A Voice For Dignity : UCI’s John Whiteley Visits Russian Regions Others Dare Not, Trying to Aid a People Torn by War and Scarred by Radiation

John Whiteley goes to places where people don’t want to be.

Places where children can step out of their front door and onto a land mine. Places where there is so much radiation it seems almost pointless to measure it.

He could be lounging on a patio in Irvine, dealing only with the everyday worries of suburban life, but Whiteley is trying to find solutions to much larger problems--how to clean up a land bombarded with radiation for 50 years, or stop ethnic rivalries from escalating to war.

On UC Irvine’s roster, Whiteley is listed as a teacher--a professor of social ecology, global peace and conflict resolution. But there are no classroom walls surrounding him: He is a researcher, psychologist, student of politics and Russian culture, former public television host, shaper of public policy, expert on radiation pollution.

Russian authorities invited him to help draft their nation’s first nuclear-waste laws. He has gone to the secret city of Chelyabinsk-65 in central Russia to survey the horrors of radioactive pollution and to war-battered Chechnya in the south. He delivers medical supplies and interviews refugees who fled fighting and families who live in a nuclear wasteland.

“When you talk about the human spirit, it’s such an enduring trait in these people,” Whiteley says.

He risks radiation sickness and the violent uncertainties of war because--well, he cannot quite explain it.

Nor can those who know him.

“He is like a missionary,” says Yuri Sakharev of the Chelyabinsk State Technical University. “He is without any thoughts of personal or financial gain.” At age 55, “his soul is young.”

“If you believe in a previous life, I think Whiteley was Russian,” says Russian-born Marianna Baker of Irvine, who serves as his translator.

“He is an American, but he is with us in spirit,” says Gulfarida Galimova, head of a Russian clinic for radiation victims in Muslyumovo. “He comes bringing medicine, courage and support, and the people depend on it. He never asks anything in return. . . . It is very rare to meet a person like him.”

Much of Grozny is now rubble--the Parliament building, the university, entire neighborhoods.

Whiteley walks carefully among the toppled stones, broken concrete and spent shells. He is looking for answers in the ruins of this once-bustling city of 400,000 in the Republic of Chechnya.

The damage is more visible--but no less devastating--than that he encountered days earlier in the radiation-poisoned Techa River Valley in central Russia.

There, Whiteley also looks for answers that will help heal the people and the land.

This is his first time in Chechnya, though he has been in the surrounding area often. Russian soldiers now occupy the mineral-rich republic, that, like Russia, used to be part of the vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At the height of the conflict last New Year’s Day, bombs rained on Grozny at a rate of 4,000 per hour.

Eight times he has traveled to the Techa River Valley, which is so polluted with nuclear waste that few outsiders will--or are allowed to--come close enough to study it.

Whiteley has visited the former Soviet Union more than 30 times--beginning with his involvement in some early glasnost projects in 1987 and, most recently, this three-week trip in September.

The destruction and illness seem overwhelming, but he remains hopeful. He brings with him medical supplies--more than $500,000 worth so far--from donors in Orange County and elsewhere.

It is little things by many people that may ultimately create change, he believes, so he carries boxes of medicine as he searches for long-term solutions. And, he arranges for Russian scientists and researchers to come to the United States to see the technology and methods that could help them create a safer environment. In the past six weeks, under his guidance, UCI has hosted three separate delegations.

Always, Whiteley is looking for lessons that can be shared with those involved directly in the issues at hand, and with his students back in Irvine.

Testing the Limits

“He knows the way to get to the people,” says Baker, Whiteley’s translator. “In Russia, it’s a specific culture of relationships. Connections are built traditionally. He knows how to communicate with people even without speaking their language. Most Americans don’t know how to deal with Russians.”

Whiteley’s style is deliberate and methodical, and it serves him well, she says.

