Their natural daughter, Zoia, born in 1950, tried rebellion too, but her story was sadder. She was a bright mathematician and, while a student at Bucharest University, had her eyes opened to the conditions for most people in Romania. She became appalled. In 1974 she attempted to run away with a boyfriend. The long reach of the Securitate tracked her down.k After that, as Zoia told friends, she was trapped.
There was a bizarre twist to the fury and revenge of the First Couple. They blamed Bucharest’s Mathematical Institute, where Zoia was studying for a PhD. The Ceauescus were convinced it was encouraging a ‘bohemian mentality’ in their only daughter, so they simply closed the Institute down, dispersing the staff elsewhere. Uncharacteristically, they allowed some of the Institute’s best minds to leave the country. Maths was one of the few scientific specialities where Romanians were conducting high-level work. All that disappeared, as more than 100 leading mathematicians fled to the West. Zoia returned to the family fold, reluctantly, and on occasion tried to talk to her parents about the food queues and the general misery in the country, ‘but they would never listen to me’, she said. She became a lonely and reclusive character and turned to drink.
The crown prince was Nicu, another natural son, born in 1951. He was far less serious than his siblings and seemed to care for little in his early years other than to enjoy the privileges that went with his birth. He was a playboy who in his youth whored his way around Bucharest and foreign capitals, enjoyed driving fast cars, and like his sister developed a serious drink problem. But he was the Ceausescus’ favourite and they lavished attention on him. He calmed down his habits as he grew older, though he continued to drink heavily, a weakness that eventually killed him. He was given political duties and handed an entire province of northern Romania to run. He was being groomed by his doting parents to take over as head, so they hoped, of a ruling Communist dynasty.l13
Women suffered the most in People’s Romania. In 1986, to coincide with his birthday, Ceausescu announced a new law forbidding abortion to women under forty-five. For the past twenty years the ban had applied to all women under forty, but the law was toughened up because the old one was not working, the leader thought. The Ceausescus had a dream of increasing Romania’s population from twenty-three million to thirty million. He launched the campaign in 1966 with a decree that made pregnancy a state policy. In the mid-1980s he said: ‘The foetus is the property of the entire society. Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity. ’ Romania was the only country in the socialist bloc with laws against abortion, which throughout Eastern Europe was widely used as the main form of birth control. In Romania contraception was banned, there was no sex education in schools, and the minimum marriage age for girls was reduced to fifteen.
At first the birth rate soared, but after about three years it began to drop sharply and Ceausescu resorted to barbaric forms of coercion. Women were forced to undergo compulsory medical examinations every one to three months. They were rounded up from their workplaces and taken to clinics by armed squads of officials - dubbed the menstrual police. There, usually in the presence of a Securitate officer, they were examined for signs of pregnancy, or for evidence that they may have had pregnancies terminated. A pregnant woman who failed to give birth at the proper time could expect to be summoned by the police for questioning. Women who miscarried were suspected of having arranged an abortion. Doctors were punished in districts where the birth rates declined, so naturally they resorted to fiddling the figures. ‘If a child died in our district, we lost 10 to 25 per cent of our salaries, but it wasn’t our fault,’ said a Bucharest doctor, Geta Stnescu.m
Predictably, abortions were driven underground. The death rate from terminations was higher than anywhere else in Europe. Back-street abortions were performed in terrible conditions. Bucharest Municipal Hospital dealt with around 3,000 failed abortions every year, including about 200 women who needed major surgery. Many other women were too frightened to go to hospital. More than a thousand women died in Bucharest every year from bungled terminations. Illegal abortions usually cost between two and four months’ average wages. If they went wrong, fear often prevented women from seeking medical help. ‘Usually women were so terrified to come to the hospital that by the time we saw them it was too late,’ said the Municipal Hospital’s Dr Alexander Anca. ‘Often they died at home.’ As conditions worsened in the 1980s and the country was driven to destitution, infant mortality grew rapidly - to twenty-five deaths per 1,000 live births, more than three times the European average. Tragically, the other increase was in the opening of state orphanages, filled in the mid-1980s with around 100,000 abandoned children whom families did not want or could not cope with. Privately, among trusted intimates, people would often refer to Bucharest as ‘Paranopolis’. But the hungrier Romanians became, while they froze in winter, the louder they were expected to sing the praises of the man who was inflicting the misery on them.14
