Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  “This is, of course, a historic event. What was predicted by the world—and particularly by the bourgeois newspapers in the West, which shouted from the rooftops that an enormous catastrophe was imminent—is no longer a threat. We are firmly convinced the danger has passed.”

  Back in Moscow, the theoretical physicists continued to insist that the molten corium still moving somewhere deep inside Reactor Number Four remained a terrible threat. But there was fierce disagreement about their findings. The atomic specialists from the Kurchatov Institute and Sredmash dismissed them as the opinions of academic interlopers who lacked any practical experience in nuclear reactors. They argued that it was almost certain that the corium would stop melting through the basement levels of Unit Four long before it breached the deepest foundations of the building. And the theoreticians agreed that this scenario was indeed the most likely—but it was by no means guaranteed. They calculated that the chances of a ball of radioactive lava searing through all four of the 1.8-meter-thick reinforced concrete floors beneath the reactor and reaching the water table of the fourth-longest river in Europe were as high as one in ten.

  In their formal report, the theoreticians advised that the only guaranteed defense against the China Syndrome was an audacious construction project to be launched in the most perilous circumstances imaginable. They recommended the excavation of a chamber deep beneath Unit Four, about five meters high and thirty meters square, designed to house a massive, purpose-built water-cooled heat exchanger, which would chill the earth and stop the molten corium in its tracks. To illustrate the nature of the threat they were facing, Pismenny, the head of the lab, arrived at a meeting at Sredmash headquarters in Moscow carrying a large chunk of concrete—melted during their experiments, a deformed pellet of uranium dioxide still embedded within it.

  The Sredmash construction chief apparently needed no more convincing. “Build it,” he said.

  13

  * * *

  Inside Hospital Number Six

  “Two steps back! Two steps back, otherwise I will not talk to anyone! Two steps back!”

  The chief economist of the Pripyat city council climbed onto a stool and surveyed the mob that packed the small room and the hallway beyond, snaking down the stairs and into the street outside. Normally a sweet-natured woman with an easy laugh, Svetlana Kirichenko had now spent days marooned in Polesskoye—a small town with rutted streets, a modest square, and a monument to Lenin, about fifty kilometers west of the Chernobyl station. She and the handful of remaining staff from the Pripyat ispolkom had set up an office in the Polesskoye town hall and were now facing the wrath and confusion of their exiled citizenry. The frustrated crowd pressed forward, demanding to see the mayor; they sat bawling children on her desk; they asked what they could do with sick grandparents and when they would receive their salaries; above all, they wanted to know when they could return home.

  By the time night fell on Sunday, April 27, at least twenty-one thousand people had been swept from their modern apartments in Pripyat and dropped off by bus in more than fifty small towns and villages scattered across the sodden flatlands of northwestern Ukraine. Told they would need to prepare for only three days away from home, the uprooted families soon ran out of food, money, and clean clothes, and then discovered that even what they had thought was clean was not. When a dosimetrist set up an improvised monitoring station at a desk in the street outside the Polesskoye town hospital, a line of evacuees formed in front of him. The queue moved quickly but never seemed to shorten. Touching his monitoring device to the clothes, hair, and shoes of one person after another, the dosimetrist chanted a slow mantra in a tired, flat voice: “Clean . . . Contaminated . . . Contaminated . . . . Clean . . . Shake out your clothes downwind . . . Clean . . . Contaminated . . . Contaminated . . . Contaminated . . .”

  At first, many of the peasant families who took in the evacuees were kind and hospitable, and they made the best of it. Viktor Brukhanov’s wife, Valentina, a trained engineer, was lodged with a laboratory chief on a collective farm in the village of Rozvazhev, where she took to milking cows. But Valentina had been separated from both her pregnant daughter and her mother during the evacuation and had no idea what had befallen her husband or where any of them might be—and had no way of finding out.

  Thirty kilometers away, Natalia Yuvchenko and her two-year-old son, Kirill, were among the 1,200 refugees who had been billeted among the clay-and-thatch homes of Lugoviki, a rural settlement on the River Uzh without a single telephone. The last time she had seen her husband, Alexander, he had been waving to her from inside his hospital ward in Pripyat and telling her to go home and close the windows. Since then, she had received no information about where he had been taken or what condition he might be in. With two other families from her building in Pripyat, Yuvchenko and her son were taken in by an elderly peasant couple who gave up the bedroom of their small house for the newcomers. Yuvchenko and the others with young children shared the bed; everyone else slept on the floor. On Monday, the old man took the children fishing, but Kirill was still sick, and the house was damp.

  By Tuesday, there was no longer enough food to feed three families, and Yuvchenko was almost out of money. She appealed to her former neighbor: “Sergei, let’s get out of here,” she said, and together they gathered enough cash for bus tickets to Kiev. When they arrived, she took Kirill to the airport and boarded a flight for Moldova, where her parents and Alexander’s parents still lived directly across the street from one another. From there, Yuvchenko set out, once more, to find out what had happened to her husband.

