The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet

Start

A Tatar melody playing in the background:

Exerior: Man in fur hat
Man: There was a cloud in the sky. Just one cloud.

Exterior: Woman in winter clothing
Woman: Everybody was looking up at the sky. A lot of people.

Interior: Old man getting a massage from a nurse
Man: We lived right next to it. But we didn't know anything.

Exterior summer: Man sitting in front of a fence
Man: We've been drinking that filth since 1946.

Exterior: Young woman wearing a kerchief, standing in a field
Woman: Six people I went to school with are dead. The first one died at 20.

Interior: Old woman with a scarf around her neck
Woman: I can't live, I can't die. All I can do is suffer.

Exterior: Old woman wearing a kerchief at the window of the film crew's van
Woman: Please help us. We're dying anyway, but we have children...

Tatar melody ends.

TITLE:

Chelyabinsk

The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet

Shots from the train: winter scenes of villages, industrial scenes

It takes 36 hours by train to get from Moscow to the city of Chelyabinsk. Until recently, no foreigners were allowed to go to this province in the Ural Mountains, and even Soviet citizens were required to get passes.

Ext: city and train station
In the late 1940's, an atomic weapons complex, called Mayak was built north of Chelyabinsk. Its existence has only recently been acknowledged by Russian officials, though, in fact, the complex was the goal of Gary Powers's surveillance flight in May of 1960. Over the last years, the Mayak complex has caused three of the worst ecological disasters of the nuclear era, affecting the health of some half a million people.

Exterior: Chelyabinsk train station, city buildings
The train is arriving at Chelyabinsk, a city of more than a million people at the geographical center of Russia, protected by Siberia to the north and the Ural mountains to the west.

Exterior: Winter street scenes in the city
The secrecy which shrouded the region prevented news of these ecological disasters from reaching not only the outside world, but even the very inhabitants who were suffering from radiation sickness.

Exterior: Chelyabinsk winter festival; festive tuba music plays, people skiing, on rides, stading in crowds.
Today the city of Chelyabinsk is celebrating its annual winter festival. It has been estimated that the three atomic accidents have affected one out of seven people living in the Chelyabinsk province. Many of those people moved from the contaminated areas into this city.

Exterior: Singers at the festival playing balalaikas, accordians, other ethnic instruments
"We're a tired bunch, life is sad and merry and Chelyabinsk, our Ural homeland, we'll never surrender. Bureaucrats, bureaucrats, your end is coming soon; we can't get any justice from you; many have tried and failed," say the words of the Russian ditty. 70,000 gulag inmates built Mayak in the late forties.

Extior: Statue of Kurchatov
Stalin's head of the secret police oversaw the building of the Mayak atomic weapons complex. It was at this complex that the physicist Igor Kurchatov built the first plutonium production reactor, called Anochka or A-reactor in a mere 18 months.

Exterior: Scenes from the van of the winter countryside
Nuclear waste was handled with equal haste.Over the next seven years, Mayak deliberately dumped radioactive waste at the source of the Techa River.

Interior: Woman inside the van wearing a fur hat
The leader of a local enviromental group, Louiza Korzova, is taking me to the site of the region's first atomic disaster.

Exterior: Crude sign painted in red
Warning: contaminated area. 1150 microroentgens per hour

Exterior: Louiza walking on the frozen river
Traces of radioactivity were found as far away as the Arctic Ocean. By 1954, officials at the Mayak nuclear complex realized that the river was severely contaminated. They put barbed wire fences along its banks and some of the population was evacuated. But by no means all. The four largest villages were left in place, among them, Muslyumovo.

Louiza: We're on the ice. We're standing on the river. Let's give it a try. Let's see what happens.

Louiza told me earlier to expect a much lower reading because of the ice.

Louiza: 192 microroentgens per hour.

That's ten times the background radiation in the area.

Exterior: Man in the distance walking along the frozen river

Exterior: Woman with two daughters walking through the winter village. One child is riding a sled.
Fifty yards from the Techa lives Farida Shaimardanova. She teaches the first through third grades in Muslyumova's school.

Exterior: Farida and her husband
Farida: Your father died, don't forget, and he was 47, too. My father-in-law died. Then a 49 year old woman died, a 53 year old teacher died, too. There are 70, 80 year olds because they grew up in an ecologically clean time, but the younger generation, the next generation, are going through it now, the people in their 40s and 50s, and we're next. And our children. They say it's worst for the 3rd generation.

