“(Re)Claiming the Past: Cultural Rescue and Nationalism in Post-Chornobyl

Ukraine”

by Myron O. Stachiw, Director, Fulbright Representative Office in Ukraine

Fulbright Scholar, 2004-2005; 2005-2006

Revised August 2008

A paper presented at the Harvard University Ukrainian Summer Institute, Cambridge,

MA, July 31, 2006

A similar version was presented at the International Congress for the Study of Central
and Eastern Europe, Berlin, Germany, July 24, 2005;

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2005

This story is well known to most of you, I am sure. In the early morning hours
of April 26, 1986, a poorly conceived and executed experiment in Reactor #4 of the
Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station in the Ukrainian SSR, went horribly wrong. With all
of the safety mechanisms and backup systems manually disabled for the experiment, the
reactor core began to dangerously overheat and began what every nuclear engineer has
nightmares about - a meltdown of the core. The resultant explosions and fires sent more
than fifty tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere – the equivalent of more than
several hundred times the radiation from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- poisoning tens of thousands of square kilometers of heavily populated forest, farmland,
and urban places in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia with radioactive fallout and changing
the course of history. First detected by scientists in Sweden, and initially denied by
Soviet authorities, the radioactive fallout spread across the earth, causing the slaughter of
sheep herds as far away as Scotland and causing many women to abort their pregnancies
in Greece. Many scholars believe that the stresses brought on by the Chornobyl disaster
to the government and economy of the Soviet Union, and its loss of credibility on both
international and domestic levels as a result of its handling of the crisis, were the
proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” and contributed significantly to the
ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.
 In Ukraine alone, radioactive fallout from the damaged reactor contaminated
6.6% of Ukraine's territory over an area of more than 40,000 square kilometers (nearly
20,000 square miles) of Ukraine’s fertile earth. Just as a comparison, the combined area
of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island is only 13,724 sq. miles . More than 3
million residents (among them nearly 1 million children) in more than 2200 towns,
villages, and cities were exposed to radioactive fallout – and this excludes the 3 million
residents of Kyiv, located just 80 km. from the reactor, which were excluded from the
radiation maps and counts for reasons of convenience, economics, and social order. In
one of the great crimes of humanity the Soviet authorities allowed the May Day parade to
go off as planned in Kyiv despite the fact that radiation readings in the city from the
fallout had reached levels as much as 3000 times the normal levels. To date more than
2.5 million people still live on contaminated lands. An even more serious threat to the
health of the entire nation of 47 million people is that streams and rivers that drain the
contaminated territories of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all flow into the Dnipro River,
from which 32,000,000 Ukrainians draw their drinking water. Mary Mycio in her book
Wormwood Forest revealed that the soils in the agricultural lands of the southern half of
the country that have drawn their irrigation water from the Dnipro River these past
twenty years have radiation levels equal to or higher than much of the land within the
designated contaminated zones outside of the exclusion zone.

In the first several weeks after the accident more than 100,000 people were
relocated from the city of Prypiat, situated just a few kilometers from the reactor, and
from more than 70 surrounding villages in a 30 km. radius zone around the reactor, where
radiation was highest due to heaviest fallout, especially of the heavy elements of
plutonium. With a half life of nearly 25,000 years, the plutonium ensured that it would
be an inconceivably long time before this area could ever again be repopulated and used
in any normal ways. Standard calculations for the decay of radionuclides to “safe” levels
at which low-risk reoccupation could occur are ten half-life cycles. Cesium and
Strontium, the two most widely distributed radioactive contaminants, and particularly
dangerous ones because of the way they insinuate themselves into plants and animals,
have a half life of approximately thirty years. In addition, huge quantities of radioactive
waste, contaminated equipment used in the cleanup, and debris gathered during the clean-
up were deposited in more than 800 burial sites located within the Exclusion Zone. Over
the next several years at least another 100,000 people were evacuated and relocated
throughout the country, and at least 100,000 left the region voluntarily. Some
contemporary estimates put the number of people who have been dislocated through
obligatory or voluntary relocation at more than 1million. Ukrainian Ambassador to the
US Oleh Shamshur, speaking at a Congressional hearing on the impacts of the Chornobyl
disaster this past April, provided the following statistics in his testimony: one-half
million Ukrainians died from various illnesses as a result Chornobyl accident between
1987 and 2004; 35,000 Ukrainian liquidators – people sent into the Zone to carry out the
clean-up - have already died; 6769 children have died from a variety of cancers directly
related to the accident and its aftermath; tens of thousand of square kilometers of
Ukrainian territory have been irradiated; and nearly 2700 settled points – villages, towns,
and cities – have been affected by the irradiation. Jim Riccio of Greenpeace estimates
that 250,000 cancer illnesses will result from the accident, with about 100,000 of those
fatal. These estimates stand in stark contrast to the recent report issued by the United
Nations, World Health Organization, and International Atomic Energy Agency that only
about 4000 people will die as result of the radiation resulting from the accident. Many
scholars and political pundits have attributed this absurdly conservative estimate of the
impact of the Chornobyl disaster on human life as nothing more than a cover by these
agencies for the efforts to revive the nuclear power industry as the answer to the world’s
energy needs within a context of growing international conflict between energy
producing and energy consuming countries that has deep and irreconcilable differences in
ideology, religion, and world view. Groups such as the Children of Chornobyl Relief
and Development Fund and Greenpeace have severely criticized the report as incomplete
and inadequate, based on flawed and incomplete data.

