VIII

1

For Mikhail Gorbachev, the accident at Chernobyl could not have come at a worse time. It was a little over a year since he had been appointed general secretary, and only three months since he had embarked upon the hazardous strategies of glasnost and perestroika at the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party. He might have the same title as Leonid Brezhnev or, for that matter, Joseph Stalin, but he had by no means the same power and had gained office by the skin of his teeth. Grigori Romanov, the party boss of Leningrad, had proposed seventy-year-old Victor Grishin, the party boss of Moscow, and it was only at the insistence of the octogenarian foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, that Gorbachev had been elected.

Once in power, Gorbachev had moved swiftly to prune the dead wood; before the end of the year, Romanov had resigned ‘for reasons of health’, Grishin had been pensioned off, and Gromyko himself was pushed upstairs as head of state. With them had gone sixteen of the Soviet Union’s sixty-four ministers, 20 per cent of the party’s officials and, in their wake, a legion of dependants in the nomenklatura – a potent source of opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms.

It was not these old Brezhnevites, however, who caused Gorbachev concern, but his own ally and second-in-command Yegor Ligachev. A protégé, like Gorbachev, of Yuri Andropov’s and brought onto the Central Committee at the same time, he was older than the general secretary and held two posts, which qualified him as a credible rival for power. As the Central Committee secretary responsible for the appointment of party officials since 1983, he could call upon the support of those he had put in power, and as secretary for ideology he was the Grand Inquisitor of communism – both the guardian and the interpreter of the dogma upon which the legitimacy of the government depended.

If the first post had created dependants in the nomenklatura, the second gave Ligachev exceptional influence in a nation still conditioned by the terror of the 1930s, when any ideological deviation led to imprisonment in a gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck. It also suited his puritanical personality. While Gorbachev’s style was relaxed, edging towards that of a Western politician, Ligachev retained the severe and formal manner of the party leader. He delivered his speeches in a loud and monotonous tone of voice, but unlike comparable officials from the Brezhnev era, he actually meant what he said. He was just as zealous as Gorbachev and Prime Minister Ryzhkov in the drive for reform, not just of the political habits and economic structures of the country, but of ‘Soviet Man’ himself. Even before Gorbachev came to power, Ligachev had begun the campaign against alcoholism under the slogan ‘For a sober leadership and a sober population’.

While Ligachev may have embodied Communist orthodoxy, he was not alone in being limited by ideological constraints. Every member of the Politburo had been raised under the Soviet system: there was nobody like Slavsky, Alexandrov or Dollezhal who could remember life before the October Revolution. Though those of Gorbachev’s generation were only too aware of the problems that beset their country, it remained inconceivable to them that socialism itself could be at fault. If Marx had been God the Father, Lenin was God the Son, the redeemer whose portrait, like an icon, hung on every wall. His word could not be doubted; his church, the party, could not err; and those who had known him, like Efim Slavsky or Armand Hammer, were venerated as the last survivors of the apostolic age.

Equally revered were the heroes of Soviet mythology – men like Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atom bomb, and his surviving disciples, Alexandrov and Dollezhal. When they had said that Soviet reactors were safe, there had been no reason why Gorbachev or Ligachev, any more than Brukhanov or Dyatlov, should doubt them. Nor had they questioned the blanket of secrecy that had covered the huge state within a state, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. The rules that had been inherited from an earlier era were the Talmud if not the Torah; canon law, if not holy writ, and glasnost, the policy of openness that they themselves had so recently imposed upon a naturally sceptical people, was meant not to question socialism but to expose such sins against it as sloth, inefficiency, drunkenness and corruption.

For a credible heaven there must be a hell, and the Soviet leaders’ conditioning had taught them that evil emanated from the capitalist West. Brought up to believe that their ideological enemies were conspiring to destroy their workers’ state, even the younger members of the Politburo were by reflex ready for a fight. Had not the American president, Reagan, described their country as ‘an evil empire’? Was he not planning a massive escalation of the arms race with his Strategic Defense Initiative? One of Gorbachev’s closest allies, Alexander Yakovlev, knew America well. He had been an exchange student at Columbia in the 1960s and had served as ambassador to Canada. Now he was the member of the Politburo who knew most about American foreign policy, and less than a year before had written in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, ‘If the political and military leadership in the U.S. views the balance of power as favourable to such a solution, the Americans do not rule out the direct unleashing of a war against the Soviet Union in their calculations and plans.’

With the gradual but growing realization that even if glasnost and perestroika succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, even if Homo sovieticus sobered up after centuries of tippling and worked as diligently and skilfully as socialist ideology suggested he should, the Soviet Union would be hard-pressed to match the technological pyrotechnics of America’s star wars, and it still did not enter the head of any member of the Central Committee or the Politburo that it was time to throw in the towel and admit defeat. In head and heart, all of them remained loyal to the cause, including the burly giant from Siberia who had replaced the discredited Grishin as party boss of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin. (At the time of the accident at Chernobyl, he was in Hamburg as a fraternal delegate at the congress of the diminutive Communist party of West Germany.)

As a result not just of this conditioning, but of the classified nature of any information about nuclear power, news of the accident at Chernobyl had remained secret. At first the Soviet leaders were informed that it was merely a fire that had been brought under control, and thereafter they were prevented from discovering the gravity of the disaster by the habitual reluctance of lesser officials to be the bearers of bad tidings – or their vain hope that their incompetence could somehow be covered up. It was only when the leaders learned of the furious protests by the Swedes about the cloud of radionuclides that had crossed the Baltic Sea that they appreciated both the gravity of the crisis and its implications for their country’s prestige abroad.

On the morning of Monday 28 April Mikhail Gorbachev had called the members of the Politburo to his office for an emergency meeting. Few of them knew what had happened. Geydar Aliev, at one time chairman of the KGB in Azerbaijan and now a deputy prime minister, had heard rumours of the accident but had not been officially informed. Even now the crisis that faced the Politburo was not so much the accident itself as whether or not to admit that it had taken place. The practical and the political were inextricably mixed. The whole population might panic, which would offer an unparalleled opportunity in the West for bourgeois falsification and anti-Soviet propaganda. Yet what was the point of a policy of glasnost if it fell at this first hurdle?