SEVENTEEN
CHERNOBYL: NUCLEAR DISASTER
Pripyat, Ukraine, Saturday 26 April 1986
FOR THREE DAYS engineers had been conducting a supposedly routine experiment on Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant around 140 kilometres north of Kiev. They were trying to establish whether the reactor could operate under electricity produced by its own turbines. It should not have been complicated or in any way dangerous. The procedure was regularly performed on the scores of similar water-cooled RBMK reactors which the Soviets had built since the 1950s. But the engineers had made a series of errors and were lax in monitoring how the experiment was progressing. Nobody spotted that they had allowed the power in the reactor to fall to a critically low level. The mistake was finally noticed late the previous afternoon. Scientists at the plant considered cancelling the procedure and trying again at some future date. There was no urgency about the experiment. But the Deputy Director of the plant, Anatoli Dyatlov, felt assured that all the earlier mistakes had been corrected and he decided to proceed as scheduled.
Just after 1 a.m., engineers noticed that again power had fallen, dangerously low to 1 per cent of its normal level. This meant that the pumps which were supposed to circulate the water to cool the reactor core were no longer working. The third of a kilogram of nuclear fuel in 1,661 pressurised steel rods was overheating wildly. The engineers tried to push the emergency shutdown button, but it was too late. At 1.23 a.m. a tremendous blast ripped through the domed roof of the reactor hall, spewing red-hot splinters of nuclear fuel, chunks of cement and steel upwards into the night sky. It was a radioactive release ten times more powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb. Four seconds later another huge explosion demolished two of Reactor 4’s walls and started a fire that shot flames and tiny particles of highly radioactive graphite 1,200 metres into the air. A radioactive cloud immediately headed north-west with the wind. About five minutes later, the first of the engineers who tried to control the reaction were sent on a desperate errand without any protective clothing or breathing equipment in a vain attempt to shut down the reactor manually. Two workers who were in the reactor room during the blast suffered excruciating burns. They were taken to the plant’s first aid unit, which had been closed down some years earlier. Managers had thought it would never be needed, so smoothly had the plant been operating. For many hours nobody at Chernobyl had any idea how much radioactivity had been released. The Geiger counters they used inside the building were designed to measure low radiation levels. They were off the gauge. The more powerful machines to measure high atmospheric levels had been locked away in a safe, on the basis that they would never be necessary.
Local firefighters were at the scene within ten minutes, but without any special equipment. Military firemen were called up as reinforcements and arrived around half an hour later. Between them, they got the fire in the radiator hall under control by 3.30 a.m., but the reactor itself was still burning and belching radioactive dust. Chernobyl’s Director, Viktor Bryukhanov, reported at dawn t
o his superiors in Moscow that there had been some minor problems but that Reactor Number 4 was still working and that radiation levels at the plant ‘were within normal levels’. It was a lie. Bryukhanov had not reached his position by telling his bosses news they did not want to hear.
A high-flying bureaucrat, originally trained as an engineer though not in nuclear power, he was first appointed director of a nuclear plant at just thirty-five years old. It was astonishingly young in the Soviet system to have risen so fast. But he had always managed to meet his targets laid down in the Plan, which pleased his superiors - and his workers, who received extra bonuses. If he had to cut a few corners, so be it. By the time errors were uncovered he would probably be elsewhere, in a better job. There had been a minor accident in one of the plant’s other reactors four years earlier; Bryukhanov had managed to hush up any information about the incident and repair the damage before Moscow knew of it.
