— Anton Kolomitsyn is what the Russians call a stalker:
he roams the hidden nooks of the countryside, looking for lost relics of war.
But earlier this year,
while he was exploring old machine gun bunkers,
he found something more than he’d expected.
— The bunkers are relics of a Stalin-era campaign to protect Russia’s northwest from invasion.
They line the forests around the Finnish border.
— So the idea here with this is that…
I don’t wanna get any particles to touch my skin, right?
That’s why we do this?
— In the 1950s, the bunkers were updated with what was then a modern marvel:
luminescent radium paint, which glowed in the dark—
and was loaded with radiation.
— Today, the bunkers sit innocuously in people’s backyards.
Children play in their concrete frames, and scavengers break them down for metal parts.
After his discovery this February,
Anton called Viktor Tereshkin, an environmental journalist,
who published his findings in a local paper.
They’re returning to one of their earliest finds,
to see if the government has done anything to secure the site.
— Anton and Viktor have all but made it a personal mission
to find the radioactive bunkers and warn people who live nearby.
The government, they say, seems to pay little attention.
— This is no isolated incident.
Decades after the Cold War,
residue of Russia’s unbridled experimentation with nuclear materials
remains scattered across the country, still posing a threat to citizens.
Nils Bøhmer monitors radioactive waste in Russia for the environmental nonprofit Bellona:
— The problem of radioactivity in Russia is quite widespread.
You find it all over Russia, in local areas.
It all started with the nuclear weapon race
between the U.S. and Soviet Union, at the end of the ‘40s.
Especially in the Soviet Union, there was a very huge industry build-up—
a lot of the secrecy surrounding development of nuclear weapons in Russia.
Now, the people living in these contaminated areas,
or have been evacuated,
have received very little information about the health consequences.
— In the Ural Mountains village of Muslyumovo,
residents have been struggling for decades with the consequences of a radioactive spill.
In 1957, the reactor at a nearby nuclear plant exploded,
triggering the largest radioactive plume in history.
Today, it’s magnitude would be third only to Chernobyl and Fukushima.
You’ve never heard of it because, until the 1970s, it was a military secret.
— How many people in the town do you think have had some symptoms from radioactivity?
— Venera Guysina is a local environmental activist.
She and other experts say radioactive waste continued to be dumped into the village river
for decades after the incident.
In 2006, Russian officials moved the entire village to a new site—
less than a mile away.
— Minifiza Batirshin grew up in the original Muslyumovo.
Her husband, Vakil, moved here 25 years ago.
He’s since developed massively swollen lymph nodes.
Like much of the situation in Muslyumovo,
Vakil’s exact diagnosis remains steeped in mystery.
Outside medical experts say it can be hard to definitively trace any one condition to radiation.
— Do you have any doubt that your symptoms are related to radioactivity?
— The uncertainty has left the family in limbo.
Vakil says the government promised him free medical care,
if he can get to a major hospital.
It’s also offered a little money if the family wants to move.
They say they still can’t afford it.
— But do you wish that she and her family would leave town?