CHAPTER NINE The Empire Explodes: Chernobyl
An unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics
Great Russia has welded forever to stand;
Created in struggle by will of the peoples,
United and mighty, our Soviet Land!
Hail to the Fatherland, free from oppression,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong!
The Party of Lenin, strength of the nation,
Leads us to communism steadfastly on!
– First verse and chorus of the Soviet national anthem
Chernobyl helped us understand that we are a colony.
– Rukh leader, April 1991
‘BIG STOMACH, LOW concentration,’ chuckles Stepan Lyashenko, pressing a metal funnel to his bulging waistband. The electronic read-out on the other end of the apparatus clicks up a few notches. ‘Look, I’m quite safe to eat!’
Outside the greasy windows of my hired Zhiguli, the midsummer countryside rolls bucolically by. Storks mince about between sugar-bun haystacks; a barefoot toddler splashes in a puddle; an old woman waits at a bus-stop with a goat on a bit of string. But like the establishing shots of some rustic fright-movie, behind apparent normality horror lurks: Chernobyl. What we are driving through is the so-called ‘Obligatory Evacuation Zone’ – the amoeba-shaped strip of countryside, roughly eighty miles long by twenty-five miles wide, most seriously contaminated by radioactive fallout during the nuclear explosion of 1986. ‘Obligatory evacuation’ is a euphemism: according to government promises, the whole population should have been moved out years ago, but lack of alternative housing means that over 30,000 people still live here, including several hundred in the fenced-off thirty-kilometre inner zone round Chernobyl itself.
Lyashenko is a middle-ranking apparatchik from the agriculture ministry. His job is to persuade the Zone’s collectives to use safer farming techniques. On his lap sits a bundle of booklets wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Smudgily printed on rough paper, they instruct farmworkers to give up planting beans and buckwheat – both have shallow root systems, and hence take up high doses of the deadly caesium and strontium particles lurking in the topsoil – in favour of deeper-rooted beets and potatoes. But on this trip at least, not many are going to get the message. ‘I asked for 300 copies,’ Lyashenko says, ‘but there are problems with the printers, and I only got a hundred.’
Down the end of a dirt road we draw up outside a dilapidated bungalow. I try out a Geiger counter on the ground – it clicks up to forty milli-roentgens, twice as high as in Kiev. Over by a drainpipe, where rainwater off the roof collects, the readout jumps to 180. The farm’s radiologist, a red-faced man with gold teeth, explains that according to regulations, livestock should only be grazed on fields spread with lime, which soaks up radioactive particles, leaving fewer to be taken up by grass, and thence via milk and meat by human beings. ‘The most difficult thing,’ he says, ‘is stopping people grazing their cows in the woods. It’s cheap for them but it’s very dangerous, because that’s where the “traps” are, the places that have never been tested for radiation.’ What’s worse, his collective is now so short of cash that it can’t lime its fields anyway. ‘Before, we were able to treat the pastures – you could see the radiation levels going down. Now we haven’t got the money and the work has stopped.’ Lyashenko looks uncomfortable – the radiologist isn’t sticking to the script. ‘If you tested every cow near your Sellafield,’ he interrupts, ‘like we do here, you would find your milk is even worse than ours.’
‘But what about the cows in the woods?’
A shrug. ‘What do you expect? Babushka controls?’
Back in the car, we pass a group of farmworkers sitting on wooden benches outside the collective’s single, boarded-up shop. I ask my driver Vlad to stop. Lyashenko climbs out too, grumpy but not saying anything. Straight away the complaints start flowing. An old man in dirty brown jacket and tracksuit trousers says, ‘The top officials don’t care about normal people – they live in Kiev and eat clean food. Here they used to send us stuff, but not any more.’ Like most of the villagers, he has his own cow, but has never had its milk tested for radioactivity. The woman sitting next to him chips in: ‘It’s really bad here – we get terrible headaches, leg pains. There’s no medicine in the shops. We thought of moving out but there’s nowhere to go. And how can you worry about the food you’re eating when you haven’t been paid for three months?’ Another woman comes up, trailed by a flock of turkey chicks. A heart-shaped religious medallion hangs round her neck, and under her arm she carries a basket of eggs.
‘Are you going to eat those?’
‘Of course!’ – a jerk of the head at Lyashenko – ‘I don’t care what they say. I’m sixty-six now, so why does it matter?’
On the way home Vlad’s Zhiguli packs up for the third time that day. By suspiciously artistic coincidence, we grind to a halt directly underneath a faded billboard bearing the message ‘UKRAINIANS! TAKE CARE OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT!’ While Vlad pokes about under the bonnet, Lyashenko and I smoke companionable cigarettes in the low evening sun. His father, it turns out, disappeared during the purges. Thirty years later the family found out that he had been shot by the NKVD. ‘The night of Chernobyl,’ he says, ‘I was twenty kilometres away, travelling on business. I didn’t know anything about the explosion until the second day – and then I only heard about it because some friends who live near the station rang me up and asked me to get them out.’ Despite all this, he had waited until 1991 to tear up his Party card, and had voted for the Communist candidate in the presidential elections.
‘The way the system treated you, why didn’t you leave the Party sooner?’
‘I couldn’t have moved up the ladder otherwise; I would have stayed in one place. The Communist idea isn’t so bad – it was just badly carried out.’
From under the bonnet, Vlad jabs an accusatory finger: ‘That’s why this place is so fucked up – these bureaucracy pigs just sit there and do nothing. Do you think he cares? No!’
