Chernobyl Children

In the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, more than a million Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian children were sent abroad. Aided by the unprecedented efforts of transnational NGOs and private individuals, these children were meant to escape and recover from radiation exposure, but also from the increasing hardships of everyday life in post-Soviet society. Through this opening of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of people in over forty countries witnessed the ecological, medical, social and political consequences of the disaster for the human beings involved. This awareness transformed the accident into a global catastrophe which could happen anywhere and have widespread impact. In this brilliantly insightful work, Melanie Arndt demonstrates that the Chernobyl children were both witness to and representative of a vanishing bipolar world order and the future of life in the Anthropocene, an age in which the human impact on the planet is increasingly borderless.

'Melanie Arndt places children at the centre of the Chernobyl catastrophe to reveal the ways Soviets built a civil society and faced the Anthropocene head-on. Brilliant research, a stunning work.' Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
'Hundreds of thousands of children suffered from the Chernobyl disaster, even after evacuation, in irradiated landscapes, as their state failed them. Melanie Arndt gives voice to these forgotten Chernobyl children, the most vulnerable members of society, and to transnational charities that struggled to help them after the collapse of the USSR.' Paul Josephson, author of Hero Projects
'In a nuanced study rife with paradox, Melanie Arndt shows how the explosion of Chernobyl's unit number 4 on 26 April 1986 shuttered cities, shattered lives, and accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. But at the same time, it kicked off an unprecedented transnational medical response, nowhere more poignant than in the story of the “Chernobyl children”, young people who emerged from under the radioactive cloud to become the focus of international aid and recuperation efforts, and who grew up grateful for and often transformed by the experience of travel in foreign lands, all while refusing the victimhood so often thrust upon them. The catastrophe of Chernobyl transcends generations; in this transcendent history of this 'long disaster' we not only begin to grasp not only its dark complexity and dreadful meaning but, astonishingly, glimmers of hope.' Louis S. Warren, author of God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

Melanie Arndt is Professor of Economic, Social and Environmental History and Vice Rector at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

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