Katia Bachko, Peter Canby, David Kortava, Tali Woodward, Joshua Yaffa, and Polina Sinovets all helped guide me toward the outstanding Russian-speaking researchers and fact-checkers I’ve mentioned elsewhere; Eugenia Butska, Anton Povar, and Gennadi Milinevsky allowed me to explore otherwise inaccessible parts of the city of Pripyat, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and the Exclusion Zone that proved central to the narrative of the book. I’d also like to thank Andrea Gallo, Inna Lobanova-Heasley, Michael Wilson, Michael D. Cooper, and Gunnar Bergdahl for their help along the way.
Among the many other memorable experiences I’ve enjoyed while reporting in Ukraine over the years, I’d particularly like to thank Roman Shumeyko for his rightly legendary plov and a great evening of lakeside drinking. Closer to home, I’m grateful to Rose George, Greg Williams, James and Ana Freedman, Yudhijit Bhattarcharjee, Brendan Koerner, Julie Satow, Ted Conover, Evan Ratliff, Nick Thompson, and Keith Gessen for their valuable advice and support.
Ihor Kulyk and the staff of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, and Christian Ostermann and the researchers of the Wilson Center Cold War History Project, all helped me find and translate key documents in Ukraine; Melanie Locay and the staff of the New York Public Library’s research division gave me access to materials I could not otherwise have hoped to get my hands on, and to the privileges of the Allen Room, where I enjoyed the time and silence necessary to use them properly.
Throughout the long process of making the initial idea into a book, I’ve been able to rely on the urbane, unflappable guidance of my agent, Edward Orloff; I’d also like to thank Millicent Bennett, Henry Vines, Michelle Kroes, and Scott Rudin, who were all early believers in the project. At Simon & Schuster, Jon Karp and Ben Loehnen shared my enthusiasm for the story from the beginning, provided exacting feedback on the manuscript—and, finally, a wonderful title; Amar Deol shepherded me expertly through the often bewildering logistics of publication, and Kayley Hoffman, Phillip Bashe, and Josh Cohen saved me from numerous typographical and literal mistakes.
I’m greatly indebted to Katie Mummah, Rob Goldston, Frank Von Hippel, and Alexander Sich for talking me through the complexities of atomic physics and nuclear engineering and reviewing those parts of the manuscript dealing with the design and drawbacks of the RBMK-1000 reactor; Timothy Jorgensen displayed similar generosity and patience in helping me understand the science and terminology of radiobiology and radiation medicine; any errors or oversimplifications that remain are entirely my own.
For keeping me sane when I finally decamped to Jay Street to wrangle my mountains of material into a book, I’d like to thank Chris Heath, Lauren Hilgers, Nathan Thornburgh, and the good people of Roads and Kingdoms. And to all my friends who have endured the long, itinerant progress of my reporting this and many other projects over the years and given up their couches, mattresses, and spare rooms so I had somewhere to stay—Toby Amies, Andrew Marshall, Peg Rawes, and Tom Corby; David Keeps, Ian Tucker, Michael Odell, Dan Crane, Kate and John; Micky and Lisa; Rupert, Julie, Stella, Soren, and Nancy; Matt, Pernilla and Harry—thank you. And belated apologies for not doing more washing up.
Most of all, I’m grateful to my frankest critic and most tireless cheerleader, Vanessa Mobley, and our daughter, Isla, for their love and forbearance through years of long absences, endless revisions, and of having to enter our apartment through a hallway booby-trapped with potentially radioactive footwear and piles of books about the Soviet economy; I could not have got here without you.
New York, September 2018
Author’s Note
This is a book of history, but also a work of reporting. In recreating the immediate experience of living through the disaster, I relied on interviews I began conducting with eyewitnesses in 2006, as well as upon published first-person accounts and declassified Soviet documents. This would not have been possible without the dedicated assistance of some superb translators, fixers, and researchers. These included Olga Ticush, Misha Smetnick, Anna Sorokin, and Artemis Davleyev in Russia; and Alex Livotka, Ostap Zdorovylo, Natalia Mackessy, Tetiana Vodianytska, and Dmytro Chumak in Ukraine. In New York, James Appell spent many months chasing elusive sources and translating documents and correspondence; Anna Kordunsky took on the work of fact-checking the manuscript and proved a tireless and unsparing collaborator on everything from the technical details of reactor design to the finer points of Russian etymology.
But the book would not exist at all without the expertise and support of Taras Shumeyko. My guide and reporting companion over the course of a dozen years, in visits to survivors of the catastrophe in provincial cities and snowbound villages, at international conferences and inside the Exclusion Zone, Taras helped track down many of the men and women whose testimony proved central to the narrative. He charmed and cajoled reluctant veterans and archivists and unearthed documents and conducted interviews that became fundamental to the story.
