Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Following his fall from power, Mikhail Gorbachev set up a charitable foundation and think tank based in Moscow and struggled to remain influential in Russian politics. In 1996, he ran for president of the Russian Federation but won less than 1 percent of ballots counted. He would later insist that it was the explosion of Reactor Number Four—and not his own bungled reforms—that proved the catalyst in the destruction of the Union he had so desperately wished to preserve. In April 2006, he wrote: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”

  Dr. Angelina Guskova published extensively on what she discovered from her treatment of the patients in Hospital Number Six and lectured the staff of nuclear power plants throughout Russia on the lessons they could learn from the accident. She remained an advocate of nuclear power generation for the rest of her life and continued working at the Burnasyan Medical Center until shortly before her death in 2015 at the age of ninety-one.

  After completing his final tour of duty in the Exclusion Zone, Alexander Logachev began lobbying to have the leading role of the 427th Mechanized Regiment of Civil Defense on the front line of the accident acknowledged by Moscow. In 1987, he was granted a personal audience with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev to press his case. Eventually sixty-four members of the regiment were granted medals and awards, but after his meeting with the general secretary Logachev was given orders for immediate transfer to Siberia. He was demobilized from the Soviet Armed Forces in 1989 and now practices alternative medicine.

  Veniamin Prianichnikov died of complications from stomach cancer in Kiev in May 2014, aged seventy.

  Maria Protsenko still teaches art, design, and architecture in Kiev. Every year on April 26, she puts on the medal she was awarded as a liquidator and places flowers at the memorial to those who died in the accident. Afterward, she lectures and takes questions from her students on what she recalls of the disaster and its consequences. She has not returned to Pripyat in more than thirty years.

  Cliff Robinson left his job in the laboratory at Forsmark nuclear power station in the autumn of 1986. He then embarked on a year of research into the radioactive rain that fell over Sweden that spring, in pursuit of a PhD, but eventually became a high school physics teacher in Uppsala, where he lives today.

  Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov gradually split with Gorbachev over the course of Soviet economic reform and suffered a heart attack at the end of 1990. The following year, he lost the race to become the first president of the Russian Federation to Boris Yeltsin and began advocating a resurrection of the USSR and the planned economy. In 2014, aged eighty-four, he was sanctioned by the US government for his role in the Russian annexation of Crimea.

  Boris Scherbina continued overseeing the liquidation of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident until December 1988, when Gorbachev sent him to Armenia as head of a new commission to marshal the Soviet emergency response to the devastating earthquake that killed twenty-five thousand people. By the time Scherbina arrived, the radiation he absorbed in Chernobyl had profoundly damaged his health, and the strain of handling a new disaster proved too much for him. Six months later, he was relieved of his duties on the Council of Ministers and died in August 1990 at the age of seventy.

  Vladimir Scherbitsky remained a fierce opponent of both glasnost and the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and clung to power for years after the accident. In September 1989 he was finally dismissed from the Politburo by Gorbachev, surrendered control of the Ukrainian Communist Party to his deputy, and announced his retirement. A broken man, his health failing, he died less than a year later, at the age of seventy-one, on February 16, 1990. In April 1993, a year-long inquiry by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the newly independent Ukraine concluded that Scherbitsky—along with his senior ministers—had deliberately concealed the truth about the Chernobyl accident and resulting radiation levels in Ukraine and had failed in his duty to protect the population of the republic. Due to Scherbitsky’s death and the expiration of the Ukrainian statute of limitations on the charges, the case—little more than political theater—was dropped before a trial could begin.

  Ukrainian energy minister Vitali Sklyarov adapted quickly to the post-Soviet world and became an enthusiastic advocate of privatizing state energy utilities but opposed the construction of new nuclear stations on economic and ecological grounds. In 1993, after more than thirty years as a power man, he resigned his ministerial position to become an advisor to then-prime minister Vitaly Masol. His few days’ work in the Exclusion Zone left him with a dose of 80 rem, but he remains in good health in his eighties and continues to spend time at his former government dacha in Koncha-Zaspa.