Different members of the Politburo argued the different points of view. Alexander Yakovlev, head of the propaganda department of the Central Committee, confessed that he did not know what to say. Yegor Ligachev argued forcefully for saying as little as possible. As head of the ideological department of the Central Committee, he had to consider the ideological implications if the full scale of the catastrophe became known. Science was the basis of communism, and communism was the religion of the Soviet state. Like the space programme, atomic power was one of their most dramatic achievements. To admit that it had failed – that rather than helping people it had harmed them – would undermine their trust in scientific socialism, not just in the Soviet Union but throughout the world.

Geydar Aliev disagreed. ‘Come off it,’ he said to Ligachev. ‘We can’t conceal this.’ The cat was out of the bag. Not just in Sweden but also in Poland and Germany there were reports of unusually high levels of radiation. Soon the whole world would suspect, and it was only by providing truthful, accurate information that they could prevent bourgeois falsification and give glasnost some credibility.

Yakovlev came around to Aliev’s point of view: it would be best to come clean. But when the vote was taken, Ligachev’s views prevailed. A statement was issued through TASS announcing that the accident had taken place and that a government commission had been appointed. A rider was to be added for Soviet newspapers that nothing was to be reported but this communiqué. The statement was broadcast that night to the Soviet people as the seventh item of news on ‘Vremya’.

Less than an hour later TASS issued a second statement:

The accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station is the first one in the Soviet Union. Similar accidents happened on several occasions in other countries. In the United States, 2,300 accidents, breakdowns and other faults were registered in 1979 alone, according to the public organization called Critical Mass. The major causes of the dangerous situation are the poor quality of reactors and other types of equipment, unsatisfactory control over the technical conditions of the equipment, non-observance of safety regulations and insufficient training of personnel.

The simple admission that an accident had taken place did nothing to assuage the anger and speculation abroad. An approach from the Kurchatov Institute to the Swedes for advice was leaked to the press and led foreign experts to conclude that there had been either a meltdown at Chernobyl or else an uncontrollable graphite fire. An admission by TASS on 29 April that two people had been killed in the accident was dismissed as improbable; it was reported by UPI on the same date that a source in Kiev ‘with hospital and rescue team contacts’ had said in a telephone interview that ‘eighty people died immediately and some 2,000 died on the way to hospitals.’ This figure found its way into the major papers in the U.S. and was reported by Dan Rather on ‘CBS News’. A short time later, UPI reported that Westerners had telephoned their embassies from Kiev to say that up to three thousand people were dead. These rumours gained credence on 30 April when Kenneth Adelman, the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, told a Congressional hearing in Washington that two thousand people lived in a village near the reactor, and that the Soviet claims of only two casualties ‘seemed preposterous … in terms of an accident of this magnitude.’

A lower estimate of casualties was given by a Dutch radio ham, who had heard from a Russian correspondent that there were ‘many hundreds of dead and injured and maybe many, many more.’ In a telephone interview, a Scottish schoolteacher living in Kiev told the London Times that local citizens with contacts in the energy ministry had said that up to three hundred people might have died. Plans were made by the British embassy in Moscow to evacuate the seventy British students and tourists in Kiev and the thirty in Minsk. The U.S. embassy advised all of its citizens in Kiev to leave at once. An Austrian firm building a metallurgical plant at Zhlobin, one hundred miles north of Chernobyl, chartered a plane to evacuate the fifty wives and children of their engineers.

The refusal of the Soviet government to release any concrete information made it difficult for responsible Western correspondents in Moscow to refute the rumours that were being relayed back by broadcasts from stations like Radio Liberty in Munich. It was not just professionally frustrating but personally disturbing; the New York Times correspondent Serge Schmemann had his wife and three children in Moscow. When it was feared that local produce might be contaminated, the U.S. embassy made its own dosimetric checks on local produce and permitted U.S. journalists and their families to buy supplies brought in from Finland for diplomatic personnel. This not only enraged the Russian government but led to awkward exchanges with Russian friends.

Even among the fraternal Socialist democracies of Eastern Europe there were signs of unease. The Polish government announced restrictions on the sale of milk and warned its people of the absolute necessity of washing all fresh vegetables to remove radioactive particles. Iodine was given to all Polish children under the age of sixteen, and queues formed outside pharmacies in the centre of Warsaw.

But there were also more moderate voices in the West. Dr Thomas Marsham, the director of the northern division of the British Atomic Energy Authority, said he would be surprised if the Soviets did not evacuate people within an area of ten miles, but that he could see good reasons to avoid panic. ‘You can cause more casualties if you panic. If you were to suddenly say everyone should get out of Kiev, you’d probably have two hundred people killed on the roads. But there’s a difference,’ he added, ‘between causing panic and telling people what’s going on.’

Although they were not privy to the proceedings of the Politburo on 28 April, it was quite clear to Western journalists and diplomats what was going on in government circles. The fallibility of the system had been exposed, and the politburo’s commitment to glasnost and perestroika was too recent to impede the reflex secrecy and evasion with which the Soviet Union had always hidden its failings from its enemies – and its own people. A pre-eminence in science and technology had been presented as a proof of the superiority of scientific socialism. More recently, Gorbachev had added a commitment to an unpolluted environment and a nuclear-free world. To come clean about the disastrous consequences of the accident would not only arm the nation’s ideological enemies abroad, but expose the fallibility of the system to those at home.

2

Deciding that the best defence was to counterattack, Academician Alexandrov called a meeting of senior scientists in his office in the Kurchatov Institute. Among them was Yuri Sivintsev, a dapper, fast-talking expert on nuclear safety who had been brought to the institute by Kurchatov himself in 1948. He knew about the accident and had reason to believe that it was serious, having heard that the existing patients had been evacuated from the nearby Hospital No. 6 to make way for the casualties.

Sivintsev found Velikhov with Alexandrov, and assumed at first that he had been summoned to advise on the accident itself; instead, he was asked by Alexandrov about accidents in nuclear power stations abroad. He told him about the fire at Windscale in Britain and the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States. He was told nothing about what had happened at Chernobyl, but assumed the accident there was on a similar scale.

The accidents at Western reactors were now repeatedly cited in the Soviet press, while the Western reaction to Chernobyl was presented as a deliberate attempt to escalate the Cold War. Wrote Yuri Zhukhov, a commentator, in Pravda:

The United States leaps at any excuse to heat up further an already tense situation, sow distrust and discord among the peoples, and poison the political climate. And the purpose of it all is to divert attention from the criminal aggressive actions of the United States, like the recent bombing of Libya and the undeclared wars against Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua, to justify the intensification of the arms race, the continuation of nuclear tests, and the refusal to accept Soviet peace initiatives.

