nuclear facilities, and in fact theoutput from nuclear facilities has increased atexisting facilities because we have gotten betterat running them. That happens a lot.

The issue you are getting at is very interestingfor two reasons. One is that you have permittingpractices. I think the Putin administration hasbeen very good about following the letter of thelaw or rule. They say they have to have a meeting,they have a meeting—but it is at an inconvenientlocation, it is hard to get to, it is not noticed, it isnot announced in advance, it is not held for a cer-tain period of time. This is a very common prac-tice of observing the letter of the law but not fol-lowing the intent of the people who wrote it.Perhaps it is following the intent. But the point is,you see this a lot. You certainly see this in corpo-rate governance, with board meetings being heldout at some resort in a very remote location soshareholders cannot attend and have their voiceheard. This is a very common practice.

I think your description accurately conveyshow officials view the situation.They do not wantpublic participation. They do not want to havepeople questioning them.

The second point that I wanted to make is thatnuclear power in Russia in particular has reat-tained the level of a national security interest. It isbeing reshrouded in secrecy. At some levels, youwant limited access to nuclear facilities because ofthe nominal concern about terrorism and terror-ist activities. But even on access to information,you are seeing the recreation of closed cities andclosed facilities. Anything that challenges the pre-rogatives of the nuclear power sector in Russia is

considered a national security threat. Thus, theytry and limit input as much as possible.

YAROSHINSKAYA: May I offer a new question?You talk about the new nuclear concept ofRussian nuclear power plants, how to developRussian nuclear power plants. But we heard thatPresident Bush also said some time ago that theUnited States is going to develop nuclear powerplants. Do you know if plans already exist abouthow many nuclear reactors are going to be builtin the United States?

PETERSON: I do not know if there is a plan—Ihave not seen one. Our approach is much dif-ferent. In Russia you have RosAtom, theAtomic Energy Ministry, which has a central-ized plan on how to generate so much energy. Itis a very centralized process, and there is onebuilder, one organization that commissions andruns the facilities. Here in the United States, wehave public utilities. Whether a reactor will bebuilt is a decision made by independent compa-nies. They might be incentivized by tax and pol-icy, and they might be incentivized by stream-lining the environmental regulations or the pub-lic review process.

But again, I think the interesting question willbe when a real proposal for a nuclear power plantin the United States actually lands on the table andthat meeting is announced. I am really curious tosee who shows up and how loud the oppositionis. That is a big question. Will people be con-cerned about their neighborhood, or will they beconcerned about energy security, climate change,and economic development? I am not sure.

MYCIO: I want to go back to something that Dr.Peterson said. I forget exactly how he put it, butin terms of looking at Chernobyl in the contextof the future of energy, I think it is very impor-tant to look at Chernobyl as an example of whatenergy costs. And Chernobyl cost a great deal interms of human suffering, money and econom-ics, and losing the value of land. But all otherenergy has costs as well. Fossil fuels have costs.Look how much the war in Iraq is costing. AndI think that when we look at nuclear energy onbalance, it is important to not just look at thecost of how many people died, how many peo-


ple will die, and how many diseases were causedby Chernobyl. How many cancers are caused byburning fossil fuels? How many coal miners diein mining accidents every year? How many wars

are fought over fossil fuels? So when we makethose choices, I think that we have to thinkabout all of the costs of different forms of ener-gy, not just one form of energy.


MARGARET PAXSON: Today we have been talk-ing about a catastrophe of epic proportions—epic in its breadth and its depth and in the scaleof what is still unknown. As I’ve listened today, Ihave been struck by an important dichotomy inways of thinking about the Chernobyl tragedy.On the one hand, it is seen by some in terms ofdefining, registering, and recording the extent ofthe pathology of this event. What was it? Whathappened? What went wrong? What is this ill-ness that has been inflicted on this part of theworld for so long? On the other hand, we haveseen people really struggling today with the needfor getting at normalcy, asking themselves“Where do we go from here?” I think both ofthese sides are really important, and they aregoing to continue to be important in this panelas we move on.

This panel, “The Human Experience,” willlook at what happened not just on sweeps of ter-ritories, or in the aggregates of inhabitants thatlive in this territory, or the horrifying statistics thatpile up on various people who live in variousplaces—but at the question of what happened tothese people? People who live in families, peoplewho have loved ones, people who have histories,people who are attached to homelands—not justparcels of land, but homelands and spaces. So, Iwould say the tragedy of Chernobyl cannot beunderstood or placed into history without anunderstanding of this grounded human context.That is one thing I want to keep in mind as wemove forward.

There is another issue that arises that is ratherpersonal for me. As I have been listening all daylong, I have been thinking over and over againabout one family that I got to know from my ownresearch as an anthropologist in the Russiannorth, up in Vologodskaia oblast—which is quite

far in miles from this tragedy. In this family, thefather had been sent to Chernobyl to do cleanup.Two sons in this family had also been sent to theCaucasus as soldiers. This is quite typical in theprovinces. These are the kinds of young men whodo not know anybody with influence and cannotget their way out of war by paying someone off.

I wrote a magazine piece about families likethis one whose sons were in Chechnya, and in thearticle I quoted Tatiana, the mother of the fami-ly. I just want to give you this little quote. This isin her words:

I do not understand why they had to takemy Andrusha [her son] so far away. Theytook his brother already and my husband.He did cleanup after Chernobyl. Thosemen were not even given gloves for theirhands, just masks over their faces. Theywere told to clean the waste with tractors.And they were not supposed to take mar-ried men but my husband already had awife and two children when he went.There was the roof of one building that wasso contaminated that Japanese robotsrefused to clean it so they sent up theRussian men to do the job and now Igor’shealth is spoiled.

I wrote on about Tatiana and her family:

I would look over at the kitchen, I wouldlook over at the small dark-haired man whohas been quietly going back and forth tothe kitchen, her husband. “One thing youcan say about my family,” Tatiana adds, hervoice lowering and losing its waver, “myhusband and sons, they will not hidebehind other people’s backs.”


Panel 4: The Human ExperienceChair, Margaret Paxson, Senior Associate, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Kate Brown, Assistant Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Irene Zabytko, author, The Sky Unwashed

I was thinking about this all day long and thinkingabout how there, far away in the Russian hinter-lands, all the same questions are hovering. Howdoes one heal from tragedies that people share? Inthis family one tragedy was Chernobyl, and theother was the wars in the Caucasus. How can suf-fering be known and then healed?

So with that I would like to introduce our twospeakers, both of them prize-winning authors. Ifeel really honored to be able to introduce both ofthem today. Both of them are bearing witness tosomething, and I think that when we look attragedies, the bearing witness—the active bearingwitness—is extremely crucial.

KATE BROWN: The Chernobyl Museum in Kyivpresents the tragedy of Chernobyl as a particular-ly Ukrainian tragedy, and you see this when yougo into the museum. There is a whole line ofnames of villages that are now evacuated, andthere are the names of villages with a big linethrough them. And there are these hand-embroi-dered Ukrainian rushnyky, which are symbols ofthe Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.Certainly, especially in the early 1990s, Ukrainianactivists and politicians pursued a policy ofnational autonomy by using the crisis, the tragedyof Chernobyl. It depicted Chernobyl as emblem-atic of Ukrainian suffering in general at the handsof Muscovite power, of Soviet power. They saidthis was another way that Ukraine was used andmistreated as a colony; that Ukraine would neverbe safe under the control of Moscow. Chernobyltherefore justified independence. Since that time,Ukrainian politicians have been handed the prob-lem of what to do with all these victims, and theyhave backed away from the portrayal ofChernobyl as this great Ukrainian tragedy. Butthe church has picked it up, and you could seethis in the museum itself.

Certainly by the time of the accident, in 1986,the Chernobyl region was a Ukrainian heartlandwith Ukrainians making up a large majority of thepopulation. Yet this version, this national versionof the story, is full of silences. The evacuation ofvillagers and townspeople from the zone of exclu-sion in 1986 was just the last in a series of massevacuations that occurred in the 20th century inthis very region. The territory was shaken up by acentury of mass displacements, deportations, and

genocide.These deportations and population shiftstransformed what had been a multiethnic border-land into a Ukrainian heartland.

So I think the silence around this representa-tion of Chernobyl as a particularly Ukrainiantragedy overlooks a great deal. It overlooks theJewish past of the city of Chernobyl itself. It was afamous shtetl where the Tsadik of Chernobyl heldcourt. It overlooks the Polish past. Polish landown-ers made up a good majority of the people wholived in Chernobyl. In the area around the regionPolish workers and artisans lived, and had livedthere for a great many decades and centuries. Andthere were also a great number of Germans therewho had settled in the region as religious dissi-dents and as entrepreneurs and businesspeople.

