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#ukraine
2 articles
Chernobyl
At 1:23:40 a.m. local time on Saturday, April 26, 1986, reactor 4 at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, exploded. A planned low-power safety test, run by night-shift personnel who had been ordered to proceed despite warnings, drove the RBMK-1000 reactor into a state its designers had specifically marked as forbidden. The graphite-tipped control rods, lowered to scram the reactor, briefly added reactivity before shutting it down. The core's thermal output spiked to approximately 30,000 megawatts — ten times rated capacity — in four seconds. Two steam explosions ripped the 1,000-tonne upper biological shield off the reactor and exposed the burning graphite core to the atmosphere. Two workers died at the moment of explosion. Twenty-nine more — firefighters, control-room operators, plant electricians — died from acute radiation syndrome within four months. Forty-eight hours passed before the city of Pripyat (population 49,360) was evacuated. The Soviet government did not publicly acknowledge the accident until April 28, after Swedish nuclear technicians at Forsmark detected the airborne plume 1,200 kilometres to the northwest. The cover-up was, by Mikhail Gorbachev's own subsequent assessment, the moment Soviet glasnost became unavoidable.
The Holodomor
Between the winter of 1932 and the summer of 1933, between 3.5 million and 7.5 million people died of starvation and starvation-related illness in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the adjacent grain-producing regions of the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan. The deaths were not the result of crop failure. The 1932 Ukrainian harvest was below average but not catastrophically so; the deaths occurred because the Soviet state confiscated the harvest. Joseph Stalin's regime, working through Ukraine's Communist Party leadership under Lazar Kaganovich and Pavel Postyshev, imposed grain-procurement quotas that exceeded what the harvest could yield. When the quotas were not met, the state introduced 'blacklists' of villages — barred from receiving any goods, including food, until they delivered the quota. The state introduced an internal-passport system in late 1932 that prevented peasants from leaving their villages to find food elsewhere. Border guards turned back peasants attempting to cross into Russia or Belarus. The death toll, denied by the Soviet government for fifty-seven years, has since been documented through demographic analysis, opening of Soviet archives after 1991, and recovery of the photographic record — particularly the photographs of the Austrian engineer Alexander Wienerberger, who documented the famine in Kharkiv on a Leica camera he smuggled out of the USSR. The Ukrainian word *Holodomor* combines *holod* (hunger) and *moryty* (to kill, exterminate). The word was first used publicly by Ukrainian diaspora writers in the 1980s. The Ukrainian government formally recognized the events as genocide in 2006. As of 2024, the Holodomor has been recognized as genocide by approximately 34 countries and the European Parliament.
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