Zhukhov charged that the escalation of these provocative actions had reached a new peak as ‘the U.S. state apparatus and the news media which do its bidding put out some fabrications about the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl AES.’

It was only senior figures in Washington and in the capitals of some other NATO states who immediately latched on to the news of the Chernobyl accident in order to exploit it for their own hostile political ends. The fuelling of hysteria and panic began. Cock-and-bull stories were concocted about ‘thousands of dead’ and about the possibility of the population of Western Europe and, in all likelihood, the United States being affected by radioactivity. Prompted by Washington’s special propaganda services, the West European gutter press started concocting fabrications, each one more awful than the one before. Expert panic-mongers began the forced evacuation of Western students, specialists and tourists from the USSR, even if they were in Siberia.

The same line was taken in Soviet broadcasts on radio and television, and in other Soviet journals, such as Izvestia and Literaturnaya Gazeta. In Hamburg Boris Yeltsin had been giving a reasonably accurate account of the accident, denouncing reports of widespread damage to crops and the contamination of water and milk throughout the Ukraine:

This whole propaganda campaign can only arouse indignation. This campaign follows political motives. And you can note that this campaign is carried on in countries whose governments stubbornly refuse to cooperate in the programme of abolishing nuclear arms and means of mass destruction.

At the very moment when the medical commission was ordering checks for radioactive contamination of all passengers travelling on trains passing through the Ukraine, TASS was denouncing the ‘humiliating examination’ for radioactive contamination of a troupe of Ukrainian actors at a border crossing from East into West Germany:

Unleashing a campaign of this kind was promoted by the FRG official authorities’ stand, who wittingly gave distorted information on the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl AES. The extremely right-wing forces in the FRG, gambling on this misfortune, were trying to make use of it to extirpate the shoots of détente appearing in Europe.

The counterattack failed. Despite the gruesome exaggerations in the Western press, it was impossible to sustain the outrage and at the same time retain the old policy of secrecy, which the Politburo had adopted at Ligachev’s insistence. It was coming under strain both at home and abroad. The governments of the Scandinavian countries made repeated demands for further information, and the Politburo’s own medical commission asked that the facts about radiation be broadcast on television. There was evidence of growing panic. After the discovery that several trains had been contaminated, dosimetric controls had been ordered by the government’s medical commission on all passengers arriving from Kiev, Gomel and Minsk. This had caused such alarm that the order had been rescinded.

There was further evidence of panic in the queues formed at pharmacies for iodine prophylactics. Initially the commission had accepted Professor Vorobyov’s assurance on 2 May that it was too late for stable iodine to provide protection, and offers of supplies from abroad were turned down. However, Ilyn in Kiev sent a coded telex to Mikhail Gorbachev warning him to expect serious consequences in the middle future from the radioactive iodine that had accumulated in the thyroids of children, and when, on 6 May, it was reported that ‘the level of radiation did require iodine prophylaxis,’ the commission changed its mind. It was estimated that 218 tons would be required in the Russian federation alone, and a request was made to the Ministry of Chemical Production to convert a factory for its production. The commission vacillated about who should take stable iodine. The Soviet ambassador in Romania was told firmly that no Soviet diplomats were to accept the iodine being offered in Bucharest, but while one member of the commission suggested that tests on patients in Hospital No. 7 had shown that only the citizens of Pripyat had received significant doses, another reminded his colleagues that whether or not the iodine prophylactic was needed, doctors must respond to the appeals of any citizen for whatever reason, in particular for medical assistance. People’s psyches were disturbed and doctors had no right to refuse them treatment, even if for all practical purposes it was of no use.

It was the same when it came to information. The first instinct of the commission was to keep all data secret, and a request was sent to a Comrade Zorin to make sure that no information about the medical aspects of the crisis was published in the press without its consent. Information about the condition of patients in Hospital No. 6 could be released because Gale and his friends would have it anyway, but none was to be released from Hospitals No. 7 and 12.

On the other hand, with the evidence of growing panic, the medical commission made a request to Ryzhkov’s Politburo commission for more information to be broadcast on television to reassure the population. With this advice, and a growing clamour for more information from abroad, the uncompromising line favoured by Ligachev was modified by two concessions. First, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Hans Blix, was invited to inspect the ruined reactor at Chernobyl together with his head of atomic safety, an American named Morris Rosen; second, a televised press conference was called for 6 May at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

That morning stories appeared in Pravda and were put out over the wires of the Soviet news agencies describing, with some accuracy, the accident and the measures being taken to monitor radioactive contamination. The same relative candour was evident at the press conference in the briefing hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was opened by the deputy foreign minister, Anatoly Kovalev, and then addressed by the chairman of the first government commission, Boris Scherbina himself.

It was a relative novelty for Soviet officials to hold Western-style press conferences of this kind, and its proceedings were strictly controlled. The room was packed not just with reporters from many nations, but also with foreign diplomats, including several ambassadors, and the spectacle was filmed by more than a dozen television cameras. However, questions were only taken from Soviet reporters or foreign correspondents from Communist papers, and they were paraphrased to suit the prepared replies.

Scherbina gave an account of the accident that, though it passed over the graver aspects of the crisis and gave a misleading impression of the competence of his commission, at least contained no outright lies. His estimate of casualties was based on the initially optimistic figures given by Baranov and Guskova. He suggested that the accident was being exploited by Cold Warriors in the West to frustrate the peace initiatives of Mikhail Gorbachev.

When asked by foreign journalists whether there was any danger to the population of other countries from the fallout from Chernobyl, Y. S. Sedunov, Yuri Israel’s deputy on the State Committee of Hydrometeorology, said, ‘In our opinion, there was no direct threat to the population either in our areas that are far away from the site of emission, or of foreign countries.’ He admitted enhanced levels of radiation in neighbouring countries, but felt that ‘this emission is shortlived, insignificant, not high.’

