Before Chernobyl

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

The Chernobyl disaster (April 1986) was, without doubt, one of the greatest technological and environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century. It was also one of the gravest crimes committed by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union -not only against its own people, but against the working class and other working people in every country affected by radioactive fallout. To regard Chernobyl merely as a “nuclear accident” is therefore to miss the full picture.

As strikingly portrayed in the 2019 HBO–Sky UK co-production Chernobyl, in the aftermath of the explosion arrogant bureaucrats -who had not the slightest regard for ordinary human life- swung between bullying and indifference, even as they struggled to cope with a catastrophe largely of their own making. As the series so accurately demonstrates, the devastation stemmed not merely from a technical failure, but from the system itself. (Though it has its shortcomings, I would recommend it to anyone who has not yet seen it.)

The disaster socialists “failed to see”

Yet in Turkey, in self-described socialist and communist circles, analyses of the Soviet Union rarely dwell on the Chernobyl catastrophe -an event that speaks volumes about the nature of the Stalinist regime and the profound crisis it was going through. More importantly, it is almost never acknowledged that the Soviet Union’s “first major nuclear disaster” occurred long before Chernobyl, in 1949, and that this disaster was “successfully” concealed for decades.

This raises a number of questions. How is it that the “forerunner” of a catastrophe like Chernobyl -one that affected vast parts of the world and, amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the NATO–Russia standoff, continues to pose a threat even today- remains so little known among socialists? And why are these disasters, in which the Stalinist regime paved the way for mass death by cutting costs, covering things up, denying the facts, and treating human life as expendable, not discussed and debated more widely within socialist circles?

What happened in 1949?

Chelyabinsk-40 (now known as Ozyorsk) was one of the “closed cities” established by the Soviet Union for its atomic bomb programme -places so secret that they did not even appear on maps. The Mayak facility there operated primarily for two purposes: producing plutonium for nuclear weapons and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.

The first serious crisis at Mayak occurred in January 1949. This incident escalated into a “radiological disaster” not because of a mere technical malfunction, but as the result of a murderous decision taken by the bureaucrats in charge of the Soviet atomic project -under pressure from the chronic failures of bureaucratic planning and driven by reckless haste.

Nuclear disasters cannot always be reduced to a single explosion (or a series of explosions). Some catastrophes are not a single moment, but the product of an insidious process unfolding over years. In the case of Mayak, the issue was the choice of the cheapest and fastest method of waste management: the direct discharge of liquid radioactive waste into the Techa River system. As a result, radioactive contamination spread across a wide area via the river; for years, people living in settlements along its banks were exposed to chronic radiation through drinking water and locally grown food.

The Techa River was the world’s most radioactive river

This was no “accident”, but a murderous policy that treated human life as expendable. The waste was later redirected away from the river and into Lake Karachay -only for the lake, in time, to become one of the most polluted and toxic places on earth. Indeed, after a drought in 1967, radioactive sediments from the lake bed were blown into the surrounding area by the wind. The cost of these decisions by the Stalinist bureaucracy was paid, at a terrible price, by workers, prisoners, soldiers, the entire local population of all ages, and other living beings -none of whom were aware of the effects of the radiation to which they were being exposed.

This systematic radioactive devastation, which began in 1949 during Stalin’s reign, was concealed for decades both from the Soviet people and from the wider world. The world first learned of the disaster in 1976 through the disclosures of the exiled dissident Soviet biologist Zhores Medvedev (1925-2018). The Soviet regime, however, did not officially acknowledge the truth until 1989, by which time it had already entered its “terminal phase”.

The 1957 Kyshtym disaster

Kyshtym

When Mayak is mentioned, what often comes to mind is the 1957 Kyshtym disaster. It was caused by the explosion of a high-level radioactive waste tank and was rated Level 6 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). But what tends to be obscured by the focus on 1957 is this: discharges into the Techa River had begun long before. In other words, even without a dramatic explosion, a silent and insidious process of environmental contamination was already under way.

“More victims than Chernobyl?”

Some sources suggest that the long-term death toll of the Mayak/Techa disaster may even have exceeded that of Chernobyl. Yet there are important differences between the two catastrophes. Chernobyl was a single, massive shock triggered by an explosion -an event that could not be kept hidden from the world or from the Soviet people for long. What happened at Mayak, by contrast, was a chronic radioactive siege that “crept insidiously into everyday life” and lasted for decades. In the course of it, soldiers and prisoners used in liquidation work -without being told what radiation would do to them- were treated by the bureaucratic apparatus as nothing more than disposable manpower.

In short, it is not easy to reach a definitive judgement about which disaster claimed more lives simply by comparing casualty figures. Even Chernobyl’s long-term toll in deaths and illness varies significantly depending on the methods used. In the case of Techa/Mayak, exposure was spread over many years, making the question “how many people died?” even harder to answer clearly.

It is, however, crystal clear that the fact exposure at Mayak stretched over decades made the social devastation more insidious, more lasting, and far more widespread. The Mayak case shows how the Stalinist bureaucracy, in pursuit of its self-proclaimed “strategic objectives,” was willing to sacrifice not only the natural environment but the working class, peasants, and other working people as well. It also shows how it was able to conceal the data -or the evidence of its crimes, if you like- for decades. Chernobyl reverberated so powerfully around the world because, once radioactive clouds reached Europe, the catastrophe could no longer be “hidden”. By contrast, what happened in closed cities such as Mayak could continue for years with impunity, precisely because they were sealed off from the outside world.

Also see: 

Soviet Stalinism and secrecy: Gorbachev's revelations