Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Dr. Robert Gale, whose work in Hospital Number Six had made him both a minor celebrity and a big name in radiation medicine, had already announced that, in medical terms, it was time to move on. “Basically nothing happened here.” he said, “Nothing happened here . . . and nothing is going to happen here.”

  Yet these conclusions were drawn almost entirely from studies conducted on groups of liquidators, often exposed to large doses of radiation, and thyroid cancer sufferers, or from broad risk-projection models. Little effort had been made to establish an internationally recognized body of data on the long-term consequences of the accident on the population at large, to replicate the seventy-year study of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in 1945. The UN agencies used the unreliable nature of dosimetry conducted among civilians as reason enough to abandon any further effort at lifespan studies, and, as a result, the opportunity to understand the long-term impact of low-dose radiation on human beings was lost. In the absence of large-scale epidemiological work, independent scientists from countries around the world continued to log “endocrinological, musculoskeletal, respiratory, and circulatory problems and a rise in malignant tumors, especially of the breast and prostate,” among residents of the affected areas.

  And in the space that remained, anxiety and misunderstanding about the real threats of radioactivity and nuclear power continued to multiply.

  * * *

  In Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk, and in towns and villages throughout the former Soviet Union, the surviving witnesses to the events of April 1986 carried on, in old age and declining health.

  In the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, I talked to Colonel Boris Nesterov, who had led the first helicopter pilots in their bombing raids over the reactor. He said that surgeons had already removed a fifth of his intestines, but he was still flying at the age of seventy-nine.

  In the garden of his dacha in the countryside outside Kiev, a former KGB major explained that he had taken sick the night before and had intended to cancel our meeting, but his wife had persuaded him otherwise: it might be his last chance to share what he knew. Sitting in his snowbound cottage on the edge of a national park, Alexander Petrovsky, who had helped fight the fires on the roof of Unit Three, credited a life of fresh air and daily swims in the nearby river with saving him from the depression and alcoholism that plagued his former comrades. Yet Piotr Khmel, the firefighter who had sped to the scene of the explosion while drinking from a bottle of Soviet champagne, was still at work and insisted on serving celebratory cognac from a pistol-shaped decanter he kept on the desk in his office.

  When I first met Maria Protsenko, the former chief architect of the city of Pripyat was approaching seventy. She lived alone with six cats in an apartment in the suburbs of Kiev and moved with difficulty on a pair of battered aluminum canes. Following a fall from the fourth floor of her building—she had locked herself out and was climbing into her apartment from a neighbor’s balcony, a feat she had often pulled off successfully in the past—the doctors had told her she was unlikely to walk again. But she had proved them wrong and continued to commute to the Salvador Dalí Art Institute in the city, where she taught interior design. Wearing a smart dark-gray suit and cream blouse, with the pin of the Union of Soviet Architects at her lapel, she said that immediately after the catastrophe, she had been afraid to talk about everything she had seen—“because I knew how I could end up . . . the example of my grandfather was enough for me.” But now she described everything in vivid detail, with the fond nostalgia of a military veteran coloring all but the darkest of episodes. She was still mourning the death of her husband and her son—both lost to cancer. The daughter who had whiled away her final afternoon in Pripyat watching a movie with her father simply didn’t like to discuss what had happened. When we met again the following year, Protsenko brought along homemade Easter gifts, her original liquidator’s pass, and the notebook she had used during her long months in the zone. “It still stinks of radiation . . . like rain—ozone,” she said. When I couldn’t identify the scent, she bent over the table and, to my obvious alarm, blew dust from the pages directly into my nostrils.

  “Tcha!” she spat, her eyes twinkling with mischief. “If you needed to be afraid, I wouldn’t have brought it!”

