The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  A. Grudino.—I worked at the power station twice, once on 25th August and once on 30th August. Before they built the sarcophagus, they had to clear up all the graphite and uranium rubble that had been thrown onto the roof by the explosion. They had already tried to do it using robots but the radiation prevented them from working: the electronic instruments melted inside, the robots blocked and would not move. So they decided to send men in. We went in wearing only our soldier’s uniforms, gas masks to protect our faces and motorbike goggles. Then I worked on the reactor itself. I had to clean up the roof of the machine room. We had to throw the graphite and uranium off the roof, sometimes using our hands, sometimes using shovels. The first time I stayed there for about 40 seconds. Within this time lapse, you had to run up, grab a shovel if there was one to hand, and if there was no shovel, you had to pick up the piece of graphite with your hands. Then throw it into the reactor. Then get out as quickly as possible. A siren would sound to tell you when your time was up. If I spotted a piece on the ground, I would try to take it as well, even if the siren was going, then I would rush back down. The second time I went up, the radioactivity measured between 800–900 roentgens an hour. We made ourselves a sort of armour made out of sheets of lead to try to protect ourselves a little from the radiation.

  Q.—Are you saying that four months after the accident, you still hadn’t been given any real protective clothing?

  A. Grudino.—No, we had nothing other than what we put together ourselves. When we came off the roof, we took our shoes off and the next person put them on, if they were the right size, when it was his turn to go up.

  Victor Kulikovsky.—I worked directly on Block 4. We were installing lighting. The work carried on night and day. Our job was to ensure there was lighting at night. We were pulling up cables from electricity panels; 5–10 people got hold of the cable and then ran with it as fast as possible and threw it down. The other team took over. We had literally two minutes to do it. There was a ladder there. And from this ladder, directly against the wall of the reactor, from the first few days, was where we climbed to install the lighting.

  Q.—And you didn’t stay longer than two minutes?

  V. Kulikovsky.—No…that was the time indicated by the dosimetrists: “There is this level of radiation, so you have this amount of time”. That’s it. But how can you do your work in two minutes: run there, do it, run back? It isn’t realistic. We stayed for five minutes, seven minutes, sometimes as long as ten. Some of the dosimetrists had to pull us away. They loaded us onto the bus and drove us away. They really had to chase us off. Today, the place where we were working is underneath the sarcophagus.

  One day, after work, I went to the depot to get a change of clothes. The dosimetrist came over and measured the radiation. “Normal” he said. “How can it be normal if I climbed up the wall?” “Normal. For you, it’s indicating normal”. Sometimes it took five or six of us to push our way through to the manager’s office in this dosimetry service. It was only after we threatened to complain to HQ that they gave us papers certifying that our clothes had been contaminated and that we needed to exchange them for clean ones.

  When we went to the canteen in town, in Chernobyl, we had to take everything off apart from underpants. “Everything off! Your clothes are radioactive!” That lasted till they set up a place for us to change our clothes. We ate our meals dressed only in our underpants. Then we put on the same togs and went to work for a couple of days again at the power station. “Your clothes are clean…”

  Anatoli Saragovets.—My first job was to measure the levels of radioactivity in the villages in preparation for digging up the top layer of radioactive soil. They gave me a Geiger counter. Everywhere I measured, it blocked. The radiation was too high. I gave the counter back so I didn’t have to see this horror. “Take it. Give me something else”. They gave me a big shovel and I did a bit of work. Then they put me in a lorry, a water container that was being used to wash out any radioactive waste in the ditches and on the roads in the villages. One day, next to a road that went through areas that were all closed off, I saw a huge pond, full of contaminated water. The water was dark green, really frightening to see. The firemen beckoned me forward and they pumped this same water into my lorry. I asked them: “Where do you want me to put this water if it’s contaminated?” “Take it to the village and don’t argue”. And that was the water the firemen were using to wash the houses. Afterwards they measured the levels of radioactivity at zero point something: “It’s liveable…” But the next day, the control units had come by in the night, they sent me back to the same village: the levels of radioactivity were too high there….We’d done a bad job.

  Q.—Do you think the work you were doing was absurd?

  A. Saragovets.—Completely absurd. You dig up contaminated earth from around a house. Then you wash the house and the contaminated dust drains away with the water into the gutter. Then you dig a channel to drain the bad water away but all around the channel everything is contaminated. The people who lived there saw perfectly well how useless it was. When I asked my superiors “What’s the point of this idiocy?” they said: “Don’t discuss it. Just do what you’re told”.

  Anatoli Borovsky.—I was battalion chief. We were decontaminating the villages. We were digging up earth with shovels and loading it onto lorries. Then it was taken away and put into ditches and buried. Obviously the dust was flying all around us and we were breathing it in. Our detachment was working in a region between Khoiniki and Bragin. We asked to be provided with mechanical excavators, made in Minsk, little bulldozers on tractors. They would have been very useful. An official from the Central Committee came and promised us everything under the sun. He kept looking at his watch as if he was very busy and had to leave any minute. We never got anything. We carried on working with shovels. But now I would like to tell you about a scandalous fact, the way the State betrayed us…

  3. STATE SECRETS

  A. Borovsky.—Savchenko, the former Health Minister, in a recent reply to the Supreme Soviet Commission that is investigating the cloak of silence that has surrounded the events at Chernobyl for so many years, has stated that they were called in by Ryzhkov, the Prime Minister of the USSR, who told them that all information about Chernobyl was top secret. That was the reason why the calculation of dose was never done, and when measurements had been taken, they had to be lowered. The order to lie came from high up.

