‘Chernobyl Children’ by Melanie Arndt review

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on 26 April 1986 was an environmental catastrophe. The radioactive fallout contaminated territory that was home to seven million people, including three million children. It also reached Western Europe, causing an international scandal. And still, the Soviet authorities attempted to do what they always did when it came to major accidents: hush it up. For three years the state concealed the truth about the scale of the disaster from its citizens and the world.

All this changed because of the children, as Melanie Arndt reveals in her book. Why, many asked, if the radiation levels supposedly posed no danger, were some children from contaminated areas being evacuated to other parts of the country? In the charged political atmosphere of the late 1980s, when glasnost turned from a slogan into actual policy, the authorities yielded to mounting public pressure. In February 1989 two main Belarusian newspapers were the first to print maps showing the extent of the radioactive contamination. Pravda followed suit six weeks later (an unprecedented reversal of the Soviet press hierarchy). The censorship ban on Chernobyl collapsed two months after that.

The revelations made clear that the children living in contaminated areas needed urgent help. Initially, all eyes turned to the state, which had long boasted that it provided Soviet children with the happiest childhood in the world. As it turned out, the state could do precious little. With the economy in free fall, it had few resources available to offer the medical care required. Local authorities in Belarus and Ukraine increasingly felt abandoned by Moscow. The regime’s failure to protect the children contributed to its spiralling loss of legitimacy.

Caught between public anger and its own impotence, the Soviet government openly appealed for international help. In March 1990 Cuba received its first group of 139 children. Only recently itself the recipient of Soviet aid, Cuba covered all the expenses and Fidel Castro personally welcomed the children at the airport. Cuba would go on to host more than 20,000 children over the following two decades.

Charity had been a dirty word in Soviet ideology, but the environmental crisis coupled with economic collapse forced a rethink. Numerous initiatives sprang up to fill the vacuum left by the dying regime, paving the way from socialist to civil society. Before that first group arrived in Cuba, a non-state initiative in Belarus had organised the first recuperative trip abroad, sending a group of children from the Belarusian village of Stralichava to India in December 1989. Many more trips to Europe, Canada, and the US would follow. Through her detailed account of this organisation, registered in November 1990 as the Belarusian Charitable Foundation for the Children of Chernobyl, Arndt traces how civil society helped turn ‘the Soviet Chernobyl children’ into the ‘children of the whole world’.

The Belarusian Charitable Foundation was just one of several organisations that collectively sent more than one million Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian children abroad. While historians have shown how Chernobyl animated anti-Soviet opposition in Ukraine, Arndt’s book reminds us how central the trauma has been in Belarus. Around 70 per cent of the radioactive contamination landed there, not least because the authorities in Moscow ordered that the ‘dirty’ clouds be made to rain over Belarus in order to protect Russian and Ukrainian cities.

As Arndt argues, civil society cannot exist outside of politics. Suspicious of state authority, the foundation believed that their project would have more than just health benefits for the children it sent abroad. It would help democratise Belarus, where authoritarianism returned after the election of Aliaksandr Lukashenka in 1994. His regime harassed the foundation precisely because it saw its activities in the same political light. In 1997 the KGB investigated it for four months on charges of financial irregularities and funding the opposition. After nearly 25 difficult years, the foundation ended its work in 2014. But politics also shaped the Western response, on which all efforts to help Belarusian children hinged. Civil societies across the Atlantic (Arndt’s main focus) were galvanised into action, but their motivations were a tangled knot of personal agendas and politics. These were exciting times, as ordinary Americans suddenly gained an opportunity to pursue citizens’ diplomacy with the former ‘evil empire’.

Despite the book’s title, this is mostly a story about adults: state organisations failing to fulfil their obligations, civil society rising on the ruins of socialism, transnational humanitarian networks forming in the wake of the Cold War. Only in the final chapter do the children take centre stage, alongside their Belarusian chaperones and American hosts. It seems a pity that this essential part of the story is relegated to the finale. It is clear from the interviews and the study by two Belarusian social psychologists on which Arndt relies that the experience burst open the children’s horizons. One participant remembers West Germany as ‘an explosion, a shock, nothing but positive emotions’.

Perhaps Lukashenka was right to worry. After all, the generation of former Chernobyl children challenged his regime in unprecedented mass protests that swept Belarus in 2020. The regime’s botched handling of another health-related disaster, the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with anger over fraudulent elections to produce a perfect storm. But unlike Gorbachev in 1991, Lukashenka survived by resorting to brutal repression, which continues to this day. Another generation of Belarusian children now lives in the shadow of Chernobyl, but there are no transnational humanitarian networks left to offer them respite. State repression has wiped out Belarusian civil society and depleted the medical profession. The regime’s collusion in Russia’s war on Ukraine has sealed Belarus’ isolation from the West.

• Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster
  Melanie Arndt
  Cambridge University Press, 368pp, £27
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Natalya Chernyshova is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London.