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Letter from Belarus: legacy of the Chernobyl nuclear incident

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Ivan J. Antanovich
Ivan J. Antanovich
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Sciences, Belarussian University of Culture, Minsk, Belarus, Tel: + 7 172 273434, Fax: +7 172 274521
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Extract

The Republic of Belarus lies in between Russia and Poland, and to the north of Ukraine. It has a population of 10 million and a complicated history; parts of Belarus were in Poland and parts in Russia. When within the USSR, policies were adopted, especially in the 1980s, that were at the expense of member parts of the Union. The Chernobyl power plant was built in the Ukraine, near the southern border of Belarus. When the Chernobyl disaster happened on 26 April 1986 (Mould 1988; Park 1989), for three days running the wind blew in the direction of Belarus and we received about 60% of the total fallout. It was not the fault of the Ukraine, but ultimately that of a bureacratized society of over-confident technocrats. About one-fifth of Belarus, as a region which acquired autonomy in July 1991 upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been affected to the extent that we have had to organize large resettlements of people, and we now have 300 km2 of land seriously affected and unfit for human habitation, surrounded by a wider circle of about 10 000 km2 which is taken to be endangered, and this within a country of 220 000 km2. Both before and after independence, Belarus' resources have been enormously drained by this disaster.

Type
Comment
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 287 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1996

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References

Antanovich, I.J. (1996) Post-Communist transition. Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Occasional Paper 7: 26–33.Google Scholar
Mould, R.F. (1988) Chernobyl: the Real Story. Oxford: Pergamon: xviii + 255 pp.Google Scholar
Park, C.C. (1989) Chernobyl: the Long Shadow. London: Routledge: 207 pp.Google Scholar