  Following his enforced retirement, Efim Slavsky lived out his remaining years in a grand apartment in Moscow, increasingly deaf and surrounded by mementos of his decades in power. A furious witness to the disintegration of the political system to which he had devoted his life, he died at the age of ninety-three in November 1991.

  Boris Stolyarchuk survived his radiation exposure in Control Room Number Four on the night of the accident and afterward returned to work in the nuclear industry. In 2017, he was named acting head of the Ukrainian State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate.

  Following treatment for radiation-induced leukemia in Hospital Number Six, General Nikolai Tarakanov returned to work in Soviet disaster relief and attended the scene of the Armenian earthquake in 1988. He began writing poetry in the hospital, published thirty books, and toured the United States, giving lectures about his work in the Exclusion Zone and the continuing risk of nuclear accidents. In 2016, he turned eighty-two and announced that his latest book would be a biography of Vladimir Putin, entitled Supreme Commander in Chief.

  Vladimir Usatenko used the 1,400 rubles he earned during his six weeks’ work as a liquidator in the Special Zone to buy his first color television set. In 1990 he was elected to the Ukrainian parliament and appointed chairman of a subcommittee dedicated to the scientific, social, and legal issues created by the disaster and nuclear power in Ukraine.

  Following the suicide of Valery Legasov and the retirement of Anatoly Aleksandrov, Academician Evgeny Velikhov was appointed director of the Kurchatov Institute in 1988. He became president of the organization in 1992 and led Russian participation in the ITER multinational project to develop an experimental plasma fusion reactor. In 2001 he was appointed by President Vladimir Putin to lead the Russian contribution to an international initiative to develop new nuclear power technologies proposed by Putin at the UN Millennium Summit.

  Detective Sergei Yankovsky did not attend the trial of the six men he helped indict for their part in the disaster but returned to his regular caseload of murder and corruption. In 1995, he was transferred to work at the Ukrainian Rada and began campaigning to have the fifty-seven volumes of investigative materials on the Chernobyl accident returned to Kiev from Moscow. When he left the job eight years later, the boxes of documents and tape recordings remained in the basement of the Russian Supreme Court, still classified top secret. In the spring of 2017, he was sixty-one years old and recuperating from a recent illness on the grounds of a state sanatorium in Kiev. “There are so many things in those files that no one will ever know,” he said.

  Natalia Yuvchenko lives and works in Moscow, close to her son, Kirill, and his wife, and her three grandchildren.

  After pumping out the basement of Unit Four, Captain Piotr “Moose” Zborovsky was promoted to major. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star, with a citation commending him “for mastering new equipment and weaponry.” In 1993, he was transferred to the civil defense reserve and took work first as a caretaker, then as a security guard. But he had lost his vaunted strength, suffered repeated blackouts, and found his bones began to fracture eas
ily. He died in 2007 at the age of fifty-five.

  1 The city of Pripyat in the early 80s, with the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station visible on the horizon. Reactor Unit Four of the plant lay just three kilometers from the southeastern edge of the town.

  2 A view of Pripyat down the length of Lenina Prospekt, the poplar-lined boulevard into the city.

  3 The Raduga—or Rainbow—department store on the corner of Kurchatov Street and the end of Lenina Prospekt. Plant director Viktor Brukhanov, like other senior members of the station staff, lived in an apartment above the store. The letters on the rooftop read “Glory to Lenin!” and “Glory to the Party!”

  4 Pripyat was surrounded by forest and white-sand beaches; the daily Raketa hydrofoil service provided a cheap and swift connection to Kiev, two hours to the south along the Dnieper River.

  5

  6 Viktor Brukhanov with his wife, Valentina, and their son, Oleg, collecting mushrooms in the woods near Pripyat, 1980.

  7 Alexander Yuvchenko, senior mechanical engineer of the fifth shift of Unit Four, and his wife, Natalia, posing in borrowed hats on the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, October 25, 1985.