  By Wednesday, the official information blackout about the accident remained in force, concealing the news from even those at other atomic plants. But some details had begun to leak, and the two families worked their connections to discover what they could. Through an uncle in Moscow with military contacts, Natalia Yuvchenko established that the most badly injured men from the plant had been taken to a special hospital in the city, part of the Third Directorate of the health care system, reserved for workers in the Soviet nuclear industry. Yuvchenko and her mother-in-law flew to Moscow that morning and found a city apparently unaware of the crisis in Ukraine, bustling with preparations for the following day’s May Day celebrations.

  The two women immediately disagreed about where they could find Alexander. Natalia had been given an address of a hospital in a highly restricted area, on the grounds of the Soviet Institute of Biophysics. But Alexander’s mother had learned of another location—a cancer research center on Kashirskoye Shosse, in an entirely different part of the city, and she insisted her sources were correct; Natalia didn’t want to argue. When the staff at the oncology center told them that they had no patient by the name of Alexander Yuvchenko, the two women hailed a cab and told the driver to take them all the way across town, to Hospital Number Six.

  It was midafternoon by the time they reached their destination, but when she saw it, Yuvchenko knew immediately that she had come to the right place. Nine stories of austere brown brick surrounded by a lawn and a cast-iron fence, Hospital Number Six itself looked unremarkable, but the scene surrounding it was not: the entrances were closely guarded, and technicians with radiation monitoring equipment were checking the shoes and pants of everyone entering and leaving the building.

  A crowd had gathered directly outside the main entry checkpoint. Among those clustered there were many faces Yuvchenko recognized from Pripyat. All were as bewildered and frightened as she was, but none was being allowed inside the hospital. Instead, as Yuvchenko stood watching, a doctor emerged from the front door and began reading aloud from a list of names of the patients from the Chernobyl plant and their current condition. The crowd was noisy and anxious, pushing, jostling, and shouting questions; when some couldn’t hear what the physician said, he had to repeat himself again and again. Even so, straining to separate his words from the hubbub, Yuvchenko heard no mention whatever of her husband. Finally, she elbowed her way through to the front of th
e huddle.

  “What about Alexander Yuvchenko?” she asked. The doctor looked up from the list.

  “You,” he said. “Come inside with me.”

  * * *

  The first patients from the plant had landed in Moscow soon after dawn on Sunday, April 27. They had been met at Vnukovo Airport by doctors clad in PVC aprons and protective suits, and buses with seats sheathed in polyethylene. The specialists of Hospital Number Six—a six-hundred-bed facility reserved for treatment of the nuclear workers of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and home to two floors dedicated to radiation medicine—had cleared the entire department in preparation for their arrival. Some were still in the same clothes they had been wearing at the moment of the explosion; many were covered with radioactive dust; and once they had been admitted to the hospital, their transport proved beyond the limits of practical decontamination. The aircraft that delivered the first wave of patients was dismantled, and one bus was sent to the campus of the Kurchatov Institute, where it was driven into a pit and buried.

  By evening on Sunday, a total of 207 men and women, mostly plant operators and firemen—but also security guards who had remained at their posts beside the burning unit, construction workers who had waited at a bus stop beneath the plume of fallout, and the anglers from beside the inlet channel—had been admitted to the wards of the hospital. One hundred fifteen of them were initially diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Ten had received such massive doses of radiation that the doctors immediately regarded their survival as impossible.

  The head of the Clinical Department of Hospital Number Six was sixty-two-year-old Dr. Angelina Guskova. She had begun her career in radiation medicine more than three decades before, at the genesis of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. In 1949 she had just qualified as a neurologist when she was ordered to Chelyabinsk-40, the closed city in the southern Urals, to treat soldiers and Gulag prisoners working in the plutonium factories of the Mayak Production Association. Sent to one of the most sensitive and secret locations in the USSR, even professionals like Guskova often had little idea where they were going, and once they arrived, they were forbidden from leaving or communicating with the outside world. When Guskova failed to return from Mayak after two years, her mother assumed she had been arrested, swallowed in the dungeons of the KGB. But while her mother wrote letters petitioning for her release by the secret police, the young doctor was forging a new career on the harsh frontiers of biophysics.

  In Mayak, Guskova encountered the first victims of acute radiation sickness she had ever seen: thirteen Gulag prisoners who arrived in her clinic suffering from nausea and vomiting. Failing to understand their symptoms, the doctor treated them for food poisoning and sent them back to work. It was only when the men returned, complaining of fever and internal bleeding, that she discovered that they had been exposed to terrible fields of radiation while digging trenches in the soil near Radiochemical Factory Number 25, which had been heavily contaminated with radionuclides. By that time, at least one unfortunate prisoner had already received what was regarded as a lethal dose: 600 rem.

