In 1957 at the Mayak plant for nuclear weapons in South Ural, a nuclear disaster took place that is comparable to the one in Chernobyl. Ever since, the region has been atomically contaminated and the government has refused to resettle the people who live there.
The legal advisor and single mother Nadezhda Kutepova grew up in the shadows of Mayak within the “closed city” Ozersk. Her own grand-
mother had developed plutonium for the first Russian atomic bomb as a Chemical Engineer and her father had worked in Mayak as a Liqui-
dator; both died of cancer due to the exposure to radiation.
Nadezhda, whose name translates as “hope“, is fighting for the rights of the local people, like a Russian Erin Brockovich, and in doing so risks her life, as the work of Nadezhda and her NGO Planet of Hopes is an anathema to the state’s policy.