Ablaze

by Read, Piers Paul;

  Others were less resilient than these military men. Victor Knijnikov suffered a heart attack towards the end of 1990. He recovered and ascribed it to stress. Boris Scherbina died of a heart attack in 1989, but like most others in the Soviet Union, he had been a chain smoker. Victor Koreshkov, the chief engineer of the Kiev metro construction workers, also died, as did seven thousand of the liquidators. To some, like the Ukrainian scientist Vladimir Chernousenko, this figure was proof of the hazards of radiation; to others it was the normal death rate for six hundred thousand people living in the Soviet Union at the time. The death of almost anyone who had been near the fourth reactor at Chernobyl came to be ascribed to radiation – for example, the Ukrainian film director Vladimir Shevchenko, who was ill before he took footage of the burning reactor and died a year later.

  General Ivanov was particularly incensed at the publicity about the medical treatment in Seattle of the helicopter pilot Anatoli Grishenko. Grishenko had been one of the test pilots, but no one remembered his spending unusually long periods over the reactor. Certainly, General Ivanov insisted, he had never been made a Hero of the Soviet Union, as was announced in the U.S. press.

  3

  In 1989 a team of scientists from the Kurchatov Institute formed the Complex Expedition to investigate conditions within the sarcophagus itself. In the aftermath of the accident, no one knew what had happened to the nuclear fuel. Ever since the graphite fire had burned itself out on 6 May 1986, the temperature within the ruins of the reactor had gradually subsided. In theory, however, there was always the possibility that if a critical mass remained buried within the sarcophagus, fission might resume.

  In 1989, the search for the fuel took the members of the Complex Expedition down into the basement of the fourth block. Working in areas of high radiation with inadequate protective clothing, they came across fractured fuel rods that were empty and cold. However, their instruments suggested a highly radioactive mass ahead of them. They sent in a television camera fixed to a robot to examine it and discovered what they called ‘the elephant’s foot’.

  This was a once molten mass that had solidified as it had oozed out of the reactor into the foundations of the fourth block. Like a limestone deposit in an underground cavern, it had rippled layers of a substance that the team had never encountered before. The radiation level on its surface was ten thousand roentgens an hour. To discover what it was, the scientists called in a police marksman, who shot off fragments with an AK-47 rifle. These showed that the elephant’s foot was a once-molten flow of nuclear fuel and sand.

  Where had this lava come from? To find out, the Complex Expedition drilled a hole into the base of the reactor. Inserting a camera through it, they saw that it was now empty. At the base there remained some fragments of graphite, but there was no nuclear fuel. Returning to the basement beneath the reactor, they explored chambers adjacent to the emptied bubbler pool and suddenly came upon the source of the lava flow: a now-solidifed mass of nuclear fuel and sand, bright yellow and black in the light of their lamps, and covered with strange new crystalline forms.

  To Konstantin Checherov, the leader of the expedition, it was a wonderful sight, not just because it explained what had happened to the fuel but also because it had its own strange beauty. It also solved the riddle that had so puzzled Legasov in the immediate aftermath of the accident. It was known that the force of the explosion had blown the biological protection shield off the top of the reactor; now it was clear that it had also forced down the base of the reactor. In doing so, the sand lining the reactor had started to pour into the basement, mixing with the molten fuel from the core. In contact with such high temperatures, the sand had vitrified and then solidified, at the same time diluting the fuel and trapping it like a fly in amber. There would be no new chain reaction.

  Knowing the whereabouts and the condition of the nuclear fuel did not remove all potential future hazards from the fourth reactor. Most acute was the condition of the sarcophagus. Built with urgency under atrocious conditions, it was supported by the structure of the fourth unit itself. This structure had been damaged by the force of the explosion and had shifted a little since the sarcophagus had been built. As a result there were gaps where it was open to the elements, where rain could enter and, washing through the highly contaminated contents, seep into the soil and contaminate the groundwater.

