Black harvest
The legacy of Russian nuclear contamination abetted by government, is the subject of Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong's heart-rending book Certificate no.000358/.
By Richard Cooke
Knoth (r) and de Jong catalogue a human catastrophe behind Soviet nuclear testing
Dutch photographer Robert Knoth has captured man's inhumanity from Iraq to Afghanistan, Sierra Leone to Rwanda. Knoth and his wife, writer Antoinette de Jong are seasoned chroniclers of disaster. But when they visited the former Soviet Union to document the ongoing effects of nuclear testing, nothing prepared them for the scale of suffering.
Tell us about how this project started?
RK Way back in 1999, I went to Kazakhstan to do a story on nuclear testing. I saw a documentary, which is curious as I've never heard about it. I knew of course that there was a lot of nuclear testing, but never knew that the Russian government has been experimenting in such a large part of its population, total of 1.7 million people who have been exposed. I was intrigued, went there, and was quite blown away by what I saw.
You've said it was worse than what you'd seen in Rwanda?
RK Yeah, because it was so calculated. I always compare it to the Gulag system, one of the most gruesome histories of the Soviet Union - it's about the willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people. And war's usually... well there's always two sides, always this coincidence, war famine, natural disasters, but this is a huge difference, this is a well calculated industrial enterprise.
ADJ The most fascinating thing was it was very easy to seduce militaries and scientists to these things. I still haven't found an answer why.
RK They seem to get enthusiastic about it very quickly.
ADJ Very much so - we found a pattern in each of the four locations. There'll be testing, in case of the Chernobyl disaster, there'd be decades of state denial that anything had happened, that anything was wrong, that people shouldn't worry, and at the same time, they would do tests on people. They would send in dozens of doctors and scientists to take dental filings, do biopsies, and they would come up with some excuse why they were doing these tests, and they never told anybody. Some villages in the Urals have a 70 per cent rate of leukemia, so something was very wrong. And it's this very deliberate using of your own civilians, so the civilians are just instruments for the government rather than with individual rights.
Do you think the book has a political message?
RK Of course. Very little is known about the nuclear industry in Russia, its history, the accidents. Everybody always speaks about Chernobyl, and we wanted to make a book which gives readers an indication of the scale in which these things happen. Chernobyl wasn't a one timer - it was the logical outcome of 50 years bad management. We felt it was important for history's sake to document it, because most people who were first-hand witnesses are gone. We felt it was important, being one of the first to make a comprehensive look at the nuclear history in Russia so that in 50 years, if you want to know something about nuclear accidents and Russia, and you can read this book and find out what it's about.
How you are able to piece together the stories behind the photographs?
ADJ What we've tried to do is document the lives of people and communities that are affected by radioactive pollution and what we've done all of these places is work through medical institutions or individual doctors, lawyers sometimes, so we were very careful in selecting the people that we have portrayed. Much to my surprise most people we approached immediately wanted to cooperate, I think in all maybe five people refused. Working in the community itself, people explicitly said they wanted to cooperate in this project to tell their stories, they felt it was necessary to have that testimony, and the title of the book Certificate no 000358/ is the number of the Chernobyl certificate that was given to Anya, a 15 year old girl when we met her in the south of Belarus, who was born four years after the accident. She developed a brain tumour when she was really small, was brought in front of these medical committees that you have in Belarus, to determine whether you qualify as a Chernobyl victim or not. We used her certificate as a title because it shows how people are treated there. They might qualify for cheap electricity, or free transportation or medical compensation but the one thing they can't get back is health.
What would you hope the outcome of this exhibition and book is?
ADJ We're still receiving emails from people asking us about specific people that we have photographed, how Anya is doing, how other people in the book are doing. So it hits a nerve with people because we get really close to the people and the communities we portrayed and have worked in. In this day and age, nuclear power is portrayed as this green and clean energy, and what I hope this project does achieve, is that it makes people think again and look again and I just hope that we can make a contribution to the debate.
Certificate no 000358/ is available from the Australian Centre for Photography.