Ukrainian sociologist Yurij Sayenko identified three terrible catastrophes that the
people and nation of Ukraine have suffered, and by extension the other nations in the
former USSR impacted by the Chornobyl disaster as well. The first was the Chornobyl
disaster itself; its consequences seriously harmed the environment and people of Ukraine
and covered the Earth with radioactive rain. The second was the breakdown of the
USSR, and the destruction of the habitual social and political reality of the world. The
situation of a “stable protected prison was changed for an unclear and frightening
freedom”. The third was a deep post-totalitarian political and economic crisis during the
1990s, resulting in a sharp impoverishment of the Ukrainian state and population and
inability to deal effectively with the monumental scale of the issues addressing the nation
in the aftermath of the Chornobyl disaster. These three catastrophes have been
superimposed each on the other and have strengthened each other.

Within this context, Ukrainian scholars have undertaken a sustained effort to

record, document, and preserve the traditional culture of the contaminated territories of
Ukraine. Similar efforts were mounted by scholars in Belarus and Russia, but these were
relatively short-lived and quite limited in scope and scale. Only the Ukrainian
government has continued to sustain the efforts of its ethnographers, folklorists,
historians, decorative arts scholars, architectural historians, linguists, ethnomusicologists,
anthropologists, and archaeologists to the present, albeit at levels that were barely
adequate to continue the work during the past five years or so, let alone process the
warehouses full of artifacts collected, thousands of pages of written reports, even more
thousands of photographs, hundreds and hundreds of hours audio and video recordings
collected. Why were these efforts undertaken and sustained longer in Ukraine than in
Belarus and Russia? When I began this research and prepared the abstract for this paper,
I thought that these actions were the result of complex national motivations by Ukrainian
leaders to take the initiative in recording and documenting the traditional culture of this
region as part of larger geo-political/geo-cultural contest among former Soviet republics,
and specifically between Ukraine and its long-time political and cultural dominatrix,
Russia. If Ukrainian scholars could succeed in recovering the traditional culture of the
Polissia Region as a distinctly Ukrainian cultural heritage, then they could draw direct
lines of connection from the newly independent Ukrainian nation back to the earliest
origins of all Slavic culture, even further back than to the usurped history of Kyivan Rus’.
Over the past several decades, Western as well as Ukrainian historians have generally
agreed that the very cradle of all Slavic culture more than 1500 years ago was located in
the borderlands between Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia – essentially the territory of
Polissia, which retains the most distinct and archaic traditional culture of all Ukraine.
This culture still retains elements of pre-Christian beliefs and practices, and is believed to
form a direct link back to early Slavic culture.

