PHOTOS BY DMITRY LEVASHOV
Dzerzhinsk is 400 kilometres east of Moscow. The average life expectancy in the city is in the forties. Environmentalists aren’t sure whether this is more to do with huge, poorly regulated industrial plants dumping waste in the ground, water and air, or because the town was the former epicentre of the Soviet chemical weapons industry. This is the place where they made all the fun stuff like mustard gas, sarin, the blister agent lewisite, and the old favourite cyanide. We had a chat with Dmitry Levashov, who lives there and is pretty stoical about these things.
