To begin with, Brukhanov had a hundred men and women working under him, and he had to find somewhere for them to live. He got hold of some rudimentary mobile homes – wooden huts on small metal wheels – and established a small settlement in a clearing in the woods. In August of 1970 he himself went to live there and was joined by his wife, Valentina, her mother and their two children.
Brukhanov soon realized that he had taken on awesome responsibilities. He had to supervise the construction of both the power station and the town to house the workers; and before either could be started he had to build sidings for the delivery of supplies and a plant to make the cement. Every month he had to certify expenditures, which started at 77,000 rubles per month and rose over the years to 120 million. Often he had to fiddle the accounts because the plans he was given were impractical. While waiting for the planned supermarket to be built, he found the money for smaller shops to sell groceries to the workers.
Goods came by rail to the sidings, and the enterprise could be fined if it did not release the rolling stock in a short space of time. Yet before the materials could be accepted their specifications had to be checked, and often they were discovered to be deficient. Caught between the demands of the planners on the one hand and the shortcomings of the suppliers on the other, Brukhanov found that he was expected to perform a superhuman task.
The initial plan for the power station was produced by a number of different institutes. The overall design, first drawn up by Elektroprojekt in the Urals, was later taken over by Zukh-Hydroprojekt in Moscow, whose expertise was principally in hydroelectric power. The plans for the reactor came from Dollezhal’s bureau, NIKYET.
Although it was a tried and tested design, the simple expedient of increasing the reactor’s output by increasing its size had led to an engineering project of gigantic dimensions. The reactor core was a huge graphite block weighing 1,700 tons. Like an immense honeycomb, it was penetrated by large-diameter machined holes: 1,661 channels for fuel assemblies – zirconium alloy tubes filled with pellets of uranium – and a further 211 channels for the boron control rods, which, when lowered into the core, absorbed the neutrons and either reduced the rate of fission or brought it to an end.
A plethora of piping brought water from six huge pumps into each of the fuel channels, where it was turned into a mixture of steam and scalding water by the heat generated by the nuclear fission. It then rose into drums, where the steam and water were separated, the steam going on to the turbines to generate electricity while the water returned to be recirculated through the reactor core.
Besides this principal circuit taking water through the reactor, there was a secondary circuit carrying water from reservoirs through the condensers, and an emergency core-cooling system designed to protect the fuel assemblies should the main system fail or prove insufficient. This required piping and pumps of its own, and although it was considered an advantage of the RBMK’s design that the rupture of a fuel assembly caused by overheating and consequent melting of the zirconium casing could be contained within a single channel, and that the water and steam were never under great pressure, it was still essential that every seam, every valve and every metre of piping should be flawless, and every installation entirely sound.
What Brukhanov discovered, however, was that the parts specified by the designers were frequently impossible to find. The industrial base existed to build the RBMK-1000s, but its productive capacity had not kept pace with the expansion of nuclear power. The Chernobyl nuclear power station had to compete with the other RBMKs being built at Ingalina and Kursk by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. This huge, secretive institution had long-standing links with suppliers and could exert the kind of pressure that came from its contacts with the armed forces and the KGB. Retaining its monopoly in the mining and processing of uranium, upon which all nuclear power stations depended, it also controlled the production of gold and precious stones. This wealth put Slavsky’s officials in a strong position when negotiating with other branches of industry or the planners at Gosplan.
Outbid in this way by his rivals, yet under great pressure to launch the first unit by 1975, Brukhanov was frequently obliged to manufacture the components he needed in workshops built on site. This encouraged a spirit of improvisation, which, though common enough in Soviet industry at the time, was dangerous when it came to nuclear power.
2
Besides this unfair competition with the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, Brukhanov had to deal with the anomalies of the Soviet system itself. First of all, there was the Communist party, which acted as a shadow administration in every social, political, industrial or cultural structure. With few exceptions – Dollezhal was one – anyone who wished to hold a position of authority was expected to join the party, and, once a member, he became answerable to those above him in the party organization. Thus Brukhanov had to report not just to the officials of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification but also to the regional party committee in Kiev. It was the regional committee he feared most, because in the Soviet Union the party had a monopoly of power. In theory one could move from one job to another, or from the management of an industrial enterprise into the civil service, but wherever one worked, one’s prospects depended upon one’s standing in the party – and, of course, clearance by the KGB.
Although some idealists were still to be found in the party hierarchy, the majority of those who parroted Leninist slogans did so to further their own careers. Besides the glory of holding high office, there were more tangible benefits, like a higher salary, better house, a car, reserved shopping facilities, holiday hotels and sanatoriums, passports and hard currency for travel abroad, and access to the best educational opportunities for their children. However, promotion came only with performance, and for this the apparatchiks depended upon Brukhanov.