Several Russian-language books reported in the months after the accident provided an excellent source of first-person testimony that informs the narrative. Both Iurii Shcherbak’s Chernobyl and Vasily Voznyak and Stanislav Troitsky’s Chernobyl: It Was Like This—The View from the Inside furnished valuable eyewitness perspective on what happened, and the collection of personal essays written by participants in the liquidation gathered by A. N. Semenov in Chernobyl: Ten Years On: Inevitability or Accident? provided an essential guide to the experience of the ministers, nuclear engineers, and other specialists caught up in the catastrophe. Elena Kozlova’s The Battle With Uncertainty is the definitive account of the work surrounding the Sarcophagus, told almost entirely in the words of those who built it.
In English, the transcription taken contemporaneously from testimony at the trial of Viktor Brukhanov by Nikolay Karpan and translated in his book From Chernobyl to Fukushima was indispensable in building a picture of events and attitudes leading to the explosion. The unedited transcripts of interviews conducted for the BBC TV series The Second Russian Revolution in 1990 and 1991, held in the library of the London School of Economics, revealed candid accounts of the accident by aging members of the Politburo and other senior Soviet figures whose views would otherwise have remained out of reach. My road map to the personal histories of those who worked at the Chernobyl plant was Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl by Piers Paul Read, who interviewed almost every one of the principal actors in the story to create one of the first comprehensive English-language accounts of what happened.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the revolutions in Ukraine, and the three decades since the disaster have helped open many archives of once-classified official records. The minutes and transcripts of meetings of the Politburo and of Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov’s Chernobyl Operations Group proved especially useful in separating facts from the Soviet myth of the accident—although I have treated these with some caution. The minutes of the Politburo were taken in different forms, varying in length, detail, and potential veracity, and have emerged from the Russian archives both as photographs of the original documents and, in some cases, as transcripts copied down by researchers given privileged access to archives that have opened briefly, only to be closed again. I’m grateful to both Mark Kramer, program director of the Project on Cold War Studies at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, and the Russian Chernobyl historian Vladimir Maleyev for their guidance in this area. The paper trail of many important decisions and all the early deliberations of the government commission in Pripyat and Chernobyl remains scant; some sources suggest that documents were destroyed either at the time or soon afterward to limit the spread of both information and contamination. I’m therefore greatly indebted to Anna Korolevska, deputy director for science of the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev, for allowing me access to the original Ukrainian Interior Ministry working record of the accident—maintained from the early hours of the morning on April 26 until May 6, 1986, and apparently preserved by the officer entrusted with its destruct
ion—which provided an invaluable insight into the evolving response to events as they happened.
The wider story of the accident, stretching back to the initial decision to build a nuclear power station near Kiev in the late 1960s, through the catastrophe itself and up to the present day, is well represented in several collections of documents: notably “Fond 89: The Soviet Communist Party on Trial,” part of the remarkable collection of more than nine million previously secret Party records photographed in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) and preserved by the Hoover Institution, Stanford, a copy of which I was able to read in Harvard’s Lamont Library. An even broader selection of primary sources has been collated by the Ukrainian historian Natalia Baranovska in her book The Chernobyl Tragedy: Documents and Materials; the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has built a growing collection of documents pertaining to the disaster in an online archive; and the involvement of the Ukrainian KGB with the Chernobyl plant is related in detail by the 121 documents published by Yuri Danilyuk as “The Chernobyl Tragedy in Documents and Materials.” Perhaps most important, I also had access to the primary materials—logbooks, personal letters, maps, photographs, and government records—curated over the course of more than twenty years by the Chernobyl Museum.
The volume of technical literature so far published on the disaster is overwhelming, but for an understanding of the ways in which the attitudes and imperatives of the Soviet nuclear industry opened the path to disaster inside Reactor Number Four, I relied upon the research of Sonja D. Schmid and Paul Josephson, in particular their respective books Producing Power and Red Atom. For an appreciation of the complexities of radiation science, I found useful guides in Robert Gale and Thomas Hauser’s Final Warning and Timothy Jorgensen’s excellent Strange Glow. To accurately recreate the sequence of the accident itself, I drew on the abundant detail contained in the IAEA report known as INSAG-7 and the extraordinary work done by Dr. Alexander Sich for his PhD dissertation, “The Chornobyl Accident Revisited: Source Term Analysis and Reconstruction of Events During the Active Phase.”
About the Author
© PETER EAVIS
ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM writes for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and Smithsonian. He lives in New York City.
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Glossary
Academy of Sciences: The most distinguished academic institute in the USSR, dedicated to basic research in mathematics and the natural, physical, and social sciences, with equivalents in each of the Soviet republics.
Aktiv: A group of Communist Party activists entrusted with enacting the decisions of the Party at local level, especially in the workplace.
Apparat: The bureaucracy of the Soviet state, particularly of the Communist Party itself.
Apparatchik: A functionary of the apparat.
