In the Name of God

In May 1986, the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in northern Ukraine suffered a melt-down. Over the next few days, the resulting radioactive emissions contaminated a little over 11,500 square miles of arable land, almost 3800 square miles of the meadows in northern Ukraine, and about 5800 square miles of primary forest area. Since the meltdown affected soil, ground water, standing crops, forest products, and livestock, and endangered the health and welfare of unborn children throughout the region for years to come, the World Bank dubbed the event the worst nuclear disaster of the atomic age.¹ In Ukrainian terms, though, the meltdown had destroyed their land, which gives to most Ukrainians a sense of stability.²

Still, what roused the Ukrainians’ indignation was not so much the accident as Moscow’s treatment of it. For over two weeks following the incident, the official word from Moscow was that a meltdown had not occurred, and no news coverage was permitted of the event by either domestic or international news agencies. In effect, the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin had refused to pass along vital information to the peoples most affected by the radiation. To exacerbate the situation, before the plant was even certified safe, the Kremlin announced that it had decided to build yet another nuclear facility on Ukrainian soil to help meet the high energy demands of the Ukrainian people. Such a decision potentially opened the way for further nuclear disasters, causing many Communist loyalists to begin questioning the Party’s competence, especially given the national suffering and environmental destruction that the Kremlin seemed to be ignoring.

What Ukrainian Communists had become concretely and painfully cognizant of was, to paraphrase Marilyn Young, “an omnipresent silent killer,”³ not the radioactive dust that Young refers to, but the simple fact that Ukraine did not occupy a credible position in the eyes of the Kremlin. As reports suggest, the Kremlin believed that Ukrainians were not on a need-to-know basis, even though it was the Ukrainian people who were facing radiation poisoning. This awareness spread over the next five years among the Ukrainian people and led ultimately to a vote for independence in December 1991. But before the vote was cast, Ukraine became embroiled in a social crisis, quite literally, of Biblical proportions.