Meanwhile, behind closed doors in Moscow, a bureaucratic battle had begun over the joint Report on the Causes of the Accident in Unit Four of the Chernobyl AES, the confidential version of events being prepared for the Politburo. In memos, meetings, and multiple interim documents, the barons of the Soviet nuclear industry—the scientists and the heads of the competing ministries that controlled it—competed to divert blame from themselves, ideally before the final report reached General Secretary Gorbachev.
The conflict was hardly an even match: on one side was the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the nuclear design bureau NIKIET, and the Kurchatov Institute, each headed by its respective octogenarian Titan of Socialist science, all veteran apparatchiks of the old guard: former revolutionary cavalryman Efim Slavsky; Nikolai Dollezhal, designer of the first-ever Soviet reactor; and Anatoly Aleksandrov, the massive, bald-headed Buddha of the Atom himself. These were the men who had created the RBMK, but had also ignored more than ten years of warnings about its shortcomings. On the other side was the Ministry of Energy, represented by the fifty-six-year-old nuclear neophyte Anatoly Mayorets. His ministry had built the plant, operated the reactor—and was responsible for the training and discipline of the staff who had blown it up.
The disputes began almost at once, with the completion of the commission’s preliminary report on the causes of the disaster, just ten days after the explosion, on May 5. Overseen by Meshkov, Slavsky’s deputy at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, it unsurprisingly laid the blame for the accident on the operators: they had disabled key safety systems, flouted the regulations, and conducted the test without consulting with the reactor designers; Senior Reactor Control Operator Leonid Toptunov had pressed the AZ-5 button in a desperate and futile bid to stop the accident after it had begun, triggered as a result of his and his colleagues’ simple incompetence. Toptunov and Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov were unlikely to contest this version of events: both would be conveniently dead within ten days.
But the specialists from the Ministry of Energy refused to put their signatures on the joint investigation report. Instead, they produced a separate appendix, based upon their own independent investigation. This opinion suggested that—whatever the operators’ mistakes—Reactor Number Four could never have exploded were it not for the profound defects in its design, including the positive void coefficient and the faulty control rods that made reactivity increase rather than decrease. Their detailed technical analysis raised the possibility that pressing the AZ-5 button, instead of safely shutting down the reactor, as it was supposed to do, may have caused the explosion.
In response, Aleksandrov convened two special sessions of the nuclear industry’s Interagency Scientific and Technical Council to consider the causes of the accident. But, despite its name, the council was packed with Ministry of Medium Machine Building staff and former boosters of the RBMK and chaired by Aleksandrov, who held the patent on its design. The meetings went on for hours, yet Aleksandrov used all his considerable skill to squash talk of the reactor’s failings and returned again and again to general discussion of the operators’ mistakes. When that failed, Slavsky—“the Ayatollah”—simply shouted down those whose opinions he didn’t want to hear. The representative from the state nuclear regulator was never even permitted to report on his proposed design revisions, intended to improve the safety of the reactor.
But Gennadi Shasharin, Mayorets’s deputy responsible for nuclear matters at the Ministry of Energy, refused to concede defeat. Following the second Interagency Council meeting, he drafted a letter to Gorbachev outlining the actual reasons for the accident and describing the attempts by Aleksandrov and Slavsky to bury the truth about the reactor design faults. Shasharin acknowledged the failures of the plant staff but argued that concentrating on these faults merely revealed the lack of organization and discipline at the plant: “they do not bring us closer to identification of the real causes of the disaster.” And the deputy minister explained that however hard they tried, they wouldn’t be able to hide the truth forever. The global scale of the disaster ensured that the international scientific community would demand to learn the technical details of the accident sequence. “Sooner or later,” Shasharin warned the general secretary, “they will become known to a broad circle of reactor specialists in our country and abroad.”
* * *
Viktor Brukhanov returned from the visit to his family in Crimea at the end of May. On arriving in Kiev, he phoned the power plant and asked for a car to collect him from the airport. There was an awkward pause on the line, and he knew something was wrong. When he reached the plant, Brukhanov went up to his office on the third floor of the administrative building. There, he found the windows covered with sheets of lead and another man sitting behind his desk. In the first of what would be many public humiliations for the beleaguered manager, no one had bothered to inform him that he was no longer in charge.
“What are we going to do with Brukhanov?” the new director asked his chief engineer. The two men decided to invent a position for him: deputy head of the Industrial-Technical Department, a sinecure in a back office where he could be kept busy while he awaited his fate. They both knew it was only a matter of time before he would be called to answer for his crimes.
* * *
Inside the headquarters of the Second Department of the Soviet Prosecutor General’s Office, in a secret high-security building on Granovskogo Street in Moscow, the interrogations continued. Sergei Yankovsky’s inquiries had now broadened to include the designers and scientists who had created and overseen the RBMK, and the academicians were summoned for questioning just like everyone else. Yankovsky brought in the reactor designer Nikolai Dollezhal, and the aging nuclear baron assured the detective that the blame for the explosion lay solely with the operators; there was nothing at all wrong with his design.
