The Soviet’s Poisoned Land : In 1945, Stalin Ordered Up An Atom Bomb At Any Price. Now The Bill Is Coming Due.

On Aug. 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb.

Bizhamal Samarova, now 70, lived about 30 miles from that original ground zero. “We were told to run to the banks of the river,” she recalls. “The bomb exploded. I saw a red ball. Heard a great thunder. Dogs began to howl.” Samarova says she was permanently blinded by that first explosion. And it was only the beginning.

Her village and the test site, the Polygon, near the city of Semipalatinsk, lie on a steppe 2,000 miles east of Moscow in the now independent country of Kazakhstan. Until 1989, the Polygon was one of two main Soviet nuclear-weapons test sites--467 nuclear blasts were set off there, an estimated 122 aboveground.

The tests were steeped in secrecy. To this day, the people who live near the site have no true grasp of what happened around them. But they do know what they see, hear and feel.

British photographer Paul Lowe journeyed to the Polygon last year. What he found were three generations of sheepherders, traders and factory workers convinced of their own diminished destiny. There is Clement Strauss, 43: “Our parents made us hide in holes , but some parents didn’t care. Their children are nearly all dead now.” And 38-year-old Elena Dolina, who died of stomach cancer last year. Her son is dying of leukemia. Her father has cancer of the mouth.

But what seems obvious to the eye is not always provable by scientific standards. A link between the Polygon tests and health problems in the nearby villages cannot be definitively established. There is simply not enough information. The effects of radiation on the body are not completely known. And Polygon researchers cannot determine past levels of radiation exposure anyway. Because basic health data is minimal, doctors cannot even accurately compare the incidence of disease around the Polygon with the general population. Other factors may also play a role, such as widespread industrial pollution.

For the families who live around the Polygon, the biggest fear now is for future generations. Children who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have shown no chromosome damage, but there is evidence that that may not be the case in Kazakhstan. Researchers point to the “yellow children” of Talmenka. It’s known in 1949 that a 25-m.p.h. wind carried a swirl of radioactive dust from the Polygon 250 miles east to Talmenka. Scientists believe that this fallout pattern could have continued for years, along with the tests.

Starting about three years ago, hundreds of children born in Talmenka turned yellow a day or two after birth. With treatment, the jaundice disappeared, but many of those children suffered congenital defects and learning disorders. “There is evidence of chromosome change due to radiation exposure,” claims Prof. Yakov N. Shoikhet, head of the Altai Medical Institute near Talmenka. “Only God knows what we will see in the fourth generation.”