Exterior: Farida's children playing on the frozen river
Farida can't explain to me why she lets her daughters play on the river, despite the dangers.

Farida: It's the way people live, they know it's harmful, especially now. Children don't understand, of course. But adults certainly understand. But they do what easier and quicker. Why go three kilometers out of your way every day there and back, when you have housework to do, children, a husband waiting for dinner.

Exterior: Farida and other women standing on the river bank

Interior: Farida's kitchen, Farida and two daughters cooking
Farida is one of Muslyumovo's four thousand residents who are waiting for a change. In the meantime, local authorities have attempted to placate residents by passing out small radiation detectors. She uses it though she doesn't trust its results.

Farida: So far it's only 15, we'll have to wait a little longer. So many years of lies have me skeptical.We used to believe everthing, like idiots. Now we don't believe anything. Like idiots.

Exterior: Winter villages from the van
Muslyumovo is about 40 kilometers downstream from the Mayak complex. Before 1990, the people of the village were kept in ignorance about how dangerous the river was. Most of the warning finally came not from the authorities, but from local environmentalists and foreign scientists.

Exterior: Van pulls up to a run-down, one-story building. A woman in a white doctor's coat leads the way into the building.
The Muslyumovo hospital has 25 beds for adults and 10 for children. Food and medicine are in short supply.

Interior: Hospital corridor
Gulfarrida Galimova has been the village doctor for ten years.

Doctor: Our children suffer from stomach and intestinal illnesses, then they get nosebleeds, that's another problem school-age children have, and there's one more sign, many of them have food allergies and they don't tolerate medicines well. Later they get gastritis, bronchitis...

Interior: Man in fur hat and coat standing by a woman in a hospital bed
Ramil Mukhomedyarov is another local teacher. His sister is here, being treated for cancer.

Ramil: The doctors won't tell her. She's been in the hospital 3 months already. She can't walk anymore, she has bed sores and she can't sit comfortably. We don't have even the simplest bandages.

Ramil's sister: The factory is over there, you probably saw it? That's where I worked.

Ramil: She worked there when the explosion occurred. And when they were dumping the waste. Now she's been in pain for a year and three months in the hospital.

Exterior: On the way to the school
Interior: In the classroom
Farida to the children:Raise your hand if you swim in the river.

Farida to the camera: Nobody knows anything about us. Chernobyl happened, but that's Europe. The pollution reached Europe, and the whole world was upset. But us, out here in the backwoods of Russia? Nobody knows about it, nobody in the world cares about the bed we've made for ourselves here. And that the children's health gets worse from year to year is no secret. It's no secret at all.

2nd Teacher: Before they had rosy cheeks, but now look at them! and that's our future generation.

Ramil: The river will thaw soon. The kids don't have anywhere to swim in the summer. They built a swimming pool [turns to woman] How many years ago was it? But the children go swimming anyway. Just ask them. To this day they swim in that river. They don't have any place else.

Farida: I'm ashamed to admit it, but I've lost all my teeth, too. The children's memory is just terrible. There are very few left in the class with a normal memory.

Farida to the children:
Farida: Can we go swimming in the river?
Children: No.
Farida: Are we going to go swimming in the river?
Children: No.
Farida: Will we let our brothers and sisters swim in the river? No. We never go to the river. Because our river is sick, isn't that right? When a person is sick, do you go to his house? No. and the river is sick, so we can't go visit it either, otherwise we'll get sick too.

Interior: Ramil ringing the school bell, children leaving classrooms

Exterior: Horse-drawn sleigh with trotting by.

Exterior: Cut to Svetlana Akhmadeeva
When Svetlana Akhmadeeva's mother died of cancer the year before, Svetlana left a good job in the city of Chelyabinsk to take care of her father in Muslyumovo.

I came for dad, he's alone now. I was afraid I would lose my father, too. So I came here, but I really didn't want to. I really don't want to live in Muslyumovo, I hate Muslyumovo. There are probably a lot of people in my shoes.

"Can't you take your father and leave?" I ask her

People who don't know life here always ask that, Why don't you just leave? But where could we go these days? Even if we go somewhere, we can't buy an apt, we don't have the money

Interior: Svetlana's parents' apartment
This used to be my parents' room. It looks more like a storeroom now because I brought all of my things from Chelyabinsk.

Svetlana showing picture of mother
My mom worked in a cafeteria as a cook. Mama had asthma, and she took all these hormonal medicines. They were the only thing that kept her going. She always thought that she would die from the asthma, but it was stomach cancer.