  * * *

  I found Viktor Brukhanov, one autumn morning shortly before his eightieth birthday, in the fourth-floor apartment he and his wife, Valentina, had occupied together since his release from prison. Brukhanov had retired from his job at the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy when his eyesight began to fail, and had become increasingly reclusive. Two strokes had left him nearly blind and rendered his face all but immobile; his mind remained sharp. He recalled the optimism and high expectations of his first weeks in Chernobyl and his struggles with the Party bosses; he talked about the demands of raising a city from scratch in the Pripyat marshes, and the plans that grew ever larger, for more and bigger reactors, and a second phase of the plant on the other side of the river. But when conversation turned to the night of the accident that destroyed Unit Four, he rose slowly from his chair and withdrew to another room, leaving his wife to take up the story.

  When I returned to visit them again a few months later, Brukhanov had suffered a third stroke. He had fallen badly and broken his left arm, which doctors had strapped across his abdomen in a complicated gray foam sling. Lying on a green velour couch in a small back room of the apartment, his head propped on a pile of pillows, Brukhanov was wearing a light-blue T-shirt, navy track pants, and thick socks. His hair was white and cropped short; his skin dry, papery, the color of parchment; his dark-blue eyes stared, unfocused, into the middle distance, and his free hand trembled. But when he spoke, although his words were mangled by numbed lips and a slack tongue, they tumbled out as quickly as before. He defended his actions on the night of the explosion and maintained that he had first learned of the total destruction of Reactor Number Four only the next day, when he circled it in a helicopter. At the trial, he had admitted his culpability as a manager for what had happened simply because that was his job. “The director has primary responsibility for everything that’s happening at the plant and with the staff. So I had to.”

  He hadn’t bothered to defend himself in court, he insisted, because he knew that was how the Party had decided it would be. And once the USSR collapsed, he’d had no interest in petitioning the Ukrainian authorities to clear his name. “It was just pointless,” he said. “Nobody will ever do anything about it.”

  But if he acknowledged that he was still troubled by his own responsibility for the accident, he also talked almost as if the issue were an administrative technicality. “I still feel responsible for the people and for the installation,” he said.

  And when I asked him to name his greatest regret, the ghosts of long-dormant ambition seemed to stir in him. He struggled to sit up.

  “What I regret most is that I didn’t live to see my office built at the top of the ten-story building, so I could watch over the first and second stages of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” he said.

  Valentina, apparently bewildered by this flash of technocratic hubris from the Soviet past, dabbed spittle from the corners of her husband’s mouth with a polka-dot handkerchief. “I don’t understand, Vitya,” she told him. “I don’t understand.”

  “According to the plan, a ten-story building was to be erected . . . ,” he began, but trailed off. “I’m joking, of course.”

  Then the old man’s sightless eyes found mine, his gaze hard and sapphire blue. For a moment, I felt plant director Viktor Brukhanov—winner of the Order of the Red Banner for Socialist Labor, holder of the Order of the October Revolution—staring straight back at me, and it seemed quite possible that there was no humor in this joke at all.

  * * *

  By the morning of April 26, 2016, the beautiful weather in Pripyat had turned suddenly cold; a frigid wind scythed down the river toward the plant, and rain whipped from a leaden sky. Beneath a massive arch erect
ed a few hundred meters from the ailing Sarcophagus, the Ukrainian president, former chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko, stood before a microphone. His amplified voice boomed off the stainless steel roof overhead, echoing like Zeus in a cheap film production of the Greek myths:

  “Satan sleeps beside the Pripyat.

  “He lies, damn him, in the guise of a dry willow on the bank of the Pripyat, on the bank of a river that was once blue and clear.”

  Directly in front of the president’s podium, a group of construction workers in blue-gray jackets, corralled behind a fence of fluorescent orange tape, stamped their feet for warmth.

  “And a black candle flickers for him in the atomic block.

  “And villages lie in ruin and woe for him.

  “His clawed roots snag in the sand.

  “And the wind whistles into his hollow ear.”