By the end of the summer, the investigation of the reactor designers would be broken off into a separate criminal case, while that of the plant operators gained momentum. Yankovsky crisscrossed the Union in pursuit of information. He flew to Sverdlovsk to confiscate documents and interrogate staff at the factory where the giant main circulating water pumps used in Unit Four had been manufactured. He spent ten days in Gorky, where nuclear expert Andrei Sakharov was being kept in internal exile as punishment for his human rights campaigning, taking with him punch card printouts from the reactor’s computer system in the hope that Sakharov could assist in their analysis. And, back in Ukraine, Yankovsky visited other nuclear power plants to gather evidence about previous accidents. Everywhere he went, he was shadowed by officers of the KGB, sent to ensure the continued secrecy of everything his investigation uncovered.
* * *
On Wednesday, July 2, Viktor Brukhanov was called back to Kiev and handed a plane ticket to Moscow, where his presence was required the next day at a meeting of the Politburo. Before leaving, he went to bid farewell to Malomuzh, the deputy Party secretary for the region. The secretary had never before treated Brukhanov with anything but icy formality yet now seized him in a sudden embrace. It wasn’t a good sign, but by now, the deposed director had resigned himself to his fate.
At precisely eleven o’clock the following morning, the Politburo gathered in a gloomy third-floor conference hall in the Kremlin. The room was filled with small desks, and Brukhanov found himself among the venerable leaders of the Soviet nuclear industry—including Aleksandrov, Slavsky, and Valery Legasov—all seated like so many errant schoolboys. The obligatory portrait of Lenin glared from the wall above them. General Secretary Gorbachev opened the session and asked Boris Scherbina to present his government commission’s final report on the causes of the disaster.
“The accident was the result of severe violations of the maintenance schedule by the operating staff and also of serious design flaws in the reactor,” the chairman began. “But these causes are not on the same scale. The commission believes that the thing that triggered the accident was mistakes by the operating pers
onnel.”
This was the preferred narrative of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building—and yet Scherbina went on to admit that the failings of the reactor were extensive and insoluble. The RBMK was not up to modern safety standards and even before the accident would never have been permitted to operate beyond the borders of the USSR. In fact, he said, the reactor was so potentially hazardous that his specialists recommended existing plans to build any more should be scrapped.
By the time Scherbina had finished, Gorbachev was furious. His anger and frustration had been building for weeks as the catastrophe bloomed. He had struggled to find accurate information about what was happening, and his personal reputation in the West—as a reformer, a man one could do business with—had been tarnished by the fumbled attempts at a cover-up. He now accused Slavsky and Aleksandrov of presiding over a secret state and deliberately concealing from him the truth about why the accident had happened in the first place. “For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you as gods. That’s the reason why all this happened, why it ended in disaster. There was nobody controlling the ministries and scientific centers,” he said. “And for the moment, I can see no signs that you have drawn the necessary conclusions. In fact, it seems that you are attempting to cover everything up.”
The meeting blazed on for hours. Lunchtime came and went. Gorbachev asked Brukhanov if he knew about Three Mile Island and about the history of accidents at the Chernobyl station; the director was surprised by how polite the general secretary seemed. Slavsky continued to blame the operators, while Gorbachev’s hardline deputy, Ligachev, clung to the flotsam of Soviet pride. “We showed the world that we’re able to cope,” he said. “No one was allowed to panic.” The representatives of the Ministry of Energy admitted they had known that there were problems with the reactor, but Aleksandrov and Slavsky had nevertheless insisted on constantly expanding the nuclear power program.
At one point, Meshkov unwisely insisted that the reactor was still perfectly safe if the regulations were followed precisely.
“You astonish me,” Gorbachev replied.
Then Valery Legasov admitted that the scientists had failed the Soviet people. “It is our fault, of course,” he said. “We should have been keeping an eye on the reactor.”
“The accident was inevitable. . . . If it hadn’t happened here and now, it would have happened somewhere else,” said Prime Minister Ryzhkov, who argued that the intoxicating power handed to Aleksandrov and Slavsky had proved their undoing. “We have been heading toward this for a long time.”
As it approached seven o’clock in the evening—after almost eight hours of uninterrupted debate—Gorbachev presented his conclusions and proposed punishments for all those he held culpable. These were drafted into a resolution, which included a twenty-five-point action plan, and put to the vote before the Politburo eleven days later. In it, the Party leaders faulted Brukhanov and the chief engineer, Fomin, for tolerating rule breaking and “criminal negligence” inside the plant and for failing to safely prepare for the test during which the accident took place. They criticized the Ministry of Energy for its slipshod management, neglect of staff training, and for becoming complacent about the number of equipment accidents inside the nuclear plants under its jurisdiction. Finally, they attacked the state nuclear regulatory authority for its lack of effective oversight.