To a follow-up question about levels of radioactivity, Sedunov painted a reassuring picture by carefully selecting the statistics he chose to reveal. In Moscow there was no change to the background level. In Chernobyl the level had risen to fifteen milliroentgens an hour but had already dropped threefold. In Kiev the level at the time of the explosion did not exceed background levels, and three days ago was 0.2 milliroentgens an hour. In Minsk there was no substantial increase over the natural background level. In Gomel the situation was approximately the same as in Kiev.

There were further questions about the safety of Soviet nuclear power stations, which Petrosyants defended with vigour. Forty-one units had been working safely for the past thirty years. The technology was young, complex, and in a number of ways problematic, but other countries had faced similar problems. Look at Windscale, Idaho and Three Mile Island!

After only an hour, with the hands of many Western reporters still raised to ask questions, the conference was brought abruptly to an end. However, excerpts from the news conference were shown on television, both on ‘Vremya’ and in a special bulletin that followed. All references to the possible dangers from radiation had been removed.

3

In the days that followed, the different approaches of Ligachev, the Central Committee secretary for ideology, and Yakovlev, the secretary for propaganda, were apparent in the tone taken by journalists loyal to different masters. On 7 May Sovetskaya Rossiya mentioned merely a ‘lack of coordination’ in the evacuation of the population of the contaminated area; on 12 May, Pravda named officials guilty of grave dereliction of duty. Sometimes contradictory stances even appeared in the same paper. In a front-page article on 18 May, Pravda criticized those who refused to take the Soviet people into their confidence; on 21 May this was contradicted by a second article saying that criticism in the West of the dissemination of information was totally unjustified, since collecting accurate data inevitably takes time.

This battle was not so much about the aftermath of the accident as over what meaning was to be given to glasnost. Gorbachev had launched the policy, but seemed uncertain about how far it should be allowed to go. In theory he saw the need for it, but as a Soviet patriot he was loath to wash his country’s dirty linen in public, and as he revealed to Armand Hammer and Robert Gale when he received them in the Kremlin, he was genuinely angry about the way the Western media had gloated over this misfortune.

Throughout the party apparatus, and particularly in the media, the wily watched and waited to see which way things would go. Both Ligachev and Yakovlev had their supporters, and cautious editors hedged their bets by giving space to each. In Pravda, commentators like Yuri Zhukhov hammered away at the wickedness of the West, but Yakovlev had both a friend and an ally in the science editor, Vladimir Gubarev. A balding, handsome man, he had the kind of tough, chiselled face given to ‘positive’ Soviet heroes in paintings of the Stalinist era. With two degrees, one in physics from Moscow University, the other from the Institute of Construction and Development, Gubarev was well qualified as a scientist. But he was also the director of television films and the author of half a dozen plays and two dozen books, several of which had been published abroad. In the company of journalists he said he was an artist; in the company of artists he said he was a journalist. In both roles, he was a Communist, and in over thirty years at Pravda had grown adept at following the different twists and turns of the party line.

On 26 April, Gubarev had been tipped off about the accident by a physicist from the Kurchatov Institute. He had immediately telephoned the Pravda correspondent in Kiev, Mikhail Odinets, and told him to investigate. Odinets rang back later that day and said that there had been roadblocks on the way to Chernobyl; the militia had let him through, but later the KGB had sent him back. Three days later, on 29 April, after the TASS communiqué about the accident, Gubarev went to see his editor with his suspicion that the accident must have been much more serious than they had been led to believe. When the editor telephoned the Central Committee, he was told to drop the matter and not to interfere. This confirmed Gubarev’s suspicions. He himself telephoned Yakovlev, but his friend, bound by the decision of the Politburo, fobbed him off. ‘I’m told it’s nothing serious. Don’t get involved.’

On 2 May, after Ryzhkov and Ligachev had returned from Chernobyl, six trusted journalists were authorized by the Politburo to visit the scene. With the local correspondent, Odinets, Gubarev boarded a hydrofoil that was to take samples of water where the Pripyat River entered the Kiev reservoir.

In a leisurely, almost literary dispatch that was later published in Pravda, Gubarev and Odinets described their journey. The article was filled with facts: the Kiev reservoir was a man-made sea occupying an area in excess of 920 square kilometres and containing 3.7 cubic kilometres of water. Polesskpe and Ivankov regions had sown over 650,000 hectares of crops that spring, which was 100,000 more than the year before, including 150,000 of corn, which was 40,000 hectares more than the year before. Chernobyl was the repair base of the Dnieper Steamship Company as well as a centre for pig-iron production, cheese and mixed-feed factories, with an industrial combine, a consumer-services combine, medical and agricultural vocational and technical colleges, four general education schools, a musical school, a hospital, a polyclinic, a culture centre, a cinema and a library.

There were uplifting interviews. ‘We people belong to one family,’ said an Estonian engineer. ‘If the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl has suffered a misfortune, we are ready to come to its assistance.’ ‘Soviet people have the same joys and the same concerns,’ said another, from Kirghizia. ‘We have a sacred principle,’ said a third, from Belorussia. ‘The sacred law of brotherhood.’

At the headquarters of the commission in Chernobyl, Gubarev and Odinets interviewed Velikhov, who described the efficiency with which they were dealing with the crisis. ‘Previously it took months to reach agreement, but now a night is enough to decide virtually any problem. There is not a single person who refuses to work. Everyone is acting selflessly.’ He conceded that the problem they faced was unusual and ‘requires solutions that neither scientists nor specialists have ever had to deal with before,’ but the main lesson to be learned was ‘how catastrophic nuclear war is.’ The accident was trifling by comparison. ‘Over there in the West, particularly in Europe, people are shouting and making a din about Chernobyl, but they themselves are keeping quiet about or are trying to belittle the danger that the Pershings’ nuclear charge contains. So it is worthwhile for Western propagandists to consider: should they gloat over an accident that has occurred or would it be better to prevent a worldwide catastrophe?’

Despite its prosaic presentation and ideological dressing, Gubarev’s article gave several indications to the careful reader of the gravity of the accident at Chernobyl. He did not interview Legasov, who was loyal to Ligachev, head of the department in which his father had served in the secretariat of the Central Committee. Velikhov, however, was willing to give substance to glasnost, and for Yakovlev, Gubarev’s visit presented an opportunity to present information to Gorbachev that might not be reaching him through official channels. When Gubarev returned to Moscow, he was summoned to the Kremlin by Yakovlev, who then took him to see Gorbachev in his study. There Gubarev told the party leader of the chaos and incompetence he had witnessed, and warned him that the aftermath of the accident would be with them for many years to come. The general secretary seemed taken aback at the pessimism of his account.

