No man-made catastrophe today can be hidden from the public eye - the development of technology simply will not allow hiding the truth. But even in the middle of the last century, any tragedy could have been “disguised”. At least, what happened on the territory of the great country, the Soviet Union. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is known to everyone. But who has heard of a similar catastrophe that affected the entire Chelyabinsk region? The Kyshtym tragedy was kept silent for almost three decades. Here is the truth about what happened and what is happening now.
Closed city
On September 29, 1957, at the Mayak plant, for the sake of which the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 was built, there was an explosion of a container for radioactive waste. 80 cubic meters of highly radioactive material, 20 million curies of radioactive substances in the atmosphere minutes after the explosion. An area of 23,000 square kilometers is infected. 270 thousand people, of which almost none of them until the end of their lives did not know about their sentence.
Disinformation of the population
After the explosion, a kilometer-long column of dust and smoke rose into the sky. It burned and shimmered with an orange-red light - an otherworldly spectacle! The authorities could no longer pretend that nothing had happened. It needed a trick. Look what the unfortunate people were forced to believe.
Promotional video:
Last Sunday evening … many Chelyabinsk citizens observed a special glow of the starry sky. This glow, quite rare in our latitudes, had all the signs of aurora borealis. Intense red, sometimes turning into a slightly pink and light blue glow, at first covered a significant part of the southwestern and northeastern surface of the sky. At about 11 o'clock it could be observed in the northwest direction … - October 6, 1957, "Chelyabinsk worker"
7 days of silence
A week has passed. A week filled with fear and lies. In the end, the leadership of the region received an order to evacuate 15 thousand people from the immediate zone of infection. No one began to think that radiation poses a potential danger to several hundred thousand more from the surrounding villages. The authorities tried to wipe out all nearby villages from the face of the earth, but they missed one village in the bustle.
Ghost village
The village of Tatarskaya Karbolka was considered not the largest in the region. About four thousand people lived here, they were not evacuated. People led ordinary lives until strange diseases began. Over the past half century, the population has dropped to four hundred people. The consequences of the tragedy are palpable even today: cancer is diagnosed in both children and adults. Eight cemeteries have already been dug near the village - people are dying faster than they receive medical assistance.
Voluntary secret
The mystery of the Kyshtym catastrophe lasted thirty years. Box cities were designed specifically for such an occasion. In addition, the Mayak plant itself was considered a top-secret facility, since it worked to support the country's nuclear industry. Even during the evacuation, people were forced to "voluntarily" sign a document according to which any disclosure of state secrets leads to capital punishment.
People who are not
The settlement has not received a special status even today. And soon there will be simply no one to fight for the truth: for many years, people have been forced to heat their houses with trees that have absorbed radiation and drink water, digging wells in the poisoned earth. Some historians of the Russian Academy of Sciences tried to find documents in order to knock out at least some support of the population from the state. Found. According to the documents, all residents of Tatarskaya Karbolka were evacuated immediately after the tragedy.