Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  The very names of Sredmash facilities were classified, and sites that ranged in size from individual institutes in Moscow and Leningrad to entire cities were known by the men and women who worked there as pochtovye yashchiki—“post office boxes”—referred to only by code numbers. Led by Slavsky, a cunning political operator with access to the highest levels of government, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building became closed and almost entirely autonomous, a state within a state.

  Under the paranoid regime of permanent warfare maintained by Sredmash, any accident—no matter how minor—was regarded as a state secret, policed by the KGB. And even as the USSR’s nuclear power industry began to gather momentum in the mid-1960s, the clandestine impulse persisted. In the bureaucratic upheaval that followed the fall of Khrushchev, in 1966 responsibility for operating new atomic stations throughout the USSR was transferred from Sredmash to the civilian Ministry of Energy and Electrification. Yet everything else—the design and technical supervision of the reactors that powered the plants, their prototypes, and every aspect of their fuel cycle—remained in the hands of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building.

  As one of the twelve founding members of the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1957 the USSR had been obliged to report any nuclear accident that took place within its borders. But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world.

  The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.

  * * *

  At 4:20 p.m. on Sunday, September 29, 1957, a massive explosion occurred inside the perimeter of Chelyabinsk-40 in the southern Urals, a Sredmash installation so clandestine that it had never appeared on any civilian map. The forbidden area encompassed both the Mayak Production Association—a cluster of plutonium production reactors and radiochemical factories scraped from the wilderness by forced labor—and Ozersk, the comfortable closed city that housed the privileged technicians who staffed them. It was a warm, sunny afternoon. When they heard the explosion, many of Ozersk’s citizens were watching a soccer match in the city stadium. Assuming it was the sound of foundations being dynamited by convicts in the nearby industrial zone, few of the spectators even looked up. The match continued.

  But the explosion had taken place inside an underground waste storage tank filled with highly radioactive plutonium processing waste. The blast, which occurred spontaneously after cooling and temperature-monitoring systems had failed, threw the tank’s 160-tonne concrete lid twenty meters into the air, blew out the windows of a nearby prisoner barracks, ripped metal gates from the nearby fence, and launched a kilometer-tall pillar of dust and smoke into the sky. Within a few hours, a blanket of gray radioactive ash and debris several centimeters thick had settled over the industrial zone. The soldiers who worked there were soon admitted to the hospital, bleeding and vomiting.

  No emergency plans had been prepared for a nuclear accident; at first, no one realized they were facing one. It was hours before the plant managers, away on business, were finally tracked down at a circus show in Moscow. By then, highly radioactive contamination had begun to spread across the Urals—2 million curies of it—falling in a deadly trace six kilometers wide and nearly fifty kilometers long. The next day, light rain and a thick, black snow fell on nearby villages. It took a year to clean up inside the forbidden zone. The so-called “liquidation” of the consequences of the explosion was begun by soldiers who ran into the contaminated areas with shovels and tossed parts of the shattered waste storage container into a nearby swamp. The city leaders of Ozersk, apparently fearing mass panic more than the threat of radiation, attempted to stifle news of what had happened. But as rumors spread throughout the cadres of young engineers and technicians, nearly three thousand workers left the city, preferring to take their chances in what they called the “big world” beyond the perimeter wire rather than remain in their cozy but contaminated homes.

  In the remote villages outside the wire, barefoot women and children were instructed to harvest their potatoes and beets, but then dump them into trenches dug by bulldozers, overseen by men wearing protective suits and respirators. Soldiers herded the peasants’ cows into open pits and shot them. Eventually ten thousand people were ordered permanently evacuated over the course of two years. Entire settlements were plowed into the ground. Twenty-three villages were wiped from the map, and up to a half million people were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity.

  Rumors of what had happened in Mayak reached the West, but Chelyabinsk-40 was among the most fiercely guarded military locations in the USSR. The Soviet government refused to acknowledge its very existence, let alone that anything might have happened there. The CIA resorted to sending high-altitude U-2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions, in May 1960, that Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War.

  Although it would be decades before the truth finally emerged, the Mayak disaster remained, for many years, the worst nuclear accident in history.

  3

  * * *

  Friday, April 25, 5:00 p.m., Pripyat

  The afternoon of Friday, April 25, 1986, was beautiful and warm in Pripyat, more like summer than late spring. Almost everyone was looking forward to the long weekend leading into May Day. Technicians were preparing the grand opening of the city’s new amusement park, and families were filling their fridges with food for the holiday; some were engaged in the home improvement fad sweeping the city, hanging wallpaper and laying tiles in their apartments. Outside, the scent of apple and cherry blossom lingered in the air. Fresh laundry hung on the balconies on Lenina Prospekt. Beneath their windows, Viktor Brukhanov’s roses were in bloom: a palette of pink, red, and fuchsia.