4

The information about the accident, cautiously and selectively imparted through the Soviet media, did little to reassure the citizens of Kiev. Clips of film showing cows grazing in the shadow of the reactor, which had been broadcast on television in the days that followed the accident, were now revealed as lies to a public already prone to distrust any form of official propaganda. They were more willing to believe the news that filtered in from Radio Liberty, the BBC or simple telephone calls from friends abroad, that Western governments were repatriating their citizens from all parts of the Soviet Union.

Controlled by the system of internal passports and unable to leave their jobs without good reason, workers in offices and factories in Kiev now put in for their vacations, paid or unpaid, and when these were refused even proffered their resignations. On the night of 5 May, people slept at the railway station to keep their place in the queue for tickets. By the next morning the ticket offices came under siege, and soon the only seats available were on planes and trains departing five or six days later. Pensioners and invalids from the Great Patriotic War, who had precedence, were brutally elbowed aside as parents scrambled to get tickets for their children. A brisk black market sprang up, and tickets were sold for a premium of fifty or one hundred rubles.

On 6 May, ten days after the accident, at the same time as the first descriptions of it were published in the press, local radio and television stations broadcast the first advice to the inhabitants of Kiev by the Ukrainian health minister, Anatoli Romanenko. This was to wash their vegetables, close their windows and remain indoors. Many preferred to try to leave. Rumours began to circulate about how the party leaders had sent their children and grandchildren to camps and sanatoriums in the Crimea as soon as the accident had occurred. Crowds formed at the banks, and some banks were forced to close only an hour or two after they had opened. Others limited withdrawals to one hundred rubles, but even that depleted their deposits, and by the afternoon of 6 May the banks in Kiev closed because they had run out of money. Those people with cars now tried to flee, and traffic jammed the southern routes out of the city.

Those who remained, hearing that iodine was a precaution against radiation, flocked to pharmacies, but found that the stocks had sold out. Some got hold of iodine intended for external application, drank it down and scalded their throats. The other reputed antidote was vodka, and the usual lines outside the liquor stores quadrupled in size. The short opening hours decreed on 1 May as part of the drive against alcoholism were abandoned. Believing themselves protected by their intoxication, drunks ventured out in the street. A group tried to pick up a dishevelled young woman in the Khreshchatyk boulevard; it was Lubov Kovalevskaya, the journalist from Pripyat, who had just returned from the airport, where she had sent her daughter off to stay with her sister in Sverdlovsk.

Since she had to pay a black-market price for the ticket for her daughter, Lubov had returned to Kiev with nowhere to stay and only twenty kopeks in her purse. She was in a state of shock, crazed, unkempt and dirty. She tried to recite some lines of her own poetry, but none came to mind. She could not even tell left from right. She was standing in line for a taxi without any clear idea of where she should go when a man asked if she was from Chernobyl. When she said she was, he took her by the arm, gave her supper at his office, then arranged for a room at the Hotel Moscow. She remained there for five days at his expense; he asked for nothing in return.

The anxiety and exasperation of the inhabitants of Kiev were shared by their, leaders. Vladimir Shcherbitsky, Brezhnev’s old crony, who was still general secretary of the Ukrainian Communist party, had done everything that had been expected of him. Minor officials might have sent their families out of the city, but he had stood on the rostrum on May Day with his grandson at his side and had appeared at the international bicycle race that had passed through the city on 9 May. But since the Chernobyl station was an All-Union enterprise, and since anything to do with it was kept secret from the province’s leaders, he knew little more of the true situation than the man in the street.

His minister of health, Romanenko, was equally ill informed. Returning from a conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on 2 May, he had gone to Chernobyl on the 3rd and gained some idea of the seriousness of the accident, but all authority had been vested in the government’s medical commission in Moscow, headed by the Soviet minister, Shepin. Romanenko’s task was to carry out its instructions as best he could, and this he did by mobilizing the entire health service of the Ukraine. He formed a thousand additional medical teams to treat the evacuees from Pripyat and the thirty-kilometre zone, and to examine the inhabitants of villages on the fringe. This put an enormous strain on their resources since there were not enough doctors or laboratory technicians to make blood tests on so many thousands of people. Eventually the army medical corps was mobilized to assist them, but the criteria upon which their care was based was stipulated by the Institute of Biophysics under Academician Ilyn and the State Committee of Hydrometeorology under Professor Yuri Israel.

Knowing as little about radiation as anyone else, the Ukraine’s political leaders became infected by the growing panic in Kiev, and on 7 May they summoned both Ilyn and Israel to a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. There Shcherbitsky insisted that they draw up in writing their recommendations for the protection of his people from the fallout. It was an unusual request, suggesting an ominous mistrust of the central organs of power. However, Ilyn and Israel agreed, and retired to prepare the paper.

The Ukrainian Politburo reconvened at 11.30 p.m. The party leaders, including Shcherbitsky and the redoubtable Ukrainian minister Valentina Shevchenko, sat facing Ilyn and Israel across the wide conference table. They presented their report as follows:

1.The radiation situation in the city of Kiev and the oblast at present does not present a danger to the health of the population, including children, and is within the limits of norms recommended by national and international atomic-energy agencies in case of accidents at a nuclear power station.

2.The level of radioactive substances contained in food products at present presents no danger to the populations.

Ilyn’s and Israel’s recommendations were:

1.An analysis of the radioactive situation in the city of Kiev demonstrates the absence, at present, of indications of the need for the population, in particular children, to be evacuated to other regions.

2.The population should be informed through the mass media, television and radio about the situation and the measures being taken.

This was signed by both Israel and Ilyn and presented to Shcherbitsky, but before the meeting broke up Valentina Shevchenko suddenly leaned forward and asked Israel, ‘Yuri Antoniyevich, what would you do if your own grandchildren were in Kiev?’

She was later to claim that Israel made no answer, while Ilyn insisted that Israel had reassured her. Whatever the truth, a resolution was passed the next day by the Ukrainian Council of Ministers, with Israel’s concurrence, bringing the school year to an end on 15 May and evacuating children up to the seventh grade from Kiev to areas unaffected by the fallout from Chernobyl.