Ask a Ukrainian when he stopped believing in communism, and the answers vary. A few quote the invasion of Czechoslovakia, some the Afghan war, others the discovery of Stalin’s mass graves at Bykivnya. Many, like Lyashenko, look blank, because they have not really stopped believing in communism at all. But by far the likeliest reply is ‘Chernobyl’. A saga of technical incompetence and irresponsibility, of bureaucratic sloth, mendacity and plain contempt for human life, the Chernobyl affair epitomised everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union. As Yuriy Shcherbak – a doctor turned environmental activist turned Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington – declared, ‘Chernobyl was not like the communist system. They were one and the same.’1 Imperilling everyone impartially and in the most basic and dramatic fashion, no other single piece of communist bungling did more to turn public opinion against the regime.
Chernobyl exploded at 1.23 a.m. on the night of Friday 26 April 1986. The cause was neither equipment failure nor human error, but an experiment which went wrong. In order to test how long the reactor could operate with no external power supply, engineers deliberately lifted all but six neutron-absorbing control rods out of the reactor’s core, and disabled the automatic shut-down system which would have normally come into play in case of power failure. As soon as the external electricity supply had been switched off, power levels inside the reactor core surged, resulting in steam explosions, rupture of the reactor casing, and a fire.2
In the months after the disaster, Shcherbak toured the hospital wards collecting interviews with engineers, doctors and firemen who had been on the scene at the time.3 Yuriy Badayev, a 34-year-old electrical engineer, was on duty in Reactor Number Four’s information processing room, following the progress of his bosses’ experiment on his computer screens. Shortly after 1 a.m. he was amazed to see that the reactor had been closed down. Fifteen seconds later he felt two massive shocks, one a few moments after the other. The lights went out and water started pouring through the ceiling. Racing out into the corridor, he could hardly see anything for steam and dust; the doors of the elevator had been crushed shut, and the stairs were covered in rubble. Back in his own room the telephone from one of the control rooms on the floor above started ringing; he picked up the receiver, but nobody answered. Later, Badayev saw the colleague who had made that call being carried out on a stretcher, his spine crushed by falling masonry. Another engineer in the same control room died immediately, of burns.
Hryhoriy Khmel, a fifty-year-old engine-driver with the local fire brigade, spent the evening down at the station playing draughts. He had just unrolled a mattress when a call came through that Chernobyl was on fire. Two engines set off; he drove the second. They arrived at about fifteen minutes to two, some twenty minutes after the blast. Flames were coming out of the reactor-block roof and pieces of graphite were scattered everywhere, hot to the touch and crunchy underfoot. Having spent some time trying to locate the station’s hydrants – wrongly marked on the map – the younger men scaled the building and started playing twenty-metre hoses down into the burning reactor itself. After watching proceedings from the ground for some hours, Khmel was taken to the station cafeteria, given ‘powders’ to eat and told to strip and wash. ‘We didn’t have much idea about radiation,’ he told Shcherbak later. ‘Whoever was working didn’t have any idea.’4
In Prypyat, the next-door town where most of the station’s workforce lived, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor, Valentyn Bilokin, was finishing his rounds. It had been a quiet shift – a few drunks, a child with an asthma attack. Driving back to the clinic, he saw two flashes in the sky – lightning, he thought, or maybe shooting stars. Told there was a fire at Chernobyl, he packed his burns equipment into a bag and set off for the station – like the firemen, without any radiation medicines or protective clothing. When he arrived, people were running around everywhere. Nobody told him what to do, there didn’t seem to be any bums victims to treat, and there were no other doctors on site. When a group of firemen complained that they were feeling nauseous, he finally remembered some of his radiation training from medical school. ‘It seemed that I had forgotten everything,’ he told Shcherbak. ‘Who needed radiation hygiene? Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all that was so remote.’5
Having realised what was wrong, he was powerless to do anything about it: ‘We had been told there were gas masks and protective suits, but there wasn’t anything of the sort, it didn’t work.’6 In desperation, he rang the clinic for gauze masks, but they hadn’t got any. More firemen came up, vomiting and complaining of acute headaches, some of them too weak to stand. Bilokin gave them anti-nausea drugs to treat the symptoms, but could do nothing for the radiation itself. One eighteen-year-old, stumbling and slurring like a drunk, drifted away into a coma before his eyes. As the night wore on, Bilokin tried to persuade people to stay inside the station cafeteria: ‘I chased them all back into the building, but they just came out again . . . People just didn’t fully realise what had happened.’7 By dawn he was feeling ill himself, and got a lift back to the Prypyat clinic, where vodka bottles were doing the rounds. ‘Some were drunk,’ he told Shcherbak, ‘and others were running around constantly washing themselves.’8 A few hours later, having distributed iodine pills among family and neighbours, he sank into a coma himself.
That same Saturday morning, the regional Party committee held a meeting in Prypyat. Though the whole town could see black smoke belching from the reactor, it was decided that there were to be no safety warnings, and no explanations. All that day – while local Party bosses were arranging for their own children to leave for holiday camps in Crimea – life in the town went on as normal. Families went shopping and walked their dogs; fishermen lugged their tackle off to the Prypyat river; couples sunbathed round the power station’s cooling ponds. Football matches went ahead, as did sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Communist Youth League. The schools debated whether or not to go ahead with a planned ‘Health Run’, and settled on outdoor gymnastics instead. Off-duty station-workers who rang up the town hall asking for instructions were told that the fire was none of their business, and that all decisions would be taken by Moscow. The town’s schoolchildren had been put through their ‘civil defence’ routines, designed for nuclear attack from the West, only days before. But with a nuclear explosion on their own doorstep none of the safety procedures, not even the simplest, were carried out.
