[danielodievich]

My well educated physicist grandfather was downwind in Gomel. In the immediate aftermath of this, all the while all the May parades were going on to show "everything is normal", he called my parents in Moscow to tell us to not send us kids to Belarus that summer, has locked his family in the apartment and sealed all windows with paper tape for a couple of weeks. After that we were never allowed to pick chanterelles in forests near Grodno downwind from Chernobyl, or pick linden tree flowers for our dried tea. Plenty of people did and sold that stuff at the markets to unsuspecting people.