So I’m here to tell another story about thelonger history of the 20th century that precedesChernobyl, and in many ways makes theChernobyl tragedy a requiem for a century of dis-location and destruction in the territory.

First I would like to describe to you what thispart of right-bank Ukraine [land to the west of theDnipro river—Ed.] was like at the beginning ofthe century, because it had long been a borderlandof the Russian Empire. It had also been a border-land of the former Polish-Lithuanian Common-wealth. It was an area within the Pale ofSettlement for Jews and was a mixing place ofpeoples migrating from the multinationalempires—the Austro-Hungarian, the Prussian,and, of course, the Russian empires.

In terms of nationality, a majority of the peo-ple were illiterate, but they were also often trilin-gual. Observers who went to the area in thebeginning of the century found few standardiza-tions of language. Each village spoke its own localpatois, a mixture of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian,Yiddish, or German, depending on the localdemography.

Intermarriage was not uncommon amongthese peoples. Religion, too, also had no definite,discrete borders. I found peasants in my researchwho turned to the Hasidic tsadik [spiritual mas-ter—Ed.] for an amulet to cure an ailment. Jewswould show up at the sites where the Virgin Maryhad appeared and when there was a healing wellor healing soil. Because of long distances,Catholics often prayed at Orthodox or Uniatechurches. Or people simply formed their own


syncretic religious communities and met at homeor met in the forest and borrowed heavily fromlocal Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewishdissenting traditions in the area.

In the 1920s, when the Soviet ethnographersstarted recording such things, they noted whatthey considered an alarming number of sectariangroups and Catholic rosary circles, which met inprivate homes rather than in churches. And withno architectural presence, they were very difficultto locate and thus root out. Oral knowledge wasvery important in this area, more important per-haps than literary knowledge. There is oneaccount of a shtetl, Habno, where a man who wasgoing there in 1924 was saying there was once alocal history of this area, but because of all thewars the history text got burned, and so now theyjust had to ask people who once read it what wasin it. So oral knowledge was more important thanliterary knowledge, and oral knowledge is oftensomething that is in flux. Meanings, identities,and histories in terms of oral knowledge oftenchange rapidly over time, change depending onthe perspective of the one telling the story.

Knowledge also was often local. It was rootedto a particular landscape: a bend in the river, aswampy field, a forest haunted with the spirits ofdead ancestors and the unclean forces that roamthe earth and land, often untethered.

In sum, this borderland was inhabited by peo-ple who lived in multiethnic communities withseveral religious creeds. Locals were often cut offfrom the outside world for months because ofimpassable roads, and borrowed heavily fromone another for sources of knowledge and belief.Often I find that people of one religion and onenationality group had more in common withtheir neighbors who were of a different ethnicgroup or religious group than they had withtheir co-nationals or co-religionists outside inWarsaw, Kyiv, or Berlin. Remember that in1924 it took about 24 hours to get from Kyiv toChernobyl, so we are talking about great dis-tances at the time.

So the first major transformation of this terri-tory came with World War I, which in right-bankUkraine was a theater of hostilities and suspicions.During World War I, the tsarist army carried outa policy of deportation of aliens and then Germansubjects and also Jews from this area. Eric Lohr

estimates that about a million people were deport-ed from this greater area during this time.

The transformation from the Russian Empireto the Soviet Union also created a new border, aborder that came very close to Chernobyl, rightthrough right-bank Ukraine. Because of this,roads that had been conduits to Warsaw and toother parts of the empire now became dead-endstreets with gates, border crossings, and borderguards. Activities that had before been character-ized as trade or visiting relatives now became clas-sified as “smuggling.” This became a real problemfor the region. It became a dead-end street eco-nomically as well. The area was transformed,because most of the Polish landowners and theGerman businessmen left with the war and therevolution. Those who remained behind tendedto be drawn from less literate populations whotended not to identify themselves in terms of“nation” and fixed categories.

The economy suffered very much at thetime. In 1924, an observer of the shtetl wrotethat there had once been a series of mines therewith Catholic laborers or Germans from PolishAustria, but they have all disappeared. By theend of the 19th century only a textile factoryremained in Mistechko Zamosti, and only apaper mill remained in the village 12 versts[about 13 kilometers] from Habno. The papermill soon also closed, but the textile factoryflourished for a long time.

In the first half of the 19th century, all theshtetl lived off the factory. Others traded clothes,made commercial trips to Berdychiv, Poltava, andeven to Moscow. The factories closed at thebeginning of the 1900s, and the shtetl lost itsmain source of income. People were forced toresort to small handicrafts and trading for survival.Then the memoirist goes on to describe how,during his time in the Soviet period, there wasnot even really an economy to speak of.Everybody was trading in bags of rye. Hedescribes this very complicated system in whichyou had to hand five bags of rye over and six bagsthere and the rye broke out of the bags, and itsounded like it was a mess.

So my point is that this place went the oppo-site of what you think of in terms of progress inthe 20th century. It became an economic back-water, and by the 1920s it was on the geo-


graphic, cultural, and economic margins of theSoviet Union. In 1897, the population was9,300. By 1926, it had fallen to 9,000 people.The Soviets thought that they would help thisplace out, and they figured that one way to do itwas to try to chart all these ethnic groups andthen give to each population the socialist mes-sage in national form. So they sent in demogra-phers and ethnographers, and they tried to fig-ure out who was who. It was very difficult forthem to do. Most people had no idea what theyconsidered their ethnicity to be. They would asksomebody, and [that person would] say, “I am atuteyshy; I’m a person from here,” Or, “I am ofthe Catholic nationality.” But they finally sortedit all out and tried to give people their nationalprograms in their national languages, such aseducation in the village.

But the problem was that by the 1930s, oncethese national taxonomies were recorded, theystarted to generate charts and maps. And thecharts and maps showed that some people signedup for the collective farm at lower rates thanothers. Some people joined the CommunistParty at lower rates than others. The people whowere most suspicious—probably not surprising-ly, given the international scene—were Polesand Germans. So in 1936, in order to secure theborder zone, the Soviet government shippedabout 100,000 people of Polish and Germannationality to Kazakhstan.

Later on, when the Germans occupied thisregion during World War II, they took these verysame records, and they used them to promotetheir vision of racial hierarchies in occupiedUkraine. They took ethnic Germans and created aspecial colony called the Hegewald, whereGermans were going to live in peace and prosper-ity. They kicked out all the other local farmers todo that. They took people identified as Ukrainiansand sent them to the Ukrainian militia units andUkrainian SS units, and they took Jews to theedges of villages and towns and shot them intopits, all using these Soviet records. And they werevery intent on this, saying, “Did you get therecords when you got to the town?”

I argue in my book A Biography of No Place thatthe Final Solution began in occupied Soviet terri-tory in August of 1941, because Soviet recordsfacilitated that in many ways.

After the war it was impossible to be Germanin Ukraine, and about 350,000 of those classifiedas Germans fled with the retreating Wehrmacht.The Soviet Union and Poland swapped popula-tions after the war, sending Ukrainians fromPoland into the Soviet Union and the remainingPoles from Ukraine into Poland.

I interviewed an ethnographer, an anthropolo-gist of the territory, a woman by the name ofLydia Orel, and she remembered these deporta-tions in the mid- to late ’40s very well. It was veryinteresting.When I interviewed her, she kept con-fusing these earlier postwar deportations with theevacuations from Chernobyl in 1986. She hadthem connected in her mind. All of this created anew demography in the region. After 1950 therewere no Germans, very few Poles, and only a fewJews, and for the first time, this place became aUkrainian heartland.

Lydia Orel also described a territory that bythe 1960s and 1970s was still suffering from thedestruction of this history of deportations—including the Final Solution in World War II. Itwas still very much an economic and demo-graphic backwater at that time. She describedfarmers who bought only kerosene and salt atstores in the 1960s and 1970s and subsisted most-ly off what they found in the forests and whatthey grew on their small farms. She describedvillagers who still prayed to the spirits of the treesand sang songs to the spirit of the sun in themorning. The demographic impact also reflectedthis marginal quality. The population ofChernobyl in 1971 was all of 10,000. That isonly 700 more than in 1897.

So this became part of the justification for plac-ing the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exactly inthis area. It was a very sparsely populated region inneed of technological assistance and an economicboost. And then the rest, of course, is history.

I think Irene [Zabytko] will tell us moreabout the tragedy itself, but I would like to endby considering this metaphor of progress. It isperhaps the great irony that in each of thesecases I have described in this region, reformersthought they were trying to improve the region,and what then came of the region was massdeportation or a form of genocide. Whether itwas clearing the territory of enemy aliens, pro-moting programs for national minorities, creat-


ing racially purified zones, or producing cheap,clean nuclear power, in each case mass deporta-tion was preceded by a desire to improve andhelp this very “backward” region. For this rea-son, we can perhaps consider Chernobyl arequiem to the 20th century. Thank you.

