Nuclear contamination in former USSR: Radioactivity in Muslomovo on Techa River near Maiak plutonium plant.

Medical Mysteries Along the Most Radioactive River in the World

Health and medicine explained.
April 18 2013 12:58 PM

Life in a Real Nuclear Wasteland


A man walks next to his old house in the village of Muslyumovo November 17, 2010. The village is located on the banks of the Techa river in Russia's Urals, one of the country's most lethal nuclear dumping grounds.
A man walks next to his old house in the village of Muslumovo, Russia. The village is located on the banks of the Techa river in Russia's Urals, one of the country's most lethal nuclear dumping grounds.

Photo by Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

In pop culture, irradiated wastelands are fascinating. If a person can’t afford a packaged tour of the Chernobyl Zone, he or she can buy an avatar on S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a popular online game where players in a virtual Chernobyl Zone battle zombies, druids, and invisible plumes of contaminants. Part of the fantasy is surviving alone in an abandoned place no longer fit for the living, but the sad fact is that there are irradiated zones that are fully inhabited, and have been since the first years of the nuclear arms race. Despite a media culture enthralled with nuclear accidents, the cameras generally turn off after the first clouds of radioactive vapors dissipate.








Marat showed me to a table full of food—veal, goose, salads, beets, potatoes. Murat wanted to eat first and talk later “in Tatar tradition.” I didn’t want to eat. It was 9 .a.m. and I wasn’t hungry, but mostly I wasn’t brave enough to ingest his homegrown food. This was the elephant in the room, about which neither he, nor I, nor his quietly attentive wife spoke; their food, which they must eat every day, must live on, was too radiated for me to eat for just one meal. Increasingly agitated, Murat rushed out to light up his sauna, and pulled out a bottle of vodka, offering me some. I turned the sauna and vodka down too. Soon, a neighbor arrived. The two men started to drink. In a few hours, Murat was howling drunk.


For Soviet leaders, the river dwellers were a unique opportunity in the history of health physics—what scientists call “a natural experiment” that promised to answer an important civil defense question about how to survive a nuclear attack. In 1962, the Cheliabinsk branch of the Soviet Institute of Bio-Physics, called FIB-4, started conducting regular medical exams of the Muslumovo population. FIB-4 doctors invited village children playing on the streets to a clinic room to take blood samples. In Cheliabinsk, they set up a repository of irradiated body parts: hearts, lungs, livers, bones. They started a collection of genetically malformed babies who died soon after birth, each infant preserved in a two-quart glass jar. A Dutch photographer, Robert Knoth, visited the repository and saw hundreds of babies in jars. He photographed one infant with skin like patched, rough burlap. Another boy had eyes on top of his head like a frog. During the examinations, doctors did not inform the villagers of their exposures or of diagnoses of radiation-related illness.

In 1986, soon after the Chernobyl disaster, Glufarida Galimova, working as chief doctor at a pediatric clinic in Muslumovo, her native town, was puzzled by the saturation of illness in her community. The illnesses were rare, strange, complex, and often genetic: hydrocephalic children, children with cerebral palsy, missing kidneys, extra fingers, anemia, fatigue, and weak immune systems. Many kids were orphaned or had invalid parents.

Galimova asked other doctors about it. They said the villagers were sick of their own doing, from poor diet and alcohol. Doubtful, Galimova investigated and learned that FIB-4 had a 50-year-old registry with Muslumovo’s health records. She requested the records be opened to the public. Her requests went unanswered. She went to the press and helped organize citizens’ groups. The security services accused her of disclosing state secrets, and she was fired from her job. Undaunted, Galimova teamed up with the chief of genetics of the Siberian Academy of Medical Science, Nina Solovieva. The two doctors tracked newborns and pediatric health in Muslumovo. When, in 1995, Solovieva died of breast cancer, Galimova continued alone. She found that more than half of the children born in Muslumovo in the 1990s suffered pathologies. In 1999, 95 percent had genetic disorders. Meanwhile, 90 percent of Muslumovo’s children suffered from anemia, fatigue, or immune disorders. Galimova examined the records of the city’s adults and found that all of 7 percent could be described as healthy.


Soviet radiation biology took a different trajectory from science in the United States. American researchers at that time were working with the highly politicized medical studies of Japanese bomb survivors. They narrowed the list of radiation-related illnesses to leukemia, a few cancers, and thyroid disease. Soviet doctors in formulating chronic radiation syndrome had grasped the effects of radiation on the body more holistically. They determined that radiation illness is not a specific, stand-alone disorder, but that its indications relate to other illnesses. They determined that radioactive isotopes weaken immune systems and damage organ tissue and arteries, causing illnesses of the circulation and digestive tracts and making people susceptible to conventional diseases long before they succumb to radiation-related cancers.



Reprinted from Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown with permission from Oxford University Press USA. Copyright © 2013 Kate Brown.

Kate Brown is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Her book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, is out now.

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