Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  On July 23 the prosecutor delivered his closing remarks. He was merciless. Senior Reactor Control Engineer Leonid Toptunov, who had died of radiation poisoning three months short of his twenty-sixth birthday, had been “a weak specialist.” His boss, Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov, was “soft and indecisive” and afraid of Dyatlov—who was described as intelligent but disorganized and cruel. The prosecutor regarded the deputy chief engineer as a “nuclear hooligan” who “thoughtlessly broke the canons and commandments of nuclear safety” and whose criminal acts were directly responsible for the catastrophe. Chief Engineer Fomin had been in a position to halt the accident before it began, yet failed to do so.

  But the prosecutor reserved his most caustic assessment for the director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, who he implied had lied to his superiors in the hope of concealing the magnitude of the accident and clinging to his position, and in so doing endangered the lives of not only his staff but also every citizen of Pripyat. “There is no reason to believe that Brukhanov did not know the true radiation situation,” he said. The director’s behavior revealed “the moral collapse of Brukhanov, as a leader and as a man.”

  In response, the defendants’ lawyers made their own arguments, and the accused spoke for themselves. Brukhanov’s lawyer said that his client was a decent man who knew he must assume the blame. They both recognized that, according to the operational regulations of the power station, the director was formally responsible for everything that happened within the plant. But privately they hoped Brukhanov might escape with only a conviction for administrative negligence and not the more serious charges of abuse of power. Fomin accepted his guilt and pleaded for the mercy of the court. Dyatlov expressed sorrow for the dead and sympathy for the injured but remained defiant. The three other members of the staff on trial—Rogozhkin, Kovalenko, and Yuri Laushkin, the plant’s nuclear safety inspector—asked to be acquitted on all charges.

  But the Soviet people had been well prepared to expect harsh justice for the men whose corruption and incompetence had despoiled the land of three republics and poisoned thousands of innocent victims. Pravda’s science editor, Vladimir Gubarev, had already published Sarcophagus: A Tragedy, a play about an accident at a fictional nuclear plant, in which he laid blame on a broken system but also upon the station officials: the unnamed director has approved the building of a dangerously flammable roof so that construction can finish on time, and when a radioactive explosion takes place, he evacuates his own grandchildren, leaving the population of his city to their fate.

  When the decorated firefighter Major Leonid Telyatnikov was asked his opinion of the defendants, he was unequivocal: “Of course, they should be punished,” he said. “According to the government commission, it was human error. It was their fault. The consequences were very severe.” Others went further still. During an adjournment in the trial, Valentina Brukhanov waited on a park bench in Kiev beside an old man who had fought in the Great Patriotic War. When talk turned to the Chernobyl proceedings, the veteran explained that some people thought that the defendants should be sent to prison, but in his opinion that wouldn’t be just. He said they should all be shot.

  On Tuesday, July 29, another fiercely hot day, Judge Brize delivered his verdict. All six men were found guilty: Yuri Laushkin was given two years in prison; Alexander Kovalenko, three; and Boris Rogozhkin, five. All three were taken into custody in the courtroom. Brukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov each received the maximum sentence: ten years’ confinement in a penal colony. Every one of them remained stoic except Fomin, who wept in the dock. Valentina Brukhanov fainted. Afterward, one of the investigators told her, “Now you can terminate your marriage at any time.”

  Driven from the Palace of Culture in a black van with bars on the windows, the former director of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station was sent to serve out his sentence in a penitentiary in Donetsk, in the far east of Ukraine. He was shipped there by rail, aboard one of the Soviet prison system’s notoriously barbaric stolypin cars, and was lucky to survive the journey: during the two weeks it took to travel the seven hundred kilometers, he was sustained mostly by rations of pickled herring. When he finally arrived at the prison, every one of his fellow convicts turned out into the yard to see the face of the infamous culprit behind the world’s worst nuclear disaster: a small, frail figure swallowed in drab blue overalls.

  * * *

  As the end of 1987 approached, the new atomgrad for the Chernobyl workers and their families in Slavutych was almost ready to begin receiving its first residents, due to arrive from both the workers’ shift camp on the Dnieper and from apartments where they had been living in Kiev. Built at frantic speed and garlanded with publicity, Slavutych had been intended as a showcase for Soviet unity, with five districts built in different regional styles by architects from the republics of the Caucasus, Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltic states. But even this prestige project had been dogged by the usual bureaucratic obstructions, construction delays, labor disputes, and slipshod work. At the last minute, the model city’s central heating system broke down, rendering it uninhabitable before spring.

  In preparation for the arrival of the new citizens, in September a radiation survey of Slavutych had been conducted by scientists from the USSR’s hydrometeorological monitoring service, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Defense. They found that the town was being built on land contaminated with cesium 134, cesium 137, ruthenium 106, and cerium 144; the woods nearby contained isotopes of cesium, strontium, and plutonium. They reported that the resulting annual radiation exposure fell within official limits permitted for populations living near nuclear power stations but recommended asphalting paths, regularly washing streets and yards, and—especially in the surrounding forest, where people might be expected to take walks and gather mushrooms—cutting down trees and bagging fallen leaves.

