News Services Like Voice of America Helped Save My Family - WSJ
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I know how important that kind of reporting can be. When I was growing up in the 1980s in Leningrad, I often overheard my grandfather Mark listening surreptitiously to Western radio broadcasts like Radio Svoboda (Radio Free Europe) and Golos Ameriki (Voice of America).
At the end of April 1986, when I was six years old, my dad, my uncle and I took a 20-hour train trip to Belarus to visit my other grandparents. We were going to stay in Gomel, a city about 85 miles from Chernobyl. The nuclear power plant explosion had taken place there days before, on April 26, but like most Soviet citizens we didn’t know about it yet. In fact, it was hard to get tickets into the danger zone because the trains were sold out, my dad recalls.
I have evidence of what happened next because Mark kept tabs on our lives in dozens of palm-sized notebooks. When he immigrated to the U.S. in the 1990s he brought them with him, and I have them now after his death.
May 1 is the first time Mark mentions Chernobyl: “There was an accident at the Chernobyl power plant (130 kilometers north of Kyiv). According to our information two people were killed, radiation was emitted, the town near the plant, as well as three other nearby municipalities, had been evacuated.” He noted that “The airwaves of Western radio are focused on just this story. The Swedes, the French, and some others instructed their citizens to leave the vicinity of Kyiv immediately.”
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But while the Soviet press was attempting to calm people down, my grandfather was getting a different message from the Western radio stations he listened to in private. On May 5 he wrote, “Saw a TASS broadcast about the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The radiation in Chernobyl fell 1.5-2 times over the course of a week.” But he noted that the French radio service RFI “says that the radioactivity of the Rhine and other rivers in Western Europe increased several times over the past few days.”
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Looking back, it’s frustrating to see how long it took my family to realize that we needed to leave Gomel. The area was contaminated by radiation from Chernobyl, and every day we spent there added to the danger. But it’s understandable. In the U.S.S.R., news was confusing and contradictory, and communication unreliable and slow. Hearing the truth from Western news broadcasts helped spare my family from the worst consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.
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