MUTANT CHILDREN OF A FAILED GOD
Max Easterman discovers the horrific consequences of the Soviet Union's experiments with nuclear weapons
Semipalatinsk IF ANY NATION can be said to have suf- fered most from official persecution by the former Soviet Union, that nation is Kaza- khstan. During the forced collectivisation of the 1930s, whole villages were starved to death. The Gulag Archipelago was estab- lished on Kazakh soil. The Aral Sea, a hugely valuable resource, has been partial- ly drained to serve the needs of cotton monoculture in neighbouring Uzbekistan. And, most recently, it has emerged that the Kazakh people have been exposed to massive doses of radiation from the Semi- palatinsk nuclear test site in the north-east of the republic.
From August 1949, the Soviet military conducted well over 500 nuclear explo- sions at what's known as the Polygon, a large area south-west of the city. Villages and small towns ring the site. Until 1963, the tests were in the atmosphere, and many settlements were exposed year after year to fall-out at close range — the worst affected were only 30 kilometres from `ground zero'. But even when the testing had to go under ground, after the atmo- spheric ban, many explosions discharged Into the air because they took place so close to the surface.
The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced relatively few long-term effects in terms of disease and deformity; but what happened around Semipalatinsk is now known to be qualitatively and quanti- tatively different. Long-term and repeated exposure to radiation has produced a whole complex of illnesses and genetic damage. Although the Soviet authorities kept everything secret, the data were col- lected, collated and filed away. Now they're available from the Kazakh Institute of Radiation, and it makes sobering read- ing. But, in any case, the evidence is there to be seen in any of the villages and towns of Semipalatinsk oblast.
Zhibik Baildinova is a lecturer at the Medical Institute in Semipalatinsk. She's a chubby, engaging woman with a nervous sense of humour. I realised why, as she showed me round the Institute's museum — at first sight, the usual assemblage of embalmed oddities and preserved speci- mens you can find in any teaching hospi- tal. But one whole wall is given over to display cases filled with aborted and still- born foetuses, victims of the Polygon tests. Many of them are preserved, incongruous- ly, in Exide battery jars. They are still appearing, and will for years to come. A cyclops, for example, was born only a cou- ple of years ago, its single eye in mid-fore- head, its ears growing below the chin, no mouth. Beside it is another tragedy, its head twice the size of its body. A third had two heads; a fourth just one, but attached to its right shoulder; a fifth, no skull — its brain perched above two sightless, unformed eyes. These were a few of thou- sands, just a random selection of the worst deformities, preserved for the instruction of the medical students. Thousands more were born alive and survived: teratoid, cretinous, living proof of a defence policy rooted in an official disregard for human life.
The twist to this collection, though, was that it was a secret. No one dared mention the foetuses, let alone discuss them either with their families or, publicly, with other doctors. 'We dealt in tragedy, but we weren't told it was linked with the tests. In those days, you didn't open your mouth the Party decided what was what, and that was that.' Zhibik Baildinova spread her hands in a gesture of resignation that I was to see many times over the next few days.
The road to Znamenka runs south-west from Semipalatinsk, straight and flat across the steppe towards a low range of moun- tains that seems almost to hang on the grey, snow-bound horizon. In late winter, Znamenka is not pretty; the single-storey, plain houses squat haphazardly round the few breeze-block official buildings, as the snow turns to muddy slush. The villagers are sheep-farmers, and therein lies their tragedy, for in summer the sheep, and those who tend them, must range far out across the steppe in search of the best pas- ture. Some of this lies alongside the Poly- gon, some inside its boundaries. The pasture is infected and deadly; over the years, the food chain has absorbed the nuclear poison, and it has penetrated the genetic system of local people.
The cemeteries of these villages are testi- mony to the accelerated death-rates from cancer, pneumonia, heart disease. The highest rates occurred after clusters of nuclear explosions. The researchers and doctors I spoke to say the evidence is that human immune systems have mutated. Children are now being born with almost no resistance to disease. The local health service is stretched to its limits by these young people, many of whom need drugs and hospitalisation on a semi-permanent basis. Kazakhs traditionally had large fami- lies: 10 or 11 children were not unusual. At the Radiation Institute, Dr Boris Gusif told me that mothers are now avoiding preg- nancy, or routinely aborting, rather than run the risk of bearing another deformed baby. Twenty years ago, he said, the num- ber of severely deformed births was only slightly above normal, but over the past decade it has doubled every year and there's no sign of it slowing down, in spite of the drop in birth-rate.
Znamenka is a Russian name — in Kaza- kh it means 'virgin's breast', referring to the shape of a nearby hill. No one knows just how many Kazakh girls have died before their time, their breasts and bodies riddled with radiation-induced cancers.
Average life expectancy on one local col- lective farm is now down to 27 years. I wasn't prepared in advance for what I saw as I went into Zeinil Khan's house, and it was heart-stopping. Birik, her 13-year-old son, is blind. He has no eyes, and his face and head are ravaged by tumours. Worst of all, where his eyes should be there are just two ugly growths of skin. Birik knows he is
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