Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  * * *

  By the beginning of June, the thirty-kilometer zone had become a radioactive battlefield encircled by a besieging army. The detritus of combat—abandoned vehicles, wrecked equipment, zigzagging trenches, and massive earthworks—lay everywhere around the plant. But even as dosimetrists in protective suits roamed the open landscape and military helicopters crisscrossed the sky overhead, the banished citizens of Pripyat began trying to return to their homes. Looting was already a problem, and each person had something they needed urgently to retrieve from the city. Some had left behind identity cards and passports; others, large sums of money; some simply wanted their everyday belongings. On June 6 alone, Ukrainian MVD troops turned back twenty-six of the city’s former residents either trying to pass checkpoints or cross the perimeter of the forbidden zone without the requisite documentation.

  On June 3 the leader of the government commission issued orders that attempts to make Pripyat habitable cease, with immediate effect. The members of the Pripyat city council—the ispolkom—had found a new temporary home in an abandoned office building on Sovietskaya Street in Chernobyl town, and it was here, a few days later, that a KGB officer came to find Maria Protsenko. He had served in Afghanistan, and—unlike so many of his colleagues in the secret police—struck her as warm and polite. He told the architect that he needed help creating a new map of Pripyat. They were going to put up a fence around the city, he said, and he’d like her advice on where it should go. Dutifully unfolding her 1:2000 scale map once more, Protsenko sketched yet another copy, and together they examined the best and shortest route to take: enclosing the main buildings but cutting off the cemetery; avoiding places where digging might sever the sewer pipes and electricity cables vital to the urban infrastructure. She asked the important questions: how the soldiers would dig the footings, what kind of equipment they would use, how they would drive in the posts. She told herself that they were simply protecting the city from thieves and looters.

  On June 10, engineering troops of the Twenty-Fifth Motorized Rifle Division arrived in Pripyat with supplies of barbed wire, wooden posts, and tractors equipped with giant augers. Driven on by the knowledge that they were at work in a high-radiation zone, they moved with amazing dispatch, and, within seventy-two hours, their task was complete: Protsenko’s beloved atomgrad was enclosed behind a twenty-strand fence 2 meters high and 9.6 kilometers in circumference, patrolled by armed guards. Soon afterward, a centralized electronic alarm system, devised by the Special Technical Division of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, was installed inside the perimeter to keep intruders out of the city.

  Around the edge of the 30-kilometer zone, the engineers also cut a track between 10 and 20 meters wide through swamps, forests, and across rivers—out of Ukraine and through Belarus, building bridges and digging culverts. Wild dogs ran through the unharvested wheat in the fields as the men drove seventy thousand posts into the ground and strung 4 million meters of barbed wire between them. In some places, they found the radiation levels so high that they decided to expand the edge of the zone as they went, improvising the perimeter to include the new hot spots of contamination. By June 24, they had completed a 195-kilometer alarmed fence around the entire Exclusion Zone. Pripyat and the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station now lay at the center of a vast depopulated area of 2,600 square kilometers, patrolled by soldiers from the Interior Ministry and accessible only to holders of a government-issued pass.

  Still, Maria Protsenko continued to hold tight to her faith in what the Party leaders had told her: the evacuation was only temporary. One day—perhaps not soon, but at some time in the future—the stain of radiation would be scrubbed from the city, and she and her family would be allowed to return to their homes on the banks of the river.

  But as the summer days began to shorten, and Protsenko continued to conduct the work of the city ispolkom from exile in Chernobyl, her responsibilities focused more and more on the developing bureaucracy of the nuclear no-man’s-land; she learned to sense which of the specialists visiting her office had come directly from the Special Zone around the reactor—by the scent of ozone rising from their clothes. At the same time, she received official instructions to help arrange for the evacuated citizens to visit their apartments and collect their furniture and personal belongings. A twelve-person committee met to agree on what could be removed and how it might be done. They made plans to summon 150 furniture trucks from all over the oblast, to deploy a team of 50 dosimetrists to take radiation measurements in people’s apartments and at checkpoints, to find buses to transport the visitors across the zone, and to requisition a half million polyethylene bags to contain their effects. After two weeks of planning, the operation was ready to begin when someone pointed out that completing it was impossible: the citizens of Pripyat remained homeless and therefore had nowhere to put any of the belongings they would remove from the abandoned city.

