Victims Of 1957 Soviet Nuclear Accident Get Their Day In Court - KRT

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KARABOLKA, Russia - One of the world's ghastliest nuclear accidents happened just upwind of here, in a secret atomic city that didn't have a name and never appeared on any maps. An explosion of radioactive sludge sent up a toxic plume that contaminated a quarter-million people.

This was the Soviet Union, 1957, but only now are the voices of the victims being heard. Communist authorities responded to the accident with a global cover-up and a scorched-earth cleanup. Even as they evacuated entire Russian communities, they were sending 1,500 ethnic Tatar farmers into the hot zones to do the dirty work. Children were pressed into service, too, from fourth-graders on up.

Many of the "young liquidators," as the children came to be known, died from radiation-related diseases soon after the explosion, which few people know about even today. They came down with afflictions they couldn't have imagined, illnesses they couldn't even pronounce. Finally, however, the surviving liquidators are starting to win victories in the Russian courts. It's taken nearly half a century for Moscow to admit any sort of responsibility for the disaster, but three Karabolka residents recently won absurdly small but perhaps precedent-setting judgments that give them reparations of $8 a month, plus an annual stay at a Russian spa.

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The Karabolka children helped with the nuclear triage alongside their parents. Week after week they dug potatoes and carrots out of the ground with their bare hands, then buried the contaminated crops in deep pits. They cleaned bricks that were covered in radioactive soot. They buried dead cattle, filled in poisoned wells and dismantled clapboard houses. "Our hands were bleeding. Everybody was vomiting," said Glasha Ismagilova, a 57-year-old paramedic who was an 11-year-old tomboy at the time. "My vomit was very green. The doctor looked at it and said I had eaten too many peas, and he sent me back to work. But of course I hadn't eaten any peas at all."

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http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/8361021.htm