Midnight in Chernobyl
Page 36
It was June before Yuvchenko’s bone marrow began functioning again, the first white cells reappeared in his bloodstream, and it seemed certain he would live. But it also seemed possible that the radiation burns—especially the ones on his arm and shoulder—would never heal fully, and the surgeons had to cut away repeatedly at both skin and muscle to remove the rotting black tissue from his shoulder blade. The agonizing open wounds left where beta particles had eaten into the flesh of his elbow made it unlikely he would ever be able to live a normal life again.
But in the second half of September, the doctors allowed Yuvchenko to go home for a short time to the new apartment his family had been granted by the government, in a well-heeled neighborhood near Moscow State University. He looked gaunt and skinny and had become addicted to the narcotics the doctors had used to stifle the terrible pain of his burns. While the doctors wanted to wean Yuvchenko off the painkillers, they also had to encourage him to learn how to live for himself after weeks of around-the-clock care. But the radiation was far from finished with him. New burns continued to reveal themselves on his legs and arms even months after the explosion, and he was admitted once more to Hospital Number Six for further treatment.
* * *
While the surviving victims of ARS lay in their beds in Moscow, the evacuees from Pripyat remained in limbo, not knowing if or when they might return to their homes in the abandoned atomgrad. Just outside the Exclusion Zone, in the town of Polesskoye, thousands of the displaced citizens, without clean clothes or money, outfitted themselves in whatever they could, including bathrobes and the white overalls of nuclear plant workers. Their belief in the power of vodka to protect the body against radiation led them to break down the doors of the settlement’s liquor store, and samogon was soon changing hands for up to 35 rubles a liter—the price of a good cognac in Kiev. In the meantime, the state struggled to provide them with new jobs, and schools for their children. In May the Soviet Red Cross Society contributed a one-off payment of 50 rubles per person to every refugee from the catastrophe. Later that month, the Soviet government provided a further lump sum of 200 rubles for every member of each family of displaced people. Fifteen cashiers distributed the millions of rubles this required, the cash brought in bags from the bank to a municipal office in Polesskoye each morning, under the eyes of militsia officers armed with machine guns. And still, throughout June and July, the people returned to the offices of their city-council-in-exile on Sovietskaya Street in the town of Chernobyl to ask: “When can I go home?”
On July 25 they received an answer: that morning, the first busloads of Pripyat evacuees set out to return to their city—but only as part of an official program to reclaim what they could from their apartments and seek compensation for what they could not. Arriving at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, they were issued cotton overalls, shoe covers, petal respirators, and thick polyethylene bags. After a document check at the entrance to Pripyat, they were permitted to spend three or four hours in their abandoned apartments and walking the streets of the city, where yellow sand banked against the curbs and grass was already sprouting through cracks in the chalky asphalt. Sixty-nine men and women stepped off the buses that first morning, and hundreds more returned every day for months after that, to salvage what they could from their former homes.
The refugees were allowed to reclaim only property within strictly defined categories. Large pieces of furniture and any object that gathered a great deal of dust—including rugs and TV sets—were prohibited, as were all children’s belongings and toys and anything at all that registered radiation readings higher than 0.1 milliroentgen per hour. Both electricity and water supplies to the apartment buildings had been disconnected, and the tart smell of cigarette smoke and human sweat that had once lingered in the stairwells and hallways was already gone. Despite militsia patrols and the alarm system fitted at the entrance of each building, many found that their apartments had been looted. Their fridges were filled with the putrefying remains of the food bought in anticipation of the May Day feast at the beginning of the long, hot summer. Some found it hard to hold back tears as they considered their abandoned belongings, standing in musty rooms they now realized they might never see again.
It was September when Natalia Yuvchenko returned to the two-room flat she and Alexander had shared with their son on Stroiteley Prospekt. She found Kirill’s stroller, broken and lying outside the entrance to their stairwell, and went upstairs afraid of what she might find. But when she reached the apartment, everything was just as she had left it: the first thing she saw was the forgotten carton of milk that Sasha Korol had brought for the boy on the morning of the evacuation, still resting on the saddle of Alexander’s bicycle. She didn’t take much but gathered a handful of slides and photographs, including the one of her and Alexander posing in hats on his birthday the year before, and the comic verses that her neighbor had written that night to mark the occasion. Other residents retrieved seemingly random possessions—a plastic bag of science-fiction novels, a handful of flatware—in a hurried tussle of utility and sentiment. Each visitor was allowed a maximum of four hours inside for deciding what to rescue from their previous life, before climbing back aboard the bus to leave. Valentina Brukhanov, by now living at the riverbank Zeleny Mys settlement and working double shifts in her job at the plant while her husband sat in a KGB holding cell in Kiev, recovered her most treasured possessions: a pair of crystal glasses they had been given for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; a family portrait taken when their son was small; a coveted sheepskin coat, which she eventually gave to a neighbor; and a few books, which she wiped down with vinegar in the belief that it would help neutralize radiation.
