Several years ago I traveled to Chelyabinsk Oblast to take part in a seminar. The event was held at a lakeshore health resort nestled among rolling hills. It was winter in Siberia, and the lake was covered in dazzling white snow that glistened in the sunlight. The setting was stunning. “This is our own little Switzerland in the Urals,” the locals proudly proclaimed. I was so taken with the natural beauty of the setting that I seriously considered bringing my family back for a vacation the following summer.
Before I departed, one of the conference attendees gave me his book: The Development of the Nuclear Industry in the Urals. By the time I finished reading it on the plane home, all my dreams of a Siberian summer vacation had evaporated, even though the health resort was some distance from the town of Ozyorsk, whose troubled history was chronicled in the book.
Humans have been ravaging the Urals for centuries. These beautiful, low-ranging, forest-topped mountains with countless lakes and rivers have always been well-suited to human habitation and have drawn waves of settlers over tens of thousands of years. Yet they are also rich in natural resources, which humans began extracting from them on a large scale centuries ago. The first factories were built here in the seventeenth century, and they rapidly grew in number and size. The perpetual quest for coal, metals, and precious and semi-precious stones has driven humans to gnaw into the Urals’ bowels and disfigure the landscape with smelting and processing plants ever since.
However, the most radical transformation of these once pristine mountains took place in the twentieth century. During the forced industrialization that was the cornerstone of Stalin’s first Five Year Plans, new industrial cities were hastily constructed across the USSR. The central feature of these cities were factories, and human livability was scarcely even a secondary consideration. This is when the renowned Magnitka – the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Factory – came into being, employing thousands of workers and producing a sky that featured every color of the rainbow, thanks to the array of pollutants being spewed by its smokestacks. But this was just the beginning.
When the end of the Second World War ushered in the Nuclear Age, it was in the Urals that the first gorodki (little cities) appeared (but not on a single map) built around factories (whose names were not included in a single publicly available report). Here, scientists pursued the most cutting-edge research, which was then translated into applications by engineers using a labor force that included civilians, prisoners, and soldiers. One of these cutting-edge products was the atom bomb.
In many ways, these “closed” factory towns were considered desirable places to live. The apartments were of a higher quality than in most ordinary Soviet cities, you could buy food and other essentials without standing in long lines, and the pay was better. Furthermore, back then there was little awareness of the hazards of radiation. Reminiscences of the early days of these factory towns feature shocking stories of people eating lunch sitting on plutonium containers or working with plutonium with their bare hands, because the mitts they were issued were too cumbersome. There was a notion that a “real man” shouldn’t be afraid of radiation. Then there were those who did not work in the plants but simply lived nearby. Nobody gave the slightest thought to their safety.
The Mayak Research and Production Association in Ozyorsk made what was commonly referred to as the “filling” for atom bombs. Later it started to process nuclear waste. Mayak’s wastewater was released right into the nearby Techa River (one can only hope – with little optimism – that this is no longer the case). The idea was that the radioactive waste would make its way to the ocean, where it would be sufficiently diluted. For a long time nobody even bothered to measure the river’s radiation levels.
In September 1957, a storage tank filled with thousands of tons of radioactive waste exploded at the plant. A huge cloud umbrellaed over the city, dispersing radiation across an area of approximately 15,000 square kilometers (nearly 6000 square miles, about the size of Connecticut). At the time, this accident, which today is ranked alongside Chernobyl and Fukushima, went unreported.
In the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons were a fact of life that was little talked about in public. Giant letters that adorned the rooftop of a building on Lenin Prospect in Moscow that dates to that era proclaimed the peaceful intent of Soviet nuclear science: «Атом для мира» (“The Atom – for Peace” or “The Atom – for the World”). We had the first ever nuclear-powered ship, the Lenin, and nuclear power plants. The atom bomb, on the other hand, was something being brandished about by a skinny old man dressed in stars and stripes by the name of Uncle Sam, according to the caricatures that appeared in Soviet newspapers.
The fact that the accident was not reported is not surprising. In an era when even plane crashes could not be mentioned in the media, one would hardly expect a nuclear explosion at a top-secret production site to make the news. The country’s leadership took quick steps to mitigate the disaster as they saw fit. The clean-up operation was carried out by thousands of military conscripts – mere boys of 18 or 19. Of course they were then thoroughly decontaminated. Just how did the army brass think you should decontaminate someone who has been cleaning up radioactive muck? With a Russian banya, of course. The soldiers were given a good hot steam bath. As we now know, that only helped the radioactive particles penetrate the skin. The soldiers were then quickly sent home to their separate corners of the USSR. What happened to them – How long did they live? What illnesses did they suffer? – no one knows.
Those living along the banks of the Techa River knew nothing about what was going on – or at least officials provided them with no information. Of course, they noticed that their children were developing strange diseases, and there were rumors of what was happening upstream, but the true nature of Mayak’s impact on the environment became known only decades later, when, during perestroika, scientists detected shocking levels of radiation in the water the local population had been (and was still) drinking and in the fish that they caught and ate. Some of the most thorough researchers even claimed that their Geiger counters started to click when they held them up to the stomachs of local children.
Of course, 1957 was a long time ago. The problem is that Mayak has been the site of many accidents since then, albeit none quite as devastating. In 2005 it was discovered that the dam system that was designed to decontaminate wastewater before it was released into the Techa River had not been operating properly for years, and radioactive waste was regularly making its way downstream. An investigation was even begun, but an amnesty was quickly announced and none of the responsible parties were punished. Has the dam been fixed? Who knows?*
By now, the local villagers understand with perfect clarity what the nuclear industry has done to them and their children. Since most of the locals are ethnic Tatars, some even believe that this environmental recklessness represented an intentional effort by Russians to exterminate Tatars.
That charge is, of course, ridiculous. In truth, when it served its purposes, the Soviet government was ready to sacrifice its citizens regardless of nationality.
* Although its five plutonium production reactors were closed in 1991, the Mayak complex has since been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel imported from a dozen foreign countries, including the U.S.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
