Comment by neffy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neffy | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly - this is one of those things that the former Soviet Union and its successor has worked hard to deny happened, an effort that extends to writing down vague or incorrect causes of death for liquidators.

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.

The life expectancy dip was mostly a consequence of the collapse of the USSR. While less traumatic than collapse of the Roman empire, collapses of this size tend to make life shorter, nastier and more brutish.

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.

I think the idea is people relocated from the Chernobyl area to other parts of the Soviet Union.

Of course, they also relocated to Brooklyn, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, etc.

>"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.)"

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.

> 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.)

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...

Voice of Chernobyl is a propaganda piece. It is full of blatant lies and was instantly rejected by everyone having a slight idea about radiation effects - i read a lot about it in the FidoNet days when it first came out - people ranging from Clinic #6 (radiation) doctors down to 19-year old Army soldiers trained in NBC protection - literally laughed their asses off it.

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.

The problem with that argument, although I congratulate you for following the state line, is that it requires us to believe that the entire operation wasn't necessary to begin with. If there were no health consequences, then there weren't any reactor rods on the roof, there wasn't any radioactive fallout requiring removal and burial of top soil, no need to shoot all the animals, etc. etc.

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.

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