Vol. 80/No. 18 May 9, 2016
(front page)
Chernobyl disaster points to need for workers power, not ‘No nukes’
Some opponents of nuclear power are using the anniversary to argue that Chernobyl proves this energy source should never be used. The facts, however, point to the need for workers to take political power and control over safety. The cause of the disaster lies squarely on the extraordinary neglect of the Stalinist regime then in power in Moscow and its contempt for working people — a contempt also shown by the capitalists and their governments around the world.
The social calamity was a result of the carelessly flawed design of the plant, the government’s decision not to construct any containment vessel around it, and a series of disastrous decisions and delays by government bureaucrats attempting to hide the existence and severity of the meltdown.
Chernobyl released roughly 400 times more radiation than the atom bombs U.S. imperialism dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Yet for 36 hours, officials told the 50,000 residents of Pripyat, built a mile from the reactor to house workers from the power plant, not to worry. When they finally ordered an evacuation, they told workers they would only be gone for a several days and not to take more than a few clothes. Scientists now say no one should live in Pripyat for 24,000 years.
The Stalinist regime ordered some 600,000 troops and volunteer miners, firemen and others — known as “liquidators” — to join plant workers to put the fire out, try to cover the leaking reactor and clean up the area. Few were provided with protective gear and all were exposed to threatening levels of radiation.
With radioactive dust still falling, Stalinist party leaders went ahead with massive May Day rallies in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, some 80 miles from Chernobyl, and Minsk, the capital of Belarus, instead of cautioning people to stay inside.
Two workers died in the explosion and 28 plant workers, firemen and others died of acute radiation within weeks. United Nations officials estimate that 4,000 more deaths have resulted since. Tens of thousands were sickened, especially children who contracted thyroid cancers and diseases from contamination by iodine-131 produced along with cesium-137 when the reactor exploded.
The government continued to cover up the real extent of the social disaster until it was blown open by angry workers and scientists three years later.
In a powerful poem about the Stalinist treachery, Lyubov Sirota, who had witnessed the explosion when she went outside to get some night air in Pripyat, wrote:
Thousands of “competent” functionaries
count our “souls” in percentages,
their own honesty, souls, long gone —
so we suffocate with despair.
They wrote us off.
They keep trying to write off
our ailing truths
with their sanctimonious lies.
But nothing will silence us!
Cuba’s internationalism
When the scope of the social catastrophe became clear, revolutionary Cuba, consistent with its unbroken record of internationalist working-class solidarity, offered to provide medical care free of charge. Beginning in 1990 and over the next 25 years, more than 25,000 people, overwhelmingly children, traveled to a special medical facility in Tarará, Cuba, built by workers’ voluntary labor, for treatment.They received love and care from Cuban doctors and volunteers alike. “This kind of social support comes from the people, from individuals,” Julio Medina, director of the Tarará program, told the Militant in a September 2014 interview. “Those values are the product of the revolution and its policies, our way of life.”
Many of those evacuated from Chernobyl were housed in special complexes in Kiev. “In my building, a ‘Chernobyl’ building where 3,000 of us live, when a sign goes up for a medical trip to Cuba, everybody wants to go,” Sasha Sirota, Lyubov’s son, told a Minnesota meeting in 1996.
The International Chernobyl Foundation in Kiev helped choose the sickest children to send for treatment. “The main Tarará miracle,” the group wrote last year, “is a genuine attitude for care, separated from the greed for money.”
The Soviet Union came apart about the same time the Tarará program began. Moscow slashed its trade and aid to Cuba. Even under these difficult conditions, which Cubans call the Special Period, the revolutionary government expanded the program to treat Ukrainian youth.
The new pro-capitalist government in Ukraine sought ties with Washington and the European Union. “At the United Nations, Ukraine joined the U.S. in voting against us on our human rights record,” Dr. Xenia Laurenti, deputy director of the Cuban program, said in a 2007 film on Chernobyl by Sic-Tv in Ukraine. “Had this been a political project, we would have broken off our relations.”
“But this is not political,” she said. “It’s an example of international solidarity.”
In 2012, under President Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian government ended funding for transportation to Cuba, forcing the suspension of the Tarará program.
Yanukovych was overthrown by a mass popular movement known as the Maidan the next year. In the absence of a revolutionary working-class leadership, his pro-Moscow regime was replaced by a government led by President Petro Poroshenko, himself a multibillionaire.
An organization of medical personnel and victims of Chernobyl and others was formed in 2015 to urge the Ukrainian government to restart the treatment program. There are hundreds of young people on a waiting list to go to Tarará and the Cubans have pledged to help them.
With the goal of increasing profits for Ukrainian capitalists, and under pressure to adopt further anti-working-class “reforms” by the International Monetary Fund and Washington, the Poroshenko government has slashed social funds, including programs to aid victims of Chernobyl.
In 2015 the government stopped a school lunch program that fed 350,000 children, many in the 1,300 settlements near Chernobyl, the only sure source of food not affected by lingering radiation.
“I am ashamed to look people in the eye,” Valery Kashparov, head of the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology, told Associated Press April 22.
Both the Stalinist government of the Soviet Union in 1986 and the capitalist regime in power in Ukraine today cared nothing for the lives and conditions of the working class.
Groups such as Greenpeace and the Centre for Research on Globalization argue the problem at Chernobyl was nuclear power itself. They claim massive numbers of deaths were caused, some estimating as high as a million. They say the only way future Chernobyls can be prevented is shutting them all down, even if it means that millions in Africa, Latin America and Asia will be unable to gain access to electrification.
Problem is what class rules
But nuclear power is neither good nor bad in itself. As Chernobyl proves, the question is who controls it in the interests of what social classes.“The dangers of nuclear power are not an argument against its potential benefits in advancing electrification of the world, but an argument for organizing the toilers to take power from the hands of the capitalist exploiters,” Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in “Our Politics Start with the World,” in New International no. 13.
Electrification opens the door to the extension of culture and deeper collaboration of working people across the world.
“The communist movement does not have ‘a position on nuclear power,’ for or against,” Barnes said. “We have a proletarian internationalist course to advance the revolutionary struggle for national liberation and socialism.”
The internationalist course of the Cuban Revolution toward thousands of Ukrainians in Tarará, embodied in the idea that Cuba doesn’t share what is “left over,” but all that it has, regardless of cost, shows that such a revolution can transform our class to make a world worth living in.
Related articles:
‘Cuba and Chernobyl’ (video)
Links to articles in previous issues:
June 23, 2014:
Chernobyl: Tale of two opposite class responses
Feb. 9, 2015:
'A program born out of the values of the Cuban Revolution'
Interview with Dr. Julio Medina, director of center in Tarará, Cuba, that treated 25,000 children after Chernobyl nuclear disaster
June 15, 2015:
New Ukraine group seeks to renew Cuba's Chernobyl aid
July 27, 2015:
‘Ukraine gov't should restart Cuba-Chernobyl program’
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