  Q.—Can you explain the logic behind this behaviour?

  A. Borovsky.—During the seventy three years of communism, our blessed State has always undertaken extensive, grandiose schemes. The first was world revolution. As a result, all of us, I’m not sure why, felt we owed something to the State. We were eternally in its debt. Never the other way round. And that continues through inertia up to the present day. The academic Ilyin’s famous thesis, according to which it is normal to accumulate 35 rem over a lifetime has its origins in this attitude. This is where it all comes from.

  V. Kulikovsky.—Just as people are all different, so communists are all different. For example, some want to evacuate the contaminated territories, some are against. And again, at Chernobyl in 1986, some were in favour of sending men onto the roof of the reactor, some were not. I remember this colonel shouting “I will get the roof built with partisans!” meaning all of us, who had been called up for the decontamination. “I will build it!” And that’s what happened; he built a cover for the reactor with our lives.

  A. Borovsky.—This year, before the sowing season, the Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution that forbade agricultural activity in any areas contaminated at levels above 15 curies per square kilometre. Three days later, the Central Committee of Belarus and the Council of Ministers, 99% of whom are communists, met together and took the decision to plant seed. An inhumane decision; anti-human in fact. And the land was planted.

  M. Boikov.—We set up a non-governmental independent association, the Pripyat Union,
which brings liquidators together. We get help from business. But the Communist Party has never given us any help.

  4. HEALTH

  A. Borovsky.—My state of health…..at the moment, I have neurovegetative dystonia, cardiac neurasthenia, that all of us have, everyone who was at Chernobyl. I suffer very badly with my stomach. I have a kidney problem whereas before I had no problems with my kidneys. I have become very irritable. I feel permanently exhausted, which they have defined as “asthenic syndrome”. It was diagnosed recently when I was hospitalised at the radiology clinic.

  M. Boikov.—In 1989, I worked as a specialist technician repairing the washing machines that were used to wash the contaminated clothing. These machines were used non-stop and had accumulated enormous levels of radioactivity. This was at Bragin. I lived in this contaminated area for six months until it was evacuated in 1991. I have heart problems too, neurovegetative dystonia. I have a lot of headaches and I feel exhausted.

  A. Grudino.—I am registered as having category 2 invalidity. I have so many illnesses that I can’t enumerate all of them. At 35, I am like an old man of 70. Diseases of the blood, stomach ulcer, shrinking of the blood vessels in the brain, permanent fatigue, I feel sleepy all the time. No energy. Dizziness. I can’t walk far. After about a kilometre, my hands and feet are swollen and I have to find somewhere to sit down. I have become a little old man of 70.

  A. Saragovets.—In November, I lost feeling in my left hand, then in my left arm, then the whole left side, then my legs became paralysed. No-one knew what it was. They refused to recognise any link with the decontamination work. I continued to work because I have to feed my family. I drove the trolley bus with one hand and one foot; I was driving people and I didn’t say anything. At rush hour there could be 150 to 200 people in my trolley, sometimes more. In the morning I left early to get to the bus stop. When I got off, I walked behind everyone else so that no-one would see me walking. My left leg would do nothing I told it to; I had no feeling in it; it was like a foreign body. It dragged on the ground.... I did the best I could, I made a joke of it, right up to the day I lost consciousness and they brought me back to the house. Now I can’t walk at all. I have dizzy spells, but that’s nothing…it’s my legs really. They don’t work at all. I have to hold on to the wall. And I have just turned thirty.

  Q.—Are you getting any treatment?

  A. Saragovets.—(laughing) From whom? We were in hospital in April. As soon as we started our hunger strike in May47, they made us leave the hospital. Nobody is interested in us now. Not the doctors, nobody. We are society’s rejects.

  47 Hunger strike to obtain recognition of the correlation between their illnesses and radioactivity, in order to get free health care and subsidies set aside for liquidators.

  V. Kulikovsky.—In 1986, I worked for two months at the reactor. We don’t really know exactly how much radioactivity we received. In my documents, as I said, they marked down 11.92 rem. I was in hospital at the Institute of Radiology in Minsk. I was in such a bad state that they didn’t even want to take me. I got worse when I went to the pulmonary hospital at Minsk. They couldn’t do anything there so I was sent back to the radiology institute. The blood test showed I had received 100 roentgens.

  I have about twenty different illnesses; when the neuropathologist at the Borovliany hospital saw my records, he said: “What’s all this, you must be an old man to have been diagnosed with all this!” I’m 35.

  The medical profession has rejected us. “We can’t help you”. When we finally got them to recognise the link between our illnesses and the contamination, the doctor at the clinic said: “What are you doing here? They’ve recognised that radiation is the cause of your state of health. We can’t cure you. Go home”.