Lyubov Kovalevska, a journalist on the local paper, had sat up all night writing a poem. Setting off for her literary club on the Saturday morning, she noticed two odd things: white cleaning-fluid flooding the streets, and lots of policemen about. A few weeks previously she had written an article exposing the shoddy work going into the construction of Chernobyl’s fifth reactor. She could have said much more – station-workers had told her of corruption, of faulty equipment and supply shortages – but she had been afraid of losing her job. ‘At the time I just hadn’t the courage to write about it,’ she told Shcherbak afterwards. ‘I knew it had no chance at all of being published.’9 But even she didn’t realise there had been a serious accident: ‘The whole day we knew nothing, and no one said anything. Well, it was a fire. But as for the radiation, that there were radioactive emissions, nothing was said about that.’10
On Sunday morning, Boris Shcherbina arrived in Prypyat, head of a secret emergency commission pulled together by Moscow the day before. Taking a map and a pair of compasses, he drew an arbitrary ten-kilometre circle round the station and ordered a general evacuation. The buses – yellow Icaruses from Kiev – started leaving the town at two in the afternoon, thirty-six hours after the initial explosion. Evacuees were told they would be back soon, so took few belongings with them. Though it was obvious that wind and rainfall would spread fallout over a far wider area, evacuation was not extended elsewhere for another five days.
All Sunday, there was no official announcement of any sort about the accident. Sixty miles south in Kiev, the public was completely ignorant of what had happened, noticing only that all the city’s buses had mysteriously disappeared. When an announcement was finally made, it was under pressure from abroad. At 9 a.m. on Monday morning a nuclear power station in Sweden detected abnormal radiation levels in the air: a nuclear dust cloud seemed to be drifting northwards from somewhere inside the Soviet Union. All that afternoon Swedish diplomats badgered the Russian foreign ministry for information, meeting outright denials that anything was wrong. Finally, at nine o’clock in the evening, there was a short bulletin at the end of the regular television news:
An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up.
The head of Moscow’s state-run Novosti news agency later admitted that he had known of the accident since Sunday, but, for the same reasons as Kovalevska in Prypyat, had failed to make it public. Gorbachev himself made no public statement on Chernobyl for two weeks, and when he did go on television, it was to accuse the Western media of spreading ‘malicious mountains of lies’. The day before Pravda had published an interview with one of the country’s top nuclear scientists, in which he told a horrified world that the reactor core might burn its way down through the station’s foundations, poisoning the groundwater of the entire Dnieper valley and setting off a second, even larger, steam explosion – the so-called ‘China Syndrome’. It was still touch and go, he admitted, whether the reactor could be brought under control at all.
Meanwhile, six days after the explosion, Kiev’s May Day celebrations went ahead as normal. Trade-union representatives marched under embroidered banners, children waved flowers, military bands tootled patriotic airs. Ukrainian First Party Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky reviewed the parade from a podium on Khreshchatyk; people noticed that although it was raining, he wasn’t wearing a hat. The day before, the wind had swung round to the north, and it was on May Day itself that fallout over Kiev peaked. A British student who flew home just as the heavy fallout was beginning was found to have a piece of nuclear fuel attached to his shoe; a Dutch tourist had fragments of nuclear fuel on his trousers.
On 6 May, after repeated assurances that the accident posed no danger to human health, the Ukrainian health minister suddenly went on local television with instructions that Kievans should not eat green vegetables or drink milk, should stay indoors if possible, wash thoroughly, and sweep out their flats. Better-informed Kievans had already begun leaving the city; now the exodus was general. Cars jammed the roads and frightened crowds mobbed the railway station. The big Univermag store on Khreshchatyk ran out of suitcases, and Aeroflot set up special ticket offices in the ministries and Party offices, so that the nomenklatura could get out first. The interior ministry posted policemen armed with automatic rifles on the main roads out of town, with orders to turn back all vehicles without official passes.
The week after May Day, tens of thousands of military reservists started arriving in the Chernobyl area, conscripts in the Soviet Union’s biggest manpower round-up since the Afghan war. Mostly teenage boys, their job was to sluice down streets, houses and trees, and to shovel topsoil into lorries for burial. They lived outdoors in tents, often without showers or protective clothing. According to a report in an Estonian newspaper, some were to be found washing in contaminated streams and ponds.
The most dangerous work was at Chernobyl itself, clearing away highly radioactive rubble from inside the reactor core. Groups of conscripts were ordered to run up on to the reactor-block roof, fling one shovelful each of deadly debris back through the hole in the roof on to the exposed reactor, and run down again, the whole operation not to last more than forty seconds. The boys involved dubbed themselves ‘bio-robots’, perfectly summing up the Soviet regime’s attitude towards its citizenry. The official upper limit radiation dose for clean-up workers was twenty-five ‘body-equivalent roentgen’ or ‘rems’ – five times the annual limit for an ordinary Soviet nuclear power worker. But in practice even this high limit was frequently exceeded. Since radiation levels near the station were one rem per hour, conscripts should not have worked on the site for more than two days. In reality many stayed for months. Better-off reservists could avoid being sent to Chernobyl altogether by paying bribes, the relevant price being 500 roubles – half that of a deferment from Afghanistan.11
Sluggish, chaotic, profligate with human life and bolstered by the crudest propaganda, the Soviet system’s response to Chernobyl has been likened to its behaviour during the Second World War. People involved in the disaster even refer to it as ‘the war’; the clean-up operations were a ‘campaign’ and the official result a ‘victory’. The old men and women who refused to leave Prypyat, holing up in their blacked-out flats with gas-masks and biscuits, were nicknamed ‘partisans’.
