TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 529 it by thirteen separate geographical regions. They include data on the beginning and end of various firms’ service, their routes and aircraft, etc. Further data in appendices help make this volume an impressive reference aid, particularly since information on the com muters was not compiled by government or private agencies but had to be meticulously gathered by the authors themselves. Still, Davies and Quastler never make clear to what use their data, which often seem rather obscure, might be put. They seem content to have sim ply provided a survey and record of America’s commuter airlines. Jacob Vander Meulen Dr. Vander Meulen is assistant professor ofhistory at Dalhousie University in Hali fax, Nova Scotia. Chernobyl: TheForbidden Truth. By Alla Yaroshinskaya, trans. Micháele Kahn and Julia Sallabank. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. viii+135; illustrations, maps. $25.00 (cloth) $10.00 (paper). Alla Yaroshinskaya was a newspaper reporter in Zhitomir, Ukraine, in 1986. In 1989 she was elected to the new Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR and thus was able to gain access to classified documents confirming her suspicion that official state ments regarding both the cause and consequences of the Chernobyl explosion were misleading. Throughout her text Yaroshinskaya re fers to these documents, to expert commentary, and to a wealth of material collected through interviews and attendance at public meetings. The challenge she undertook was enormous: in reporting responsibly on the Chernobyl disaster, she had to transform the role ofjournalism in Soviet society. Yaroshinskaya worked in the early days ofglasnost, within the continuing authority of state experts, and Sovietjournalists were still expected to secure this authority and to “normalize” any social instability. As Russian historian David Mar ples explains in his introduction, “journalists had never been highly regarded in Soviet life. Their function, after all, was to parrot party decrees and offer paeans to the General Secretary of the CC CPSU of the day” (p. xii). Yaroshinskaya’s story is thus a story about risk communication in a milieu dramatically challenged by new ideas about expertise, responsibility, and the right to know. Through a careful practice of empiricism, Yaroshinskaya refuses to parrot the party line. She avoids ideology throughout a substan tive description of specific ways in which the needs of victims have been ignored, both through blatant abuse of authority and by slow, systematic processes of denial, institutionalized through bureau cratic programs. Yaroshinskaya finds blatant “scientific misconduct” at such events as the August 1986 meeting in Vienna of the Interna 530 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tional Atomic Energy Agency, at which the Soviet delegation deliv ered an interpretation of the causes of the disaster from which pas sages citing faulty design of the reactor control rods were deleted. Perhaps even more insidious, however, is the overall denial of the magnitude of the disaster through gross underestimates of the num bers of victims, authorized by “official” medical surveys and scien tific theories. The microprocesses of bureaucratized denial of social crisis are often difficult to recognize, especiallywithin contexts different from our own. Yaroshinskaya documents these microprocesses of the Chernobyl disaster, aiding our understanding of the multiple ways in which the power of technoscience operates. Increased morbidity was attributed to improvement in health monitoring, which simply made visible problems, such as iodine deficiency in the soil, endemic to particular regions. Residents were required to sign commitments not to eat locally grown food yet were not provided with the small “coffin allowance” for purchase of canned imports. Villages were identified as “washed,” while “de-activation” was delayed. Evacuees were relocated to “clean places,” right next to the “forbidden zone,” where “clean-up” was conducted through the burial of soil, which didn’t keep radioactive caesium from appearing again on the surface. Villages under “special control” often had telephones, but no clinics. Meat and milk from contaminated areas were exported to other territories, with the “cleanest” going to Moscow, the “slightly dirty going to Kiev, and the dirtiest to Zhitomir.” (p. 115) Narodichi district, the most dangerous area marked on the map of radioactivity in the Ukraine, won the socialist prize for its level of agricultural production in the...