Ablaze

by Read, Piers Paul;

  In due course, the fuel was covered, first with iron ore and then with concrete, without risking anyone’s life. The would-be heroes whom Steinberg had relieved were grateful for what he had done. Four hours after they left, a colonel appeared in the bunker and asked for Steinberg.

  ‘Are you Steinberg?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have a package from headquarters.’

  Steinberg opened the parcel and found two bottles of cabernet.

  4

  While the operators assisted the military in the work of decontamination, their chief task was to bring the first three units back on line before winter, when the three-thousand-megawatt capacity would be urgently needed. The electrical circuits had to be repaired and the cooling systems overhauled, all in hazardous areas of the power station. Radioactive dust had entered all three units through the ventilation system. In the third unit, both of the electrical circuits in the cooling system were damaged; unpurified water had been used to cool the core during the shutdown because all the purified water had been diverted to the fourth reactor.

  The work was hazardous and exhausting. Many operators succumbed not so much to radiation sickness as to stress. Although they knew how to minimize their exposure to radiation by shielding their bodies from its source, they were also aware that it could not be avoided altogether. Both inside and outside the power station, there was constant monitoring of the level of radiation. At the Pioneer camp, readings were taken every hour, both at ground level and at one metre above it. Anyone who wanted to could read the statistics, but they were not published in the press. Indeed, the young doctor from Pripyat, Tatiana Ben, having seen that the level at the entrance to the nuclear power station was one rem per hour, later saw it stated in a newspaper as five millirems per hour. It came as a rude shock; hitherto she had believed what she had read in the press. She was now without her husband, Anatoli, whose hand had become swollen and sore after removing his gloves to treat the radioactive body of Shashenok in Pripyat hospital on the night of the disaster.

  The operators all wore dosimeters, but few added up their cumulative dose. A blend of professionalism and patriotism drove them on, not just to eliminate the consequences of the accident but to get the first three units back into production. Whatever the risk, they stayed at their posts. In particular, Dyatlov’s protégés from Komsomolsk worked tirelessly to repair the damage done unwittingly by their patron and friend. Sitnikov was dead, but the boyish Vadim Grishenka was now head of the workshop for the first and second units, and Vladimir Chugunov, who had almost died from radiation sickness at Hospital No. 6, had persuaded the doctors on his release to allow him to return to work at Chernobyl.

  On 11 May, a call came through to the bunker with the news that Akimov had died. Steinberg, who on leaving Chernobyl in 1984 had handed over his flat to the Akimovs, was so upset that he commandeered a jeep and drove to Pripyat. The traffic lights were working and music still came from the loudspeakers on the streets. Lines of washing flapped on the balconies; in a playground, by the swing and jungle gym, sat an abandoned pram. In the amusement park, the Ferris wheel stood idle.

  It had been Brukhanov’s dream to have a city filled with roses; now they were in full bloom. Steinberg stopped by Akimov’s flat. He saw that the windows were open and realized that Akimov would never return to close them. At the entrance was an old pair of slippers and a badminton racket, both dropped in the rush of the evacuation. He turned the jeep around, returned to the power station and never went back to Pripyat again.

  There were moments of comedy. When Steinberg attended his first meeting of the commission, he was amused by all the generals reporting in squeaky voices, but a day or two later his was the same. The shared sense of danger and common endeavour eliminated all the usual prejudice and formality of everyday Soviet life. In this atmosphere of crisis, it did not matter whether a man was a Russian, a Tatar or a Jew, an officer in the army or the KGB, a party member or, like Steinberg’s friend Reichtman, one who had been thrown out of the party for insubordination.

  To compensate them for their hazardous work, every effort was made to ameliorate their living conditions. When Ryzantzev and his companions arrived at Ivankov, they were astonished to find caviar on the menu for supper. The soldiers lived under canvas, sixty men to a tent, and at the Pioneer camp the operators and scientists slept up to eight in a room. There was segregation according to sex, so married couples, like Anatoli and Tanya Ben, could not share the same room.