I remember there was a militiaman who would walk along the bank of the river. He would chase us away from the river, but for us it was a game, we would run away from him, we would hide until he had walked away and then we would dive back in. Now, of course, I'm horrified. If someone had at least explained it to us then, we wouldn't have swum in the river. When I was little we would take the geese there, we would swim all the time. It's such a temptation, it's so hot in the summer, you just want to take a swim in the river.

Interior: Svetlana and her father in their kitchen
Svetlana's father is 52 years old, and works on a collective farm. His name is "Sotsializm," or "Lizm" for short.

Sotsializm: What's the count on the pelmeni so far? Thirteen, that's all right.

Exterior: Svetlana on her way to the cemetery
Those two graves over there, mama's is the one with the fence around it, and grandma's is right next to it. You know, the average age of the people here, both the men and the women, is 50. These scientists and Japanese came to visit, and they told us that the effects of radiation are worst of all for the third generation. So, mom was the first, I'm the second, and it'll be worst of all for my children. And it's true, my friend's children are sickly. I've been reading up on how you can get that strontium 90 out of your system. I read that you have to eat eggshells. So I've been doing it.

Interior: Sanatorium, Lizm watching TV, then in cafeteria
Two weeks later, Svetlana's father has checked into a Chelyabinsk sanatorium created at the initiative of the Kyshtym-57 association. The sanatorium is located in a former trade union hospital. The sanatorium resembles a spa more than a hospital. Lizm's favorite part of the day is the bioenergy treatments.

Interior: Lizm and a woman giving him "bioenergy treatment"
Woman: Wonderful, wonderful all your canals are open, but we have to spend some time on your liver.

Interior: Lizm sitting on a bed
Lizm: The old people who didn't get the radiation live to be 80 or 90. But people our age, 35, 40, they're dying right and left, and always from cancer.

Interior: Office of Romanov, start at picutre of Lenin, go to Romanov talking on the phone
Doctor Gennady Romanov is the head of Mayak's experimental research institute,created to study the effects of radiation.

Romanov: Which doctors? The M. doctors? They're all ignoramuses. They're all ignorant about nuclearbiology and radiology. They don't know anything. They're swayed by their emotions.

Interviewer: But they say that there is a lot of cancer?

Romanov: I'm telling you: let's divide the situation into two groups: the situation today after 40 years, and the situation of those first years. Those cancers that you see today are the result of irradiation during the first years of the plant. Cancer has a latency period of 20 years. So if the situation today is bad, and if it causes cancer, then we won't see those cancers for another 20 years. That'll be when? Say, around, oh, about 2015.

Exterior: Bus coming to a stop, children and parents getting off
Every three weeks, this chartered bus brings children and their parents from the contaminated villages to the Chelyabinsk sanatorium. Mayak officials now admit that at least 937 people have been diagnosed with chronic radiation sickness. The actual total is apparently many times higher, since only a small percentage of the population was checked.

Interior: Sanatorium, children receiving inhalation treatments
The sanatorium has only one doctor, and is not equipped to handle major medical problems. Children with cancer or leukemia, for instance, are not admitted here. Many children from the contaminated areas suffer from chronic skin, kidney, liver, and respiratory disorders.
This is the only treatment option that the local government offers such children.

Exterior from van: Passing a military truck with a radiation sign on it
The second tragic accident happened at the Mayak nuclear facility in September of 1957 when the cooling system of a waste containment unit failed, and the radioactive waste exploded with the force of 70-100 tons of TNT. About 80 metric tons of waste-- some 20 million curies of radioactivity-- were ejected into the atmosphere. 270,000 people were in areas with increased radiation levels. All the water sources in these areas were contaminated.

Exterior: Two-story building

Interior: Orphanage
This building in Yesaulka was built for the evacuees from the Boyovka [Boyuvka] orphanage. Ironically, the orphanage was the last thing to be evacuated. In fact, it was the only inhabited building in the village for over a year. Finally, two years after the accident, the authorities moved the 80 children and 30 personnel from the contaminated area.

Interior: Sofiya making tea
Sofiya Khrolenko is one of the few survivors of the Boyuvka orphanage. Her husband however died of leukemia.

Ext of Sofiya walking
She was given a one-room apartment to live in after her retirement and the equivalent of a twenty-dollar a month pension.

