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CHORNOBYL A RETROSPECTIVE ON SEMANTICS As an English instructor at the Pennsylvania State University I often assign themes based on contempor ary issues. Students frequently choose to write on nuclear energy; within the parameters of the assignment they occasionally opt to investigate nuclear disasters and accidents. Among these, naturally, they include Three Mile Island and Chornobyl. Since the first of these is a “local” phenomenon, there is no difficulty locating the site of the accident in Pennsylvania. Chor nobyl is a different matter. Almost invariably the stu dents refer to Chornobyl as a Russian disaster, a Rus sian problem, a Russian catastrophe. My immediate response is to give a brief explanation about the struc ture of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, an ex planation that includes a list of all the Soviet republics, an explanation that pointedly distinguishes Russia as only one of fifteen. Most of my students never make the same mistake twice; some may even leave my class knowing that Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan are not parts of Russia. I am always annoyed, yet never surprised at their confusion. These are students, who like most Ameri cans, have heard the terms Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Soviet Union and Russia used interchangea bly for years. Their mistake is a mistake that has been induced and repeatedly encouraged by television an chors and editors of the popular magazines they read. They have also heard politicians speak of Russians in a way that presumes that all citizens of the Soviet Union belong to this ethnic classification. When the nuclear reactor at Chornobyl blew, the media immediately pronounced it a Russian tragedy. Magazine covers screamed "Russia” in letters two in ches high; television commentators proclaimed “Rus sia” while pointing to Kiev on a map of the U.S.S.R. On a radio broadcast about Chornobyl on the program “Face Off,” both Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Robert Dole consistently referred to the “Russian” nuclear reactor and the “Russian” victims. When Bar bara Walters conducted an interview with Dr. Robert Gale, the American doctor who flew to the Soviet Union to perform bone marrow transplants on some of those affected by heavy doses of radiation, she never sued the word Ukraine. Dr. Gale did not dispute or question her constant allusion to Russia and the Russians; in a book he subsequently wrote about his experiences, he him self referred to Ukraine only sporadically. Like most Ukrainians I was outraged, both at the scope of the disaster that had befallen the country I had been raised to love and revere and at the ignorance of public figures who obscured the real location of the dis aster and the real identity of the victims. It did not much matter whether the “Russian” was careless or deliber ate; it mattered only that “Russian” was almost univer sally used by these people and placidly accepted by an uninformed public which then parroted “Russian” whe never the subject of Chornobyl was mentioned. For many Ukrainian-Americans this made the nuclear disas ter even more painful. Ukrainians in America responded to the events at Chornobyl by demonstrating before the Russian em bassy in Washington, by holding candlelight vigils throughout American cities, by pleading with Moscow to evacuate the area around Chornobyl and to provide adequate care for the innocent victims of the accident. Relief efforts were launched; medicines and other ne cessities were collected and sent to Ukraine. Many also felt the need to make America aware of the political real ities that had made the disaster at Chornobyl possible, one of those political realities being America’s lack of awareness about Ukraine and its relationship to Mos cow. The Ukrainian famine had been covered up by Moscow and virtually ignored by the West for fifty years. Would the Ukrainian nuclear disaster be a sequel to this? Moscow had tried to keep the accident a secret from the West and was forced to admit that it had occurred only after Western European nations became alarmed by abnormal levels of radioactivity. What would stop Moscow from downplaying the threat to Ukrainian lives if the world did not know that Ukrainian lives were at stake? Many feared that this would happen. They wrote let ters to television stations, to media personalities, to edi tors, to officials in Washington, protesting Moscow’s reckless endangerment of Ukrainian lives and protest ing the indiscriminate use of “Russia” and “Russian” in stories and speeches and reports on Chornobyl. Some of the letters made an impact. Some appeared in U.S. News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, Insight and other magazines. Newspaper stories about Chornobyl began to mention “Ukrainian”, if not exclusively, at least more often. I too wrote letters. Two of those letters were sent to Senators Kennedy and Dole to protest their inaccurate use of “Russia” and “Russian” on the “Face Off” radio program. A similar letter was sent to Barbara Walters after her interview with Dr. Gale. While I never heard from Ms. Walters, each of the Senators wrote me a per Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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