The government says Paladiy Safarov is a victim of Chernobyl, and it pays him Hr 43 ($23) a month to prove it. Safarov accepts the money, even though the nuclear disaster he escaped as an 11-year-old boy has yet to seriously affect his health. He and his neighbor, fellow evacuee Maria Kolyadina, sometimes spend the money on CDs. Safarov and Kolyadina qualify for government compensation not for any documented medical reasons, but because they were living in one of the four designated evacuation zones when reactor number four exploded on April 26, 1986. They are well aware of the resentment among Ukrainians at the less-than-scientific manner in which the government decided who deserved official “victim status,” and the benefits that go with it. And they empathize with the many Ukrainians who suffer serious illnesses as a result of the world's worst nuclear accident, but get no help from the government because they were not residents of the official evacuation zones.
“I know I don't deserve privileges,” said Safarov. “It's just life, it just happened.”
Blunt instruments
Western health experts say legitimate victims of Chernobyl are suffering because of the simplistic parameters of the government's aid program, which still does not recognize the often unpredictable ways in which radiation finds victims.
Nathan Hodge, the in-country director of the Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund, said radiation sufferers from outside the official Chernobyl zones are being unjustly deprived of aid.
“A lot of people who don't have [Chernobyl victim] status may be facing the same illnesses,” he said. “Diseases can't be reduced to one factor, or aid limted to people who by some irony of fate received this designation.” Parents of Kyiv children suffering from leukemia and tumors have united into a group called Onkolog, convinced that their children are suffering from Chernobyl-related diseases that deserve, but do not receive, government aid. Because they were born in Kyiv, their children receive no benefits above the standard invalid pension of Hr 37 a month.
Violetta Nedavneya's 6-year-old son was recently diagnosed with a recurring brain tumor. The tumor showed up on a magnetic resonance imaging scanner that was donated to a Kyiv hospital by an American charity to help children suffering from the after-effects of Chernobyl. Nedavneya had to pay Hr 160 for the test, which officially designated victims receive for free.
Nedavneya and other parents in the group say some of the “official” victims are benefiting unfairly from their status.
“Some children who lived in the zone were healthy, then they moved to an industrial zone and became ill, but they get benefits,” said Valentina Rusakova, whose son also has a brain tumor.
Not-so-distant memories
Social fallout from the catastrophe goes back a decade, to the first days of evacuation and relocation. In 1986, the government Committee for Chernobyl pledged comprehensive aid to all evacuees, including provisions for housing and job placement. Those families the government deemed worst-off received an initial sum of 1,500 rubles per child – the equivalent at the time of about eight months' average salary.
Benefits were also introduced for the 3.2 million inhabitants of the four contaminated zones. These include free medicine and an annual medical check-up, free breakfasts for school children and larger student stipends. All victims also receive small monthly allowances for food and vitamin supplements.
More than a decade after the catastrophe, 7 percent of all Ukrainians receive Chernobyl-related benefits, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry.
The 21-year-old Kolyadina's father, Anatoly, has no doubt that he is a worthy recipient of Chernobyl benefits. He said those who were uncomfortable with the amount of assistance to catastrophe victims fail to appreciate the level of suffering in 1986.
“Of course there is envy – it is human nature,” he said. “There are some people who understand what we've gone through, and some people who don't want to understand.” Kolyadin served as a liquidator, one of the thousands of workers who helped clean up the immediate aftermath of the explosion. He also worked on the emergency committee that found housing for victims in the summer of 1986. He remembers that Kyiv families waiting for new flats had to make way for the catastrophe's victims. In a few instances, locals who had already moved into their new homes were evicted in favor of evacuees.
“The regular list of people waiting for flats [in Kyiv] was suspended,” said Kolyadin. “Some of them had been waiting for 20 years, and they saw the flats as theirs already.” As one of 44,000 Chernobyl refugees assigned to live in Kyiv, Safarov can remember the anger of displaced native Kyivites.
“Whenever a conflict started, local people said, ‘You're new here, you're living in places where we used to live; so you've got no right to be here,' “ he recalled.
Good intentions gone bad
Accusations of corruption have raged around many of the benefits programs. In the confusion surrounding the Soviet collapse and Ukrainian independence, many perfectly healthy people who were nowhere near Chernobyl at the time of the accident managed to obtain liqidator certificates. Angry parents from Onkolog have no doubt that many recipients of government aid are not legitimate victims at all.
“There is the question of where these children and their parents got this status,” said Nedavneya. “Some people have false certificates, but real benefits.”
Allegations of dishonesty also taint ‘holiday' programs for Chernobyl children.
“Children of Chernobyl are given every opportunity to rest, they are sent abroad, they live in Spain, in France with families, and our children are given nothing,” said Rusakova.
Onkolog parents complain that a Ministry of Health decree actually prohibits them from taking children in remission outside Kyiv region, as a change in climate is supposed to be dangerous. Other government programs send Chernobyl children abroad to far-off countries, however. “Going abroad isn't a matter of health; we can go somewhere in Ukraine for treatment,” said Safarov. “Foreign trips really involve creating a certain impression, to show that these people have been given a hand – that they have been abroad so everything is all right.”
