Drawing on what we learned from years of leading groups in despair-and-empowerment work, we came to offer, as we put it to the authorities, “psychological tools for coping with the effects of massive, collective trauma.” We had entitled the workshops “Building a Strong Post-Chernobyl Culture.” The name had a nice Soviet ring to it, but I soon realized that the word “post” was wrong. It suggested that the disaster was over, but it was soon obvious that it was far from over. The radioactivity was still spreading silently through wind, water, fodder, and food, creating new toxins as it mixed with automotive and industrial pollution, and sickening bodies already weakened from previous exposures. Our workshops, we soon realized, were not so much to help people recover from a catastrophe as to help them live with an ongoing one.

We came to Novozybkov at the insistence of Harasch; he preferred to be called by his family name rather than his first name, Adolph. A Russian psychologist practicing in Moscow, he flew to Chernobyl within hours of the accident to give support to the operators of the doomed reactor. In the six years that followed, he traveled to towns throughout the region to help the survivors, but no place had touched his heart more deeply than this city and its fate.

On the train, as we headed east from Minsk, Harasch pulled out the map and told us the story in greater detail. The burning reactor was a volcano of radioactivity when the winds shifted to the northeast, carrying the clouds of poisoned smoke in the direction of Moscow. To save the millions in the metropolitan area, a fast decision at the highest levels of government was taken to seed the clouds and cause them to precipitate. The towns, fields, and forests were soaked by an unusually heavy late April rain, bearing intense concentrations of radioactive iodine, strontium, cesium, and particles of plutonium. The highest Geiger counter readings were—and still are—around the city of Novozybkov. “The people there were not informed of their government’s choice—who wants to tell people they’re disposable?” said Harasch. “By now it’s common knowledge that the clouds were seeded, but it is rarely mentioned, and that silence, too, is part of the tragedy for the people of Novozybkov.”

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