IRENE ZABYTKO: Thank you very much. It is areal honor to be here at the Kennan Institute andthe Woodrow Wilson Center. I am not a scholar,and this is kind of a rarity. I am going to talk toyou from the perspective of someone who is acreative writer—a fiction writer. I am not a schol-ar; I am not a scientist, even. Yet Chernobyl doeshave a very definite effect on me. I am Ukrainian.I have been brought up in the Ukrainian Villagearea of Chicago; some of you may know wherethat is located. My first language was Ukrainian,but I do not speak it very well and my mother willtell you that without hesitation.

It is interesting because, as I assimilated overthe years and decided I wanted to be a fictionwriter, I did not want to write about anythingUkrainian. It was not until I was on a fellowshipas an artist-in-residence at the Helene WurlitzerFoundation in New Mexico, about the time ofthe fifth anniversary of Chernobyl, that thatchanged. On NPR of all places I heard this fas-cinating report of the eyewitness accounts thatwere recorded about what happened to the real-life evacuees who had to leave Chernobyl. ThenI read a newspaper account very soon afterwardwritten by Marta Kolomayets in The UkrainianWeekly. She and a group of women from ahumanitarian organization went over to theexclusion zone, where they found a lot of elder-ly residents who had returned after being evacu-ated from Chernobyl. And that was interestingto me as a Ukrainian. It was interesting to meanyway as a citizen who is interested in globalissues. But as a fiction writer, it touched off awhole different kind of reaction in me. I wasthinking, oh, how did they survive that? It isrelated to what Margaret was saying as an anthro-pologist. How do people become healed whenthey have to suffer extraordinary catastrophes?These are usually people who are not veryextraordinary. In fact, the people I write aboutare very simple peasants, as Kate was mentioningin her paper. They believe in pagan spirits. And

also, my people in my book are very much intothe Orthodox tradition and the Orthodox faith.

So as a fiction writer my concern was well, thisis very interesting. There is a great deal of statisti-cal and scientific evidence, etc., about the falloutand the aftereffects of Chernobyl, as we heardthroughout this conference, that are very interest-ing and important. But the creative part of mybrain was thinking, what happens to these peopleafter they return? How do you live in a zone likethat? How do you survive, especially if you areelderly? It was hard enough to live anywhere inwhat was the Soviet Union. What do you dowhen you return to your village? Are you that tiedto living in your ancestral home? Or was itbecause people could not survive anywhere elsethat they returned to this place?

So I began writing a short story, and I had amain character named Marusia Petrenko. I donot know where she came from. I think she ismy mother really, and yet not. Writers do notoften know where they get their ideas from,really, when they are in the midst of writingcreatively. And what happened was that I waswriting a short story. It was pretty much basedon Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryona’s Home” thathe wrote several years before One Day in the Lifeof Ivan Denisovich. I was very much influencedby that because of the peasant connection andeverything—not that I have much to do withpeasants—but I thought it was interesting. Imean, I am looking at it from the perspective ofcharacter development. And what happened wasit grew into a novel, because the people startedappearing in my book in a sort of supernaturalway. I know this sounds crazy to all these scien-tists in the room today. However, as a creativewriter, this is what happens when you are writ-ing fiction. These characters start appearing.They are probably formed from people youknow, such as people I grew up with in theUkrainian Village, like my mother, and people Icame across when I taught in Ukraine. I knewthese people. They were Ukrainians. Theymaterialized themselves as Ukrainians who livedin a village that I made up called Starylis. I hadnever visited a Ukrainian village before in thatway, especially in the eastern part of Ukraine. Soit just sort of happened that the short storyemerged and materialized about what happened


to these people who came back after being evac-uated. It turned into a novel, which was pub-lished in 2000, and there is now a movie deal inthe making, which I am very proud of. But I amalso doing the documentary based on the real-life inhabitants in the exclusion zone. I wrote thebook because it was just something that mat-tered to me as a writer and something that I alsowanted to ask as a writer: how do people survivethese extraordinary circumstances in their liveswhen they are thrust in a situation like that? It isthe “what-if ” sort of question that creative writ-ers ask when they are writing something like thisas a story.

Basically, my book is about a group of people,the Petrenko family. The son works at theChernobyl plant, and Marusia is the matriarch.She is in her seventies and she worked on a col-lective farm, and they all live in this village calledStarylis, which is in the Chernobyl zone. It isvery near the Chernobyl plant. At one point, thenuclear reactor explodes. People in the village donot know what was going on, but Zosia, who isthe daughter-in-law, takes the children. They areall evacuated. The son eventually dies, and Zosiatakes the children to Moscow. She is a very feistywoman. But Marusia decides to come back toher village, and eventually other women returnas well. Before they do, Marusia rings the churchbells and keeps her woodstove burning becauseshe cannot believe that nobody will know thatshe is there.

I was trying to put myself in her mind-set.This was very curious to me. Here it is—wehave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, theheight of Soviet progress at the time. Yet here isa woman who is a peasant and is very devout inthe Orthodox tradition and believes in theTrinity more than she does the radiation. So thatis a kind of juxtaposition between past and pres-ent, old and new traditions, ritual and progress,that she and the other characters represent.

I am going to read a little bit from the book,if you do not mind, to give a perspective, to puta real face on the human condition. I think oneof the ways we can actually talk aboutChernobyl is through literature, through themovies, through something beyond just thenonfiction articles and books and statistics thatso many of us are able to find access to.

Anyway, I am going to begin with a veryshort excerpt from The Sky Unwashed, and this iswhere Marusia does return after about a year ofbeing evacuated to Kyiv. She comes back alone.She lights her woodstove, hoping that someonewill see the smoke, and she goes to the villagechurch and rings the bells, hoping that some-body will hear her. And she meets a visitor:

Marusia’s eyes ached constantly and itched.The irritation wearied her so much thatone evening she had to slice two pieces ofa potato she was about to boil for her din-ner and applied them to her swollen eye-lids. The poultice ceased her pain some-what. She found relief in a heavy darksleep void of urgent dreams and did notawake until dusk.

“Okh,” Marusia said, disoriented andsurprised to find the potato slices over hereyes. “I have to ring the bells.” She grabbeda candle and a match and hurried to thechurch. On the way she heard crickets inthe grass and saw the faint white half moonin the sky.

She climbed the stairs in the church.High in the tower it seemed darker thanusual. She lit the candle and waited for thewax to drip on the counter where shewould plant the light. She heard a littlehumming sound and stumbled back onsomething that felt like a rope. She heardanother screech and the rope came alive andwhipped itself out of her path. Then sheheard a dull thump followed by a low crythat sounded like an old woman’s moan.

“What’s that?” she yelled.She peered into the growing darkness.

Two cold-lit eyes stared at her from atop aceiling beam. “Oh, hello kotyku,” she said.She brought her dripping candle closer toits face. The cat’s fur stuck up in spikes asthough it had tried to wash the poison outof its coat. It sat there watching her slowingheaving its caved-in chest.

“How long have you been here, kotyku?Are you crazy too like the dogs I hear atnight and me?” she said. “Well, be carefulthat the man with the gun, the dog shooterdoesn’t get you.”


The cat meowed but softer than before.She was afraid to touch it. It hissed its

fear, then scampered away down the stairsand out of her sight.

The next morning, she brought alonga small bowl of powered powdered milkmixed with water and left it at the foot ofthe winding stairs. The cat jumped downfrom its place in the shadows and brieflyrubbed against her ankles like an electricshock before it darted straight for the dish.It sniffed the milk for a long time beforelapping it up.

“Oh, once you were a pretty one,”Marusia said. The cat was matted andfilthy. Its front paws were caked with driedblood and both of its ears were torn.“You’ve been fighting,” she told it. “Becareful—there are wild animals out there.Fierce like bears.” The cat looked up ather, blinked its filmy eyes and purred.

“You’re welcome. Now excuse me, Ihave to ring the bells,” she said, climbingthe stairs. She rang them for a long timeand was surprised to find the cat waitingfor her when she came down from thetower. “Well how nice. But are you deaf? Iswear I will be in no time.” Her bodyswayed from dizziness and she had tosteady herself against the clammy wall.

The cat followed her inside the churchbut stopped short of going outside thedoor. “No? Stay here then. You’re such askinny one. I wish I could feed you so thatyou can plump up like a pillow.” She her-self ate only once a day—mostly from herstored supply of dry staples and what wasleft of the canned vegetables she had pre-served in the summers before the accident.

She thought about her limited pantry.She did have jars of apple sauce, greenbeans, peas and carrots left. And a fewmore jars of compote she had made ofdried apples, pears and apricots. But thosesupplies will get very low in a matter ofweeks. She feared the approaching winter.“Getting cold out there.” She hesitated inthe doorway.