His first concern was to protect himself - not so much from radiation poisoning. He did not at first believe the problem was particularly serious. He wanted to shield himself from blame, in the manner that Soviet bureaucrats habitually did. One of his most senior engineers, Anatoli Sitnikov, told him that he believed the reactor had been destroyed. Bryukhanov did not believe him. Sitnikov went to look for himself and received a fatal dose of radiation. He told the Director what he had seen with his own eyes. Bryukhanov told him he was exaggerating. The Director did take some action, though: soon after that conversation with Sitnikov - who was already amongst the walking dead and knew it - the Director ordered that all the non-essential telephone lines around Chernobyl should be cut, so that ‘unauthorised’ information to the public could be kept minimal.1
The military were the first outsiders to hear about the disaster. Their instinct for secrecy was even more powerful than that of a mid-level Communist Party official. The absurd attempt to cover up the Chernobyl explosion - even when the rest of the world knew of it - was partly because in the Soviet Union all nuclear matters, civil or military, were in effect controlled by the armed forces. Army Chief of Staff Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev was told at around 2.20 a.m., though details were sketchy. He did not know the extent of the damage at Chernobyl, or that a plume of radioactive poison was spreading outside Soviet borders. The Soviet Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, was informed just after 6 a.m. and he immediately called Gorbachev. Both were misled; they had been assured that the fires were out, and that there had not been a significant radiation leak. They were told that nine people at the plant were seriously ill and twenty-five military had moderate injuries, but the recommendation of the army and the Energy Ministry was not to evacuate anybody from the area. That would cause panic.
Over the next few hours, the military became aware of the scale of the disaster. The reactor was still red-hot and on Sunday morning scientific experts decided that the only way of cooling it was to try smothering the reactor from the air with sand from a nearby quarry. It was a difficult and dangerous procedure, requiring courage and precision from pilots. A squadron of MiG-8 ‘workhorse’ helicopters were selected for the task. The heat and radiation levels were enormously high and pilots had to find a fast route to the crater, drop bags of sand at a carefully calculated spot and then manoeuvre away from the heat, all within seconds. They made ninety-three of these ‘bombing runs’, without protective clothing. One of the pilots remembered later that they stuffed lead plates under their seats and joked to each other, ‘If you want to be a dad, cover your balls up with lead.’ Joking did not prevent some of them developing cancers in later life.
Officials in Moscow knew the reactor core was still burning. Gorbachev had sent a commission headed by the Prime Minister to take on-the-spot control and provide honest reports back to the Kremlin. They arrived late on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning, more than a day and a half after the explosions, the local authorities finally decided that it was time to evacuate Pripyat, the dormitory town of around 45,000 people just three kilometres from the Chernobyl plant. It was, by Soviet standards, a well-built industrial town, in a lovely setting that had not been entirely spoilt by the sight of the reactor domes, or the slight humming sound that the plant emitted. Pripyat was clean, the apartment blocks were solid and there were excellent recreational facilities for inhabitants, most of whom worked at Chernobyl. The surrounding countryside was beautiful woodland, pine trees beside a meandering river. It was a fine and warm spring weekend. From the edge of town, a favourite place for walks, people could see the damage to the power plant and the emergency services hard at work. But they had been told throughout the Saturday that there was no danger, that radiation levels were barely higher than normal, and there was nothing to worry about. So they took advantage of the warm weather. They took country walks. Children played outside. Sixteen couples were married. It was a normal spring day.
