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Life Exposed: Biological Citizenship after Chernobyl. Adriana Petryna. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xvii + 264pp.
This is an extraordinary book. It simultaneously details the rational-technical administration and lived aftermath of a disastrous nuclear explosion and tackles a broad range of theoretical issues on state-building processes in the post-Soviet context. If the Chernobyl tragedy represents a somewhat unique event (albeit one that has affected over 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone and continues to impact future generations), Petryna's framing of the study holds relevance for an even larger set of the world's population. Her moving, often heart-wrenching, ethnographic narrative exposes the painful human costs of hinging democratization to market reforms-the price of which, we learn, involves the reconstitution of citizenship as an unequal social bargain with the state, not for political rights and opportunities, but for the most elementary conditions of physical survival.
The Soviet government responded to the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in April 1986 with 18 days of silence followed by a very limited acknowledgment of human loss and injury. Official reports documented 31 deaths among workers and 237 injured, whereas Soviet policies of denial and...