“Well then, I’ll just go back toChernobyl and demand that they give me

some food. Or maybe that zaraza dogcatcher will be back. But it has been threeweeks already…would he let an oldwoman starve?

“Yes he would!” She turned toward thecat, who meowed its sickly croak at her. “Iwon’t starve. You are invited to share myfood. I won’t starve! I haven’t lived as longto die like that. Don’t you worry!” Shestood in front of the iconostasis again,bowed low and left for home.

From then on, Marusia brought the catmilk every morning. Sometimes the ani-mal came to her, other times she had tosearch for it when she found the milkuntouched. She was surprised how muchshe missed it when she didn’t see itsmangy body curved over the bowl at leastonce a day.

Her mornings were spent gardening.Her hoe sometimes turned up old pota-toes green and withered that she took ingladly. She would wash and boil themcarefully. Everything counted.

She liked to hoe in the early morningafter she had rung the bells, before the sunbeamed its heavy rays on her. She searchedand found some old seeds in her kitchenfor beets and squash which would survivethe light frosts. She sprinkled holy waterover the dirt so that the seeds would gainstrength and not be poisoned by at the evillurking in the soil.

One morning she didn’t see the cat inthe church but found it staring at her inthe garden. It looked grayer than in thedark tower, and its fur was slicked backwith wet streaks, as though it hadgroomed itself before coming to visit her.Then it moved, pulling at the neck of alarge dead rabbit.

The cat dropped its gift at Marusia’sfeet.

“What’s this? Do you want me to burythat thing or eat it?” She laughed andprodded it with her hoe. It looked healthyenough but who could know.

“I’ll make it for you,” she said. “You’llbe my guest. My first one since I cameback home.”


She found that the rabbit’s skin tore offeasily enough, and its flesh was pink. Sheroasted the legs and boiled a generous por-tion of potatoes and carrots.

She didn’t notice the cat silently follow-ing her into the house. It sat on the sinkwhere her granddaughter’s cat used to rest,and it stared at the old woman, ready topounce.

“We’re going to die so let’s at least eatwell and look good in our coffins,” shesmiled at the cat. “But who will bury me?Will you?” She laughed and felt giddybecause of the live presence of the animal.

“Will you drag me into the field andbury me? No I suppose not. Dogs are bet-ter at burying. Cats—what good are they?Except that you at least let me talk to you.Oh, and you did bring me this feast.” Shethought briefly about the dog catcher andhoped that she wouldn’t be forced to turnthe cat in to him.

For dinner they shared the rabbit.Marusia declared that it tasted as sweet andfine as the ones her father caught forChristmas dinner. “Not one difference,” shetold the cat who scuttled to a window ledgeand licked its bloody paws.

Thank you.


PAXSON: Thank you very much. Actually, I wantto jump in with something first that I was think-ing about right at the end of your talk, Kate. Yousaid something that really was quite striking. Itmade me sit here and think about it dumbfound-ed for a while. Progress is a tragedy, you implied.In this room, in the wideness of this room, thereis a lot of conversation that has happened all daylong about the need for energy. What are wegoing to do about these real human beings withreal problems? How do they live? How do theyget energy?

But you are talking about this really very hardand painful century, and I want to ask you, maybeboth of you, to think about this question.Comment a little bit about progress, and whatprogress is and what it can be. We are where we

are and we are in a place. We are not a hundredyears ago in the world. We are in a certain placenow, and we have needs and demands, but maybewe can reflect on that a little bit to get the con-versation on the floor going, because I think thereare people on the floor who might be thinking insomewhat different ways about this issue.

BROWN: One enjoys progress in a city likeWashington, D.C., or New York, or Berlin orLondon. But if you live someplace in the margin,what you experience is, more often than not, thewake of progress. You get what lies in the wake ofall the things that happen in the big cities, thethings that happen in places that are lucky enoughto be prosperous. I once saw a list of the top 10environmental disasters of the last couple ofdecades, and they all happened in places I neverheard of before. They happened in far out territo-ries on the margins of countries, usually on themargins of major countries—some marginal cityin Pakistan, for instance, or on the edge ofMexico. And I do not know if that is an accident,but I think it is worth considering. We have nothad any major environmental disaster in NewYork that I know of.

ZABYTKO: What was interesting to me when Iwas writing the book was the total disregard theSoviet government had for the population. Theyhad progress, yes, in nuclear energy and all thesepower plants in Chernobyl, and all this stuff.Interestingly, when I visited the Soviet Unionback in the 1970s for the first time, they werereally big on the word progress. They were alwayssaying, “We have the biggest tractor in the world,we have the best electrical stations here,” andthings like that. This was their idea of progress.But they did not care for their population. Theydid not care that these people were dying fromradiation immediately after the explosion. Theywould hide the truth from them as they wouldhide the truth in other ways. So it is a relativeterm. It is sort of a spin, this progress.

I was trying to bring that out in writing thebook, how very little the people mattered to thegovernment.That was just the norm. Peasant is nota derogatory term at all. Actually, I would havebeen proud to be in Marusia’s place instead of[that of] the progressive people at the plant who


were making these decisions. This is a womanwho was trying to just live her life with nature asmuch as she could. She worked on a collectivefarm, and basically this plant was in her backyardand it blew up.They did not protect her then, andthey did not protect her after she was evacuated,either. This is based on a true story.

PAXSON: Now that you are beginning a docu-mentary, can you talk a little bit about the con-versations, the kind of conversations that you’vehad with survivors of Chernobyl?

ZABYTKO: I have not interviewed any. This is thepoint of going to do the documentary. People askme how much research I did. Well, I did not doany research, really, in the conventional way,except to read newspaper accounts and hearwhatever I could on the radio and the news, andthat is about it. I took an extraordinary situation,Chernobyl. This could have been about theHolocaust. This could have been about the tsuna-mi in Indonesia. This could have been aboutHurricane Katrina. I took this extraordinary situ-ation, and because I had a personal attachment—being Ukrainian, that part of the world, which Ifind very interesting anyway, and I do have a per-sonal bond—the story just came through.

The whole point is to make a particularinstance into some sort of universal transcen-dence, and trying to teach people. I do not knowwhat I was trying to teach, actually. That was notmy agenda; I do not have an agenda when I writea story. But some sort of moral truth or somemoral question is raised in the process.

BROWN: I went a couple of years ago to the zoneof evacuation and talked to people who were stillliving there. I found it remarkable that there wasnot much self-pity to be found there. It was just,“We have always lived here, we still live here,and we only eat things that come from the trans-ports. We never eat anything locally anymore.”And in the next breath, I’m being offered a driedlittle fish.

I said, “Did you get this out here?”“Yeah, yeah, but these are clean fish.”There was this sort of remarkable staying

power that I found extraordinary. From what Iunderstand, there are more people coming back

now. Perhaps from what I understand of MaryMycio’s work, the people who were evacuatedwere put in what we would recognize very well inAmerica, these single-family dwellings, all grid-ded out in straight lines on this field. They justplopped them into these homes.Those older peo-ple are dying at faster rates than the people whoremained in their homes within the zone. Theyhad trouble handling the stress. The stress of thetransition was somehow worse than the stressfrom radiation. So I found that sort of an interest-ing comparison.

QUESTION: I have a long-time interest in Russia,but I am with the Eisenhower MemorialCommission. I am fascinated by this session andthe way in which numbers fail to communicatewith regard to the human condition. I was think-ing as we dealt with the numbers this morning—the experts in numbers, truths, and progress—it isall wrapped together, from my understanding ofhistory, how poorly those numbers communicatethe reality of what we experience to our largerpopulation, which in a democratic society has tobe very important to us. I think if I were justwearing my hat as a citizen, I would be very sus-picious of the numbers I heard today in terms oftheir ability to communicate the reality of thesevery large events that we are talking about. So Ithink this panel is very important in a way that Iam not articulating very well. It is somehowlinked to the rest of our fellow citizens as we alltry to participate in making these decisions,whether about nuclear energy or what have you.So I think I would like to compliment the panelorganizers for sort of facing these issues, because Ifind you both very eloquent but leaving me—contrary to what you just heard—speechlessalmost. Numbers do not do it.

QUESTION: This question is for Dr. Brown. I amnot a Russia specialist, but from what I have readabout the geography of the marshes region, itmakes it very difficult to move large militaryforces quickly. As a result, the main German andSoviet movements tended to avoid that region.Now obviously that did not prevent the workingof the Holocaust and some of the other thingsthat you described. But I am interested whether inyour book you get into the influence of the geog-


raphy of that region on what happened in WorldWar I and World War II?

BROWN: No, not really. I came across documentswhere the Germans would say, “We hold that ter-ritory in name alone.” By late 1942, 1943, noGerman officer or soldier could go in there with-out getting picked off by the partisans. That iswhy the partisans chose to use that as their base ofoperations, because it was so hard to get throughand you needed to have all this local knowledgeto work it.

