Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Even so, the patients and their families had high hopes for the imminent arrival of the American doctor they had heard about and the vaunted expertise and life-saving foreign medicines he would bring.

  * * *

  After checking in to the Sovietskaya Hotel near Red Square on Friday evening, Robert Gale rose early the next morning, pulled on a singlet emblazoned with the letters “USA,” and went for an eight-mile run through the streets of Moscow. Afterward, he met Alexander Baranov for breakfast at the hotel. Gaunt and bald, Baranov was a pioneering Soviet surgeon responsible for the first bone marrow transplant ever performed in the USSR, but he had the haunted look of a man who had watched many of his patients die in agony. He chain-smoked constantly and was in the habit of improvising ashtrays from scraps of paper, which he crumpled into the trash each time he finished a cigarette. After breakfast, the two men were driven to Hospital Number Six, where Baranov introduced Gale to Angelina Guskova. She was cordial but disappointed that the boyish-looking American surgeon arrived carrying only a small bag and not the expensive Western equipment she had been led to expect. Afterward, Baranov took him to visit the patients on the eighth floor.

  Up here was the hospital’s sterile unit, where the transplant recipients recovered after their operations. Until the transplanted marrow cells became sufficiently well established to begin producing blood components—a process that could take two weeks or a month—the patients’ immune systems would be all but useless, leaving them susceptible to hemorrhages, minor infections, and even pathogenic attack from the bacteria in their own intestines, any of which might prove fatal.

  In the sterile unit, Gale found four patients sealed inside “life islands”—plastic bubbles designed to provide a vital line of defense in the doctors’ battle to keep the men alive long enough for the marrow cells to engraft. The patients breathed air that had been filtered or passed through a duct where it was sterilized by ultraviolet light. To further isolate them from infection, they could be reached only by staff whose hands and clothing had been sterilized or through portholes in the plastic fitted with gloves. Because the hospital had far fewer life islands than it needed, their use was rationed. To Gale, who had never seen a beta burn before in his life, the four men he examined that afternoon appeared sick, but not alarmingly so. He participated in his first transplant procedure, assisting Baranov in drawing marrow from a donor, soon afterward.

  After he had received the transfusion from his sister, Vasily Ignatenko was transferred to the eighth floor and placed in a life island. The staff tried to keep his wife out, but Ludmilla got in anyway, reaching into the bubble to moisturize his lips. Young soldiers now came to his room instead of nurses, wearing gloves to give him injections and disposing of blood and plasma. No one wanted to be in the room anymore—perhaps, Ludmilla thought, for fear of contamination. Some of the staff, especially the younger ones, had become irrationally terrified of the patients and believed that the radiation disease was somehow infectious, like the plague.

  Ignatenko recovered quickly from the transplant procedure. But his overall condition had already begun a sudden and frightening slide. His appearance changed from minute to minute: his skin changed color, his body became distended. He had difficulty sleeping, so they gave him tranquilizers, adding to the dozens of pills he had to take every day. His hair began to fall out, and he became angry. “What’s all this about?” he asked. “They said I’d be bad for two weeks! Look how long it’s been!”

  Gradually it became harder and harder for him to breathe. Cracks covered his arms; his legs swelled and turned blue. Eventually the painkillers stopped working. By Sunday, May 4, he could no longer stand.

  * * *

  The worst-affected patients in Hospital Number Six were attacked from both without and within. As their white blood cell counts collapsed, infection crawled across the skin of the young operators and firemen: Thick black blisters of herpes simplex encrusted their lips and the inside of their mouths. Candida rendered their gums red and lacy, and the skin peeled back, leaving them the color of raw meat. Painful ulcers developed on their arms, legs, and torsos, where they had been burned by beta particles. Unlike thermal burns caused by heat alone, which heal slowly over time, radiation burns grow gradually worse—so their external beta burns expanded outward in waves from wherever radioactive material had touched them and ate into the tissue below. The men’s body hair and eyebrows fell out, and their skin darkened—first red, then purple, before finally it became a papery brown-black and curled away in sheets.

