”We began to look for medical books about radioactivity to find out what to
do. There was only information about what to do in the case of a nuclear war.
There was nothing about what to do in peacetime if an accident occurred
at a nuclear power station. The contents of the books were just ridiculous.
It was as if they had been written for children."


Valentina sits in her office at the hospital in the small provincial town of Buda-Koshelevo, but the interview is interrupted all the time Although she is in her mid-60s and should be thinking about retirement she doesn’t, as a matter of course, have time to talk. Work is her top priority. The telephone rings constantly and in between she has to pop over to the side building to see to some patients. The manager of the hospital had to be interviewed before we could talk to Valentina. It was the formal ’ritual’, after which we were allowed to talk to Valentina.

”Our senior doctor understands the problem, even though he can’t openly tell you his opinion. But he allows me to perform my work,” says Valentina and places some large home-made posters with figures and graphs on the table. ”These are real, statistical documents, which I got from our hospital.”

Although Valentina worked as a paediatrician in 1986 she didn’t hear about the accident. The weather was good and people were working the land. Then suddenly there was a storm followed by rain. ”We noticed that the puddles were yellow. The water wasn’t black or blue, but yellow. We had rain like that a couple of times that May.”

”We didn’t hear about Chernobyl until the beginning of May,” remembers Valentina. ”The radio station ’Svoboda’* aired a programme called ’Voice of America’. They broadcast the news about the Chernobyl disaster. That was how we heard about it. But it was kept quiet here in the country.”

”We were totally different people in the old days. We were raised as Soviet citizens. We believed in the Party because we were pioneers, Komsomol members and communists all our lives. If the Party said something we simply believed it. It was impossible for the Party to make mistakes. We actually doubted whether the things Voice of America said about our country were true.”

There was a civilian protection programme in the Soviet Union, which meant that everyone working in the health service had to undergo military exercises. Valentina knew exactly what she should do if the enemy launched atomic bombs. Her team was the first that would take action; they had geiger counters and various military instruments. When the accident was announced on the
illegal radio station they asked the manager if they could go out with the equipment. ”All the managers were Party members back then. We weren’t allowed to spread information about the accident, but we knew that we should be giving iodine to the population. We recommended that people drank milk with iodine and closed their windows and doors. But we couldn’t do it
officially.”

”We began to look for medical books about radioactivity to find out what to do. There was only information about what to do in the case of a nuclear war. There was nothing about what to do in peacetime if an accident occurred at a nuclear power station. The contents of the books were just ridiculous. It was as if they had been written for children.”

The team had learnt about radiation sickness but could not see any symptoms in the people. Their training had not informed them that the illnesses would not appear until later among those who were present at the accident and those who lived nearby.

Valentina’s team went to the villages of Zabolod, Lipa and Khoroshevka situated nearby. Their plan was to examine people’s thyroid glands for signs of accumulated radioactivity. The medical clinics in the villages had never had enough nurses so the team’s tasks were to examine children, give injections and vaccinations, examine children in schools and kindergartens – everything except to measure radioactivity. Many of these villages were later demolished and buried because the radioactivity levels were too high.

”At one point we had to have people come to the library because the clinic in the village was closed. The books in the library were radioactive, so we couldn’t use the equipment correctly. Our apparatus detected a background level that was far too high. The apparatus couldn’t take such high readings.”

From 5th May people from the disaster area began to come to Buda-Koshelevo while young men from the town were sent to Chernobyl to help. The drivers, laboratory staff and doctors went out there to an uncertain fate. Paediatricians were not requested to go. They remained to take care of the stream of children and women who were being evacuated.

People arrived with nothing and were placed with families they did not know. They were sent to villages where there were few inhabitants. Subsequently construction workers from across the Soviet Union were commissioned to build new houses for the evacuees.

”That was why the USSR fell apart,” says Valentina of the accident. ”It was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. We knew nothing for five years, even though we were living on contaminated soil. Nobody said we were living in an affected area, despite the fact that the government knew it.”

It was difficult to obtain permission to move. Even those with a specialised education could not find new jobs if they moved; furthermore they could risk being thrown out of the Party. ”It must be hard for you to understand because you were born in the free world. It’s hard to understand why people were so afraid. We had to do everything the Party commanded us to do. If you moved away you would be a traitor, a bad person,” says Valentina. ”People are still afraid. Don’t expect everyone to tell you about Chernobyl. People in the villages are still afraid.”

”Shortly after the accident our measuring equipment was taken away from us. We were told that the instruments were old and no good – that they gave inaccurate readings. They lied to us. The authorities wanted to destroy all the information we had collected. I have proof. I worked in Khoroshevka, which has since been evacuated. We gathered information using the old instruments. Everything was registered for each person once or twice a month.”

Scientists came to prepare a method for the treatment and registration of patients coming for the first time. But later this data was also destroyed. ”I think they burned it,” says Valentina. ”The same people who took the measurements were the ones who burned the documents. I can understand the machines not being perfect and the gamma radiation being far too high. Maybe there were some inaccuracies with the readings. But in that case they should have given the documents to scientists so they could investigate. Instead they destroyed everything in a great hurry.”

”We little people did what we were ordered to do. If we had to take measurements, then we did just that and wrote down the results. Afterwards they destroyed all our notes – so we couldn’t reconstruct the same data. In our country it will never be possible to find the ones who are guilty of this. One person gives an order and someone else gives a completely different order. It’s so annoying.”

While the authorities were busy concealing the scientific results Valentina was busy as a paediatrician, working with the illness complications that appeared in the years following the accident.