  Behind Poroshenko, heavy trucks and excavators toiled up a muddy slope, and men wearing rubber boots and face masks prowled in the shadow of a new structure rising around the ruins of Unit Four. With each new gust of icy air blowing toward the president, the level of gamma radiation spiked sharply. The alarm on a pocket dosimeter beeped insistently; the site was still so contaminated that eating and drinking outside were forbidden.

  “He scrawled obscenities upon the houses. Stole the icons, lost his respirator. And now he wants to rest.

  “This is his kingdom. He is an emperor here.”

  His invocation complete, Poroshenko launched into a speech, carried live on national television, to mark exactly thirty years since the disaster. He spoke of the accident’s catalytic role in Ukrainian independence and the breakup of the USSR and placed it on the continuum of events that threatened the state’s very existence, halfway between the Great Patriotic War and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. He described the enduring costs of the accident, the 115,000 people he said would never return to their homes in the Exclusion Zone, the 2.5 million more living on land contaminated by radionuclides, and the hundreds of thousands of disabled Chernobyltsi who continued to require support from the state and society. “The issue of the aftermath of the catastrophe is still open,” he said. “Its heavy burden lay on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people, and we are, unfortunately, still very far from overcoming it for good.”

  The president turned, then, to the glinting arch that rose on the construction site above and around him, known by its designers as the New Safe Confinement—a new structure that, he announced, “will cover the Sarcophagus like a huge dome.” The still-incomplete project had its roots in the fears raised first by the men of the Kurchatov Institute’s Complex Expedition in 1990 and plans formulated by the G7 countries in 1997 but delayed for more than a decade by wrangling over who would foot the bill. The official cost of its completion would ultimately triple, to at least 1.5 billion euros—donated by a group of forty-three countries around the world—even though the funds were meticulously managed to prevent them from being siphoned away by the corruption submerging the government of Ukraine. Designed to stabilize and hermetically seal the decaying Sarcophagus, the building was one of the most ambitious civil engineering tasks ever undertaken: a giant steel arc 108 meters high—tall enough to contain the Statue of Liberty—packed with ventilation and dehumidifying equipment and three times as large as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

  Its architects faced problems not encountered on any other construction project since the specialists of Sredmash US-605 had set down their tools in the winter of 1986. Reactor Number Four still remained too radioactive for work to take place around it, so the arch was being constructed on a separate site four hundred meters away, and the French contractors would then slide it into place using rails and dozens of hydraulic pistons. At thirty-six thousand tonnes, it would be the biggest land-based movable structure ever built. Even protected by a specially constructed concrete radiation shield, every one of the workers at the site had to be monitored for exposure. Working time was limited to periods ranging from hours to seconds.

  Yet Poroshenko expressed confidence that with international help—including a fresh infusion of 87.5 million euros from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development—his country would see the project to completion and finally banish the disaster to history. “Ukrainians are a strong people,” he said, “that can overcome even the nuclear demon.”

  * * *

  Six months later, mist and snow once again blanketed the fields beside the Pripyat as Poroshenko stood beside executives from the European Bank, the French ambassador to Ukraine, and the eighty-eight-year-old former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Hans Blix, for a grand dedication ceremony. Inside a heated canvas marquee, close to the same spot where Viktor Brukhanov and the nomenklatura from Moscow had once embarked on their grand project with a ceremonial stake and cups of cognac, a crowd of well-fed men in dark suits celebrated with champagne, hors d’oeuvres, and platters of profiteroles. At the entrance, young women in matching navy uniforms accessorized with scarlet neckerchiefs handed out lanyards hung with dosimetry buttons to monitor guests’ radiation exposure. Others stepped into the snow to take self-portraits against the backdrop of the marvel of civil engineering outside. Slid into place at last, the massive span of the New Safe Confinement had entirely swallowed the black silhouette of the Sarcophagus. When sun broke through the heavy cloud, the steel glinted in the autumn light.