  Inside their bodies, the gamma radiation ate away the lining of their intestines and corroded their lungs. Anatoly Kurguz, who had fought to close the airlock door to the reactor hall in the moments after the explosion and was enveloped in steam and dust, had so much cesium inside his body that he became a dangerous source of radiation. He began having hysterical fits, and one of the doctors, the burns specialist Dr. Anzhelika Barabanova, had to physically lie down on top of him, using her bodyweight to make him remain in bed. Radiation readings around Kurguz’s room eventually became so high that the head of the department had to move from her office next door to elsewhere in the hospital; the parquet flooring in the hall outside it was so contaminated that it was taken up and replaced.

  Within the first twelve days after the accident, Alexander Baranov and Robert Gale conducted fourteen bone marrow operations, and Armand Hammer and the Sandoz Corporation arranged for hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of medicines and equipment to be air-freighted into Moscow from the West; Gale received Soviet approval to bring in more colleagues from New York and Los Angeles. But the doctors knew that much of their effort was probably futile: afterward, Gale announced at a press conference in Moscow that as many as three-quarters of their transplant patients would probably die.

  For Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov, who had spent hours bombarded from all sides by energetic sources of gamma rays and wading in contaminated water, the transfusion of marrow from his twin brother could do nothing to arrest his metabolic collapse. His contaminated overalls alone had exposed him to 10 grays—equivalent to 1,000 rem of radiation, causing a beta burn that covered almost his entire body, with the exception of a thick band of unexposed skin around his waist, where the overalls had been fastened with a heavy military belt. But Akimov had also received a separate dose of 10 grays to the lungs, resulting in acute pneumonia. His temperature rose; his intestines disintegrated and oozed from his body in bloody diarrhea. On one visit, his wife, Luba, looked back from the window and noticed her husband had begun pulling out his mustache in tufts.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  Akimov knew that he might not leave the hospital alive, but while he remained well enough to speak, he told a friend that if he lived, he’d like to pursue his love of hunting and become a gamekeeper. Luba suggested that they could live on a river with their two sons, tending buoys and regulating navigation, just as Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov’s father had done. Whatever happened, Akimov was sure of one thing: “I’ll never go back to work in the nuclear field,” he said. “I’ll do anything. . . . I’ll start my life from scratch, but I’ll never go back to reactors.”

  By the time Sergei Yankovsky, the chief investigator of the Kiev prosecutor’s office, came to Akimov’s room to question him about the accident, the engineer’s body had become grossly swollen. He could barely speak. The doctors had little time for the investigators and now demanded to know why Yankovsky was torturing a dying man. They told him that Akimov wouldn’t last more than a few more days. The detective’s attempts at interrogation proved useless.

  Before he left, Yankovsky bent close to the stricken nuclear engineer’s bed. “If you remember anything,” he said, “just write it down.”

  On May 6 Akimov celebrated his thirty-third birthday. Soon afterward, he fell into a coma.

  * * *

  On the evening of Friday, May 9—Victory Day, marking the Soviet triumph over the
Nazis in the Second World War—the patients watched from the windows of the hospital as another fireworks display lit the sky. But this time they felt little happiness. Vasily Ignatenko had begun to shed his skin, and his body bled. He coughed and gasped for air. Blood trickled from his mouth. Lying alone in his room, Piotr Khmel received an encouraging note from his friend Pravik, delivered by one of the doctors: “Congratulations on the holiday! See you soon!” Khmel hadn’t seen his old classmate since they had arrived in the hospital together twelve days earlier and now had no idea where in the building he might be. But he scribbled his own note in reply, reciprocating the greeting.

  The deaths began the next day. The first was a firefighter from the Chernobyl power plant brigade, Sergeant Vladimir Tishura, who had climbed to the roof with Pravik minutes after the explosion. On May 11 Pravik and Kibenok—the commander of the Pripyat brigade—both succumbed to their injuries. Grotesque rumors would later reach Pravik’s men back in Ukraine: that he had been exposed to such intense radiation that the color of his eyes had changed from brown to blue, and doctors found blisters on his heart. That same day, Alexander Akimov became the first of the plant operators to slip away: he died with his eyes open, his skin black.