”If you compare the statistics from 1986 with those from the turn of the Millennium you can get frightened,” says Valentina. ”There has been a large increase in the number of invalids in the region. 40 % of young men have illnesses that prevent them from doing their military service. Another 30 % of young men are declared only partly fit for military service.”

According to Valentina 14-19 children per year are declared invalids in the Gomel region. Among adults this figure is around 210-230 people per year. There has been a constant increase since 1986. Across the country there are 64 invalids per 100,000 people. In 2003 there was a total of 477,000 invalids in Belarus, which equates to 4.8 % of the population.

”Children should not have contamination of the body greater than 20 becquerels per kilogramme. And that is a high figure,” says Valentina. ”If you accept a larger dose the numbers of children getting sick and dying will increase. We have a large proportion of children who are invalids. We’ve never had that before. We’ve never previously had children aged 14-15 being declared invalids.”

In her daily work at the hospital Valentina carried out systematic investigations of the health of the local population. ”We checked everything for the children who were severely contaminated, including the food they ate. We couldn’t check everyone, but we did, for example, check an entire school. We did everything we had to. We removed contaminated milk and gave everyone pectin. We made a list of the families who had cows. Every cow-owner had to check his cows for radioactivity. If the milk was alright then the family continued to use it. If the milk was contaminated then the cow was given some pills. If the cow was still contaminated after seven months then it was destroyed and the family got a new cow. After one month we could see that 50% of the children were in better health.”

There was a considerable amount of hunting in the area and game was sold on the market without inspection. Valentina’s hospital informed the hunters how to avoid spreading radioactivity and after one year the results of this could be measured in the health of the population. Furthermore there were problems with many other foodstuffs, which, right up until 1991, were too contaminated to be eaten. However, corn continued to be sown on the farms. Young, newly educated agricultural workers were deployed to drive the machines in the radioactive fields. Another serious information problem was to persuade all the young mothers to use only breast-milk substitutes. For many years human milk was simply too radioactive for babies.

As opposed to many of her colleagues Valentina constantly tries to get the public interested in the real problems of the country. For instance, in August 2004 she presented herself as a parliamentary candidate in the elections. Not because she expected to win, but to have a chance to discuss the problems that are otherwise not discussed in the country’s own media.

Valentina explains her perseverance with the fact that throughout her life she has constantly had to become thoroughly involved in completely new things and make independent decisions. She originally wanted to become a surgeon but Belarus also needed paediatricians and sent people to the other Soviet republics to study. She and 10 other students were sent to L’vov in the Ukraine.

After she completed her education the authorities sent her to practise in a village. There was only one surgeon at the village hospital so Valentina was allowed to assist and through this she also received a diploma in surgery. The work led her to understand the importance of being meticulous in one’s considerations. Once one begins to operate on a body one cannot change one’s mind.

”I have always worked with sick children. When you work with a sick or dying child you have to do everything you can to help the child. There was nobody else who could help. Just me. So I had to read a lot of books to obtain the knowledge I needed, because I was also the one making the decisions. It’s important for a person to understand a problem in order to be able to solve it.”

However, she did not work for long as a surgeon. After she got married she and her husband moved east to Sverdlovsk and they were later moved to the industrial town Nizhnij Tagil in the northern part of the Urals - an industrial town where nuclear weapons were produced. There she found a job as an ear, nose and throat doctor at a hospital by the railway and once more had to specialise in a new field.

After she had children she wanted to become a neurosurgeon but it was too hard. The patients were children who had been involved in road accidents and so on. The operations were difficult and many patients died.

In 1977 when an accident occurred at a nearby nuclear power station in Belojarsk only two doctors from the clinic were given permission to go there. Valentina became interested and began to study radioactivity. There were stories in the literature about trial explosions in Nevada and in the sea and there were descriptions of how they damaged the environment. However, there was only information about the American trials. There wasn’t a word about explosions in the USSR.

In 1978 after her divorce she moved back to Belarus. The Chernobyl accident in 1986 didn’t just change her view of the Soviet system – it also gave her a greater understanding of the world through the many international initiatives which came in the wake of the accident and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. ”I grew up in the USSR. I have been a pioneer, a Komsomol member and a Communist. Imagine that. The first time I was abroad I went to the Netherlands with a women’s movement. It was the first time I saw another country. It was a new world opening up for me.”

”Now we’re almost back to 1989 again. Information is being kept secret. It’s not being made public. Nowadays you have to look at Chernobyl in a completely different way. We have a totally different situation. You have to consider new methods of protection. When you send children to other places with the aim of rehabilitation and then put them back in the contaminated areas you do them a disservice. They’re always ’living out of a suitcase’ – just as if they were at a railway station – always ready to travel. They can’t read and nor do they get a proper education. We’re short of teachers here. It’s awful. They are in poor health and are poorly educated. The alternative is to follow the recommendations I’m giving. Then you know what you’re eating and drinking.”



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 Alexander Filippov, Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
- Meet Igor Komisarenko, Direktor of the Komisarenko Institute for Endochrinology and Metabolism, Kiev, Ukraine
- Meet Constantine Checherov, Nuclear Physicist, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia / Slavutich, Ukraine
- Meet Natalia Ivanovna Ivanova, Deputy Director, Vesnova Orphanage, Mogilev Oblast, Belarus
- Meet Danilo Vezhichanin, Mayor, the village of Yelno, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine


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* Radio Svoboda (Freedom) was a station critical of the Soviet Union and which informed the Soviet people about life abroad and events in the USSR which were otherwise unheard of in the country. The station was forbidden by the Soviet authorities.


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