On the evening of 8 May, Romanenko spoke on Ukrainian television. He reassured the viewers that since his earlier broadcast the radiation situation had improved. The level of background radiation was gradually falling and was well within the norms recommended by national and international bodies and did not represent a danger to the health of the population, including children. Nevertheless he drew attention to the danger from radioactive dust. The intensive washing of the streets and hosing down of apartment blocks would continue, and people were advised to take a shower and wash their hair every day. Children could play outdoors, but only for a limited period of time. ‘They want to be out in the open air, so let them play, but not as often in good weather from morning until night, but just for the odd hour, and they should not kick balls around in dusty areas.’

Romanenko then announced that ‘to improve the health of the children of Kiev city and oblast’ the school term would end on 15 May. The children would be sent to Pioneer and holiday camps in the southern oblasts ‘in a well-organized manner, and for this purpose an adequate number of trains and vehicles are being set aside.’ In conclusion, he stressed, ‘All matters connected with the influence of the environment on the health of the population are constantly being monitored by the Ukrainian Republican Ministry of Health.’

5

These measures by the Ukrainians were not approved by the government’s medical commission. The dose established by Ilyn’s Institute of Biophysics as virtually harmless was twenty-five rems. This was the special exposure limit set for members of the armed forces dealing with the aftermath of the accident at Chernobyl. On the very day of Romanenko’s broadcast, the commission proposed to set a limit five times lower, at five rems, which would mean that at the current level of contamination, the inhabitants of Kiev were safe for two and a half years. Professor Vorobyov confirmed that this left a vast margin of safety. On 5 May he had been anxious when it was reported that the medical personnel in Hospital No. 6 had been receiving over a short period doses of more than ten to fifteen rems, and had ordered them to work in shifts. But on 8 May, in considering emergency-dose levels leading to intervention, he asked the commission to look at the facts, which were that even one hundred rems did not lead to leukaemia. The chromosomes repaired themselves. A favourable prognosis could be established for one generation. As the deputy Minister of Health Shepin reported to the medical commission, the decision of the Ukrainian leadership to evacuate children from Kiev was ‘an emotional reaction without any objective justification’. It was also the first intimation that the scientists were no longer in control.

As reports came in of contamination far beyond the thirty-kilometre zone, including vast tracts northeast of Gomel in Belorussia, the medical commission gave orders for the evacuation of the inhabitants of some affected areas and the provision of uncontaminated food and milk in others. There was considerable confusion in the field about the dose levels that should trigger this kind of government intervention. The commission was told that medical staff in the field were applying the ten-rem limit, drawn up to limit their own short-term exposure, as the intervention level for the estimated lifetime exposure of the general population.

After repeated requests to the commission to arrive at definitive norms, a working party of experts was set up and on 12 May it recommended that temporary norms of ten rems of external radiation to the whole body and of thirty rads to the thyroid be set for children and pregnant women. For the rest of the adult population, intervention was to take place when the estimated lifetime dose was fifty rems. This was approved by the commission for a month, after which it was reduced to thirty-five rems.

Although areas to the northeast of Gomel were evacuated on 2 May, and measures taken to provide those who remained with ‘clean’ imported milk and food, the contamination of about fifteen hundred square kilometres of land so far from Chernobyl was not mentioned on television or in the press. The public was left with the impression that pollution was restricted to the thirty-kilometre zone. There was a fear of widespread panic if it were to become known that land three hundred kilometres north of Chernobyl had been rendered uninhabitable by the fallout, or that significant deposits of radioactive caesium had been found five hundred kilometres to the west, only two hundred kilometres from Moscow.

There was also the preoccupation with Soviet prestige. It was thought that reducing the scale of the disaster would limit the damage done to the country’s reputation abroad. For the same reason it also became a matter of urgency for the government to come up with an ideologically acceptable explanation of how the catastrophe had occurred.

6

On hearing of the accident at Chernobyl on 26 April, the public prosecutor in Kiev had opened an investigation into a possible offence under Article 220, Section 2, of the criminal code, which covered breaches of regulations at ‘explosive-prone enterprises or in explosive-prone workshops’. The file was tagged as Criminal Case No. 19–73. The following day, 27 April, a team was formed to conduct an investigation, which included not just lawyers from the prosecutor’s office, but investigators from the Ministry of the Interior and the KGB. At the same time, a parallel investigation was started in Moscow by the deputy general prosecutor of the USSR.

The investigators, however, worked under two constraints: the first was the subordination of all who worked in the Soviet judicial system to the dictates of the party; the second was the abstruse nature of the evidence, which only a few physicists could understand.

Immediately after the accident, an investigation into its causes was set up by the different ministries and institutions involved in atomic energy – the Ministry of Medium Machine Building; the Ministry of Energy and Electrification; Alexandrov’s Kurchatov Institute; Dollezhal’s design institute, NIKYET; Abagyan’s institute, VNIIAES; the State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy; Hydroprojekt; and by the chief engineer of Chernobyl, Nikolai Fomin. Reporting to the commission on 5 May, this committee of inquiry pointed out that the programme drawn up by Dyatlov for tests of the turbines was flawed; that in implementing it the operators had broken certain safety regulations and the accepted technical procedures; and that the reactor had gone out of control because of these mistakes. However, it recommended that the two ministries running RBMK reactors should reconsider whether in fact they were complying with certain laws on industrial safety, and if it transpired that they were not, should take strict measures to comply with them in all operating RBMK power stations and those under construction.

At the same time, on 26 April, a second investigation was started by Boris Scherbina, head of the government commission. This was led by Armen Abagyan, chief of VNIIAES, the All-Union Research Institute for Nuclear Power Plant Operation, and included representatives from the same ministries and institutes, among them Alexander Kalugin from the Kurchatov Institute, as well as senior figures from the prosecutor’s office, the Interior Ministry and the KGB. The legality of this investigation’s proceedings was supervised by the deputy general prosecutor of the USSR, O. V. Soroka, and its final report was signed by the general prosecutor of the USSR, A. Reykunkov.

This committee also blamed the Chernobyl personnel for the breach of safety regulations, including not just Dyatlov as the deputy chief engineer responsible for the tests, but also Brukhanov and Fomin, who ‘made grave errors in the running of the nuclear power station and did not ensure its safety.’ These errors were regarded ‘above all else’ as the real cause of the accident at reactor No. 4.

