Radiation safety

Russia's radioactive past continues to haunt its citizens

Anton Kolomitsyn has an unusual hobby: He searches the Russian countryside looking for remnants of past wars. Earlier this year, he made an unexpected find.

The relic hunter stumbled across a Stalin-era bunker with radium paint on the interior walls, used previously to make the bunker glow in the dark. It was one of hundreds on the Russian-Finnish border, aimed to protect the Soviet Union against a northern invasion.

These bunkers are not an anomaly; they are part of a legacy of improperly managed radioactive sites across Russia. During the race to obtain a nuclear weapon during the Cold War, the Soviet Union experimented with a wide variety of nuclear materials. This phase of experimentation occurred under a veil of secrecy, leaving communities in the dark about the risks associated with their exposure.