Lawsuits for victims of secret Russian nuclear wasteland

Posted on Mon, Apr. 05, 2004
Lawsuits first ray of light for victims of secret Russian nuclear wasteland
By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KARABOLKA, Russia - One of the world's ghastliest nuclear accidents happened just upwind of here, in a secret atomic city that didn't have a name and never appeared on any maps. An explosion of radioactive sludge sent up a toxic plume that contaminated a quarter-million people.

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. Even if the villagers had been told the truth, terms such as atom, radiation and nuclear simply weren't part of the vocabulary of a remote village in the southern Urals circa 1957.

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.

"But this was no accident," said Alexander Aklayev, the director of a small, underfunded research hospital in Chelyabinsk that studies and treats radiation diseases. "The Techa discharges were authorized."

Aklayev's database, developed with help from the U.S. National Cancer Institute, is tracking 69,000 documented victims from the Mayak disasters.

They've even issued ID cards to the sufferers.

Victim No. 001213 is Safia Skaripova.

"I want the state to pay for killing my first son and damaging my second son," said Skaripova, 51, a single mother who's launched the first lawsuit based on what's known in Russia as moral damages.

Skaripova wasn't exposed during the Mayak blast, but she grew up along the Techa, swimming in its pools, drinking its water, eating its fish. She believes her contamination from the radioactive river caused Valery to die of brain cancer at age 5 and Misha, 8, to have Down syndrome.

"Children exposed to Mayak are no different than the children from Chernobyl," she said, stroking Misha's broad, sweet face. "They have the same diseases. They have the same fate."

"A big group of children," Aklayev agreed, "were irradiated inside the womb."

Glasha Ismagilova 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." World War II combat veterans in the village thought Cold War hostilities had broken out. Women hurried their children indoors while the men climbed onto barn roofs and haystacks to look for approaching American tanks.

All they could see was a strange cloud - black and low, and 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. Nobody in, nobody out, except to help in the decontamination effort on the far side of the village, where there was a native Russian community.

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; these "Volga Russians" were relative newcomers who'd come to work in the foundries and chemical plants in the nearby industrial center of Chelyabinsk.

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

Aklayev, the clinic director, said 10,000 people from seven villages were resettled after the blast. "No one knows why some were resettled (from Karabolka) and others were not," he said. "Even for the evacuees, though, it was too late."

Ismagilova doesn't buy the government's explanation that the Tatar side of her village was safe enough while the Russian side had been contaminated. She said it was genocide.

"Our farms and houses were right next to the Russians'," she said. "They lived on one side ... we lived on the other side. But our (Tatar) families were not well-educated, so it was easier for the authorities to keep us in the dark. They used us to clean up their disaster."

Sipping tea in her mother's home in the village, Ismagilova scraped the frost from a windowpane and looked out at Karabolka's snow-covered fields. Even now, more than four decades on, the irradiated fields and pastures remain dangerous and unplantable: no hay, no potatoes, no carrots.

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."