The Downward Spiral of the Economy

The After Chernobyl Podcast discusses the social, economic, and political effects of the Chernobyl explosion. The USSR's attempt to fix the situation caused a recession in Eastern Europe, leading to lower wages and economic decline. Middle-class families in Pripyat suffered the most, losing jobs and homes. Older people chose to stay close to Chernobyl for sentimental reasons. Loss of farmland caused migration and homelessness, with 120,000 hectares affected. The next episode will cover the political impacts and the downfall of the USSR. What's up guys, it's Cece and Bill, and you're listening to the After Chernobyl Podcast, where we talk about the aftermath and effects of Chernobyl socially, economically, and politically. So, to recap, last episode, Chernobyl was an explosion, well, Chernobyl is a plant that had an explosion and was a reactor in the mid-1980s and caused a whole continent decades of despair. One of those despairs was the recession that most of Eastern Europe went into due to the USSR, the government that Ukraine, where Chernobyl is, was under, because the USSR was trying to fix everything, and that caused for lower wages to occur, which brought the economy down, and this didn't really work out well, because for the middle-class families from the town of Pripyat, which we spoke about last episode, experienced the most due to loss of jobs and loss of homes. Well, you say middle-class, and it was mainly the younger middle-class, because it's actually kind of funny how the closer you get to Chernobyl, the average age of the population gets older, so the older the person, the closer to Chernobyl they typically were. Why do you think they're older? I think it was mainly for sentimental reasons, and they didn't want to leave, and they didn't want to go too far, and they didn't want to uproot their whole life from it, but the whole migration and homelessness was due to the loss of agriculture closer to the event, and it was mainly due to loss of farmland, and this started as soon as two days after the event, and it lasted a week, just getting worse and worse and worse, and like we touched on the cancer and the ARF last episode, it was mainly now from digestion, and that was the main cause of ARF. If I remember correctly while researching, it was close to 120,000 hectares of farmland, which hectares are much bigger than acres, so that's a lot of loss of farmland, which also helps bring down the economy. Well, next episode, we will be talking about the political impacts and how it eventually led to the downfall of the USSR, or more commonly known as the Soviet Union. Thank you, and come back!