  Dr. Guskova now forbade further communication among the patients, confining them to their rooms. Outside the windows, the trees were in full bloom; the weather was perfect. Beyond the fence on Marshal Novikov Street, Moscow went about its business as usual. Those men and women who survived lay alone in their beds, attached to IVs or blood exchange machines for hour after hour, often with only the nurses for company. News of further losses among their friends and colleagues came in whispers from relatives and the disquieting sound of loaded gurneys rolling down the long corridors of the hospital.

  While the first of his comrades from Unit Four were taken to the cemetery, Alexander Yuvchenko’s ordeal was just beginning. As the doctors had warned, the beta burns on his body were slow to reveal themselves. At first, small red spots appeared on the back of his neck. Then more lesions arose on his left shoulder blade, hip, and calf, where he had braced himself against the massive door of the reactor hall, and the slime of beta- and gamma-emitting radionuclides covering it had soaked through his wet overalls.

  Yuvchenko moved into intensive care, one of only four gravely ill men held in separate rooms on a single floor. Next door was his boss, reactor shift foreman Valery Perevozchenko. The former marine had taken a huge dose of gamma rays when he entered the reactor hall and gazed into the burning core—but had kept Yuvchenko from looking inside, sparing him the worst of the radiation. Still the burns on Yuvchenko’s body darkened and spread, and his skin blackened and peeled away, revealing tender, baby-pink flesh beneath. And what had begun on his shoulder blade as something like a sunburn gradually blistered and necrotized, turning yellow and waxy as the radiation ate down toward the bone. The pain became almost unbearable, and the nurses administered morphine. The doctors began discussing the need to amputate and summoned special equipment from Leningrad to determine if his arm could be saved.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, May 13, Ludmilla Ignatenko took the bus out to Mitino cemetery in the northwest suburbs of Moscow with her friends Nadia Pravik and Tanya Kibenok, whose husbands had died two days earlier. She watched as the men’s bodies were lowered into the ground. Ludmilla had left the hospital at nine that morning to prepare for the journey but gave instructions to the nurses to tell Vasily that she was merely taking a rest. By the time she returned to Hospital Number Six that afternoon, her husband, too, was dead. The morticians who came to prepare him for burial found his body so swollen they couldn’t get him into his uniform. When he was eventually laid to rest beside his comrades in Mitino, the young fireman’s corpse was sealed inside two thick plastic bags, a wooden coffin, and a zinc box, nested together like an irradiated matryoshka doll.

  That same day, Valery Perevozchenko succumbed to his injuries. Natalia Yuvchenko tried to keep the news from her husband, but, from his bed, Alexander heard the beeping of the machines in the room next door fall silent. On May 14 three more operators from Unit Four died, including Leonid Toptunov, whose parents stayed at his bedside until the end. With 90 percent of his skin covered by beta burns, and his lungs destroyed by gamma radiation, the young man awoke late that night gasping for breath. He suffocated before his bone marrow transplant could take effect. In the end, the doctors calculated that he had absorbed 1,300 rem of radiation, more than three times the lethal dose. Viktor Proskuryakov, one of the two trainees who had ventured out onto the gantry with Perevozchenko and gazed into the burning reactor, was covered in terrible burns, especially on his hands, where he had held Yuvchenko’s flashlight. He hung on for three more days but died on the night of May 17.

  By the end of the third week in May, the death toll from the accident had reached twenty, and Alexander Yuvchenko grew frightened. His white blood cell counts plunged to zero, and his remaining hair fell out. When will it be my turn? he wondered. Alone in their rooms, the most seriously injured survivors began to fear the darkness, and the lights in some wards were kept on almost constantly.

  A good Communist, Yuvchenko wasn’t religious and knew no prayers. Yet each evening, he lay awake and pleaded with God to let him live through one more night.

