Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT TAKING MEASUREMENTS

Already by the end of May, about a month after the accident, we began receiving, for testing, products from the thirty-kilometer zone. The institute worked round the clock, like it was a military institute. At the time we were the only ones in Belarus with the specialists and the equipment for the job.

They brought us the insides of domestic and undomesticated animals. We checked the milk. After the first tests it became clear that what we were receiving couldn’t properly be called meat—it was radioactive byproducts. Within the zone the herds were taken care of in shifts—the shepherds would come and go, the milkmaids were brought in for milking only. The milk factories carried out the government plan. We checked the milk. It wasn’t milk, it was a radioactive byproduct.

For a long time after that we used dry milk powder and cans of condensed and concentrated milk from the Rogachev milk factory in our lectures as examples of a standard radiation source. And in the meantime, they were being sold in the stores. When people saw that the milk was from Rogachev and stopped buying it, there suddenly appeared cans of milk without labels. I don’t think it was because they ran out of paper.

On my first trip to the Zone I measured a background radiation level of five to six times higher in the forest than on the roads or the fields. But high doses were everywhere. The tractors were running, the farmers were digging on their plots. In a few villages we measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred, sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. There was a woman in our group, a radiologist. She became hysterical when she saw that children were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We checked breast milk—it was radioactive. We went into the stores—as in a lot of village stores, they had the clothes and the food right next to each other: suits and dresses, and nearby salami and margarine. They’re lying there in the open, they’re not even covered with cellophane. We take the salami, we take an egg—we make a roentgen image—this isn’t food, it’s a radioactive byproduct.

We see a woman on a bench near her house, breastfeeding her child—her milk has cesium in it—she’s the Chernobyl Madonna.

We asked our supervisors, What do we do? How should we be? They said: “Take your measurements. Watch television.” On television Gorbachev was calming people: “We’ve taken immediate measures.” I believed it. I’d worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well-acquainted with the laws of physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only for a while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television. We were used to believing. I’m from the postwar generation, I grew up with this belief, this faith. Where did it come from? We’d won that terrible war. The whole world was grateful to us then.

So here’s the answer to your question: why did we keep silent knowing what we knew? Why didn’t we go out onto the square and yell the truth? We compiled our reports, we put together explanatory notes. But we kept quiet and carried out our orders without a murmur because of Party discipline. I was a Communist. I don’t remember that any of our colleagues refused to go work in the Zone. Not because they were afraid of losing their Party membership, but because they had faith. They had faith that we lived well and fairly, that for us man was the highest thing, the measure of all things. The collapse of this faith in a lot of people eventually led to heart attacks and suicides. A bullet to the heart, as in the case of Professor Legasov, because when you lose that faith, you are no longer a participant, you’re an also-ran, you have no reason to exist. That’s how I understood his suicide, as a sort of sign.

Marat Filippovich Kokhanov, former chief engineer of the

Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences