Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Bocharov and his engineers set up their headquarters directly in front of Unit Four, in a building with meter-thick concrete walls, which before the accident had been intended as a storage facility for liquid radioactive waste. In the inside-out world of the zone, it was now one of the least contaminated places in the station complex, and it was here that Commission Chairman Boris Scherbina attended daily briefings on the project, forwarding updates to Gorbachev every twenty-four hours. Efim Slavsky, the octogenarian head of Sredmash, was a constant visitor. From inside the makeshift bunker, the engineers oversaw the assembly of the Sarcophagus using a network of remote-controlled television cameras. Keeping their eyes on a bank of TV screens displaying feeds from the deadliest parts of the construction site, they shouted instructions—“Up!” “Down!” “Left!” “Right!”—to the crane drivers through walkie-talkies. The Demag operators themselves drove blind, cocooned in their cabins by sheets of lead fifteen centimeters thick, seeing nothing but close-up black-and-white images of their own crane hooks flickering on a small monitor.

  Bocharov, too, worked in the dark. Even as final assembly began, he had no blueprints of the Sarcophagus and could not take reliable measurements within the ruins. He worked instead from aerial photographs of Unit Four shot from helicopters or by satellite and looked through binoculars from the lead-lined observation post up on mark +67 in Unit Three. When it finally became impossible to proceed without surveying the scene in person, the technicians of NIKIMT produced yet another creative solution. The batiskaf—bathyscaphe—was a twenty-tonne lead cabin, with a single porthole of leaded glass thirty centimeters thick, which dangled on a five-meter cable from the hook of a Demag crane. With enough space inside to accommodate four men, the bathyscaphe, lifted a hundred meters in the air, could be “flown” by crane over Unit Four and allowed the engineers to descend into even the most radioactive areas of the site in relative safety.

  The chief designer’s plan for covering the reactor was simple but risky. He had proposed a roof built from twenty-seven massive steel pipes, laid side by side over beams supported by what remained of the walls of the reactor building and covered with concrete. But radiation made it impossible to assess how badly damaged these supporting walls were or estimate their ability to bear the weight of the new roof. If they collapsed, the physicists feared it could cause a new explosion.

  When they hoisted the Airplane roof beam into position, it was so heavy that one of the main cables on the Demag crane snapped, parting abruptly with the crack of a cannon shot. According to Bocharov, the crane operator, fearing a fatal collapse, leapt from his lead-lined cab and fled in terror. It was another twenty-four hours before the cable could be replaced and a new driver found to winch the piece into position.

  And when Bocharov took Boris Scherbina up to the observation post on mark +67 to show him the intended foundation site of the largest and most important beam—the 180-tonne Mammoth, designed to support the roof covering the entire southern side of the Sarcophagus—the chairman was horrified. All he could see to rest the beam upon was a tangled mess of wreckage, including not just broken concrete and tangled pipework but also the remains of office furniture jutting from the rubble. “Are you crazy?” he asked Bocharov. “It’s impossible! Find another way.”

  But there was no other way. The completion of the entire structure now rested on the successful installation of this single, massive piece of steel. If he couldn’t make it work, they would have to start the Sarcophagus again from the beginning. Bocharov decided to scout the foundation site in person, on foot.

  * * *

  By late autumn, tens of thousands of middle-aged partizans had been drafted from across the Soviet Union and put to work in the high-radiation areas of the zone until they reached their 25 rem limit. Afterward, they were decontaminated and demobilized and told to sign a pledge of secrecy before being sent back to where they had come from, clutching a small cardboard booklet: the official record of their total accumulated dose. Few regarded this document as accurate. Before leaving, some were presented with awards for distinguished service and given a choice of reward: cassette player or watch? Many returned to their homes and sought to purge the radiation from their bodies with vodka. Regardless of the triumphant headlines in Pravda and Izvestia, the bitter truth about the conditions they faced spread gradually through towns and cities across the USSR. As a result, when reservists received the draft notice summoning them for “special training,” they increasingly knew what it meant. Some bribed the draft officer to stay at home: while a deferment from the war in Afghanistan could reportedly be bought for 1,000 rubles, escaping from duty in Chernobyl cost only half as much. And inside some tented encampments on the perimeter of the zone, commanders faced mutiny from their troops. One group of two hundred Estonian partizans, told that their tour was being extended from two to six months, gathered in a furious mob and refused to go back to work. Military police patrols in Kiev picked up senior officers who had deserted their men, drunkenly attempting to flee the city by train.