QUESTION: I read that the Germans used thePrypiat marshes area to test the V-1 rocket proto-types, and the Polish resistance in the area actual-ly retrieved one of these, collected intelligence onit, and sent it to the Home Army people. It wascommunicated to the [Polish] government-in-exile in London.

BROWN: Amazing. I did not know that.

QUESTION: I am not sure where this comment isgoing to go but it strikes me as very interesting.We have a creative writer, an anthropologist, anda historian on this panel, all of whom approachthe epic story of Chernobyl through individuallives and in some cases tell the story through veryparticular individual lives. The old woman whomoved back, the woman in the far north ofRussia who is talking about her family—theimage that all three of you capture is very differ-ent in one particular way from the image thatcame up earlier in the day about the psychologi-cal effects of Chernobyl.

One of the strong images that came up thismorning had to do with the Chernobyl syn-drome—the idea that we are Chernobyl victims,not Chernobyl survivors. But all three of you talkabout individuals who in some ways areChernobyl survivors, not Chernobyl victims.

Maggie, your woman said, “My husband, myboys, do not hide behind anyone else.” Is this apeculiarity? One question you always get is aboutthe extent to which this is a peculiarity of ananthropologist going into the field, or a creativewriter sitting at a typewriter and having a charac-ter come to mind. Is there something more sys-tematic going on here about what it takes to be a

survivor of Chernobyl rather than a victim? Andif so, what do you think those characteristics are?

ZABYTKO: Well, a crucial matter when I wrotethe book in the early 1990s was that the charac-ters, especially Marusia—the main character, theold woman—are not based on any one person.She is really based on a conglomeration of per-sonalities, and all I came up with when I waswriting her as a character was that she was a verystrong woman. And this is what I have experi-enced in my own life with the women in my life,my mother and my grandmother, but also goingto what was the Soviet Union, seeing thewomen in action. It was just something that leftan incredible impression on me. I did not think,“She is a survivor, I am going to write this storyof her as a survivor.” It just turned out that waybecause of the circumstances she was forced toface in the plot, in the story. So she just natural-ly evolved into that.

It is like Flannery O’Connor, the Americanfiction writer, said that you have to know yourpeople, and somehow I just know my people.Thisis how this woman would act. She is strongenough to come back to her village after it hasbeen irradiated. My goodness. She is not going tostarve. She is just going to survive. That is just howthe story is. This is how these people are. I neveronce thought of them as victims, curiouslyenough. It is interesting you brought that up.

PAXSON: That is a really interesting question. Forme, as an anthropologist, this has to do withagency. When you look up close at people’s lives,and you listen to them for a really, really longtime, they seem like whole, fully fleshed-outpeople because that is what they are. Fullyfleshed-out human beings have wills, they haveagency, and they have the ability to make deci-sions in their lives. I feel that fairly strongly. It isnot everyone that likes to think about that first.But this is a political issue. This can become apolitical issue in a lot of our fields. To whatextent are human actors actors, and to whatextent are they acted upon? And I think thatboth of these sides of the equation are reallyimportant. These are people who are actors.There are plenty of people who will come backinto their villages, and into their lives, and figure


out how do they wrestle with the catastrophesand the joys that they have in front of them, onthe one hand, and with the terrible, terriblethings that happen to them that they have nocontrol over, on the other. I think the questionof agency is really sort of at the heart of a lot ofwhat has come up today. Because we also have tobe able to say, this is a terrible thing that hap-pened to these people, and we as a human soci-ety owe them some measure of help and healing,on the one hand, and on the other hand, wecannot think of these people as simply expres-sionless specks in the wind. They are humanbeings, and they have the ability to have creative,imaginative lives as well. So is it something spe-cific to Ukrainian or Belarusian or Russian vil-lagers? I would not go that far, but I would thinkthat when you slow down and you pay attentionand you listen to people’s lives, the picture thatemerges is much, much more complex andmuch more subtle. Then I think we get a muchbetter sense of what the role of agency can be.

QUESTION: Your comment about technologybefore set me to recall a talk I listened to lastJune by a specialist in the ethnology or culturalanthropology of the Chernobyl region. He is afellow from Rhode Island, Roger WilliamsUniversity, a fellow by the name of MyronStachiw. He was a Fulbright fellow, and he wentthere to study this, and to work with theanthropologists, trying to preserve the culturalheritage of this region. One of the observationshe made was that even with all the technologyof the 20th century, it still does not make a heckof a lot of difference for these people. They havenow gone back to the 19th century or even ear-lier with their farm implements, for instance. Allof the collective-farm equipment is rusted out;it is not maintained. The common buildings areall destroyed. These people have nothing to turnto, so they have gone back to their very folkmethods of reaping and winnowing and sewingand gathering of honey, for instance. He says itis a tremendously primitive society at this point.Except for the transports that bring in food,these people actually do their own farming intheir own very primitive ways, and they haverelearned how to manufacture their own equip-ment, including their plows. I do not even

know half of the terminology for all theseinstruments. But it is an interesting thingbecause it has gone through a whole cycle ofdevelopment and destruction, and now they aregoing back to the much earlier stage of devel-opment. That is just a comment. It just struckme when you mentioned it.

BROWN: I do not know how developed it reallywas in terms of agriculture. It is not the type ofplace where you can bring a big combine. Thereare some fields, but it is very swampy. It isabsolutely gorgeous. There are streams, swamps,and marshland, and when you have a little bit ofland you farm it, but there is not that much thata tractor can plow through. I remember visitingthis cemetery, and in cemeteries people leavethings at the graves. The crosses themselves fromthe 1960s and 1970s were all handmade ofwood, and the baskets—they were all handwo-ven baskets. And there was even a bort, whichwas this honey hive that was just carved out of alog. It was still hanging up there. It had beenbolted by a big metal screw, but other than that,it could have been the 18th century.

ZABYTKO: And I can just add that I think thisreturn to what we would call more primitivetechnology first of all happened throughout theSoviet period, and second of all once the SovietUnion collapsed and the kolhospy [collectivefarms—Ed.] collapsed, and so this was what wasleft with or without tragedies like Chernobyl.

QUESTION: When you interviewed people inthe affected region, did you get the feeling thatChernobyl was just another string of events thathappened to people? Do they feel like it is justan event they have to overcome like their par-ents did—that they did not have any trust ingovernment?

BROWN: I was not interviewing people aboutChernobyl because the book I wrote when I wasdoing most of these interviews ended in the1950s. But it did not come up when I was insome of these villages, not so close to Chernobyl,but farther south around Zhytomyr. I would askolder women, what about the Famine and whatabout collectivization?


Often what came up was the Holocaust. “Oh,we were rich in Jews in our village, and they cameand took our Jews.”

And, “Well, let me show you the graves.”I saw many graves outside many villages, not

because I asked.But a little bit farther south, Chernobyl did not

come up that much.

QUESTION: I have a question that tries to bringtogether some of the different themes that havecome up in the morning sessions and in the after-noon sessions, and that is of betrayal. A lot of thediscussions this morning focused on Chernobyl asa betrayal of trust in government, of the promiseto protect people, to warn them of harm or tohelp them recover from the pains and hardshipsinflicted by mistakes of governments or engineersor states.

And yet here there is a paradox in that thepeople who seem to be closest to that tragedy—the people who are living in the zone of alien-ation—in a way seem to be the least affected bythe sense of betrayal, at least in the part that youspoke to. They go on with their lives. They kindof cope with the needs of subsistence farming.They offer fish to people who visit. And yet, ifyou look at the people outside of that area, thebetrayal is really visceral to a lot of them, to thosewho are directly affected and ill, to those whowere evacuated, to those who fear becoming vic-tims and who are not clear if their health prob-lems are related to Chernobyl or not, to thosewho found a voice in opposing the closed natureof the system—the people like AllaYaroshinskaya, the people she represented. Iteven extends to the international communitythat was trying to understand what happened. Allof those people saw this as a betrayal.

Given your intuition for what is happening inthat area and the research that you have done, allthree of you, I am interested in whether or notyou see any potential to overcome that feeling ofbetrayal, if the sources of overcoming that feelinglie in the experiences themselves?

ZABYTKO: This is interesting because my charac-ters feel very much betrayed by what happened tothem, but the need to return to their ancestralhome overrides that, and they still demand things

from the government. They want their pensions,they want their cow. They think they should stillbe taken care of in the old way, especially becauseof Chernobyl. Now that is intuitive and that is justmy characters, so I do not know.