  There was also a possibility that at some stage the sarcophagus could collapse onto the many tons of highly radioactive dust, sending a new cloud of radio-nuclides into the air and endangering the personnel at the station. The same thing would happen if the huge biological protection shield, now supported only by broken pipes, should fall to the ground. There was no obvious solution to this problem. It might be possible to rebuild the sarcophagus with stronger foundations, or to build a mammoth new one to encase the one already in place, but either solution would cost large sums of money, which the bankrupt country could ill afford.

  Nor was it clear what would happen to the other three units. A resolution was passed in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet to decommission the entire Chernobyl nuclear power station. However, the plant still belonged to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification in Moscow, which insisted that the economy could not afford to lose the three thousand megawatts of electrical power. The future of Chernobyl became one of many bones of contention between the government in Moscow and those in the republics, and its fate remained, as it had been since 26 April 1986, inextricably entwined with the political evolution of the country.

  4

  On 21 August 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was scheduled to sign a new treaty with the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. After Yeltsin’s election as president of Russia, it was clear that some devolution of power must take place. According to the draft of the treaty, most internal matters were to be left to the republics. Most notably, they were to have control over their own mineral resources and could legislate to allow ‘all forms of property’, even the private property abolished by the Bolshevik Revolution. As Soviet president, Gorbachev would be responsible for foreign affairs and defence.

  Two days before the treaty was due to be signed in Moscow, and while Gorbachev was still on vacation in his state dacha in the Crimea, tanks and armoured personnel carriers moved into Moscow. It was announced on Soviet television that Mikhail Gorbachev had fallen ill and that his powers had been assumed by a state committee headed by the vice president, Gennadi Yanayev. Included among its members were the prime minister, Boris Pug; the minister of defence, Dmitri Yazov; the minister of the interior; the head of the KGB and also, most significantly, Oleg Baklanov, the chief of the military-industrial complex, so long concealed behind the euphemistic title of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building.

  It was a preemptive strike by the heirs of Stalin and Beria against a treaty that would destroy the Soviet Union. Looking back on what Legasov had described as the ‘heroic’ decades of their history, when the whole world had trembled before the might of the first Socialist state, these men hoped that their nostalgia would be shared by the populace. It was the coup that many had prophesied and more had feared. Theoretically the state committee had at its beck and call the largest coercive force in the history of mankind, but the patriotic programmes that ran on television seemed like a historical pastiche harking back to the era of stagnation and beyond. The junta had nothing to offer the Soviet people but nostalgia for an era that for a majority had been a passage through hell.

  The coup failed. First, Gorbachev would not cooperate. When the commander of his presidential guard at his villa in the Crimea announced unexpected visitors, Gorbachev’s first thought was that there had been another Chernobyl. Discovering that it was merely a coup, he refused to sign a decree proclaiming a state of emergency and told the conspirators to go to hell.

  Nor would Yeltsin submit. The democratically elected president of Russia remained defiant in his republican legislature, the ‘White House’ overlooking the Moscow River, and thousands of Muscovite
s came to protect him with a human shield. Among them were the grown-up children of Nikolai Steinberg and bringing them food was the daughter of General Pikalov. The decent, honest Sasha Yuvchenko, watching these events on television at home and seeing the democratic mask drop from the face of the Communist party to reveal a self-interested oligarchy of self-deceiving old men, suddenly realized the extent to which his whole outlook had been formed by false indoctrination. On the third day of the coup he tore up his party card.

  In the new town of Slavutich, the equally honest and courageous Vadim Grishenka, the taciturn man of few words married to Ylena, the woman of many, sternly refused to succumb to fashion; he still believed in socialist ideals and remained in the party. Throughout the Soviet Union, the same emotional turmoil went on in the minds of millions of men and women, but the success of the coup depended upon very few. Its leaders had no stomach for the kind of slaughter that had come so easily to their mentors, Stalin and Beria. Nor was the juggernaut of coercion what it once was. The young conscript commanders of some of the tanks sent to surround the White House were persuaded by the crowds to turn to defend it, and when ordered to storm the White House at midnight on 20 August, the crack assault force of the KGB, known as the Alpha Group, came to a unanimous decision to disobey.

