But the citizens of the Soviet Union no longer trusted their scientists. In Kiev, even two years after the accident, young couples were afraid to have children, and people ascribed every kind of minor illness to the effects of radiation. Ukrainian Pravda began publishing what it promised would be weekly reports on radioactivity in the three major cities nearest to the station, updated regularly, like the weather forecast. But the mandarins of the atomic industry still failed to appreciate the degree to which they had lost the public’s confidence. Accustomed to their place as revered icons of the Socialist utopia, they found themselves regarded with suspicion and enmity yet clung to their convictions with righteous disdain.
Speaking at a press conference on the closing day of the medical convention in Kiev, the head of the Soviet Institute of Biophysics chastised those scientists who had publicly predicted that thousands of cancers would develop as a result of the accident. “They inflict great damages, because they forget there are many variables,” he said. “We never speak of any number of cases. That is immoral.”
He dismissed reports of illnesses caused by the long-term consequences of the explosion as the result of a new psychological syndrome, which he called “radiophobia.”
* * *
For the final rulers of the USSR, the most destructive forces unleashed by the explosion of Reactor Number Four were not radiological but political and economic. The cloud of radiation that spread out across Europe, making the catastrophe impossible to conceal, had forced the touted openness of Gorbachev’s glasnost on even the most reluctant conservatives in the Politburo. And the general secretary’s own realization that even the nuclear bureaucracy had been undermined by secrecy, incompetence, and stagnation convinced him that the entire state was rotten. After the accident, frustrated and angry, he confronted the need for truly drastic change and plunged deeply into perestroika in a desperate bid to rescue the Socialist experiment before it was too late.
But once the Party relaxed its rigid grip on information, it proved impossible to fully regain its former levels of control. What began with more open reporting from Chernobyl—the news stories in Pravda and Izvestia were followed by TV documentaries and personal testimonies in popular magazines—widened to include open discussion of long-censored social issues, including drug addiction, the abortion epidemic, the Afghan war, and the horrors of Stalinism. Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.
Soon after Valery Legasov’s suicide, Pravda published an edited extract of the Chernobyl memoir the academician had recorded on tape, in which he described the hopeless lack of preparation for the catastrophe and the long history of safety failures that had led up to it. “After I had visited Chernobyl NPP, I came to the conclusion that the accident was the inevitable apotheosis of the economic system which had been developed in the USSR over many decades,” he wrote, in a testament that appeared under the headline “It’s My Duty to Say This.” By September 1988, in a sign of how quickly the system was changing, the Politburo had bowed to public concern and abandoned work on two new nuclear plants, even though one of them—on the outskirts of Minsk—was almost complete.
Ten months later, the Soviet nuclear engineer Grigori Medvedev published a sensational exposé of the accident in Novy Mir. In spite of glasnost, it had taken Medvedev two years to get his account into print, fighting a clandestine battle against the KGB and a Chernobyl censorship commission organized specifically to keep the most sensitive information about the accident from the public. Behind that stood Boris Scherbina, the chairman of the government commission, who rightly feared what Medvedev would reveal about his actions in Pripyat. A minute-by-minute reconstruction of the events of April 26 based on his own visits to the scene and dozens of interviews with witnesses, Medvedev’s Chernobyl Notebook was explosive. It depicted Viktor Brukhanov as a spineless fool, the mandarins of the Soviet nuclear industry as callous and incompetent, and showed Scherbina unnecessarily delaying the evacuation of the doomed atomgrad. An introduction to the story was provided by the USSR’s most famous dissident, Andrei Sakharov, recently released from internal exile by Gorbachev. In a letter he personally addressed to the general secretary, Sakharov had threatened that if the Central Committee did not allow Medvedev’s story to be published, he would personally see to it that the information it contained was disseminated as widely as possible. “Everything that pertains to the Chernobyl disaster, its causes and consequences, must become the property of glasnost,” Sakharov wrote in his introduction. “The complete and naked truth is necessary.”
In February 1989, almost three years after the accident, a prime-time report on Vremya revealed to the Soviet people that the true extent of radioactive contamination beyond the perimeter of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone had been covered up—and that the total area of contamination outside the zone was, in fact, even larger than that within it. “ ‘Glasnost wins after all’ is the way we might begin this story,” the correspondent said, standing in front of multicolored maps showing that the most heavily radioactive hot spots lay as far as three hundred kilometers from the station, across the border in Belarus, in the districts of Gomel and Mogilev, where witnesses had watched black rain fall in April and May 1986. The land was so poisoned that the Belarusian government estimated another hundred thousand people would have to be evacuated, and planned to request the equivalent of $16 billion in further aid from Moscow.