“When you first meet him, he seems like he’s slow . . . like he doesn’t get it,” Baker says. “Only when you look in his eyes, you know that something is going on. And when you look at the results, you realize he is very quick. It is very difficult to get things moving in Russia.”

After the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine in 1986, Soviet officials were inclined for the first time to accept advice and assistance from outsiders, and Whiteley embraced the opportunity.

“It was a time of testing the limits of what was possible in the relationship between the U.S. and Soviet Union,” Whiteley says. “It was an extraordinary period of hope.”

Russell Dalton, a political scientist at UCI, began working with Whiteley in 1991. They met at a conference Whiteley organized on cleaning up nuclear sites in Russia, China and the United States.

“This is typical of John, to take on the role of bringing people together to deal with these environmental problems, even though that is not under the narrow definition of what a faculty member might do,” Dalton says.

After the conference, the Russian deputy of atomic power invited Whiteley to visit the city of Chelyabinsk-65--so secret it was not put on maps.

Whiteley and Paula Garb, an anthropology professor at UCI, were among the first foreigners admitted to this high-security zone during the nuclear age. In the winter of 1992 they conducted a health survey of those living in the Techa River Valley, where Chelyabinsk and Muslyumovo are located.

Dalton, like Whiteley, is a veteran of research at the U.S. nuclear-waste facility in Hanford, Wash.

“Doing research in Russia is not doing research in an open, advanced, industrial democracy,” Dalton says. There is official secrecy and KGB scrutiny. But Whiteley has been able to navigate his way around such obstacles.

“One of the uncertainties about Chelyabinsk is that one doesn’t quite know how much danger you’re exposing yourself to,” Dalton says.

“When John went to Russia in the spring of ‘93, they took personal dosimeters to measure radiation exposure, and it maxed out before he even left the airport in Chelyabinsk.”

In Muslyumovo, the average life expectancy for men is 43, for women, 49.

“One can say you’re only there for a week, you’re only exposed to a small fraction of it,” Dalton says. “But through their specific research interests, it brings John to the worst polluted places. To go to Muslyumovo, to walk along the Techa River, visit villages downwind and walk through the leukemia ward. There’s a physical risk, but it’s also the emotional toll it involves.”

Galimova, a doctor and head of the clinic in Muslyumovo, has been working with Whiteley and his UCI colleagues in the study of radiation levels in the river, food and people. She is among Russian scientists and researchers who have, with Whiteley’s assistance, come to the United State this fall to lecture and to learn American methodology.

Whiteley’s commitment to the people of Muslyumovo has been unswerving, she says.

“He is extremely courageous and brave. The system in Russia is very strong. There are so many people who try to prevent him from coming to do research,” Galimova says. “Other scientists turn around and leave when they can’t get access into Muslyumovo.”

Cold War Lessons

Born in Jackson, Mich., Whiteley lived briefly in Florida before moving to San Diego County, where his father worked at the veteran’s hospital at Camp Pendleton.

As he was entering grade school in the 1940s, the Cold War was beginning. The so-called Iron Curtain closed off the rest of the world from the Soviet people and those in satellite nations.

The mystery of the region appealed to Whiteley, and when the Soviets in 1957 launched Sputnik, the first space satellite, during his high school years, he was inspired to begin studying Soviet culture.

Graduating from Chula Vista High School in 1958, he went to Stanford, where he majored in political science. He went on to Harvard, earning a master’s degree in guidance in 1962, a doctorate in counseling psychology in 1964.

Renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner became a role model, Whiteley says. “He started me on a way of thinking about problems--to step back and look at roles of formative and stabilizing institutions like government, business, religion, education and the family.”

Whiteley had been assistant to the chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., before moving to UCI in 1972 to become dean of students. He and his wife, Rita, who had married the year before, have three sons and two daughters--the eldest now 28, the youngest 17.

