Nuclear Blast Survivor Declares War on the Russian Army : Lawsuit: Yuri D. Sorokin wants $52,000 from the Defense Ministry for radiation exposure during a 1954 test.

In 1954, the Soviet army exploded a nuclear bomb over Yuri D. Sorokin’s head.

The 68-year-old veteran said he is among the last survivors of the 44,000 Soviet troops who were massed on the plain in Russia’s southern Urals on Sept. 13, 1954, to take part in a giant war game featuring a real atomic bomb.

Sorokin, who was an intelligence officer, said he and his troops were marched through the epicenter six hours after the blast, with no protection from the radiation.

A week later, Sorokin was hospitalized with violent head pain. Ever since, he has suffered from a plethora of mysterious ailments affecting his head, heart, stomach, lungs and limbs.

Where exactly does it hurt? “Everything hurts,” he said. “Everything has hurt for years.”

In a groundbreaking case for the former Soviet Union, Sorokin last week entered a Moscow courtroom seeking compensatory damages from the Russian Ministry of Defense.

It is a sign of how fast the Soviet era is fading that Sorokin is unafraid to file a lawsuit against the government. He is a huge man, the size of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. But his broad face and hands are swollen and discolored. He needs help to stand and can barely manage stairs.

“Why should I be nervous about the court?” Sorokin asked. “I was under The Bomb. The Defense Ministry has no document to show that I asked to be experimented on. I didn’t. They put me in place and blew up an atomic bomb over my head, and they have to answer for it.”

Even more surprising, a key military official agreed. “If we want to follow the dictates of our conscience, we must of course admit that the man must get paid,” said Sergei Y. Ushakov, a lawyer and spokesman for the military prosecutor’s office.

He said there may be tens of thousands of victims of radiation exposure because of “illegal actions” of the former Soviet military. Ushakov said it is difficult to predict the court’s ruling or to evaluate Sorokin’s demand for $52,000 in compensation for lost wages, medical costs and pain and suffering. That is a handsome sum in a nation where the average monthly salary is about $40.

“There has never been a precedent when an individual has taken a state agency to court to sue it for damages,” Ushakov said. “I am sure this is the first case in the entire history of the Soviet-Russian military when an ex-soldier dares to take this mighty monster to court. The Defense Ministry is simply not in the habit of paying compensation for loss of health.”

A $52,000 payment to each of the 44,000 men who were at Totsk--or their families, as the press reports fewer than 1,000 are still alive--would break the Russian defense budget, the lawyer said. Still, he added: “People like Sorokin should definitely be paid. . . . I personally expect the court to rule in his favor.”

None of those exposed to the radiation volunteered for the military exercise conducted in Totsk, Sorokin said. Strong, healthy men were yanked from their units and told nothing of their mission.

While traveling by train to the staging ground at Totsk, about 115 miles southeast of Samara, some of Sorokin’s friends spotted boxcars filled with empty coffins. No one dared to investigate. “It was all secret,” Sorokin said. “Everyone was afraid of each other.”

According to Sorokin’s suit and an expose of the Totsk war games published in the Moscow News, after the 40,000-ton atomic bomb exploded 1,150 feet in the air, the soldiers were to pound the mock enemy with artillery. They rushed through the blast epicenter to finish their foes off.

Soldiers were to be permitted to don gas masks and cover their heads with paper shields only if the level of radiation exceeded five or more roentgens per hour, Sorokin said. But as they passed through the epicenter, the radiation level was about 1.5 roentgens, and soldiers were coated with radioactive dust.

That is about equal to 14 times the maximum annual exposure permitted for civilians in the United States, according to Katherine Yih, research coordinator of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Cambridge, Mass.

Sorokin and the other soldiers allegedly exposed to the radioactivity continued to breathe the dangerous dust for days. The only decontamination came four days later when the soldiers were allowed to swim in the Samara River, he said.

The test was ordered by Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, a World War II commander who later became defense minister. Zhukov, Defense Minister Nikolai A. Bulganin, Igor V. Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet nuclear program, as well as the defense ministers of China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland were present.

“All of them stared at us like idiots,” Sorokin asserted, claiming that he personally saw Bulganin and Kurchatov.

Sorokin said he was discharged in 1958 with no medical examination, contrary to military rules, and although he received a verbal commendation from Zhukov, there was nothing in his files to indicate that he had ever been at Totsk.

For more than 20 years, he has been fighting to prove that his exposure at Totsk is the explanation for the 63 different diagnoses--other than radiation sicknesses--that doctors have made of him over the years. Soviet officialdom has steadfastly insisted that there is no proof Sorokin was ever at Totsk, let alone that radiation damaged his health.

“All these years, I was subjected to sadistic (psychological) torture by medical and military bureaucrats,” Sorokin said. “Everything was secret. It is secret to this day. There is no glasnost, openness.”

Finally, in 1991, Sorokin was examined by a medical center in Kiev that specializes in treating radiation disease in victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. With fumbling hands, Sorokin pulled out the most treasured document of the two-inch-thick stack of yellowing paper that represents his long struggle for vindication. “The illnesses are analogous to those received as a result of cleanup of the Chernobyl accident,” the report concluded.

Sorokin and other “nuclear veterans” from the Committee of Special Risk Contingent Veterans have succeeded in having some Soviet documents about Totsk declassified. But some won’t live to see justice.

Ernest M. Kan, 63, another survivor who lives in Moscow, has already lost one lung to a spreading cancer. “I am not going to sue anybody, because I know how our bureaucracy works,” Kan said. “I don’t have that much time.”