A small, curly-haired man with a mild manner, Brukhanov was ill-equipped to stand up to the party bosses in Kiev. The kind of brutality that had been found in the Communist officials who had administered Stalin’s terror in the 1930s had evolved forty years later into a bullying manner, crude language and a threatening tone of voice. It was said that you could always tell a party functionary because he had the face of a truck driver but the hands of a pianist. ‘What is the first thing you want to do when you reach the top?’ asked Mikhail Zhvanetsky, the Jewish humourist from Odessa. ‘Spit down!’
To cover up their shortcomings, the party bosses took advantage of the dogma that the party could never err. In implementing the most recent Five-Year Plan, they were merely obeying the will of the party, as made manifest in the most recent Congress or a decree of the Central Committee. Its leaders, as the heirs to Marx and Lenin, were not only politically all-powerful, but morally infallible too. It was therefore impossible for Brukhanov to criticize the Plan. Since the party was always right, anyone who failed it was by definition either a criminal or a saboteur, and any criticism that suggested that there were shortcomings in socialism was counterrevolutionary.
Everyone knew that the party’s rhetoric was false; they learned to live with lies. A large part of the population withdrew into itself, with little expectations of life outside a small circle of family and friends. Already possessed of the Slav temperament – moody and sentimental, passionate yet apathetic, prone to hypochondria and self-dramatization, and with little love of work for its own sake – they ignored the collectivist slogans that were put out by the party and brandished on banners above public buildings. C. G. Feifer, an American correspondent in Russia at the time Brukhanov was building the power station at Chernobyl, remarked that no one he knew felt driven to get a job done, or even to go to work when not in the mood. The foreman could usually be persuaded to overlook an odd day’s absence: a favour to be returned in due course with a bottle of vodka or a dozen eggs from one’s mother-in-law’s dacha. But even if one went to work, little was done. ‘On a given day, in any one office,’ Feifer was told, ‘eighty per cent of the staff are in the corridor goss
iping, going out to pee or comb their hair, or making a glass of tea.’
Besides this general distaste for hard work, there were particular difficulties with the work force at Chernobyl. Gone were the days when red banners on the construction site or exhortatory Bolshevik slogans would inspire heroic achievements. Makeshift accommodations in the middle of nowhere had not attracted either skilled or experienced workers. The workers were mostly young, and the quality of their workmanship was poor. The head of construction, Vasili Kizima, was a tough and determined man, but neither threats nor exhortation could provide skills for the unskilled or persuade them to spend their evenings going to night school rather than getting drunk.
These problems with both labour and supplies meant that construction at Chernobyl fell behind schedule. After only a year as director, Brukhanov bitterly regretted that he had ever taken the job and tendered his resignation. It was refused. He remained as director and, leaving the problems of construction to Kizima, started to recruit the operating personnel.
3
The most important post to be filled was that of chief engineer. Because of the rapid expansion of the industry, there was competition for the best men, and Brukhanov’s first choice left soon after his appointment to work for the Nuclear Safety Committee in Moscow. His successor, Akinfiev, came from the same military facility in Tomsk where Academician Legasov had worked in the 1960s. To head the turbine unit, Brukhanov hired a man named Taras Plochy, whom he knew from his days at the Slavanskaya power station. Nikolai Fomin, a Russian from the Donets region, was made head of the electrical workshop; like Plochy, his background was in conventional power generation, and there were whispers that Brukhanov chose his deputies from his own field because he felt intimidated by specialists in the nuclear sphere.
In the summer of 1973, during his summer vacation, a nuclear engineer named Anatoli Dyatlov came to Chernobyl prior to applying for a job at the nuclear power station at Kursk. On Akinfiev’s recommendation, Brukhanov offered Dyatlov the post as deputy head of the reactor workshop. With many years’ experience installing small VVER reactors into nuclear submarines in the Soviet Far East, Dyatlov came with the highest recommendations: the management at Chernobyl was delighted to snatch him from under the eyes of their rivals at Kursk.
Besides his qualifications as a nuclear specialist, Dyatlov was politically sound – a good example to the younger workers of how a man from the humblest background could flourish under socialism. He was the son of a Siberian peasant whose job had been to light the buoys each night on the Yenisey River. At fourteen, when his father died and the village school closed for lack of students, he ran off to Norilsk, a city in the Arctic Circle that in winter hardly saw the light of day. There, after four years at a vocational school, he worked as an electrician, studying by night to qualify for further education. In time, he won a place at the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physical Engineering. It meant that his wife had to live with her parents in Vladimir: for six years Dyatlov lodged in a student dormitory and only saw his family on weekends. In 1959 he graduated and went back east, this time to Komsomolsk on the Amur.
This majestic river, which for a thousand miles forms the border between China and the USSR, flows into the sea of Okhotsk by the island of Sakhalin. Two hundred miles inland is the city of Komsomolsk, founded in 1932 as part of the first Five-Year Plan. Built by Komsomol volunteers, by the 1960s it had grown into a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, with oil refineries, steel works and heavy engineering. It was here, in the greatest secrecy, that the small VVER reactors developed by the Kurchatov Institute were fitted to Soviet nuclear submarines.
