Stanley Greene

The city of Dzerzhinsk, on the river Volga in Russia, is located in the center of a huge industrial complex. Six or seven chemical factories worked day in, day out for over 50 years. From the beginning of World War II, they produced chemical weapons, dioxines and rocket fuel, three groups of the most hazardous chemical substances.

Although their activity has been reduced, some of the factories are still producing herbicides based on dioxine, DDT and chlorine gas. These activities were held secret by USSR, and information only started to seep out after 1988, when specialists were brought in to investigate on the abnormally high level of lung diseases on the area. Today, everything is poisoned: the air, the water, the land. According to scientists who visited the area after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Dzerzhinsk is the most polluted town on earth. The situation is worsening due to the fact that the factories are unable to process their toxic waste. A reservoir built to contain the chemical waste is crumbling and a “huge white sea” of residue has formed which seeps into the Volga river and subsequently flows into the Caspian Sea several hundred miles away. Clearly, this is an ecological time bomb catastrophy which concerns many more than the local population.

The inhabitants of Dzerzhinsk, who were maintained in ignorance of how highly dangerous the products made in the factories were, have a life expectancy of 42 for men, and barely 45 for women. Children fish in the Volga river directly downstream from the White Sea. If they swim, they develop skin ulcers. Dioxin infects mother’s breast milk. Cattle graze on former toxic waste dumps.

It would take hundreds of millions of dollars to evacuate and clean the location, and Russia is simply ignoring the problem. Inhabitants do not have the financial means to move out of the area. Nor are they supported by the government. Says one inhabitant : “We have no hope in the government at all. When we made a request to Moscow for money to buy a water filtering system, we were told our town no longer existed and had been demolished in 1965.”

Dzerzhinsk’s story is a story of generational denial. Its people, like its history are slowly being erased. Like much of the history of Russia itself, it’s the victims, the damage largely invisible to the modern world, who bear witness.

As we enter the 21st century, the world is discovering that today our planet is poisoned. The situation is getting worse due to factories that continue to pump out toxic waste, blacken the sky with poisonous fumes, and pollute rivers with chemical waste. Most factories are for industrial purposes. I have spent a good deal of time covering wars. Now, I’m interested in doing photo essays on the causes and effects of war. In the future, I will focus on a subject on the manufacturing of military weapons particularly chemical weapons.

Stanley Greene, April 1998