Word: tumerman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tumerman, a Soviet scientist who later emigrated to Israel, set off for home after visiting his brother. As he drove through a deserted region in the southern Ural Mountains, he passed a road sign warning motorists not to stop for the next 20 miles and to proceed as fast as possible. A little farther on he saw why. "To the right and to the left, as far as the eye could see," he later wrote, "there was empty land. The land was dead: no villages, no towns, only chimneys of destroyed homes, no cultivated fields or pastures, no herds...
Whatever the cause of the wasteland, a few years after the disaster, the government sent death squads of prisoners to cover up the contaminated soil with sand. The workers were housed in special barracks, and many probably died from intense doses of radiation. Sometime after Tumerman's visit, Soviet authorities seem to have completely given up on the region, evacuating all farmers, destroying their houses and fencing the area off with barbed wire. Finally, officials decided to use the devastated zone as a radiological training ground for army troops...
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