After nearly two years of research, interviews with participants in the expeditions
and key people in the planning of the cultural rescue efforts, participation in two
expeditions into the irradiated territories, as well as more than a dozen independent trips,
I have come to the conclusion that the motivation for these efforts at cultural rescue -
efforts that can only be called heroic at the personal level - was not a calculated gambit
in cultural geo-politics by the authorities of the newly independent Ukraine, but an effort
of love of nation and culture – as well as economic and scholarly opportunism - by the
hundreds of scholars who volunteered to work in the contaminated zones. The result was
a sustained effort – albeit an erratically sustained effort - that covers nearly 15 years and
includes dozens of expeditions into the irradiated territories, the 30 km. Exclusion Zone,
and to the newly created homes and villages of relocated former residents to conduct
fieldwork in a number of disciplines, all with the goal of recording, documenting, and
preserving the traditional spiritual and material folk culture of the Polissia region. To
date nearly 300 villages were visited by the expeditions and subjected to some level of
fieldwork – interviews, photographs, measured drawings, video filming, and recording of
music and song. In total the archive currently housed in the Center for the Preservation
of Cultural Heritage within the Ministry of Emergency Situations contains more than
40,000 photographs; several hundred hours of audio tapes; more than 200 video tapes;
more than 10,000 documents salvaged from municipal offices, archives, and private
homes; and hundreds of measured drawings of buildings and landscapes. In addition,
more than 10,000 objects of traditional material culture have been collected and placed in
storage in Chornobyl and Ivankiw, waiting to be cleaned of radiation and forming a
significant collection that some dream will one day be the basis of a museum dedicated to
the traditional culture of Polissia. While this body of information represents a truly
remarkable accomplishment in the face of tremendous adversity – dangers of radiation,
truly primitive working conditions, lack of appropriate technology, inadequate and ever-
shrinking budgets – it unfortunately falls short of a truly systematic and comprehensive
survey and analysis of the culture of Polissia. From the beginning it was a race against
time, and often was based on the old Soviet practices of quantity not quality – to visit
more villages during the two week expeditions, often two or three per day by the field
teams. As a result, the image we receive of the traditional culture of Polissia is largely
impressionistic, based on many small and highly idiosyncratic encounters between
researchers and subjects. The process has fallen victim to the ubiquitous professional
jealousies and conflicts within scholarly communities in former Soviet states, to the
practices of scholars who hoard and protect the results of their fieldwork, and, until
recently, to the lack of political and financial support from a corrupt, Russia-oriented
government that, like its Soviet predecessor, had little need of celebrating and reinforcing
the cultural heritage of Ukraine. Throughout their 13 year reign, the governments of
Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma have repeatedly shown their disdain for the heritage of
Ukraine, preferring to recreate showy Disney-like historical monuments and tourist
attractions while cutting funds for museums, scholarly institutes engaged in historical and
cultural studies, and substantive cultural programming.

Among the scholarly community, it is now generally felt that most of the
important fieldwork has been completed and little interest remains in continuing the
difficult work of cataloguing, analyzing, and publishing the results of the past fifteen
years of work. A group of enthusiasts, led by Rostyslav Omeljashko, curator at the
Center for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at the Ministry of Emergency Situations,
continue to work and organize expeditions into the Exclusion Zone to document the
abandoned villages and to collect objects of traditional material culture. Omeljashko was
one of a small group of scholars who first pushed for action to be taken as early as 1989.
Most scholars now loudly lament the loss of this unique traditional culture of Polissia and
are content to know that they did their part in collecting and preserving elements of this
culture, that the reports of their field work (if they even submitted them as required) are
ensconced on the shelves of the archives for future generations of scholars to study –
maybe, if they can ever get access to them. Yet few if any acknowledge that there are
still more than two million people living within the irradiated territories of Polissia, and
that the culture need not die and disappear. Few are ready and willing to take the logical
next step – to take the raw materials they have collected during their fieldwork – stories,
folktales, prayers, traditional songs and dances, and rituals; the traditional practices of
agriculture, livestock husbandry, fishing, hunting and gathering, medicine; and traditional
craft practices, and analyzing them and then generating popular texts and programs that
will place this culture into a larger context and return this information to the still extant
communities in the Polissia region . An integrated and sensitive heritage reeducation
program can help to reestablish and heal the temporarily severed links of these residents
of shattered communities to their cultural heritage and to their past communities. One
very serious impact of the disaster and the government’s largely unavoidable strategy of
relocation from the most heavily contaminated territories was the total disruption of the
process of cultural regeneration and transmission from generation to generation, from
neighbor to neighbor, from community to community that had existed prior to the
Chornobyl disaster in many of the region’s towns and villages. Numerous studies have
shown that the psychological health of most current and former residents of the irradiated
territories is very poor. In addition to ill health, many suffer from depression and
alchoholism, and feel themselves to be helpless victims.

