Illness and the Right Not to Work

Petryna recalls the case of Ivanivna and her transformation from a disenfranchised citizen to an achieved status as a disabled citizen with the "right not to work". The system enacted by a post-Soviet Ukraine created a weird inversion of what we would expect of a society, in that the healthy were worse off socio-economically than the ill. It was a system that was reactionary to the previous Soviet system, which was largely blamed for failures to adequately respond to the Chernobyl disaster or adequately provide for all but a few individuals with the highest immediate radiation exposure. The wider population affected by radiation, particularly during drafted clean-up work, were inadequately provided for. Thus the Ukraine system differed from the Soviet one in that it tried to provide for the entire population of affected individuals, both of deterministic and stochastic consequences of radiation. This however left a newly sovereign nation poorer in a time of economic transition, depression, and inflation. Thus, the result was a population of impoverished people where a significant proportion could try to claim social-welfare compensations for Chernobyl-related illnesses and pathologies. This is a market system that that ensures economic instability and drives people towards wanting to be in a state of illness. Thus the society becomes fixated on the concept of illness, and with that, institutions of medicine become the keepers to becoming more economically secure. It ensures that people try to maintain a state of illness and that people must navigate the bureaucracy and legalities of this system and their own medical symptoms and histories in order to achieve the benefits they sorely need.

Particularly powerfully, Petryna refers to this Chernobyl legacy as a "marriage between life and death". The section where Petryna shadows an office where claims are filed is particularly haunting in the almost statistical weariness in which claim after claim are filed and evaluated. Widow after widow submit documents and inquire about their late husband's Chernobyl pensions. It is haunting in that the physical and emotional suffering of countless people are seemingly reduced to documentations and numbers and reviews.