  In July, the housing shortage was eased by the arrival of eight comfortable cruise liners, which were moored fifty kilometres from the power station at a point known as Green Cape on the shore of the Kiev Sea. Built to accommodate Western tourists in some comfort, they had berths for up to twelve hundred workers from the Chernobyl power station. There were shops, libraries and a television on each deck. To mitigate the effect of radiation, a shift system was arranged for the personnel; after fifteen days at the power station, they were given fifteen days leave in Kiev. Wives could not join their husbands unless, like Tatiana Ben, they worked inside the zone. Whenever possible, particularly if they had children, women were evacuated to uncontaminated areas. However, there were, some among the medical personnel, and others who still worked in ancillary positions at the plant. There were some love affairs among the liquidators, as well as transitory liaisons of a less romantic kind. When Luba Kovalevskaya returned to the zone during the summer to write about the living conditions of the power station personnel, she was appalled by what she saw. Dormitories were used as brothels; some had the vomit of drunks on the floor. She also heard stories of rapes, broken marriages, alcoholism and suicide.

  Some bonds, however, were more elevated and had endured for many years. Katya Litovsky, the young woman who had worked for Steinberg in the turbine hall in the late 1970s, had been evacuated from Pripyat to her mother’s cottage in the southern Ukraine. When she heard of his appointment as chief engineer announced on television, she leaped up and shouted, ‘Mama, Mama, now everything will be all right.’ To her mother’s consternation, she immediately wrote to Steinberg volunteering to return to work at Chernobyl in any capacity whatsoever. Her offer was accepted, and though she was qualified as a mechanic, she took up the duties of secretary to the chief engineer.

  Katya had been married and had two children, who went first to live with her former husband in Krasnoyarsk, then to a boarding school in Kiev. To her, working for Steinberg at the nuclear power station came before both family life and her own well-being. The conditions were hard; she wore a mask to work, and the windows of her office were covered with lead. Nevertheless, she was happy, and whenever she went away on leave she longed to return to Chernobyl. As one of the few women at the plant, she sensed her value to the workers’ morale. ‘We were all a little in love with you,’ a naval officer told her later, ‘and tried to live up to the cheerful look on your face.’

  To raise their spirits, the operators also played tricks on the management, which would have incurred severe censure under normal conditions. Steinberg had a pass printed that certified that he had received ‘an external dose of radiation of forty-five rems and an internal dose of 40 per cent alcohol. This cannot be explained. He is allowed to go nowhere. He is to be buried in the Chernobyl area at a depth of not less than eight metres. Drilling is compulsory. A biological protective wall must measure 4 × 4 × 0.5 metres.’

  Steinberg also gave himself certain rights: ‘1. To buy alcohol and have tests without queueing. 2. To be in public places while dead drunk. 3. To attend women’s beaches and saunas (sexually harmless). 4. To attach to his T-shirt any medals, orders or other objects that glitter. 5. To consume energy from the fourth unit free of charge. 6. He is immune from arrest by the administration; he is not obliged to dry out when drunk.’

  The order was signed by Bang, the vice chairman, and countersigned by the secretary, Mille Roentgen.

  Steinberg was repaid in the same currency, receiving a report from
the head of the scientific research unit that complained ‘that the female workers in the canteen, in the period from 30 August 1986 to 24 September 1986, have systematically contributed to the deterioration of the health of the army’s scientific group No. 19772. As a result, the effectiveness of their work has sharply decreased, and therefore the deadline for the relaunch of the first two units has had to be postponed.

  ‘I would therefore like you to instruct the head of the canteen to make sure that the female personnel change only in rooms that have no curtains and that have windows facing the office of the above-mentioned scientific group, and that you permit regular meetings between representatives of the canteen and our workers in the laboratory of the chemical workshop between 9.00 a.m. and 6.00 p.m. (telephone No. 2448).