  By the morning of the 21st, its leaders realized that the coup had failed, and that afternoon the tanks were withdrawn from Moscow. Yazov and Yanayev were arrested. Boris Pug, Ryzhkov’s successor as prime minister, shot himself. So, too, did Marshal Akhromeev, chief of the general staff at the time of Chernobyl, who had sided with the plotters.

  A race now began to reach Gorbachev. The leaders of the coup hoped to persuade him to give some kind of legitimacy to what they had done, but Yeltsin’s delegation, consisting of his vice president, Rutskoi, and his prime minister, Ivan Silayev (the same Silayev who had succeeded Scherbina as chief of the Chernobyl Commission), reached the Soviet president first.

  Gorbachev returned to the Kremlin, but not to power. To the victor goes the spoils, and the victor was Yeltsin. While his supporters pulled down monuments to Lenin and the statue of the KGB’s founder, Feliks Dzerzhinski, under the eyes of the KGB, Yeltsin declared the Communist party to be ‘the organizing and inspiring force’ behind the coup. Invited to address the Russian parliament two days after the coup’s collapse, Gorbachev was heckled and booed by Yeltsin’s supporters, and asked why he had made ministers of the coup leaders. Yeltsin then invited him to read out the names of the conspirators.

  ‘My situation right now is hard enough,’ said Gorbachev. ‘Please don’t make it more difficult for me.’

  ‘Comrades,’ said Yeltsin. ‘How about the decree to suspend all the activities of the Russian Communist party?’

  ‘To prohibit the Communist party,’ Gorbachev protested, ‘I have to tell you, would be a mistake for such a democratic Supreme Soviet, for such a democratic president of Russia.’

  Yeltsin ignored him. ‘The decree is hereby signed,’ he said. ‘It’s not a prohibition. It is a decree of cessation of activities … so this can be dealt with by the courts.’

  5

  Three weeks later, on 10 September, Victor Brukhanov appeared before a judge in Uman, where he had been imprisoned, to consider his petition for early release. He was the last of those convicted for the accident in Chernobyl to remain in prison. Laushkin had died of stomach cancer soon after his release. Fomin was now working at the Kalinin nuclear power station, where his mental condition was still said to be strange. Rogozhkin and Kovalenko had gone back to work at Chernobyl, and Dyatlov was now receiving treatment in Germany.

  Brukhanov had suffered much over the past five years – physically from the privations of a KGB prison; psychologically from the humiliation of his fall as the decorated director of the country’s largest power station to a menial labourer among convicted currency speculators and black marketeers. Morally he could not escape the knowledge that while his conscience excused him from blame for what had happened, he was nonetheless nominally responsible for the suffering of millions of people, among them his devoted wife Valentina, ill and unhappy in a hospital in Kiev.

  Brukhanov’s time in prison had not been entirely wasted; he had acquired a good knowledge of English, and his spirit had not been broken. When he was asked by the judge whether he now admitted his guilt, he replied that he did not. ‘I have been punished for the mistakes of my subordinates,’ he told the judge. ‘I am no more guilty than Gorbachev was for the crimes committed by his subordinates during the coup.’

  The judge laughed, but suspended the hearing. Brukhanov assumed that he had to telephone to Kiev for instructions. When the court reconvened that afternoon, his application was approved. He was a free man.

  6

  In Kiev Brukhanov’s release went largely unnoticed; the minds of the Ukrainians were on other things. The failure of the coup had given them the chance to seize their independence, and under the cunning ex-Communist Leonid Kravchuk, the dream of centuries now came true. The role played by Chernobyl was given its due. Yuri Shcherbak, who described the coup as ‘a political Chernobyl’, was made minister of the environment, and since its covert task had been accomplished, the membership of Green World dwindled from half a million to eighteen thousand. The nuclear power station at Chernobyl was not closed down. Despite a fire in the turbine hall of the No. 3 unit the year after the coup, all three units were back on line by the beginning of 1993.