But the Politburo resolution also plainly recognized the true origins of the accident that destroyed Reactor Number Four. The catastrophe occurred “due to deficiencies in the construction of the RBMK reactor, which does not fully meet safety demands,” it stated. Furthermore, although Efim Slavsky was well aware of these shortcomings and received numerous warnings, he had done nothing to address the failings of the reactor design.
The Politburo reserved the harshest discipline for the middle ranks of the apparat. Meshkov, deputy head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, and Shasharin, the deputy minister responsible for nuclear power at the Ministry of Energy, together with the deputy head of the nuclear design bureau, NIKIET, were all dismissed from their posts. Viktor Brukhanov was stripped of his Party membership and put on a plane back to Kiev in disgrace.
But they also proposed sweeping changes throughout the industries and organizations whose failings had been exposed by the accident. The resolution instructed the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense to equip and retrain troops and firefighters to deal with radiological emergencies and decontamination work. Gosplan and the Ministry of Energy should reexamine their long-term expectations of nuclear electricity. Standards of training and safety should be overhauled and oversight of nuclear energy unified under a new Ministry of Atomic Energy. Finally—in an implicit acknowledgment of all that was wrong with the reactor itself—the Party leaders decreed that all existing RBMK plants should be modified to bring them into line with existing safety standards. Plans to build further RBMK reactors were terminated immediately.
Yet those at the top of the nuclear industry, who had supervised the project from the start, escaped overt censure almost entirely. Slavsky—who, by now, was overseeing the construction of the Sarcophagus, intended to entomb the failed reactor forever—and Aleksandrov were merely reminded of their commitment to ensuring the safety of the peaceful atom. Nikolai Dollezhal’s name wasn’t mentioned at all.
At the end of the marathon meeting, Gorbachev underscored the profound international impact of the catastrophe. It had sullied the reputation of Soviet technology, and everything they did was now under global scrutiny. It was now imperative, he said, to be completely frank about what had happened, not only with fellow Socialist countries but also with the IAEA and the international community. “Openness is of huge benefit to us,” he said. “If we don’t reveal everything the way we should, we’ll suffer.”
Not everyone agreed. The following day, officers of the Sixth Directorate of the KGB circulated a list of subjects relating to the Chernobyl accident regarded as classified to varying degrees. Covering two sheets of typescript, the document listed twenty-six numbered items. At the top, marked Sekretno—“Secret”—was item one: “Information revealing the real reasons for the accident in Unit Four.”
* * *
On his arrival in Kiev, Viktor Brukhanov was taken to the Leningrad Hotel and summoned the next morning to give a statement in the offices of the public prosecutor. The investigator gave him a list of questions, and Brukhanov wrote out his answers by hand. The statement eventually filled ninety pages, and when it was finished, he was driven back to the Fairy Tale Pioneer camp.
On the evening of Saturday, July 19, the official version of the Politburo’s verdict was announced on Vremya. It was unequivocal and damning. Through the findings of the government commission, the anchor said, “it was established that the accident had been caused by a series of gross breaches of the operational regulations of the reactor by workers at the atomic power station. . . . Irresponsibility, negligence, and indiscipline led to grave consequences.” The statement included a list of the ministers who had been dismissed and concluded with the news that Brukhanov had been expelled from the Party. The Prosecutor General’s Office of the USSR had launched an investigation, and court proceedings would follow. There was no mention of any design faults in the reactor.
The next morning, the news was emblazoned on the front pages of Pravda, Izvestia, and all other Soviet newspapers; the Politburo statement would also be printed in full by the New York Times. That day in Moscow, a reporter for the Canadian Globe and Mail found a woman cleaning a statue of Lenin and asked her view of the guilty men. “They should all be thrown in jail,” she said.
At home in Tashkent, where she lived with one of her three younger children, Brukhanov’s elderly mother was watching TV when the news broke. When she learned of her eldest son’s downfall, she staggered out of her apartment and into the street, where she suffered a heart attack and died. A few days later in Kiev, the Central Committe
e of the Communist Party of Ukraine handed down its own verdicts, ejecting Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin for ordering the test that had led to the explosion, for “flagrant errors and omissions in work,” and removing plant Party secretary Serhiy Parashyn from his position.
By the second week of August, Viktor Brukhanov had returned from his mother’s funeral in Uzbekistan and, along with hundreds of other plant staff and liquidators, was billeted aboard one of eleven river cruise ships moored on a picturesque bend in the Dnieper some forty kilometers from the Chernobyl station. On August 12 the deputy chief engineer of the plant came back from a trip to Kiev bearing a summons with Brukhanov’s name on it, instructing him to report, at 10:00 a.m. the next day, to room 205 of the prosecutor’s office, on Reznitskaya Street in Kiev. There, after three further hours of interrogation and an hour’s break for lunch, Brukhanov was formally charged, under Article 220, paragraph 2, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, with “a breach of safety regulations in explosion-prone plants or facilities” and arrested. Led out through the back door by two men in civilian clothes, he was driven to a KGB holding cell, where he would spend much of the next year.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 32