A war maybe, but Chernobyl was no victory. Just how many people have been killed by Chernobyl to date nobody knows. Two people died in the explosion itself; another twenty-eight, mostly firemen and engineers, of radiation sickness soon afterward. Estimates of the total number of subsequent deaths attributable to the disaster range from around 6,000 to 8,000. This does not take into account deformed births, genetic disorders, and early deaths still to come through cancer and leukaemia. A World Health Organisation report of 1995 noted a hundred-fold increase in thyroid cancers in Ukrainian and Belarussian children, but oddly, none in leukaemia or other blood disorders. If the 120 million curies of radioactive material released in the explosion – almost a hundred times more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined – had not been pushed high into the atmosphere, spreading thinly over a wide area, the death toll would already be much higher.
Today’s uncertainty over the health consequences of Chernobyl is largely the fault of a deliberate cover-up by the Soviet authorities. Registers of clean-up workers and evacuees were left hopelessly incomplete, making post-Chemobyl medical histories hard to track, and in 1988 Shcherbina issued a decree forbidding doctors from citing ‘radiation’ on death certificates. Instead, deaths were put down to ‘rare toxins’, ‘debility’ and the like. (When Shcherbina himself died in 1990, having suffered a large dose of radiation organising the evacuation of Prypyat, the cause of death was marked as ‘unspecified’.)
Independent research on the effects of the accident was derided or hushed up. In 1988 a group of journalists made a short film on events at collective farms round Narodychy, a small town thirty-eight miles west of Chernobyl. A foal had been born with eight legs, piglets without eyes, calves without heads or ribs. More than half the children in the district had swollen thyroids, and cancers of the lip and mouth had doubled. The government response was an outburst of vilification and denial, choreographed via Kiev’s Centre for Radiation Medicine. Scientists from the Centre lambasted the film as ‘incompetent’. Deformities were due to inbreeding, they said; mouth cancers to poor dental work, thyroid problems to a shortage of iodine in the diet. Eventually, after a series of angry meetings in Narodychy, fourteen villages were evacuated – all the fault, the scientists continued to assert, of the media in stirring up irrational ‘radiophobia’. Later, records turned up showing that radiation levels in the area in the months after the explosion had been three times higher than round the power station itself.
In the spring of 1995, seven months after my trip to the Zone with Lyashenko, I got permission to visit Chernobyl. At the time, two of its four nuclear reactors were still operating, in the teeth of an international campaign to close the station down. The International Atomic Energy Agency had just issued a report lambasting its dangerous design, lack of back-up systems and fire-proofing, and general ‘poor safety culture’. The section of the reactor-block building nearest the wrecked Unit Four, the report said, was structurally unsound, and in ‘significant’ danger of collapse. Backed by the European Union and America, the IAEA wanted Chernobyl shut immediately. The Ukrainian government had agreed in principle, but argued that since it still provided 6 per cent of the country’s electricity, nothing could be done until the West came up with the money to complete three half-built reactors on other sites, the bill for which it put at an eye-popping $4 billion.
Again, the countryside looked uncannily peaceful, more like a nature reserve than the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Baby pines sprouted in the middle of untilled fields; brambles swamped the whitewashed cottages like the roses round Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Of one village nothing was left but a faded road sign and a row of grassy barrows where its buildings had been bulldozed underground. A few more years, and this would all turn back into forest.
Apart from the concrete ‘sarcophagus’ enclosing the remains of Unit Four, Chernobyl itself looked like any other run-down Soviet factory. On the pot-holed forecourt, men and women stood about in flapping blue cotton jackets, smoking and chatting, and a workman dabbed at a war memorial with a pot of yellow paint. A public relations man – an innovation this – led me upstairs, past maidenhair ferns in knobbly ceramic pots and a stained-glass window of heroic cosmonauts, to meet Vitaly Tolstonogov, the station’s chief engineer. The sound of ‘Radio Rocks’, the latest pop station from Moscow, drifted out from behind chipped plywood doors, and girls with frizzy perms and pantomime make-up stood about in the corridors staring at their nails. As we came in, Tolstonogov switched off his television.
‘So what do you think about the closure rumours?’
He drew himself up, stuck out his chin. ‘I don’t think anything about them. The decision will be taken by the state. As a private soldier, I will implement its decisions.’
‘And the IAEA report?’
‘Incomplete, let us say one-sided.’
‘But what about the reactor block being close to collapse?’
‘The building is perfectly safe, it has been tested by the explosion already. Nothing about it has changed. It’s all just a pretext for another scandal.’
‘And your staffing problems; the engineers quitting for better pay in Russia?’
With the mention of cash, Tolstonogov’s military pose took a dent: ‘Once we knew that everyone throughout the Soviet Union got the same! But now, everyone gets different salaries even though they’re in the same job! It’s monkey business, monkey business!’
After lunch in a dingy cafeteria, we changed into lab coats and went to see one of the control rooms. Lined with scratched metal panels and hundreds of paint-splodged buttons and old-fashioned circular dials, it looked more like the bridge of a decommissioned battleship than the nerve centre of a modem nuclear power station. The floor was covered in wrinkled lino, and the plastic upholstery on the controllers’ stools was slightly frayed. You didn’t have to be the IAEA to find it a less than confidence-inspiring place.
