Brukhanov—along with four other senior members of the plant staff, including Dyatlov and Fomin—was charged formally under Article 220, paragraph 2, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, under which he was accused of “a breach of safety regulations” resulting in loss of life or other serious consequences at “explosion-prone plants or facilities.” This was an inventive legal gambit—never before had Soviet jurists considered a nuclear power station an installation likely to explode—and the first of many logical contortions necessary to confine responsibility for the accident to the handful of selected scapegoats. To bolster the case, Brukhanov and Fomin were also charged under Article 165 of the Criminal Code with abuse of power. Brukhanov was accused of deliberately underreporting the radiation readings at the station on the morning of the accident, thereby delaying the evacuation of the station and of Pripyat, and knowingly sending men into the most dangerously contaminated areas of the reactor building. If found guilty, the three most senior members of the plant staff each faced a maximum of ten years in prison.
Scheduled to begin on March 18, 1987, the trial was delayed when it became obvious that Deputy Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin remained too mentally unstable to take the stand. Placed under arrest at the same time as Brukhanov, he had attempted suicide in prison, shattering his spectacles and using the fragments to slash his wrists. While the wretched technician was sent to the hospital to recuperate, the trial was postponed until later in the year.
* * *
Maria Protsenko returned to Pripyat for almost the last time in January 1987. Bundled against the cold in a padded cotton jacket and pants, thick felt valenki on her feet, she led a small squad of soldiers up the snow-covered steps of the White House. They went from room to room in the deserted city council building, cleaning out every cupboard and safe, filling sacks with documents too contaminated to be consigned to the archives of the bottomless Soviet bureaucracy but too sensitive to leave behind. When they had finished, Protsenko collected the key to every office door in the building, while the soldiers threw the sacks into the back of a truck. They then drove them away to be buried in one of the growing patchwork of eight hundred radioactive waste dumps spreading across the Exclusion Zone.
On April 18 that year, local council elections were held for the new atomgrad in Slavutych, the Pripyat administration was formally dissolved, and the city bureaucratically ceased to exist. After working for almost a full year inside the Exclusion Zone with barely a day off, Protsenko was now transferred to a new job in Kiev. In recognition of everything she had endured in the long months since the accident, she was finally permitted to apply for membership in the Communist Party. At the end of the year, Protsenko checked in to a hospital in Kiev and stayed there for more than a month, suffering the symptoms of what the doctors described as “nervous tension” related to overwork. They marked her medical records with the diagnosis “Ordinary illness: not related to ionizing radiation.” Back in Pripyat, the empty ispolkom building became the headquarters of the Kombinat Industrial Association, a new state enterprise established to manage the long-term research and liquidation efforts within the thirty-kilometer zone. Now sole masters of the empty town, the new authority reopened Pripyat’s main swimming pool to give the liquidators somewhere to relax and established an experimental farm in the city’s hothouses, where green-thumbed technicians grew strawberries and cucumbers in irradiated soil.
As the cleanup inside the thirty-kilometer zone ground on, morale among the tens of thousands of liquidators who had been shipped in to perform the dangerous and apparently inexorable task sank ever lower. Dust from highly contaminated areas continued to blow into those that had been cleaned, rendering weeks of work pointless; Kombinat appeared to have been making progress in Pripyat until the KGB learned that their specialists had been reporting readings from only the cleanest areas, and thus underestimating the true levels of radiation in the city by more than ten times. The secret policemen also noted that the liquidators’ food was bad, radiation safety was lacking, workers weren’t even being paid on time, and one radioactive waste dump was being flooded regularly with river water. The Kombinat leaders would eventually be reprimanded by the Party for tolerating nepotism, theft, and drunkenness.
In the meantime, looting from inside the zone had begun on an industrial scale, often initiated by the liquidators themselves and sometimes with the collusion of their commanders. One night, radiation reconnaissance officer Alexander Logachev watched in amazement as a renegade group of soldiers loaded one truck after another with gas stoves and building supplies taken from a heavily radioactive construction warehouse, in the shadow of the plant. “Guys, are you fucking crazy?” he asked, but they carried on regardless, and, by dawn, two massive Antonov 22 heavy lift transport aircraft were on their way to the Siberian military district filled with toxic contraband. Lieutenant Logachev himself joined the pilfering soon enough—although he remained sufficiently professional to decontaminate his stolen goods before taking them beyond the perimeter of the zone.
In Pripyat, the cars and motorcycles left behind by the fleeing population—more than a thousand of them in all, corralled in the center of town—fell victim to scavengers, who stole their windshields and destroyed their bodywork. Some cars had been requisitioned to provide transport for the scientists and technicians within the zone, organized into an improvised motor pool of brightly colored Ladas, Zhigulis, and Moskvitches. The hood and door of each one was painted with a number in a white circle, and details on who was using which one, and where, were noted in a log that Maria Protsenko had carefully kept until her last day on the job. The hundreds of vehicles that remained, too contaminated ever to be returned to their owners, were removed to a radioactive waste zone, where they were crushed, bulldozed into a trench, and buried.