Interior: Sofiya in the orphanage
There were abandoned cats and dogs that wandered around every night, came up to our houses. It was just terrible. When they evacuated us, they gave us a resettlement pass, 400 rubles, and made us sign a form saying that we wouldn't reveal state secrets for 25 years. Of course we knew what that meant, and we tried to keep it confidential when we came here. People knew of course where we were from, they were afraid of us, they thought we might be contagious. They shied away from us like people do now if you have AIDS. We couldn't leave the children, after all. But it's because of that that I've never been able to have any children of my own. I don't have any children. Now I'm left all alone in the world.

Interior: Kyshtym-57, Louiza's office
Louisa Kurzova and her staff are preparing a battle plan in order to reach all of the radiation victims in the region. Some of them visit the office and fill out a form prepared by the association. But others live in remote villages. Louisa also prepares Kyshtym-57 volunteers to seek out such victims.

Louiza: I see you have the second and third generations here. All of them, all of them. You have to check all of them. There are children and parents who live there. Those are the ones we're going to help.

Exterior: Villages from van
The inhabitants of the village of Metlino were moved from the Techa river in 1956, after the contamination was discovered. The authorities moved them only a few kilometers away, however, to Bolshoi Kuyash.

Exterior: A one-horse sled goes by with three passengers
When the explosion occurred in 1957, they were in a direct line and once again were irradiated. The villagers were resettled a second time, most of them to Bolshoe Toskino, which today is again in a high radiation area.

Exterior: A woman drawing water from a frozen well, then hauling it back to a hut
Local environmentalists are bringing me to Maysky Gubaidulin, one of those who experienced the resettlement plan.

Interior of Gubaidulin home; Gubaidulin and environmentalist check the radiation levels in the water
Man: Here the water measures 19. It's within the allowable norm, but it could be a lot lower. 20 is the maximum.
Gubaidulin: And we have 19?
Man: Background radiation is 08.
Gubaidulin: You mean this water is twice as dirty? I went fishing in that river. And I go there to swim there and I cut my hay there. We don't understand this.

Exterior: Two old women on village street
Old woman: One of my daughters died. Just died.

2nd old woman: We swam in that river, we drank that water!

Exterior: In front of Gubaidulin's hut
Gubaidulin's wife: My son's sick, too, he's really skinny, my oldest son. He's very sick.

Gubaidulin: And my son gets these nose bleeds. And look at her back. Her spine is crooked, and she gets these bleeding sores all around.

Old man: We've been living up until now. Those Chernobyl people got help, but here we are. We're born without arms and legs, and no matter how bad things are, we manage to walk. And there's nowhere to go.

Exterior: Villagers waving "good-bye"

Interior: FIB Institute, records office
Dr. Mira Kosenko is the head of the clinic at the Institute of Biophysics, or FIB, where she has worked since the early 1960s. FIB was established in order to measure the effects of radiation on the human body. The Institute has 50 beds and 15 doctors, but they take real pride in the thousands of files which record cases of radiation sickness in the area. I've asked her to show me Maysky Gubaidulin's file.

Dr. Kosenko: The name is Gubaidulin, right? This is Maysky Gubaidulin's card. He was born in 1937. And in 1959 he was checked here and admitted for a week. He lived in Bolshoe Toskino, his body contains a lot of strontium 90, more than 1000 curies of it. They didn't know anything, and we had no right to tell them that they were irradiated. All this information was top secret. And it was a secret because of the factory where they produced weapons grade plutonium. And no one was supposed to know its location. If someone found out that in some area there were people who had been irradiated, then it would have been possible to find the factory. That's why these people weren't given any information about radiation. The doctor had the information to treat the patient properly. He had that information.

Interior: Office of Louiza Kurzova
Louiza: Why don't they treat people? Why can't they treat them? Why is that dissertation written on how to recognize the course of the disease? Why is it that Professor Kirushkin only defended his dissertation, but the dissertation isn't used as a manual to treat children? Why don't they treat the children?

Interior: Children's hospital
This is the childrens' hospital of the Chelyabinsk province. One ward is devoted to leukemia patients. This 30-bed facility serves the nearly one million children who live in this province. The 30 beds on this floor are always full, and the waiting list is enormous.

Interior: Doctor walking down corridor
Doctor Eleyna Basharova is the director of the leukemia ward. She has researched the incidence of childhood leukemia in the Chelyabinsk region.

Interior: Children being treated, checked by the doctor
Her research shows that the incidence in closed towns like Mayak is twice the average.

