Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  In Russia, as well, many returned to the faith of Orthodox Christianity. At Easter, the banners that had once proclaimed the triumph of the proletarian revolution now read CHRIST IS RISEN, HE IS RISEN INDEED. A ceremony held in the auditorium of the Olympic Village in Moscow to mark the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster was presided over not by a party leader but by the Patriarch of Moscow. ‘God help those who died at Chernobyl,’ he prayed, ‘and save the world from another tragedy of this kind.’

  For many raised as atheists, it was not easy to exchange their Marxist convictions for Christian beliefs. Moreover, there were Soviet citizens like the Tatar Davletbayevs whose traditional religion was not Christianity but Islam. Raised as Communists, and with no reason until Chernobyl to doubt its atheist philosophy, Inze had rediscovered through suffering her people’s one true God. No longer did she pray to the mummified body of Lenin or to the bronze statue of Pushkin but took her son Marat across Moscow to pray to Allah in a Mosque.

  In Slavutich, the new town built for the nuclear power station’s personnel forty kilometres from the Chernobyl plant, agitation started for the construction of a church. The Communist mayor suggested a ‘ritual hall’ in a museum to be devoted to the power station, but the new believers would not be fobbed off. Plans were drawn up for an Orthodox church, but by the time they had been approved there was no money to build it.

  The morale of those living in Slavutich was low. Started on virgin territory in 1986, the town was going to be as fine as Pripyat. To show their solidarity with this All-Union enterprise, each republic built a sector; therefore there was a variety of architectural styles, from the Nordic houses built by the Baltic states to the Levantine blocks of flats built by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. There were the same wide walkways, parks and children’s playgrounds and, as at Pripyat, the beautiful forests of the Polessia, which began at the boundaries of the town.

  When the maps showing radioactive contamination were finally published in 1989, it became clear that the town had been built on contaminated land – between one and five curies per square kilometre. It was unsafe to walk in the forests and hazardous to eat the mushrooms. As a result, some looked for jobs elsewhere. Many of the former residents of Pripyat had been given flats in Kiev and had initially commuted from there to the power station. Great pressure had to be put on them and their wives to get them to live in Slavutich.

  Despite the preference for Kiev of his cheerful and sociable wife, Ylena, the dutiful Vadim Grishenka stayed on as deputy chief engineer responsible for the sarcophagus. He had received a dose of thirty rems at the time of the accident; afterwards he had ceased to count. Vladimir Chugunov had returned despite a dose of one hundred rems. Nikolai Steinberg remained as chief engineer until 1987, and his loyal secretary, Katya Litovsky, became secretary to the director. But the blight cast by the accident over the whole enterprise could not easily be dispelled. There were too many strange faces, and the memory of old friends – both those who had died and those who were in prison.

  At the time of the trial of Brukhanov, Dyatlov and the others from the Chernobyl plant, there had been an assurance that an investigation into the culpability of the designers of the RBMK-1000 reactors was continuing. However, no charges had been brought, and no further investigation was undertaken. In March 1987, Nikolai Steinberg left Chernobyl to become vice chairman of the All-Union Committee for Nuclear Safety in Moscow. Raised by Communist parents, he had been an active member of the Pioneers, the Komsomol and the party, but the disaster at Chernobyl had revealed to him the flaws in the ideology he had so uncritically accepted throughout his youth.

  In 1989 Steinberg resigned from the Communist party. In May 1991, at the First International Sakharov Congress on Human Rights in Moscow he presented a report on the true causes of the accident, which had the full authority of his official position. The root causes of the accident, he concluded, combined ‘scientific, technological, socioeconomic and human factors’. In essence, in order to complete the tests on the turbines, the operators had brought the reactor into an unstable condition. The most serious error – made by Toptunov, on Dyatlov’s instructions and with Akimov’s acquiescence – was to raise the power of the reactor after it had dropped to zero, but this had only been done because the operators felt under pressure to complete the test.