Elbowing aside a stub-filled ashtray, the shift controller told me that he had come out of retirement to work back at Chernobyl. During the ‘war’ he had been in this very room, helping shut down the three surviving reactors. So far he hadn’t fallen ill himself, but his daughter had problems with her bones and stomach: ‘She has to go and rest before and after classes – when she was a schoolgirl she didn’t need this.’ The weekend of the explosion, the family had been evacuated from Prypyat to a nearby village, only to find that it was contaminated too.
‘Why don’t you work somewhere else?’
One of the younger men, his cotton coat undone, interrupted angrily: ‘If you were Ukrainian, you’d be begging for a job here, because otherwise you wouldn’t survive! The bazaars are full of teachers, doctors – educated people, all out of work.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of getting cancer?’
‘And if I was a taxi-driver or a kiosk owner? I’d only get killed in a car crash, or by the mafia. We’re safer here.’ Like the rest, he wanted the station to stay open. ‘If the West wants to close the old Soviet reactors it’s because Western companies will get the orders for the new ones!’ As we turned to go he lifted his cotton hat derisively: ‘Success to you! Come back! And bring your children!’
On the way out, the PR man took me to look at an architect’s model of the plant. This was how Chernobyl was supposed to be – neat and tidy, with two modern air-cooled reactors and no scorched buildings or crumbling sarcophagus. Turning to go, he knocked over a miniature chimney. ‘Where did this go? Oh well, who cares.’
Chernobyl’s corrosive effect on public opinion took some time to make itself felt. Kiev saw no big anti-nuclear demonstrations until the autumn of 1988, more than two years after the disaster. The popular independence movement got under way a year after that, well behind its counterparts in the Baltics and the Caucasus. Why was the opposition so slow to get off the ground?
Through the long Cold War years, Ukrainians had been in an anomalous position, simultaneously extra-privileged and extra-repressed. Like the Scots of the British empire, they acted as trusted junior partners in the Union, subordinate to Russia of course, but senior to Armenians, Uzbeks and the rest. All the post-Stalin leaders save Gorbachev had close personal ties to the republic: Khrushchev and Brezhnev were both Russians from eastern Ukraine, Andropov built his career as head of the Ukrainian KGB, and Chernenko was born of Ukrainian kulak parents in Siberia. Politburos were packed with Russians and Ukrainians, and the usual practice in the republics was to appoint a native as first Party secretary, while a Russian or Ukrainian wielded real power as number two. Ukraine, like Belarus, even had its own seat at the United Nations – though it always voted with Russia.
But Ukraine’s ‘younger brother’ status exacted costs as well as privileges. If rewards for loyalty were higher for Ukrainians than for other non-Russians, penalties for dissent were harsher too. After the war, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians sent to the camps during the Soviet occupation of Galicia were joined by another half-million partisan supporters, collectivisation-resistant peasants and religiozni, making Ukrainians the most prominent nationality in the 1950s Gulag.12 Later, they made up the largest single group of political prisoners in what remained of the camps after Khrushchev’s amnesty. Under pressure from renewed Russification – publication of Ukrainian-language books and journals plummeted in the 1970s, and Russian immigration increased – most Ukrainians found it easiest to conform. ‘You could teach a Jew to speak Ukrainian in no time, a Russian in two or three years,’ ran an old Soviet joke. ‘An ambitious Ukrainian – it would take for ever.’ The Ukrainian Communist Party grew from 165,000 members in 1945 to a high of 3.3 million in 1989,13 earning itself a model reputation under arch-conservative Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, an old Dnipropetrovsk crony of Brezhnev’s.
But despite all the incentives to go along with the Soviet system, Ukrainian nationalism never quite died. The first post-war generation of activists were the ‘sixtiers’, a group of young writers who, like the nineteenth-century ‘awakeners’ before them, used the language issue as a cloak for wider discontents. Under the slogans ‘Speak Ukrainian’ and ‘Defend the Ukrainian Language’, they petitioned for an end to Party meddling in literature, and for freedom to debate and experiment. Russified Ukrainians were scolded, Shevchenko-style, for cowardice and opportunism.
The summer after Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, a hundred or so of the most vocal ‘sixtiers’ were arrested and put on trial on charges of ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’. The verdicts were foregone conclusions, but to the regime’s amazement, the public refused to let the writers go quietly. In Kiev the literary critic Ivan Dzyuba stood up in the middle of the Ukraina cinema and appealed to the audience to protest. In Lviv, supporters and relatives demanded to be let into the courthouse, and defied fire-hoses to shout ‘Glory’ and throw bouquets as the prisoners were escorted into police vans. Petitions for information and explanations included the signatures of Supreme Soviet deputies, Writers’ and Composers’ Union members and the famous aircraft designer Oleg Antonov. The young Komsomol journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil was so outraged by the trial’s blatant bias that he sent a 200-page document to the public prosecutor and the heads of the Supreme Court and KGB, listing all their own infringements of the constitution and criminal code. Interrogation techniques, he pointed out, had not changed since Stalin’s time:
It is not obligatory to slam doors on fingers, to stick needles under fingernails, or to strike someone’s face in order to force him to denounce his deeds as terrible crimes, or to confess everything that the investigator needs to complete the evidence he has contrived beforehand. All that is needed is to lock the man inside a stone sack with bars, a privy, to forbid him any contact with close relatives for half a year, to hammer into his head, day after day, for several hours at a time, the feeling of great guilt and, finally, to drive that man to such a state of mind that he would not at first recognise his wife if she came to visit him . . .14
In due course Chornovil was sentenced to three years of hard labour in a closed trial of his own, but not before his Petition had been smuggled out of the country for publication in the West.