Under fiercest attack is the Cuban program. Since the early 1990s, 15,000 children have been to special camps on the Cuban coast. The Ukrainian Health and Emergency Situations ministries pay for transport, while the Cuban government funds medical treatment.
Officials from various Western relief organizations that deal with Chernobyl victims see the Cuban program as a black hole of corruption and mismanagement. They say many of the children sent to Cuba are not actually from the Chernobyl zones, or, if they are, are not seriously ill. Lena Ponomaryova, 21, an evacuee from the town of Pripyat, 3 kilometers from the Chernobyl power plant, went on one of the first treatment trips to Cuba. Her month-long stay was extended another month because funds could not be found for a return flight.
“The first month was fine, but we were so bored and homesick during the second month,” she said. Ponomaryova was selected for the trip by the local Children of Chernobyl organization. She recalled that many children did not want to go, or their parents were worried about sending them so far away for so long.
Ponomaryova said that most of the 350-odd children on the trip spent only a couple of days in the hospital during their stay. Treatment wards were half-full, and the Cuban staff clearly expected more occupants.
“There were children who had never seen the sea,” said Ponomaryova. “They preferred to stay on the beach. They didn't want treatment and they just didn't go to the hospital.”
For Ponomaryova, the benefits of Cuba were the ocean and the sunshine. However, she noted that for children with radiation diseases affecting the skin or thyroid, a sunny climate is positively harmful.
“People who go to Cuba should be selected according to their diseases,” she said.
Never too late
The blatant abuses and waste have caught the attention of the Emergency Situations Ministry, which is proposing major changes to laws affecting Chernobyl victims. If the proposals are approved, the purely geographical approach to aid designation will change. The continuing program of evacuation from the zones will be reduced from 3,000 people to 600 in total, based on the principle that radiation enters the body through polluted food rather than through contaminated territory.
“Aid will become more specific in order to be more effective,” said Volodymyr Potikha, deputy emergency situations minister. “For example, in Zone 4 [farthest away from the plant] we pay everyone additional money and everyone gets benefits. The new concept is based not on territory but on the level of the dose [of radiation] people received, and will give aid to those who have really suffered.”
The ministry is also attempting to fight corruption. The approximately 400,000 liquidators on the books in January of this year are being required to re-register in an attempt to weed out false claimants. Results so far have proved encouraging.
“We expected the number of false liquidators to be bigger, but actually they are more honest than we thought,” said Potikha.
The forecast was for 30,000 to 40,000 false claimants. Potikha now estimates that the number will not exceed 35,000.
Potikha stressed that evacuees with genuine health problems will never lose their privileged status. Yet among evacuees living in Kyiv, fears that benefits will be curtailed or cut completely are rife.
Uncertain future
Still other evacuees in the city, especially healthy young people like Safarov and Kolyadina, are willing to forego their controversial victim status in order to assert their independence and ensure a fairer system.
“We can't say that all people evacuated from Pripyat have the same problems; some people in Kyiv have worse problems,” said Kolyadina. “We don't want to be separated into a certain group; it isn't fair. Of course if my privileges were stopped it wouldn't be pleasant, but looking at it objectively, I see that the only thing to do is to give help to anyone who needs it.”
Maria's father Anatoly recently retired from the Chernobyl plant, though he still works as an administrator in the zone five days a week. He spends weekends with his family in Kyiv – when he is well enough. These days, he spends extended periods of time in the hospital. He is entitled to free medicine and care for his failing eyesight, and claims his benefits as a right.
“I'm glad my children don't feel like invalids,” he said. “But I think the state and government should not concern itself with [the way individual victims feel]. Consequences [of the catastrophe] may still be taking place, even if you don't think you are an invalid or feel sick. “I don't support the idea that benefits will save our lives; all I want is to live normally. If the economic situation changed I wouldn't need these benefits. Benefits are left over from socialist ways of thinking, and I think it's too early for our country to change from the socialist principle.”
In fact, economic depression has been steadily eroding benefits. Anatoliy Kolyadin often has to pay out of his own pocket for his supposedly free medicine because it is unavailable from state dispensaries.
He has a framed photograph in his living room. It appears to depict a bed of cheerful red and orange flowers. But on closer inspection, the pale outline of the Chernobyl power station looms behind, a grim ghost forever overshadowing the bright foreground.
However optimistic young people like Safarov and Maria Kolyadina seem, occupied with the usual hopes and ambitions of 21-year-olds, Chernobyl is always in their past, darkening their lives.
Safarov recently failed his army physical. Kolyadina was inspired to become a doctor because she saw so many ill people around her. Now, having seen apparently healthy women give birth to sickly babies, she worries about the health of the children she hopes to have some day. “Life is a risky thing, so I trust in God that my children will be healthy,” said Kolyadina.