  In the distance, the V. I. Lenin Atomic Energy Station, attended by the huge latticed power masts carrying high-tension cables to the switching stations, shone a brilliant white against the skyline. On the roof of the ten-story apartment building on Sergeant Lazarev Street, overlooking the central square, giant, angular white letters spelled out in Ukrainian the mellifluous propaganda jingle of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification: Hai bude atom robitnikom, a ne soldatom! “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier!”

  Brukhanov, harried by work as usual, had left for the office at 8:00 a.m. and driven the short distance from the family apartment overlooking Kurchatov Street to the plant in the white Volga he used for official business. Valentina had arranged to take the afternoon off from her job in the plant construction offices to spend time with her daughter and her son-in-law, who had both driven over from Kiev to visit for the weekend. Lilia was already five months pregnant, and the weather was so good that the three of them decided to take a day trip to Narovlia, a riverside town a few kilometers over the border in Belarus.

  * * *

  Alexander Yuvchenko, senior mechanical engineer in the reactor department on the night shift of Chernobyl’s Unit Four, spent the day in Pripyat with his two-year-old son, Kirill. Yuvchenko had worked at the station for only three years. Lean and athletic, almost two meters tall, he had built up his towering frame with competitive rowing in high school back in Tiraspol, in the tiny Soviet republic of Moldova. At thirteen, Yuvchenko had been one of the first members of the city rowing club, where the trainer selected only the tallest and strongest boys to test themselves on the fast-flowing waters of the Dniester. At sixteen, he became the Junior League champion in Moldova; his team went on to take second place in the All-Union Youth Competition, competing against teams from across the entire USSR.

  But Yuvchenko was also gifted at physics and mathematics, and, at seventeen, he showed such promise as a rower that he faced a painful decision: to go to university or pursue a career in athle
tics. It was only over the objections of his trainer that he finally chose academia. In 1978 he enrolled to major in nuclear physics at Odessa National Polytechnic University, less than a hundred kilometers away from home, just across the border in Ukraine. He was young and zealous, and had decided to do something futuristic and spectacular: he dreamed of working at a nuclear power station.

  Now, at twenty-four, Yuvchenko was deputy secretary of the Chernobyl plant’s Komsomol—the Young Communist League, the Party’s youth wing. In spite of the long hours he put in at work, he still liked to play ice hockey with his friends from the station, on the rinks poured in the city every winter. In the spring, he and his wife, Natalia, borrowed a neighbor’s small motorboat, and together the family took trips down the Pripyat River—idling through the slick, brown water, drifting past forest glades carpeted with sweet-scented lilies of the valley, stopping at empty beaches of fine, white sand, surrounded by towering pines.

  Alexander and Natalia had first met as children in Tiraspol, where they were in the same class at school. At twelve, Alexander was already taller than the other boys, gangly and clumsy. Natalia was slight, and spoiled. Her parents were members of the nomenklatura: loyal Party members, both with senior management positions in local industry. She wore her dark hair in two braids that dangled to the small of her back. Her blue-gray eyes seemed to change color with her mood and the weather. Alexander noticed her immediately. But if she reciprocated his interest, she didn’t show it.

  A few years later, Alexander and his family moved into an apartment on Sovietskaya Street, directly opposite the small private house where Natalia lived. They began dating on and off—often breaking up, seeing other people—but always got back together again. Finally, in August 1982, after spending an entire year apart, they married. By then, they were both deep into their studies at the university in Odessa: Natalia was twenty-one; Alexander, just twenty. Kirill was born a year later.

  Like all newly qualified Soviet specialists, when Alexander graduated in 1983, he had to choose a posting from a government short list of work assignments. But there was never really any question about which he would take. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one of the best and most prestigious nuclear facilities in the entire Soviet Union; it was in Ukraine, close to Kiev, and surrounded by tranquil countryside. Most important, he’d heard that married couples moving to Pripyat could expect to be allocated an apartment in the city. Alexander hoped that he and his new family would have a place of their own within a year, an unthinkable prospect elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

  When their son was born, Natalia still had another year of her degree in Russian philology to complete. She stayed in Odessa while Alexander moved into a single men’s dormitory in Pripyat and began working at the plant. And when she first visited him there, at the end of December 1983, she saw none of the city’s vaunted beauty. In the flat winter light, Pripyat was wan and featureless, stifled between the fallow landscape and grubby, dishwater skies. She was struck only by the concrete monument that marked the entrance to the city in massive, brutalist characters, reading “Pripyat 1970.” But the next year, the family was assigned an apartment on the top floor of a big building in a newly completed district of town, on Stroiteley Prospekt—Avenue of the Construction Workers. They moved into it in August, and the two-room flat seemed as big as a palace. From the balcony, the Yuvchenkos had a sweeping view of the Pripyat River and the forest beyond. A fresh breeze blew through the kitchen windows. They hung bright-pink floral wallpaper in the living room and filled it with furniture Natalia’s mother had secured through connections at the timber kombinat where she worked.

