I imagine it's hard to say, given the amount of control the USSR had over the press.
There's this credible sounding account of a little girl dying in Pripyat from radiation exposure: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernob...
There's this credible sounding account of a little girl dying in Pripyat from radiation exposure: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-chernob...
If you read the book Voice of Chernobyl (on which the TV series was based), by about half way through it becomes fairly obvious that a lot of the liquidators must have died of radiation related diseases after their service, just from references to "he was the last one of his group to die" etc. However there is a scientific literature, mostly derived from a single Russian Scientist, V. K. Ivanov and his team, that actively works on denying this. The biggest single indicator that something terrible happened is simply the life expectancy chart for Russia which shows a profound dip for about 5 years after Chernobyl. (This gets blamed on soaring alcoholism post collapse, which isn't particularly credible.) Generally I would treat claims that there was little contamination, and that contamination didn't spread, with scepticism. There was a lot of looting of the closed off areas.
Meanwhile the liquidators themselves are starting to get organised and their estimate is about 200,000 early deaths out of 600,000. Which does line up with the life expectancy chart.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-22/chernobyl-what-it-was...
The most recent documentary on Chernobyl using Russian archive footage has a few minutes hinting at significant mutations in children at at the time, but it's hard to know what the details are behind that.
Why not? That there was endemic alcoholism is well known and easily explainable. Not only an entire empire collapsed, but an entire lifeworld. Some of the best Russian testaments as to what happened after the end of the Soviet Union, like Svetlana Alexievich's Second-Hand Time and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, place great emphasis on it. I mean look at Yeltsin - he was drunk non-stop, and it almost killed him during his presidency.
Liquidators actually have longer life expectancy than common folk. Compared to the control group (males of same age starting the same year), more of them are alive today (which is mostly explained by the regular health checkups they all get for free so they are less likely to die from long-neglected chronic diseases Slavic men are very prone to). This is true for 3 liquidator groups out of 4 (that is, to everyone who wasn't on the scene during the first night - of those, and that's a very small group of under 700 people, most suffered radiation sickness or trauma and their life expectancy is of course, shorter).
No one of civilians including Pripyat residents, could have suffered any level of radiation damage at all.
It also requires us to believe that there was no widespread looting in the area, which is a claim that turns up in multiple sources, and is consistent with Russian behaviour in the current and past wars.
It requires us to believe that unlike pretty much every other event in Soviet history, Russia has told the complete honest truth about Chernobyl.
On which front, let me just ask - where are the memorials to the victims of Stalin's purges? There has been plenty of time to put a few up since the Soviet Union fell.
This one? [1]
The terrible thing that happened was the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was a humanitarian catastrophe, nearly as much as its existence had been. The life expectancy decline starts in 1989 (when the Soviet economic system starts disintegrating as republics splinter off and declare independence) and then accelerates after 1991, when the USSR dissolves. I'm convinced by the normal explanation offered: the consequences of general economic recession and chaos. This is Russian food production over the same period [2]. Unsurprisingly, life expectancy went down much more in Vladivostok, in far eastern Russia, than it did in Moscow. Moscow did get somewhat irradiated, while Vladivostok did not, but Moscow fared better economically.
Nutrition, healthcare, incomes, access to housing, all significantly worsened in the 1990s for much of Russia compared to under the late Soviet system. (And unsurprisingly, so did alcoholism.)
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_male_and_fem...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Ag...
Russia is absolutely vast and most people living in Russia were so far from Chernobyl that their radiation burden from the disaster wasn't significant. The wind conditions meant that foreign countries like Poland were hit by more radiation that, say, Moscow or St. Petersburg. Asian cities like Novosibirsk or Vladivostok were absolutely out of range.
But the life expectancy dip was ubiquitous, not concentrated in the areas closest to Chernobyl. IDK how much of it is attributable to alcoholism, but a healthcare system starved of money seems to me a quite likely culprit.
Of course, they also relocated to Brooklyn, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, etc.