Chernobyl: Ukraine’s Soviet-era nightmare

By Efrem Lukatsky

updated 10:45 a.m. ET April 25, 2006

KIEV, Ukraine - Associated Press photographer Efrem Lukatsky has visited the Chernobyl power plant and the highly contaminated zone dozens of times since a 1986 reactor explosion caused the world’s worst nuclear accident. He reflects on the catastrophe that continues to haunt him and his nation.

The first advice we got after the Chernobyl explosion was to take a daily drop of iodine on a sugar cube. We heard it on the Voice of America broadcasts we listened to clandestinely.

Local media, heavily under the Soviet thumb, told us there was nothing to worry about.

A few days after the explosion, my friend Viktor Ivashchenko called me and told me I should flee Kiev and never come back. Viktor’s words carried a lot of weight — he was an engineer at the Institute of Nuclear Physics.

But Kiev, the Ukrainian capital just 75 miles from the destroyed, radiation-spewing reactor, was home. My parents lived there, and leaving never occurred to me.

Staying meant living through tragedy
Staying meant that I eventually was able to go to Chernobyl dozens of times since the world’s worst nuclear disaster, whose 20th anniversary falls on April 26. There I would take photographs and feed my hunger to learn all I could about the catastrophe that had hit my country.

But staying also meant that I lived with gnawing anxieties and saw good friends die mysteriously or grow thin and sallow.

Some frightened people went overboard on the Voice of America’s advice. They drank half-glasses of iodine and ended up hospitalized with throat and stomach burns.

Later I would meet a biologist, Professor Vyacheslav Konovalov, who wore a lead undergarment for years after the explosion. He collected mutated plants, animals and human embryos, planning to create a museum to the perils of radiation, but ended up storing his specimens underground.

May Day, the biggest Soviet holiday, fell just five days after the explosion and those who trusted the authorities’ reassurances took part in rallies and parades. I was one of them, carrying a portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who had taken the helm of the Soviet Union a year earlier promising reform.

Many of us felt a tickle in our throats that day — apparently a sign of radioactive iodine — and decided not to linger outdoors to watch the bicycle race.

Living with radiation gauges
News of the explosion didn’t surprise me. Four years earlier I had visited Pripyat, the city where most Chernobyl workers lived, and had seen trucks spreading soapsuds on the asphalt. There were rumors of a radiation leak.

But after the explosion we were worried enough to get hold of a military radiation gauge and check ourselves, our homes and loved ones. Some of the readings were high, especially aboard city buses which had been used to evacuate residents from Pripyat and Chernobyl.

My neighbor, Bohdan Semenov, a bus driver, told me that since his passengers didn’t have protective masks, he wouldn’t wear one either. His wife told my mother that he ordered her to throw out every stitch of clothing he wore on those trips. But she refused — they couldn’t afford to replace them.

A week later this athletic man in his 30s was dead of a heart attack. At his funeral, shocked mourners whispered that it was because of Chernobyl.

Kievans panicked. They jammed the railroad station trying to send their children as far away as possible. Many refused to eat dairy products and berries, relying instead on canned fish.

The health effects of the radiation that the blast spewed over a wide stretch of the Soviet Union are still hard to assess 20 years later. A consortium of U.N. agencies said last year that about 4,000 people eventually are likely to die from Chernobyl-caused illnesses; Greenpeace International this month said the death toll will be 10 times higher — around 93,000.

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