Chernobyl

In November 1988, a colleague of Oliinyk’s in the Writers’ Union, Yurii Shcherbak, helped organize the first truly mass rally in the city of Kyiv that was not under party control. A medical doctor by training and a distinguished medical scholar, Shcherbak had spent three months in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone soon after the explosion, interviewing scientists, plant operators, and liquidators. He began to publish chapters of his documentary novel about Chernobyl in the liberal Moscow journal Iunost' (Youth) in the summer of 1987 and completed it a year later.

A whopping twenty-one new reactors are under construction in China, plus nine in Russia, six in India, four in the United Arab Emirates, and two in Pakistan. Five new reactors are currently being built in the United States, and none in Britain. The next great nuclear-power frontier is Africa. Volatile Egypt is currently building two reactors—its first in history

Russia’s oil and gas riches helped it deal with the post-Chernobyl crisis, while resource-poor Ukraine and Belarus had nothing comparable. Those two countries introduced a special Chernobyl tax in the early 1990s, amounting in Belarus to 18 percent of all wages paid in the nonagricultural sector.

In Ukraine, in the first five years after the disaster, cases of cancer among children increased by more than 90 percent. During the first twenty years after the accident, approximately 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer were registered in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus among those who were younger than eighteen at the time of the explosion

But of all the countries affected by Chernobyl, Russia had the largest contaminated area, close to 60,000 square kilometers. Given the country’s size, that area constituted only 1.5 percent of its territory, with 1 percent of its population. All three countries had to bear the cost of resettlement and deal with the health problems caused by the disaster, not only among those residing in or resettled from the contaminated areas, but also among the hundreds of thousands of liquidators exposed to high doses of radiation in the first days, weeks, and months after the explosion

Even harder hit was Belarus, with more than 44,000 square kilometers of land severely contaminated, accounting for 23 percent of the republic’s territory and 19 percent of its population.

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, the three newly independent countries most affected by the Chernobyl disaster, estimated their overall losses from it in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Kuchma was greeted with a sixteen-gun salute and compared to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had led America at a time of economic hardship—a reference to the deep economic crisis in Ukraine and the rest of the post-Soviet space.

When the Soviet Union fell apart in December 1991, Ukraine inherited 1,800 nuclear warheads that had been deployed with Soviet armed forces stationed there and agreed to dismantle and send them to Russia. Ukraine was supposed to complete the task by the end of 1994, but parliamentarians in Kyiv soon put forward a number of conditions, including monetary compensation for weapons-grade uranium in the nuclear warheads. After the US government promised financial aid, the Ukrainians agreed to get rid of their nuclear arsenal, the third largest in the world after those of the United States and Russia.

Eco-nationalism was now giving way to nuclear nationalism.