BROWN: I do not have any prescriptions for thefuture as a historian. I am outside of my territo-ry when we look forward. Chernobyl also coin-cided with perestroika and the bid for autonomyand independence. There is a tradition in that thefounding moments for many central Europeannations are moments of great tragedy or loss:Mohács for the Hungarians, and Kosovo for theSerbians, and May 3rd for the Poles. Poles have awhole string of defeats. And “that is the reasonwe should have our nations, because we havebeen so martyred and we have suffered so great-ly.” So with that tradition, it is going to be hardto get over victimization and that sense of betray-al if you continue to justify your existence basedon that kind of narrative.

PAXSON: Your question makes me think aboutwhat betrayal at that level is, and there are lots ofdifferent kinds of betrayal. This is the kind ofbetrayal where people as communities and asindividuals blame something way up outside ofthemselves like a state. How does that work?That is complicated. I am thinking in my headabout this woman who has her two sons in theCaucasus as soldiers and a husband who, yearsearlier, was sweeping off the roof in Chernobyl.Why did she end that interview by saying, “Myhusband and sons—they do not hide behindother people’s backs”?

Now on the one hand, she has provided hermen and her family to the state and she contin-ues to do so, and that is trust at one level. She didnot go running off anywhere. Nobody ran away.So there is a level of trust there still. But there isanother level—and I have been grappling withthis over the years—of trying to figure out howin rural Russia you have this relationship with thestate. On the one hand, the state is granted agreat deal of trust. On the other hand, peopledirect a different message to the state: “Leave usalone, and we can do this without you, and wewill be what we can be in our space, on our ownland, in our own parcel.”


I do not know what will happen in terms oftrust or betrayal, as events like these continue, butI do not think it can be good for the enterprise ofcreating trust for events like this to accumulate inthe way that they have.

QUESTION: My question has to do with politicsand inclusivity. I think one of the interestingthings that the historical perspective brings outis the enduring power of the village and what is“ours” specifically as opposed to what isinvolved with the state. I was wondering if wecan make any sort of historical judgments basedon the reactions of people to the Chernobylincident, to the experience with the Sovietideal of progress, and maybe even to the sort ofUkrainian ideal of progress that has been theofficial stance since independence. I think eachof the successive changes in regime had its ownvision of progress, but there was a tendency tobe sort of exclusionary in decision making, andno one necessarily thought to involve people atthe village level. I am interested in post-totali-tarianism. What kind of implications doesChernobyl offer to us, given that there is this

long history of regimes that believed themselvesto be progressive?

BROWN: I think you are right. In each case, thepeople who came in with ideas to improve theplace had ideas that were very prescriptive: “Thisis what you should do. You are a peasant, you aredumb, dark, and we will tell you what to do.”

Or “You are a Slav and you are dumb,” or“You are a Jew”—whatever it was.

I do not see a major movement to change thatin some ways.

[…] I think there are great fears about nuclearpower, but more nuclear power plants are goingup. It would be great to have that kind of conver-sation, and maybe that relates to this questionabout betrayal and victimization: “How are wegoing to take control of the situation and takecharge, rather than have these things happen to usand be victims of them?”

PAXSON: I think Kate’s last comment is a goodone to have resonate in our minds as we thinkabout moving forward.



Film Screening: The Camera’s PerspectiveScreening and discussion of Oscar-winning documentary Chernobyl Heart

Chair, Margaret Paxson, Senior Associate, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

William Novick, pediatric cardiac surgeon; Founder and Medical Director, International Children’sHeart Foundation

MARGARET PAXSON: This is a moment nowwhen we can illuminate the ideas that came uptoday with images of human beings who havelived through this tragedy. I am not going to intro-duce the movie at any length. We have heardabout it several times today. It is called ChernobylHeart. It is a Downtown TV Documentaries pro-duction. The director and producer is MaryannDe Leo, and the production coordinator is AngieKenny. We have here today Dr. William Novick.I will be introducing him after the film. He isprominently featured in the film. So with no fur-ther ado, Chernobyl Heart.

FILM SCREENING

PAXSON: Dr. William Novick is a professor ofsurgery and pediatrics at the University ofTennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) inMemphis. Dr. Novick came to UTHSC inSeptember 1993 and became the EndowedProfessor of the Paul Nemir Jr. Chair ofInternational Child Health in October 1999. Dr.Novick is founder and medical director of theInternational Children’s Heart Foundation, anonprofit organization whose primary focus is onimproving the care of children in developingcountries. To date, the foundation has operatedon over 2,400 children with congenital heartdefects in 19 different countries. In 2002, Dr.Novick was presented the Red Star of Croatia byPresident Stipe Mesic for his humanitarian serviceto the children of Croatia. In 2004, Dr. Novickwas awarded the Franskaya Scorina HumanitarianPresidential Medal for his dedication to the healthand wellbeing of Belarusian children with con-genital heart defects. Born, raised, and educatedin Alabama, Dr. Novick did his undergraduate

work at Troy State University and graduate workin biochemistry and medicine at the University ofAlabama at Birmingham. He received his trainingin general surgery at the Graduate Hospital of theUniversity of Pennsylvania and cardiac training atthe University of Alabama at Birmingham. He isboard certified in general and thoracic surgery andis a member of many professional organizations.

Thank you so much for joining us today andfor being willing to answer some questions. Iknow this is quite a stunning and powerful movie,and we might all be as speechless as I feel rightnow, but perhaps there are some questions thatDr. Novick could answer.

WILLIAM NOVICK: Let me just bring you up todate on the situation in Belarus for children withheart disease, so that you have a little bit of an ideaof where we have gone since this film was pro-duced. The foundation started in Belarus inDecember of 1996. The film was made on ourtrip of October 2002. Our program was discon-tinued for political reasons in 1998, and we wereasked to return late in 1999. We were finally ableto put a trip back together in 2001.

This hospital that you saw us operating in wasa children’s hospital of Minsk, the number onechildren’s surgical center for the city and oblastof Minsk. It was funded entirely by the city ofMinsk and received no federal funding from thenational level.

At the reinstitution of our program in 2001,we had the opportunity to write a white paperabout the issues of the children in Belarus withcongenital heart disease, which was received bythe Ministry of Health, and over the ensuingtwo years we spent a great deal of time discussingthe issues for children with heart disease in

Belarus with presidential advisers as well as theMinistry of Health.

In early 2003, the president finally came for-ward and created a list of the major health careissues for the children of Belarus. At the top of thelist was congenital heart disease. Second on thelist—as you saw, a number of these children havesevere neurological and physical deficits, so neuro-logical disease was second on the list.

In early 2004, construction started on a new$24 million congenital heart center in Minskattached to the first children’s hospital, the ideabeing that this new center would become a repub-lic hospital; that is, it would be funded strictlythrough the federal government rather thanthrough the city of Minsk. I had the good fortuneof attending the opening of this hospital the dayafter the presidential medal was presented to me,on December 30, 2004.

Prior to the opening of this hospital, approxi-mately 150 children received surgery on a yearlybasis at that particular institution and 150 others atan institution across town. With the combinationof these two institutions into the new NationalChildren’s Cardiac Center, we hope to be able toincrease the caseload for the children of that coun-try. In the first 12 months, they operated on over

700 children with heart disease, which is an all-time high and double any previous number ofchildren who received such operations over acomparable time period.

We continue to go twice a year. As a matter offact, I just flew in from Minsk on Sunday, whereI assisted them not only in operating on compli-cated cases but training and educating the nurses,physicians, and technicians on a regular basis.

We have done the same in Ukraine, at whatused to be known as the Kyiv Institute ofCardiovascular Surgery, and is now known as theAmosov Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery.Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government hasneither seen fit nor had the funds to build a cen-ter equivalent to the one in Minsk, which, quitefrankly, is probably better equipped than theWashington National Children’s Medical Center.

So as difficult as this film is to watch from thepoint of view strictly of children with heart dis-ease, things have become very much better.


QUESTION: I used to work in Ukraine. Thankyou, I think, on behalf of all of us. We are so verymoved by the generosity of you and your profes-sional colleagues. We understand that theChernobyl accident occurred 20 years ago. Arethese problems likely to continue for children? Igather these problems arise from the Chernobylaccident?

NOVICK: Let me try to answer the latter part ofyour question first. Congenital heart disease isseen all over the world. Ukraine and Belarus arenothing special with regard to the total numberof children who are born with congenital heartdisease. Approximately one percent of all livebirths, regardless of where you are in the world,are children who will have heart disease. So thatis 1 per 100.

Now the issue in Belarus and in Ukraine—Ihave not traveled to western Russia, so I will notspeak to that area—is whether or not the radia-tion induced changes in the parents’ geneticmaterial that resulted in a change in the percent-age of defects of a specific type. Now let me tryand explain that. There have been multiple epi-demiologic studies around the world on what


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types of heart disease occur in children at birth,and it is fairly well studied and fairly well proventhat there are specific percentages of each differ-ent type of heart defect, regardless of where youare in the world. Yes, there are some defects thatare more pronounced in certain areas of theworld, but those have been well classified.

