[1][2] She was a 1992 recipient of the Right Livelihood Award,[1] for "revealing, against official opposition and persecution, the extent of the damaging effects of the Chernobyl disaster on local people" and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 as part of the 1000 PeaceWomen project.
[2] As a student at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Yaroshinskaya was a political dissident, attempting to expose party corruption, for which she was branded an "unreliable" person and suffered intimidation and administrative penalties.
She also began self-publishing a newspaper, Stenogramma, promoting resistance to the Soviet totalitarian regime.
[2] On the Ecology and Glasnost Committee of the Supreme Soviet, she continued her campaign for full disclosure of the Chernobyl contamination.
Despite this she succeeded in making copies of top-secret documents of the Politburo of the Central Committee, which she summarised in an article, Forty secret protocols of the Kremlin wise men, published by Izvestia and the Western press.
[2] Yaroshinskaya's political work has involved international security, including the elimination and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Through the Fund she initiated creation of The Nuclear Encyclopedia, which became a reference for anti-nuclear NGOs around the Commonwealth of Independent States.