* * *
As the first anniversary of the disaster approached in April 1987, in Moscow the members of the Politburo considered a series of propaganda measures designed to show the USSR’s handling of the disaster in the best possible light. The proposals included story ideas for use on TV and in the scientific press and publications for foreign distribution. The official Soviet report to the IAEA had included seventy pages of detailed radio-medical information provided by Dr. Angelina Guskova and her colleagues—including the collective radiation dose they expected the seventy-five million people in the western USSR to receive as a result of the accident. But the Soviet report had not forecast the total number of additional deaths or sicknesses the contamination might cause, and Western specialists had filled this gap with estimates that infuriated the Soviet doctors. Robert Gale told the press they could expect to see another seventy-five thousand people die of cancers directly attributable to the effects of the disaster, forty thousand of them within the Soviet Union, and the remainder abroad.
So, in spite of the increasing freedoms afforded to the editors and producers of the Party-controlled media by Gorbachev’s glasnost, in this case, the truth would not be allowed to impede a directive to “smash the hostile, prejudiced statements in the Western press.” The deputy chief of the USSR State Committee for Radio and Television proposed a list of twenty-six stories to be carried by the TASS agency, including “Birthplace: Chernobyl,” which followed three hundred children born to evacuees from the Exclusion Zone, showing that they were under constant medical observation, with no evidence of illness; “What Was the Scent of the Winds of April?,” in which the chairman of the Soviet meteorological agency presented data to refute the idea that dangerous radioactive particles fell on Western Europe; and “Palettes of the Spring Marketplace,” a report on the spring fruit and vegetables arriving in Kiev, with dosimetry results showing a reassuring absence of radionuclides.
The final plan, approved on April 10, included counterpropaganda measures to be sent to Soviet embassies abroad and a proposal to allow a delegation of foreign journalists to report directly from the Exclusion Zone. Newspaper reporters from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune finally entered
the area in late June to bear witness to the sterile moonscape of concrete and asphalt surrounding the Sarcophagus, the desiccated pines of the Red Forest, and the empty streets of Pripyat.
Here, more than a year after the accident, the streetlights still came on at night, and operatic music sometimes crackled from the speakers mounted along Kurchatov Street. But the bright pennants that twitched in the breeze above the central square were sun-bleached and tattered, and the laundry on the apartment balconies had begun to rot. Yet still the authorities maintained the illusion that the city was not dead but only sleeping and one morning would be awoken by the footsteps of its returning population.
18
* * *
The Trial
The trial of Viktor Brukhanov and the other five men who stood accused of causing the disaster at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station began on July 7, 1987. Soviet law dictated that a criminal hearing take place within the same district where the alleged crime occurred. But since Pripyat had become a radioactive ghost town, the proceedings were held in the nearest alternative, fourteen kilometers from the plant, in Chernobyl itself. Although subjected to months of decontamination, the city remained at the heart of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone and was accessible only to those issued a government pass. While the trial was nominally open to the public, attendance was therefore restricted to those who worked inside the zone or whom the authorities saw fit to grant entry. Both within the borders of the Soviet Union and beyond, those transfixed by the world’s worst nuclear accident awaited justice, but the Party did not want its legal pantomime disrupted by an intrusive audience. A handful of representatives of the international press, including correspondents from BBC radio and Japanese TV, were invited to attend but would be brought in by bus to witness only the opening and closing of the proceedings, in which nothing but scripted statements would be read. The formerly dilapidated Palace of Culture on the corner of Sovietskaya and Karl Marx streets had been refurbished and repainted to provide the venue for the trial: the theater auditorium filled with new chairs, the walls hung with lustrous gray curtains, and a radiation checkpoint installed at the entrance.
At 1:00 p.m., Judge Raimond Brize of the Supreme Court of the USSR took his place on the stage, and the six defendants, escorted by uniformed Internal Ministry troops, stepped into the dock. For two hours, they sat and listened as Brize read the indictment aloud. Collectively, the six men stood accused of negligence in conducting a dangerous and unsanctioned experiment on Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, resulting in the total destruction of the unit, the release of radioactive fallout, the evacuation of 116,000 individuals from two separate cities and dozens of villages, and the hospitalization of more than two hundred victims of radiation sickness, of whom at least thirty were already dead. The court also heard that the Chernobyl plant had suffered a long history of accidents that had not been addressed or even reported and that what had been regarded as one of the best and most advanced nuclear installations in the USSR had, in fact, operated constantly on the edge of catastrophe as a result of its lax and incompetent management. There was no mention of any faults in the design of the RBMK-1000 reactor.
All five men accused of breaching the safety regulations of an “explosion-prone facility”—including Boris Rogozhkin, the chief of the night shift at the time of the accident, and Alexander Kovalenko, the head of the workshop who had signed off on the test—entered pleas of not guilty. But Brukhanov and Fomin admitted to criminal failures in their performance of official duties, under Article 165—the lesser offense, which carried a sentence of five years in prison. “I think I’m not guilty of the charges brought against me,” Brukhanov told the court. “But as a manager, I was negligent in some ways.”
