Online exhibition of documents The Chernobyl Nuclear Catastrophe 25 Years Later on the website of the Gomel Region Executive Committee
An online exhibition of documents The Chernobyl Nuclear Catastrophe 25 Years Later is posted on the website of the Justice Administration of the Gomel Region Executive Committee.
The documents, which were not previously on display nor published, make known the history of the liquidation of the consequences of Chernobyl NPP catastrophe.
The catastrophe at the nuclear plant became a disaster that affected the fates of millions of people. Especially tragic the disaster consequences were in the Gomel region, which made up over 40% of the contaminated area in the former USSR and over 60% of the contaminated area in Belarus. The radiation affected 20 out of 21 agricultural districts in the Gomel region with the population over 1,400,000 people.
In 1986, the Gomel Region Executive Committee took over fifty decisions, resolutions and instructions on the elimination of the disaster at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The measures and activities for the liquidation of the catastrophe aftermath were carried out according to the decisions taken at the close sessions of the Gomel Region Executive Committee with a signature for confidentiality until 2006. Twenty years later the documents were declassified and transferred to the State Archives of Gomel Region for preservation.
Some of these unique documents were for the first time published in two books to mark the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl catastrophe. The first book, entitled Chernobyl. 26 April 1986 – December 1991. – Documents and Materialswas prepared by the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus together with the Russian State Archives of Contemporary History. The second book, The Chernobyl Catastrophe in Documents and Materials, 1986-2006 was prepared by the archivists from the Gomel region. The latter one includes, in addition to the declassified documents, a selection of articles that were published at that complicated time in the newspapers Gomelskaya Prauda, Chacherski Vesnik and Golas Vetkaushchyny.
The photographs and documents on display are available from the Belarusian State Archives of Films, Photographs and Sound Recordings in Dzerzhinsk, the State Archives of Gomel Region, the State Archives of Public Organizations in Gomel Region and the local state archives in Mozyr, Zhlobin and Rechitsa.