  Later, the young women who worked at the benches inside the factory began to suffer from another mysterious malady, which rendered them weak and dizzy and led to an aching so severe it made one victim want to “climb the walls.” Guskova would be among the first physicians in history to record the symptoms of this new disease—chronic radiation sickness, or CRS—caused by long-term low-level exposure to radioactive isotopes. She devised methods of screening and treating it, produced studies that suggested to her bosses in Sredmash that workers’ exposure to radiation caused little harm if managed carefully, and was quickly promoted. She traveled to the secret weapon proving grounds of Semipalatinsk—the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of Kazakh steppe known as “the Polygon”—to witness the first Soviet atom tests and treated the cameramen who rushed into the blast area immediately after the explosions to recover their film. Guskova became personal physician to the father of the bomb, Igor Kurchatov himself, and in September 1957 she was in Mayak to give emergency aid to the victims of the USSR’s first nuclear disaster, following the explosion of Waste Tank Number Fourteen. That same year, at the age of thirty-three, she was appointed to the new radiation medicine clinic being established at the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow.

  Over the next thirty years, the nuclear empire of the newly formulated Ministry of Medium Machine Building expanded with ferocious speed, in a gallop toward Armageddon that spared little time for safety. The price of progress was paid by unfortunate reactor technicians and irradiated submariners who one by one fell in their traces before receiving clandestine burials or being sent for examination in Moscow at Guskova’s department in Hospital Number Six. The accidents themselves remained secret, and, afterward, those patients who survived were forbidden from disclosing the true cause of the illnesses that would dog them for the rest of their lives. But Guskova and her colleagues gathered an awful bounty of clinical information about the impact of radioactivity on human beings. Alarmed by the refusal of Sredmash to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the breakneck development of the atomic power industry, in 1970 she completed a book that described the possible consequences of a serious accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. But when she presented the manuscript to the deputy health minister of the USSR, he threw it furiously across his office and forbade her from publishing it. The following year, she codified her clinical findings from her years of treatment in the book Radiation Sickness in Man, for which she was awarded the Lenin Prize.

  By 1986, Guskova had spent more than ten years presiding over the largest radioactive injury clinic in the USSR. She had treated more than a thousand victims of severe radiation exposure and knew perhaps more than any other physician in the world about nuclear accidents. A committed Communist, and one of few women in the upper echelons of Soviet medical administration, she was tough minded and widely feared by her staff but remained proud of the work she had done to protect the people and security of the USSR. She lived alone in an apartment on the grounds of Hospital Number Six, the phone at her bedside ready to alert her of the next nuclear emergency.

  * * *

  It took only a few moments for Natalia Yuvchenko to pass through the checkpoint, mount the five stone steps, and cross the threshold of Hospital Number Six. But the time stretched into an eternity of numb horror. This is the end, she thought.

  Only once the massive wooden doors of the hospital closed behind her did Yuvchenko discover the truth. She had been picked from the crowd not to be told that she was a widow but because of the privileged status granted by her family connections.

  Through his contacts with the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, Natalia’s uncle had arranged for a special pass that would admit her to the hospital. He had spent hours waiting for her inside earlier that morning, bewildered by why she was taking so long to arrive.

  Yuvchenko climbed into a narrow, cramped elevator—just large enough to hold two people and the operator. The hospital was dim and crumbling, with parquet floors and high ceilings. Here and there, loose wires dangled from holes in the walls. Everyone working there, from the soldiers mopping the hallways, to the doctors and technicians, was identically gowned in white or blue, with caps and masks covering mouths and noses. Damp cloths lay folded across the threshold of each room, to keep radioactive dust at bay. When the elevator shuddered to a stop at the eighth floor, Yuvchenko opened the door and turned left, into room 801. And there, sharing the space with a man she didn’t recognize—a firefighter named Pravik—was Alexander. His thick, unruly hair had been clipped down to the scalp.

  “Damn!” he said. “Look how ridiculous I am! Look at this head!”

  After the days of fears and uncertainty since she’d last seen him, Natalia felt only joy. Regardless of whatever had happened to him that night at the plant, here was the same Sasha she had always known: he didn’t look like someone who belonged in a specialist hospital.


  By the time they awoke in their hospital beds on Monday morning, Yuvchenko and the other operators from the plant—including Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov, Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov, and the young senior reactor control engineer, Leonid Toptunov—no longer felt the acute effects of radiation sickness. The dizziness and vomiting that had seized them in the early hours of Saturday had passed. The firefighters—big, healthy young men who had gone to work that night filled with strength and vitality—were once again boisterous and cheerful and sat playing cards on their beds. Some felt so well that it was all the doctors could do to prevent them from discharging themselves. The remaining symptoms of their ordeal now seemed mild: some men were left with searing headaches, loss of appetite, and a dryness in the mouth that no amount of drinking seemed to slake. Others noticed a reddening of their skin and mild swelling where they had been exposed to gamma rays or radioactive water had splashed on them or soaked through their clothes.

  Alexander Yuvchenko’s head had been shaved by a nurse when he arrived—as part of a protocol devised following the Mayak disaster, when heavily exposed victims had been profoundly shocked to find their hair falling out in clumps, weeks after the accident. The radioactivity in some of the Chernobyl operators’ hair now registered a thousand times higher than normal, and once cut, it was gathered in a plastic bag for burial. But Sasha seemed happy enough to joke about his baldness and otherwise looked fine. What could be wrong?

  He told Natalia he didn’t want to talk in the room. “Let’s go and have a smoke,” he said.