  14

  * * *

  The Liquidators

  On Wednesday, May 14, 1986, more than two and a half weeks after the explosion inside Unit Four, Mikhail Gorbachev finally appeared on TV to address the accident in public for the first time. Reading from a prepared statement on Vremya to its audience of two hundred million people distributed across thirteen time zones and broadcast live simultaneously on CNN, the most telegenic leader in the history of the Soviet Union now looked wan, lost, and haunted. The accident at Chernobyl “has sharply affected the Soviet people and raised the concern of international society,” he said—in a speech that sometimes veered into the defensive, often flared with anger, and eventually wound on for twenty-six minutes.

  Gorbachev railed against the “mountain of lies” told by the United States and its NATO allies about the accident, part of what he called a “vile” campaign to distract attention from their failure to engage with his recent proposals for nuclear disarmament. He thanked Robert Gale and Hans Blix and expressed his sympathy for the families of the dead and injured. “The Soviet government will take care of the families of those killed and of those who have suffered,” he said. He assured viewers that the worst was behind them, but warned that the task was far from over: “This is the first time that we have truly encountered a force as terrible as nuclear energy escaping human control. . . . We are working twenty-four hours a day. The whole country’s economic, technical, and scientific resources have been mobilized.”

  Forty-eight hours earlier, the Soviet defense minister—Hero of the Soviet Union Marshal Sergey Sokolov—had arrived in Chernobyl accompanied by a team of senior staff officers and medical administrators from his ministry. A military task force, spearheaded by the radiation specialists of the chemical warfare troops and the civil defense, had been arriving in the thirty-kilometer zone since the beginning of the month. Young men in Kiev, Minsk, and Tallinn had been summoned from their workplaces—or roused by a knock on the door in the middle of the night—and taken to be issued uniforms, sworn under oath, and told they should consider themselves to be at war. They learned their final destination only once they arrived in the zone. Now Marshal Sokolov, who had sent the Soviet armed forces across the border into Afghanistan in 1979, had come to lead his men on one more heroic military campaign to protect the motherland, which would become formally known as “the Liquidation of the Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident.”

  From every republic of the USSR, men, women, and equipment poured into Chernobyl, as the full might of the centralized state—and the largest army on earth—ground into desperate action. Soldiers and heavy equipment flew in aboard huge Ilyushin-76 military transport planes. Scientist
s, engineers, and other civilian workers arrived from everywhere between Riga and Vladivostok. Bureaucratic strictures, plan targets, and financial priorities were abandoned. With a single telephone call, any necessary resources could be rushed to the station from almost anywhere in the Union: tunneling experts and rolled lead sheets from Kazakhstan; spot welding machines from Leningrad; graphite blocks from Chelyabinsk; fishing net from Murmansk; 325 submersible pumps and 30,000 sets of cotton overalls from Moldova.

  The spirit of patriotic mass mobilization was boosted by the first detailed coverage of the accident appearing in the Soviet press, as the propaganda experts in the Kremlin finally found an angle on the catastrophe. Izvestia and Pravda published awestruck blow-by-blow accounts of the courageous sacrifice of the firefighters who helped battle the initial blaze, alongside portraits of the miners and subway workers busy tunneling beneath the ruins. Although these stories appeared to bear the hallmarks of glasnost—frank descriptions of the dangers of radiation and visits to the injured men in Hospital Number Six—the openness was circumscribed. There was no room for talk of confusion, incompetence, or lack of safety precautions; each of the firemen apparently strode selflessly into danger fully aware of the risks he faced, ready to take his place in the pantheon of Soviet heroes. The causes of the accident were not explored. Elsewhere, it was made clear that the emergency would soon be over. According to the weekly newspaper Literaturna Ukraina, the atom “had temporarily got out of control.” Soviet scientists “had a solid handle on everything taking place in and around the reactor.” The residents of the evacuated territory, the newspapers reported, would be able to return to their homes just as soon as decontamination work had been completed.