  But there were still many who volunteered to work in Chernobyl, attracted by word of the high wages, paid as a bonus for service in the high-radiation zone, or who were motivated by scientific curiosity—or the chance to sacrifice themselves for the motherland, as their fathers and grandfathers had done in the Great Patriotic War.

  Vladimir Usatenko was thirty-six years old when he was drafted on October 17, one of eighty partizans flown from Kharkov to Kiev aboard an Ilyushin-76 transport plane and driven in a fleet of trucks to a tent encampment near the power plant. An engineer who had performed his national service as a radio operator in the Soviet missile defense forces, he could have bribed his way out but chose not to do so. Inside the zone, he found total chaos: there were uniformed soldiers everywhere, scurrying to their tasks like green ants, but the senior officers seemed to have little idea what was going on. Gangs of troops lollygagged in high-radiation areas, awaiting instructions or watching while others worked, apparently ignorant of their mounting doses.

  Usatenko assumed command of a platoon of men, and the noncommissioned officers who had been there a while warned him to look after himself: pay no attention to the commanders, and save your lads from the worst of the radiation. Almost immediately, they were assigned to work for Sredmash US-605 inside the machine hall, beneath the rising walls of the Sarcophagus. Usatenko took eight men up to level +24.5, where the concrete barrier between Units Three and Four was still under construction, and spent an hour nailing wooden boards along the wall. Everything they did was supposed to be secret, and the soldiers never learned the purpose of their work: here, a stack of boards; there, hammers; here, nails. Get to it. The jobs varied, but in the most important ways, they were all the same: backbreaking, manual, inexplicable. They hauled forty-liter sacks filled with water into the basement of the building as part of a chain of men mixing concrete by hand, threw abandoned fire hoses from the roof, and collected debris from beneath the bubbler pool—told to simply pick up whatever they could find and bring it out quickly.

  It was dark and humid inside the Sarcophagus, and Usatenko’s biggest fear was of losing his men somewhere inside the benighted labyrinth. But there was heavy radiation everywhere, and, in certain rooms, they could feel it popping against their eyeballs, like an invisible spray; in others, they found that Sredmash had installed speakers relaying a constant, low-frequency roar—an aural warning not to linger. Elsewhere, the construction specialists from US-605 slung garlands of 36-volt lamps along the walls and watched the partizans’ progress through TV cameras from their lead-lined observation booths. At last, when given the command to work inside a room right beside the reactor—where, after a single minute, their dosimeters reached their maximum readings—Usatenko and his men rebelled. They went toward the room, but then pushed over the camera monitoring the entrance and hid in safety until the time allotted for the task was up. It took the US-605 technicians ten days to install a new video camera. By then, Usa
tenko and his men were gone.

  Vladimir Usatenko would eventually complete twenty-eight missions inside Units Three and Four and spend a total of forty-four days inside the zone. But he found no great patriots there. Everyone he talked to wanted only to catch his regulation 25 rem and get home as soon as possible.

  * * *

  Led by a physicist from the Kurchatov Institute who knew the route and accompanied by a cameraman weighed down by cumbersome video equipment, Lev Bocharov, the chief engineer of the final shift of US-605, made his way into the ruins of Unit Four, toward the foundation site of the Mammoth beam. The men mounted a staircase, wrenched away from the wall by the explosion and now hanging in space at a fun-house angle. At mark +24, they turned down a darkened corridor and started to run. But the farther they went, the lower the ceiling became: they realized slowly that the hallway had been filled with errant Sredmash concrete. By the time they reached the end of the black passageway, Bocharov and his team had to crouch and then wriggled through a space forty centimeters high, each holding the legs of the man in front. On level +39, they finally saw daylight: an exit hole close to the place where the Mammoth would rest. Leaving the others behind, Bocharov sprinted out across the rubble. Three minutes later, he returned, with a large dose of radiation—and a plan.

