Perhaps all this was only to be expected from a team of investigators who were in essence investigating their own failings. Since there were representatives from the Kurchatov Institute and Dollezhal’s design bureau on the investigating team, but none from the personnel on the spot, it was only to be expected that the emphasis should be put on the shortcomings of the operators, and the word went out almost at once that their reckless mistakes had caused the disaster. If the design of the reactor itself was blamed, the pressure of public opinion both at home and abroad might force the closing of all the other RBMK reactors, with catastrophic consequences for the Soviet economy.
Certainly the fallibility of the operators was the easiest face-saving explanation to feed to the bourgeois press in the West. As early as 30 April, Boris Yeltsin in Hamburg told a West German television network that the accident had been caused ‘by human error’, and on 4 May, he told the Associated Press that ‘one thing, certainly, is hard to believe, and that is that it had anything to do with the quality of the equipment.’ At his press conference on 6 May, Boris Scherbina announced that a full investigation of the causes of the accident was under way:
… but taking into account that the design and structural solutions correspond fully to the norms of both our country and generally accepted international practice, and that the quality of the manufacture, the installation and acceptance of equipment was properly checked, the cause of the accident could be the consequence of the coincidence of several exceptionally unlikely and therefore unforeseen failures. The activity of the staff on duty is also being analysed carefully.
When he addressed the nation on television on 15 May, Mikhail Gorbachev refrained from saying what had gone wrong. ‘It is as yet too early to pass final judgment on the causes of the accident. All aspects of the problem … are under the close scrutiny of the government commission.’
Equally reticent were the two officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna: its Swedish director general, Hans Blix, and the head of its nuclear safety department, the American Morris Rosen. Both had flown over the reactor in a helicopter on 7 May, and on 9 May held a press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. They confirmed that ‘a full and authoritative description of the accident, the causes of the accident, and its consequences, can only be given by the Soviet authorities after the necessary analysis.’ In their own summary description, they reassured the journalists that ‘as a prophylactic measure, people inside and outside the thirty-kilometre zone were given potassium iodine tablets.’ Rosen assured them that ‘the accident area will be inhabitable again,’ and in a reply to a suggestion from the Novosti Press Agency that the Western media were trying to frighten the public, Blix asked the reporters present ‘not to exaggerate, not to disseminate rumours of different kinds or any kind of information that will only worry people.’
‘Mr Director General,’ asked a correspondent from Pravda, ‘are you satisfied with the volume and the nature of the information that you have received during your visit to the USSR?’
‘To this question I reply unquestionably yes,’ replied Blix. ‘We had very frank and open discussions with ministers and experts, and in many cases the experts and officials are people whom we have known for a long time.’
Before returning to Vienna, Blix and Rosen were promised by the Soviet authorities that a full explanation of what had happened would be presented to the IAEA in due course. Back in Vienna, they were subjected to a more rigorous interrogation by two correspondents of the German magazine Der Spiegel. ‘The Russians are confident,’ said Blix, ‘that they will be capable of decontaminating the area. It will be agriculturally usable again.’
‘How soon?’
‘We did not talk about when they will begin or how long it will take.’
‘How strong was the radiation intensity – four hundred or even one thousand rems?’
‘We did not ask,’ said Rosen.
‘Why not?’
‘We did not go there to ascertain what dose of radiation has hit the populace.’
‘It is hardly comprehensible that you did not raise this question, since it is highly significant for the consequences in all neighbouring countries.’
Later, the two interrogators from Der Spiegel asked Rosen if he had raised the question of the RBMK’s unsatisfactory safety standards before the accident.
‘We do not have any proof that they are faulty,’ Rosen replied.
‘Can you tell whether the Soviet reactors are safer, or less safe, than the reactors in the West?’
‘They are a different type.’
A month prior to the accident, Lubov Kovalevskaya, obviously an insider, published in the journal Literaturnaya Ukraina a report on the Chernobyl power plant. It constitutes a horror picture of mishaps that occurred during the construction of the reactor – slovenly work, decrepit material, dangerous haste. Did you read the report prior to the accident?’
