Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation reproduces an IZVESTIYA article by A. Tarasov, published 26 October 1991, on the "Sverdlovsk syndrome." The illness left students and other harvest workers on Ural potato fields with toxic polyneuropathy. The article lists many suggested causes, from pesticides and thorium storage to military activity and UFOs, and gives Prof Ye. Krupin's view that imported pyrethroid pesticides were to blame. A postscript notes that a Russian Ministry of Health commission blamed combined factors and cleared the pesticides.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1992 ## Document 2 of 12 unknown to science. And then there are these: the cause is an anomaly of geological structure of those territories; the specific composition of the soil; the mafia blocking the harvest of the potatoes in order to spiral up the prices for a ''second bread''; intrigues of UFOs; poisonous mosquitoes. Not a single one of the suggestions has been proven, but none has been refuted. 5. Such an array of versions is remarkable in and of itself. After all, many of them, except for perhaps only the last few, are not at all far-fetched, and there's some basis for most of the suggestions. It's ridiculous, of course, to blame weakened immunity or avitaminosis of the city people as the main cause of the group's injuries to the peripheral nervous system. But the USSR Ministry of Health commission, in investigating the circumstances of one of the unusual incidents, could not help but note the acute deficiency of vitamins B and C and the weakened state of the bodies of those stricken. Some specialists indicate that isolated incidents of the strange ailment were noted long before 1989. And maybe the worsened supply of fruits and vegetables to the Ural people of recent years played a role of its own in the outbreak of the illness. 6. Or how about the entirely improbable 'hypotheses'' voiced 'in a delirium,' which bring into play the military, radiation, or some sort of natural anomalies? Were those versions born on arid soil? Issue No 162 of IZVESTIYA wrote of the Krasnoufimskiy storage facilities, where behind plank fences are kept ore that contain thorium-and the unusual incidents are occurring just a few kilometers from those facilities. The version about the military? The outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk in 1979 is not forgotten, and that's why the attitude toward the military is particularly suspicious. What goes on behind the 'postal box'' fences is known to only a small circle of people. (It wasn't until 16 September of this year that the oblast executive committee allowed the oblast health-epidemiological station to visit, for 'reasons of environmental protection,' the facilities of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.) Natural anomalies? They exist, too. Above the fields of the village of Pridannikovo, where the students suffered the paralysis, local people observed a 'tipsy'' rainbow several weeks before the arrival of the city people-the ends of the arc rested not on the ground, but above, in the clouds. 7. But the most mysterious thing about the 'potato' detective story is the position taken by the people in power. It remains unchanged, even though the people who formulated it have changed more than once. The people in power continue to fight for the harvest with the same valor. Two years ago, the number of those sent away could not stop the flow of new harvest contingents to the front with the unknown illness. It's the same today-the place where losses were
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 4 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.