With Shcherbytsky’s appointment in 1972 came a second, more successful crackdown. Hundreds more writers, teachers, artists and scientists were arrested, and dealt far harsher sentences than the ‘sixtiers’. At the same time Shcherbytsky purged the Ukrainian Communist Party, expelling 37,000 Party members, and sacking half the Ukrainian Politburo. In 1977 he rounded up almost the entire membership of the Ukrainian Helsinki human-rights group, founded with help from Russian dissidents the previous year. ‘I was certain,’ the Tatar-rights campaigner General Hryhorenko recalled in his memoirs, ‘that the authorities would react with particular sensitivity to the creation of a Ukrainian group, since such a group could not avoid touching on the question of nationality, the most sensitive of all issues for the Soviet Union.’15 He was right. Twenty-two Ukrainian Helsinki Group members were despatched to the Gulag, to serve terms of between three and fifteen years. Two were sent into internal exile, and five, including Hryhorenko himself, were forced to emigrate. Put to work as slave labourers in camp factories and farms, deprived of proper clothing, washing facilities or medical care, and kept in a continuous state of semi-starvation, the prisoners’ lives narrowed to bare survival. ‘The con’s diary in prison is simple,’ wrote one inmate. ‘Bread-breakfast-dinner-supper, day after day, month after month, year after year.’16 Suicide, self-mutilation, random beatings and long spells in freezing punishment cells were all common. The Soviet Union did not release its political prisoners until 1987. For many, like the poet Vasyl Stus, who died with three other Ukrainian Helsinki Group members in a Mordovan camp in 1985, amnesty came too late.
By the time Gorbachev launched perestroika, Ukrainian nationalism looked like a thing of the past. The movement’s best-known leaders were exiled, in prison, or dead. Save for the hard-core North American diaspora, protest at home and abroad had fizzled out. ‘By and large,’ the historian Orest Subtelny wrote wistfully in 1988, ‘it seems that most Soviet Ukrainians accept the Soviet regime as their legitimate government and identify with it. Because of the government’s monopoly on information and intensive propaganda, they are, at best, only vaguely aware of the hardships that Ukrainians have suffered at Soviet hands in the “ancient” past . . . Many Soviet Ukrainians take pride in the power and prestige of the USSR of which they are an important part.’17
Subtelny’s analysis was perfectly correct. The number of active Ukrainophiles was negligible, and had been so for the last thirty years – a few thousand out of a population of 52 million. Advocates of outright independence could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Open national feeling was restricted to a small intelligentsia clique; ordinary Ukrainians remained stolidly uninvolved. ‘The simple citizen,’ one activist complained, ‘resembles a hypnotised rabbit.’18 To any reasonable observer, independence looked like a Quixotic dream. Yet within three years of Subtelny’s putting pen to paper Ukraine had, to universal amazement, become a fully independent, democratic state.
Did the Soviet Union collapse under pressure from national independence movements, or did the independence movements fill a vacuum left by Soviet collapse? It is a chicken-and-egg question: the phenomena fed off one another. But the two factors – popular opposition at the periphery, political weakness at the centre – had different relative weights in different republics. The Baltics, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan all possessed Popular Fronts so strong that it was obvious they could not be kept in the Union without use of force. But in the case of Ukraine, where the independence movement was real and persistent, but only ever involved a minority of the population, it was never clear that this was so. For separatism to succeed, the centre had to fail. This it did in August 1991, when an attempted coup in Moscow left the Ukrainian Communist Party’s conservative bosses with the choice between the Soviet Union and military dictatorship, or democracy and the Ukrainian nationalists. When it became clear that the coup had misfired, they accepted the inevitable, and went with the nationalists. Until that moment, there was no point at which one could confidently declare ‘From now on, Ukrainian independence is inevitable’.
None of it would have happened without Galicia. For a hundred years Galicia had been the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. It was where the remnants of the partisan army had fought on after the war, where Uniate priests still held secret masses in woods and barns, and where Ukrainian was most widely spoken. It had no Russian population to speak of, and since the war, no Poles either. It produced many of Ukraine’s Cold War dissidents, and later, most of the leaders of Rukh, the opposition coalition that led the popular independence movement. Galicia was never strong enough to take Ukraine to independence on its own: the region was too small and sparsely populated for that. But without it – if, say, it had stayed under Polish rule after the war – Ukraine might never have become independent at all.
Ukraine’s first big anti-communist demonstrations took place in Lviv. In June and July 1988 a characteristic medley of independent organisations – the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, the Committee in Defence of the Uniate Church, the Ukrainian Language Society and a student group – organised a series of illegal mass meetings, attended by between 20,000 and 50,000 people, underneath the Ivan Franko statue in front of the university. Newly-released dissidents made speeches calling for an end to Party privileges, closure of the KGB and release of remaining political prisoners. Though there were demands for more republican autonomy, there was no talk as yet of independence: some demonstrators even waved Gorbachev banners in the belief that perestroika was being obstructed by local communists. The meetings were broken up by interior ministry troops, and several of the organisers arrested. Kiev followed Lviv’s lead in November, when 10,000 marchers stood in the rain listening to speeches mixing protests against nuclear power with appeals for a Popular Front. When plainclothes KGB men switched off the sound system the crowd refused to budge, chanting ‘Mikrofon, mikrofon.’