  * * *

  On December 4, 1987, after more than eighteen months of decontamination, repairs, and modifications, the last of the three surviving reactors of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station once again began providing electricity to the Soviet grid. Unit Three, although now separated from its entombed twin by a wall of concrete and lead, remained so radioactive that reluctant engineers were rotated in from other reactors—to prevent them being overexposed during the course of their shifts. Despite the sacrifices of General Tarakanov and his bio-robots, uranium fuel pellets were still scattered on the roof of the building, and the turbine operators who worked in the machine hall below did so from protective concrete cabins fitted with portholes of lead glass.

  The three Chernobyl reactors—along with the twelve other RBMK-1000 units operating elsewhere in the USSR—had all been subjected to the extensive technical refit proposed in the secret Politburo resolution the previous July. In what amounted to a tacit admission of the designers’ culpability in the accident, each RBMK was now fueled with more highly enriched uranium; modified with scores of extra control rods, which reduced the positive void coefficient; and featured a faster and more effective emergency shutdown system. The authorities revised instruction programs for reactor operators and made money available to build computer simulators to prepare them for accident scenarios. Yet little had really changed: more than a year after the disaster, the Politburo received a report showing that Soviet atomic power stations continued to be bedeviled by bad construction, poor staff discipline—and hundreds of minor accidents.

  At the Chernobyl plant, the operators manning the three remaining reactors were also demoralized by the way their dead colleagues had been blamed for the accident. Although they went to work dutifully every day, many believed the true causes of the disaster had not been properly considered; some remained convinced that the same thing could easily happen to them. Almost none of them wanted to live in Slavutych.

  In public, Valery Legasov continued to hold the Party line about the safety of the USSR’s nuclear industry. He said that he did not fault Soviet reactors, which had been designed to take into acc
ount all but the most unforeseeable circumstances. The academician insisted that nuclear power represented the zenith of atomic science and was essential for the future of civilization. But privately, Legasov had been struck by what he had heard Prime Minister Ryzhkov tell Gorbachev and rest of the Politburo more than a year earlier: that the explosion in Chernobyl had been inevitable, and that if it hadn’t happened there, it would have happened at another Soviet station sooner or later. It was only then that Legasov had finally recognized the true scope of the decay at the heart of the nuclear state: the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction. He saw that both the RBMK reactor and its pressurized water counterpart, the VVER, were inherently dangerous. He began to investigate the problems in more detail and advocated at Sredmash for a new generation of reactor, cooled with molten salt. But his suggestions were met with fury and indignation: Efim Slavsky, at that time still head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, told Legasov he was technically illiterate and should keep his nose out of matters that didn’t concern him.

  By then, Legasov’s health problems had intensified, and over the following year, he made repeated visits to Hospital Number Six, where he was treated for neurosis, erratic white blood cell counts, and problems with his heart and bone marrow. Although the doctors made no formal diagnosis of acute radiation syndrome, the scientist’s wife had no doubt what was happening to him. Nonetheless, inspired by the rising winds of perestroika, Legasov now went to work on a series of proposals to modernize the monolithic structures of Soviet science. The report he delivered to his colleagues at the Academy of Sciences challenged the hegemony of some of the most powerful forces of the state, and to anyone else would have appeared an obvious political risk. He proposed that the Ministry of Medium Machine Building should be broken up into smaller units that would compete with one another in an internal market; that the research of the Kurchatov Institute should be funded with a new rigor, focused on practical results; and that the old men who now controlled the budgets and made all the appointments to its many jobs-for-life should be replaced with younger and more vital scientists. Legasov had good reason to believe the report would be well received. Not only had he distinguished himself in the liquidation of the Chernobyl disaster and in defending the reputation of the nuclear industry in Vienna. He was, after all, also Aleksandrov’s anointed successor to lead the Kurchatov Institute and had powerful backing within the Politburo.

  Yet Legasov’s proposals were ignored. He failed to realize that he and his ideas would alienate not just the old guard, whose comfortable positions in the status quo he threatened, but also his more reform-minded colleagues—who saw Legasov as a creature of the Era of Stagnation, with a privileged background that had eased a frictionless rise to the top. Even his role at Chernobyl became controversial, as his fellow scientists began to question the wisdom of the operation to cover the burning reactor with sand and lead. In the spring of 1987, the Central Committee of the Communist Party ordered that the staff of the Kurchatov Institute undertake a perestroika of its own and elect a supervisory Science and Technology Council. Legasov, citing his poor health—and also recognizing that votes against him could jeopardize his path to succeed Aleksandrov as director—did not wish to stand. But Aleksandrov insisted, and when the results were declared, Legasov discovered how little he understood his colleagues’ feelings about him. Of the 229 votes, only 100 had been cast in his favor; 129 were against. Legasov was thunderstruck. At fifty, it was the first reversal of his gilded career.