‘No,’ replied Blix. ‘I did not read it.’
‘I know some of the commentaries made in that respect,’ said Rosen. ‘There are similar reports on slovenliness in the construction of U.S. reactors.’
‘This report did not make you nervous?’
‘Nervous? Why?’
‘Because of the dangers to mankind and the environment …’
‘I am interested in commentaries on all reactors,’ said Rosen. ‘I file them away for potential future reference.’
Der Spiegel suggested that perhaps there should be an organization like Amnesty International to monitor the dangers inherent in nuclear energy. ‘If we take a look at what you publish,’ Blix was told, ‘we gain the impression that your organization is nothing more than a public relations agency for the application of nuclear energy.’
‘No, quite the contrary,’ said Blix. ‘You are quite wrong there.’
7
The world now awaited the full disclosure of the causes of the accident, which Gorbachev himself had promised would be made at a conference in August of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The task of preparing the report was entrusted to a group of twenty-three experts – half of which was from the Kurchatov Institute, including Legasov, Ryzantzev, Kalugin and Sivintsev; the other members included Ilyn, Israel, Abagyan, Guskova and Pikalov. Papers were also submitted by the very institutions that had an interest in concealing the truth: the Kurchatov; NIKYET, Dollezhal’s design bureau; Zukh-Hydroprojekt, which had built the reactor; Abagyan’s research institute, VNIIAES; and, protecting them all in its huge embrace, Slavsky’s Ministry of Medium Machine Building.
It was not merely a question of saving the reputations of a few physicists; they could have been thrown to the wolves. There was the far greater danger that if it was admitted that RBMK reactors were faulty by design, responsibility for the accident would reach up to the minister, Slavsky, to the chief designer, Dollezhal, and to the scientific leader and president of the Academy of Sciences, Anatoli Alexandrov himself. This was unthinkable. To the generation of political leaders now in the Politburo, these three octogenarians were like living statues in the pantheon of Soviet heroes. To pull them down, to show the world that they were careless, incompetent or simply mistaken, would fatally discredit the whole Soviet system. It would demoralize the scientific community; in their own institutes, they were revered, and the accident at Chernobyl was seen as a tragedy not merely for the harm it had inflicted on its victims but for the blight it had cast on their life’s work.
No one felt more protective of Alexandrov than his first deputy director, Valeri Legasov; yet no one knew better the full extent of the catastrophe. Before the accident he had been nominally responsible, along with Alexandrov, for all atomic enterprises in the Soviet Union. Together with Alexandrov, he had insisted that Soviet reactors were safe.
On 26 April, snatched from a party cell meeting at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, as a member of the government commission Legasov had set off for Chernobyl in his smart suit and leather coat
, imagining a mishap of the kind the Americans had suffered at Three Mile Island. Ten days later, on 5 May, he had returned briefly to Moscow in the uniform of a soldier. His suit and leather coat were both highly radioactive. ‘If you can decontaminate these,’ he said to his friend Protzenko, ‘you’ll win the Nobel prize.’ He was physically exhausted, but also morally shaken by what he had witnessed in the past two weeks. ‘Such unreadiness,’ he told another friend, ‘such disorder. A worst possible version of 1941 with the same courage, the same desperation and the same unpreparedness …’ With tears in his eyes, he told his friends how everyone had been taken by surprise. There had been no stable iodine and none could be obtained; nor were there any respirators, medicines, reserves of fresh water or uncontaminated food. He feared for the accident’s long-term effects.
Legasov returned to Chernobyl to lead, with Velikhov, the struggle to contain the consequences of the disaster. The prodigious power of the Soviet state, marshalled by Ryzhkov – tens of thousands of troops, fleets of helicopters, battalions of miners, metro construction workers and engineers – looked for guidance to the handful of physicists to tell them what action was necessary. Some, like Kalugin and Fedulenko, might know more about the RBMK reactor than more eminent academicians, like Velikhov and Legasov, but because they were not leaders and did not have the stature to share in the deliberations of the commission, they were ineligible to play a heroic role.