  A fresh testament to the power of gigantomania, the finished structure made up in bulk what it lacked in elegance, with the aesthetics of an aircraft hangar and the presence of a suburban shopping mall. Back in Moscow, the original architects of the Sarcophagus regarded it with derision and insisted it was an absurd boondoggle. But if it worked as intended, the design would seal up the ruins of Unit Four in complete safety for another hundred years. “We have closed a wound—a nuclear wound—that belongs to all of us,” Hans Blix told the crowd. The new building would also serve as a final monument to the last resting place of Valery Khodemchuk—a radioactive mausoleum to memorialize for generations to come the first victim of the accident.

  Around his remains, the engineers hoped, the New Safe Confinement would provide a secure space within which the wreckage of the molten core of Reactor Number Four might finally be dismantled. Yet, even as the final deadline for the structure’s completion approached, no one seemed certain how that might be accomplished. At least one veteran nuclear expert feared that even now, more than thirty years after the catastrophe began, neither man nor machine could work in such a hostile environment.

  Epilogue

  Anatoly Aleksandrov retired as the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in October 1986 and as director of the Kurchatov Institute in early 1988, but kept working there until his death in February 1994, at the age of ninety. He never accepted responsibility for the explosion of Reactor Number Four, and in an interview given shortly before he died continued to fault the plant operators for what happened: “You are driving a car, you turn the steering wheel in the wrong direction—an accident!” he said. “Is the engine to blame? Or the designer of the car? Everyone will reply, ‘The unskilled driver is to blame.’ ”

  Major General Nikolai Antoshkin was transferred to Moscow in 1989, promoted to colonel general, and eventually founded the first Russian aerobatic display team. As commander of the frontline aviation units of the Russian Federation, he oversaw airborne operations during the war in Chechnya. He retired from the air force in 1998, and in 2002 became chairman of the Society for Heroes of the Soviet Union. In 2014, Antoshkin was elected to the State Duma as a member of the ruling United Russia party.

  Hans Blix retired as the director general of the IAEA in 1997. Three years later he was recalled to the United Nations to serve as the leader of the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, charged with overseeing Iraqi compliance with its obligations to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction. In February 2003, his commission concluded that there were no such weapons in Iraq; a US-led force of more th
an 125,000 troops nevertheless invaded the country the following month. Shortly afterward, Blix left the UN for good.

  Lev Bocharov, chief engineer of the third shift of Sredmash US-605, reported on the integrity of the Sarcophagus until the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1996, he was part of a Russian group that submitted their own plans for a replacement structure to the president of Ukraine, but which were rejected in favor of the European proposals. Twenty years later, he remained sprightly at eighty-one, living with his wife in a large house he designed himself in Zvenigorod, to the west of Moscow.

  Alexander Borovoi continued to oversee the exploration and monitoring inside the Sarcophagus for almost twenty years after the accident and eventually located all but 5 percent of the missing fuel inside the building. He helped devise the original concept for the New Safe Confinement project and has since dedicated himself to cataloging and preserving the documentary record and practical lessons of Chernobyl.

  After the dissolution of the Pripyat city council, Alexander Esaulov was resettled in a new home in the Kiev suburb of Irpin and eventually found a job in the bureaucracy of the Ukrainian energy industry. He embarked on a career as a writer and has since published twenty-seven books—many of them children’s adventure stories. He still keeps the official seal of the Pripyat mayor’s office on his desk and in his spare time gives occasional tours of the abandoned city for foreign tourists.

  Dr. Robert Gale returned repeatedly to Moscow and Kiev in the years after the accident and became a well-known face throughout the Soviet Union. In 1988, he published a memoir about his experiences, Final Warning, which was adapted into a TV movie starring Jon Voight as Gale and Jason Robards as Armand Hammer. With an international reputation as an expert in the medical response to nuclear disaster, he attended the scenes of several major radiation accidents, including those in Goiânia, Brazil, in 1987, and Fukushima in 2011.