University of New England

“The Wind Blew Eastward”: Vladislav Valtsis, UNECOM Class of 2011

[Editor's Note: The following profile originally appeared in the December 2007 COMmunicator]

There is the river, but we will not speak about that. Not how in winter the water turns black with cold, or how yellow bits of ice form scabs around the rusting bridge. In the first weeks after the accident, contaminated water drained into the greater Dnieper and poisoned the fish. But we will not speak about that.

Instead, we will talk about the pine trees turned ginger brown, the empty houses with swinging doors and trees sprouting through their roofs, and the neatly parked rows of trucks that the workers left behind when they fled. We will mention the concrete sarcophagus in the middle of it all, and how the wind blew eastward with its deadly load. Twenty years after the disaster, Pripyat remains a ghost town, and twenty years hence it may be empty still. Only the deer and the wolves have returned, and little birds that perch along the girders of the tomb.

“Get them out or they’ll die!”

Vlad Valtsis remembers very little about Kiev, or about the Ukraine in general. The city is beautiful today; there are the green and gold domes of St. Sophia Cathedral and trees that spread their shade across the streets. Vlad remembers playing in the sandbox and living in a Soviet-style apartment building on the 16th floor. His grandfather was an engineer who built bridges and was in the military, “like everyone else.” The extended family all lived together in the 2-bedroom apartment. And that’s all Vlad remembers about Kiev, because in April 1986 he and his brother became sick and the family fled to Russia.

“The wind blew eastward,” Vlad recalls, “but we didn’t find out about it until we heard on the radio from another European country. The government didn’t want us to know. My brother and I developed moderate fevers, and we became more and more ill. My parents took us to my grandmother’s brother’s house in Russia, where we recovered for two months. When we returned to Kiev, we got sick again.”

Doctors in Kiev didn’t know what to do with the little boys so sick. “You need to get them out of here or they’ll die!” one doctor said, and Vlad’s parents believed him. “It was a big decision to move,” Vlad remembers. “My parents and grandparents gave up their jobs. They sold our belongings to get money. My mother used to have a thousand books, but now just a few. We followed the path that most immigrants take: through Austria, into Italy, and then a plane to the United States. In Austria, we stayed with a family and the father took the door off the hinges to sleep on at night. In Italy, we stayed in refugee camps.” When they arrived in the United States, the family started fresh. The boys were better and did not sicken again.

Chernobyl

Twenty years have given experts plenty of time to pick apart the deadly dominoes that cascaded in the early hours of April 26, 1986. A poorly trained night crew and the faulty design of the RBMK 1000 reactor contributed to the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, located 110 kilometers (70 miles) northwest of Kiev. A test planned during the daytime was postponed until night, leaving a skeleton crew that was unfamiliar with the intricacies of the system and oblivious to certain safety precautions.

As the test began, power in the reactor dipped beneath required levels. The RBMK 1000 reactor was built like a layer-cake tipped on its side: nuclear fuel bundles alternated like frosting between cakes of control rods that were designed to inhibit accelerated nuclear reactions. When Soviet engineers saw the power plummet, they raised control rods out of the reactor (removed the cake) to allow layers of fuel rods (frosting) to react more aggressively with each other. After a large number of safety rods were mechanically removed, the engineers lifted even more rods out of the reactor manually, leaving far fewer than the prescribed safety margin. Their goal was to raise power to a level necessary to conduct the test.

Very quickly, however, xenon gas developed in the cooling system, forming pockets of steam that became super-heated. As coolant stopped flowing, power levels surged dramatically. Surprised engineers attempted to lower control rods back between layers of fuel rods, but the channels began to melt with the heat, blocking the control rods before they could descend. Within seconds, fuel rods ruptured and sent scalding steam exploding through the reactor’s roof, blowing off the top and sending fission products into the atmosphere.