Atomshchiki: Nuclear engineers; the elite of atomic power specialists, often trained in the military facilities of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building.
Central Committee: In theory, the highest decision-making body of the Communist Party, directing the activities of Party committees, ministries, and enterprises throughout the USSR. In practice, subordinate to the much smaller Politburo.
Council of Ministers: The Soviet cabinet, with counterparts at the top of the government in each republic, which enacted the decisions of the Politburo.
Energetiki: Power engineers, including those operating nuclear stations, directly employed by the Ministry of Energy and Electrification.
Era of Stagnation: The period after 1970, given its name by Mikhail Gorbachev, in which the Soviet economy and culture began to ossify.
General Secretary: Leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and de facto head of state.
Gorkom: The district committee of the Communist Party, responsible for enacting Party decisions at town or city level.
Gosplan: The state committee for economic planning, the brain of the centralized economy.
Ispolkom: A local government committee appointed to manage the affairs of a town, city, or district; the equivalent of a Western municipal council.
Kolkhoz: A collective farm.
Komsomol: The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Communist Party, with membership limited to ages fourteen through twenty-eight.
Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy: The USSR’s principal agency for research and development in nuclear energy, originating as the secret Laboratory Number Two of the Academy of Sciences, which had been dedicated to building the Soviet atom bomb.
Militsia: The regular police force maintained by the MVD; despite its name, not to be confused with a militia.
Minenergo: The Ministry of Energy and Electrification, the Soviet civilian energy ministry.
MVD: Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del—the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the paramilitary agency responsible for the police, firefighting, and internal security.
NIKIET: Nauchno-issledovatelskiy i konstruktorskiy institut energotekhniki—the Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technology, the agency where the designs of Soviet nuclear reactors, including the RBMK, were created.
NIKIMT: Nauchno-issledovatelskiy i konstruktorskiy institut montazhnoy tekhnologii—the Research and Design Institute of Assembly Technology, the Sredmash department devoted to developing technical solutions for nuclear construction.
Nomenklatura: The elite of the Communist Party, appointed to key positions with access to special privileges and high salaries, and the name given to the system of lists that assigned them.
Oblast: An administrative district or province. In 1986 Ukraine was divided into twenty-four oblasts, of which the Kiev oblast was the largest. Each oblast was further subdivided into rayons, or regions, similar to the bureaucratic hierarchy of US counties or city boroughs.
OPAS: Gruppa okazaniya pomoschi atomnym stantsiyam pri avariyakh—the Ministry of Energy’s emergency response team dedicated to accidents at nuclear power plants.
Politburo: The “political bureau” of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, intended to assume decision-making between meetings of the Central Committee. In fact, the seat of ultimate power in the USSR.
RBMK: Reaktor bolshoy moschnosti kanalnyy—a graphite-moderated boiling water reactor, a design unique to the Soviet Union.
Soyuzatomenergo: The All-Union Industrial Association for Nuclear Power, the civilian agency within the Ministry of Energy overseeing the operation of atomic power plants.
Sredmash: The Ministry of Medium Machine Building, responsible for the Soviet nuclear weapons program and all reactor technology.
Supreme Soviet: Nominally, the parliament of the USSR, responsible for formulating legislation for the entire Union, with equivalent subsidiary bodies in each of the member republics.
VNIIAES: Vsesoyuznyy nauchno-issledovatelskiy institut po ekspluatatsii atomnykh elektrostantsiy—All-Union Research Institute for the Operation of Nuclear Power Plants, the civilian body providing research support for atomic power stations.
VVER: Vodo-vodyanoy energetichesky reaktor—a water-cooled and water-moderated reactor, similar to the Western pressurized water reactor.
Young Pioneers: The Communist Party’s politically indoctrinating answer to the Scouts, for children aged ten through fourteen.
ZhEK: Zhili
shchno-ekspluatatsionnaya kontora—the housing and maintenance office of city apartment buildings.
Units of Radiation
There are numerous ways of measuring radiation and its effects, and the terminology has evolved repeatedly since the science emerged more than a century ago. Although scientists now use standardized international (SI) units, the ones used in this book are those prevailing in the USSR at the time of the Chernobyl accident, principally the roentgen and the rem. To aid the reader in understanding the meaning of these older units, and their relation to their replacements, each is described here.
curie (Ci): A quantity of radioactivity, originally defined by the number of radioactive disintegrations in one gram of radium (approximately 37,000,000,000 disintegrations per second). The Ci has been replaced by a newer standardized unit, the becquerel.
rad: Radiation absorbed dose, a measurement of the dose of ionizing radiation deposited in a given mass of matter—whether a brick, a pine tree, or a human organ. The SI unit of absorbed dose is the gray (Gy), which represents one joule of ionizing radiation energy deposited per kilogram of matter. One hundred rad is equivalent to one gray.
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