  At a meeting of his Party cell on June 10, old man Aleksandrov had better news to report: he told the room that they should congratulate Legasov. The director explained that he had seen the final list of those who would be honored by the Politburo for their heroism in Chernobyl, and the name of his first deputy was near the top: Legasov would be granted the one award that had so far eluded him and made a Hero of Socialist Labor. But when the final list was published, Legasov’s name was no longer on it. Word went around that Gorbachev had decided at the last minute that no one from Kurchatov should receive a state award for actions in containing a disaster that the institute had helped precipitate. The following day, Legasov phoned his secretary from home. Before he ended the call, he asked her to look out for his two children, and she became concerned. Colleagues hurried to the house on Pekhotnaya 26, where Legasov was found unconscious, a bottle of sleeping pills at his side.

  Although rescued from his attempted suicide, Legasov returned to work profoundly changed. The playful light in his eyes had dimmed, and he shuffled up the stairs like an old man. Attending a scientific conference in England that summer, he met his old friend and Pravda science editor Vladimir Gubarev, whose play Sarcophagus was being performed at the National Theatre in London. Gubarev tried to encourage the academician to make the most of the foreign trip, to find some girls or perhaps see the West End production of Cats. But Legasov wanted only to get back to his hotel. That autumn, for the first time, he began reading the Bible. Using a new Japanese Dictaphone he received as a gift from an old friend, he made a series of tape recordings about his experience in Chernobyl, gathering material for a memoir. But he told those close to him that his career was finished. He tried, unsuccessfully, to commit suicide again.

  Afterward, Gubarev attempted to raise his friend’s spirits by suggesting he articulate his ideas about nuclear safety in an article for Pravda. Legasov finished the piece in a matter of days and, once it was published, called Gubarev every day for news on how it had been received. When this, too, was ignored, Legasov took a more drastic step. He gave an interview to the liberal literary journal Novy Mir in which he warned that—contrary to everything he had said before—another Chernobyl catastrophe could occur at any one of the other RBMK stations in the USSR, at any time; he told the reporter that many scientists were aware of the danger, but no one would act to stop it. In a separate interview with Yunost, another Soviet journal where the shackles of censorship were being loosened by glasnost, Legasov went further still.

  Turning his back on every political orthodoxy he had believed in since he was a teenager, the academician said that Soviet science had lost its way. The men and women behind the great triumphs of Soviet technology—who had created the first nuclear power plant and launched Yuri Gagarin into space—had been striving for a new and better society and acted with a morality and strength of purpose inherited from Pushkin and Tolstoy. But the thread of virtuous purpose had run through their fingers, leaving behind a generation of young people who were technologically sophisticated but morally untethered. It was this profound failure of the Soviet social experiment, and not merely a handful of reckless reactor operators, that Legasov believed was to blame for the catastrophe that had bloomed from Reactor Number Four.

  By the beginning of 1988, Legasov had given up hope of ever succeeding Aleksandrov as director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Instead, as Gorbachev’s reforms gathered pace and public criticism of the state increased, the academician organized a Council on Ecology and proposed to set up his own institute of nuclear safety—an autonomous body that would bring truly independent regulation to the Soviet atomic industry. He submitted his plans to the Academy of Sciences, optimistic that they would be approved in recognition, if nothing else, of his role in liquidating the consequences of the greatest nuclear accident in history.

  But when the hearings were finally held toward the end of April, his mentor Aleksandrov gave the idea only tepid support, and Legasov’s proposal was declined. The academician received the news on April 26, 1988, exactly two years to the day after the accident. That afternoon, Legasov’s daughter, Inga, picked up her son from kindergarten as usual. When they reached home, she was delighted to find her father waiting beside his car outside the entrance to her apartment building. Inga invited him upstairs for something to eat, but he said he had to go. “I’m coming from the Academy of Sciences,” he said. “I just droppe
d by for a moment to look at you.” It was the last time she saw him alive.

  At lunchtime the next day, Legasov’s son, Alexey, returned from work to the family home at Pekhotnaya 26 and discovered his father’s body hanging in the stairwell, a noose around his neck. He had left no note. When a colleague from the Kurchatov Institute checked Legasov’s office for radioactivity, he found every one of his belongings too contaminated to be returned to his family. Gathered into a series of large plastic bags, they were buried instead. Soon afterward, when an official visited Anatoly Aleksandrov in his office to discuss candidates to assume some of Legasov’s duties, the eighty-five-year-old director broke down and cried. “Why did he abandon me?” he said. “Oh, why did he abandon me?”

  * * *

  Two weeks after Legasov’s death, the Soviet minister of health delivered the opening address of an international conference on the medical consequences of the accident, convened in Kiev and attended by representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization (WHO). For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31. The health minister said that they had not discovered a single case of injury in the general population due to radiation. “One must say definitely,” he told the assembled delegates, “that we can today be certain there are no effects of the Chernobyl accident on human health.”