Borderland by Anna Reid Page B

The old men and women who refused to leave Prypyat, holing up in their blacked-out flats with gas-masks and biscuits, were nicknamed ‘partisans’.
    A war maybe, but Chernobyl was no victory. Just how many people have been killed by Chernobyl to date nobody knows. Two people died in the explosion itself; another twenty-eight, mostly firemen and engineers, of radiation sickness soon afterward. Estimates of the total number of subsequent deaths attributable to the disaster range from around 6,000 to 8,000. This does not take into account deformed births, genetic disorders, and early deaths still to come through cancer and leukaemia. A World Health Organisation report of 1995 noted a hundred-fold increase in thyroid cancers in Ukrainian and Belarussian children, but oddly, none in leukaemia or other blood disorders. If the 120 million curies of radioactive material released in the explosion – almost a hundred times more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined – had not been pushed high into the atmosphere, spreading thinly over a wide area, the death toll would already be much higher.
    Today’s uncertainty over the health consequences of Chernobyl is largely the fault of a deliberate cover-up by the Soviet authorities. Registers of clean-up workers and evacuees were left hopelessly incomplete, making post-Chernobyl medical histories hard to track, and in 1988 Shcherbina issued a decree forbidding doctors from citing ‘radiation’ on death certificates. Instead, deaths were put down to ‘rare toxins’, ‘debility’ and the like. (When Shcherbina himself died in 1990, having suffered a large dose of radiation organising the evacuation of Prypyat, the cause of death was marked as ‘unspecified’.)
    Independent research on the effects of the accident was derided or hushed up. In 1988 a group of journalists made a short film on events at collective farms round Narodychy, a small town thirty-eight miles west of Chernobyl. A foal had been born with eight legs, piglets without eyes, calves without heads or ribs. More than half the children in the district had swollen thyroids, and cancers of the lip and mouth had doubled. The government response was an outburst of vilification and denial, choreographed via Kiev’s Centre for Radiation Medicine. Scientists from the Centre lambasted the film as ‘incompetent’. Deformities were due to inbreeding, they said; mouth cancers to poor dental work, thyroid problems to a shortage of iodine in the diet. Eventually, after a series of angry meetings in Narodychy, fourteen villages were evacuated – all the fault, the scientists continued to assert, of the media in stirring up irrational ‘radiophobia’. Later, records turned up showing that radiation levels in the area in the months after the explosion had been three times higher than round the power station itself.
    In the spring of 1995, seven months after my trip to the Zone with Lyashenko, I got permission to visit Chernobyl. At the time, two of its four nuclear reactors were still operating, in the teeth of an international campaign to close the station down. The International Atomic Energy Agency had just issued a report lambasting its dangerous design, lack of back-up systems and fire-proofing, and general ‘poor safety culture’. The section of the reactor-block building nearest the wrecked Unit Four, the report said, was structurally unsound, and in ‘significant’ danger of collapse. Backed by the European Union and America, the IAEA wanted Chernobyl shut immediately. The Ukrainian government had agreed in principle, but argued that since it still provided 6 per cent of the country’s electricity, nothing could be done until the West came up with the money to complete three half-built reactors on other sites, the bill for which it put at an eye-popping $4 billion.
    Again, the countryside looked uncannily peaceful, more like a nature reserve than the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Baby pines sprouted in