Former Nuclear Testing Site Comes to Terms with Past

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Former Nuclear Testing Site Comes to Terms with Past 
August 1, 1998

KURCHATOV, Kazakhstan -- (Agence France Presse) Outsiders call this city 
Konnechnaya -- the Final Stop -- but the young scientists and military 
personnel who arrived here to develop the nuclear bomb for the Soviets 
and test its effects on the population thought themselves lucky. 

Lydia Sysoyeva, 52, remembers moving to the closed city of Kurchatov 
with her husband, an engineer at the National Nuclear Center, and the 
droves who came to work at the nearby Polygon in the 1950s and 60s. 

"The town that first struck my eyes was a green oasis on the steppe," 
said Sysoyeva, now the administrator of what is fast becoming a ghost 
town. 

"All the buildings were inhabited. Each year, one or two five-story 
buildings were constructed, and the entire population was young." 

Today, Kurchatov is a town of 10,000 with blocks of apartment buildings 
abandoned after more than half the population packed their furniture 
onto railroad boxcars and left in 1993 and 1994. 

Just as the radiation from the more than 460 nuclear tests the Soviets 
conducted from 1949 to 1989 at the Polygon -- now a virtually barren, 
restricted area of 18,500 square kilometers (7,400 square miles) -- 
still sets Geiger counters beeping, the region's past weighs heavily on 
people's minds. 

Nearly every adult remembers the trauma of seeing the modern-day symbol 
of Armageddon -- the mushroom cloud -- followed by a blinding light and 
tremors. For many, the monthly or bimonthly nuclear tests were a part of 
life. 

Villagers calmly recall how authorities told them to leave their homes, 
even during above-ground tests, and how they lay on the banks of the 
Irtysh River with their arms over their heads. 

But others, like Aleksander Shevchenko, 71, a former forced laborer who 
helped build a metro, bridges and buildings inside the Polygon so the 
Soviets could see how a nuclear war would affect urban structures, are 
still suffering emotional trauma. 

Shevchenko, who channels his emotions into horrific oil paintings of the 
mushroom clouds, watched the first atomic bomb in 1949 with pride at 
having caught up with the Americans. But his pride was short-lived. 

During the tests "everything went white, a frightful white. There was no 
light. These rays penetrated a person through like x-rays." 

"What happened to us was we were absent at this moment. This explosion 
was unsettling. You watch yourself as if from the side. ...It's shock. 
Then gradually you come to, and the real suffering starts here," he 
said. 

Only after the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement lobbied to stop the testing 
did the population, which today suffers from higher than normal rates of 
cancer, blood diseases, mental retardation and grotesque deformities 
like babies born with cone-shaped heads, learn of radiation's effects. 

Dr. Boris Gusev, today the deputy director of the Kazakh Research 
Institute for Radiation Medicine and Ecology in Semipalatinsk, knew 
before many others that the Soviets were using the local population as 
human guinea pigs. 

Gusev worked in one of four dispensaries, institutions created in 1957 
to secretly study the effects of radiation by telling "patients" they 
were being treated for an infectious disease. 

Gusev, who said he could have been shot or imprisoned had he told his 
patients the real nature of his work, is not apologetic. "Now I feel 
very good because the things I knew and saw ... I could somehow help 
these people. I helped them from the first second of my work to the 
present day," he said. 

Surprisingly, few Kurchatov residents, unlike those in the villages 
around the Polygon, complain about the effects of the nuclear tests on 
their health. 

They are more concerned with moving on. Privatization is only now coming 
to Kurchatov since it became an open city last September, Sysoyeva said. 

Ironically, the past that destroyed so many lives still provides the 
livelihood of most of Kurchatov's residents -- the Polygon and the 
Nuclear Center are the main employers. 

Kairat Serimov, whose youngest brother has Down's syndrome, works at a 
nuclear reactor in the Polygon, but he doesn't consider radiation a 
problem. 

"Here where we live it's normal. If I lived anywhere else, there 
wouldn't be enough radiation," he said.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Glenn
GACMail98@aol.com
 
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