It was often late at night by the time each group of visitors returned to the dosimetric checkpoint on the perimeter of the zone, where their belongings were checked by teenaged nuclear engineering students from the MEPhI campus in Obninsk. They manned the barriers in all weathers, waving the wands of their radiometers over boxes of china, tape recorders, books, cameras, clothing, and bric-a-brac. When their belongings proved too contaminated to pass, some people tried to bribe their way through with cash or the other currency in common use throughout the forbidden zone—vodka. The young students were astonished to discover that even former workers from the Chernobyl plant were ignorant of the dangers of radioactive dust, and surprised by furtive strangers who materialized from the shadows to offer cases of alcohol in exchange for a few moments riffling through the piles of confiscated belongings, which they planned to sell in secondhand markets outside the zone.
The visits to the deserted city continued for exactly four months and ceased on October 25, 1986. By that time, 29,496 people had returned to their apartments in Pripyat. Some had been back more than once, but others hadn’t been at all, and their belongings remained unclaimed. The town council planned a program of further trips for the fall of the following year, but the government commission refused permission for these to proceed. A state decree provided for compensation for lost property to be paid to the displaced: a flat payment of 4,000 rubles for a single person and 7,000 for a family of two. At the time, a new car—for anyone lucky enough to find one—cost 5,000 rubles. The ispolkom received hundreds of applications for compensation every day throughout the summer, and by the end of the year, the claims for the domestic property lost by the residents of Pripyat to the ravages of the peaceful atom—and excluding cars, garages, dachas, and motorboats—had reached a total of 130 million rubles. That autumn, the furniture stores of Kiev experienced a prolonged boom in trade, as evacuees attempted to rebuild their lives, beginning with a hollow quest to replace almost every major possession they had ever owned.
* * *
At first, the plight of those who had been banished from their homes by the fallout from Unit Four had elicited widespread sympathy across the USSR. At the end of April, the government established a relief fund at the state bank—named, with traditional Soviet a
usterity, Account No. 904—into which well-wishers could deposit donations to help support the victims. In May a charity rock concert—the first ever in the Soviet Union—was held in the Olympic Stadium in Moscow before an audience of thirty thousand people, with a live TV link to a studio in Kiev, where miners, plant operators, and other liquidators gathered, and firefighters recited the names of their comrades who had died in the wards of Hospital Number Six. In early August, the chairman of the state bank reported that Account No. 904 had already received donations of almost 500 million rubles, sent in by individuals and collectives and drawn from wages, pensions, and bonuses, as well as foreign-currency transfers from abroad.
But the permanent resettlement of 116,000 people—the specialists and their families evacuated from Pripyat, the residents of Chernobyl, and the farmers from the dozens of small settlements that now fell within the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, all of whom needed new jobs, schools, and homes—was more complicated. In June the Politburo passed a resolution making the fate of the evacuees a political priority and called on the republican governments of Ukraine and Belarus to build tens of thousands of new apartments before winter arrived. In Ukraine, fifty thousand men and women arrived from all over the republic, and shock-work construction began at once. The first settlement, 150 brick houses near the enormous Gorky collective farm, a little more than a hundred kilometers south of Chernobyl, was unveiled at an elaborate ceremony in August. Each home was reportedly provided with furniture, gas cylinders, electric light, towels and linens, and a concrete cellar stocked with potatoes. In total, the Ukrainian republic alone undertook the building of 11,500 new single-family houses, with the intention of completing all of them by October 1.
But the Politburo task force in Moscow also requisitioned an additional 13,000 newly completed apartments in Kiev and other cities across Ukraine—snatching them from under the noses of families who had spent years on waiting lists—and handed the keys to evacuees from Pripyat. Specialists from the Chernobyl plant and their families were transferred to the remaining three Ukrainian nuclear stations in Konstantinovka, Zaporizhia and Rovno, where they were given new jobs and moved into brand-new flats. When they arrived, they were not all welcomed warmly by their colleagues, who saw no justice in having to give up their hard-won places in line to fellow nuclear specialists apparently chased out of their homes by the consequences of their own incompetence. In Kiev, several large apartment construction projects that had been due for completion by winter—and would have been ripe for requisition for the evacuees—mysteriously came to a halt. In the end, many of the former residents of Pripyat were found homes in the same sprawling complex of high-rise buildings in Troieshchyna, a remote and isolated suburb on the northeastern edge of the city.
There, they were shunned by their new neighbors, who both resented the refugees and feared the invisible contagion of radioactivity. At school, other children were forbidden by their parents from sharing desks with pupils evacuated from Pripyat—and not without good reason. The radiation readings in the stairwells and hallways of the new apartment blocks in Troieshchyna were soon found to be hundreds of times higher than elsewhere in Kiev.
Back in Chernobyl, the government commission remained zealously committed to overcoming the handicaps of operating a power station in the heart of the radioactive zone. With the first reactor back online at the beginning of October, the new station director announced plans to have the second generating electricity imminently. Unit Three remained so contaminated that the plant’s chief engineer and specialists from the Kurchatov Institute all advised that it would be too expensive—and cost too many operators their health—to recommission it. But their objections were overruled, and the third Chernobyl reactor was scheduled for reconnection to the grid in the second quarter of 1987. The commission even issued orders to resume the construction work on Reactors Five and Six, which—although it was close to completion—had been stopped dead on the night of the accident.
