Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

An abbreviation for kollektivnoye khozyaystvo, kolkhoz (plural kolkhozy) is Russian for “collective farm.” The first kolkhozy emerged spontaneously in the 1920s as a version of the traditional Russian peasant commune, but after Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign they became state-controlled enterprises with members serving as employees. Members were permitted to hold small plots of land and some livestock, and these highly productive private plots helped families compensate for low wages and chronic shortages of consumer goods.

The approximately 600,000 workers conscripted to the Zone to “liquidate [i.e., eliminate] the consequences” of the explosion were called liquidators. Most were soldiers and reservists, including a large number of 18- to 20-year-old draftees. Their tasks included evacuating villages; digging up and burying topsoil, forests, roads, structures, and livestock; exterminating abandoned dogs and cats; digging tunnels under the reactor; and, in the case of the unfortunate “biorobots,” removing 100 tons of highly radioactive debris from the reactor roof.

In a 1953 speech, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke to the public candidly, for the first time, about the rapidly growing destructive capacity of atomic weapons and the intensifying arms race between the US and its former ally the Soviet Union, pledging to “help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by promoting peaceful uses of nuclear technology so that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.