On a warm spring evening on the last day of April 1986, my grandmother, a doctor, rushed to my parents’ house after work.
“Don’t take Zoya outside and close the windows,” she told my mother. “Something has happened.”
Earlier that day, a colleague whose husband was a high-ranking KGB officer had whispered that an accident had occurred up north.
My grandmother had never heard of Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant operating near the small town of Pripyat.
Staying indoors was easier said than done. My parents, my
sister and I lived in one room in a stuffy communal apartment in
Chernivitz, Ukraine — 597 kilometers away from Chernobyl. In the next
room, divided from ours only by a set of thin, frosted glass French
doors, a family of five. We shared a kitchen and a toilet, when it
worked. We had no telephone connection, despite having been on a waiting
list for years. Water and electricity were patchy. But stay indoors I
did.
Labor Day parades in cities and towns around the USSR went
ahead as planned, even as a radioactive plume continued to envelope
great swathes of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. In Kiev, less than 200
kilometers from Chernobyl, a high-ranking Communist official appeared on
stage with his toddler grandson, smiling and waving.
Those in the know secretly dosed their children with iodine
to lessen the amount of the radioactive chemical absorbed by the
thyroid. But the news of the world’s worst nuclear disaster on April 26,
1986, took weeks to filter out to the general population.
Data: 05.05.2016
Fonte: www.politico.eu
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