However, some additional blame was attached to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification for allowing such tests to be carried out at night and for tolerating ‘physical and technical shortcomings in the RBMK reactor’ without insisting that the chief designer and scientific leader take the necessary measures to improve the safety of the reactor. There was also criticism of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which had permitted the same shortcomings in its RBMK reactors, and, in brackets, as if in passing, its leader, Efim Slavsky, as well as Alexandrov, the scientific leader; Nikolai Dollezhal, the chief designer; and Ivan Yemelyanov, his deputy at NIKYET. All of these were rebuked for failing to implement timely measures to improve the safety of the RBMK reactors in accordance with the requirements ‘stated in general safety regulations’ for nuclear reactors at any stage in their design, development or exploitation. ‘In the design of the reactor,’ the report concluded, ‘there were insufficient technical measures to ensure its safety.’

The ripples of responsibility for the accident spread further still. Criticism was directed to the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry, which ‘did not ensure adequate supervision of the implementation of norms and regulations concerning nuclear safety, and did not make full use of its statutory rights.’ Its leaders, Kulov and Sidorenko, had been indecisive and had not stopped ‘the breach of norms and safety regulations by the various ministries, enterprises, power stations and factories that supplied equipment and devices.’

Though mistakes made by the operators initiated the explosion, the report went on, the explosion itself stemmed from flaws in the reactor’s design that permitted a positive void coefficient in the core and the possibility of a sudden surge of power. There were no systems incorporated in the design to deal with such eventualities, and there was a fatal flaw in the specifications for the control rods, which had led to positive reactivity in the first moments of their descent into the active zone. The design of the reactor did not include a device that would show the operating reactivity or threshold of danger.

Although it ascribed some culpability not just to the designers but also to those who knew of the potential hazard, this report to the commission did not make clear that there was no mention of any danger in the operating manual of the RBMK reactors. An experienced operator should have realized that it was dangerous to remove so many control rods from the core of the reactor, but not that pressing the emergency button to return them would start the process that had led to the explosion. The report made much of the breach of safety regulations, but it did not say that operators were permitted to disregard them on the authority of a deputy chief engineer – in other words, that these regulations were more like guidelines than laws; nor did it point out that most of the breaches, such as disconnecting the emergency core-cooling system, had no bearing whatsoever on what had gone wrong.

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.

The meeting started at 11.00 a.m. with Mikhail Gorbachev as chairman. First, Scherbina presented a report. Brukhanov was then invited to speak, and gave a brief explanation of what had occurred. Gorbachev asked him if he had known about the accident at Three Mile Island, and Brukhanov said that he had. He was impressed by the courtesy of the general secretary, noting that the higher the party official, the better he behaved. At the city level, they had snarled and shouted at him, at the district level they were a little more civil and here in the Kremlin, they were calm and polite.

The meeting continued until 7.00 p.m. At the end of it Gorbachev pronounced sentence: Brukhanov was dismissed from the party.

Brukhanov returned to Kiev with a foreboding that worse was to come. As a party member, he had been protected from arrest; this rule had been instituted by Khrushchev to prevent arbitrary action by the KGB. But now that he was no longer a party member, the legal process could begin. In Kiev, where a room had been reserved for him at the Leningrad Hotel, he was summoned each day to the office of the public prosecutor to draw up a statement, which when finished ran to ninety pages.

When it was completed, Brukhanov was driven back to the Pioneer camp, and it was only when he got there that he realized that he was no longer the director of the Chernobyl nuclear power station. No one told him, but he discovered that in his absence he had been replaced by Erik Pozdyshev. He still had some weeks’ holiday to his credit, so he remained at the camp for the rest of June and throughout July with nothing much to do. Occasionally he would travel to Kiev to visit his wife, who was in the hospital for a heart complaint.

When it was time to return to work, Brukhanov asked if he could work as deputy chief of the industrial-technical unit, but his request was refused. On 12 August, the deputy chief engineer, Smyshlyaev, told him that he was to report to room 203 at the prosecutor’s office at 10.00 a.m. the next day. There he was charged under two articles of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Union. The first, Article 220, Section 2, covered the breach of safety regulations at ‘explosive-prone enterprises or … workshops’; the second, Article 165, Section 2, covered the abuse of power for personal advantage, and related not to the accident itself but to the signing of a document containing false data on the levels of radiation that followed it.

There was a break for lunch. When Brukhanov returned, two men had joined the prosecutor’s team, and he was told that he was to be taken into custody by the KGB, where he would receive better treatment than if left in the hands of the militia. He complained that this was unnecessary because he was unlikely to abscond; only later did he realize that it was to prevent him from taking his own life. He was driven off in a jeep by the two officers from the KGB. When they reached the prison he gave up his belt, shoelaces and watch before being locked in a cell measuring two metres by four. There was a lavatory, a washbasin and, in the steel door, a spy hole, which opened every minute.

Brukhanov was to remain in this cell for a year awaiting trial.

On 21 July, before Brukhanov’s arrest, the Politburo’s full and final judgment was published in Pravda:

‘It was established that the accident occurred because of a whole series of crude violations of the rules for the operation of reactor installations that were perpetrated by the workers of this power station.’

Experiments on the turbogenerators had been carried out without coordination or authorization from the appropriate organizations, and while they were being carried out, proper control was not exercised and appropriate measures were not taken. Both the Ministry of Energy and Electrification and the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry were chastised for allowing such laxity at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which had led to the deaths of twenty-eight people, the sickness of many more, the destruction of a reactor, the pollution of one thousand square kilometres of land, all to a value of around three billion rubles.

Promising to hand over the evidence collected by its own inquiry to the prosecutor’s office, the Politburo then announced the sentence it had served on those held responsible. Yevgeny Kulov, the chairman of the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry; Gennady Shasharin, the deputy minister of energy and electrification; Alexander Meshkov, Slavsky’s first deputy minister of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building; and Professor Ivan Yemelyanov, Dollezhal’s deputy director at NIKYET, were all dismissed from their posts. Anatoli Mayorets, the minister of energy and electrification, would have been dismissed if he had not been in his post for such a short period of time; as it was, he received a severe reprimand and was threatened with more serious punishment if he did not learn from his mistakes. Only Victor Brukhanov was expelled from the party. The fates of lesser figures, such as Dyatlov and Fomin, were left to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. No disciplinary measures were taken against any scientists at the Kurchatov Institute.