  ‘Scientific research has shown that if the first request is met, then the coefficient of labour productivity will rise in the above-mentioned military unit No. 19772 by 1.58 per cent; if the second is met, it will rise by 82.52 per cent; and if the above-mentioned is taken into account, the launch of the unit No. 3 might be brought forward by 14+ days.’

  The report was signed by ‘V. P. Karpov, Head of Scientific Research Unit.’

  5

  Although brave about the risks they ran, the operators nonetheless took all necessary precautions to minimize their dose, and regulations in the zone were strictly applied. It was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence and patrolled by the MVD, the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There were only three points of entry, each of which was equipped with a medical clinic, dosimetric control and decontamination facilities. No vehicles that were ‘dirty’ – that is, contaminated by radiation – were permitted to leave the zone. No one could enter without a pass, and everyone was encouraged to wear a mask or respirator to avoid inhaling contaminated dust.

  Pripyat posed a particular problem. Almost all the possessions of the power station’s relatively affluent work force remained in the several thousand apartments. The levels of radiation were too high for the militia to mount a guard on each block; therefore an electrified fence was erected around the town, and alarm systems installed in some of the shops and offices. This did not prevent some looting, and in due course it was decided to allow the inhabitants to return and salvage those belongings that were not badly contaminated. In this way Luba Akimov was able to retrieve her husband’s ear, which had been kept in a garage; she gave it to his brother, who had donated his bone marrow in a fruitless attempt to save Alexander’s life.

  The rural population also came back to retrieve their belongings, and in two villages where the contamination was low, Cheremoshnaya and Nivetskoye, residents were allowed to move back to their homes. Some had never left; in the village of Opachichi, fifteen kilometres from the reactor, Ivan and Irina Avramenko hid from the militia, and whenever they heard a helicopter ran for cover under a tree. They were both over seventy years old, and no talk about radiation was going to persuade them to leave the land that their forefathers had farmed for generations. In the town of Chernobyl, too, some of the older inhabitants sneaked back into their wooden houses. To prevent the liquidators from moving in, they put up little notices saying THE OWNER LIVES HERE, and the authorities had not the heart to move them.

  Further afield, forty kilometres to the east of the power station, work had started on a new town for the displaced power station workers, called Slavutich. It was built on virgin land near the east bank of the Dnieper between Chernobyl and Chernigov, and each of the republics that made up the Soviet Union was to design and build a section of the city. It was to be as bright and modern as Pripyat, with small villas for senior personnel. Though the homes were lavish by Soviet standards, the families for which they were intended were in no hurry to move in. Some of the wives in Kiev were unhappy at their husbands’ prolonged absence, but having been allocated flats either in Kiev or Moscow, they began to dread the moment when they would be asked to return.

  6

  Like a modern cathedral, the sarcophagus rose to cover the ruins of the reactor. The body of the unfortunate Khodemchuk could not be recovered; never, since the time of the Pharaohs, did one man have such a costly mausoleum. Tilles’ wall at the base was eight metres thick: the concrete struts at the side were fifty-five metres high. Huge steel girders stretched from this new wall to the still solid structure of the new unit and were then covered in concrete to seal the roof. No one was on the site to guide the girders into place; it had to be done from the relative safety of the crane’s cab, using television cameras to monitor the work. Ventilators were installed to cool the inside of the sarcophagus and were fitted with monitoring equipment and powerful filters.

  On 23 September Boris Scherbina announced that the sarcophagus was virtually completed. ‘There are now no dangerous discharges from the damaged reactor. This enables us to start up the power station again.’ On 29 September the first unit received its certification, and on 1 October it went on line. The second unit followed on 5 November. Two thousand megawatts had been restored to the grid. There was to be a delay of more than a year before the relaunch of the third unit, but by the end of 1986 the various government commissions – Ryzhkov’s in the Politburo, Scherbina’s at Chernobyl and Shepin’s in the Ministry of Health – could be reasonably pleased with what they had achieved. Certainly there had been a serious accident; one might even call it a disaster. Thirty-one men and women had been killed and many others injured or made ill. The cost was enormous; no one yet knew how many billions of rubles would be required to pay for clearing up after the accident and relocating people, let alone the loss of the fourth unit at Chernobyl and of six months’ electricity from the other three. Nor could the cost be counted only in lives or in rubles: there was also the humiliation of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the gloating bourgeois capitalist world.

