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Review Author(s): Paul Josephson Review by: Paul Josephson Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 352-353Published by: on behalf of Wiley Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3664444Accessed: 12-10-2015 17:50 UTC

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352 The Russian Review

rely primarily on their own work (granted it is voluminous and excellent-and I would include work the authors have done with Vadim Borisov and Peter Fairbrother as well) and ignore much of the existing literature on Soviet and Russian trade unions including: Linda Cook, Labor and Liberalization: Trade Unions in the New Russia; Walter Connor, Accidental Proletariat; Paul Kubicek, Organized Labor in Post-Communist States: From Solidarity to Informity; Sue Davis, Russian Trade Unions: 1985-1995; and Steve Crowley's Hot Coal, Cold Steel. Ignoring this literature gives the reader the impression that the conclusions in this volume are novel, which they are not. However, it is an excellent overview of the topic with lots of new primary data and deserves our attention.

Sue Davis, Denison University

SOCIAL SCIENCE, CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA, AND OTHER

Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl. Translated by Kieth Gessen. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005. xii + 240 pp. $22.95. ISBN 1-56478-401-0.

In Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich introduces the reader to a number of victims of and participants in the Chernobyl disaster. The disaster occurred nearly twenty years ago, but most of its victims remain faceless and voiceless. Alexievich enables them to share their fears, disappointments, confusion, and suffering. Some of the individuals worked at the station, some were evacuees, some lived in Pripiat, others were ordered to Ukraine to eradicate the radiological danger, and others were connected to Chernobyl through jobs in the nuclear establishment in Moscow and elsewhere. These voices include medical personnel, school teachers, journalists, and cameramen; people who have returned illegally to the exclusion zone, but are left alone to live there by the authorities; liquidators, nuclear specialists, and party members, including a few who remain convinced that nuclear power was an appropriate path to supply Ukraine and Belarus with electricity and jobs.

Alexievich reveals how class, educational, and other differences showed through during the disaster. The scientists, officials, and party members who came to observe, worry, and study wore personal safety equipment including masks, while virtually all of the evacuees had neither equipment nor iodine pills to protect them from thyroid cancer, nor complete information about what hazards they faced. Alexievich transcribes the torment of parents and medical personnel over the children born with huge quantities of radiation already lodged in their thyroids. Parents lament children too sick to go to school, state officials powerless or unwilling to help them. The voices describe how forests changed color overnight from green to red to orange due to radiation. How could officials not see the danger for the local residents?

The eradication of the disaster led to more suffering for the people of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine, and Belarus than perhaps the accident itself. Alexievich's voices describe the haphazard effort to remove and bury anything that was contaminated, including household pets. Perhaps some 340,000 liquidators worked at the site, all poorly protected from radiation. The liquidator soldiers took over empty houses and barns during their stays in the exclusion zone. They fried up the chicken eggs they found-and the chickens too-then washed everything down with vodka as a radiation prophylactic. After a few months, everything seemed normal to them, so they ate berries from the trees, caught pike and bream in the streams, and went swimming. Liquidators describe burying anything that could move under mounds of soil, shooting animals and burying them, burying houses, burying dirt itself. The burial sites are filled with clothing, pipes, concrete, metal, bulldozers, and these household pets. The hunters and other liquidators rarely had access to personal safety equipment. But no matter what the

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Book Reviews 353

dear people in Voices claim, I remain convinced that drinking lots of vodka will not protect you from radiation.

Throughout it all, the authorities continued to lie to the people that they were safe, and that there was no need to worry. Many of the scientists could not understand how a nation so steeped in the ethos of science could have permitted an inherently unstable reactor to be built in the first place. Alexievich's voices reveal that a high cult of science centered on the physicists persisted after the disaster, even though their designs had made such an accident almost inevitable at some point. One official, the first secretary of the regional party committee, ignores the complicity of party officials in the disaster, denies having covered anything up, claims that all of the actions of officials were appropriate, and attributes his nation's ongoing problems to the break-up of the USSR, not to any of his or his comrades' deeds.

Early in 2005 the International Atomic Energy announced that fewer people would perish from leukemia and other forms of cancer caused by Chemobyl radiation than originally estimated. This conclusion is based on incomplete data and ignores the fact that the Soviet authorities failed to survey and register those unfortunate people who fell into the radiation cloud's path. There is no way of tracking who has died and from what causes. We should expect such a sanguine pronouncement from an agency whose purpose is the promotion of nuclear power. Just a few weeks later, scientists in a joint Russian-American study of exposure to radiation near a haphazardly and hastily built nuclear waste facility along the Techa River issued a report confirming that even low levels of exposure to radiation will result in increased numbers of cancers. But neither of these studies gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were ruined by the disaster. Svetlana Alexievich has succeeded in achieving that goal.

Alexievich conducted her interviews in 1996. She has not provided any explanation about how she assembled her voices. Alexievich has not only transcribed the stories of her respondents but written them up in her own style, and it is clear that she has not included every word. This then is an artistic work, not sociological or anthropological in terms of its objectivity. While the style is effective, even moving and gripping, the result is the creation of one voice that shapes all others. Nonetheless, in the incomplete effort to comprehend the personal losses, choices, and suffering required by Chernobyl, Voices is an important source, especially as Chernobyl wrongly recedes in our memories.

Paul Josephson, Colby College

Primakov, Yegeny. Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millennium. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. x + 337 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-300-09792-1.

Primakov has written an eclectic book that he describes as, "not a biographical book [and] not a memoir either" (p. viii). In ten chapters he examines recent Soviet and post-Soviet domestic and foreign policies arguing that, "Russia has been scrutinized but not fully understood" (p. 314). This book is his attempt to further our understanding.

The author sheds light on many events from the 1980s to the present. In his positions as Presidential Counselor, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS), Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Prime Minister, Primakov held many positions of influence and power and gives readers rare glimpses into the world of Soviet and post-Soviet policymaking. While he offers unique insights into many events and personalities, much of the book simply praises those he is fond of: former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, former President of the World Bank James Wolfensson, Moscow's mayor Yury Luzhkov, former Russian Prime Ministers Viktor Chernomyrdin and Sergei Kirienko, former head of the Russian Central Bank Viktor

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