Dr. Basharova: Twenty-two percent of the children survive for over 5 years, which is the criterion for a cure. So we simply observe them, and they're healthy without any treatment. 22 percent of the patients. But the rest die. They die. Sooner or later they die. That's the way it is. But since last year we've been trying to use the German course of treatment. It gives them a better chance, about 50%. But in Germany the treatment is much more intense. But we can't do that here. We haven't gotten to that point yet.

Exterior: Child being carried into a hospital
Three year old Maxim Ivanov's parents and grandparents lived and worked in the Mayak atomic complex for more than 30 years. His father and grandfather eventually died of leukemia.

Interior: Doctor in white coat talking on the phone
Maxim will be seeing the most reknowned orthopedic specialist at City Hospital #9, Dr. Naum Pollak.

Interior: Doctor's office with child and mother
Dr. Pollak (to child's mother): Just a second. It's all right. Go ahead, stand him up on the table.

Maxim was born without a left arm and his right leg is shorter than his left. Doctor Pollak has seen many such cases in his long career.

Doctor (to child): Don't be afraid, there's nothing to be afraid of here. 43 centimeters. Bend your leg, dear, bend your leg.

Mother: In the city where I live, there are a lot of children born without hands, legs, and feet.

Doctor Pollak: Today we know that it builds up in the genes. Not only the first generation, but the second, the third. It's interesting that we didn't talk about it, to tell you the truth. For one thing, we didn't know as much. But besides that, it wasn't really allowed to tell most people these kinds of things. In a word, we would look for any explanation, just as long as it wasn't connected with radioactivity.

Interior: Walking down the corridor
Dr. Pollak: But later we found out the reasons. Look at this deformation. They operated on it when she was a child. But you can see that it grew back. It looks just like a bump. It restricts her mobility. It's a birth defect.

Interior: Man walking down a corridor
Idris Sunrasin has cancer of the stomach. He has been admitted to the Chelyabinsk sanatorium. His village, which was located only 15 kilometers from Mayak, was leveled and the inhabitants resettled to the town of Argayash after the 1957 explosion.

Interior: Idris sitting on bed in sanatorium
I was ten when the explosion happened I remember that we were running in the woods, and soldiers had surrounded our village and started to drive us back into the village. They wouldn't let us go anywhere. They wouldn't say anything.

Interviewer: They didn't tell you what had happened?
Idris: They didn't tell us anything. They didn't talk about anything. Not about the explosion, nothing. They put up posts, made a danger zone, but there was nothing said about an explosion. Maybe the adults knew about the explosion. They put you in this barrel-shaped thing, you slide in and out of it. That's how they measure the radiation. "What's wrong with me," I asked. "You don't have radiation sickness," they told me. And that's all they would say.

Exterior: Scenes from van
Winter can be harsh in Chelyabinsk, a province in the south-western corner of Siberia.

Interior: Passengers in van, man and woman
Two local environmentalists are taking me to the village of Brodokalmak, where they were born and raised.

Man: They used to fish in the river. They probably still do. It's a really big fish, what's it called? A trench? A trench.

Exterior: Village
The 4,000 inhabitants of this village on the banks of the Techa River were never evacuated.

Exterior: Old man in fur hat, carrying a cane
Mikhail Ryadnyov is a veteran of the Second World War and a widower who lives in Brodokalmak.

Ryadnyov: The kids swim and whatnot in the river. The geese, the cows, the sheep, they're all down there.

Interviewer: Aren't you afraid?

Ryadnyov: What's there to be afraid of? The worst has happened already. The fish are still alive after all. And there are a lot of them, and they're big like this. Trench fish, that's right. Trench.

Interviewer: Do you still fish now?

Ryadnyov: Yes, yes, I still fish. I fry them. Fried, all the atoms fly out of them.

Interior: School room
Today, for the first time, people who live in Brodokalmak are meeting to discuss their concerns out in the open.

The school's principal and geography teacher, Dmitri Svinin, leads the discussion.

Young man: Every third person dies of cancer. My grandfather died of cancer. Nobody dies of old age anymore.

Svinin: You mean when they're seventy?

Young man: No, not seventy. Young people are dying. Young people are dying of cancer, too.

Woman: I know a 17 year old girl who died of cancer. How does someone that age get cancer? Why are these young people dying? There was a young man who grazed his cattle with ours, and he died already. They already buried him.

Svinin: We have to do an analysis

Woman: The river was contaminated. and no one even explained anything to us not even why we can't go near it, and when we asked that man, he says, that's the way it is, that's the way it is. And there were times when a militiaman would stand next to the river, and we'd be swimming, and doing laundry.

