Who are the Victims of Chernobyl?

Initially, this question seems easy enough, but the number of people victimized by Chernobyl is larger than you might expect. Chernobyl does not create a singular archetype of victim; there are first-responders and liquidators who have suffered severe illnesses and death due to radioactivity, there are families who were forcefully evacuated from the exclusion zone, never to return to their homes, and there are victims who have never been to Chernobyl or even existed when the disaster took place. 

What officially constitutes “Chernobyl victim” status? For the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on the social and physical effects of Chernobyl’s radiation on ‘nuclear refugees’, those who were forced to flee the exclusion zone, as well as children born post-disaster, born to nuclear refugees or parents living on contaminated land, such as in Belarus. I will be using first-hand accounts of Chernobyl victims from the compilation entitled “Voices from Chernobyl” – stories which were originally told during the 1990s before being translated in the early 2000s.

Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of one of the first firefighters called to Chernobyl, lied to doctors about her pregnancy to be near her husband as he wasted away in hospital of radiation poisoning, measuring 1600 roentgen. Her exposure to radiation through her husband caused her child to live only four hours after birth, born with radioactivity-induced cirrhosis of the liver. Years later she would give birth to another child that was “also sick: two weeks in school, two weeks at home with a doctor.”(Voices from Chernobyl: 23) Lyudmilla herself suffered a (presumably premature) stroke.

Undoubtedly, Chernobyl’s radiation seriously affected those living in exclusion-zone towns like Pripyat, but what about Chernobyl’s effects on those outside the exclusion zone, in a different country entirely?

Children in Belarus have been affected by the radiation that has seeped from Chernobyl. One mother from Khoyniki in Belarus spoke of her four-year old daughter, born as “a little sack, sewed up everywhere, not a single opening, just the eyes.” (81). Despite being so young, she had already had four major surgical procedures with detrimental effects on her body – as of the interview, her mother had to manually squeeze out her urine every half hour, as her urinary function had ceased after a recent operation. Professors told the mother her child was of “great interest to science” (83).

Yet, through all of this, despite papers from doctors linking this child’s condition to exposure to ionized radiation, Belarus insisted she was the “victim of a congenital handicap” (83). Doctors told her to wait thirty years or so, until a database about Chernobyl has been created, before the government would be willing to examine her daughter’s case as one connected to Chernobyl. The mother recalled a bureaucrat yelling at her wanting “Chernobyl privileges” and “Chernobyl victim funds” (84). Why is there refusal to acknowledge the effect of Chernobyl on Belorussians living with the realities of the adverse effects of radioactivity?

Part of this reluctance to acknowledge could be from our inability to perceive radiation in less-than-lethal doses, discussed in this post here. People were well-aware that the reactor’s initial explosion was dangerous,that irradiation and thermal heat were dangerous,  but what went unsaid – and therefore largely unknown – was the danger of radioactive contamination. Folk ideas of what radioactivity looked like never agreed with each other: “Some people say it has no color and no smell… other people say that it’s black.” (52). It flies through the air like dust. If it’s invisible, one woman says, then it’s like God. This can lead to an interesting discussion about interpretations of radioactivity and attempts to explain why disasters happen, but I’ll let that idea marinate and talk about it another time.

One last topic I would like to examine is the social ‘othering’ of Chernobyl victims – both those who lived in the exclusion zone and Belorussian ‘Chernobylites’.

They are an isolated group, separate from ‘regular’ society: Lyudmilla Ignatenko was moved to a street in Kiev with those who worked at Chernobyl, aptly named Chernobylskaya.

Nadezhda Vygovskaya, while evacuating from Pripyat, noted how differently she and other Chernobylites were treated. Nobody wanted to be near them. When her son started back at school, nobody wanted to sit with him. All the children were afraid of him, that he was radioactive.

Nikolai Kalugin lamented about being turned from a normal human being into a “Chernobyl person, an animal that everyone’s interested in…” (31). People were afraid of him, repulsed by him, but also intrigued by him. Life could never return to normal, not for him, not for any of Chernobyl’s victims.

For some, like the little Belorussian girl born as little more than a sack of flesh and organs, there never got to be a “normal”.

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Alexeivich, Svetlana. Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Translated by Keith Gessen. New York: Picador, 2006.