While he would later focus on global conflict, early in his career Whiteley was recognized for his work in family relations. He developed award-winning films on divorce and anger. He founded, edited and published the Counseling Psychologist, a periodical cited by the American Psychological Assn. in 1985 for its contribution to the profession.

In the early ‘80s, Whiteley immersed himself in the social ecology department at UCI and began promoting discussion of world peace. In 1983, he helped launch the Global Peace and Studies Program at UCI.

That was also the year he began hosting “Quest for Peace,” a weekly public television series. The program, which aired until 1991, was produced by KOCE in Huntington Beach. Whiteley’s guests--beginning with Skinner--were national leaders in diverse fields: Karl A. Menninger, Edward Teller, Norman Cousins, Robert S. McNamara, Kenneth Clark, Barry Goldwater, John Kenneth Galbraith, Clark M. Clifford, J. William Fulbright and many others.

The series aired on more than 400 cable stations in 47 states. “That was a decade where people really worried about the fabric of civilization,” he says.

In 1989, with backing from the UCI Foundation and the National Geographic Society, Whiteley set up what became known as the Global Common Classroom. The project linked, via computer, students in UCI classrooms to students in Soviet classrooms.

In recognition of his quest for world peace and international goodwill, the UCI Alumni Assn. in 1991 presented Whiteley its highest honor: the Extraordinarius Award.

A Poisoned Valley

The Techa River that Whiteley visits was once a lifeline for 124,000 Russians. No more. The amount of radiation dumped in the Techa is estimated to have equaled the amount unleashed by the Hiroshima bomb, or 20 times the amount spewed by the Chernobyl explosion.

There is a long history of radiation contamination in the valley--from Mayak at the mouth of the Techa to the large industrial city of Chelyabinsk, 70 miles to the south.

The Techa River was the site of secret nuclear waste dumping for years. It is said to have been worst in 1951, when the dumping produced a foam on top of the river 40 miles long and the river’s fish went blind.

There was a nuclear power plant explosion in 1957. At Mayak, a weapons-grade plutonium plant spewed radioactive contamination for years. Health problems in the area became so obvious that evacuations of river towns began in 1953 and continued through 1960.

Whiteley and his colleagues from UCI have studied the health of the population for the past four years. He has written about the region for academic journals and has helped educate Russians who were once employed by the military and industrial firms about environmental issues and toxic-waste control. “We’re hoping these people will be instrumental in redesigning a new environmental health system for Russia,” he says.

In their 1992 visit, Whiteley and Garb, the UCI anthropology professor, surveyed 1,200 people in the region and discovered, among other things, that 90% of the families of Muslyumovo had health problems traceable to the radiation disasters. Next year, they plan to survey the population again.

Muslyumovo is home to 6,000 people, mostly Muslims. They and others who live in the river valley compose the only population in the world known to have been exposed for half a century to constant radiation.

Guzman Kabirov is the co-founder of White Mice, a local environmental activist group, and is one of Whiteley’s main contacts in the village. “We think Muslyumovo was left here alone, as an experiment,” Kabirov says.

Intended or not, it has become a laboratory for the study of radiation illnesses.

When the UCI team first visited the pediatric ward at Chelyabinsk Oblast hospital in 1992, the mortality rate of children with leukemia was 80%. Now it’s at 50%, a direct result of Western aid.

Galimova, who is also active in White Mice, says Whiteley must hand-deliver to her the boxes of medical supplies he brings into the country. Otherwise she doesn’t get them.

“Even the Red Cross representatives complain they have trouble getting into the area. Whiteley is the only person who continues to come to Muslyumovo not only as a scientist and researcher but also to help the people,” Galimova says.

On his most recent trip to the area, Whiteley attended a memorial for a 58-year-old man who had died of radiation poisoning.

The dead man’s family told Whiteley that they had been given special “privileges” in the 1950s--access to the river in exchange for collecting water samples for government inspectors. All seven children are now dead, ill or sterile.