A few weeks later, just as the last Soviet troops slunk home in defeat from Afghanistan and amid worsening news about the domestic economy, General Secretary Gorbachev traveled to the scene of the accident for the first time. He pulled on a white coat and protective cap to tour Reactor Number Two of the Chernobyl plant, his wife, Raisa, at his side, and visited Slavutych. In Kiev, he spoke to Party officials, announcing a program to protect the environment, and promised to hold a public referendum on any controversial new projects. He pleaded for patience with the growing shortages and the faltering economy and warned that any Soviet republics thinking of leaving the Union were “playing with fire.” But environmental issues were already becoming a focal point for nascent independence movements in Latvia and Estonia and would soon provide a platform for Zelenyi Svit, the Green World opposition party in Ukraine. When Gorbachev climbed from his limousine in Kiev for one of his choreographed walkabouts and began to talk about the need to support perestroika, the crowd veered off script. “People are afraid,” one woman told him. When he tried to respond, another woman interrupted the general secretary to ask his view of two new nuclear reactors under construction in Crimea.
As the third anniversary of the disaster approached, Moscow News reported from a collective farm in the Zhitomir region of Ukraine, forty kilometers west of the Exclusion Zone, where radioactive hot spots of strontium 90 and cesium 137 had been discovered. Farmers in the area had observed a steep rise in the number of birth defects in their livestock since the accident, describing piglets with froglike eyes and malformed skulls, and calves born without legs, eyes, or heads. One member of a team visiting from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev told the press their findings were “terrifying” and insisted the region be evacuated immediately. A representative from the Kurchatov Institute dismissed any connection between such deformities and the accident, blaming excessive use of fertilizers and improper farming methods instead. In October 1989 the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya reported that hundreds of tonnes of pork and beef contami
nated with radioactive cesium had been secretly mixed into sausages and sold to unsuspecting shoppers throughout the Soviet Union in the years since 1986. Although the workers at the meat factory responsible had been paid a bonus to compensate them for their exposure to radiation, a follow-up report to the Politburo insisted that the Chernobyl sausage was perfectly safe to eat and had been processed “in strict accordance with the recommendations of the Ministry of Health of the USSR.”
* * *
Inside the zone, as thousands of soldiers continued to scour the landscape of radionuclides, bulldoze ancient settlements into the ground, and toss contaminated furniture from the windows of apartments in Pripyat, scientists began to notice strange new phenomena in the wildlife they found there. Hedgehogs, voles, and shrews had become radioactive, and mallards had developed genetic abnormalities; in the cooling reservoir of the plant, silver carp grew to monstrous sizes; the leaves of the trees around the Red Forest had swelled to supernatural proportions, including giant conifers with pine needles ten times their usual size and acacias with “blades as large as a child’s palm.” The authorities announced their intention to set up a wildlife preserve in Belarus and an international research center inside the zone to study the long-term effects of radiation on the environment.
But money was short. The Soviet economy, after decades of spending on the Cold War arms race, was now staggering under the burden of the botched market reforms of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the high price of withdrawing and demobilizing troops from Afghanistan, and the collapse in the international oil market. And the financial cost of Chernobyl—the irradiation and destruction of equipment, the evacuations, the medical care, and the loss of factories, farmland, and millions of kilowatts of electricity—continued to rise. The price for the construction and operation of the Sarcophagus alone was 4 billion rubles, or almost $5.5 billion. One estimate put the eventual bill for all aspects of the disaster at more than $128 billion—equivalent to the total Soviet defense budget for 1989. The bleeding was slow but proved impossible to stanch—one more open wound that the state could no longer shrug off as the Soviet colossus sank slowly to its knees.
In July 1989 Gorbachev gave a speech signaling to the people of the Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe—East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the rest—that he would not intervene if they chose to unseat their leaders or even break with the brotherhood of Socialism altogether. Four months later, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet empire began to unravel.
Within the borders of the USSR, ethnic division and opposition to Moscow rule gathered pace amid chronic shortages and an imploding economy. Riots and civil disobedience roiled through the fifteen Soviet republics. In Lithuania, six thousand people encircled the Ignalina nuclear power plant, where the two new RBMK-1500 reactors had become a target of nationalist anger, triggering the start of protests that soon led the three Baltic states to declare independence from the Union. In Minsk, a reported eighty thousand people marched on the headquarters of the Belarusian government, demanding to be relocated from contaminated territory. “Our leaders have been lying to us for three years,” one participant told a Soviet reporter. “And now they have deserted this land damned by God and Chernobyl.”
In the West, public confidence in nuclear energy—which had never fully recovered after Three Mile Island—was finally shattered by the explosion in Reactor Number Four. The disaster unleashed a wave of popular mistrust, and opposition to the industry spread across the globe. In the twelve months following the accident, the governments of Sweden, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, and the Philippines all pledged to permanently abandon their nuclear programs, and nine other nations either canceled or delayed plans for further reactor construction. Opinion polls suggested that, since Chernobyl, two-thirds of people around the world opposed any further development of nuclear energy. The United States faced a complete collapse in reactor building, and the very name of the Ukrainian plant became embedded in the international lexicon as shorthand for the failings of technology and a well-justified suspicion of official information.