The process of relocation did not help the situation either. Most residents
evacuated in the first weeks from the exclusion zone were told that they would be gone
only a few days, and thus packed only overnight bags; most never were allowed to return
to their homes and belongings, and many were scattered across Ukraine and even to other
countries in the Soviet Union to widely differing communities. Those evacuated over the
months and years following were allowed to take many of their belongings, but some
were relocated into environments totally foreign – forest people to the open steppes for
example – and into dwellings that were radically different from the one or two-room log
buildings they were used to. Initially people were moved wherever there was room; later
they were moved in clusters of several families or an entire neighborhood to the same
village. Many of these people also suffered depression in their new and sometimes
strange environments among people who frequently resented their presence and the
government help they received, feared that radiation would be passed on to them, and
often made fun of the odd traditions of the relocated Polissians.

The economies of the irradiated regions have all but collapsed, and few if any
new enterprises have emerged over the past decade. Organized agriculture largely ended
with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the collective farm, and corrupt
officials sold off any remaining tractors and other technology so that people are forced to
work small plots by hand or to resort to preindustrial methods employing horses and oxen
and hand-threshing of grain. Little help has come from the government, which also
provided little or unreliable information to the residents about risks, safe methods, and
available relief programs. Organizations like the United Nations Development Program,
some NGOs, and some religious sects are helping individual communities; the UNDP has
set up a number of community centers and until the recent report issued by the UN had
expressed interest in expanding its focus on health and economic issues to issues of
cultural heritage education as a tool of psychological regeneration of the population.
Now however, following the recent UN report, their investment and support is almost
entirely in economic development. Yet many scholars and community activists do not
always assess these developments positively. For example, in those communities where
some religious sects have established congregations, the material conditions of life have
improved, and people have created new communities. But ethnographers bemoan the
establishment of these communities, as the members of these communities are
encouraged to turn their backs on the past and their traditional ways and beliefs. They
break apart the traditional communities and create smaller splintered communities that
consciously reject the old ways and no longer interact in any meaningful ways with the
traditional communities. An example from one village will illustrate the problem. When
the orthodox uncle of a man who joined one of the newly formed evangelical protestant
communities died, the member of the evangelical community refused to enter the
orthodox church and participate in the funeral of his favorite uncle, as he had been told
that it was not a true church and its members not true believers.
 Approximately 60-70% of the population of the irradiated territories are
pensioners – people with few choices or ambitions other than to live out their remaining
lives on their small plots of land. Many, but not all, younger families with children have
moved out of the zone seeking a healthier environment and better economic
opportunities. It is the fate of the elderly residents that is of particular concern to scholars
of traditional culture. In my assessment, the Chornobyl disaster is not the major threat to
disappearance of the traditional culture of Polissia – time is. The passing of the older
members of the population of these territories - those over 70 years of age – is the
greatest threat. These people represent the last generation that participated in the
traditional folk culture of the region before a long and tragic sequence of events that had
serious impacts on this and other traditional folk cultures of Ukraine, with the Chornobyl
disaster only the most recent. These include the Great Famine or Holodomor of the
1930s, intentionally created by Stalinist policies to break the back of the Ukrainian
peasantry and force it onto collective farms, and resulting in the death of at least seven
million people across Ukraine; the effects of collectivization and destruction of
traditional agricultural practices, traditions and rituals; Stalinist repressions and
deportations; the destruction of the church and its very important ritual calendar; World
War II, which saw successive and devastating occupations by Nazi and Soviet troops and
tremendous destruction in the Polissia region as a result of being the center of the Belarus
Front; and seventy years of Soviet rule. As a result, the younger members of the
population never really openly practiced the traditional culture. They may have been
exposed to it in their homes, heard stories and learned songs from parents and
grandparents, but most never openly practiced the customs of the traditional culture. The
primary impact of the Chornobyl disaster and the efforts undertaken to mitigate the
disaster was to speed this process up – to break up communities and the possible lines of
transmission of cultural information, to remove grandchildren from grandparents, to
destroy whole communities and scatter their residents, to make traditional ways of life
impractical and unnecessary, and in some cases, impossible. Therefore, the efforts of
Ukrainian scholars to record and document this now rapidly fading and stressed culture
gained tremendous importance. And it is essential that the emerging effort to transmit the
rescued knowledge of this traditional culture be carried out if it is not to suffer the same
fate as countless plant and animal species and other traditional cultures have during the
20th century – total extinction, remembered only in musty texts on obscure archive
shelves.