Svinin: They didn't know...

Woman: They knew! Dmitry Semyonovich, this is serious! Why are you turning everything into a joke? I meant what I said. We still have relatives living there, and are they still dumping that filth into the river? How can you be so sure of what you say? Who runs Mayak, your brother?

Svinin: The woman doesn't have enough knowledge of science to yell that. I'm a geographer, and I don't know about the underground water.

2nd Woman: It was an experiment on people We were just guinea pigs. Now I suppose we're hostages.

3rd Woman: In our school there is a separate class that has been going on for years, the fifth grade that has been using a different separate program for years. We all know very well that all of those children are retarded. No one talked about that before, either. Now we do. How is it that suddenly we have an whole grade of retarded children? It's our radiation. We, especially you, the younger generation, should be upset, and I am very happy that our comrade from America who is a going to do a film about us, will show everyone, and I hope the whole world finds out what sort of situation we have today in this country.

Interior: Hospital corridor
Dr. Alexandra Slusaryeva is making her rounds at the Brodokalmak hospital. She suspects that she herself suffers from radiation sickness.

Dr. Slusaryova: When I started working here, that was in 1983 I came here, when our patients or out-patients would die, we were told unofficially, nothing was on paper, we were told that if people have cancer, we shouldn't write that down as a diagnosis. Write something else, anything else, either a stroke, or a severe heart attack of some sort. Even chronic heart disease, basically any of those accompanying diseases, but they would only let us put down cancer as a contributing factor. But to just put down cancer as a cause of death was not allowed. We have that Institute of Biophysics in Chelyabinsk that studies these problems. But they don't inform us. I went there about 4 years ago as a doctor to meet my colleagues since they had done research on my generation, people born in around 1953, 1954. Well, they wouldn't even tell me about the radioactivity, how much I've got of that strontium-90 in my system. I asked and they said it was a state secret. Everything here is a state secret.

Interior: File room of FIB with Dr. Kosenko
Dr. Kosenko: The location, the placement of the factory was a secret. It was a state secret. So we couldn't tell people that by living here they were in danger of irradiation. We couldn't write down radiation sickness. We weren't allowed to. So how did we indicate it? We were given instructions to indicate it with initials, the three letters ABC. And whenever we would see that abbreviation--and we have it on those cards over there, I can show you some--all of us who work here knew that that was radiation sickness.

Dr. Kosenko shows a file from a large rack
Dr. Kosenko: In the village of Metlino. But we weren't allowed to write even that. You can see it's crossed out here. We only wrote it in later, when they started to allow it. In 1953 she was diagnosed with 1st degree chronic radiation sickness. And then here we have 2nd degree chronic radiation sickness. We knew that. This is what the markings on the cards indicated. It doesn't say that it's radiation sickness, but this and this tell you that this person had radiation sickness. We know that.

Interior: Testing a woman for radiation
The level of strontium-90 is one of the factors used to determine the amount of radiation received by a person during his lifetime. Since the installation of this radiation detector in 1974, 15,000 people have slid through its door. According to a study by Dr. Mira Kosenko and her colleagues, the over 28,000 people who lived along the Techa received an average dose of radiation 57 times higher than that received by the Chernobyl inhabitants. And for tens of thousands of people, the dose was four times greater.

Exterior: Summer scenes from the train
Before I left the region last winter, I promised the friends I made that I would return.

Exterior: Ramil hoeing in a potato field
My first visit is to Ramil Mukhamedyarov, whom I met last winter when his sister was in the hospital.

Ramil: You left when? In March?

Interviewer: Yes, In March, at the end of March. Ramil: The end of March, around the 20th, right? After that we took her home. She died at home. 56 years old.

Exterior: Ramil leading us down the village street
Ramil: Every second or third family here has lost someone. I think it's abnormal. I wouldn't mind if people lived to see their pensions, died of whatever, of natural causes. But this is the river. Leukemia, cancer, those are the things that kill us. Those are what kill us.

Exterior: Ramil points to houses
Ramil: The husband there died, didn't make it to 40. And the husband there died, too, his wife is left all alone. He died before he was 40 I think. He was 36, 38, just like my father. Last year a young man died of lung cancer, 40, 42 years old. That house there is empty right now. A young family lived there. The wife died, she was 28, of leukemia. Then her husband died exactly a year later. Now only their orphaned daughter is left. My uncle lived in that house, 56 years old. He died of leukemia.

