Life Exposed

The 1986 explosion at Unit Four of the Chernobyl plant in Soviet Ukraine continues to affect millions of people in Ukraine and neighboring countries. Adriana Petryna, an anthropologist, looks at the tangled political, scientific, and social fallout. Her account begins with officials who withheld information from the public and follows the efforts of post-Soviet governments, under pressure to democratize, to offer compensation to those harmed.

Petryna argues that ordinary people's lives under these conditions are far more immediate and harsher than the accounts offered by policymakers and scientists suggest. She asks what happens to political life when the state keeps citizens uninformed about dangers to their health, and what moral and political costs follow from the remedies offered after a technological catastrophe.

Drawing on fieldwork in government offices, clinics, laboratories, and among affected families and workers in the Zone, she shows how the disaster has shaped a newly independent nation and turned health into a contested matter of entitlement. She traces the rise of "biological citizenship," in which claims to medical care, social fairness, and human rights are made by pointing to damage to the body.

The book offers a framework for understanding emerging democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and the everyday strategies of survival that unfolded alongside the collapse of the Soviet Union.