Although Chernobyl is actually in northern Ukraine, neighbouring Belarus is the country that has suffered most from the disaster. After all, Svetlana Aleksievich’s Chernobyl Prayer was known around the world long before its author received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Today, Belarus’s official attitude to the legacy of Chernobyl is rather ambiguous. On the one hand, it recognises its persistence and allocates funding to continuing clean-up operations, but on the other it withholds information from the public, encourages people to return to contaminated areas and is building a new nuclear power plant in the area.
What has changed over the last 30 years? Have the enormous sums of money thrown at the problem been able to save lives? Has Belarus been successful in overcoming the impact of this horrific catastrophe, and what do Belarusians themselves think?
