Decade
of Resistance 
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Dedicated to Breaking
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Shundahai is a Newe (Western Shoshone) word meaning "Peace and Harmony with all Creation"
April 25, 2006
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Chernobyl: The Day the Empire Cracked
"I remember it very well ... when it happened," said a friend who was in his teens when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor blew in 1986. "I was picking cherries that afternoon." Cherries? In April? The disaster happened April 26, 1986, but the Czech government didn't officially announce it until several months later. A mother I spoke to remembers her daughter, then age 6, running in the rain outside their house, mouth upturned to the sky and then saying how she thought the raindrops were "sandy" and tasted salty. The nuclear cloud passed over the country, but the authorities kept quiet. Only those who listened to Voice of America or the BBC or who worked in certain professions with access to environmental information had any idea. That summer was great for mushrooms. A neighbor of that mother had picked so many she had to wash them in the bath. Presumably they hardly needed cooking in the microwave. I was in the United States when it happened and flew home to Wales wondering if there would be a Europe to fly back to. I do remember, about three years later, stumbling on a small graveyard in the mountains of North Wales, finding a row of babies' graves; they had all been born a few months after Chernobyl — and had all died at less than 18 months old. In this country, in November 1986, the male birthrate plunged. Male embryos are more sensitive to chemical and environmental stress during the third month of development than females. In North Wales, where the cloud had passed into the high hills, there are many farms where sheep pastures are still contaminated by Chernobyl fallout. In the United Kingdom as a whole, 20 years afterward, there are still nearly 400 farms with more than 200,000 contaminated sheep. But Chernobyl was more than a single disaster, however large that one event was. It was the first highly visible crack in the Soviet Union. Things would never again be the same for the evil empire. The West had known the bitter truth of Soviet life for many years before: the 500,000 prisoners in the East, in Siberia, as an example, the repressive regimes in the satellite states — all that, but none of it actually affected us in the West personally. Indeed, there was even the feeling that the Russian people had always been victims, and that somehow that could never change. That was their destiny. But suddenly in April 1986 the tragedy of life in the Soviet Union directly threatened us. Even after Swedish scientists had sounded the alarm, for 48 hours after the explosion the Soviet News Agency Tass was putting out, "Everything is absolutely safe and there is no need to worry; the accident is under control." The staff of the power plant were at first too frightened to tell their superiors, hoping that somehow they could patch it up themselves. Only two months before the accident, Ukrainian Energy Minister Vitaly Sklyarov had stated that the odds of a meltdown were one in 10,000 — and that the Chernobyl plant had strict, reliable controls and three safety systems to prevent an accident. There was a deadly delay in evacuating the area. When the decision was finally made, 50,000 people were moved out in a single afternoon. I remember watching CNN's coverage of the event. The most extraordinary moment was when the Soviet Union realized it couldn't handle the disaster. Ukraine had been, centuries before, the heart of Russian culture. It was one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union, joining in 1921. For all intents and purposes, it was Russia. The year before, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had become first secretary of the Communist Party. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan was pressing ahead with his "Strategic Defense Initiative," the SDI — popularly known as Star Wars — which had been announced in 1984. Chernobyl was the climb-down: the first time the Soviet Union had to admit its bankrupt society to the world. Admission is hardly the word, as it was self-evident. The West was actually invited to assist — which it was anxious to do to save its own skin — and the dark secrecy of the Soviet era was exposed. In November 1986, at the arms limitation summit, Reagan scored a considerable victory over Gorbachev when he made it clear that the United States was prepared to out-spend the USSR with Star Wars. Within two years of Chernobyl, Perestroyka was in full swing, and the first private/state real estate developments with U.S. partners were beginning in Moscow — something that would have seemed unthinkable prior to the accident. The exposure of the emptiness of the Soviet threat, as Chernobyl demonstrated, had ripple effects all over the satellite countries. In Prague, speculation was rife that the regime couldn't last, but no one would attempt to guess how long it could survive in its death throes. Some said it might hang on for another 10 or 20 years. The police were still aggressive in pursuing dissidents, and yet there were signs that the writing on the wall was evident quite low on the food chain. An academic found, to his surprise, that he was allowed out of the country to attend a conference in the United States in 1987 — something he had been denied before. When he returned, the books he had acquired on his visit were, as he had expected, confiscated. However, three weeks later, a policeman delivered them to his home, saying they had been cleared. The officer was very particular to leave his name, as if trying to establish his good credentials for when the time came. "But what made me convinced the end was near," my academic friend said, "was that the rabid communists began to privatize a lot of businesses throughout Czechoslovakia. ... They began to steal in earnest before the regime closed." I contend that Chernobyl was the landmark event, the symbolic and de facto beginning of the end of Soviet communism. The regimes would have ended anyhow, of course: Their lies could not have survived the Internet; the great Czechoslovak infrastructure that the communists had taken over in 1948 was simply worn-out by the 1980s; movements like Solidarity in Poland were well established. But Chernobyl was a worldwide event. It gave the focus for a swifter end. Today, the plant at Chernobyl is at the center of many thousands of acres that have remained depopulated and have become an unnatural nature reserve. Although the old communist statistics stated that only 49 people were killed in the accident, it is thought that up to 40,000 Ukrainians were exposed to and suffered from the residual affects of radiation. The international spotlight that was suddenly put on Chernobyl 20 years ago turned into the torch of Central Europe's freedom.
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2006/Art/0420/opin1.php
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