With Shcherbytsky’s forced retirement in September 1989, the demonstrations turned into a political movement. The same month, a range of nonconformist organisations – the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, the Ukrainian Language Society, the Helsinki Union, Green World and the historical campaign group Memorial – formed a loose coalition titled the ‘Ukrainian Popular Movement in Support of Perestroika’ or ‘Movement’ – Rukh in Ukrainian – for short. Predictably, most of the delegates at Rukh’s inaugural congress came from the intelligentsia and from central and western Ukraine: there were few representatives from the farms, the factories, or the Russian-speaking east and south. Though the camp veteran Levko Lukyanenko told the hall to ‘abolish this empire as the greatest evil of present-day life’19 (the only speech not reported by Literaturna Ukraina, the country’s most outspoken paper), the bulk of delegates were far more cautious, voting a programme that called for ‘a sovereign Ukrainian state’ within a ‘new Union treaty’.20
While Rukh met in Kiev and students scuffled with riot police in Lviv, the Orthodox Church, hitherto the moribund province of KGB stooges and pious grannies, burst into uproar. Led by the SS Peter and Paul Church in Lviv, parishes all over the country started declaring themselves members of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, last heard of in 1930. At the same time, a campaign got under way for legalisation of the Uniates, liquidated after the war. Refused a meeting with Supreme Soviet officials in Moscow, six priests went on hunger strike, and on 17 September, the fiftieth anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, 150,000 Uniates held candlelight vigils in memory of the victims of the Soviet annexation of western Ukraine. By December around 600 parishes and 200 priests had applied for registration as Uniates, finally winning official recognition following Gorbachev’s meeting with Pope John Paul II. The following summer, the reborn Autocephalous Orthodox Church held its first Council for sixty years, with a service in Santa Sofia. Metropolitan Mstyslav, head of the diaspora church in America, had been refused a visa to attend, but was elected Patriarch in absentia. In October Gorbachev capitulated and the Autocephalous Orthodox were legalised too. In just over a year, Ukraine had progressed from one official church to three. Unchristian battles promptly broke out over ecclesiastical property. Rival congregations marched on the churchyards, and it was quite common for priests to be stoned.
Meanwhile, in March 1990, Gorbachev initiated the final, fatal phase of perestroika, allowing semi-democratic elections to the republican Supreme Soviets, among them Kiev’s Verhovna Rada. Fighting on a platform of ‘real political and economic sovereignty’ – though not outright independence – Rukh and its allies won 108 out of 450 seats. Predictably, they did much better in Galicia and central Ukraine than in the Donbass and the south: a human chain, high point of the campaign, had stretched from Lviv to Kiev, but no further east. Despite being in a minority, Rukh’s presence revolutionised Rada proceedings, hitherto a rubber-stamp for Party orders. ‘The democrats represent only a third,’ wrote an observer, ‘but they are always at the microphones and dominate the hall as if they constituted a majority.’21
The literary scholar Solomea Pavlychko recorded the events of 1990 in a series of letters to a friend in Canada. Over and over, she contrasted Kiev’s defeatism with the reigning sense of optimism and excitement in western Ukraine. In Kiev, she wrote in May, ‘morale is low. Everyone criticises everything, yet at the same time people are apathetic . . . Some people are in despair, others are demoralised . . . Servility is alive and well.’22 But on holiday in Galicia, she was amazed to find villagers avidly following Rada debates on television, and blue-and-yellow banners flying in the local town. The gossip was all of independence and even the local drunks sank their vodka with the toast ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ ‘They believe in aid from the West,’ she wrote. ‘How naive!’23
By autumn, Kiev was catching up. On 30 September, opening day of the Rada’s second session, the city was brought to a halt by its biggest anti-government demonstration yet:
The meeting opened at three o’clock near the Central Stadium. It began despite the fact that all the roads into Kiev had been closed, with armoured cars at the approaches to the city on the pretext that the soldiers in these military vehicles had come to collect the harvest. Ten huge army trucks were positioned on Repin, my street, alone . . .
At s .00 p.m. a protest march departed from the stadium along Red Army and Khreshchatyk streets. At least 200,000 (and perhaps 500,000) people in enormously wide, tightly packed columns, singing and yelling slogans – ‘Freedom for Ukraine! Down with the CPU!’ – moved out on to Lenin Komsomol Square. The column came to a halt near the two monuments of Lenin and people began chanting ‘Down with the idol!’ Near one of the monuments a ring of defenders took up their positions, among them decorated veterans and, probably, KGB men in disguise. Foreign television correspondents paced about. Police stood in ranks around the second Lenin statue which, in April, had been decorated with a wreath of barbed wire . . .
My feet felt battered and burned from the long hours of standing and walking; my head was buzzing from all the shouting and slogans. Yet we could barely drag ourselves away . . .24
Two days later students from Kiev and Lviv universities went on hunger strike, camping out under tents on what had been October Revolution and was now renamed Independence Square. They demanded new parliamentary elections, no military service outside Ukraine, nationalisation of all Party property and the removal of Vitaly Masol, the republic’s prime minister. Passers-by, not all of them enthusiastic, watched proceedings from behind rope barriers. ‘Some scolded the layabouts,’ wrote Pavlychko, ‘others passed flowers across the rope, still others said that it wouldn’t make any difference, and why were they wrecking their health?’25 On 10 October the students were joined by eight opposition deputies, and on the 17th, after a protest march by workers from the Arsenal weapons factory, scene of a pro-Bolshevik uprising in 1918, the government caved in. There would be no more military service outside Ukraine, a commission would be created on the nationalisation of Party property, and Masol would go. When the terms were read out in the Rada, deputies applauded.
