To mark the 30th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986, Wladimir Tchertkoff has published a book based on his findings while documenting the Chornobyl story for various news outlets. He has visited the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident multiple times.
The book was originally published in French in 2006 by Actes SUD. Mr. Tchertkoff interviewed residents of the villages in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus, where they were consuming radioactively poisoned food items on a daily basis. Also interviewed were the “liquidators” who sacrificed their lives in the initial days of the clean-up effort and those who extinguished the fire that had spread at the power station. The author documents the health effects and premature deaths they experienced. Doctors and physicists made up the third group of people who were interviewed by Mr. Tchertkoff. These same doctors and scientists refused to deny the link between the Chornobyl disaster and the health effects on the populations of Ukraine and Belarus and their environments.
The book tells the story of two Belarusian scientists – Vassili Nestrenko and Yury Bandazhevsky – who risked their careers and their own health and personal safety to aid the contaminated populations. Nestrenko, a physicist, and Bandazhevsky, a doctor and pathologist, were persecuted in Belarus for refusing to accept the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on the harmful effects of low-dose radiation. Nestrenko died in 2008 from exposure to high-level radiation in April 1986, when he flew over the exploded reactor in a helicopter.
The real health effects of the accident at Chornobyl continue to be covered up by governments, by the nuclear industry and by the international institutions that support them, the author argues. This cover-up has made it a certainty that, sooner or later, another catastrophe will occur. In 2011, following an earthquake and tsunami, three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant experienced a nuclear meltdown. The health effects there are only just beginning to manifest.
Mr. Tchertkoff was born in 1935 in the former Yugoslavia, and his parents immigrated to France from Russia. In the 1960s he moved to Italy. As an Italian citizen, he worked for the Italian TV company RAI, then with the Swiss company TSI.
While working for TSI in the 1990s, he documented the aftermath of the Chornobyl accident. Being able to converse in Russian, he had direct communication with first-hand witnesses who saw the disaster and the Soviet government’s response, as well as the international nuclear lobby. Survivors also explained the effect on the health of the people in the surrounding areas of the fallout.
In 2003, Mr. Tchertkoff and Emanuela Andreoli released the film “The Sacrifice” that documented the lives of the liquidators following the Chornobyl disaster. He also was among the founders of the organization Children of Chernobyl Belarus.
Readers can obtain copies of the book at their local booksellers and online retailers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Readers may also contact Ksenia Papzova at Glagoslav Publications in the Netherlands, +31-0-13-744-00-27 or visit the publisher’s website, www.glagoslav.com.