This essay explores science as a political technique and the place of scientific knowledge in the dynamics of a postsocialist transition by taking the management of the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe as a case in point. I begin with a brief exploration of three ways of conceiving of science as political technique: science as repression, science as a forging of a cosmopolitan ethos, and science as a way of rooting people in political regimes. Variations on these approaches informed the management of Chernobyl during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet period of nation-state building, and this Soviet and post-Soviet management has significantly shaped the experiential, legal, and biological aspects of the disaster’s aftermath. While, for example, in the Soviet period of the disaster’s management 31 people were said to have died, during the post-Soviet management of the disaster, more than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone claim to be suffering from the disaster’s effects. The web of scientific, political, and social interests behind this stark numerical contrast is explored here. In mapping environmental contamination, measuring individual and population-wide exposures, and arbitrating claims of illness, the biological effects of Chernobyl became inseparable from the political interventions that were meant to contain them. Scientifically informed policies recast the aftermath as a complex political and technical experience in which administrators and affected people alike negotiated the scale of the aftermath, forms of remediation and compensation, and claims to social equity and human rights. These processes had their own bureaucratic and legal contours and exemplify how science supports a field of political and moral agency through which the dynamics of postsocialist state-building, democratization, and citizenship can be understood.