Exterior: Approach a house with an old woman and three children standing outside
Ramil's Aunt: I'll tell you everything, of course. But I only know a little Russian. My husband lived in that house. He had cancer. Roma was 50. Yes, he was in FOB? What was it? FIB for fives months. My daughter got sick and died right away.

Ramil: Your daughter was 36 last year, right?

Ramil's Aunt: Right. These are the girls she left, three little girls.

Exterior: Bridge as seen from van
On his way to work, Ramil, like many other villagers, crosses this bridge over the Techa River at least twice a day. The bridge has a radiation level ten times higher than background radiation.

Exterior: River bank
Ramil: It's simpler, of course, to leave, but our roots are here. Our father. We were born here. Where should we go. You can't run from fate. We're already irradiated. Even if we go to a clean area, maybe we've already adapted to things here. Maybe our bodies are used to these conditions. Maybe we've adapted.

Exterior: River, barbed wire, Robert with a geiger counter
Another Muslyumovo teacher, Farrida Shaimardanova, takes us to the river bank where her daughters went sledding last winter. Since she doesn't trust the devices passed out by the local government, she has asked us to use our equipment to measure the radiation a mere 50 yards from her house.

Robert: Incredible.

Farida: 100, 150, 200. This is insane.

This is 25 times normal background radiation.

Exterior: Boys fishing, Robert with the geiger counter
Robert: I'll bring it down towards the fish, and watch what happens. It goes all the way down to the bottom.

1st boy: Is there a lot in the fish?

Interviewer: Yes, a very large amount.

1st boy: We shouldn't eat that fish?

Interviewer: No, you shouldn't.

1st boy: What'll happen if you eat it?

Interviewer: You'll get sick.

1st boy: We're sick anyway. That's what they mean when they say, you can't infect an infection.

Interviewer: What did they tell you in school about coming here?

1st boy: That the river is contaminated?

Interviewer: With what?

1st boy: Aaaahhhh, chemicals? There's an electric station...

Robert: Whoa! It's hovering around 1. That's the highest reading so far.

Interviewer: The radiation is high here. You shouldn't be here. Don't stand there!

The level of radiation we just measured is 50 times higher than the normal background radiation.

Exterior: Horses grazing on the bank of the river

Exterior: Summer countryside from van
In 1967, radioactive dust swept over the countryside when Lake Karachay, a makeshift waste containment basin, dried out during a drought. Over 27 hundred square kilometers and 40 thousand people were affected.

Exterior: Lena Morozova in a field
A hundred meters from the river, we meet Lena Morozova. She suffers from stomach cancer.

Lena: Of course we're going to die. What's there to be optimistic about? It's better to believe. I've got no home, no medicine, how are things going to get better? Maybe if they gave me an apartment, that would be some kind of stimulant. The way things are I don't believe in anything anymore. Nobody's going to cure me. Who needs me? Who needs me? My God. The individual doesn't mean anything to us. It's the people, the people got used to it. But all alone, what can I do? I have to bring up my children, take care of them so that at least they won't be sick.

Exterior: Idris Sunrasin on the banks of a lake
Idris Sunrasin, who was diagnosed with stomach cancer, has come home from the sanatorium in Chelyabinsk. He has lost another ten pounds.

Idris (to sons on the lake): Be careful there! Don't rip the net! Haul it in carefully!

After Idris's sons catch five fish on the lake, he invites me back to his home in Argayash.

Interior: Sunrasin apartment; small boy brings in a pail of water; Idris's wife cleans fish

There's no running water today in the Sunrasin apartment.

Interior: Idris sits with his young daughter, who is playing a Tatar melody on an accordian
Idris: You had an aunt, the oldest of my three sisters. She lived about 3 kilometers from here. She had cancer too, of some internal organ. They did 2 operations but it didn't help. It didn't help. Another sister lived int he Stavropol region from 1954. She has her own family, children. Cancer. She's younger than me. My younger sister. She died of cancer too. Your uncle, my older brother, he got an intestinal disease. Probably cancer, too. They took him to the hospital. He died. Your grandfather died in Kosli. He was in the hospital. They let him check out. There was nothing they could do for him. Grandma had a tumor too. She died in 1954. She was 43, 44, she died young too.

