Linked with our presentation of Nuclear Weapons and Non-Proliferation – the Russian Perspective.
Linked also with Uni Cambridge, Event 24-02-2006.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed fort the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
She says: “Never be humiliated. Do not fear to have your own opinion and to make it public, even if your opinion does not coincide with the opinion of the authorities.”
Alla Yaroshinskaya – Russian Federation
She works for Soyuz Zhurnalistov Rossii (SZR), and for Regionalny grazhdansky front (RGF).
Alla Yaroshinskaya was born in 1953, in Zhitomir region of the Ukraine. She was graduating in from Kiev University and worked for 13 years as a correspondent of the local newspaper. At university she had been a political dissident. During her work she consistently tried to expose party corruption and suffered administrative penalties. At the end of 1986 she began to feel uneasy about the supposed evacuation of areas which had been contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident in April that year, and she began to investigate.
Yaroshinskaya discovered that people from highly contaminated villages were being settled in hardly less contaminated villages nearby; that their health problems were serious but officially denied and ignored; that their new accommodation was grossly inadequate; and that people could not survive without eating the highly radioactive food being grown in the area. Her newspaper not only refused to publish her article but commissioned another journalist to write a reassuring article about the area instead. Her piece was also refused by Pravda and Izvestia and other national papers to which she sent it. But, under the influence of glasnost, Izvestia did publish a story about how her work was being suppressed. Locally, she distributed samizdat versions of her article. Great pressure began to be put on her, but popular support for her was great. In 1989 she was nominated for election to the new Supreme Soviet of the USSR and was elected with 90% of the vote.
On the Ecology and Glasnost Committee of the Supreme Soviet, she used her position to continue her campaign for full disclosure of the Chernobyl contamination. In 1990 she was appointed to a Commission to look into the matter. That year she made a presentation on the subject to the European Parliament. In the USSR the Commission’s progress was blocked by bureaucrats at every turn and even after the abortive putsch in 1991 she was not permitted to copy relevant documents. In April 1992, having made clandestine copies of top-secret documents of the Communist Party Politburo, her resultant article, « Forty secret protocols of the Kremlin wise men », was published by Izvestia and picked up by the Western press.
Yaroshinskaya is the author or co-author of a dozen books and over 700 articles in scientific magazines and the mass media. Her book on Chernobyl was published in five languages. She is also originator, editor-in-chief and co-author of of the Nuclear Encyclopaedia, the first of its kind in the world, which shows the true nature of nuclear problems.
Being unpopular with the Communist authorities in her native Ukraine, Yaroshinskaya stayed in Russia after the Soviet Union broke up. In 1993, after working as Deputy to the Minister of Press and Information, she became Adviser to the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin. She has been a member of Russian delegations to the United Nations for negotiating an extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to the UN Women’s Conference (1995).
Actively engaged in political and public work on human rights, press freedom and nuclear issues, she is President of the Ecological Charity Fund, Co-chair of the Russian Ecological Congress, Chief of the Federal Council of the all-Russian Social Democratic Movement and a member of other international committees. In 1998 she received an international women’s award as one of « 100 heroines of the 20th century ».
She says also: « Haste is good only in catching fleas ».
Her following books are available in english:
Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth, Alla Yaroshinskaya, et al, Jon Carpenter Publishing, Paperback – November 25, 1993;
and do.: with John Gofman as Foreword, (et al), University of Nebraska Press,
Paperback – June 1, 1995;
and do. University of Nebraska Press, Hardcover – December 31, 1995.
links:
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research IEER;
The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation;
Nov 21, 1997, ALLA YAROSHINSKAYA;
another bio by inesglobal;
Dictionary Labor Law Talk;