Velikhov and Legasov had different areas of expertise – Velikhov in nuclear fusion, Legasov in noble gases – that had little to do with nuclear reactor accidents, but each had the inestimable advantage of having patrons on the Politburo. Velikhov was Gorbachev’s scientific adviser, which, given the challenge of the American Strategic Defense Initiative, was a post of considerable political significance. Within the realm of science, he was an exponent of glasnost and perestroika, cooperating with the Americans on joint ventures in nuclear fusion. He was also vice president of the Academy of Sciences, the chief rival to Legasov to succeed Alexandrov.
Legasov was a protégé of Ligachev’s and his father had been the head of the ideological department in the secretariat of the Central Committee, which Ligachev now controlled. Although aware, like Velikhov, that Soviet science was in need of some reorganization, Legasov was ideologically sympathetic to Ligachev’s line, but behind his political differences with Velikhov, there was professional rivalry. Alexandrov could not go on for ever, and only one of them could succeed him as director of the Kurchatov Institute and president of the Academy of Sciences. Accompanying this professional rivalry, there was personal antipathy. Velikhov and Legasov disliked each other, and each tried to go to Chernobyl when the other was not there.
For Legasov, Chernobyl presented an opportunity to shine. Theoretically relieved by Velikhov when Silayev replaced Scherbina, he nevertheless remained to advise the commission. More commanding in demeanour than the pudgy Velikhov, he got greater respect from military commanders like General Ivanov of the civil defence and Major General Pikalov, commander of the chemical troops. He also had the advantage of being among the first to reach Chernobyl after the accident, so there was no questioning his undoubtedly heroic role. This record, together with his scientific reputation and political pedigree, made him the obvious choice to lead the Soviet delegation to Vienna. There was some opposition; hardliners in the Ministry of Medium Machine Building saw no reason for any disclosures at all and thought Legasov dangerously independent. But with the support of Ligachev, the Grand Inquisitor of the Central Committee, the Politburo approved him.
Like Ligachev, Legasov believed that there must be limits to glasnost: nothing should impair either the power or prestige of his country. There was also the question of his own responsibility for the catastrophe at Chernobyl; as Alexandrov’s first deputy, he shared the older man’s responsibility for nuclear power, for he too had assured the world that Soviet reactors were entirely safe. At the time of the accident, he had been investigating the whole question of industrial safety, in particular the safety of nuclear power, which, since the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi reactor, had seemed vulnerable and dangerous in the event of war.
With respect to the report for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Legasov’s interests and those of his country were the same. Nor were any of his colleagues in any of the many institutes connected to the atomic-power industry likely to oppose him. It was his task to collate the reports that came in from the various institutes, and he worked tirelessly, the floor of his living room covered with piles of papers. It was a task of the utmost complexity, but he was helped by his colleagues in the Kurchatov Institute nearby.
That June, before the appointment of the working party, two meetings of nuclear physicists were held to consider ways in which the analysis contained in the report to the commission could be changed. The list of serious deficiencies in the reactor’s design must be replaced with an explanation that put the blame on the operating personnel.
Given the nature of the Soviet system – the many tentacles of the octopus whose brain was the Politburo – the presentation to the public of an authorized version was not left to Legasov alone. In Kiev, Volodomyr Yavorivsky, part journalist, part publisher, part poet, and a secretary of the Writers’ Union, set off for the thirty-kilometre zone to collect material for his novel, The Star Called Wormwood, in which the personnel at a nuclear power station were depicted as incompetent and dissolute. It was a roman à clef: the unfortunate people from Pripyat who had lost their jobs, their homes – some their health, a few their lives – were the models for thinly veiled portraits of idle operators, a drunken director and an adulterous chief engineer.
