SEMIPALATINSK (Kazakhstan): “I saw birds turning into ashes in the sky,” said the stooping old man, tears in his eyes. “Believe me, that is still painful to recall.”

Alexander Shevchenko, a frail 75-year-old, is one of the few surviving “nuclear soldiers” who lived through the horrors of the first Soviet nuclear blasts tested on live humans at the Semipalatinsk test site.

“We were treated like human waste. We were all nameless, just known as guinea pigs,” he said.

In his palsied hands he holds an allegorical painting, a white dove — the fragile symbol of peace — is dying, tangled on a strand of barbed wire, as the ominous giant mushroom of a nuclear explosion rises against the skyline.

He says his pictures, stored in a squat house in this bleak town in northeastern Kazakhstan, are a message to posterity.

One features stone-faced Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, dispassionately looking past a heap of human skulls while a nuclear mushroom looms nearby.

Another depicts a mother in Kazakh national dress, sitting in the middle of a vast steppe overcast by a huge nuclear cloud. She is breastfeeding an emaciated child with protruding ribs, a disproportionately large head, and horror in his wide eyes.

“The child is the spitting image of a sick boy abandoned by his parents whom I once saw in an orphanage here,” Shevchenko said softly. “He later died.”

“I am pressed for time to accomplish all my plans,” said the painter, who has not yet fully recovered from his fifth heart attack. “The truth must be told.”

CRIPPLED LIFE: The story of Shevchenko, an ethnic Ukrainian from southern Russia, resembles that of many who, against their will, found themselves on the Semipalatinsk test site at the wrong time.