A lot has been done in twenty-two years of combating the aftereffects of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station (ChAES) disaster, yet experts insist that “Something very important, probably the most important point, has been missed. No one has taken care of reviving life” [in the contaminated area]. What they mean is life in the broadest social and cultural sense of the word: millions of people are receiving social payments, but they aren’t feeling well. Back in 1999 forty-nine percent of the Chornobyl victims complained about their health; today it is almost seventy percent. Biased assessments of physical and mental conditions come first. Experts believe that Chornobyl victims currently register several social syndromes that cannot be remedied by social payments or medications. What I have in mind is the victim syndrome, when one keeps thinking of oneself as a victim of a disaster until one’s dying day, when there is constant social exclusion, lack of initiative, paternalism, evacuation and resettlement, being unable to adjust to the new social environment; worst of all, self-assessment of one’s physical condition (“lost health”; “uncertainty and confusion”) that keeps getting from bad to worse with each passing year, what with the popular distrust of the powers that be, with the victims blaming the government and its incompetent officials who are supposed to know the rules of survival in the contaminated areas. According to Prof. Yurii SAIENKO, Ph.D. (Economics), head of the expert examination department of the Institute of Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU), in order to improve the situation, the state must essentially change its approach in terms of aid to the victims. It is time to transfer from the survival philosophy and material aid to the chance philosophy, when people can get actually socially active. More on this in the following interview.
Dr. Saienko, you have been monitoring the social situation in conjunction with the Chornobyl disaster over the years of Ukrainian national independence. What are your most important findings?
I would say, first and foremost, that the Emergency Management Ministry has remained interested in our studies and financed them for the past sixteen years. We have of late conducted one research project every two years. We poll several categories of [Chornobyl] victims. First, the “squatters” in the first exclusion zone. They numbered a thousand sixteen years back, now it’s between 300 and 400 persons. People keep dying because those who stayed in the Exclusion Zone were aged over 50. The next category is the second area of “unconditional evacuation.” However, people keep living there. Then there is the third exclusion zone, where survival is kept on a virtual level. We also poll the “liquidators” [the surviving Soviet propaganda term for the members of the Chornobyl rescue teams]. As for my important findings, people from the first and second exclusion zones wanted to resettle first, but then they discovered that resettling was easier said than done. Some of them started returning to their homes because they could not adjust to the new environs. There are two most eloquent psychological phenomena. The first one concerns the squatters who don’t give a damn about radiation, who neglect the objective risks, who say that there is no radiation and everything is OK.
For these people it is important to live in their parents’ homes, and to know that they will be buried next to their close and dear ones. The second phenomenon addresses the resettlers. People who live in ecologically clean areas like Poltava or Kyiv oblasts say that the situation is bad there, what with clean air and water. These people couldn’t adjust themselves to the new objectively better conditions. There was also the maladjustment factor of scarce employment opportunities. Back in 1998, almost seventy percent of the middle-aged [Chornobyl] resettlers wanted to return home, but they put up with the situation eventually.
What made the resettlement process so difficult? After all, people were moved to various oblasts while staying in their home country?
People keep visiting the Exclusion Zone every year to pay homage to their relatives’ graves. This is our tradition, and this is their native land. In general, this is the philosophical notion of ethos, the place, the territory where one actually exists... There is the ethos of language, atmosphere, one’s established lifestyle handed down by generations, the ethos of culture. This must have played the main role in people finding it so hard to adjust to the new environs. Therefore, when polling these categories of the population, we compare them to those who inhabit ecologically safe areas, like peasants in Poltava oblast (since most of the [Chornobyl] victims are rural residents). We also carry out expert polls to find out what should be done, how the situation can be improved. Among the experts are government officials in charge of the process, physicians, sociologists, economists, and ecologists.
Is there a way to make people socially healthy?
Regrettably, the concept of social policy in Ukraine (not only in regard to the Chornobyl survivors) boils down to monetary aid. What we actually need is revival. We need a special state program. There is such an excellent organization as the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is a corporate nuclear energy organization that protects its nuclear interests. Its experts say there is nothing to fear in Ukraine these days, that it’s just the Ukrainians’ scare of the explosion at Chornobyl’s Power Unit 4. They do no want to listen to stories about victims who are doomed to long terms of social exclusion, people who are excluded from active life, with no one to help them get back to normal. The United Nations is the only world body that understands this problem. I visit our UNDP office almost every year and it was thanks to the Institute of Sociology that we launched a UNDP community revival program which has been effective for a couple of years. It is an excellent program. More than 170 pertinent projects have been carried out in certain populated areas. In other words, people have started being included in an active social environment. Among other things, we have helped to clean a village pond, the adjacent territory, started the local school, cleaned drinking wells, helped launch a youth center [club], and assisted certain municipal and housing authorities. Most importantly, we have given these communities an impetus. We found top priority tasks for them, gave them a little money, and encouraged them to seek funds for further development. Whereas the IAEA isolated itself and discarded the social component, the UN is showing us what to do and how. Regrettably, our state doesn’t have the kind of a program about which I have shouted for the past decade. I hope it will be instituted, eventually.
