The Legal Heritage of the Atom (original) (raw)

Looking at the different compensation policies, laws, and practices in post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, I develop comparative perspectives on the ways in which these new states dealt with victims of radioactive contamination and how the societies constructed victims' identities. I argue that post-Soviet compensation programs can serve as a "window" into the transformation societies. It seems to be specific for the developments in the former Soviet space that here environmental victims stand on an equal footing with the victims of the Stalinist and National Socialist dictatorships. The process of coming to terms with the experience of dictatorship after the end of the Soviet Union therefore has a strong ecological component, which requires that approaches to transitional and environmental justice be thought of as interconnected. More recently, this process has also taken on an international dimension, manifested in a growing number of appeals to the ECHR by Russian and Ukrainian environmental victims. The once unnoticed environmental victims of the Soviet past have learned to assert their rights vis-àvis national and international institutions and organizations. The heritage of the atom in the former Soviet space includes not only radioactively contaminated landscapes but also specific legal legacies, new historical resources (e.g. thousands of private letters with claims for compensation), and a new place for environmental victims in the national cultures of remembrance. The end of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the extensive uncovering and documentation of the crimes of the past hand in hand with an erosion of old Soviet patriotic memory and the development of a new culture of remembrance. Next to the victims of Stalinism and National Socialist crimes in World War II, the victims of nuclear accidents and radioactive contamination also played a central role in the nation-and state-building processes in some of the successor states of the Soviet Union. Historical knowledge about places of Stalinist and National Socialist mass crimes as well as environmental disasters, which before 1989 were often known only by rumor and within the borders of local communities, has since grown. In addition, various victim groups received (often for the first time) state and social recognition in the form of rehabilitation, compensation, and social protection laws. This process gave rise to a variety of social negotiation