Word: medvedev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...north, he would never have become General Secretary. But in Stavropol Krai, he was on hand to welcome top Moscow officials who came to the local spas at Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk for vacations and medical treatment. They found their host unusual in several respects. Says Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev: "A regional party first secretary who was intelligent and congenial would have been considered untypical. If Gorbachev had yelled, sworn, been a heavy drinker or a high liver with a rest house outside of town where officials could be entertained by pretty waitresses, that would have been considered normal behavior...
...secret calamity first began to come into the spotlight in 1976, with the appearance of an article by Zhores Medvedev, an exiled Soviet biologist now living in London. In it, he claimed that the Soviets had carelessly stored radioactive wastes in shallow burial facilities. As the debris accumulated, he wrote, radioactive decay caused the material to overheat and, finally, to erupt like a volcano. The first response to this assertion was pronounced skepticism, even among Western experts. The CIA said there had been nothing but a minor accident, and the chairman of Britain's Atomic Energy Authority dismissed the theory...
Undeterred, Medvedev began burrowing through open Soviet scientific journals. There he found more than 100 articles discussing the effects of what was called "artificial" radioactive contamination of lakes, fields and forests. Reading the papers closely, he found clue after clue revealing that the contamination had been neither artificial nor controlled. In 1979, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee noticed that the names of about 30 small towns in the region had disappeared from Soviet maps, and that an elaborate system of canals had been built, presumably to bypass miles of contaminated river valley...
...Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, for example, initially attributed the contamination to fallout from nuclear- weapons testing at Novaya Zemlya, more than 1,000 miles to the north. In 1982, they completed a full survey that confirmed the existence of the devastated area, but they still contested Medvedev's explanation. There was probably never any dramatic nuclear explosion, they argued, but merely a series of minor incidents resulting from the carelessness of Soviet authorities...
...Medvedev ∙ Eisenhower. Stephen...