  In his report Steinberg wrote: ‘A refusal to go on with the tests meant a failure to fulfil the plan and a postponement of the verification of the important safety regime for many months. Under those circumstances, the unit operators and managers made a decision that, in all probability, predetermined the subsequent accident. Why “in all probability”? Because there is as yet no answer to the question of at what moment the reactor could have been shut down without running the risk of a serious accident.’

  The personnel certainly violated the operating instructions, but they did not know and could not have known that the control rods of the RBMK reactor had a design fault whereby their insertion, instead of leading to an immediate decline in reactivity, led to a momentary increase – sufficient, given the condition of the reactor on 26 April, to lead to a runaway surge in power and subsequent explosion.

  Only very complex calculations would make it possible to discover what actually happened that night, and ‘unfortunately … no representative model has been developed up to now.’ However, all those investigating the causes agreed that the power surge was initiated by the insertion of the control rods into the core. ‘Thus the Chernobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world. It begins with an accumulation of small breaches of the regulations; more than ten were identified in the design of the safety system of the No. 4 reactor. These produce a set of undesirable properties and occurrences that, when taken separately, do not seem to be particularly dangerous, but finally an initiating event occurs that, in this particular case, was the subjective actions of the personnel that allowed the potentially destructive and dangerous qualities of the reactor to be released.’

  Given this context, Steinberg continued, it seemed unproductive to ask who was to blame, ‘those who hang a rifle on the wall, aware that it is loaded, or those who inadvertently pull the trigger.’ Rather, one should look to the more general causes of the Chernobyl disaster: the lack of specific legal accountability for the safety of nuclear power stations; inadequate control over the quality of both the construction and the operation of the reactors because the regulatory bodies (such as his own) had insufficient powers. ‘Even now, a substantial part of the nuclear-fuel-cycle facilities has not been placed under the supervision of the state regulatory authority.’

  Then there was the human factor: a lack of consideration for the psychological impulses that lead to human behaviour (more specifically, the idea of an operator as an automaton), and at the same time a tradition of driving a worker on to such superhuman accomplishments as breaking production records or exceeding the norms, which encourage him to improvise and cut corners. ‘This list could be extended. However, most of [these factors] could be cumulatively defined as the complete absence of a safety culture.’ In other words, the accident at Chernobyl could be ascribed to the old Communist adage that the end justifies the means.

  Complementing Steinberg’s paper for the Sakharov Congress, Dr Armen Abagyan produced a report reaching similar conclusions on the technical questions, views he had always held but which hitherto it had been impolitic to publish. He also described the measures that had been taken to prevent such an accident from happening again: the introduction of additional control rods; reducing the time it took for them to descend into the core; the use of uranium with 2.4 per cent enrichment; updating the documentation and the training of the personnel. Like Steinberg’s report, Dr Abagyan’s findings did not exonerate the operators, but they at least demonstrated that the celebrated breaches of the regulations were not in themselves what had caused the accident, and they implicitly admitted that the operators could not have learned either from thei
r training or from the documentation that existed at the time that the reactor could explode.

  2

  Anatoli Dyatlov was not satisfied. Released early from prison because of his deteriorating health, he embarked upon a campaign to prove his complete innocence. It was one thing to have been condemned by a Soviet court – he knew that the system required scapegoats – but it was quite another that the Western scientists who had compiled the INSAG-1 report in 1986 should have followed the party line. In a letter to its authors written towards the end of 1991, he claimed that they had been deceived by Legasov, and he refuted point by point their claim that mistakes made by the operators had led to the accident. He insisted that the regulations they were said to have breached had only been drawn up after the accident, and that the changes made to the RBMK-1000 reactor proved that its design had been inherently dangerous. The cause – not the main cause, not the root cause, but the only cause of the accident – was to be found in the characteristics of the RBMK-1000 reactor.

  Those serving shorter sentences had been released before Dyatlov, and Fomin had been freed soon after because of his fragile state of mind. By the fifth anniversary of the disaster, only Brukhanov remained in jail. To some this seemed just, not because he had been responsible for the accident but because in the aftermath he had put the interests of the party before the lives of his own personnel.