  P. Shashkov.—In any case, they don’t have the medicines we need.

  V. Kulikovsky.—The professor told us quite openly. “These medicines can only be bought with foreign currency, from abroad. They’re not for people like you”.

  A. Grudino.—(He holds the papers in his hands, looks at them and says) It’s like looking at a piece of waste paper. They gave us these diplomas just after we’d been on the roof, for all our good work.

  In the documentary “The Sacrifice”, we included a clip from a Soviet news programme, in which you see a colonel giving out diplomas to the liquidators, who have just come down off the ruins of the roof at block 4 and are looking a little intimidated: “And to this brave young man too, I am awarding you this certificate and I wish you good health, well-being…and may you continue in your work with enthusiasm”.

  A. Grudino.—At the time, I was proud to receive this certificate, like everyone else. I thought that this document would give my children the right to live in a clean area, that I would have priority if I wanted a telephone installed, or wanted housing. We were promised everything but that’s all they were… promises.

  A. Borovsky.—As an officer, I needed to keep up the morale of my soldiers. My men understood perfectly well the importance of the task, to save the population and they didn’t ask for anything in return, but they didn’t think they’d be forgotten. Today, we’re of no use, we’re just a burden. We upset people because we are asking simply to be treated like human beings. In my opinion, we have paid all our debts to the mother country. Now, it’s her turn to do something for us. But she wishes we weren’t here. When we’re gone, she’ll be relieved.

  A year after this first meeting, Lieutenant Colonel Borovsky died.

  Chapter III

  CITIZENS UNBOWED

  Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Belarus, the liquidator Vassili Nesterenko took us to the Institute of Nuclear Energy, situated in “Sosny” the little scientific community, built in the 1960’s, eight kilometres from Minsk, where Nesterenko worked for twenty six years (1963 to 1989) including 10 years as director (1977 to 1987). Functioning at a reduced level, the institute now had the same air of abandonment that you find in many places in the former Soviet Union that were once of strategic importance. In the deserted forecourt at the edge of the forest, Nesterenko continued his account of the dramatic events he experienced here in his last few months after the disaster.

  1. PERSECUTION

  V. Nesterenko.—After the accident at Chernobyl, when we had already stopped work on the mobile mini-reactor, there were hundreds of cars parked here. They arrived from everywhere in the Southern part of the USSR to have food products tested. Our laboratory worked night and day. We had a special radioprotection service. It was the first to report that there was radioactivity in Minsk.

  We tried to work on the ‘Pamir’ reactor again, but already our main focus was to use most of our staff, more than 1000 institute employees, to draw up the first maps of the contamination. By the end of May we had completed the map of Gomel, showing contamination by caesium and iodine, and by the end of June, of Mogilev. We put forward our proposals. There were instruments in this building and we explained to the government how to use them to help the inhabitants. As we were explaining the situation in Gomel, Sliunkov48 suddenly turned to me and said: “What equipment are we going to be able to send there?” I told him: “This is to protect the people here. For other places, you’ll have to ask Moscow”. Equipment was requested and we sent it off. As regards Mogilev, I wrote a letter at the end of June. It caused great irritation. They had scarcely made the decision for the Gomel region and evacuated some of the inhabitants and here I was bringing up another problem. I told them they needed to monitor 50 villages and that the Ministry of Health needed to determine the degree of danger for inhabitants if they continued to live there. They would need to implement the distribution of preventive iodine, and all the rest, of course. I wrote all this in my letters to the government. So they decided to get rid of me.

  48 First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Belarus.

  As it was a military Institute—subject to defe
nce secrets—I had a second in command, a Lieutenant General Budakovsky. He had worked in Prague, in central Asia, in short, I think he was probably a KGB collaborator. He was called in to the Central Committee and was told: “Your director is causing us enormous problems with his letters about Chernobyl, we need him removed. There must be things going on at the institute that are not satisfactory. Write to us about it. We’ll send a commission from the Party to undertake an inspection”. He wrote in August. On 2nd September, a commission from the Central Committee arrived. The commission was restricted to 75 people in all. They brought together all the staff and asked them to make accusations: “If you have any complaints about the director, write to us”. There were about 200 to 250 people in the large assembly hall; there were officers, and the intimidation began: “No-one leaves the room until they have presented their deposition”.

  I continued to send letters to the Belarus government, then I wrote directly to Gorbachev and to the Prime Minister of the USSR, but my letters were returned. I started to have problems with my health, because after flying over the burning reactor, my stomach ulcer reopened and I finished up in hospital. They tried to treat me there while the commission continued its methodical work at institute. I was given a lot of support by the President of the Academy, Nicolai Borissevich. He was an academician, not only in Belarus but in the USSR and now works in Russia. He defended me as much as he could, but I saw that it was going to turn out badly. So then, because I knew V. Legasov—we had worked together—I said to him:” Vladimir Alexeich, they won’t let you work in Moscow, come to Minsk. This institute should dedicate itself entirely to Chernobyl and I will work for you in whatever post”. I knew quite well they were going to sack me. He agreed, he got on well with the president. But a week after our conversation—they had started to persecute him in Moscow—he committed suicide.