Un héritage empoisonné devenu patrimoine : le changement de statut politique et symbolique des déchets nucléaires militaires de la Russie

Abstract

Since the dawn of the nuclear era, Russia has accumulated hundreds millions of cubic meters and tons of liquid and solid radioactive waste, the lion's share of which comes from the military; this is more than half of radioactive waste accumulated in example, refers to the "legacy of waste". 4 A US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Report of 2000 called this waste precisely "legacy waste" nine years later. 5 In Russia the term "legacy" started to be used with regard to radioactive waste in the mid-to late 1990s, was connected to growing East-West exchanges in the environmental area, and was often used in the context of public criticism of the inadequate handling of radioactive waste and its related hazards. For example, the Greenpeace Nuclear Free Sea Campaign held a conference in Moscow in September 1991 called "Violent Peace, Deadly Legacy." Historian and science journalist Vladislav Larin calls his book series and research program on the environmental impact of the Russian nuclear military program precisely the "Russian nuclear legacy," with his first book on the plutonium production facility Maiak written in 1996 and published in 2001. 6 In the early 2000s, the term "legacy" began to be widely used by Russian officials and scientists. In 2000 a large International Conference on Radiation Legacy of the 20th Century: Environmental Restoration (Radleg-2000) was held at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Organized by the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Atomic Energy (Minatom) in co-operation with the

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…One response to the problems with deep future archiving is to emphasise more explicitly the role of gaps, incapacities, and instabilities of archival memory processes as something inherent to future thinking. As Kasperski (2019) argues, processes of archiving are clearly not only about selecting what should be preserved, as much as it is about apprehending what will be demolished and destroyed. Wikander (2015b, 18) captures something of this destructive character of nuclear waste archiving in arguing for “the necessity of linguistic redundancy – the need for preserving texts in many different languages and media – as there is no way to predict the socio-political changes that influence the use of one particular language instead of another in the future”.…”

The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago

“…16 Moreover, authors such as Tatiana Kasperski, Andrei Stsiapanau, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, and Anna Storm have investigated the USSR's nuclear program from a cultural heritage perspective. 17 We make ample use of this existing literature on Soviet nuclear history, synthesizing these works while also adding substantial new sources. In terms of archival collections, we draw on documents from the Soviet Ministry of Energy and Electrification (Minenergo) and the planning and design institute Gidroproekt, consulted at the Russian State Archive of Economy in Moscow and the Russian State Archive in Samara, respectively.…”