This is less a review and more of an essay on the subject matter of the 2014 documentary The Polygon.
It’s not the first account of nuclear testing in the Soviet Union which I read or watched, but it hit me harder than any I before encountered.
The reason for this was the interviews with and depictions of the deformed descendants of those exposed to the radiation.
It describes a tract of land known as the Polygon in Kazakhstan, which was once a satellite of the U.S.S.R.
According to records, the Soviets, over a forty-year period, tested hundreds of nuclear bombs there.
People who lived in the villages around the Polygon were told that they were safe and even urged to watch the bombs from outside their homes.
These international affairs have no doubt invisibly affected all our lives, just as it has mutated the genes of those who were born in the aftermath of bomb tests and nuclear meltdowns.
I’ve lost many who were dear to me to cancer, including my parents.
Mere coincidence? Though we are finding better ways to prevent death from cancer, the incident rate, especially in young adults, has risen consistently over the last century.
We’re all the way on the other side of the world here in the U.S., but once radionuclides are in the waters and the soil, the wind and the rain is bound to take them on a round trip.
I’m not pretending the U.S. didn’t do its own “testing”, both out of sight and mind of its citizens, and on them as well.
At Horror to Culture, we explore the genre as entertainment, but, speaking personally, I do not seek to desensitize myself to real life horrors thereby.
I want to be able to look at the ugliest aspects of the world we live in, not to laugh them off, or endlessly weep at their tragedy, but rather to understand how we might better avoid them.
Alas, dear reader, I am but a thinker, a philosopher, a writer, and a hapless schmuck who labors in a factory to pay the bills.
I have no more power than the poor people of Kazakhstan to arrest the momentum of empires.
I am not privy to the machinations of tyrants and scoundrels, but only one more insignificant ant marching beneath a gaze I suppose I should wish to avoid.
But to Hell with them. All of them. To Hell with the machinations of power, whence or whenever it arises.
There is no justification for any being to abuse another living thing as a test subject.
In one part of the documentary, there is a shot of dogs trapped in a small room, being blasted by the force of a nuclear bomb.
Frightened and frantic, they are hurled against one another and the walls around them. The documentary doesn’t tell us what we are seeing, but deductive reasoning can lead us to the understanding that these dogs were being filmed because those who set up the camera knew they would also be detonating the bomb and wanted to study the effect.
Are we to be such dogs?
Are we already such trapped animals?
I may be just a thinker, but this great swath of destruction that has come in the aftermath of industrialization came from thoughts, dreams, and hopes.
A road to Hell paved with good intentions.
It is my hope, in adding here my humble analysis, to stimulate that sort of thought which might rectify these wrongs, even if my name is never known or long forgotten when such a time comes.
After Chernobyl, the Soviets stuck to the line that the symptoms of the fallout were psychosomatic effects of “radiophobia”.
You will see in the documentary that as of 2014 the government of Kazakhstan, though admitting the effects of the testing on their people, still used the term “radiophobia” to fob off pleas for aid while literal billions of dollars exchanged hands.
“Nothing to see here, folks,” they say, while they go on promising and pretending to help.
It will be hard to watch, but The Polygon will only take an hour of your time, and the perspective will be worth it.
It’s not hard to laugh at entertaining antics or stop to admire the transcendent beauty of art, but if we don’t take the time to face the horrors of our everyday reality, which we are always through these arts reflecting, there may very well be nothing…
Nothing to see here…
Nothing to see here at all.
***** * *****
MAD and I have talked before about the horrors of the Cold War, here and here. We grew up as it was coming to a close, being around ten or eleven years old when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
I also wrote a cognate horror story, Leviathan, based in the Novaya Zemlya area north of Siberia, which you can read here.
