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That giant of U.S. newspapermen, H.L. Mencken, once said that what sells papers is catastrophes and sex. Russians have never really understood, appreciated or liked sex. They don't even have their own native word for it and would have to borrow from English to translate "sex" секс as it was used in the two preceding sentences. So what's left for Russians is catastrophes. They've had a lot of them, both natural and man-made. Unfortunately for newspaper sales, Russians have not always been particularly forthcoming about their catastrophes.
Indeed, one of the great frustrations of the Cold War for the West was that Russians managed to keep a lot of their catastrophes secret. The Soviet attitude was that having accidents reflected negatively on the system: "Money-hungry Capitalists have accidents because they don't value human life; we have an occasional mishap, but why focus on the negative?" Even during the age of Glasnost and Gorbachev, several critical days passed before the Russians admitted that there was a nuclear accident авария ядерной установки at Chernobyl. Тo lessen the impact, in early reports they used the term происшествие "incident" or "situation" instead of авария "accident." It took the fall of the Soviet Union and a few more years for them to admit that what happened at Chernobyl in 1986 was a nuclear core meltdown расплавка/расплавление активной зоны.
To be fair, Russians have been less secretive when it comes to natural catastrophes, the so-called "emergency situations" чрезвычайные ситуации (ЧС) or чрезвычайные происшествия (ЧП), such as earthquakes землетрясения, floods наводнения, and fires пожары.
Moreover, now that the Cold War is over, Russians appear to be making a concerted effort to expose some of the dark sides of the Soviet era, and we are finding out that over the years they have had more than their share of man-made catastrophes: sunken submarines
затонувшие подводные лодки, air crashes авиационные катастрофы, explosions at rocket launch sites, and so on, and so forth. The consequences последствия of some of these catastrophes - radioactive contamination of the environment радиоактивное заражение окружающей среды - will be of continued concern for the world for centuries to come.
In fact, we are discovering that when it came to nuclear accidents, Soviets had an almost criminal attitude toward their people and their environment. Take the example of Chelyabinsk-65, a former secret defense industry installation that produced nuclear weapons. Not only did the site experience several major nuclear accidents, including a serious explosion взрыв, but it also conducted a quiet program of nuclear waste dumping выброс ядерных отходов into nearby waterways, which one Russian scientist equated to a Three-Mile Island accident -- every day, for thirty years. The result, experts now estimate, was that 400,00 people were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation. To put this figure into perspective, this is more than three times the people affected by Chernobyl. The tragedy is that, unlike Chernobyl, no one was told.
Then there's the problem of "Made in the USSR" or "catastrophes waiting to happen." We know about the remaining Chernobyl-type nuclear power plants scattered throughout the former Soviet bloc. There are also underserviced and neglected nuclear submarines, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and research centers and their lightly protected storage facilities. Russia's infrastructure is falling apart. Bridges, railroad tracks, water, gas and electrical lines are in disrepair. As we shall see later, apartment buildings constructed during Soviet era are now occasionally collapsing without warning. At the main international airport, Sheremetevo in Moscow, one of the two airstrips has been closed for some time на ремонт "for repair," the other is filled with potholes and requires daily patching. And a little less known fact is that Soviet-made television sets explode if left plugged in! This is no joke. Several hundred apartment fires a year are attributed to exploding television sets. This is why when stations go off the air at night, a load and shrill alarm is sounded for several minutes to warn drunken Russians to wake up and unplug their TVs.
And so, without further ado, let us get to the planes, trains, automobiles, nuclear plants - and to a strange invisible little poltergeist барабашка-невидимка - that make up MODULE 4: CATASTROPHES! -- Dr. B.B.S.
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