  Eventually, Protsenko befriended a group of physicists from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences who had come to monitor levels of radiation in the zone, and it was they who finally told her the truth. General Pikalov’s chemical troops would go on to conduct a five-month campaign of decontaminating the streets and apartment blocks of the atomgrad, but it was intended only to contain the further spread of dangerous radioactivity. The government commission calculated that cleaning the city to make it habitable once more would require a dedicated force of 160,000 men. The price of such an operation would be unimaginable.

  “Forget it,” the physicists told her. “You will never return to Pripyat.”

  15

  * * *

  The Investigation

  When Sergei Yankovsky arrived on the accident scene shortly before dawn on April 26, he wondered why he had bothered.

  Just thirty, slight and bucktoothed, the chief investigator of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Kiev Region had been a detective for almost six years. He worked “crimes against the person”: rape, assault, armed robbery, suicide, and murder, as well as criminal negligence at work. While the KGB was busy locking up people for telling jokes about Brezhnev, and nonideological crime was—according to the precepts of Marxism-Leninism—supposed to be a strictly capitalist problem, Yankovsky found plenty to keep him busy.

  Vodka, in particular, was a powerful engine of violent or sudden death. Weddings and funerals often ended in fights, stabbings—or, in winter, with men falling asleep outdoors, only to be discovered frozen stiff the next morning; deadly workplace accidents were common. On one kolkhoz in Yankovsky’s district, five combine harvester drivers passed out in a wheat field after a vodka-heavy lunch, unaware that a sixth would prove more conscientious; by the time he realized what had happened, his five comrades had all been cut to pieces beneath the blades of his combine. In 1981 alone, Yankovsky sent 230 bodies to the morgue.

  It had been two in the morning when he was woken by a phone call from his boss, Valery Danilenko, the deputy regional prosecutor in charge of investigations. Twenty minutes later, the chief was waiting outside Yankovsky’s Kiev apartment in the department’s mobile crime laboratory: a minibus full of equipment, painted in militsia colors, with red and blue lights and a siren. There was a fire at the Chernobyl station, he said, and they were going to investigate.

  The road to the plant was practically empty, and they made good time through the silent countryside, the inky outlines of trees and electricity pylons silhouetted sharply against the flat horizon. If he saw another car, the driver flicked on the siren. As they approached the plant, they sped past a column of fire engines heading in the same direction.

  Yet when they arrived at the power station, drawing up two hundred meters from the fourth reactor, the scene seemed oddly quiet. It was not yet fully light, and Yankovsky could see some mist or fog hanging above the building. But there were no flames. There were the fire trucks, but he couldn’t make out any signs of great catastrophe. The investigator spotted someone standing in the gloaming who was idly smoking a cigarette, watchin
g the water cascading through the wreckage.

  “Hey! What happened here?” Yankovsky asked.

  “Oh, something blew up,” the man replied. Casually—as if it happened all the time.

  The locals could have handled this, thought Yankovsky.

  “Why did they call us out?” he said to Danilenko. “Why did they get us up so early?” It all seemed like a waste of time.

  “Wait—wait a minute,” Danilenko said. “Something isn’t right here.”

  Together they headed to the main administration building of the plant. The leading regional officials were already there. Malomuzh, the Party chief from Kiev, was in the middle of a briefing.

  “What are you doing here?” Malomuzh asked the detectives. “We can deal with this ourselves. The fire is already out. And the unit will be running again in no time.”

  But when they drove over to Pripyat, they found the police station full of Ukrainian Interior Ministry bigwigs. More information was starting to come in: men had been admitted to Hospital Number 126, burned and vomiting; the KGB was out on the perimeter of the plant, looking for saboteurs. It was clear that something serious had happened. Danilenko went for a meeting with his supervisor, the top regional prosecutor. Meanwhile, the local policemen gave Yankovsky a car and an office to use.