Idris's daughter: We're already contaminated, and we get along that way. But some people can't live with the contamination, and they die from it. Probably all of the Urals are contaminated. And we live in that contamination, we swim in the contaminated lake. But we'll be fine, we'll probably live to be fifty or so. But people who move here, they can't live here too long, because they come from Moscow, or abroad, and the air there is clean, well, cleaner, and that's why they can't manage for too long here. And that's why people die so quickly.

Interior: Sunrasin kitchen, everyone comes for dinner

Interior: Dr. Romanov's office

Interviewer: How many people died?

Romanov: Not one. Not one. Not a single person died.

Interviewer: What about afterwards?

Romanov: No one died afterwards either. We have no evidence of any sort that anyone died either as a direct result of the explosion, or as a result of an illness caused by it. There is no evidence. No one died.

Interior: Sofiya Khrolenko in a van
Sofiya Khrolenko is a retired teacher from the Boyovka orphanage. The village was evacuated a year after the explosion; but the authorities left the orphanage in the empty town for another year before its children and personnel were moved.

Sofiya: The building was here, L-shaped. And right here, this is the first floor, and there were steps going up. Game rooms, and this was the cafeteria. Over there was the well. That's where we could get our clean water. It's such a beautiful place. You know, even after all this time it breaks my heart that we had to leave here. This bush was absolutely tiny, and now look how big it's gotten. It grew.

Sofiya grabs and branch and buries her face in it, crying
Sofiya: I can't stand it. I feel so bad. I wish so much that we hadn't had to leave.

Sofiya crying, holding branch in her hands
There were thirty of us. Only 7 are still alive. The rest have died. Even the children. Some of them died while they were still children, not long after we were resettled. Some a year after, some two after, and some maybe 10 years after. Some had leukemia, but most often it was cancer of various internal organs.

Exterior: Anisa and Robert walking through a grassy field. Robert has a geiger counter
Anisa Nineeva's family was resettled when she was only 4. Today ,we are taking her to measure the radiation in her grazing lands for the first time.

Robert: .15, .2, went off the scale, it's very high. This is the highest we've seen we're not even close to the river. This is the highest we've seen, so far. It's almost twice what we've seen in Muslyumovo.

Anisa: It's high, right?

Interviewer: It is 100 time normal background radiation. What do you do here?

Anisa:We cut hay, this is where we cut hay, right here, this is what we feed our cattle. That's our field. The animals eat the grass, the children drink the milk. I'm just amazed. I didn't think it could be so high.

Interviewer: How many years have you been doing it?

Anisa: How many years? Well, for as long as I can remember. And I'm 38. I was born in 1953, they resettled us in '56, but we kept these fields by the river. We all cut hay here. Half the village cuts hay along the river. We all cut hay.

Interviewer: And no one ever said anything?

Anisa: Who's going to say anything? They only started talking about it 2 years ago. We don't have geiger counters, we don't have anything. I don't even know how much there is in my own field. How would I know? Where am I going to go? Who else is going to give me land? And where else am I going to get hay? So that's how it is.

Robert: The needle's even buried there, almost.

Anisa: So that's it. What are we supposed to do now? We've got to leave here.

Exterior: Robert and driver by the van
Robert: They told me when I checked out the meter not to stay in an area if the meter... I asked them, when would you leave an area, and they said when the needle gets buried, when the needle gets buried. And it was buried on times 1, it was buried on times 10, and at times 100, it was getting up there. This is the highest area we've seen. Definitely.

Exterior: Fields, grass

***

On Screen Information

Page 1

The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of the Mayak Nuclear Weapons Complex and its impact on the surrounding area.

Page 2

On July 17, 1993, 20 liters of radioactive plutonium leaked from a ventilation shaft.
On August 9, 1993, radioactive waste spilled from a pipe into the plant.
On August 31, 1994, a fire erupted at the processing plant. Radioactive gasses escaped into the atmosphere.

Page 3

Greenpeace announced on October 27, 1993, that a Finnish nuclear company has been sending its own high level radioactive wastes to Mayak since 1981.

Page 4

Perestroika revealed that the country has been turned into a nuclear waste dump. Mayak, with its nearly 500 million curies of radioactivity, is only one of many similar complexes dotting the map of today's Russia.

Production Assistance...........................................Roberg Rieger

Photographed and Edited by......................................Slawomir Grunberg

Post Production Assistance......................................Lesli La Rocco

Translators.....................................................Lesli La Rocco, Slava Paperno

Narrated by.....................................................Slawomir Grunberg

Russian Voices..................................................Lesli La Rocco

Post Production Facilities Provided by..........................Log In Productions