Different Cloud Lingers Over Chernobyl
Sense of victimhood and fatalism does more damage than radiation
By Erika Niedowski
The Baltimore Sun, MD
April 9, 2006
CHECHERSK, Belarus -- The aims are decidedly modest: to mow overgrown grass in front of weathered, long-abandoned houses; open a bakery to provide fresh bread to children at village schools; plant small gardens to yield fruit and vegetables free of radiation.
Those small steps are part of the latest chapter of the long recovery effort in this part of the former Soviet Union 20 years after an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, the deadliest accident in the history of nuclear power.
The accident occurred 120 miles to the southeast, across the border in Ukraine. Thousands of workers labor at the site to maintain the protective concrete shell around the plant's destroyed reactor No. 4 and to remove radioactive material from its three other reactors.
But in this rural district of scattered villages and lonely roads, the recovery effort focuses on a different, debilitating problem: the psychological toll the accident has taken on people here.
In a report released last fall, an international team of experts concluded that the population's sense of fatalism had done more than radiation-induced cancers and the contamination of farmland to put the future of communities in doubt.
Nadezhda Kiryushkina struggles to describe how Chernobyl changed her village in the Chechersk district in Belarus. It's as if she finds the question itself somehow strange.
People have houses, she says, and jobs. She has to have her milk and produce checked periodically for radiation. But not that often, she says. She wishes she could go into the forest to collect birch sap and berries the way she once did.
The tens of thousands of deaths some researchers initially forecast have not occurred. As of mid-2005, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation exposure, most of them among emergency workers who participated in the cleanup, according to the Chernobyl Forum, a group of 100 doctors, scientists and economists from eight United Nations agencies and representatives from the governments of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
More than 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer have developed - the majority in children who drank milk from cows grazing on contaminated grass - but most of the people affected could have a normal life span.
Scientists say that so far there is no convincing evidence that the rates of other cancers have risen. They also point to a lack of statistical evidence for an increase in birth defects or a decrease in fertility caused by Chernobyl.
But traditional medicine has no simple measures or remedies for the impact on mental health.
The Chernobyl Forum described the population's "paralyzing fatalism," showing up as dependence on government, apathy about poor living conditions and people's belief that the situation here can't, and even shouldn't, become better.
"If we continue to treat them like victims, they feel like victims," Zoya I. Trafimchik, coordinator for a U.N. effort to encourage economic development, said of people in the affected areas of Belarus.
Many people seem willing to settle merely for survival, trapping them in what the Chernobyl Forum called a "downward spiral" of isolation, poor health and poverty. That is the mentality that experts say must change.
"Don't wait for the state's help," Tatyana Novak, head of the Chechersk Rural Council, urges residents. "You should start caring about your land and your health."
Projects supported by the United Nations in the affected areas of Belarus include master classes to help revive such industries as beekeeping, devastated by the accident. A new sheep farm will provide mutton and wool socks to children and their families. With U.N. help, residents are seeding flower beds and building greenhouses.
They are, in short, working to reclaim control over their lives.
Worst accident
The explosion at Chernobyl's reactor No. 4 began in the early morning of April 26, 1986, because of engineers' errors, mistakes fatally compounded by design flaws in the reactor. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and for two days the Soviet government made no acknowledgment that an accident had occurred. Only after Sweden detected higher-than-normal radiation over its territory did Soviet officials disclose the disaster.
About 116,000 people were evacuated that spring and summer. Authorities later moved an additional 220,000. Twenty-eight workers died in the first months from radiation poisoning, according to the Chernobyl Forum. Nineteen others died between 1987 and 2004, though not all from radiation. Thyroid cancer has killed 15 more.
Belarus, not Ukraine, bore the brunt of the damage. Seventy percent of the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl landed here. In a nation roughly the size of Kansas with a population of about 10 million people, 1.6 million live in zones deemed "contaminated" by the government.
