Deactivation

Deactivation is the term used in the testimonies for attempts to deal with radioactive contamination by altering, removing, or burying the material that carried it. Its procedures could sound like ordinary maintenance—washing roofs, digging earth, clearing houses—but their scale and consequences made familiar work strange. The accounts show a landscape where contamination could not simply be seen or washed away, and where the acts meant to manage it often collided with farming, home, and ordinary ideas of what should be kept or discarded.

Meaning and Scope

The term appears in accounts of work in the evacuated area around the plant. One description defines the effort materially: earth, trees, and houses were dug up and buried as nuclear waste, sometimes haphazardly. The account likens such scenes to ordinary human activities gone terribly berserk. Deactivation therefore names more than a cleaning technique: it marks the point at which familiar surroundings were treated as contaminated matter requiring removal or burial.

The measures extended beyond the physical landscape. In one village, a cameraman saw roofs being washed, though an old woman’s roof leaked. The soil presented a more radical problem: removing its entire fertile layer left yellow sand behind. An old woman followed the instruction to throw out the earth, then scraped up manure to use later. The juxtaposition captures the difficulty of making the procedure conform to everyday practice. The soil was both a suspected carrier of danger and the ground on which people had worked and hoped to grow food.

Homes, Possessions, and Burial

For residents barred from evacuated villages, the distinction between contamination control and the loss of home was immediate. A soldier describes roadblocks and observation posts set up to keep former inhabitants from returning. People asked why they could not retrieve a bucket, pitcher, saw, or axe, or harvest their crops. The soldiers had to enforce the restriction, although explaining it to farmers was difficult.

The landscape around the checkpoints seemed to contradict the prohibition. On one side of the road, soldiers kept people out; on the other, cows grazed, harvesters worked, and grain was shipped. The soldier’s account also describes women milking cows only to be ordered to pour away the milk, and carrying eggs that they had to bury. Farmers quietly harvested potatoes that, according to the account, had to be buried too. Deactivation made food production and destruction occur almost side by side: cultivation continued, while what it yielded was treated as unsafe.

Burial also became a method for handling domestic goods. One worker describes people arriving after dark with money, cigarettes, and vodka, seeking access to confiscated belongings. Some items were taken away; dresses, boots, chairs, harmonicas, and sewing machines left behind were buried in ditches. The workers called these ditches “communal graves.” The phrase gives discarded household objects a grave-like destination, turning disposal into a material record of possessions severed from their owners and homes.

Animals and Contaminated Food

The effort to manage contamination reached animals as well as buildings and fields. A few months after the explosion, regional Party officials told a hunters’ leader that evacuated settlements still held pets. Dogs and cats, they said, had absorbed heavy doses of radiation in their fur and might wander beyond the contaminated area. The hunters were instructed to enter and shoot them. The danger was thus addressed not only by restricting human movement but by eliminating animals that might carry contamination outward.

Other accounts describe the food supply as contaminated matter rather than food in any ordinary sense. Tests of animal products found that what was being received could not properly be called meat, but radioactive byproducts. In a separate account, measurements in some villages found thyroid activity in adults and children at one hundred, and sometimes two or three hundred, times the allowable dosage. Breast milk was radioactive; food in village stores lay uncovered beside clothing. The speaker describes testing salami and an egg and concluding that they were not food but radioactive byproducts. These findings place deactivation within a wider disruption of ordinary use: milk, eggs, and meat could remain part of production and trade even as measurement challenged their status as safe nourishment.

Work, Representation, and Contradiction

The accounts also distinguish between the material response and its public image. At an agricultural club, villagers watched Mikhail Gorbachev on television saying that everything was fine and under control, while deactivation work was taking place nearby. The cameraman recalls washing roofs and the removal of soil, but says he failed to film the old woman discarding earth and saving manure. That unrecorded action would have shown the practical contradiction inside the cleanup more clearly than an official scene.

When livestock was buried in a huge pit with a bulldozer, the cameraman turned away from it. Instead, he filmed bulldozer drivers reading Pravda beneath a headline declaring that the nation would not abandon those in trouble. He also filmed a stork landing in a field, taking it as a symbol that life continued and the country would triumph. The images he chose displaced the pit and its dead animals with patriotic reassurance. Deactivation appears here both as physical work and as a subject whose meaning could be screened or redirected by the way the response was presented.

Measurement and the Limits of Control

The procedures could not make the danger fully legible. A scientist’s first trip into the area found forest background radiation five to six times higher than on roads or fields; measurements in villages registered thyroid activity far above permitted levels. Yet supervisors instructed the group to take measurements and watch television, while official reassurance persisted. In another account, a director calling Nikolai Slyunkov about the accident says that the government telephone line went dead whenever he began discussing it. Later, he sent maps, figures, and four folders of reports, each 250 pages, to officials; the folders disappeared from his office, and the institute’s measuring equipment was confiscated.

These testimonies place deactivation in a struggle over how contamination was known and acted upon. Instruments could register radiation in soil, food, and bodies, but readings did not by themselves determine whether people could return, whether production should continue, or what information officials would acknowledge. Deactivation’s concrete acts—washing, digging, burying, blocking access—showed an attempt to impose order on a contaminated environment. Their contradictions make clear how incomplete that order remained: the land continued to be cultivated, goods could be removed or buried, and the measurements that might justify protective action could be constrained or ignored.