In Moscow, Legasov’s friend Vladimir Gubarev, the scientific editor of Pravda, was suddenly inspired to write a play. Already, on 15 June, he had quoted in his paper the opinion of a Ukrainian party leader that ‘in the complex situation of the accident, former AES Director V. Brukhanov and Chief Engineer N. Fomin were unable to ensure the correct firm leadership and proper discipline, and showed irresponsibility and inefficiency.’ On 19 July Gubarev started to write his play, which he called Sarcophagus. He wrote it in a frenzy, sleeping only three hours a night, and finished it in a week. The drama was set in the medical wing of a radiological research centre, where victims are brought in from a nuclear accident. A state investigator collects evidence from the patients. Little by little, the play exposes the carelessness and complacency of the plant’s management, the recklessness of the operators and the cowardice of the personnel at the time of the accident.
The heroes of the play are a courageous young fireman and a young physicist who stays at his post. The villains are the director, who runs off to save his grandchildren but fails to warn the inhabitants of the town; the blustering, buck-passing officer responsible for safety in the plant; and the dosimetrist who, like the director, fails to warn others of the danger. The dramatic device of the state investigator enabled Gubarev to expose all the shortcomings in construction and management of the power station he had based on Chernobyl: the inflammable roof, the lack of adequate dosimeters and the delay in the evacuation of the town. As in Yavorivsky’s novel, the personnel and the system are to blame, not the design of the reactor.
Although in essence it said little more than the article by Lubov Kovalevskaya published before the accident in Literaturnaya Ukraina, Gubarev’s Sarcophagus broke new ground in speaking so openly about the shortcomings of the system. ‘What swine, excuse the unliterary word,’ says one of the characters, ‘switched off the emergency system? I wanted to say that this is murder. Not suicide, but murder …’
‘The main thing for you,’ replies the physicist, ‘is to clarify who took off the emergency protection.’
‘Who took it off? Who took it off? It was the system that switched off the emergency cooling. A system of irresponsibility.’
Gubarev was no dissident; the system criticized was not the Soviet one as such but that which had prevailed during Brezhnev’
s era of stagnation. Although larded with lofty thoughts about the nature of civilization and the destiny of man, Gubarev’s play was no more than a plea for the new party line that Gorbachev was pursuing within the Central Committee. It was not communism but the lack of glasnost and perestroika that had led to the accident at Chernobyl.
As a result, Sarcophagus had no difficulty in finding theatres to stage it. It was noted at the time by William J. Eaton of the Los Angeles Times that ‘the play’s rapid appearance suggests strongly that it has the support of high-level Kremlin officials, if not that of the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev himself.’ It appeared in the literary magazine Znamya, was translated into several foreign languages and appeared in many theatres abroad, establishing effectively in most people’s minds that the accident was the fault of the operating personnel.
8
Others joined the campaign. In an interview in Pravda at the end of July, the head of the State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy, Andranik Petrosyants, said that it appeared that the operators ‘had forgotten what kind of fuel they were working with.’
But for the Soviet people more eloquent than any interview was the public disgrace of Brukhanov. For almost a month after the accident, he had remained at Chernobyl, fulfilling his duties as director of the station as best he could. He had been at the disposal of the government commission, and even when he suspected that the measures recommended by the illustrious academicians were futile, he carried out his orders to the letter. Shocked by the catastrophe and horrified by the deaths of his men, he was fully aware that as director he would sooner or later be held responsible for what had occurred.
On 22 May Brukhanov asked for permission from Mayorets, the minister of energy and electrification, to take a few days off to visit his wife and son, who had been evacuated to the Crimea. Permission was granted, and he stayed with them for a week. On 2 June he was summoned back to Kiev. There he was given a ticket to fly to Moscow the next day to attend a meeting of the Politburo in the Kremlin. When he went to say good-bye to the second party secretary, who had treated him with the utmost formality in the past, the man impetuously embraced him, which suggested to Brukhanov that something unpleasant had been arranged for him in the capital city.
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