  There was little call for the expertise of a philology graduate in the technically focused world of the atomgrad, so Natalia went to work as a schoolteacher. School Number Four was enormous, with more than two thousand children: Natalia taught Russian language and literature and supervised a fourth-grade class. She often wondered why she had to spend her time looking after other people’s children, while her own son languished in a crèche. By spring 1986, Alexander had been promoted from circulation pump operator to senior mechanical engineer in the Number Four reactor department. At the end of March, he was summoned to the offices of the Pripyat Communist Party. They offered him the job of first secretary of the city Komsomol. Unlike his part-time role in the plant organization, this was a full-time political position, and would mean resigning from the job he loved at Unit Four. Yuvchenko declined; they insisted; he declined again, this time quoting a few lines from Engels. They allowed him to go home, but Alexander knew he couldn’t say no forever: nobody could refuse the Party’s requests. In the meantime, with two salaries and a place of their own, the Yuvchenkos had all they needed. They began thinking about a second child.

  Still, with no family nearby to provide help, life was hardly easy. In the second half of April that year, Kirill became sick with a bad cold. At first, Natalia took time off work to look after him. But the illness lingered, and when she had to go back to her students, the couple began sharing child care. When Alexander was on the night shift at the plant, caring for the boy during the day fell to him. When Natalia returned home from work on the afternoon of April 25, she looked down from the apartment window and spotted her husband on the street below, giving Kirill a ride on the crossbar of his bike. Alexander had worked from midnight until eight the previous night and then spent all day with their son without sleeping. He was due back at the plant again in just a few hours for another shift. Natalia realized how exhausted he must be, and the thought made her uneasy. Despite the bright sunshine and the excited cries of her son drifting up from below, a shadow of apprehension passed over her.

  After dinner, Natalia put Kirill to bed and sat down to watch the climactic episode of a TV miniseries, the Soviet blockbuster adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s potboiler Rich Man, Poor Man. Alexander usually left for the night shift at around 10:30 p.m., but he seemed restless and prepared for work with an odd meticulousness. He spent almost an hour taking a bath. Then he put on a smart new outfit—a pair of slacks and a coveted Finnish-made Windbreaker—as if he were going to a party, not a power station. He poured a cup of coffee, alone in the kitchen. But he wanted company and asked Natalia to join him.

  She left the TV, and they spent the next few minutes talking about nothing much until, finally, it was time for him to go.

  * * *

  A few hundred meters away from the Yuvchenkos, in his apartment opposite the big swimming pool on Sportivnaya Street, Sasha Korol was reading on the couch when his friend Leonid Toptunov ambled in. The two nuclear engineers had been close for almost a decade, ever since the early days of their studies at a branch of Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute—MEPhI—in the nuclear city of Obninsk. Now they lived one floor apart in a block of almost identical one-room apartments, occupied by doctors, teachers, and other single, young nuclear engineers. The two men shared keys and let themselves into each other’s homes whenever they felt like it.

  Korol, the son of a physics teacher, and Toptunov, the only child of a senior army officer attached to the Russian space program, both had science in their blood. They had been born into a world where, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the startling coups of Soviet engineers regularly humbled the West. Toptunov’s father had been at the heart of the USSR’s shadow world of clandestine technology, overseeing the construction of rocketry facilities at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan—the site, in 1957, of the surprise launch of Sputnik, which first shattered the United States’ complacent assumptions about its technical superiority over an empire of ham-fisted potato farmers.

  Toptunov was born within sight of the Baikonur launchpad, in the secret space city of Leninsk, three years later. He grew up surrounded by the hallowed group of men and women who would lead mankind into orbit, idolized not just by the children who lived around the Cosmodrome, but throughout the USSR. Toptunov’s father liked to boast that Yuri Gagarin, soon to be the most famous man on earth, used to
babysit the infant Leonid. When Gagarin’s massive Vostok 1 rocket thundered off the launchpad early one morning in April 1961, Toptunov, just seven months old, was there to witness its blazing exhaust plume vanish into the stratosphere, and a Soviet pilot become the first human being in space.

  When Toptunov was thirteen, his father was appointed military attaché at the Dvigatel rocket engine plant in Tallinn, and the family moved to Estonia. Three years later, in July, Toptunov went to Moscow, to sit for the MEPhI entrance exams. Reserved and attentive, he had proved an able student in math. But MEPhI—established with the patronage of Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atom bomb—was the USSR’s most prestigious institute for the study of nuclear engineering and physics. The examination was notoriously difficult, with as many as four students competing for every place; some sat for it again and again before being admitted. While Toptunov toiled over the test papers, his father waited outside the room on a bench. When the young man emerged at last, he was shaking with exhaustion. Toptunov passed on the first attempt, but when he called to give his mother the good news, she pleaded with him not to go. He was her only child, and the idea of nuclear power terrified her; she begged him to remain in Tallinn and study there.

  But Leonid had no interest in life in a Baltic backwater. At seventeen, he left home to join the cult of the atomshchiki—the disciples of the peaceful atom.