Archive / Magazine / Economy / Nuclear energy / Article | 04/10/2008

Radiating certainty

First came the dust, then the silence – fifty years ago radioactive waste exploded in the Russian nuclear plant Mayak. The victims are still fighting for recognition today.

At first sight Tatarskaya Karabolka looks like a typical Tatar village. Clean and tidy with a high wooden fence in front of each house. But the fence offers no protection from the danger that most threatens the people here; nor does the state for that matter. For this is a danger that seeps through the walls and into your skin and bones.

A woman holds up a radiation counter near a ruined church in Chelyabinsk, July 1992.
Photo: AP

"Cancer is rife in every house here," says Gulchara Izmagilova. She lets the gate fall shut. Next to the house stands a rusty car that was once white. It belonged to Gulchara's father, the chairman of the village soviet. It was the only luxury he allowed himself. His daughter says her father dreamed of a better life for the village inhabitants. But then he died of cancer. Today Gulchara, who is now sixty-one, leads the movement "For a Karabolka without radioactivity."

A secret city in the Urals

Tatarskaya Karabolka is situated in the middle of the Urals, on the border between Europe and Asia. It actually used to be a rather fertile region: birch forests full of berries and mushrooms, lakes and rivers full of fish. Until the first factories in the Soviet industrial centre of Chelyabinsk began filling the air with smoke. And then, a top secret nuclear plant was built forty kilometres away from Karabolka. That was in 1949.

A secret city was born. Its first name was Sorokovka, but it had many different names to make it easier to hide. Today it is called Ozersk. For a long time it was not to be found on any map. The best Soviet scientists, physicists and chemists from all corners of the country, worked there. Their assignment was to construct an atomic shield against the United States, to enrich uranium until they produced plutonium that could be made into nuclear weapons. It was Stalin's answer to Hiroshima und Nagasaki. The plant was called "Mayak," the pride of a growing world power.

"The ground trembled under our feet," Gulchara says, recalling her first encounter with the secret world of Mayak. It was an autumn day in 1957, fifty years ago. Gulchara was eleven years old and was digging potatoes with other schoolchildren from the village when at 16:22 the harvest was suddenly interrupted by an explosion. Panic broke out. People thought a war had started. They ran into the village, barricaded the windows and doors and waited for the next explosion. But it never came. Not the next day either.

The biggest nuclear disaster before Chernobyl

Gulchara wipes the dust off the windowsill with her index finger. She can't tolerate dust. Back then, after the explosion, everything became covered in a strange powder. At school the children cleaned it off with chlorine solution as they were instructed to do. The dust came from a dark cloud that appeared on the horizon directly after the explosion. Only decades later did Gulchara become familiar with the term "East Urals Trail," which scientists used to describe the area contaminated with radioactivity. The East Urals Radioactive Trail is 300 kilometres long and 50 kilometres wide.

Back then more than 20,000 people living around the secret city of Sorokovka tried to guess what the explosion meant. At the Mayak nuclear plant everyone knew exactly what it meant. A concrete tank containing liquid nuclear waste had exploded – after cooling regulations had been breached, as investigations later revealed. The plant site alone was contaminated with 666 million giga-becquerels. Before the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which twenty-nine years later resulted in radioactive contamination that was twenty times worse, according to reports by Greenpeace and other experts, it was the world's worst nuclear disaster. And nobody heard anything about it.

During the first two months after the explosion 10,000 people were picked up by soldiers and taken away. They weren't told why. Their empty houses were demolished and their animals were destroyed so that the owners would not come back. They were not allowed to take anything with them from their former life. Everything was contaminated with radioactive isotopes.

Gulchara Izmagilova points to an old black-and-white photo hanging on the wall. Her grandparents. The photo is contaminated too. If the soldiers had come to Gulchara's village she probably wouldn't have been allowed to keep the photo. But the soldiers didn't come. Karabolka is one of three highly irradiated settlements that were never evacuated.

A sign at Chelyabinsk warns "River Techa is polluted," July 1992.
Photo: AP

Radiating potatoes, contaminated water

The fate of the village can be pieced together from secret documents that were not published until the 1990s. It came out that Karabolka should really have been evacuated as well. Moscow had made the money for the evacuation available, and a short time later a report about the evacuation of Karabolka arrived in Moscow. In reality, however, only the Russians were taken away from the village – the Tatars were given the job of cleaning up. The "voluntary" clean-up operations were supervised by members of the army in breathing masks

Like everyone at her school Gulchara had to go out into the fields. They spent the whole of October throwing away freshly harvested, contaminated potatoes into pits that were then covered with earth by tractors. They crawled around the fields without gloves. During the breaks they secretly boiled potatoes they had managed to salvage from the pits in water taken from the contaminated river. Even then their bodies were already reacting to the radiation. One boy went deaf. Gulchara's brother lost his hair. Her mother gave birth prematurely.