  Yet even in this area there was reason for some satisfaction. Legasov’s performance at Vienna had gone down well. The horrific exaggerations in the American press had been exposed as false, and the danger that public opinion would force them to close all their RBMK reactors, with catastrophic consequences for the Soviet economy, had been averted. In some quarters, indeed, the efficiency with which the city of Pripyat had been evacuated and the 135,000 inhabitants of the thirty-kilometre zone relocated was proof that there were some advantages to a political system with centralized power. Think of the accident at Three Mile Island, and consider the chaos that would have ensued if a comparable catastrophe had happened in the United States!

  Only one thing remained to be done before the file could be closed: the culprits had to be punished. There had to be a trial. It was not a question of deciding on anyone’s guilt or innocence – this had already been done by the Central Committee – but in the era of glasnost and perestroika there had to be a convincing semblance of legality. Justice must be seen to have been done.

  An investigation had been opened on the very day of the accident by the Ukrainian public prosecutor in Kiev, and the next day by his All-Union opposite number in Moscow. The general prosecutor in Moscow, Alexander Reykunkov, appointed a senior assistant to head the investigation, which was only completed on 18 January 1987, when charges were filed against Brukhanov, Fomin, Dyatlov, and Rogozhkin, the head of the shift on the fateful night, as well as against Alexander Kovalenko, the head of the reactor workshop who had approved the programme for the tests on the turbines, and Yuri Laushkin, the safety inspector attached to the Chernobyl nuclear power station.

  Brukhanov had already been in solitary confinement since his arrest in August. His wife was permitted to bring him a food parcel once a month, and since he had set himself the task of learning English, a British newspaper could be sent in – until a guard saw that his son Oleg had written ‘Hi, Dad’ on one copy, after which this concession was withdrawn. The arrests of Fomin, Rogozhkin, Kovalenko and Laushkin followed. Dyatlov remained in Hospital No. 6 until the beginning of November. A month later, returning from a walk to his flat in Kiev, he was met by t
wo plainclothes officers from the prosecutor’s office, who courteously showed a warrant for his arrest and then drove him away in an unmarked car. Akimov and Toptunov, both of whom were dead, were actually sent notification, to their wives’ home addresses, that in the circumstances no action was to be taken against them.

  The prosecuting team prepared their case with great diligence, working under two constraints. Since the evidence was classified, it had to be cleared by the KGB before they could examine it; second, many of the documents from the fourth unit of the power station remained highly radioactive. Trained as lawyers, they nevertheless had to master scientific and technical details; yet when they wanted to question certain experts, they became aware once again that what they were told had to be approved by the KGB.

  To prosecute the case in court, Reykunkov chose his senior assistant, Yuri Shadrin. A plump man with a humorous face that could, at the appropriate moment, turn stern, Shadrin was the son of civil servants and had studied law in Kazan. For the first twenty-five years of his career, he had served as a public prosecutor in Siberia, then he had transferred to Archangelsk and Azerbaijan before reaching his present post in Moscow.

  The trial was due to be held in the high court in Kiev, but the venue was abruptly changed to the town of Chernobyl itself, where the auditorium of the House of Culture was transformed into a courtroom. Under Soviet law, the victims of a crime are entitled to attend the trial of those accused of committing it; with 135,000 obliged to leave their homes, as well as the hundreds of victims of irradiation, this would have allowed an uncontrollable number to hear the evidence. By holding the trial in the thirty-kilometre zone, in a building with limited space, the court could give practical reasons for limiting access to the public. The change of order was relayed to the judge, Raimond Brize, from the Politburo by the chief justice, Vladimir Terebilov.