The in-rush of oxygen caused the graphite moderator in the reactor to explode, resulting in a fire that burned for nine days and sent more than 5% of the reactor’s radioactivity into the surrounding region. Pripyat, Kiev, and the greater Ukraine were covered in radioactive dust. Most of the men working the reactor received a lethal dose of radiation, as did the firefighters who responded to the inferno. Few understood the danger as invisible forces spewed from the reactor.

Nausea and Bleeding

Mild exposure to radiation results in flu-like symptoms that range from nausea and vomiting to diarrhea, fatigue, and loss of body hair. More severe exposure may induce bleeding from the mouth, under the skin, and from the kidneys. Acute exposure, according to one source, “has a high likelihood of death in hours to a few weeks. Severe diarrhea, intestinal bleeding, and coma are common at the acute level. There may be a period of several days of almost normal human activity in some cases, before acute symptoms are visible.” Before he died, one Chernobyl worker reported that the invisible radiation felt like “pins and needles” all over his body.   

Most people, of course, have little to fear in the way of radiation sickness, unless a person “is intentionally poisoned, which is uncommon,” one manual explains, or a person works in the commercial or military nuclear sectors, or - as another manual helpfully reminds us – “You can also be exposed to large doses of radiation from atomic and nuclear weapons that detonate in your geographic region.”

Vlad experienced at least mild exposure to radioactive particles that were carried on an eastward wind and settled invisibly on Kiev shortly after the Chernobyl reactor blew. Europe knew nothing of the accident until Swiss workers at a nuclear power plant began to detect radioactivity that could not be traced to their own operation. In the meantime, Soviet authorities began to acknowledge the scale of the disaster internally, first evacuating 45,000 people from the towns around Chernobyl, then removing an additional 116,000 people from the region within 30km of the site. To contain the radiation, Soviet helicopter pilots flew directly over the reactor and dropped 5000 tons of boron, sand, and concrete onto the fires raging below. A sarcophagus was formed that remains to this day, and the entire region is still a wilderness. “It is a dead zone,” says Vlad, “as though a comet hit and everything died.”

Childhood in Brooklyn

When people ask Vlad if he experiences any side effects from the radiation poisoning, he grins and says, “Yes, I glow in the dark sometimes.” Credulous classmates grow wide-eyed until they recognize his wry humor and burst into laughter. It is characteristic Vlad - dry and self-deprecating - always stated in a slight Russian accent that reminds one of fur hats and baklava.

In Brooklyn, his family settled on Argyle Street, where his grandfather worked in a grocery store moving boxes and Vlad’s parents tried to resurrect their former professions of construction worker and laboratory assistant. Their neighborhood was heavily Russian, and Vlad spoke Russian and English with ease. “You need more words to get a point across in Russian,” he says, “it is more embellished. My English teacher kept saying, ‘Stop embellishing everything!’”

His neighborhood was quiet enough, except for the ubiquitous wailing of police sirens that are the eternal white noise of Gotham. “I’d be on the phone with friends,” Vlad says, “and they would think that I was under attack or something: ‘Is your house on fire?’ they’d ask.” Nothing particularly dramatic happened, except that he saw five car crashes at the same street corner during a single month. And there was the time he visited a Starbucks in Manhattan with his friend Kenny, and one of the gothic statues from the top of the building fell in a crash – right outside the door they had just entered. Eerie. Vlad smiles unblinkingly. “If it had hit us,” he says, “we could have sued and paid for medical school!”

The Smoke Cloud Group

With a close-knit family, Vlad enjoyed adapting to the U.S. and quickly felt at home in the city. He played all the normal team sports with friends in grammar school, but his high school in Brooklyn was a different ball of wax. “I think it may have been an experimental school,” Vlad says, “I don’t really know. But they didn’t have any sports teams.” He pauses to think. “And they didn’t have any normal letter grades, either. They had ‘E’ for ‘Excellent,’ and ‘G’ for ‘Good,’ and things like that. They didn’t have study halls. ”

But high school is high school anywhere, and social stratification was alive and well in Brooklyn: “I was exposed to a lot,” Vlad says, “smoking, drugs, fights, you name it. There was a social hierarchy; you know, the popular kids and the ‘smoke cloud group’ outside and all that.” He played tennis at the Brooklyn Racket Club, which at first terrified him. “My mother wanted me to play a sport,” he recalls. “My hand was shaking and the ball was flying everywhere, but then I got better.”

