Translated material
The story of a human rights activist from a closed city where plutonium is made for nuclear weapons: from courses for pregnant women to foreign agency and immigration
On July 2, 2015, Nadezhda Kutepova was cooking in the kitchen when she heard the announcement of a report about spies on TV. On the Rossiya channel, she saw TV presenter Olga Skabeeva approaching the entrance of her house, climbing the stairs and walking to her apartment. “[Skabeeva] said: “Espionage activities against our state are carried out from here.” And I have such a funny bell hanging on the wire... Well, in general, you can’t say that the spy is very rich,” Nadezhda recalls. A few days later, she and her three children left Russia and never returned to the country.
Nadezhda lived in Ozersk, a closed monotown in the Chelyabinsk region. The Mayak production association operates here, which processes and stores radioactive materials from nuclear power plants, nuclear submarines and icebreakers, and also produces weapons-grade plutonium. The city was built in the second half of the 1940s, initially to produce plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb.
According to official statistics , one of the three most common causes of death in Ozersk is oncology.
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“You can’t sit in the snow, it’s dirty”
On September 29, 1957, an explosion occurred at the Mayak chemical plant in the city, which at that time was called Chelyabinsk-40 (or Sorokovka). The radioactive cloud covered an area of 20 thousand kilometers. Within a month, 23 villages in the district were liquidated , about 12 thousand people were resettled to new places, and their property and livestock were burned. The population of the USSR learned about the accident only in 1989, during the period of glasnost. Today, the explosion at Mayak is considered the worst nuclear disaster after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Among the liquidators of the accident was Lev Nikolaevich, Nadezhda’s future father. He was mobilized to Sorokovka at the age of 18. After working in the liquidation, he remained in the city - the standard of living here was higher than in his native Sverdlovsk. He trained as an engineer and got a job at a nuclear waste processing plant . He got married for the first time, his first daughter Natalya was born. “She suffered from a brain disease that was associated with her father’s exposure [to radiation] during the liquidation, and she died at the age of 20, having spent her entire life in psychiatric clinics,” Nadezhda says about her older sister, whom she never saw.
Then the man met his second wife Larisa Ivanovna, Nadezhda’s future mother. They got married in 1971. The father died of cancer in 1985, when his second daughter was 13 years old. Nadezhda Ivanovna, Nadezhda’s maternal grandmother, who was among the builders of the first Soviet atomic bomb and, as her granddaughter put it, “made plutonium with her own hands,” also died of cancer.
In 1990, Nadezhda graduated from medical school and began working as a nurse in the emergency room. Then she entered the correspondence department of the Faculty of Sociology of the Ural State University. At the same time, I traded at the Ozersk market: “I was a shuttle operator, a street businesswoman. For six years, from 1993 to 1999, I sold socks on the street: in winter up to minus 30, in summer up to plus 40. I earned money to study. This is an important fact for me, I never hide it. After all, it is [thanks to my work at the market] that I know the [Ozersky] people well.”