In the meantime, Pravda reported ambitious plans to build another atomgrad to accommodate the workers who would operate the resurrected Chernobyl plant and their families. This was to be a new city of the future, fit for the twenty-first century, located forty-five kilometers northeast of Pripyat in the middle of the forest on a remote bank of the Dnieper. Named Slavutych, the city would be filled with modern conveniences, and particular care would be taken to integrate it into the natural environment. Planned around a central market square, it would have a statue of Lenin and, nearby, a museum dedicated to the heroes of Chernobyl.
* * *
In Moscow, the propaganda narrative of the disaster had now crystallized around the gallant sacrifice of the firefighters from the Chernobyl station and Pripyat brigades and their commander, Major Telyatnikov. In September, a photograph of Telyatnikov—still bald from the effects of radiation sickness—appeared on the front page of Izvestia under the headline “Thank You, Heroes of Chernobyl,” and the state media announced that he and General Antoshkin, commander of the helicopter troops, had been granted the state’s highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union. The two young lieutenants who had led their men to the roofs of the reactor buildings to pour water on the fragments of fuel assemblies and chunks of blazing graphite, Vladimir Pravik and Viktor Kibenok, were given the award posthumously. The leaders of Sredmash US-605, who had built the Sarcophagus, were made Heroes of Socialist Labor. Once his auburn hair grew back, Telyatnikov was sent abroad, where he was greeted as a celebrity. He was presented with awards by fellow firefighters in the United States and Britain, interviewed by People magazine, and, in London, granted an audience with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
At a televised award ceremony in January the next year, the grizzled apparatchik Andrei Gromyko, the ceremonial leader of the USSR, delivered a speech in which he lionized the firemen, the liquidators from the armed forces, and the Sredmash construction chiefs who had entombed the smoldering reactor in sand and concrete. “Tens upon tens of millions of people around the world, near and far, followed your shock-work with hope,” he said. “This feat is a mass feat, a feat of the whole people. . . . Yes, Chernobyl was pain we shared together. But it has become a symbol of the victory of Soviet man over the elements. . . . At the same time, our Party renders due tribute to each individual. There are no nameless heroes. Each of them has his own face, his own character, his own specific exploit.”
Yet some heroes would prove more equal than others. There was still no public acknowledgment for the engineers and operators of the Chernobyl station who had put out the fires and prevented further explosions inside the turbine hall, or for those who had toiled in vain amid lethal fields of gamma radiation to cool the doomed reactor. The few awards granted to plant workers were processed in total secrecy. At one point, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Central Committee secretary in charge of foreign affairs, came to visit the injured operators in the wards of Hospital Number Six, but the trip went unreported in the press. Instead of recognition of their loved ones’ heroism, the families of Alexander Akimov and Leonid Toptunov were notified that, under Article 6, paragraph 8, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, the accused would escape criminal prosecution for their crimes only on account of their recent deaths.
* * *
Throughout the winter of 1986, disgraced Chernobyl plant director Viktor Brukhanov remained in his KGB jail in Kiev, awaiting his impending trial. He was permitted no visitors, but once a month his wife, Valentina, could bring him a five-kilogram parcel of food, which she packed with sausages, cheese, and butter. Occasionally Brukhanov had a cellmate—a counterfeiter or a burglar—but mostly he spent endless weeks in solitude and passed the time reading books from the prison library and learning English. For a while, Valentina was allowed to bring him English-language newspapers, until their son wrote a furtive four-word message to his father inside one of them: “I love you, Daddy.” Then that privilege, too, was revoked.
At first, Brukhanov refused to retain a lawyer to conduct his defense
in court, because he understood that the final verdict of the trial had been decided long ago. But his wife persuaded him otherwise, and in December Valentina traveled to Moscow, where she found an attorney willing to represent Brukhanov—a specialist permitted to act in cases involving the closed facilities of the Soviet nuclear complex, with the top-secret clearance necessary to view evidence gathered behind the Ministry of Medium Machine Building’s wall of silence. That same month, as part of the discovery procedures dictated by Soviet law, the investigators brought Brukhanov the materials they had uncovered during the course of their inquiries, which would be used in the case against him. Buried among the files, the director found a letter written by one of the Kurchatov Institute experts, which revealed to him the existence of the secret history of the RBMK reactor—the trail of perilous design faults that the scientists had known about all along but kept hidden from Brukhanov and his staff for sixteen years.
On January 20, 1987, after Brukhanov had sat in isolation for six weeks poring over the details of his case, the investigators from the prosecutor’s office filed their closing indictment with the Supreme Court of the USSR. They sent a total of forty-eight files of evidence to Moscow, all of which were classified top secret. Fifteen, containing documents taken directly from the plant, were so contaminated with radioactive dust that the lawyers had to wear protective clothing to read them.