“What is it you need if you live in the country? You need land, water
and roads. Then it is a good life! In our village you don’t complain
of having no gas or the like. Here you hope at least to get some really
good land so that you can plant potatoes and get some ’clean’ hay.
Our children must be able to drink ‘clean’ milk, our milk is
contaminated with radioactivity, you see. Without Chernobyl, of
course, our land would have been ‘clean’. It would have been easier
for people to live here.”


Polesie is one of Europe’s largest bog and marsh areas. It stretches from Russia along the border between the Ukraine and Belarus and further into Poland. The village of Yelno, where Danilo is the mayor, lies about 300 km west of Chernobyl and was among the hardest hit places after the nuclear power plant spread its radioactive contents into the open air.

The place is surrounded by sand and peat bogs, which means that there is a high mobility of radioactive elements from the soil into the plants. The better the soil is, the better it will hold on to the radioactive elements. The worse it is, the more the radioactivity will circulate. Given the bad soil of Polesie, scientists think that about 97% of the radioactivity is circulating from the soil into the plants and back again.

“We don’t have any future prospects. Of course, we hope for the best. People don’t want to move away. That’s why the state should organize our lives in a better way so that it could be easier to live here,” says Danilo, who loves his part of the country. For him, there is no better place on earth and he could not at all envisage a life anywhere else.

Like so many others the inhabitants of Yelno were not informed about the accident in 1986. Actually, a whole year passed before the information reached them. They did hear the rumours and watch something on television, but not until people began getting headaches and pains in their joints during the winter of 1987 did the village get in contact with the health authorities.

The authorities tried evacuating the population, but most inhabitants soon returned. It is typical of people in Polesie that they are intimately connected with nature and would prefer a lake or a river nearby. Each region has their own traditions and it is difficult to leave the place where your parents are buried. Danilo ́s family has lived in the area for more than 100 years. His sister now lives in Kiev, but when he went to visit her he could not stand the big city for more than a day.

As a consequence of the Chernobyl accident, in 1991 the contaminated areas of the Ukraine were divided into 4 different zones depending on the contamination:

Zone 1 is better known as “the exclusion zone”, the closed zone, which is an area winding 30 to 60 km around the exploded reactor. Everybody living in the zone was evacuated in 1986 and even today only about 450 people have been permitted to return. This zone was exposed to a radiation of 5 milliroentgen per hour. The release of radioactivity from the reactor was spread very unevenly and some areas are considerably more radioactive than others.

Zone 2 is the name of the places of the Ukraine where the contamination level for caesium is above 15 curies/km2, 3 curies/km2 for strontium and 0.1 curies/km2 for plutonium. The radioactivity of these areas is above 5 millisievert* a year and evacuation was compulsory for the people living there, but many stayed anyhow. Because their villages had zone-2 status there were no investments in improving the infrastructure for 18 years. There were no schools or clinics. The classification was not changed until 2004 when some areas became zone 3 instead and thus could get support.

Zone 3 is places where evacuation is voluntary. These areas have a radioactivity from 1 to 5 millisievert a year.

Zone 4 has a radioactivity between 0.5 and 1 millisievert a year. The major part of the population in Polesie lives in an area with zone-4 status.

In the Ukraine a total of 2,261 villages and towns lie in zone 4, which was officially hit by the accident. In zone 3 there are about 400 villages and towns. In zones 1 and 2 about 1,500 people are living unofficially.

About half of the population of the Ukraine lives in the country in more or less primitive villages. The most primitive places make you think of a feudal medieval community where the population works at a nearby kolkhoz** without much pay and survives by cultivating their own small plots of land. Economically, this is very irrational. The Ukraine is aiming for membership of the EU, but they have a subsistence economy and there is no economic growth in the country areas.

Well-educated young people would rather not live in the country and there is only one clinic per 6 villages for the sick villagers.

In the area where Yelno lies, 80-90% of the contamination reaches people through their food. Just 5-20% comes from external radiation. Milk is the largest problem, being the source of 53% of the contamination of people. On the other hand, milk products like yoghurt, cheese etc. are much cleaner because the radioactive caesium stays in the whey.

The milk is contaminated because the cows graze in meadows where there is much caesium. The radioactivity typically lies in the upper layers of the soil where the grass roots also are. The radioactivity will probably stay in this layer of the soil because the agricultural methods are old-fashioned and only cows use the meadows. If agriculture was more intensive and the soil was ploughed, the scientists think that the concentration of radioactivity might be lessened by a factor of 3. Accordingly, you might lessen the mobility of radioactive elements by fertilizing the soil more, using e.g. potassium. Potassium is much like caesium so if there is a lot of potassium present the plants will absorb this instead of the radioactive caesium.