  8 Natalia with their son, Kyrill, then two years old, at home in Pripyat for New Year’s 1985.

  9 Viktor Brukhanov (center, wearing sunglasses), Chernobyl plant Communist Party secretary Serhiy Parashyn (on the director’s left), and other Party chiefs from the power station and Pripyat lead the city’s Victory Day parade on May 9, 1985—celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Germany in the Great Patriotic War.

  10 Anatoly Aleksandrov, the octogenarian director of the Kurchatov Institute and head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, lecturing with pictures of the nuclear-powered icebreakers he helped pioneer. Aleksandrov personally endorsed the breakneck expansion of nuclear power in the USSR and took credit for the invention of the RBMK reactor.

  11 The central hall of Unit Three of the Chernobyl plant, showing the reactor’s 1600 fuel channels with their top covers removed. The RBMK-1000 model reactors of Units Three and Four, constructed back-to-back, were almost identical.

  12 Unit Four, the newest and most advanced of the reactor blocks of the Chernobyl station, photographed soon after its completion in 1983.

  13 Leonid Toptunov (left), senior reactor operator on the midnight shift of April 25, with his friend Alexander “Sasha” Korol (center) in 1981, on a trip with an unidentified friend two years before they graduated from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute.

  14 Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik, the twenty-three-year-old head of the third watch on duty at the Chernobyl plant fire station on the night of April 25.

  15 Alexander Akimov, foreman of the midnight shift in the control room of Reactor Number Four, on April 25–26.

  16 The first photograph of Unit Four after the accident, shot from a helicopter by Chernobyl plant photographer Anatoly Rasskazov, at approximately 3:00 p.m. on April 26, 1986.

  17 A sketch made by a member of the team sent to open the giant electrically operated valves feeding coolant to the stricken reactor in the early hours of April 26: Alexander Akimov (bottom left) and Leonid Toptunov (bottom right) are shown up to their ankles in radioactive water; Akimov can no longer stand unsupported; Toptunov is seized by vomiting.

  18 Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev, lead radiation reconnaissance scout of the 427th Red Banner Mechanized Regiment of the Kiev region civil defense, with his daughter in 1984.

  1 Captain Sergei Volodin, the first helicopter pilot on the scene of the accident on April 26, in the cockpit of his aircraft.

  2 Major General Nikolai Antoshkin, chief of staff of the Soviet Air Defense Forces of the Kiev region, in the cabin of one of the helicopters under his command.

  3 Captain Piotr Zborovsky in 1986. Nicknamed Los—or “Moose”— on account of his strength, Zborovsky commanded the operation to pump water from the basement of Unit Four in the hope of heading off a second explosion at the plant—one scientists feared could be orders of magnitude larger than the first.

  4 A photograph of the Polisye Hotel (left) and the Pripyat ispolkom building—the “White House” (right)—annotated by Antoshkin to show the sighting position from which his officers guided helicopters into their bombing runs over Unit Four.

  5 Maria Protsenko, chief architect of Pripyat, in her office in Chernobyl after the accident; visible behind her desk is a map of the evacuated city.

  6 Two of the US hematology specialists who flew to Moscow in early May to help treat the victims of the accident, photographed with their Soviet counterparts at Hospital Number Six: (left to right) Dr. Richard Champlin, Dr. Robert Gale, Dr. Alexander Baranov, and Dr. Angelina Guskova.

  7 The telegram sent by Leonid Toptunov from his bed in Hospital Number Six to his parents in Estonia on April 29. “MAMA I AM IN HOSPITAL I FEEL OK,” it reads, and provides the address in Moscow where they could find him.

  8 The STR-1, one of a handful of Soviet-designed robots deployed to remove radioactive debris from the roof of Unit Three in the late summer of 1986, shunting a block of graphite from the reactor core off the edge of the building. When the radiation proved too much for the robots, more than 3,000 men were sent to do the job instead.