  However, Brukhanov was not without defenders in high places. Professor Anatoli Nazarov, one of only three doctors of ecological science in the Soviet Union, had been elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies by the Academy of Sciences. A small man with a balding head and a beard, he had never been a member of the Communist party because he did not share its ideals. Even after his election to the Congress, he saw himself not as a politician but as a specialist of a kind much needed in the polluted Soviet Union.

  Nazarov’s first assault on the sacred cows of the military-industrial complex had been a pamphlet criticizing plans to build a new reactor in the Chelyabinsk region of the Urals. In it he described the nuclear pollution caused by the disastrous explosion at Mayak. This had been revealed in the West as early as the 1970s by the exiled nuclear scientist Zhores Medvedev, who, while still in the Soviet Union, by reading articles about the effects of radiation in Russian scientific magazines, had inferred that a serious accident must have occurred. Medvedev’s conclusions had been dismissed as anti-Communist propaganda, even by nuclear scientists in the West, and had been kept as state secrets in the Soviet Union itself. Now Nazarov’s pamphlet confirmed everything that Medvedev had supposed.

  Despite threats and bribes, Nazarov continued his opposition to nuclear pollution and was therefore the natural choice to head a Supreme Soviet commission on Chernobyl. With the full power of the legislature at its disposal, it included among its investigations ‘an analysis of materials of Criminal Case No. 19–73’, which suggested that it was the last of the Soviet show trials. This read, in part:

  There is no doubt that a number of serious breaches in the running of the reactor allowed by those convicted in this case can be considered as proved during the trial. However, what is the nature of such breaches? For example, a group of prominent specialists from Obninsk, led by Professor B. G. Dubovski, which carefully investigated the problem, came to the conclusion that ‘if the safety protection of the RBMK-1000 reactor had been close to what it was supposed to be, then all the mistakes made by the operators would only have led to a week’s shutdown of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station.’ Thus, the worst charge would have been negligence – i.e. a crime in line with Article 167 of the Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code.

  The investigators went on to largely exonerate Brukhanov:

  It is difficult to consider as valid the conviction of the ex-director of the Chernobyl nuclear power station, V. P. Brukhanov, according to Article 165 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code (‘abuse of power or administrative position’). He was found guilty of intentionally hiding the fact that radiation levels were considerably above the norm; that he sent the operators on different missions into dangerous areas without providing them with necessary protective clothing, etc. First, there is evidence in the case testifying to the fact that very quickly numerous bosses arrived on the scene of the accident and that they appealed to him ‘not to create a panic’. Second, it is doubtful that in the atmosphere that prevailed shortly after the accident, the director of the power station could have had any precise information. Academician Legasov stressed this particular point in his memoirs. Thus the order to go on missions to dangerous zones without adequate protective clothes to combat the consequences of the accident can be regarded as dire necessity under the circumstances that then prevailed.

  Innocent or guilty, Brukhanov and his fellow convicts had suffered from more than their incarceration. Dyatlov had received a dose at Chernobyl of 550 rems; with a poor diet and rudimentary medical care in prison, he looked so old when he came out that it seemed he had aged fifteen years in only three. Brukhanov fared slightly better; he had a lower dose, and in his own estimation was better able to avoid the ill effects of radiation because he had spent his childhood in Tashkent under the hot sun.

  But even with the best medical care, many of those who had received high doses were still suffering five years after the accident. Piotr Palamarchuk, who had defied all medical prognostication by surviving a dose of between 750 and 800 rems, had grown stronger as the years passed, but there were still open sores on his back and legs. Sasha Yuvchenko also had open sores on his arms and was flown to Bavaria for skin grafts by German army surgeons, which Dr Baranov felt could have been done in Hospital No. 6 had everyone not lost faith in Soviet medicine.

