Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 3 – In the final decades of the Soviet Union, Moscow exploded 124 nuclear devices to help develop mines, change the course of rivers and create storage facilities for waste of various kinds. Sakha (Yakutia), the enormous republic in the Far East, was the site causof 12 of these.
Unlike nuclear tests and accidents elsewhere, the Soviet authorities were able to throw a veil of secrecy over such tests in that distant republic, refusing to tell those near explosion sites what was going on or allowing local officials, scholars and activist to investigate and report on their consequences (kedr.media/stories/otecz-videl-belok-bez-meha/).
In at least two cases, there were massive releases of radiation which left people ill and led to premature deaths, sparking protests when that became possible and prompting the Sakha parliament to adopt a law prohibiting nuclear explosions or even storage of nuclear waste on the territory of the republic.
But in 2000, in the name of unifying the legal space of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin demanded that Sakha cancel that law and the Sakha authorities backed down. But as a new Kedr.Media investigation shows, people in that distant republic are still furious not only about the tests themselves and their consequences but also about Putin’s action.
In many places, Estonia being the best known, protests about environmental depradations by Soviet officials led to protests which became political. Sakha is another such place, although just as its ethno-political protests were the first in the late Soviet period, predating even the 1986 clashes in Kazakhstan, they have been mostly overlocked.
The new 3,000-word Kedr.Media article provides details about what happened in Sakha in this regard and thus allows that enormous but little known republic far from Moscow to take its place near the beginning of these processes, a fact that merits mention not only for historical reasons but also for what may happen in the future.
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