The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl

6 Setting the Limits of Knowledge

Professor Yuri Bandazhevsky relocated from Grodno to Gomel to become, in 1990, the first rector of the Gomel State Medical Institute, a position he held until 1999.1 A pathologist by training, he led a group of researchers studying the effects of the internal accumulation of radionuclides—that is, radionuclides consumed with contaminated food products—on pathogenesis in the cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, reproductive, and other systems.2 Bandazhevsky conducted autopsies to show that the concentration of Cesium-137 in vital organs, including the heart, was higher than average in the organism. He found that children residing in contaminated communities had higher dose burdens than adults from the same communities.3 His research demonstrated that children’s organs began displaying pathologies at Cesium-137 levels of 30–50 becquerels per kilogram, a level much lower than what was generally considered dangerous.4 Using a different methodological approach, he and his wife, cardiologist Galina Bandazhevskaya, examined cardiograms of children and the concentration of Cesium-137 in their bodies, showing a dose-effect dependence between the accumulations of Cesium-137 and disturbances of the cardiac rhythm in children. Galina Bandazhevskaya explained to me in an interview that the sorts of heart problems observed with low doses may progress and become irreversible with chronic exposure—when children living in the affected areas continuously consume contaminated food products. In the late 1990s, Bandazhevsky criticized the government approach to mitigating the consequences of Chernobyl and the wasteful spending of the limited state resources for medical research after Chernobyl.5 This landed him in trouble. As one local scientist put it, “The only impact his message had was on prosecutors” who began hounding him. Bandazhevsky was arrested in 1999, and in 2001 he was convicted of taking bribes and sentenced to eight years in prison. Amnesty International declared him a 6 Setting the Limits of Knowledge 138 Chapter 6 Prisoner of Conscience and demanded his release, relating his arrest to his critique of the Belarusian government’s Chernobyl policies. Bandazhevsky was conditionally released in 2005, and later he left the country, his ability to work in Belarus appearing impossible.6 Two years after his release, when an interviewer asked him who the leading Chernobyl researchers in Belarus were, he answered, “I would like to know that myself.”7 Although Bandazhevsky’s treatment was extreme, it does illustrate the government’s commitment to the policies of rehabilitation of the areas affected by Chernobyl. The case of Bandazhevsky, whose work and imprisonment made him arguably the best known Chernobyl scholar in Belarus, also sets the context for analyzing the historical emergence and then disappearance of opportunities for research on the biological effects of radiation in Belarus. My focus will be not on the explicit harassment of researchers but on disruptions to the institutional and infrastructural foundations of research. The history of radiological research in Belarus is largely coextensive with the history of Chernobyl-related research, which emerged here in the last years of the Soviet Union and the first years of independence. A number of research institutes were established in 1987–1992, mostly in the capital, Minsk: the Institute of Radiobiology, the Institute of Radiation Medicine (with branches in Gomel, Mogilev, and Vitebsk), the Institute of Radioecological Problems, the Institute of Agricultural Radiology (in Gomel), and the Sakharov International Institute of Radioecology, which provided radiological training. Several other research institutes had departments or laboratories that also conducted radiological research.8 This systematic development of radiological research capacity was part of the state program to mitigate the consequences of the accident. The new state policies of normalization and rehabilitation (introduced in the second half of the 1990s) brought changes to the organization of radiological research in Belarus. Certain research directions were encouraged and others discouraged; leadership positions changed hands; and capabilities for data collection and analysis were maintained, added, or dropped. An even more dramatic reorganization of research institutes and priorities took place in the first decade of this century. For studies on health consequences of the accident (one of several key areas of Chernobyl-related research), changes in state policies resulted in a loss of qualified personnel and some subject populations and caused disruptions in data accumulation (a process exacerbated by existing problems with Chernobyl-related databases and classification categories). This in turn increased the likelihood that empirical data would be unavailable and that researchers would focus Setting the Limits of Knowledge 139 on theoretical assessments that...