The real authors of this book are the victims of the disaster at Chernobyl that occurred on the 26th April 1986. Wladimir Tchertkoff recorded their voices in the villages of the north of Ukraine and in the forests in the south of Belarus.
They are the millions of peasant farmers who consume food containing caesium 137 on a daily basis: the young pregnant mothers, themselves contaminated, who are unknowingly poisoning the life developing within them: the children whose lives are condemned, even if they are born apparently healthy, because they will become ill as a consequence of consuming radionuclides, morning, noon and night. Then there are the "liquidators", the unsung heroes of Europe who were sacrificed in order to extinguish the fire at the power station. They suffer any number of unknown "atomic" illnesses. Hundreds of thousands of them are ill, tens of thousands have already died prematurely, and continue to die in unimaginable suffering....And finally there are the doctors and physicists, at least the few of them who have not submitted to the will of the nuclear lobby.
This book also tells the story of the struggle undertaken by two Belarusian scientists who risked their careers, their health and their personal safety to come to the aid of the contaminated populations. Forced into the role of dissidents by the refusal of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to recognise the harmful effects of low dose radiation on health, the physicist Vassili Nesterenko, and the doctor and pathologist Yury Bandazhevsky, were persecuted in their own country for their opposition to the official dogma. Vassili Nesterenko died in 2008, having suffered innumerable health problems following his exposure to high levels of radiation in April 1986, when he flew over the exploded reactor in a helicopter.This book was first published in 2006 in France.
Despite the biblical proportions of the disaster that could have rendered the whole of Europe uninhabitable, the world has still not learnt its lesson. The real health effects from the accident at Chernobyl continue to be covered up by governments, by the nuclear industry and by the international institutions that support them. This cover-up has made certain that sooner or later, another catastrophe would arise. In 2011, following an earthquake and tsunami, three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant experienced a nuclear meltdown. The health effects there are just beginning.
Author Biography:
Wladimir Sergeevich Tchertkoff began his career as a documentary-maker rather than a professional writer, although he felt a keen sense of envy and admiration about great works of literature from his childhood onwards.A child of the first wave of emigration from Russia, Tchertkoff was born in 1935 in the former Yugoslavia, the country to which his maternal grandfather, Mikhail Vladimirovich Rodzianko (the Chairman of the last State Duma), emigrated with his family in 1920.At the end of the Second World War the Tchertkoffs moved to France and settled in the outskirts of Paris. The ten-year-old Wladimir was in luck: he was given a free place at the Boarding School of St Georgy, known as the 'Russian school of the Jesuit fathers', which, in the days of the civil war, had been a sanctuary for hundreds of Russian children, including a number of orphans who had been taken to safety; it helped them to avoid forgetting their mother tongue, gave them an education and set them on their way in life. The Boarding School had reception classes, and all subjects were taught predominantly in Russian, including history, geography and divinity. One of the school's mottos was: "Since you're Russian, speak in Russian!"Wladimir received French schooling in addition to his Russian education, and then obtained a classical education at the Sorbonne. One of the statements made by the director of the Boarding School, which seemed to him to be barely credible at the time, was to stay with him throughout his life: "Your mission is to serve as a link between East and West."In the early '60s W. Tchertkoff moved to Italy, where he got married and acquired Italian citizenship. This was a turning point in his life. His relationships with the Russian emigré community and with the Russian language were put on hold for three whole decades.Over the course of more than 30 years of collaboration with the Italian TV company RAI, then with the Italian-language Swiss TV channel TSI in the southern canton of Tessin, Tchertkoff produced more than 70 investigative films, taking a particular interest in describing and analysing power struggles in society. He little knew, at the time, that his chosen craft would later serve as an unusual tool for the writing of a work of investigative literature exposing the criminal policies of the nuclear lobby, which represented a threat to the very existence of life on Earth.His first collaboration with RAI was the film 'The Autumn Drive' (La spinta dell'autunno) - a film which told the story, in five episodes, of Italy's Hot Autumn of 1969, when, for three months, five million Italian workers fought back against the outdated Fascist customs of the Confederation of industrialists. The unique experience of capturing a time of great social upheaval, which had engulfed the whole country within just three months, on his video camera, gave the young film-maker an insight into academic and investigative work which brought a touch of magic to his films.