Despite the contamination, Whiteley takes no special precautions against the radiation pollution himself. He eats the food offered him and feels no compulsion to scrub his skin or burn his clothes when he leaves. He’s not worried, he says, because he knows his time in this environment is limited.

Not so for his friends and associates in Muslyumovo.

Many there have constant muscle pains and headaches, hacking coughs and suffer from fatigue. Most just call the common ailments “river disease.”

A City Crushed

The road Whiteley takes into Grozny in a Red Cross truck is rutted from tanks and pitted by explosions and neglect. It is also sprinkled with Russian military checkpoints.

Moscow sent its troops into Chechnya in December to reassert control over the region that had declared its independence in 1991. The Russian offensive hammered the Chechens.

Though the fighting has stopped, land mines remain a routine hazard in Chechnya. Thousands of unexploded devices laid by Russian soldiers over the past year still maim and kill civilians.

Thousands of refugees are making the trip back to Grozny from rural villages and neighboring Ingushetia. While many Chechens fled to outlying areas, most Russian citizens who make their home in Grozny stayed--often absorbing the shelling from their countrymen. “Another example of this senselessness,” Whiteley says.

The animosity between Chechens and Russians is longstanding. In 1944, the Chechen and Ingush populations--almost half a million people--were herded into cattle cars at gunpoint and exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin charged they had been collaborating with the Nazis.

The Republic of Chechen was dissolved, and its land was given away to new settlers, mainly Russians. It was not until 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, that Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev allowed families to return and reclaim their property. Today the oldest generations of Chechens “pass down lessons they’ve learned about dealing with the Russians,” Whiteley says.

Whiteley says that in the future, more conflicts in this region are likely to erupt than are settled. Many, including the Chechens, wear their history proudly, gaining resolve when challenged.

In the Caucasus Mountains alone, there are 40 distinct language and ethnic groups with aspirations for more autonomy or independence, he says.

“This is a problem that is not going to go away.”

Bringing It Home

Whiteley tries to commit to memory the details of what he sees in hospitals, in the streets of Grozny, in the Techa River Valley. He wants to be able to recall those things when he is back home, talking with his students at UCI or lobbying for research funds or medical supplies.

Seeing and feeling things firsthand, he says, gives him the heart he needs to fight for peace. He will return next in January, visiting both Grozny and Chelyabinsk.

Among his stops in Grozny this trip is the remains of a memorial the Chechens constructed 40 years earlier after their previous conflict with Russian soldiers.

“The Chechen memorial, littered with expended rounds, brings the monstrosity of the devastation home in a way no written or spoken presentation can,” he says.

“What I hope my students will come away with is an appreciation of what problems of nationalities and their aspirations really bring to the 21st Century,” Whiteley says.

At the memorial, Whiteley notes a weathered tombstone inscribed: “If a man gets on his knees in times of adversity, he will live on his knees. But if he stands up, he will live in dignity.”

Whiteley says his interest in bridging gaps between the United States and the former Soviet Union has always been based on such noble notions as “enhancing human dignity.”

Right now, he says, “it’s a tough time for issues of dignity.”

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John Whiteley

* Background: Born in Jackson, Mich., in 1940, the eldest of four children of Robert and Alice Whiteley. Grew up in Carlsbad and Chula Vista. Studied at Stanford and Harvard. UCI professor, lives in Irvine.

* Family: He and his wife, Rita, have five children: Greg, 28; Elizabeth, 21; Jennifer, 20; twins John II and William, 17.

* Interests: Education, Russian culture, international public policy, adolescent development, sports.

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In a Cloud of Secrecy

* 1948: Plutonium production facility opens; waste dumped into Techa River.

* 1951: People along river become ill. Dumping into Techa slows as nuclear waste diverted to Lake Karachay.

* 1957: Huge explosions at Mayak spreads radioactive debris across 7,500 square miles.

* 1967: Lake Karachay dries up; storm blows radioactive dust over 1,300 square miles.