Considering a vocation, Vlad turned to his grandmother’s nephew, a man who held his M.D. from the Soviet Union, then earned a D.O. through NYCOM and performed his residency at Methodist Hospital. “I idolized him,” Vlad says. “He is the only one in my family who is a D.O.” Vlad’s mind is a playground for mathematics and science, and his family fostered strategy-games and mental gymnastics. “My family plays Russian rules in checkers,” he smiles, “you can go backwards: it is much faster-paced. It also helps your mind to think.” His parents encouraged strict discipline and hard work, and Vlad enjoyed studying the mechanisms of the human body in high school. “It made sense,” he recalls. “You get a taste and want to learn more. I like math because I like numbers.” Memorization of numbers comes easily for Vlad.

Vignettes From a Sardine

“The commuter-train ride to Hunter College?” Vlad asks. “A pack of sardines if you ever wondered what that feels like. You don’t need to hold onto anything; there are so many people on the 4, 5, and 6 trains. People sweat and smell in the summer. I’ll tell you something, too, I could fall asleep on the train and wake up automatically at my stop. Guaranteed.” An occasional psychotic passenger was cause more for amusement than alarm. “One man would stand like everyone else when the train moved,” Vlad recalls, “but he would dance around every time the doors opened.” It takes all kinds.

Mr. Smith was late one morning coming to Vlad’s Parasitology class. “We wondered where he was,” Vlad remembers, “then he came walking in and says, ‘A plane just hit the Twin Towers.’ They were a couple of miles away. We found out that it was a terrorist plot and they let us out early. Everyone was nervous and scared. On the train, I could see smoke rising from the Avenue M stop. People were just standing outside of stores – all ages, all races – people were crying and emotional.” The attacks on 9/11 did something the terrorists never anticipated, Vlad says, giving New Yorkers a sense of solidarity. “It brought the whole country together,” he decides.

The 2003 New York Blackout impacted Vlad personally – his electric razor stopped working mid-shave. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s just my apartment,’” Vlad recalls, “but then the whole building was dark. The train wasn’t working, either. Then we found out that there was no power anywhere in New York City. I was scheduled to take an exam and my friend Igor said, ‘How are you going to take it? The room has no windows.’ I was upset; I was ready to take it. My Mom walked home from Bellevue Hospital over the Brooklyn Bridge in her heels. It was a unique experience.”

If You Come Here

There is the Saco River, but we will not speak about that. Not how in winter the ice forms sugar cakes on shore, or how oak trees clutch their last few leaves like twenties in a stiffened breeze. In the first few weeks of December, lights adorn the roadside spruces and angels appear near Rheault’s furniture store. But we will not speak about that.

Instead, we will talk about the medical school with its bricks and glass, the silver turrets in medieval jut, and the students and staff who make it come alive. We will talk about Vladislav Valtsis, and how he wanted a job where he would learn things daily in the context of math and science. “I liked medicine,” he says, “and I really liked the environment at UNECOM. I spoke to Steve Fosmire (second-year student) on AIM a lot, and I loved the camaraderie here. Students share info with each other. I love the philosophy of osteopathy, and I love my class.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t go anywhere else; everyone gets along really well.”

Though Vlad expected more time to relax and watch TV, he doesn’t complain. The scenery is beautiful, the small-town feel is fresh, and his close-knit class is a new morphology of family. Living in a loft in downtown Biddeford is far from Brooklyn, and even farther from Kiev, but Vlad doesn’t mind. Except for one thing. “If you come here,” he quips, “bring warm clothing. Friends tell me, ‘You’re from Russia, you should be used to the cold!’ What can I say? Cold is cold.”

Especially when the wind blows eastward. 

 - Steve Smith, RSAS