In the naval shipyards, it was Dyatlov’s task to assemble the active zones of these reactors and then test them both on shore and at sea. He liked the work. He was well paid by Soviet standards; he could afford to send his family on holidays to Russia, the Caucasus or the Crimea, although he could rarely go with them because it was in summer that the submarines underwent trials in the Sea of Japan.
Dyatlov rose to be the head of the physics lab, leading a team of young nuclear engineers. He was a difficult man to work for – demanding, despotic and aloof. Having reached his present position by dint of his own efforts and innate intelligence, he was intolerant of the shortcomings of others: His knowledge was not limited to science; he loved literature and had collected the entire Library of World Literature that Maxim Gorky had started in the 1930s. But despite his arrogance and tactlessness, he inspired admiration as well as fear in the younger engineers. He was an outstanding nuclear specialist, and they were eager to learn from him. Some compared him to a snake that mesmerizes its victims; it would never occur to any of those who worked under him to question what he said.
Komsomolsk was not a pleasant place to live. It was devoted to its industries; the cultural amenities were poor. Almost everyone who worked there hoped to move on after a couple of years. For a time Dyatlov was the exception; only after more than ten years did he start to feel restless and consider looking for another job.
4
By the time Dyatlov started work at Chernobyl the construction of the first two units was well under way and plans had been drawn up for two more. ‘The bigger the better’ had become an axiom of Soviet planners, and it applied not just to the enormous generating capacity of each unit but also to the number of them at any one location; by the mid-1980s there were six RBMK-1000 reactors either operative or under construction at Chernobyl.
The building that arose was huge and bland. A rectangular white block like a large shoe box housed the turbine halls, while the reactors were built in the square wings. Inside these geometric shapes was a mass of piping and machinery, but the exterior was clean and smooth. When the four units were completed, there were three chimneys – one, by the fourth unit, painted red and white – and outside the building there were clusters of pylons carrying the electricity to Kiev and beyond.
On either side of the power station were smaller buildings – stores and workshops of various kinds – and near the first unit was the administrative block where Brukhanov had his office. In the basement of this block was a series of interconnected rooms known as ‘the bunker’: living quarters, a communications centre and a clinic for use in the event of an emergency.
Seeing the power station for the first time was always extraordinary for those who came to work there because this temple to modern technology was set in such a backward part of the world. On the road from Kiev, visitors would pass through a landscape of ponds, slow-flowing rivers and huge marshy meadows. Solitary peasant women, scarves tied tightly around their heads, tended herds of cows, as their ancestors had done for hundreds of years, while their husbands brought back their crops from the fields in horse-drawn carts. The only signs of the twentieth century were the occasional tractor or motorbike with a sidecar, and the long lines of pylons carrying power across the mournful landscape towards the pine forests to the north.
While the peasants who lived around Chernobyl spoke their own dialect and had lived there in ancient wooden cottages for many generations, the dazzling new town of Pripyat, which grew up only two kilometres from the gigantic power station, was inhabited by people from all over the Soviet Union. It was a young town – the average age of the inhabitants was around twenty-six – and exemplified the Soviet way of life. It was well planned, with well-spaced, eighteen-story blocks of flats. There were shopping centres, sports facilities, five schools, three different swimming pools and a permanent amusement park with a Ferris wheel. The city soviet, or town hall, was known as the ‘White House’, and besides a hotel with two hundred beds, called the Polessia, there was a government guest house with 104 rooms and four suites for visiting party grandees.
There was no church, of course, but there was a cultural centre for poetry readings and theatrical productions, as well as cinemas and excellent libraries. The town was well placed. To those who had lived in faraway places like Komsomolsk, Pripyat seemed to be at the heart of the n
ation. Kiev was only two and a half hours away by hydrofoil, and it was only a long day’s drive to Moscow, Minsk, Moldavia or the Black Sea. To those who had queued for scarce groceries in some of the larger cities, Pripyat was a place of abundance. Thanks to energetic lobbying by Brukhanov, the shops were full of food; in one butcher’s store, a newcomer counted fourteen different kinds of meat and sausage! And if an item could not be found in Pripyat, it was a simple matter to drive over the border into Belorussia, where food was always in good supply.
Better than the abundance of food or the facilities, however, was the proximity of the countryside. In a nation so recently industrialized, where most of the scientists and engineers were either the children or grandchildren of peasants, it was common to feel a strong bond with nature. In Pripyat, there was no pollution – nuclear fission gives off no fumes – and the town was surrounded by forest. A short walk or bicycle ride found the operators of the nation’s most sophisticated technology among the birches and pine trees, fishing in the many rivers and lakes, collecting berries or mushrooms or letting their children run wild in the woods and bathe in the river.
The society there was also relatively egalitarian. The bosses had their perks, of course: Brukhanov was driven around in a white Volga and also had a dacha; but in Pripyat his flat on Lenin Street looked like all the others. There were rumours that it had been surreptitiously enlarged by the builders at the expense of his neighbours, and that a blue bathroom suite, intended for the Palace of Culture, had been appropriated for the director, but even if true, these were modest forms of privilege and corruption.
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