the records of those with lower exposure and without severe symptoms were not to mention radioactivity at all. Instead, Moscow dictated that the hospital files of these patients were to state that they had been diagnosed with “vegetative-vascular dystonia.” This was a psychological complaint with physical manifestations—sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, and seizures—triggered by the nerves or “the environment,” unique to Soviet medicine but similar to the Western notion of neurasthenia. The memo decreed the same misleadingly vague diagnosis for liquidators who came for examination having
...more