The hearings began at eleven each morning and continued until seven in the evening, with an hour’s break for lunch. The brassy summer sun beat on the low roof of the small brick courtroom, thickening the atmosphere inside with heat and tension. Yet Brukhanov remained as composed and impassive as ever. Wearing a suit jacket but no tie, he sat with his head slightly raised, listening attentively as the witnesses and experts took the stand. He gave an account of his actions on the night of the accident yet did little to defend himself. He stood by the safety record of the plant and described the impossible nature of his job: the difficulty of recruiting trained staff and the overwhelming burden of being responsible for every detail of both the plant and the city. And yet he told the court it had been beyond his power to order an evacuation of Pripyat; he had not intended to conceal the true levels of radioactivity. Brukhanov claimed that he had not closely read the critical statement on radiation levels around the plant and town before he signed it. When asked by the prosecutor how he could have failed in such an important duty, he remained silent.
During cross-examination, one of the director’s fellow defendants asked him if there was any documentary evidence that the plant had ever been categorized as “explosion prone.” Brukhanov carefully demurred. “The answer to this question is provided in the investigation materials,” he said.
Despite all the humiliations and hardships that had befallen him, and the apparent inevitability of his fate, Brukhanov remained a creature of the system that had molded him. He understood the role the Party expected him to play on the stand and stuck almost unswervingly to the script.
“Who do you think is guilty?” a people’s assessor asked.
“The court will decide,” Brukhanov replied.
“Do you consider yourself the principal offender?” said the prosecutor.
“I think that the shift personnel are—as well as Rogozhkin, Fomin, and Dyatlov.”
“But what about you, as the senior administrator?”
“Me, too.”
* * *
Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin, the once-imperious Party apparatchik, the electrical engineer who had learned nuclear physics by correspondence course, sat before the court a broken man, frowning to himself or staring owlishly away into space. His face pale and glistening with flop sweat, he stood to read aloud from a sheet of prepared remarks. He explained how he had been incapacitated by his car crash months before the accident, staggered under his workload, and appealed in vain to the Ministry of Energy to allow him to restructure the management of the plant. He admitted that he had approved the fateful test program for Reactor Number Four without notifying the nuclear safety authorities or the reactor designers in Moscow and had not even told Brukhanov it was taking place. He described how he had arrived in the bunker at around four on the morning of the accident and yet remained unaware of the scale of destruction or the grievous injuries of his men. The prosecutor said he found the chief engineer’s level of ignorance at this moment “incomprehensible.”
When asked who had caused the accident, Fomin replied, “Dyatlov and Akimov, who deviated from the program.”
Of all the defendants who came before the court, Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov proved the most confrontational. He sat forward in his seat, rigid and alert, waiting to pounce with questions, corrections, demands, and requests for clarifying references to specific documents and directives. He had an acute command of the technical aspects of the testimony, learned more every day from the information disclosed in evidence, and proved combative and truculent. At one point, when pressed by one of the assembled experts about the reactivity margin of the reactor, he replied, “Is this a physics exam? I’ll ask you to answer the question!”
From the beginning, Dyatlov contended that the Chernobyl operators bore no blame for what had happened to Reactor Number Four and addressed in detail every one of the charges brought against him. He said responsibility for the accident rested with those who had failed to warn the plant staff that they were operating a potentially explosive reactor and that he personally had given no instructions that violated any regulations. Despite being contradicted by several witnesses, Dyatlov also insisted that he had not been present in the control room of Unit Four a
t the crucial moment when Leonid Toptunov let the power of the reactor fall almost to zero before the test, that he had not given orders to raise it, and that he did not send the two now deceased trainees to the reactor hall to lower the control rods by hand.
But it soon became clear that neither the design of the reactor nor the long trail of accidents and institutional cover-ups that preceded the disaster would be considered by the court. Although none of the accused was tortured to confess or brought to the stand to denounce counterrevolutionary activity, no one doubted the outcome of the proceedings: it effectively became one of the final show trials in the history of the Soviet Union. Although the chief prosecutor relied upon the official government commission’s accident report to make his case against the operators, he ignored what it had to say about problems with the reactor design. Reporters were told that a separate case against the designers would be prosecuted at a later date.
Yet many of the expert witnesses called to the stand were drawn from the very state agencies—including NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute—responsible for the original design of the RBMK-1000. Unsurprisingly, the physicists absolved themselves of blame, arguing that the quirks of their reactor became dangerous only in the hands of incompetent operators. The court stifled any dissent from this view. When one nuclear specialist began to explain that Toptunov, Akimov, and Dyatlov could not have known about the positive void coefficient that helped precipitate the explosion of the reactor, the prosecutor dismissed him abruptly from the stand. Dyatlov submitted twenty-four written questions to be put to the expert witnesses about the specifications of the reactor and whether it conformed to the regulations of the USSR’s State Committee for Nuclear Safety. But the judge simply ruled them out of order, without further explanation.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 37