In Ukraine, the Soviet Ministry of Energy’s continuing construction of new nuclear power stations had become a focal point of regional opposition to Moscow. When Kiev called for an end to work on the controversial plant in Crimea, building went on regardless—until the local authorities sanctioned strikes and cut off funding for the project at the state bank. On March 1, 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine passed a series of sweeping environmental protections for the republic, among them an agreement to close down all three of the remaining reactors at the Chernobyl plant within five years. On August 2, republican legislators placed a moratorium on the construction of any new nuclear plants in Ukraine. In Moscow, the Ministry of Energy was forced to consider who would control the Soviet Union’s network of nuclear plants if its Unionwide decision-making power was suddenly devolved to the republics.
In the Exclusion Zone, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of debris from the reactor, radioactive soil, vegetation, furniture, cars, and equipment had now been interred in roughly eight hundred waste disposal sites, known as mogilniki, or “burial grounds”—concrete-lined trenches, pits, and mounds sprayed with polymer solutions and then seeded with grass. But the warren of nuclear dumps had been hurriedly excavated and poorly maintained. Nobody had bothered to keep track of what had been buried where, and by the beginning of 1990, the liquidation was being starved of manpower. Even offered twice the average Soviet salary and bonus payments paid directly into their bank accounts, when military reservists were told they were being sent to Chernobyl, many refused to go. The continued mobilizations created a public outcry, and, at last, the Soviet military authorities decided to stop sending troops to the zone. In December 1990 the liquidation effectively came to a halt.
By the end, it was almost impossible to calculate the total number of liquidators who served in the forbidden zone—in part because the figures were falsified by the Soviet government. By the beginning of 1991, as many as six hundred thousand men and women from across the Soviet Union had taken part in cleanup work in the radioactive netherworld surrounding the site of Reactor Number Four and would be officially recognized as Chernobyl liquidators. In acknowledgment of their service, many were issued special identity cards and an enameled medal depicting the Greek letters for alpha, beta, and gamma surrounding a scarlet drop of blood. All understood that, as with the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, their sacrifices had earned them a lifetime of care from their motherland. In Kiev, the Soviet Ministry of Health set up a dedicated clinic—the All-Union Radiation Medicine Research Center—to provide treatment for everyone who had been exposed to radiation. But as the first of the demobilized liquidators began to fall ill, arriving in clinics with complaints that seemed inexplicable, unpredictable, or premature, they found the state’s doctors reluctant to connect their symptoms to the conditions they had endured inside the thirty-kilometer zone. The bankrupt state could ill afford to provide the specialist care it had promised to more than a half million new potential invalids, and so doctors wrote up their notes in code; their medical records were classified as secret. All but the most extreme cases were dismissed with the same diagnosis given to Maria Protsenko: “Ordinary illness: not related to ionizing radiation.”
* * *
Early in December 1991, in a national referendum called by the parliament in Kiev four months earlier, the Ukrainian people voted to declare independence from the USSR, and Mikhail Gorbachev lost the battle to hold together the union of the twelve remaining Soviet republics. Returned briefly to his position as head of state after a failed reactionary coup in August, he had been forced to watch as Russian president Boris Yeltsin stripped him of his powers and announced that he was suspending the activities of the Communist Party. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev appeared on television to deliver an emotional resignation address, and the red banner of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time from the flagpole above the Kremlin. Amid the chao
s of the collapsing empire, most of the men and women who had fought the Battle of Chernobyl were forgotten—the final defenders of a nation that had seemingly vanished overnight.
In the years that followed, many of those who had lived through the catastrophe became invalids in middle age—struck down by mysterious clusters of symptoms, including high blood pressure, cataracts, kidney trouble, and chronic fatigue. Captain Sergei Volodin, the first helicopter pilot on the scene, who had inadvertently flown his machine through the plume of radioactive vapor rising from the reactor, developed a fear of heights and took an air force desk job. Those unable to work at all subsisted on diminishing state pensions and struggled to find medical care. Some died of heart disease and blood disorders, including leukemia, in hospitals in Kiev and Moscow. Major Telyatnikov, who commanded the firefighters on the night of the accident, was killed by cancer of the jaw in December 2004 at the age of fifty-three. For others, the psychological burden of enduring the disaster only to be set helplessly adrift in a world so abruptly transformed proved too much to bear. The electrical engineer Andrei Tormozin, who had miraculously survived exposure to apparently lethal levels of radiation, a failed bone marrow transplant, and blood poisoning, emerged alive from Hospital Number Six but afterward sank into depression and drank himself to death.
* * *
Almost two decades after the accident, in February 2006, in a desolate cafe near the apartment block where he lived in Kiev, I met the physicist Veniamin Prianichnikov. A big man wearing a three-piece suit and a polka-dot tie, sixty-two years old, he was animated and emphatic, his speech rich with metaphor and arid humor. He recalled with exacting clarity the flecks of graphite on the leaves of his wife’s strawberry plants and the fight against the China Syndrome in the basement of Unit Four. Of the five men who had gathered temperature and radiation readings from the bowels of the reactor in the most terrifying days of May 1986, he told me that four were already dead. “So twenty percent survived,” he said with a dark smile. “If you include me.”
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 39