In a Battered City, Gravestones Tell the Story of a New Russia

If cemeteries are the history books of towns, this one is full of pages. Along its winding, narrow paths, the headstones of the elderly mingle with those of the not-so-old: 17 years old, in one case. Then 33, 38.

“There’s my classmate’s grave,” Andrei Yudin, a 33-year-old driver who has lived here all his life, said, pointing to the grave of a young woman.

“She had something wrong with her blood -- she was 27. Her daughter was born disabled; she was very weak in her legs, and couldn’t even stand,” he said.

After the woman died, her husband started drinking. He died 10 months later.

Karabash is part of the industrial belt of the southern Ural Mountains that through much of the 20th century provided the Soviet Union with raw metals, smeltered copper and nuclear fuel, the industrial ammunition that helped transform it into a superpower.

To the south is the once-secret nuclear weapons complex and reprocessing facility at Mayak, which was responsible for the discharge of an estimated 1.7 billion curies of radioactive waste into rivers, lakes and the ground. A 1957 explosion there was more disastrous than Chernobyl. It contaminated an area the size of New Jersey.

In Karabash, 26 miles from Mayak, people tend to blame their constant stomachaches and rough coughs not on unseen radiation, but on the very visible copper smelter that for years belched toxic gas unchecked into the center of the city.

Yudin, the father of a 12-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, can’t afford to move away. As he wandered through the serene cemetery, which has crept steadily up the road, he pointed out the graves of relatives.

“This is my grandmother. She died of cancer. My second grandmother died of cancer too. My cousin’s grandfather also died of cancer. Both of my grandfathers died of heart conditions,” he said.

A friend appeared. “I have four of my classmates here in this cemetery,” Yudin’s friend said. “They died of different diseases, and one of them in an accident.”

“Here,” Yudin said, moving along. “That was the projectionist at the movie theater. He was 38. He died of some sickness; I don’t remember what.

“This one died drinking,” he said. “This one died in the army, in Chechnya, and that one over there, he was 8. He drowned in the river.”

There are twin headstones for a married couple: She was 41, he 46.

At least, Yudin said, there is the sound of birds chirping in the trees. During most of 2004, when a toxic plume from the plant killed off many gardens in Karabash and some of the surrounding countryside, the town was eerily silent.

Even the butterflies left.

Yudin laughed.

“It’s funny that birds are much smarter than we are,” he said.

“They flew away.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com