Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 27 – Thirty years
ago this week, the Chernobyl power plant accident set in train the forces that
destroyed the Soviet Union and that are still driving it apart. Not only did it
force Mikhail Gorbachev to turn to glasnost after initially covering up the
event, but more important, it helped dispel the fear Russians, Belarusians and
Ukrainians had of the party bosses.
It highlighted how indifferent the
Communist leaders were to the tragedies of those they liked to say were part of
the family of Soviet peoples, an attitude that continues to this day when as
Belarusian Nobelist Svetlana Aleksievich says, Alyaksandr Luashenka is given
safe food while others are given radioactive kinds (belaruspartisan.org/life/341374/).
And it called attention to the ways in which Moscow was prepared to put
non-Russians at greater risk than Russians from risky nuclear technologies –
half of the USSR’s nuclear power plants were in the non-Russian portion of the country
– but also that when push came to shove, it would protect ethnic Russians
against the others.
It was widely reported at the time and
is very likely true that Soviet planes seeded the clouds to the east of
Chernobyl so that fallout would not spread to Russia, an act of ethnic selectivity
that still riles many in Belarus, the country that suffered and continues to
suffer the most from the disaster (charter97.org/ru/news/2016/4/26/201361/).
The accident brought to the fore heroic
leaders like Mikhail Shushkevych, a specialist on nuclear physics, who by his
heroism and against the wishes of the Soviet authorities, helped save tens of
thousands of people from the horrific diseases and death that radiation can
cause. He became his country’s first president as a result.
Out of self-interest or other
anything but honorable reasons, officials and even scholars in many countries
have played down the impact of Chernobyl. The IAEA ascribed to poverty and poor
medical care illnesses in the radiated zone many medical problems that were
clearly related to Chernobyl. And the post-Soviet regimes have talked about it
largely only on anniversaries.’
But the population
knows and suspects even more as Aleksiyevich has documented and as some
concerned groups have said. Belarusian
ecologist Tatyana Novikova argues that “Chernobyl continues” to this day, with
more than a million Belarusians still living in dangerously contaminated areas (charter97.org/ru/news/2016/4/26/201407/).
Except on anniversaries and when
they think they can extract money from the West, Mensk officials play down the
danger, she continues, and even taken the unwarranted steps of speaking about
Chernobyl only in the past tense and reducing the size of the exclusion zone
each year putting ever more people at risk.
Novikova says that it is “a
dangerous misconception” to think that people can now live safely on the areas
that were contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. Some of the radiation has been washed away,
but the half-life of many of the components is still centuries in the future;
and people in the zone continue to suffer from higher rates of cancer and other
diseases.
Politically, the current Belarusian
regime may ignore all this, but Belarusians are not: they have their fears and they
have drawn political conclusions. Some
of these are suggested by the opposition Rada of the Belarusian Peoples
Republic, a group that Lukashenka pushed out of the way but has not silenced (charter97.org/ru/news/2016/4/26/201361/).
In its declaration
on this year’s anniversary of the 1986 disaster that had to be distributed
first via Facebook, the Rada declared that “Belarus suffered more than all
other countries from Chernobyl, and the consequences of this catastrophe will
be felt in Belarus for many centuries. A third of [its] territory was contaminated”
and illnesses from it increased dramatically.
The Rada said that “direct
responsibility for the Chernobyl catastrophe and its consequences for Belarus
are born by the totalitarian communist regime, both the central all-union
powers and the occupation ‘republic’ authorities of the BSSR” given “the
ineffective soviet system of economics, ineffective soviet technologies” and so
on.
“After the accident, the communist
authorities strove to keep quiet or understate the extent of what had happened
until radiation from Chernobyl spread to the countries of Western Europe.” The
communist leaders displayed “criminal inaction in the most critical first days,”
even holding the May 1 demonstrations and putting more people at risk.
“The Rada of the Belarusian Peoples
Republic points out that Belarus did not receive any compensation from the central
Soviet authorities nor from the legal successor of the USSR – the Russian
Federation.” And it notes that Belarus, using soviet technology and Russian
contractors, has gone ahead and built another nuclear power plant near the
border with Lithuania.
Until Belarus recovers its democracy
and the Belarusian people can express their outrage effectively about all of
this, the Rada says, there is a great danger that all of this will continue and
that the consequences of Chernobyl, which opened the way for the recovery of
Belarusian statehood, will continue to cast a dark shadow on Belarus and her
neighbors.
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