  It was around 6:00 a.m. when Danilenko returned. The regional prosecutor had made a decision.

  “We’re opening a case,” he told Yankovsky. “We’re pressing charges.”

  The detective sat down at a typewriter, drew a single piece of paper around the cylinder, and began to type.

  * * *

  The investigation into the causes of the accident in Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that began in the early hours of April 26 developed along two parallel paths. The first, the criminal inquiry, escalated in scope and importance over the course of the day, as the impact of the disaster slowly became apparent. By lunchtime, as Sergei Yankovsky and a handful of colleagues spread out across Pripyat and the plant site, interrogating the operators in the hospital and seizing documents from the control rooms of the station, it was no longer a regional investigation but a republican one. Then, just before nightfall, the deputy prosecutor general of the USSR arrived from Moscow with new instructions. He ordered the creation of a special investigative group within the Second Department of the prosecutor’s office of the Soviet Union, the division dedicated to crimes committed within the state’s closed military and nuclear installations. The entire investigation was henceforth classified as top secret.

  That same evening, the government commission in Pripyat also launched a technical and scientific inquiry, entrusted to Academician Valery Legasov—but overseen by Alexander Meshkov, the deputy head of the all-powerful Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which had designed the reactor in the first place. Meshkov concluded quickly that the cause of the accident had surely been operator error. The water pumps had been overloaded, the backup cooling system had been switched off, the reactor had run dry, and some kind of explosion had resulted. This was the much-feared, but predictable, maximum design-basis accident that every member of the operational staff was trained to guard against.

  But the following morning, a pair of experts on RBMK reactors from the Kurchatov Institute flew into Kiev from Moscow to begin a forensic analysis of the data from the reactor. On their way by road from Zhuliany Airport to Pripyat, the scientists were held up by an endless stream of buses coming in the opposite direction and didn’t reach their destination until evening. The next day, they went to the bunker beneath the station, where they gathered the logbooks from Unit Four, the computer printouts from the reactor’s diagnostic and registration system, and tapes recording the conversations of the operators in the minutes before the explosion. As they examined the data, the physicists discerned the broad sweep of events that led up to the accident: the reactor running at low power; the withdrawal of almost every one of the control rods from the core; muffled voices, a shout of “Press the button!”, and the activation of the AZ-5 emergency system. Finally, they saw the pen trace lines showing reactor power beginning a steep ascent until suddenly they rose vertically and ran off the top of the page.

  To one of the two specialists, Alexander Kalugin, who had dedicated his career to the RBMK project, it all seemed chillingly familiar. Two years earlier, he had attended a meeting of the reactor design bureau, NIKIET, at which someone had suggested that—under certain circumstances—the descending control rods might displace water from the bottom of the core and cause a sudden spike in reactivity. At that time, the institute’s scientists had dismissed this concern as too improbable to worry about. Now, as Kalugin gazed in dismay at the fearsome geometry of the computer printouts from Reactor Number Four, it seemed all too possible.

  But until the data could be subjected to detailed analysis, Kalugin’s idea remained merely a discomfiting theory. In the meantime, the experts phoned Legasov with their initial analysis. On the afternoon of Monday, April 28, a telegram arrived at the Politburo in Moscow: CAUSE OF ACCIDENT UNRULY AND UNCONTROLLABLE POWER SURGE IN THE REACTOR.

  Yet the question of how this power surge had been triggered remained unresolved. The search for appropriate scapegoats began immediately.

  * * *

  By the end of the first week in May, the team of reactor specialists from the Kurchatov Institute had returned to their campus in Moscow and started decrypting the information contained in sacks full of documents, punch card printouts, manuals, and reels of magnetic tape recovered from the recording and diagnostic systems of Unit Four. Every one of the computers at the institute was turned over to the task and began working twenty-four hours a day to decode the data and reconstruct the final hours of the reactor. Meanwhile, the investigators from the prosecutor’s office and the KGB continued to walk the wards of Hospital Number Six, interrogating the engineers and operators of the plant even as they began to lapse into comas and die.