  Using a Demag crane, the bathyscaphe, a team of sixty partizans handpicked for their speed and fitness, and a supply of fishing net flown in overnight from the Arctic port of Murmansk, Bocharov improvised a concrete platform, poured on top of the debris at level +51. A series of hasty loading tests assured the engineers that this foundation would be strong enough to bear the weight of the Mammoth. At ten in the evening on the first of November, the massive beam was finally lowered into place. For the first time since the liquidation began, Efim Slavsky was seen to smile.

  After that, work moved quickly: with the poisonous maw of the reactor finally covered, the Sredmash teams installed a ventilation system to stabilize the atmosphere inside the Sarcophagus and connected a network of radiation- and temperature-monitoring devices to a freshly decontaminated room nearby filled with computer equipment. There was still no sign of the missing 180 tonnes of uranium from the reactor core, and Academician Legasov and the other scientists remained concerned about the possibility of a new chain reaction. So inside the new structure the Sredmash engineers also installed a sprinkler system, supervised by the Kurchatov Institute, designed to spray the ruins with neutron-absorbing boron carbide solution and coat everything with a film to suppress any new criticality as soon as it started. Finally, the roof and windows of the Unit Four machine hall were layered with steel plates, and the western end of the reactor hall was shored up with a row of ten massive steel buttresses, each forty-five meters high.

  When Slavsky arrived to survey the project once more, on November 13, the Sarcophagus was all but complete—a terrible edifice of black angles, still and ominous, which perfectly expressed its purpose, like a medieval fantasy of a prison to hold Satan himself. It was an extraordinary achievement, a technical triumph in the face of horrifying conditions, and a new pinnacle of Soviet gigantomania: the engineers boasted that the structure contained 440,000 cubic meters of concrete, 600,000 cubic meters of gravel, and 7,700 tonnes of metal. The costs had risen to more than 1 million rubles—or $1.5 million—a day. As he gazed up at his masterpiece, a cathedral of brutalism in concrete and steel, it was said that tears welled in the old man’s eyes.

  It would be Slavsky’s final achievement as the leader of the sprawling Sredmash empire. A week later, Prime Minister Ryzhkov summoned him to his office in the Kremlin and asked for his resignation. Slavsky scribbled a single sentence in his distinctive blue pencil: “I’ve become deaf in my left ear, so please dismiss me,” a truculent parting shot that made clear his feelings about being forced to step down when he felt he had so much more to give. Slavsky was eighty-eight years old and six months short of celebrating thirty years at the head of Sredmash. When news of his departure reached the headquarters of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building on Bolshaya Ordynka Street in Moscow, his staff wept with grief.

  * * *

  The document formally commissioning the Sarcophagus received its final signature on November 30, 1986, just seven months and four days after the first explosions tore through Reactor Number Four. On December 3, Lev Bocharov completed his tour in the Special Zone. Winter had come to Ukraine, and the first snow would soon fall on the Sarcophagus. He arrived at the railway station in Kiev muffled in the cold-weather jacket and striped undershirt issued to the troops in Afghanistan. With a handful of colleagues, Bocharov boarded the overnight train to Moscow carrying a large cardboard box filled with bottles of vodka. On the way home, they all had a drink.

  When the train pulled into Moscow early the following morning, Bocharov thought they would be greeted at the station like conquering heroes, but there were no crowds on the platform to meet them. He saw only his wife, a friend who had driven her in his car to collect him—and a soldier back from the Afghan quagmire, who recognized the engineer’s fur-collared camouflage.

  “Kandahar?” the soldier asked.

  “Chernobyl,” Bocharov said.