What we have found, unfortunately, is thatthere are two particular defects— which seemto have risen to extremely high levels for raredefects—that are now occurring at very highrates within the children who are being bornwith heart disease in both these countries. Oneof these defects is called Ebstein’s anomaly,which is generally only seen in about half a per-cent of all children born with heart disease.Normally, in a country the size of Ukraine, youwould see three or four of those children per year. What we have seen is that that num-ber has tripled.

The other defect, the Chernobyl heart,which is the multiple holes in the heart, is seeneven less frequently than the Ebstein’s anomaly,and we are seeing as many as 8 to 10 of thosechildren per year.

So has it caused an increase in the number ofcongenital heart defects in the general popula-tion? No. Has it changed the distribution tomore complicated defects? We think that there isenough soft information to have a look at this ina serious epidemiologic way.

QUESTION: It is interesting that you say that it isone percent in Ukraine and Belarus, and onepercent around the world—with congenitalheart defects, the percentage has not changed. AsI was watching this, I was looking for that linkwith radiation, and I did not quite see it direct-ly in the film. It occurred to me that this is moreof a condition of general social public-healthproblems in this part of the world. Is that part ofwhat you are addressing when you go there?

NOVICK: Yes. I think that in the film you noticeit is said that congenital defects had increased by250 percent, and that is an overall statement thatincludes not only cardiac defects but also mus-culoskeletal, neurological, immunologic, etc. Ido not believe that the care of children withheart disease, and the associated problems for

those children, has been the direct result ofChernobyl, by and large. I think it has been, aswe have discussed all day, a combination of fac-tors. Chernobyl occurred at the time of the dis-solution of the former Soviet Union, and thecomplete loss of support for many of therepublics.

Unfortunately, the mind-set throughoutBelarus and throughout much of Ukraine is thatthese children are being born [with cardiacdefects] as a direct result of the radiation. I have tosay that I agree and do not agree with that state-ment. We have not seen the overall incidence ofcongenital heart disease increase substantially.What we have seen is that more-complex defectsare occurring more frequently. It is a general pub-lic health problem. Yes.

QUESTION: Thank you very much for your veryimportant work. I have two serious comments.As a specialist, and as a sociologist who studiesthis problem, I have read the report of the IAEApartly presented by Mr. Louvat today. I can neveragree with the point of this report. Supposedly,we must forget Chernobyl because the result ofChernobyl is only the 4,000 victims. But I willnever forget my visit, and I am absolutely surethat all who see this film will never forget, andnever agree with the IAEA report.

The second point is that I am very upset, Iam worried, and maybe I will be happy if I amnot right, but I think that the time of a newwave of nuclear energy is starting. If the firstwave started in Europe, particularly in Francein the 1970s, now we can observe a shift toAsia, and we can observe the very fast growthof the nuclear industry in China and India. Thedevelopment of nuclear programs in Iran andNorth Korea is a very dangerous tendency. Andas a specialist, I can observe the very dangeroustendency of the development of nuclear pro-grams in Russia in the territory of the city ofOrsk, which is situated in the Urals. Chernobylnow is concentrated. Its nuclear waste, its ura-nium and plutonium and many other problems,are there. The Russian government is planningto create new nuclear spots in the territory ofRussia. We have many problems around theworld now concerning nuclear programs. Thatis why your work and your film are very impor-


tant for all of us and for many people. Thankyou very much again.

NOVICK: You are welcome. I am about as special-ized a physician as you can become, and theprincipal point of our work—regardless ofwhether it is in Belarus, Ukraine, or any of theother multiple countries that we travel to—is toprovide these children with an opportunitytoward a life that they may not [otherwise] havebecause of the absence of adequate education,training, and experience [on the part] of thelocal physicians.

Now, the involvement that our group has hadas a direct result of the work in the areas whereChernobyl occurred has moved us—or myself inparticular—into this discussion of nuclear disas-ters. I had the unique opportunity two years agoat the United Nations to speak before a group atthe General Assembly when this film was shown,which was the year that it won the AcademyAward. And I do not think that my feelings havechanged very much with regard to how we treatour Earth, how we treat our people, and wherewe are headed. And I have many of the sameconcerns that you do. We were given one Earth.We all need to get together, and we all need todetermine are we going to survive here or are wenot. It is really simpler than our governments andour leaders would like for us to believe.Unfortunately, governments and religions canmake life extremely difficult for all of us. Whenyou break it down for me to the level of a childwhose life is dependent upon someone’s inter-vention, then I do not think it matters whetherthey are Russian or Sudanese or North Korean. Ido not think it matters whether they are Muslimor Orthodox or Catholic or pagan. I think that iswhat we all need to remember: what complicatesour life are the laws and the rules that we artifi-cially put in front of just being people. So we willkeep doing what we are doing all over the world:trying to make a difference, and help children,and help physicians and nurses become educatedso that they can care for their own. We will haveto deal with issues like nuclear catastrophes.

It has been 20 years. I do not think the worldshould forget. There is a very old saying thatperhaps we should all remember when wedepart today, and that is that those of us who

forget the past are doomed to repeat those mis-takes in the future. I think that statement sort ofsums up what we should do about Chernobyl. Ido not think we can ever forget it. It is an ongo-ing, unnatural experiment that has been placedon these people, and we need to do somethingserious to correct this problem.

PAXSON: I do not believe that there is a way tosummarize this better, and I am really grateful forwhat you just said.

QUESTION: Someone had mentioned that therewas a need for continuity in data and studies, andyou are in a unique position. You have been thereand you are going to continue. I was just curiouswhether your organization is gathering informa-tion, and, if so, was any of it provided to theForum report or the UN?

NOVICK: As a scientist—and I think of myself notonly as a physician, but also as a scientist becauseof my previous training—we have all been trainedto be observant, to observe changes that occur orabnormalities, and to document those things. Iwould have to say that I was a little remiss in myduties. We do keep data on all these children. Wehave a huge database of kids all over the world.But we had a very unique thing happen to usrecently. In 1994, we went into Ukraine for thefirst time. We were asked specifically to come inand help with two serious problems that they werehaving. One was this thing called Ebstein’s anom-aly, where they had a very high mortality rate forchildren they were operating on. The other wasthis Chernobyl heart—multiple holes in the heart,where children were declared inoperable. Thosewere the two issues they really wanted us to helpthem with. So we taught them a new techniquefor this Ebstein’s problem, and we invented a newoperation for this Chernobyl heart problem. Andover the years, Ukrainians, who are without adoubt some of the most ingenious people I haveever dealt with (my grandmother is Ukrainian, soI could probably say that safely), learned very wellhow to deal with this Ebstein’s anomaly. So afterabout five years, we really did not need to helpthem on a routine basis anymore, but we stayed incontact through research and through other mutu-al projects that we had.


Last year, I was asked to participate in thegathering of all the data from the AmosovInstitute of Cardiovascular Surgery for thosepatients with Ebstein’s anomaly since the incep-tion of its hospital. This is 40 years. We have1965 as our start date, and we stopped collect-ing data on the patients in February of 2005 tocollate and analyze the data.

Now, what we found is that pre-Chernobylthere were about three and a half patients peryear receiving operations for Ebstein’s. Post-Chernobyl, that number went to nine. Nowthat does not sound like a lot, but it is a 160percent increase in the total number of patientsreceiving operations on a yearly basis.

Our intervention did not occur until 1994.If you look at the number of patients referredon a yearly basis for surgery, that number wentup in 1987, and it skyrocketed. It went straightfrom 3 cases a year to 14.

Now we have gone back and looked at thisa little bit, because this was an unusual finding.We were only looking to see whether or not weimproved the situation, how the patients weredoing, and so forth. We did not look at thisfrom the point of view of what happened withChernobyl. This fell into our laps. So wethought, OK, maybe it is because our inter-vention resulted in more referrals. Well, no.The number went up before we came. Then wethought, OK, if that is not it, then perhaps itwas secondary to the fact that the cardiologistswere holding back patients and they referredthem later. And we looked at that, and it turnedout that the patients operated on afterChernobyl were younger by a significant differ-ence compared to the patients operated onbefore Chernobyl.

So tomorrow at the U.S. congressionalbriefings, I am going to present this data tothem and suggest that perhaps this idea thatthere are not ongoing problems is not exactlyright, at least in the area of congenital heartdisease, and suggest perhaps that they shouldlook at the possibility of doing a serious epi-demiologic study in both Ukraine and Belaruson children with congenital heart disease. Ifthis casual observation has found this issue,then what would real, strenuous scientificobservation reveal?

QUESTION: Are your tissue samples from theseoperations, like the cells around the hole, beingsent anyplace for genetic studies?

NOVICK: No. I am walking around holding thisreport because I wanted to make a point.Through the course of the day there has beendiscourse back and forth about what really hap-pened there. I think all of you are more or lessfamiliar with this subsequent report, and Iwould like to sort of put the following argu-ment forward.