  9 Deputy Prime Minister Ivan Silayev (left), the second leader of the government commission sent from Moscow to take charge of the crisis, examines aerial photographs of the ruined plant, with the scientists Yuri Izrael (center) and Evgeny Velikhov (right) in May 1986.

  10 Deputy Prime Minister Boris Scherbina (second from left), the original leader of the government commission, and Academician Valery Legasov (fourth from left) on their return to Chernobyl to deal with the ongoing liquidation in September 1986.

  11 Efim Slavsky—also known as “Big Efim” or “the Ayatollah”—(left), head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, with design and engineering specialists Vladimir Kurnosov (center) and Ilya Dudorov (right) at the scene in September 1986. Slavsky had established a dedicated construction unit, Sredmash US-605, to encase the ruins of the reactor in a ‘Sarcophagus’ of steel and concrete.

  12 The Sarcophagus under construction in mid-October 1986. The upper levels of the Cascade Wall are being backfilled through the pipes of a chain of pumping trucks; on the right, a caterpillar-tracked Demag crane is at work on the tower which will anchor the western end of the building.

  13 The completed Sarcophagus in November 1986.

  14 The trial of those accused of causing the disaster began in the Palace of Culture in Chernobyl in July 1987. Seated between two MVD guards are (left to right): plant director Viktor Brukhanov, Deputy Chief Engineer for Operations Anatoly Dyatlov, and Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin.

  15 One of the equipment graveyards to which buses, fire trucks, helicopters, armored vehicles, and construction equipment—too contaminated to be removed from the exclusion zone surrounding the plant—were consigned after the accident. By 1997, according to one estimate, the total losses resulting from the accident had reached $128 billion.

  16 The “Elephant’s Foot,” the huge congealed mass of once-molten sand, uranium fuel, steel, and concrete, found in the autumn of 1986 by the scientists of the Chernobyl Complex Expedition in the basement beneath the ruins of Reactor Number Four. It remained so radioactive that less than five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee an agonizing death.

  17 The city of Pripyat in April 2016, with the Chernobyl station and the arch of the New Safe Confinement building visible on the horizon. Thirty years after the accident, the atomgrad had been almost completely reclaimed by nature.

  Acknowledgments

  The origins of this project go back many years, with roots in the story that I first followed in the news as a teenager and returned to decades later as a magazine writer. During that time I’ve received invaluable help from friends and colleagues all over the world. It was inspired, and made possible, by the men and women whose lives were changed by the explosion of Reactor Number Four an
d who agreed to share with me the stories of their time in Pripyat, the Chernobyl plant, and the other atomic cities and installations of the USSR. From my first meeting with Alexander and Natalia Yuvchenko one gray afternoon in Moscow, I have been welcomed into the homes of people who showed me great kindness, hospitality, and patience, even when discussing the most traumatic of events; I’m grateful to all of them for agreeing to be cross-examined by a foreign stranger in the interests of bringing their experience wider attention. I’d also like to thank Anna Korolevska for helping me make contact with many of those witnesses to the disaster, and to Elena Kozlova, Tom Lasica, Maria Protsenko, and Nikolai Steinberg, who provided me with vital leads and introductions that proved essential to recreating an accurate account of what happened.

  My first reporting from Chernobyl was made possible by my editors at the Observer Magazine, Allan Jenkins and Ian Tucker, who—after some spirited debate—agreed to trust me with a thick envelope of hard currency and dispatch me on that initial trip to Russia and Ukraine. Later, my editors at Wired in London and San Francisco helped me make subsequent forays into the Exclusion Zone, each of which I may well have sworn would be absolutely my last. As I embarked upon the reporting for the book itself, I was lucky to benefit from the advice of Piers Paul Read, who was generous with both his time and encouragement, and practical guidance in navigating the nations of the former USSR from Natalia Lentsi, Andrey Slivka, Micky Lachmann, Fiona Cushley, and Matt McAllester.