ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the politics of medical knowledge and Cold War legacy in its exploration of the failed mobilisation in the 1990s of the parents of child survivors of Chernobyl to win the attention of foreign audience to the illnesses their children suffered. It argues that, with the influx of Western medical experts in the post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl context, Soviet medicine’s focus on environmental causes of disease gave way to more Western, individualist approaches that attributed cancer and other diseases to individual behaviors, psychological states and even genetic coding. Furthermore, former Soviet citizens were considered addicted to state welfare. International “experts” working for UN agencies and national nuclear agencies built these Western assumptions into their scientific reviews and presentations, diminishing the effects of fallout.
