During the night of 26 April 1986, the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Only thirty-six hours later did the Soviet news agency Tass announce the catastrophe to the international press. The news spread like wildfire.

On the 28 April, workers at a Swedish power plant 700 miles away detected the first traces of radiation outside the USSR. Throughout May, radioactive particles, initially carried to Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Germany, spread throughout Europe. By 1989, 404 000 people had been evacuated from the contaminated zones in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

Only twenty years later is the full truth about Chernobyl emerging. In a groundbreaking article, Russian journalist Alla Yaroshinskaya reveals the Soviet leadership's massive cover-up operation and calculated policy of disinformation following the accident. Basing her information on secret documents obtained after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Yaroshinskaya reveals just how much the public, both in the USSR and internationally, was duped over the extent of the catastrophe.

Three journalists featured here made it their jobs to document the visible and invisible aftermath of the contamination. Ukrainian photographer Igor Kostin, the first journalist on the scene of the catastrophe, describes how he went back to the zone repeatedly over seventeen years. Belarusian photographer Anatol Klashchuk returns to the Baraulany oncology hospital, where he photographed child patients shortly after the disaster. And ethnographer Dzianis Ramaniuk revisits the region to witness the folkloric rituals still maintained by its inhabitants.

Chernobyl is more than a technological accident belonging to the past, writes risk sociologist Guillaume Grandazzi: it is a catastrophe that has an effect on the present and that determines the future. But amidst the commemorative events, will the lessons of Chernobyl be heeded? The conclusions of last year's Chernobyl Forum report suggest not: presented as "reassuring", they stem from a way of thinking that aims to minimize not the real consequences of the catastrophe, but the image of these in the eyes of the victims and the public. According to Grandazzi, the commemorations will attempt to salvage the fiction of risk-free nuclear power.

Published 2006-04-21

Original in English
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