In 1986 in the former Soviet Union, the sci-entific collection of epidemiologic studies andsubsequent publication were almost nonexistent.There were demographics on patients, yes. Butstrenuous science, not really.

There was a study produced by theUkrainian Academy of Medical Sciences in1998 that showed that there was a significantincrease in the number of children being bornwith congenital defects in general from the timeperiod 1987 through 1997. Within that, therewere several children studied who were the off-spring of liquidators, and what they found wasthat a number of those children—a very signif-icant number above control population—hadbreakage in their genetic material, in theirDNA. That report is actually available online inEnglish now. I think that the Greenpeace side, ifyou will, of this is that a certain amount ofmaterial has not been collected, has not beenvalidated, has not been looked at seriously. AndI would make the same argument, that it is verydifficult to look back at this. The way we intendto do it is to pick a very specific population ofpatients and to analyze their DNA for breakage.

QUESTION: As you know, in the case of thyroidcancers, specifically the papillary thyroid can-cers, [these cancers] have been tied to not justchromosome breakage, but to specific breaks atspecific points with translocations and dele-tions. We all know that out of those papillarythyroid cancers, some will have a genetic basis,some will not. The same thing is true of breastcancer. What chromosome region had beenimplicated, if at all? And if not, are there anyplans to do such genetic studies around the cellsaround the hole?


NOVICK: I do not have all the data from thatstudy from the Ukrainian Academy of MedicalSciences. The data was only recently passed tome by a member of the academy, who also hap-pens to be a pediatric heart surgeon in Kyiv. It isour plan to review this data completely to deter-mine whether or not any of that has been done.I guess the point that I would like to make is alittle bit of the following with regard to com-paring thyroid cancer in children to congenitalheart disease. The issue with thyroid cancer, Ithink, is that the very significant bump in thenumber of cases was apparent to everybodythroughout the health care system in Ukraineand in Belarus.

With regard to congenital heart disease, sincethere was not such a large bump in the total num-ber of cases, then there was no perception thatthere was an issue with congenital heart disease. Sonobody really looked at that group of childrenclosely. Retrospective data is nonexistent, certain-ly in Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Health isinterested in looking at this, but only on a defect-specific basis. And so we focused on those childrenwho have Ebstein’s anomaly.

QUESTION: Are you able to look at parallel studiesof miscarriages and stillbirths to see if there is a risein defects in children who do not survive, who arenot viable, or who are not born, basically?

NOVICK: I would suppose that if the Belarusiangovernment were to allow that, we would beable to do that. The scope of this study is goingto be extremely limited. I think that we wouldhave significantly more success with theUkrainian government. We have very good rela-tions with President Lukashenko, but when youstart shaking the Chernobyl dust in Minsk, rela-tions start to become frayed. So we will takewhat little bit of positive reaction we have andrun with that.

QUESTION: Here is a question that has been hang-ing in my mind the whole day, and, in a way, it isbeyond your expertise, but perhaps you can shedsome light on this. It is a question of how do weend up with projections as wildly different as4,000 and 200,000? The question really becomes,are there differences in motivation, are there dif-

ferences in winners and losers, is it a search for thetruth? How does this happen? That seems to meto be a fundamental question that has not beenanswered today. Because if we take at face valuethat everybody is trying to do their best to figureout what the legacy of Chernobyl is, it seems likethe best does not get us to where we need to bebecause everybody’s best is leading in a differentdirection. So what is your sense of what the storyis behind this difference?

NOVICK: You know, that is really a politicallyhot-potato question you have asked. I am sureyou know that. There was a slide put up earlierin the day, a statement made by Kofi Annan thatthe legacy of Chernobyl should not be forgot-ten—the disaster in and of itself, not only at thehuman level but on an environmental level,should never be forgotten. That statement wasmade by Secretary General Annan I think in2000, and yet we find that six years later theUN has issued a statement saying thatChernobyl was not nearly as bad as we allthought it was. I think there are a number ofissues that are causing these gross disparities tobe published. We very much have a serious issuein the world right now with where our energyis going to come from. There are a number ofcountries that are pushing nuclear energy veryhard, and it is the job of the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency to make sure that it issafe and that we use it all around the world.

I do not think there is one single answer toyour question. The Belarusian governmentspecifically would like to reduce the cost that ithas in its payouts to those individuals who live inthe contaminated region. We were in Minsk in2002 when President Lukashenko made a tourof the country and changed all, literally all, ofthe zones and reduced payments, as you saw, toa number of these parents. There are financialissues. I think there are pride issues. I think thereare issues of ego that we all have to deal with.And then I think there are agenda issues. It is onthe agenda of Greenpeace, if you will, to makeany natural environmental disasters sound as badas they can possibly be. It is on the agenda of theInternational Atomic Energy Agency to makenuclear power look as safe as it can possibly be. Ido not think the truth will ever be known, and


I think that the statement earlier in the day thatwe have these two very disparate reports andnothing in the middle is an absolutely true state-ment. And the middle road is the road that weneed to find.

The film obviously is extremely disturbing,and it was designed that way. I know MaryannDeLeo very well and have come to know hervery well over the years. They wanted a specif-ic story told. They wanted the worst possiblestory told.

Everyone has their agenda, and the datakeeping and the secrecy that existed in theUSSR at the time of this accident compoundthe problem that gives us this great disparity. Ifthe data had been collected right, if the record-ing instruments had been available, if, if, if, if,if…. Unfortunately either it was not or theywere not available. And so we are all left to guess.

As you know, your sister organization [theHarriman Institute at Columbia University] hadthis similar meeting yesterday in New York, andone of the points that was brought up in NewYork yesterday by an expert in thyroid cancerwho is Ukrainian and who emigrated to theUnited States about 20 years ago, and is now aprofessor there at one of the universities in NewYork, is look, we do not really know how badthe thyroid cancer issue is because of the num-ber of people who are emigrating out of thecountry. What they noticed in New York is thatthe incidence of thyroid cancer has gone upover the last five years. And when they lookedback at how the population had changed, theyfound out that 50 percent of the immigrantsinto the New York area over the last five yearswere from these regions.

So the numbers that we are hearing comingout of Ukraine and Belarus are falsely low,because their population has now moved to theUnited States, and they are coming up over hereas American thyroid cancers. So the dispersal ofpeople is also, I think, complicating the ability of all of us to gather accurate statistics. Unfort-unately, I think that coupled with all of theother things that we have mentioned during thecourse of the day, the inability to provide accu-rate data is what is giving us these totally dis-parate reports. We have the worst-case scenarioby Greenpeace. We have the best-case sce-

nario—it really did not happen and nobody isbeing irradiated—by the others.

I know that is not an answer to your ques-tion, but over the last four or five years that wehave become involved in this, we have seenpeople in different countries act completely dif-ferently on the issue of Chernobyl. Even thesame individuals have acted differently at differ-ent political times within their country. Therewas absolutely no discussion of Chernobyl.They all knew that I was coming to all of thesetalks and that I would be at the congressionalbriefings. And the only person who was inter-ested in discussing any of this with me and pro-viding me with any information was a memberof the Ukrainian Academy of Medical Sciences,and I think the only reason is that he and I havebeen personal friends for 15 years.

QUESTION: Where are your tissue samplesdeposited after your operations, and did youhave to negotiate any kind of agreement as toownership of the samples?

NOVICK: No, you are not allowed to take any-thing out of the Republic of Belarus that is inany way connected to the human. That isanswer number one. Because we have otherstudies that we would like to do on pulmonaryhypertension, which have nothing to do withChernobyl, and we are not allowed to take onedrop of serum out of that country.

Number two. The tissue samples ostensibly goto the pathology lab. I can tell you that it isextremely rare to get a path report back, though.

PAXSON: Well, to sort of sum up and finish thislong day that we have had, this long, very richday, I kind of want to return to what you werejust addressing. I think that is a question that wascoming to mind for me as well. You take us to aplace where we can sort of return to one of theanimating principles behind this conference. Wecan talk about these issues, hopefully withoutbeing attached to our agendas. Perhaps betweenthe Greenpeace version and the official UN ver-sion, at some point we can approach a morecommon truth because there are complex truthsout there. They may be complex and inconven-ient, but they exist. By letting go of our agen-


COMMEMORATION OF THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER: THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE TWENTY YEARS LATER82

das and by holding on to what you really so elo-quently said, we can remember these are reallyvery human issues, there are children who aresuffering, there are people who are clearly suf-fering. You and this film have left us with indeli-ble images, human images to take away from this

long day, and I am very grateful to you for that,and I think we all are.

We can finish the day with that and take ourheads away and our hearts away full from this longday. So thank you very much, everyone, for stay-ing, and thank you so much, Dr. Novick.


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