With the marches and the hunger strikes, Kiev’s popular independence movement peaked. ‘Remember,’ a friend told me, ‘that a lot of these demonstrators came in buses from Lviv. We were proud of them, we would support them, definitely. But when they left, that was it.’ Rukh was splintering, leaving behind a slew of quarrelsome, disorganised factions. ‘The public,’ Pavlychko wrote despairingly in December, ‘doesn’t give a damn . . . it demands something to eat, but nothing very special, anything will do.’26 With her parents on New Year’s Eve, she decided that independence was still ten, twenty or even thirty years off. Her four-year-old daughter Bohdana might be the only one to live to see it.
What the Pavlychkos did not realise was that while the opposition lost momentum, the communists themselves were edging towards a change of heart. The shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Vilnius and Riga in January revealed a split between pro-Moscow hardliners, led by First Party Secretary Stanyslav Hurenko, and an emerging bloc of ‘national communists’ under Leonid Kravchuk, a former Party ideology chief and chairman of the Rada. While the Rada condemned Moscow for its ‘inadmissible . . . use of military force’, the Party’s Central Committee accused the Lithuanians of extremism and provocation.27 In March Kravchuk joined forces with the opposition to vote in an ambiguously worded supplementary question to Gorbachev’s referendum on a new Union Treaty. Gorbachev asked voters whether they wanted to ‘preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics’; Kravchuk asked if they wanted to be ‘part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States’. In Galicia, Rukh-run local soviets added a third question of their own: ‘Do you want Ukraine to become an independent state which independently decides its domestic and foreign policies?’ True to their mixed feelings towards the Soviet Union, Ukrainians gave all three questions large Yes votes: 71 per cent for Gorbachev’s USSR; 80 per cent for Kravchuk’s ‘Union of Sovereign States’, and 88 per cent in Galicia for outright independence. As usual there was a clear split between east and west, with 85 per cent support for Gorbachev in Donetsk, compared to 16 per cent in Lviv.28
To come to any sort of decision on independence, it was clear, Ukraine needed a mind-concentrating jolt from outside. On the 6 a.m. television news on Monday 19 August, Moscow delivered the goods: President Gorbachev had been taken ill, the announcer said, and a ‘State Committee for the State of Emergency’, headed by the defence and interior ministers and the chief of the KGB, had taken power. At 9 a.m. Kravchuk and Hurenko were visited by General Varrenikov, head of the Soviet Union’s ground forces and one of the five men who had taken Gorbachev prisoner in his Crimean dacha the evening before. If they failed to cooperate, Varrenikov told them, the state of emergency would be extended to Ukraine – the Ukrainian government, in other words, would be overthrown.
The choice now facing the Ukrainian communists was as follows: to throw in their lot with the junta, risking resubordination to Moscow if the coup succeeded and complete loss of credibility if it failed; or to come out for Yeltsin and democracy, leading in all probability to the total collapse of the Soviet Union. Scared of both options, their response was prevarication. At 11 a.m. a delegation of opposition deputies asked Kravchuk to condemn the coup; Kravchuk refused. On Ukrainian television at 4 p.m. he stressed that the state of emergency did not extend to Ukraine, but avoided either condemning or condoning the coup, and asked the public to be ‘calm and patient’. On Russian television that evening he was even more equivocal, saying ‘what was bound to happen was bound to happen’. He also refused repeated opposition requests for an emergency meeting of the Rada.
All next day, as crowds faced down the tanks round Moscow’s White House, the Ukrainians continued to stall. The Rada’s twenty-five-member Praesidium voted a panicky resolution defending Ukraine’s ‘sovereignty’, but again failed explicitly to condemn the coup. Despite Rukh calls for a general strike – not carried in the official press – the streets stayed quiet. While Muscovites rushed to the barricades, Kievans sat tight at home, their radios clamped to their ears. ‘We were scared,’ a friend told me, ‘but we were fatalist. We thought – if dictatorship’s going to come, it’s going to come, and it’s no use protesting.’
But the worst was not to happen. Drunk and disorganised, the coup leaders had lost their nerve. On Wednesday, when it was clear the coup was failing, Kravchuk finally climbed off the fence, going on television to demand Gorbachev’s release. ‘The so-called Emergency Committee,’ he intoned, ‘no longer exists . . . and actually never existed. This was a deviation from the democratic process, from the constitution and the legal process.’ That evening Gorbachev flew back to a revolutionised Moscow, and the coup leaders were put under arrest.
With Soviet power in tatters about their feet, Ukraine’s communists now either had to take Ukraine to independence themselves, or wait for the opposition to do it for them. On Saturday 24 August Kravchuk resigned all his Party posts, and the Rada met in emergency session. At midday the speaker read out the next item of business: Ukrainian independence. Pandemonium broke out, and the speaker announced a twenty-minute break. Nationalists raced up to the third floor, communists down to a cinema in the basement. Upstairs the atmosphere was ecstatic; downstairs, deputies were stunned and afraid. ‘I don’t see why we should be independent,’ one communist said, ‘we’ve done nothing wrong!’ As the hubbub died Hurenko stood up and said slowly, in Russian: ‘Today we will vote for Ukrainian independence, because if we don’t we’re in the shit.’29 When the deputies reassembled, all save one – from Donetsk – obeyed. ‘In view of the deadly threat posed to our country on the night of 18th–19th August,’ read the final declaration, ‘and continuing the thousand-year-old tradition of state-building in Ukraine . . . The Verhovna Rada solemnly proclaims the Independence of Ukraine . . . From now on only the Constitution and laws of Ukraine will be in force on its territory.’ A lifeboat for the Communists, a Mayflower to a new world for the nationalists, Ukraine thus floated to freedom.