Chernobyl 20 years later

Prevailing winds carried 70 percent of the fallout over Belarus where families were enjoying the warmest spring any of them could remember. No one told them to bring their children inside and close the doors and windows; no one distributed iodine tablets that would have helped keep the radioactive isotope out of their thyroid glands. They knew less than their European neighbors who were alerted when sensors in Sweden picked up a significant increase in atmospheric radiation and traced the origin back to Chernobyl.

Many analysts of the arcane politics of the USSR believe that the failed attempt to hide the enormity of the disaster led more directly to the dissolution of the Soviet Union than any other cause. A young and vibrant Mikhail Gorbachev had succeeded another in a long line of walking corpses as premier, and he later wrote, he was humiliated by the chain of events that the reactor accident set off. When he was confronted later by events out of his control (such as the fall of the Berlin Wall), he was no longer willing to use force and oppression as it had been used on his own people in 1986.

The Soviet Union was dissolved on Christmas Day 1991 by a stroke of a pen at a gathering of representatives of the 15 republics in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. The city gained its autonomy and assumed the total economic and social burden of the catastrophe with no help from the politicians or the country that created it.

Belarus has struggled to deal with 10 million people in the throes of medical, psychological and economic crises in the wake of Chernobyl and hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland lost to the barricaded Dead Zone of exclusion around the reactor. While the rest of the countries of the Soviet bloc scarcely blinked twice before than rushed headlong into market economies, NATO and the European Union, Belarus hunkered down with Europe's last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who made news earlier this month by sending storm troopers into break the bodies of dissidents protesting his most recent "election."

In some towns and villages of Belarus and Ukraine, the bells of the onion-domed cathedrals will also toll for the dead whom Chernobyl claimed from their communities. Throughout the contaminated regions, obelisks are etched with the names of the "liquidators" who rushed onto the roof of the reactor and tossed shovelfuls of sand into the burning maw. Thirty-one people died within the first 10 days of the disaster. How many more names should be chiseled onto those monuments is an issue of no small controversy.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, in its first report after the accident, accepted the USSR estimate that the catastrophe would claim no more than those 31 "liquidators."

Slowly, other groups like the World Health Organization recognized that that radioactive iodine in the fallout had created an epidemic of childhood thyroid cancer. The "Chernobyl smile" -- the thin white scar at the base of the throat -- defined a generation of school children in Belarus. In the last five years, the medical community has come to learn what happens when children undergo thyroidectomy before they reach puberty -- the loss of secondary sex characteristics, sterility and a particularly virulent form of diabetes.

What about the spike in breast cancer in Gomel in the contaminated zone or the unusual types of childhood leukemia and bone cancers? Dr. Olga Aleinikova, director of the Belarusian Pediatric Center for Oncology and Hematology in Minsk, has spent the last 20 years searching for the genetic marker that will prove that the children who have filled her hospital are Chernobyl victims as well.

While any discussion of the number of Chernobyl deaths (31 or 31,000) will launch an argument, everyone is in agreement that the first and most lasting casualty of Chernobyl was hope. Parents live in fear when their children show up with a bruise or a cold hangs on too long. Many studies confirm that despair is the major cause of a plummeting birth rate and the Chernobyl malaise that poisons attempts at recovery.

Twenty years of glancing at the radiation counter next to the clock in Victory Square will do that to a people.

Michelle A. Carter is an instructor of journalism and communications at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont. She is the former managing editor of the San Mateo Times and co-authored "Children of Chernobyl: Raising Hope From the Ashes." Carter will be speaking on this topic from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday April 25 in the Faculty Lounge at Notre Dame de Namur University, 1500 Ralston Ave. in Belmont.<