Accordingly, there are various fodder additives you can give the animals so that the radioactive materials are not absorbed in the blood. The only problem is that these are not produced in the Ukraine and therefore seldom used.

About 700 people having about 250 cows live in Yelno. Most people are unemployed and live on their own production of milk, potatoes and vegetables; however, most produce has far above the permitted radioactive contamination. E.g. milk is 8 to 10 times as contaminated as permitted. The same goes for meat and potatoes. 92% of the potatoes grown are contaminated because they are grown in the peat bogs.

Pork is normally cleaner than other types of meat, but because the pigs are fed potatoes their meat becomes radioactive as well. The mushrooms in the woods are contaminated the most. The maximally permitted amount is 2,000 becquerels/kg*** but at Yelno the level is about 44,000 becquerels/kg. Mushrooms with a contamination of as much as 200,000 becquerels/kg have been found, which is absolutely unfit for human consumption, but if you have no economy you cannot buy produce from the outside world.

In order to work out agricultural methods suitable to decrease the radioactivity, the IAEA is running a project in three villages. One village in Belarus, one in Russia and one in the Ukraine, where the village chosen is Yelno. Some fields are ploughed so that the radioactive elements of the upper 5 cm are now spread over 20 cm.

Although the plants and thus the food, in the short term, are getting cleaner, the question is whether you can really ’thin out’ radioactivity in this way. “People here have a lot of radioactivity in their bodies,” Danilo says. “They don’t buy much fresh produce in the shops. They eat the food they are growing themselves, which is containing a lot of radioactivity. To avoid radioactivity you have to renew the soil. Our soil is bog. If we had real fields with grass there would be less radioactivity.”

Beyond people having officially become self-employed, not much has changed in Yelno since the Soviet Union fell apart. The town is connected with a kolkhoz* where you work during the day, and in the evening, you cultivate your own plot of land and milk your own cows. The inhabitants get 2 hryvnia (34 Euro cents) a month as ‘coffin money’ as they say about the Chernobyl compensation. That is why people gather berries and mushrooms in the radioactive woods. They are sold to buyers who bring them to the markets or the factories.

“Which income are you talking about?” Danilo replies to the question about people’s possibilities of income. “There is no money here! We have no work. When you want to eat you have to work too. That’s why people gather mushrooms and blueberries to sell. Afterwards they’ll have money to buy something for themselves.”

In addition to the mechanical cultivation of the soil, the village will also have to fertilize much more, which Danilo is not too keen on. “Our soil here is bad,” he states. “In order to make the soil yield something you must have animals. To feed the animals you must have hay. That’s why you have to work hard. In order for me to get potatoes and food enough I must have 8 or 9 lorries of fertilizer. Each lorry carries about 5 tons of manure. I.e. I have to use 45 tons of manure to get a good harvest. Without fertilizer nothing will grow in our soil. If people could do it all mechanically it would have been good, however, here there is only manual labour. We have no money to do it differently. There are bogs here, and you can’t use machines in the bogs. It’s hard to do all of it manually. To be able to have 6 or 7 animals at home you have to work day and night.”

Through the development of agriculture, the IAEA project will ensure that people can stay in the area, but the local population is very sceptical of the changes. “People don’t believe in these experiments,” says Danilo. “They think it is done for the kolkhoz – the whole village, but not for them personally. Here we want more domestic animals.”

Primarily, the region is contaminated with caesium. In radiobiology there is a rule of thumb that it takes about 10 half-life periods before a radioactive element is safe. The half-life period of caesium is 30 years, which means it will be about 300 years before the problem of Yelno has fully disappeared.




About EarthVision's 20 Years 20 Lives Project.

- Meeti Grigorij Sorikov, Pensioner, Belarus
- Meet Hanna Koslova, Wife and Mother, Ukraine
- Meet Galina Bandazhevskaya, Pediatrician, Minsk, Belarus
- Meet Valentina Smolnikowa, Buda-Koshelevo, Belarus
- Meet Igor Komisarenko, Direktor of the Komisarenko Institute for Endochrinology and Metabolism, Kiev, Ukraine
- Meet Alexander Filippov, Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
- Meet Constantine Checherov, Nuclear Physicist, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia / Slavutich, Ukraine
- Meet Natalia Ivanovna Ivanova, Deputy Director, Vesnova Orphanage, Mogilev Oblast, Belarus


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Text: Mads Eskesen
Translation: Angela Heath

Photos: Mads Eskesen and Gabriala Bulisova

The story is based on interviews in 2004 and in 2005 by Marianne Barisonek and by Mads Eskesen