CCCPAKA

Your dad would be so proud!

Thanks for your kind words. Up until Chernobyl, kids only knew about radiation from stories/propaganda showing "the evil Americans" bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Soviet movie theaters actually ran a "children's cartoon" - Japanese Anime "Barefoot Gen" - or click here, if you want to have your heart twisted that I saw only few months before Chernobyl. So, when news did come out, I expected everyone I knew to die of radiation. It was very frightening.

Because Soviet government was keeping it under wraps, we only found out because countries up north started seeing high levels of radiation. My father had a short-wave radio that he used to listened to Voice of America. VofA was always scrambled, so he had to hunt between bands and frequencies to find it, until it got scrambled again. I remember hearing about Chernobyl, but I had no idea where it was or significance of these news. Even my father did not fully know the extent of seriousness.

Only after few days, he told me to stay indoors of our standard-issue apartment in a 12 story high concrete building. And this was after I just got my first bike for 11th birthday. I couldn't ride it?! After begging for it for all these years? That was, at the time, the biggest devastation.

After people eventually did find out, the town turned ghostly. Once busy streets were nearly empty - people stayed indoors. If you looked out the window, it was so eerie. We were looking to see which way the clouds were going - if towards us, we had to stay indoors, if away from us, we could go outside.

Every morning, our building maintenance man would come out and hose down the streets - to hose down the radiation dust, as my father explained. However, it didn't matter much - he said - because we lived right next to forest that went all the way up north for hundreds of miles. Same forest that Chernobyl was next to. And all these trees were absorbing radiation that they would give off for many years later. This was the main motivator for us to move.

In response to the disaster, many school children were evacuated to the camps for the summer. We were loaded up into trains and taken to the Back Sea - camps in Crimea (and surrounding areas) for the summer. It was great for us - but almost everyone was worried about parents and family left back home. It was a really restrained sort of joy.

The biggest change was not being able to spend all my free time outdoors. Remember, we only had 3 channels on TV, nothing to watch, nothing to do, no internet, only books to keep you entertained. So, when my parents left for work, I'd sneak out with my bike and go riding all over the city with my friends. We all thought we were invisible - besides, if you can't see the radiation, it may not exist.

Heck, my friends even joked that if a coin sticks to your forehead - you're exposed to radiation. Imagine sticking a coin to your sweaty forehead and it sticks??? :)

We tried to live with new reality - adopted quickly like many kids do, but it was definitely different.

When news started to leak out, our local news were saying that it was just a fire and it was under control. Nothing to worry about. So, many folks without having other sources of info, believed it.

Sad and disgusted. So many people were exposed to radiation and were not told what was happening to them. Those people would have been able to at least protect themselves or given an option to reduce the risks to their long term health.

My father died early from heart problems - one of the side effects of radiation exposure could cause heart problems.

I'm not sure if it's related, but both my children had very enlarged tonsils/adenoids that were causing sleep apnea. My son had a urological disorder that is suspected to be related.

It's hard to say whether it was caused by Chernobyl, but it's equally as hard to dismiss it.