BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

25/04/2006

A symbol of Soviet incompetence

PAUL ABELSKY

What remains the most excruciating memory today is how brisk and luminous those sun-drenched days were in late April 1986. It now seems as if even nature conspired to disguise the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the most catastrophic technological accident in human history.

The weather bespoke of vernal replenishment just as a whole region would wither for generations to come. No warnings sounded, children basked in the sunlight, and the masses were herded to the routine Soviet parades on May Day.

Growing up in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the republic that bore the brunt of the radioactive cloud, we drowned in the informational void, hastily resorting to inept folk cures after nebulous rumours began to spread.

Relatives abroad were unable to phone for weeks; the introverted Soviet system short-circuited, reflexively filtering, denying and obscuring news reports, deploying doublespeak to hush up the scale of what had taken place.

Radiation seemed the embodiment of fear itself: elusive and unseen, all-embracing and unyielding, sudden and inescapable. Seemingly nothing could be mobilized to defend against it.

The coercive social order could easily shift to war footing to battle external enemies, imagined and real, but it was powerless to safeguard its people against so cunning an adversary from within.

Twenty-three minutes and 58 seconds after 1 a.m. on April 26, 1986, a series of explosions at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station incised a dividing line in a generation of individuals and their children, uprooting populations and instilling dismay at people's capacity to oversee the technological power at their disposal.

The decisive role of the human factor in the accident, the ineptitude of Soviet authorities in handling the aftermath, the mixture of mass hysteria and heroism that accompanied the response mark this as a uniquely human tragedy.

The changing regional borders and political alliances have done little to diminish the totality of this singular experience, whose agonizing consequences still bring people together in solidarity and grief.

Twenty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, competing scientific assessments, the resurgent atomic power industry, and even resourceful tour operators - they offer the practitioners of extreme travel a chance to glimpse the ghost towns and the riotous natural scenery in the Exclusion Zone - have tended to understate the human dimension of the event.

The immediate radioactive fallout was only the first component of the tragedy that unfolded 20 years ago. The other major contributing factor was the indefensible secrecy imposed by authorities in the aftermath.

Critical hours passed before qualified rescue crews were deployed; days and weeks passed before inhabitants were made even vaguely aware of the scope of the disaster; months, years and decades passed before any far-reaching moves were made to redress the consequences.

Indeed, even today, the Belorussian government's policy of "reclaiming" the irradiated areas has alarmed many observers.

After two decades, amid the barrage of conflicting data and reports, it is still a challenge to identify all the hazards facing the region. Veterans of the cleanup campaign continue to struggle for proper compensation and social benefits.

Chernobyl remains a political plaything for all sides of the debate. Advocates of atomic power, industry and environmental activists, regional leaders and survivors continue to voice disjointed accounts, instead of aspiring toward a conclusive assessment and shared responsibility for the outcome.

For the Soviet order of governance, Chernobyl delivered the ultimate blow; it struck at all the weakest links in the system. Technological backwardness, evidenced by the reactor's design flaws, was compounded by judgment errors made by technicians on the site, even though the personnel's poor training, low morale and insufficient pay were already publicized at the time.

The inflexible centralized system could not cope with the challenge. A lack of self-critical regard for the technical shortcomings and the strict hierarchy of the managerial caste left the system vulnerable to real threats.

Chernobyl's casualty figures - past, present and future - stand as one of the harshest indictments of Soviet rule. Whether Soviet communism succumbed in a global struggle for power or just exhausted itself, the flames consuming Chernobyl's fourth reactor signalled the limits of the system's viability.

The shroud of secrecy enforced after the disaster, however, was met with public protests that represented the most consolidated civic movement to emerge in the Soviet Union.

Nothing propelled Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or public openness, as much as the indignant reaction to the cover-up of Chernobyl.

Buoyant scientific assessments, the tenacity of returning inhabitants and the renewed flourishing of wildlife in the abandoned areas convey an outward sense that the past two decades have mended some of the worst damage, while the most glum predictions have failed to materialize.

Perhaps Chernobyl's most lasting, albeit inadvertent, legacy was the movement toward informed public awareness and accountability it spurned in the aftermath.

No other dimension of that past experience is more needed today.

Paul Abelsky is a staff writer for the Moscow-based magazine Russia Profile, http://www.russiaprofile.org

Source:

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1145875389125&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795