By mid-morning on the Sunday the inhabitants were told to leave in a hurry, most of them expecting that it would be safe to return in a few days. They left most of their belongings behind. By 1.30 p.m. all of them had left and Pripyat looked like a ghost town, its only inhabitants the domestic pets left to fend for themselves. They either died or turned wild. The evacuation was too late. If people had been moved earlier they might have been saved from long exposure to high levels of radiation. Or if within a few hours they had received iodine they might have been spared the tumours to the thyroid gland from which thousands of Pripyat residents suffered later. Many hundreds died from cancers and leukaemia within three years - many more within a decade.2
By Sunday afternoon the rest of the world was beginning to know about Chernobyl. A radioactive cloud blew north-west, dusting eastern Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavia. By Sunday afternoon in Helsinki a laboratory reported that it was seeing radiation levels of six times higher than normal background. By dawn on Monday 28 April the Studsvik energy laboratory on the Baltic coast in Sweden and the Forsmark nuclear power plant around eighty kilometres north of Stockholm recorded radiation levels 150 times higher than background. Initially it was thought that the contamination might have come from a missile test or a nuclear weapon that had accidentally blown up in its launch silo. But soon the Swedes discovered that the cloud must have come from a power plant - nuclear weapons and nuclear energy produce distinct kinds of fission material. Calculating wind direction and velocity, Sweden officially announced that there must have been a large explosion at a Soviet nuclear power plant that was spreading radiation across northern Europe. It was the front-page story throughout the world for the next several days.
The Soviets had said nothing. They did not inform governments of the countries that were being contaminated, or their own people in Ukraine, Russia or Byelorussia. They did not tell the comrades in the ‘socialist commonwealth’. This was not the first nuclear disaster in Soviet history. Unknown to the rest of the world and the Soviet public, there had been at least one accident at a weapons-testing site and thirteen serious power-reactor accidents since the Soviet Union had become a nuclear nation in the late 1940s. In the earlier accident at Chernobyl Number 1 reactor in 1982 the central fuel assembly had ruptured and relatively low levels of radiation had leaked out. In 1975 the core of the Leningrad plant, an RBMK reactor similar to the four at Chernobyl, partly melted down, spewing radiation into the atmosphere. But the wind carried the radioactive cloud over Siberia. In 1985, fourteen workers at the Balakovo plant on the Volga River near Samara were killed when jetting steam of 500°C burst through the reactor hall when they were restarting the core following routine maintenance.3
Always the Soviet Union’s reaction had been to keep silent, or if asked any questions to deny that any accident had happened. The instinct on this occasion was to follow the traditional pattern. This was the first major test of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost - and he flunked it badly. On Sunday, the day after the explosion, the newspaper Izvestia was told not to mention the accident. Gorbachev did not give the gagging order directly, but he knew it had been i
ssued and he did not overturn the instruction. By Monday morning the world’s media was jamming the phone lines to the USSR with official inquiries. The Soviet government was still saying nothing. At 11 a.m. the senior magnates met in the Kremlin for the first time since the disaster. The military still proposed staying silent and issuing denials, arguing that Chernobyl should be treated like a state secret. There was a long debate about the accident. Most of it concerned how much information to release. Amazingly, Shevardnadze had not heard anything about the accident until early that morning, more than forty-eight hours after the explosions. Soon world leaders and foreign embassies would be protesting about Soviet behaviour. But such was the culture of secrecy, that nobody thought to tell the Foreign Minister that he would soon be required to handle a diplomatic crisis.
At first, only Shevardnadze and Yakovlev suggested saying anything about Chernobyl. Shevardnadze quoted a speech Gorbachev had given about ‘openness’ just a few days earlier in which he said: ‘We categorically oppose those who call for releasing public information in doses. There can never be too much truth.’ Shevardnadze’s comment did not raise even the slightest ironic eyebrow. Then he said it was impossible to deny Chernobyl. ‘It’s an affront to common sense, it’s absurd. How can you conceal something that can’t be hidden? How could people [here] complain that we are washing our dirty linen in public, when it is radioactive and had slipped out in spite of us?’ Gorbachev was convinced. ‘We must issue an announcement as soon as possible. We must not delay,’ he said. But the military and the conservative bureaucracy were unhappy. For hours nothing happened and then late in the afternoon all that appeared was a bland announcement: ‘From the Council of Ministers of the USSR. An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. One of the four atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Victims are being helped. A Government commission has been created.’4
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