JOURNALIST'S NOTEBOOK IN UKRAINE

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

The victims, the legacy

Last week in Moscow, the leaders of the G-7 countries reaffirmed their financial commitment of $3.1 billion to help Ukraine close down the Chornobyl nuclear plant that exploded 10 years ago.

The consequences of the explosion, which took but seconds, will last for decades to come and will scar millions of people in Ukraine, some physically, but most emotionally. And no price tag can be put on the fallout - and not only the nuclear fallout - of Chornobyl.

The figures on how many people died because of the accident differ. Some organizations to this day insist that only 31 people died as an outright result of the explosion, while the Ukrainian government refers to numbers ranging from several thousand to the newest figures of 148,000.

But that, too, is a misleading figure. In reality, the victims of the Chornobyl accident number in the millions. They range from the 800,000 liquidators who came from all parts of the Soviet Union to help with the clean-up of the accident, to the sickly and deformed newborns to children who lived in the zone and came out to play on Saturday morning, April 26, 1986, as a radioactive cloud hovered over the town of Prypiat.

No matter what the recorded numbers of the dead may be, even one life lost due to Chornobyl is one too many. We can point fingers at the guilty persons who kept the truth from their citizens, but the guilty party is the Communist Party, with its totalitarian methods and criminal actions.

For people in Ukraine, the day of the Chornobyl accident is deeply embedded in their memory. Most remember where they were and what they were doing when they realized something terrible had happened at the nuclear power plant and the Soviet government was keeping it from them.

Many heard the news on Radio Liberty or other foreign news services on the short-wave radio. Some realized something was rotten in Kyiv, when the children of party officials were being shipped off to resorts and camps in the Crimea or the Carpathian Mountains or to relatives in Russia.

No matter how and when they heard the news, Ukraine's citizens were changed forever. Each and everyone's life was touched by the accident, which in the minds of many political analysts and observers sparked the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.

For example, Ivan Drach, the poet and chairman of the Ukraina Society, says that Chornobyl was the straw that broke the Soviet camel's back. For him, the lies and half-truths had to stop. Very soon afterward, he began taking an active part in the formation of Rukh, the democratic movement for perebudova in Ukraine - which later was transformed into a movement for independence.

For Volodymyr Shovkoshytny, the Russian-speaking nuclear engineer who worked at the plant and had just returned to Prypiat from Moscow on April 25, 1986, where he successfully defended his dissertation, the accident changed his life and that of his family forever. Working as a liquidator at the plant, he later moved to Kyiv and became chairman of the Chornobyl Union, a humanitarian organization formed to help victims deal with the consequences of the accident. Elected to the 1990 Ukrainian Parliament, Mr. Shovkoshytny became an activist of the democratic movement and the chairman of the subcommittee on Chornobyl matters. Today, he speaks Ukrainian, writes poetry in Ukrainian and calls himself a Ukrainian patriot who is well aware of his national identity.

But for others, it meant leaving their native lands forever. Driving through the countryside of the 30-kilometer zone, visiting abandoned villages or pensioners who live in the "zone of alienation," the charm of nature, of the pine forests remains clear.

However, a certain sadness envelopes visitors to the zone, as they view the deserted houses, the abandoned stores, the ghost towns of the region.

Some villages were so radioactive that they had to be evacuated, razed and their remains buried deep underground. Some people can never go home again.

The village of Opachychi will never again hear the sound of school children being let out for summer vacation. The clubhouse at Yampil will never hold another dance. The bells of the church in Tovstyi Lis will never again toll for its people.

Ivan Makukha of Opachychi - a returnee to the 30-kilometer zone in 1987 - sometimes curses the day that the Swedes noticed increased levels of radiation in the atmosphere and the news spread like wildfire around the free world .

"If it weren't for the West, we would never have had to leave here," he says. Then, he contemplates the years since the evacuation. "But then, I wouldn't be getting letters from America," he adds, showing this writer a note he recently received from Lida Chernyk and Anna Krawczuk of the Ukrainian National Women's League of North America, who have visited the 30-kilometer zone twice in the last six years and often send the residents of this village care packages. Many here feel they are both unwanted and unneeded by society, living out their last days in the villages that will disappear once these pensioners take their last breaths.

The psychological scars run deep. Most Ukrainians believe they are victims of their past (and many are fatalists, perhaps a genetic trait of not only Ukrainians, but Slavs in general) and many believe that their children are children of Chornobyl, weak, ill and unmotivated. Many feel that they have undergone more than one Chornobyl: the actual accident in 1986 and the revelation, a few years later, of the lies about the catastrophe. In 1991, with independence came a certain euphoria, but that, too, was short-lived, as the economic situation declined drastically in the years after the declaration of independence. Some sociologists refer to this decline as yet another Chornobyl.

A decade has passed since the actual accident. Perhaps, it is time for Ukrainians to look to the future and seize the day. But the tragedy of Chornobyl is that it will be with them not only for this first decade, but for decades to come.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 28, 1996, No. 17, Vol. LXIV

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