58 Laura Sembritzki
Nuclear Knowledge beyond the Nuclear Landscapes
The changed institutional affiliations of the FIB-4 and the apparent importance of the tasks conducted by the staff of the ChLenNIIRG and the dispensary № 1 to the military underline the question what kind of significance was
given to territories in the Southern Urals contaminated with artificial radionuclides within Soviet radiobiological, radio-ecological, and radio-medical
research in the Cold War context. Marvin Goldman, participating in human
experiments conducted within the Manhattan Project by the University of
Rochester, portrays the Southern Urals as a big experimental laboratory:
And, what [were] they doing? Feeding people strontium-90 in
Chelyabinsk, [an Asian city near the] Ural [Mountains and one of the
Russian centers for plutonium production]. They’d been doing it since
1950, and [of course] they didn’t know it [at the time and perhaps then]
they didn’t care. So I have now seen [a parallel] in the human studies in
Russia. Unbeknown to me, they were doing in humans what I was doing
in beagles. When Yuri Moskalev from Moscow came to visit me in 1960,
he was taking pictures of my whole-body counter. I didn’t know that
when I visited Chelyabinsk in 1991, I would see my whole-body counter
in this secret city, used to count people the same way I was counting beagles. And so, I have a kind of internal commitment now to reach closure,
because I know about dosimetry and all of the basics [of what] they’re
doing from the other end, epidemiologically. 50
Of course, this serves also as a justification of his own work and is a contested view. Nonetheless, some of those scientists who became important
experts in the field of radiation knowledge in Moscow started their career in
Chelyabinsk in the early 1950s. At that time due to the influence of Trofim
D. Lysenko, genetics were under general suspicion in the Soviet Union.
However, recent research shifted from a focus on Lysenko and his ideological influence on genetics toward a paradigm that looked for niches in classic
genetics. Mark Adams pointed out that the establishment of the Siberian
Branch of the Academy of Sciences was such a niche. He states:
Kurchatov, Lavrent’ev, Kapitsa, and others had his [Khrushchev’s] ear
on other things, such as rockets, sputniks, and bombs. Their strategies:
Open labs in areas under their own control. Maneuver to isolate Lysenko
in the biology division, where they would, with Engelhardt’s help, chip
away at his stronghold. Open a new Siberian division, part of which
would involve a genetics institute of their own design and create an
administrative structure for it that closed Lysenkoists out. (…) 51
According to this, the nuclear complex can be seen as an umbrella that protected geneticists and their work against the influence of Lysenko and his
followers.
Nuclear Knowledge beyond the Nuclear Landscapes
The changed institutional affiliations of the FIB-4 and the apparent importance of the tasks conducted by the staff of the ChLenNIIRG and the dispensary № 1 to the military underline the question what kind of significance was
given to territories in the Southern Urals contaminated with artificial radionuclides within Soviet radiobiological, radio-ecological, and radio-medical
research in the Cold War context. Marvin Goldman, participating in human
experiments conducted within the Manhattan Project by the University of
Rochester, portrays the Southern Urals as a big experimental laboratory:
And, what [were] they doing? Feeding people strontium-90 in
Chelyabinsk, [an Asian city near the] Ural [Mountains and one of the
Russian centers for plutonium production]. They’d been doing it since
1950, and [of course] they didn’t know it [at the time and perhaps then]
they didn’t care. So I have now seen [a parallel] in the human studies in
Russia. Unbeknown to me, they were doing in humans what I was doing
in beagles. When Yuri Moskalev from Moscow came to visit me in 1960,
he was taking pictures of my whole-body counter. I didn’t know that
when I visited Chelyabinsk in 1991, I would see my whole-body counter
in this secret city, used to count people the same way I was counting beagles. And so, I have a kind of internal commitment now to reach closure,
because I know about dosimetry and all of the basics [of what] they’re
doing from the other end, epidemiologically. 50
Of course, this serves also as a justification of his own work and is a contested view. Nonetheless, some of those scientists who became important
experts in the field of radiation knowledge in Moscow started their career in
Chelyabinsk in the early 1950s. At that time due to the influence of Trofim
D. Lysenko, genetics were under general suspicion in the Soviet Union.
However, recent research shifted from a focus on Lysenko and his ideological influence on genetics toward a paradigm that looked for niches in classic
genetics. Mark Adams pointed out that the establishment of the Siberian
Branch of the Academy of Sciences was such a niche. He states:
Kurchatov, Lavrent’ev, Kapitsa, and others had his [Khrushchev’s] ear
on other things, such as rockets, sputniks, and bombs. Their strategies:
Open labs in areas under their own control. Maneuver to isolate Lysenko
in the biology division, where they would, with Engelhardt’s help, chip
away at his stronghold. Open a new Siberian division, part of which
would involve a genetics institute of their own design and create an
administrative structure for it that closed Lysenkoists out. (…) 51
According to this, the nuclear complex can be seen as an umbrella that protected geneticists and their work against the influence of Lysenko and his
followers.