  To the north, the professor of nuclear electronics, Stanislas Shushkievicz, who had had his instruments sealed away at the time of Chernobyl, became the first president of an independent Belorussia. In Moscow, Ligachev’s rival, Alexander Yakovlev, took charge of Soviet radio and television; and Ilyn’s antagonist, Professor Andrei Vorobyov, became Yeltsin’s minister of health, while Ilyn, without the patronage of the once all-powerful Ministry of Medium Machine Building, saw his Institute of Biophysics disintegrate for want of funds.

  Also in Moscow, in a grandiose flat with large rooms, tall ceilings and ornate fittings from the era of slaves and heroes, a small, stocky old man roamed among the memorabilia of his own heroic past. On walls hung ceremonial sabres commemorating the days when he had ridden with Budenny’s cavalry brigade, the Konarmia, in the civil war. In a glass-fronted bookcase stood stacks of certificates in plump red folders extolling his achievements and recording his state awards. There were accolades from the Central Committee signed by the different general secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev.

  This was Efim Slavsky, until Chernobyl the omnipotent Minister of Medium Machine Building. Cared for by his granddaughter, he was now almost stone deaf – but not so deaf that he had not heard and seen on television the demise of the Socialist state for which he had wielded his sabre so many years before. What use now were those orders and accolades when the heroes of that era were called criminals by their former slaves? But the old man was still defiant. ‘They may destroy our Communist state,’ he shouted with clenched fist raised, ‘but they will never destroy the Communist spirit in me!’

  Outside Moscow, in the wooded suburb of Zhukovska, ninety-two-year-old Academician Nikolai Dollezhal lived in retirement with his wife in the dacha given to him by Stalin for his role in the construction of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Surrounded by tall pine trees, the brick house was now dilapidated, with ancient plumbing and peeling paint. In the living room there was a grand piano at which Academician Dollezhal had played until he had suffered a stroke a year or two before. Shostakovich had often played on this Steinway when he had dropped in from his home across the road.

  In the garden was the small play house, its colours faded now in the summer sun. Here the childless Kurchatov had played with Dollezhal’s daughter when he had spent the day with the Dollezhals. So too had other physicists who had received the same rewards for their services to Stalin’s Soviet state – Academician Tam, Academician Khariton, Academician Kikoyin and even Academ
ician Sakharov, until his second marriage, to Elena Bonner. There they met the artists and musicians who were also Dollezhal’s friends, but never their fellow physicist, Academician Alexandrov.

  Dollezhal had never liked politics; he had always refused to join the party, preferring a game of vint to a discussion about Marx. Too much of his character had been formed before the Revolution; he had been raised as a Christian and still believed in God. Now, looking back on his life as old men do, he thought of how easily it might have taken a different course; he could have finished up like his school friend Salivsky in an outpost in the Sahara as a French legionnaire, or like his half-American friend, Vladimir Dixon, the son of the manager of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in Russia before the Revolution who had volunteered to fight for the United States in World War I and had died in Paris of influenza.

  Dollezhal had stayed behind, and in time had been swept up by the great Kurchatov, the mesmerizing ‘Beard’, whose rages had frightened all those around him because it was known that he enjoyed Stalin’s trust. Truly, Dollezhal had lived through a reign of terror, but he was a small man and it had not been hard to keep his head down. Now, in retirement, it was better to remember the good times and try to forget about the bad.

  In another section of Moscow, a suburb in the time of Kurchatov but now absorbed into the city, the huge bronze head of the father of the Soviet atom bomb remained on its plinth outside the institute that he had founded. Behind it the thick steel gates, built to resist the forced entry of even the most determined saboteur, creaked as they opened on their rusty hinges.