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332
CHORNOBYL: A RETROSPECTIVE ON SEMANTICS A couple of decades ago, when I was teaching English at Pennsylvania State University, I often assigned writing themes on contemporary issues. Students frequently chose to write on nuclear energy; within the parameters of the assignment they occasionally opted to investigate nuclear accidents, and among these, they included Three Mile Island and Chornobyl. As the first of these was a “local” phenomenon, there was no difficulty pinpointing the site of the accident and expounding on themes of proximity and clear and present dangers. Chornobyl was a different matter. Almost invariably, the students referred to Chornobyl as a Russian disaster, a Russian problem, a Russian catastrophe. My immediate response was to give a brief explanation about the structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, an explanation that included a list of all the Soviet republics, an explanation that pointedly distinguished Russia as one of fifteen. Most of my students never made the same mistake twice; some even left my class knowing that Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan were not parts of Russia. I was always annoyed but never surprised at their confusion. These were students, who like most Americans, had heard the terms USSR, Soviet Union, and Russia used interchangeably for many years. Their mistake was a mistake induced and repeatedly reinforced by television anchors and editors of magazines they read. They had also heard politicians speak of Russians in a manner that presumed that all citizens of the Soviet Union belonged to this ethnic classification. When the nuclear reactor at Chornobyl blew in April 1986, the media immediately pronounced it a “Russian” tragedy. Magazine covers screamed “Russia” in letters that were two inches high; television commentators proclaimed “Russia” while pointing to Kyiv on a map of the USSR. 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 Barbara Walters conducted an interview with Dr. Robert Gale, an 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 once used the word “Ukraine.” And Dr. Gale never disputed or questioned her allusions to Russia and Russians; in a book he subsequently wrote about his experiences, he himself referred to Ukraine only sporadically. Like most Ukrainian Americans I was outraged, both at the scope of the disaster that had befallen the country I had been raised to revere and at the public figures who carelessly or by design obscured the location of the disaster and the true identity of the victims. It didn’t much matter whether the lapse was careless or deliberate; what mattered was that “Russian” was almost universally used and placidly accepted by an uninformed public, which then parroted “Russian” whenever the subject of Chornobyl was broached. It made the tragedy more painful. Ukrainian Americans responded to the events at Chornobyl by demonstrating before the Soviet Embassy in Washington, by holding candlelight vigils in their communities, by pleading with Moscow through official and unofficial channels to evacuate the area around Chornobyl and provide adequate care for the victims of the accident. Relief efforts were launched; medicines and other necessities were collected and sent to Ukraine. Many of us also felt the need to make America aware of the political realities that had made the disaster at Chornobyl possible. Ukraine’s Holodomor 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, in fact, did try to keep the accident under wraps, and was forced to admit that it had occurred only after Western European nations became alarmed by abnormal levels of radioactivity. And so Ukrainian Americans wrote letters to television stations, to media personalities, to editors, to official in Washington, protesting both the endangerment of the Ukrainian populace and the indiscriminate use of “Russia” and “Russian” in stories and speeches and reports about Chornobyl. Some of the letters made an impact. A few appeared in U.S. News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, and other magazines. And eventually newspaper stories about Chornobyl began to include the word “Ukraine.” 10 XXIXКонвенція СУА www.unwla.org
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