In 1989, three years after the accident and two years before the collapse of the
Soviet Union, as a result of the policies of glasnost which finally allowed any open
discussion of the realities of the Chornobyl disaster, Ukrainian scholars active in the
preservation of historical and cultural monuments and heritage began to lament the
impacts of the Chornobyl disaster and the steps taken (or lack of them) by the USSR to
mitigate its impacts. They protested the heavy-handed and poorly planned relocations
that did not take into account issues of cultural heritage and the need to minimize the
stresses of moving as a result of the disaster. They were especially troubled by the policy
adopted within the exclusion zone of bulldozing and burying entire communities. Four
large villages were destroyed in this way before the practice was halted through their
complaints that these villages have not been studied by ethnographers, architects and
historians. The Parliament of the Ukrainian SSR acted in 1990 according to safe and
accepted Soviet practices to approve the creation of “an inventory and preservation of
historical, architectural, and cultural monuments within the evacuated territories.” A
limited work plan within the 30 km. work zone was submitted to the Council of Ministers
of the USSR and Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow for review. Limited
work was approved for the period 1990-1992. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 and Ukraine’s assertion of independence, scholars and advocates of expanded
fieldwork stepped up their efforts, now openly claiming the need to preserve Ukraine’s
cultural heritage as justification for more extensive efforts at the documentation and
preservation of the traditional culture of Polissia. At a conference of scholars held in
1992 to plan the cultural rescue efforts, held in the city of Rivne at the western edges of
the irradiated territories, the Minister for Mitigating the Impacts of Chornobyl on the
Ukrainian population, H. O. Hotovchytsya, stated

For nearly one half year now we are building and renewing an independent
sovereign Ukraine. This renewal of her independence begins with a spiritual
reawakening of its people, its history, its culture. The rich, but plundered
 Polissian countryside, darkened by the shadow of Chornobyl – this is a unique
region where archaic traditions have survived…The loss of the unique
wooden architecture of Polissia, its traditions, folklore, crafts – this all demands
our closest attention and preservation, because their loss will be a loss not just for
Ukraine, but for all humanity…

The work scope was subsequently expanded to include those territories beyond the 30
km. exclusion zone – the zone of obligatory relocation (Zone II) and the zone of
voluntary relocation (Zone III) as well as the settlements into which people were
relocated. In 1994 the first large-scale organized expeditions were launched; over the
next decade more than two dozen expeditions were carried out in these territories, though
the most concentrated activity occurred between 1995 and 1998, with as many as four to
six expeditions of up to thirty people mounted per year.

Some of the scholars who were engaged in this work had conducted research
there before the disaster at the power plant. Others refused to enter the irradiated
territories for fear of the effects this would have on their health. Yet others joined the
expeditions out of curiosity, or for the meager pay, or for the chance to engage in
fieldwork, as other opportunities to conduct any type of field work were increasingly
disappearing as the country sank further into post-Soviet corruption and economic
turmoil. However, it is clear that for the majority of these scholars, the motivating factor
for joining in these expeditions was the sense that a significant part of traditional
Ukrainian culture was about to be lost forever. Their efforts must be remembered and
celebrated, and the fruits of their labor must not be shelved and forgotten but
reinvigorated with an infusion of new energy and political and financial support from the
new Ukrainian government and from the world cultural heritage community. It is not yet
clear how the new government of President Yushchenko will address this issue. While
he has visited the Chorobyl Zone of Exclusion, the instability of the government
situation, slowed economic growth, and a looming energy crisis have all diverted
attention and resources from work that still needs to be done. This year marked the 22
year anniversary of the disaster. It remains essential for the Ukrainian government and
international community to continue to remember and to study the enourmous scope of
the disaster and its impacts and to seriously and responsibly assess their responses to a
disaster that will unfortunately occur again on this planet, and probably sooner than we
all wish to admit.