  The soldier put an arm around his shoulder. “Brother, you had a tougher job.”

  17

  * * *

  The Forbidden Zone

  By the beginning of August 1986, the number of graves in the special section of the clean new cemetery near the village of Mitino in the suburbs of Moscow had risen to twenty-five. They stood in two rows, fifty meters from the yellow-tiled crematorium at the entrance, with space for more. Some had white marble headstones, with inscriptions lettered in gold and adorned with a Soviet star; others, so fresh that they were little more than dirt mounds, were scattered with flowers and marked with pieces of cardboard. Crows circled overhead. When inquisitive Western reporters made the trip out to the graveyard and tried to record the names of the dead, police officers confiscated their notebooks and silently led them away.

  In September, Dr. Angelina Guskova announced that a total of thirty-one men and women were now dead as a direct result of the explosion and fire in Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This number would henceforth be regarded as the official death toll of the accident. Anything higher was treated as evidence of bourgeois Western propaganda. The body of pump operator Valery Khodemchuk, killed immediately by the blast or by falling debris, remained buried beneath the wreckage of the reactor hall; his colleague Vladimir Shashenok, who had died as a result of physical trauma and thermal burns a few hours later in the Pripyat hospital, had been laid to rest in the graveyard of a small village near the power station. Since then, twenty-nine more victims—operators, firemen, and security staff—had succumbed to the effects of acute radiation syndrome in the radiology wards of Kiev and the specialized clinic in Moscow. Of the thirteen patients who had been treated with bone marrow transplants by Robert Gale and the Soviet specialists, all but one had died—so many that Guskova would eventually dismiss the technique as useless for managing ARS. Yet many of those who had sustained terrible injuries in the first hours of the disaster, after months of agonizing treatment in Hospital Number Six, had at last begun to recover.

  Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, who had insisted on proceeding with the fateful turbine experiment over the objections of his subordinates and then spent hours wandering in disbelief through the wreckage of Unit Four, had sustained ghastly beta radiation burns on his lower legs and absorbed a total dose of 550 rem but was released from the hospital at the start of November. He returned to Kiev and soon after was arrested and placed in pretrial detention. Major Leonid Telyatnikov, who had commanded the Chernobyl plant’s fire brigade on the night of the accident, had not been told about the deaths of his men until July, when he was released from isolation to walk the hallways of the hospital unaided, wearing a gauze mask to protect him from infection. In August, he was discharged and sent to recuperate at a resort on the Latvian c
oast with his wife and two children, but told to avoid too much sunshine—and fatty foods, because of radiation damage to his liver. The following month, he had recovered sufficiently to visit his parents in Kazakhstan.

  The doctors regarded the survival of some of the most badly exposed operators as almost miraculous. One electrical engineer, Andrei Tormozin, had been only 120 meters from the reactor when it exploded, and then spent hours in highly radioactive areas of the machine hall, working to stop feed pumps and extinguish oil fires. He had absorbed what Guskova and the other specialists had always understood to be a mortal dose of gamma and beta radiation: almost 1,000 rem. His body rejected a bone marrow transplant; he contracted blood poisoning and radiation-induced hepatitis and was not expected to live. But at the end of May, his blood counts began to rally, and—for reasons the doctors could never fully explain—he eventually made a complete recovery.

  Alexander Yuvchenko, who had listened as the machines sustaining his friends in adjacent rooms fell silent one by one, had himself lingered close to death throughout the month of May. For weeks, his wife, Natalia, woke each morning in a nearby hostel, fearing what might have happened overnight, and asked her mother to phone the hospital. Superstitious, Yuvchenko hoped that if she didn’t call the doctors herself, the news about her husband’s condition would be better. When his bone marrow function collapsed, the physicians kept him going with blood transfusions, and Natalia scoured the city for scarce and expensive ingredients to keep up his strength. She brought black caviar sandwiches to his bedside; his friend Sasha Korol came to visit and insisted he try ketchup instead. But Yuvchenko proved unable to eat anything, and he was placed on an IV.