Why do you think nothing is being done?
There are two reasons. Lack of funds, of course. And our social policy being focused on aid. Let me stress that in Ukraine both the Chornobyl survivors and the rest of the population are in a post- Soviet paternalistic condition, with everyone waiting for the government to lend a helping hand. Our people must be wakened from their socially passive sleep, encouraged to start in a private family business and take part in public works. There will be a gala conference in Liutizh on April 24 that will discuss this topic. Our president will attend it. I will take the floor to once again stress the need to certify all the contaminated areas and check the physical condition of their inhabitants. Some of these communities need leaders to be elected from among their members. Other communities have to be provided with such leaders, people who can show them how to change their life for the better.
This kind of certification may help us find out that there are absolutely passive residents in certain populated areas — middle-aged individuals, children who can’t take part in active public life although they may be willing to act as volunteers; there are also “semi-passive” people who can earn a living, but who need help. And there are perfectly active, self-sufficient people. Therefore, each such category requires a particular kind of program and strategy. There are populated areas dominated by pensioners, there are other areas (e.g., Rivne oblast) with enough young residents and high birth rates. We may build targeted settlement revival and development models on this concept, depending on the condition of a given community. Whereas we rely on a target basis in providing social aid — i.e., in regard to each individual in need thereof — we must think of such aid in regard to a given community. This is our future.
You said you had learned some Chornobyl lessons.
I would like to stress that Chornobyl refuted the myth about our “Slavic brother” — I mean Russia. We know that Russia officially proclaimed itself the legal successor to the Soviet Union. Russia took over the Black Sea fleet, the USSR’s assets, and its program to overcome the ChAES disaster’s consequences. Russia has done nothing in regard to Chornobyl. The international community of nations has contributed a great deal of funds and has been helping Ukraine in line with special programs and projects. Separate individuals have also been very helpful, among them two US physicians: Patricia Cox and Janey Weingold, who visited Ukraine toward the end of April 1986, then returned to the States and found a hundred American families that have since been aiding a hundred Ukrainian families affected by the Chornobyl disaster. Such an American family has visited its Ukrainian counterpart almost every year since then. Over these 22 years there has been nothing from Russia except threats. Not a word of sympathy. In the early 1990s, when our project was launched, I tried to establish cooperation with Russia to carry out a comparative analysis, but Russia turned it down, as did Belarus. Three “fraternal peoples” without a joint Chornobyl relief program, although they should have a complex one aimed at mutual aid! Whereas there is a community of European nations based on respect for individuality and culture (however diversified), we the Slavs, who are supposed to be similar and brotherly, refuse to help each other in time of ordeal. This is an unbelievable sociocultural phenomenon and another lesson for the rest of the world: a poor country cannot afford a nuclear power station because it won’t be able to cope with social problems resulting from this station’s breakdown. Ukraine is an example of such social consequences being the hardest to overcome, that a great deal of work must be carried out with the people. Figuratively speaking, people must be charged with volitional energy because they are exhausted by their hopeless situation. We must have specially trained volunteers, teachers and physicians. Add to this Ukraine suddenly becoming a poverty-stricken country, with its people exposed to the Soviet slave syndrome: the governemnt tells you what to do and where to work. In return, you get a resort accommodation once a year, along with the shining prospects of building communism, and so on.
The very notion of private property is taboo. No one wants to mention it, but private ownership is the key to, the core of individuality: I have the right to be my own self, my property protects me from the state and makes me free. The Soviet system destroyed all this, just as its public property destroyed individuality. Then there was the Chonobyl disaster, and then Ukraine found itself poverty-stricken. Chornobyl taught mankind a very important lesson; it made mankind look for ways to survive in conditions of “scientific and technological comfort” and made it face the issue of planet-wide intercivilization integrity.
Do you think Ukraine stands a chance of overcoming these problems?
Our polls contain 250-300 questions, including those about risks and opportunities. This is an extremely important issue. Fear and risk are always close-by. Back in 1999, our institute’s monitoring registered seventy percent of respondents who feared famine. Today, it is thirty-five percent. This is still a hair-raising percentage. Famine is alive in our memory. However, it is opporutnities/chances, rather than risks, that make us human. Therefore, we chose the opportunity/chance concept. The thing is that sociology and philosophy in the West focus on the risk concept. It is true that risks are increasing throughout the world, yet the philosophy of world history is not about risks; it is about chances/opportunities that a given community, a given leader or country has had and lost while struggling to survive. We exist because we find chances of survival and take our risks (even when crossing a street). Therefore, we have to find chances of surviving this particular problem. We will find them if we can change our social mentality. What prospects do the Chonobyl survivors have? They must find chances of taking part in our culturual and socioeconomic life; they must learn to practice an active lifestyle. After all, Ukraine’s future is in revival, in implementing the opportunity of existing forever.