Studies find that people living in areas with high contamination suffered anxiety levels twice as high as those in unaffected areas. Those residents are also three to four times more likely to report physical problems that have no medical explanation.
Many of the residents have what physicians believe are exaggerated fears about their health and the well-being of their children; some are unsure whether having children is safe.
Others live cavalierly, with little regard for safety precautions. A mother told Dr. Tamara V. Belookaya, head of the Children of Chernobyl committee, of another dilemma: She said she preferred giving her child contaminated berries rather than not be able to provide any nourishment at all.
People who do suffer illnesses, such as heart disease, often blame radiation rather than poor diet, excessive drinking or other factors.
"It might sound strange, but the population does not have a full, complete picture of the consequences of Chernobyl and the impact it has on their health," said Dr. Sergei S. Korsak, head physician at the regional hospital in Chechersk.
Problem of apathy
Part of the problem is apathy. At community meetings, Korsak outlines ways to live safely in contaminated areas, including avoiding burning yard waste.
"I make speeches and people are nodding," he said, "but come spring, they'll be burning leaves and the whole city will be in smoke. How can you make a person healthy when he doesn't want to be? How can you make a person free if he doesn't want to be?"
Labels have only reinforced the situation. Called "Chernobyl victims" by the government and the news media, many residents adopted a victim's mentality and have been reluctant to let it go.
"People blame Chernobyl for problems that have nothing to do with radiation," said Belookaya. "Today there's no panic. There's a feeling of helplessness."
No one is allowed to live within a 6-mile radius of the Chernobyl reactors, and that area is an unintended monument to the scale of the disaster. It's hard to picture what life was like in Pripyat, a planned city for workers and their families built in the plant's shadow, when its population was 50,000. It now is just a grim curiosity for occasional visitors who poke around the abandoned high-rises and stare up at a long-motionless Ferris wheel.
Residents were evacuated hurriedly and without full explanation. They expected to return within days but never did. Laundry stayed for years on clothes lines strung across apartment balconies, as if people were about to come home.
There are 337 people living as permanent "squatters" within 19 miles of the plant, Ukrainian officials say. Most of those living in that exclusion zone, marked by a government checkpoint, were already well past middle age when the disaster occurred.
Their lives are built around constancy and monotony. They receive pensions, care for their chickens and know on which days a shuttle will arrive to deliver groceries or take them to town to pick up supplies.
Save for five cats, Maria Shaparenko, 82, lives alone in the otherwise abandoned village of Illintsi in a modest house decorated with colorful wall hangings, family photographs and framed needlepoints of smiling wildlife. Like everyone else in the village, she and her husband, now dead, were evacuated after the accident, but they sneaked back within two weeks: They wanted to tend to their livestock.
'I'm happy' here
Shaparenko was born here and has every intention of dying here. She doesn't know the radiation level in her yard, or in her home, where she does laundry by hand in big metal buckets.
"Health is not an issue of concern," she said. "It's when you're young you should be concerned about your health."
If that is fatalism, she seems at peace with it.
"I'm happy," she said. "Somewhere else I would not be happy. This is all very native and dear to me. This is the best place in the world."
In the Chechersk district in Belarus, the population fell by more than 40 percent after the accident. A towering monument lists the names of the 43 evacuated communities and the number of houses abandoned in each.
Nadezhda Kiryushkina lives in a one-story brick house - once abandoned - with her husband and two children in a village of 178 people. It is among those targeted by a program that aims to reseed 50 acres of land, establish regular household waste pickup and persuade residents to dispose safely of the grass and weeds mowed around abandoned dwellings and the homes of pensioners living alone.
Kiryushkina busies herself as a cleaning woman and with fixing up her house, which was bought from the state for $400. She grows cucumbers, cabbage and potatoes behind a crooked fence. She helps her mother, who lives in a neighboring settlement, with the realities of owning two cows.
She describes her situation with half a shrug. "I can't really say what's the difference," she said. "For us, it's just normal."
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From the Baltimore Sun
erika.niedowski@baltsun.com
Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun
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