Russia finally acknowledging '57 nuclear disaster

By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers

	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

This was the Soviet Union, 1957, but only now are the voices of the victims being heard.

Communist authorities responded to the accident with a global cover-up and a scorched-earth cleanup. Even as they evacuated entire Russian communities, they were sending 1,500 ethnic Tatar farmers into the hot zones to do the dirty work. Children were pressed into service, too, from fourth-graders on up.

Many of the "young liquidators," as the children came to be known, died from radiation-related diseases soon after the explosion, which few people know about even today. They came down with afflictions they couldn't have imagined, illnesses they couldn't even pronounce.

Finally, however, the surviving liquidators are starting to win victories in the Russian courts. It's taken nearly half a century for Moscow to admit any sort of responsibility for the disaster, but three Karabolka residents recently won absurdly small but perhaps precedent-setting judgments that give them reparations of $8 a month, plus an annual stay at a Russian spa.

The children and grandchildren of the liquidators inherited a sad array of congenital health problems. They, too, have begun filing damage claims.

The Karabolka farmers never were told about the dangers of the explosion at the secret nuclear lab called Mayak ("The Lighthouse"). Authorities told the villagers the cleanup was necessary because crude oil somehow had seeped into their fields and groundwater.

The Karabolka children helped with the nuclear triage alongside their parents. Week after week they dug potatoes and carrots out of the ground with their bare hands, then buried the contaminated crops in deep pits. They cleaned bricks that were covered in radioactive soot. They buried dead cattle, filled in poisoned wells and dismantled clapboard houses.

"Our hands were bleeding. Everybody was vomiting," said Glasha Ismagilova, a 57-year-old paramedic who was an 11-year-old tomboy at the time. "My vomit was very green. The doctor looked at it and said I had eaten too many peas, and he sent me back to work. But of course I hadn't eaten any peas at all."

The explosion wouldn't be the only nuclear disaster to befall the area. People living along the nearby Techa River now are suing for the damage caused by decades of Mayak engineers dumping radioactive waste into the water. That practice, which began in the late 1940s, ended only recently.

Environmental experts have called the Techa district the most polluted place on earth. Radiation levels once reached the rough equivalent of four Chernobyl accidents.

Glasha Ismagilova, one of the young liquidators in Karabolka, spoke calmly about her own various illnesses, about the new 3-inch tumor on her liver and the painful crumbling of her knees and hips.

She's a strong, plainspoken woman, but the tears started to come when she remembered borrowing her mother's orange sundress on that morning 47 years ago when the Mayak cleanup began. She wanted to look nice that day because she thought she and her fourth-grade class were headed off on a special field trip.

They were headed, of course, to their doom.

"We were treated like laboratory rabbits," she said. "This was a horrible crime by the state. What kind of monsters would assign children to do such work?"

The secret Mayak lab, hidden in the closed city now known as Ozersk, was the epicenter of the Soviet nuclear-weapons program. A heavily guarded city of some 80,000, Ozersk is still operating full-bore, and it's still off-limits to nonresidents.

Sept. 29 arrived hot and hazy that year, another muggy Sunday in the southern Urals, another typical workday down on the collective farm. But then in midafternoon, 70 tons of superheated atomic waste blew the lid off its concrete storage vault.

The ground in neighboring Karabolka, 12 miles away, shook so badly that one resident said "the teacups were flying."

A strange cloud, black and low, was coming their way.

The cloud was gone the next morning — it rained during the night — but a few days later a squad of Red Army soldiers arrived to seal off the Tatar half of Karabolka.

The initial cleanup lasted throughout the fall of '57, then began again in the spring of 1958 when the winter snows receded.

Once again, the kids were taken out of school and put to work. Almost all of them were Muslims, the children of ethnic Tatar and Bashkir families that had lived in the area for centuries. A couple hundred Russian families lived across town.

"But when we got there, not a single soul was left in Russian Karabolka," Ismagilova said. "They had all been evacuated and resettled."

Today, only 520 destitute villagers remain from an original population of 2,900.

"Almost all the people here were liquidators, but they're too old and sick to press their claims," she said, the tears coming again. "They did the state's dirty work 45 years ago and now they have no money. Not even enough for bread. They have no future."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company