  It was a demoralizing period for the doctors at Hospital No. 6. It had been the boast of the Soviets that whatever the other shortcomings of their system, it took care of the health of its people, but the international experts had described the low level of health care for peasants in Belorussia and the Ukraine. At the time of Chernobyl, Guskova, Baranov and the young men and women working in Hospital No. 6 had, at great risk to their own health, done everything in their power for the patients in their care, only to be vilified by Professor Vorobyov as the lackeys of the Third Division and the KGB. To rub salt in these wounds, Baranov and Guskova were given a showing of an American film, The Final Warning, based on the book by Dr Robert Gale, in which the Russian doctors played minor roles while the American specialist was the hero.

  Razim Davletbayev remained a semi-invalid: his hair was now grey, his movements slow. He had a nominal job at the Ministry of Atomic Energy but suffered from regular bouts of weakness and fatigue; even a common cold turned into a prolonged disease. Inze Davletbayev remained a close friend of Akimov’s wife, Luba, who, while she seemed to Inze to be detached about their marriage while he was living, became the champion of her husband after he was dead.

  Alexander Nemirovsky, one of the firemen who had received a dose of up to two hundred rems while laying the hose under the reactor, was rewarded with promotion and the sum of 700 rubles. He also developed a malignant tumour on his spleen. Ivan Shavrey, who was told after analysis in Israel that he had received a dose of six hundred rems, went back to work as a fireman because an invalid’s pension was too small. Many of the wives suffered as well; Valentina Brukhanov was in the same hospital as Ylena Grishenka, who had multiple growths in her ovaries, while Lubov Kovalevskaya had nodules in her thyroid.

  Worse than their own suffering was that which these people observed or anticipated in their children. The Palamarchuks’ younger daughter, who had been in Pripyat at the time of the accident, had developed continuous headaches, though the doctors assured them that this had nothing to do with radiation. If the children were healthy, their parents waited and watched for the appearance of symptoms; if, like the Yuvchenkos’ son, they were a little listless, they tried hard to remember whether or not the children had been like that before the accident. Certainly life in a small flat in a suburb of Moscow in
times of shortages and political uncertainty compared badly to the healthy life they had all enjoyed in Pripyat. Piotr Palamarchuk felt much healthier when he visited his native Vinnitsa in the south of the Ukraine, but he dared not move away from the specialists in Hospital No. 6.

  There were also fears for future generations. The risk of bearing a malformed baby made couples hesitate to have a second child. Still, Alla Kirschenbaum, the wife of the young turbine engineer from the fourth unit, gave birth to a second child five years after the disaster, and it was a healthy baby girl. By then she and Igor had decided that when the opportunity arose they would emigrate to Israel.

  The men who appeared least affected by high doses of radiation were the military leaders – first and foremost, Major General Pikalov, commander of the chemical troops, now a Hero of the Soviet Union. Of all the 260,000 soldiers involved in the aftermath of the accident, Pikalov believed that he had had the largest dose. Guskova estimated an internal dose of eighty-seven rems and an external one of fifty-three rems. Radioactive particles had left ulcers on his legs. However, this had not stopped him from remaining in command of the chemical troops until his retirement, and after his retirement from working for a Ph.D. He also served as president of the Liquidators Association, and took an interest in the new political developments through his daughter, who was a democratic member of the local council. There were times when he felt weak or slept badly at night, but he had had frequent medical checkups and his blood formula was normal.

  General Berdov, the commander of the Ukrainian militia, received a dose estimated at one hundred rems with no notable ill effects. General Ivanov, the robust deputy commander of the civil defence, who had received a dose of about sixty rems, saw no reason to revise his view that a small dose of radiation did no one any harm. Indeed, for fruit and vegetables it could be positively beneficial, so why not for human beings too? The dose to his thyroid had been about 120 rads; as a result his metabolism seemed to have changed for the better. He had absorbed a whole cocktail of ruthenium, niobium, zirconium, and caesium. Some elements, like ruthenium, had a short half-life, but the caesium was more problematic. A couple of months after the accident, the director of a nuclear station told Ivanov that he could wash caesium out of his body with beer. The barley in the beer, the scientist insisted, absorbed big particles of caesium and came out with sweat. It was a therapy that appealed to the general, as did another theory, that red wine was good for the bone marrow and the spleen.