9

This apparently impartial investigation by the Politburo, followed by the punishment of the culprits, cleared the decks for the Soviet team led by Legasov to present its case in Vienna. Few remarked upon the inherent contradiction in the Politburo’s judgment: if the accident was caused by the breach of safety regulations by the operators, which in turn derived from the failings of Brukhanov, then why punish Dollezhal’s deputy, Professor Yemelyanov, or Slavsky’s deputy, Alexander Meshkov, at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building?

On 25 August the meeting of the world’s experts on atomic energy was convened by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. In the four months since the accident, Chernobyl had aroused an obsessive and terrified curiosity throughout the world, so that as well as delegates from the accredited governments, thousands of correspondents descended on the ornate capital of the former Austrian empire.

It was sometimes a struggle to attend the deliberations, for there were only four hundred seats for delegates from 150 accredited governments. Legasov arrived with a large team, among them Guskova, Ilyn and Abagyan. The United States was limited to eighteen delegates, and so in order to attend, an independent expert on atomic safety, Professor Richard Wilson, first arranged to be included in the Kuwaiti delegation and then, when this was considered inappropriate by the State Department, was accredited as a correspondent of the British scientific magazine Nature.

The conference opened with Legasov’s report; he spoke without faltering for over five hours. After a prologue expressing Gorbachev’s good intentions, he proceeded to describe the RBMK reactor without mentioning any deficiencies in its design. He listed the different safety systems, suggesting that the comparatively slow rate at which the independent regulatory rods were inserted into the core when the emergency system was triggered ‘was offset by their large number.’ He described the tests made on the turbines in the early morning of 26 April, how the power surged out of control, leading the operators to press the emergency AZ button, but how ‘in the conditions that had now arisen, the violations committed by the staff had seriously reduced the effectiveness of the emergency protection system. The overall positive reactivity appearing in the core began to increase. Within three seconds the power rose above 530 megawatts, and the total period of the excursion was much less than twenty seconds. The positive void coefficient worsened the situation.’

In analysing the causes of the accident, Legasov insisted that ‘the design of the reactor facility provided for this type of accident, with allowance for the physical characteristics of the reactor, including a positive steam void coefficient of reactivity.’ He then listed ‘the most dangerous violations of the operating rules committed by the staff of the fourth unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant: … The chief motive of the staff was to complete the tests as expeditiously as possible. The failure to adhere to instructions in preparing for and carrying out the tests, the noncompliance with the testing programme itself and the carelessness in handling the reactor facility are evidence that the staff was insufficiently familiar with the special features of the technological processes in a nuclear reactor and also that they had lost any feeling for the hazards involved.’

The designers had not provided a protective safety system to prevent an accident of this kind because they never envisaged ‘the deliberate switching off of technical protection systems coupled with violations of the operating regulations’; they had ‘considered such a conjunction of events to be impossible. Thus, the prime cause of the accident was an extremely improbable combination of violations of instructions and operating rules committed by the staff of the unit.’

Next, Legasov described the measures taken to protect the population from the effects of the accident, and announced that 135,000 people had been evacuated from the Pripyat and the surrounding zone. ‘As a result of these and other measures, it proved possible to keep population exposures within the established limits. The radiological effects on the population in the next few decades were evaluated. The effects will be insignificant against the natural background of cancerous and genetic diseases.’

It was a virtuoso performance and was greeted with great acclaim. Together with the charts, diagrams and statistics provided by the Soviets, the impression was given that the full and frank disclosure promised by Gorbachev had been delivered. ‘At last,’ said the headline in a Viennese newspaper, ‘a Soviet scientist who tells the truth.’ Not only did Legasov seem to speak with much greater candour than the world had come to expect from behind the Iron Curtain, but there were moments when emotion showed through the traditionally impersonal manner of the Soviet spokesman – for example, when Legasov said that the commission would like to have heard more from one of the operators (Akimov), ‘but unfortunately he died.’

The next day it was Guskova’s turn to describe the treatment that had been given to her patients in Hospital No. 6. Some of the cases made medical history: no one had imagined that someone as severely irradiated as Piotr Palamarchuk or Anatoli Tormozin could survive. Robert Gale was with the United States delegation when Guskova stated that this was not due to, bone-marrow transplants, which both men had rejected. He felt that political pressure had been put on Guskova to downgrade American assistance.

Given the publicity he had received in his own country, Gale had become something of a hero. He seemed to symbolize the superiority of American medicine, and hence the American way of life. Therefore it was galling to hear from Guskova that while the Soviets were grateful for his help, and particularly for the equipment donated by Armand Hammer, it had not actually saved a single life.

Guskova, on the other hand, who had been annoyed by the way Gale, an expert on bone-marrow transplants, had been presented by the media as a specialist on radiation sickness, noted with some satisfaction that her fellow specialists on the American delegation seemed to share her irritation with the man.

After Guskova, there was an address by the jovial Armenian, Professor Armen Abagyan. His institute, albeit under the umbrella of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, was nevertheless distinct from either Dollezhal’s bureau or the Kurchatov Institute. Specifically set up after the accident at Three Mile Island to supervise safety in the atomic industry, it had recognized the deficiencies in the RBMK’s design, but given the climate at the time, did not insist on its analysis of the accident appearing in Legasov’s report.

Indeed, Abagyan, when questioned by experts from Canada about the emergency-shutdown systems operating at Chernobyl, avoided answering; to the anger of many of the delegates, he appeared to pretend that he did not understand. When asked what measures would be taken against those responsible for the accident, he replied that punishment did not fall within his area of expertise. It was as close as he could come to suggesting that the operators alone were not to blame.

Wednesday, 27 August, was an open day during which experts from different countries could question their Soviet colleagues. Professor Wilson approached two members of the Soviet delegation – a professor from the Institute of Applied Geophysics and a young researcher from the Kurchatov – and asked if he could compare his own data on the release of radioactivity with theirs. There followed an open and straightforward discussion that lasted for three hours. They described their methodology to Wilson; it broadly coincided with his, but when he checked the total recorded emission with the sum of figures on the printout, he found that they did not match.

The two Soviets looked confused and told Wilson that there must have been some mistake in the calculation. In reality, six pages covering the serious contamination of the area north of Gomel had been removed. Wilson was later told that this had been done on Legasov’s instructions.