The following summer Gulchara could no longer get out of bed. She spent three weeks in a delirium with a fever of 41°C. She vomited. Her joints hurt so much that she could no longer walk. Radiation sickness – another word Gulchara didn't hear until Perestroika. Later, while working as a doctor's assistant, she saw the first open studies of radioactivity and a strange feeling came over her. She began to suspect that radiation had been the cause of the cancer of which her father had died and from which her mother and brother were suffering. The cancer that you came across in nearly every house in her native village.

A battle of red tape for the rights of the radiation victims

Perestroika brought new hope – initially, anyway. In 1993 the so-called "liquidators," the clean-up workers, were granted the right to receive social benefits. Gulchara hoped a new life would begin for her village and herself. But in 1998 her application and those of her classmates was rejected by the regional Office for Social Protection. They were told there was no proof that they had taken part in the clean-up operation.

Since then Gulchara has had difficulty sleeping. When she finishes work at the clinic she sits down at her desk to continue her battle with the state. She writes applications, letters, complaints, often all night. In 2002 she won her court case and is now officially recognised as a liquidator. She has helped many of her neighbours as well and has conducted some 200 court cases. This year she was awarded a prize by a human rights organisation for her campaign.

Gulchara smiles when she shows the award. She smiles rarely because she spends too much time being angry. For her battles are far from over. Despite warnings by environmentalists, the regional Ministry for Radioactive and Ecological Security still claims the village was not endangered. "These people are not recognised as victims. That means they have not received any dose of radiation," head of the ministry Gennadii Podtesov declared at the end of September 2007. A total of 7,000 people in the whole region are affected.

20 cancer deaths a year

The reports of the Russian weather service "Rosgidromet" show the village to be highly contaminated with radioactivity, however. And Vladimir Chuprov from Greenpeace says: "Karabolka is very contaminated." The earth and the plants in the garden, for example, are highly contaminated with strontium 90 isotopes, a nuclear fission product. They emit up to 25.9 giga-becquerels of radioactivity. The critical level starts at 11.1. The fields two kilometres from the village are allowed to be cultivated, even though tests performed by Greenpeace have shown that contamination with isotopes of plutonium 239 and 240 is ten times higher than regulations allow. "The farmers thresh their straw directly along the East Urals Trail in a highly radioactive area. The cows eat the hay and the farmers eat the cows and the dairy products."

Between fifteen and twenty people die in Karabolka every year, mainly of cancer. Anyone able to leave has left. People only return to their native village once they are dead. To be buried at one of the eight cemeteries.

Sue the Russian state?

Why are you still here, Gulchara is often asked. For forty years she has had a second residence elsewhere, but she returns to her village every Friday, to Karabolka where her mother lives. Gulchara often brings bread with her. Many people in the village are unemployed. She also brings painkillers. At the village pharmacy they are usually sold out.

So why is she in Karabolka? Sometimes she asks herself that question, at night when she can't sleep. At dawn she leaves the house and goes down October Revolution Street, where more and more houses are being abandoned, behind the wooden fences that couldn't protect their owners. Sometimes she stops in front of a house. Then she thinks of Strasbourg, of the European Court. That's where justice is to be had, she has heard. There she'll be able to sue the Russian state, for fifty years of lies. There she could demand the final evacuation of Karabolka and compensation for the suffering that the state has inflicted with its nuclear experiments. Perhaps she could even demand that Mayak be shut down – for Mayak is still active, and in 1976 another plant was built that processes radioactive waste. Only a week ago a tank containing liquid radioactive waste broke. The stuff poured down the street over a distance of one-and-a-half kilometres.

But she is thinking about something else as well. About an enemy that makes the battle against the radiation hopeless. That enemy is cancer. For Gulchara has cancer too. Cancer of the liver. Last time she was examined they told her the tumour had grown ten centimetres.

Renata Kossenko

Born in Riga in 1984. Moved to Moscow in 1988. Studied political science at the Moscow State University of Linguistics. Wrote her degree thesis on ...
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