  Back at the station, Director Viktor Brukhanov remained at his post, outwardly as impassive as ever, but exhausted and stricken by the deaths of his men, crushed by the burden of responsibility he felt for the catastrophe all around him. Each day, he fulfilled the instructions of the government commission as best he could but was absorbed in replacing specialist staff who had already been hospitalized or become too irradiated to continue work at the plant. At the end of each day, he returned to the Fairy Tale Pioneer camp, where, together with his senior colleagues, he had bunked in the camp library. Lying between the bookshelves at night, they talked for hours about what could have caused the catastrophe, but barely slept.

  When Sergei Yankovsky came to interrogate the director about his role in the accident, he found him in the infirmary. “Damn it,” Brukhanov told him, “I trusted Fomin. I thought it was an electrical test. I didn’t think it would turn out like this.” The detective mocked him with a quotation from the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, an infamous suicide: “Perhaps tomorrow, the hospital bed will bring me eternal peace.”

  Soon afterward, the nuclear engineer and author Grigori Medvedev visited the accident scene and stumbled upon Brukhanov loitering in the hallway at the headquarters of the government commission in Chernobyl town. The academicians, Velikhov and Legasov, were sharing an office down the corridor with the Soviet minister of nuclear energy, where they were still struggling to contain fears of the China Syndrome. Brukhanov wore the white overalls of the plant operator; his eyes were red, his skin chalky, and a dejected expression had settled into the deep creases of his face.

  “You don’t look well,” Medvedev said.

  “Nobody needs me,” Brukhanov said. “I’m just bobbing around like a piece of shit in an ice hole. I’m no use to anybody here.”

  “And where is Fomin?”

  “He went crazy. They sent him away for a rest.”

  Two weeks later, on May 22, Brukhanov submitted a request to the nuclear energy minister, Anatoly Mayorets, seeking permission to take time off to visi
t his wife, Valentina, and their son, Oleg, who had been evacuated to the Crimea. Mayorets gave his approval, and Brukhanov flew south for a week’s holiday.

  In his absence, the minister made arrangements to have Brukhanov permanently removed from his position as director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

  * * *

  While the investigation continued, Soviet leaders suggested in public that the accident was the result of an all-but-impossible confluence of events, triggered by the operators. “The cause lies apparently in the subjective realm, in human error,” Politburo member—and future Russian president—Boris Yeltsin told a correspondent from West German TV. “We are undertaking measures to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

  “The accident was caused by a combination of highly improbable technical factors,” Andranik Petrosyants, the chairman of the Soviet State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy, wrote in a statement published by the Los Angeles Times. “We are inclined to believe that the personnel made mistakes that complicated the situation.” Petrosyants pledged that as soon as the inquiry was complete, a full report into the causes of the disaster would be presented at an international conference of the IAEA at the organization’s headquarters in Vienna.

  The task of leading the Soviet delegation and collating the report for the conference—which promised an unprecedented glimpse into one of the most clandestine redoubts of Soviet science—and preparing it for public consumption was assigned to Valery Legasov. Hardliners inside the Ministry of Medium Machine Building opposed his appointment, fearing that he would be hard to control. The academician had returned home from Chernobyl for the second time, on May 13, a changed man, his hands and face darkened by a radioactive tan, his ideological confidence shaken. With tears in his eyes, he described to his wife how overwhelmed they had been by the accident, how unprepared they were to protect the Soviet people from its consequences: the lack of clean water, uncontaminated food, and stable iodine. An examination at Hospital Number Six revealed the toxic fingerprint of the reactor deep within Legasov’s body: doctors found fission products, including iodine 131, cesium 134 and 137, tellurium 132, and ruthenium 103, in his hair, airways, and lungs. His health shattered, he suffered from headaches, nausea, digestive problems, and chronic insomnia. Nevertheless, Legasov threw himself into collating material for the report, which was compiled from the work of dozens of specialists and hundreds of documents. He worked day and night in his office at the Kurchatov Institute and continued at home, as he and his colleagues compared their statistics until he was certain everything was accurate. He covered the floor of his living room in the villa at Pekhotnaya 26 with piles of papers, which crept down the corridor and climbed the stairs.