Revealing Secret Spots That Evoke Dark Secrets (Chernobyl victims)

[undeterred]

Tarusa Journal
Revealing Secret Spots That Evoke Dark Secrets

TARUSA, Russia — The tablets were simple, and understated, so much so that some residents and many regular visitors had never noticed them. The story they turned out to tell had epic touches fitting for the vastness of Russia and its history, as well as a quiet dignity often obscured by the recent Russian brashness: the conspicuous consumption, intense patriotism and suspicion of the outside world.

The top tablet bore the alpha-beta-gamma symbol of radiation. The bottom one said: “To the victims of radioactive catastrophes, their courage and devotion to duty.” But no “radioactive catastrophe” has ever befallen Tarusa, a picturesque spot some 75 miles south of Moscow on the river Oka, or any towns nearby. So what was this memorial plaque for, and why was it positioned with the town’s memorial to the fallen of World War II — known here as the Great Patriotic War, and reckoned by many as Russia’s finest hour?

Queries of Tarusans who might know produced a shrug, or genuine surprise, and a consensus that it must have something to do with Chernobyl, the disastrous nuclear accident 23 years ago in Ukraine.

As is now well known, the Soviet authorities took three days to confirm that anything had happened at Chernobyl, where a giant release of radiation occurred when the No. 4 reactor exploded during an experiment that went catastrophically wrong on April 26, 1986. The Soviets found just 42 words for that first pronouncement, tersely noting there had been an accident and “measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world/europe/25russia.html?hp

The monument to Chernobyl in Sochi, a resort city on the Black Sea. On its base is part of a poem about the fate of the people who were drafted or volunteered to clean up the reactor: "We thought that our Motherland was with us. We were proud of the glitter of our golden epaulets. The steps of our rubber boots took measure. Of Chernobyl's deadly testing ground."

[Dogmudgeon]

1. That's more than the Nedelin Catastrophe victims got

In late 1960, an experimental rocket exploded on its launch pad, killing almost 100 people, including Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, most by incineration. Some films of the event have been released. The Soviet apparatus kept it quiet for some years. Behind the scenes, it allowed Leonid Brezhnev to emerge as a power in the Politburo.

There are several websites dedicated to it. Wikipedia will get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe">Nedelin Catastrophe at Wikipedia.

The Chernobyl disaster resembled it in many ways, especially the ass-covering reaction of the apparatchiks, which probably caused several more deaths by neglect. But since the USSR was on its way to the dustbin of history, the information was able to get out quickly after the world found out.

--d!

[Slyder]

2. Thank you for posting

Chernobyl keeps killing. A fine young lady I worked with a over a decade ago was an emigrant from Ukraine and had lived about 40 miles from Chernobyl. After several years in this midwestern US city she married and moved away. We had regular letters and e-mails from her about her new life, her children, and how much she loved her American husband and life in the United States. Then we received word that she had developed ovarian cancer. Doctors felt her proximity to the nuclear accident was the cause. She recently passed away. The premature death of such a beautiful vivacious woman who loved to quote Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova, is a terrible loss not only to those who knew and loved her, but to the world. Donne had it right! Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

[KitSileya]

3. I still can't eat certain kinds of berries.

When I was a kid, the summer after Chernobyl, we were warned so strongly against eating berries, I still can't eat cloudberries and foxberries. I also know that I slept outdoors, under the open sky, the night of May 1, which is right around the time when the worst of the radiation cloud hit Scandinavia. Whether it has caused me any damage, I do not know, but when I am worried about it, how worried must not those who lived a lot closer be? It's not like they have ever gotten a straight word form the Soviets about what happened and the consequences - it was all hush hush, and if the Swedish researchers hadn't come in to their reactor with radioactivity on their clothing, I'm sure the Soviets would still be denying it.