In a typical Belarusian village there is at least one cow per house. In the mornings the cow is let out onto the road, along with the other cows of the village, for collection by a herdsman who takes the herd to pasture. In the evenings the scene is repeated with hundreds of cows on the road when they are on their way home to be milked.
”We had 300-400 cows in the entire village,” says Alexander. ”But today we don’t have more than 50. Many cows became sick with leucosis, a blood disease similar to leukaemia. They wandered around in the forest where there was a lot of radioactivity. Now there are fewer cows and we have therefore had a clean field allotted. I don’t know whether we had this sort of illness before. Nobody checked the milk then. Perhaps there was some problem but we didn’t check for it. The only sort of check there was on the percentage of fat in the milk.”
Alexander made some calculations of the cows’ problems. Approximately 3⁄4 of the herd used to go into the forest. That was because it led them to yield 11⁄2 to 2 times as much milk. Of the cows that went into the forest 50 % got leucosis and of those that went into the field 15 % got the disease.
”In the forest there is a background radiation of 20-22 micro roentgens per hour – up to 30. But in the soil there is between 1 to 5 curies per km2. Six months ago our area was categorised as a ’region entitled to evacuation’, i.e. an area where there is a level of 5-10 curies of radioactivity per km2. An order from the ministerial council was made public, in which more than 200 villages were declared contaminated at a low level. We therefore became an area with ’periodic control’,” explains Alexander. ”I was surprised that our village was entitled to evacuation when our forest is officially clean. The forest ranger has had absolutely no money in compensation, or ’coffin money’ as we call it”.
In August 2002 the government carried out a new investigation of the contamination and issued an order about reorganising the system with the country’s zones so that people could return to the land. 146 villages were declared ’contaminated at a lower level' than before.
”It’s not about compensation. People have become disorientated,” says Alexander. ”They don’t know anything about this sort of thing. They were told that everything was clean and that it’s fine to live here. But that’s not true!”
”I can certainly tell you how that investigation was conducted here. A radioactivity measurer from the regional centre came here with another from the regional administration who was responsible for the Chernobyl questions. There was also a representative from the office of the Hygiene Board. They went round our sports facilities and took readings of the background radiation. Then they came back to our village, where I met them. They asked me where the most contaminated place in the village was. I invited them to the laboratory where I had my equipment, which we could use to take readings. Then we could investigate where the most contaminated place was. They said to me that we didn’t need to do that because they believed me. And as a result our village kept its old status as a ’highly contaminated place’. All the areas around us were declared clean. There was no one they could ask in those places. 6 kilometres from here there is a village called Golovki, which lies on peat soil. I know that it’s more polluted than our village, but it’s now been declared clean, while ours continues to be regarded as contaminated”.
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