The following is to be considered classified:
1.information about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station;
2.information on the results of the medical treatment of the victims;
3.information on the levels of irradiation of the personnel taking part in the liquidation of the effects of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station.
This was not directed at the scientists from the Kurchatov Institute or the Institute of Biophysics, who had long since accepted the discipline of secrecy, but at the many thousands of ancillary workers – among them three hundred army doctors – who had been mobilized in the wake of the accident. Nor was it simply the product of a reflexive secrecy inherited from the Stalin era. There was also the plausible motive that the dangers of radiation were understood only by a handful of scientists like Knijnikov and Ilyn. The chaos in Kiev in early May had taught the government that even local party leaders could behave irrationally as a result of ill-informed rumours.
However, no one knew better than the provincial party bosses that there were times when ideological orthodoxy took precedence over objective truth. The Ukrainian mistrust of Moscow, apparent in the decision to evacuate children from Kiev, resurfaced at the beginning of June, when Ukrainian scientists complained directly to the Central Committee in Moscow that the military dosimetrists – Pikalov’s men – were understating the levels of contamination. Their own measurements were considerably higher. Alexandrov was asked to investigate and sent Sivintsev to Kiev. There he discovered that the Ukrainians were using geological radiometers developed to detect uranium, which gave exaggerated readings of gamma radiation. The Ukrainians accepted Alexandrov’s explanation, but their suspicions remained. An agreed statement was issued only after considerable negotiation and was a further foretaste of what was to come.
3
Despite the promulgation of the policy of glasnost, in 1986 and 1987 the Central Committee still retained the means to impose the secrecy it deemed necessary. It not only controlled the media and the party apparatus but could count on people’s residual fear of the ubiquitous KGB, which, though it could no longer arbitrarily arrest Soviet citizens or deport them to Siberia without trial, was nevertheless capable of ruining those who did not toe the party line.
But while the apparatus was still in place, there were some within the Politburo itself who felt that for too long it had been used to conceal the incompetence of state officials. To the apostles of glasnost and perestroika, the accident at Chernobyl was the fruit of the era of stagnation. Ryzhkov himself was to admit, ‘We were all heading for Chernobyl.’ No longer should those who worked under the aegis of the vast Ministry of Medium Machine Building – that state within a state – be allowed to exploit the anxieties of the Cold War to hide their own shortcomings. Within a year of the accident Slavsky was retired, his ministry dissolved and all nuclear reactors placed under the authority of a new Ministry of Atomic Power; but the self-serving inertia in the minds of the populace was more difficult to displace.
The struggle over glasnost within the Politburo between Yegor Ligachev and his department of ideology, and Alexander Yakovlev, head of the party’s propaganda department, which had started over the reporting of Chernobyl, became more pronounced in the months that followed. This disagreement at the top of the party had serious implications for those further down, for on the outcome depended the future course of Soviet communism and the power of political leaders. Innumerable ministers, secretaries, directors and chairmen had much to lose from glasnost and perestroika; equally, their ambitious rivals had much to gain. Ligachev could count on several powerful groups: the huge military-industrial complex, the powerful bureaucrats in Gosplan, and senior officers in the KGB, but also writers and intellectuals who had a mystical, reactionary and often anti-Semitic vision of Russia. Yakovlev had less powerful and less prominent allies, but he had the all-important support of Gorbachev himself.
The preliminary skirmishes, fought over the reporting of the accident in the newspapers and on television, continued in the arena of the Writers’ Union. This body, to which any author had to belong if he wished to see his work in print, was far more than a mere union in the Western sense. With privileges comparable to those given to members of the Academy of Sciences, its members were expected to inspire their readers to follow the party line. If they did not, they were punished – under Stalin with death or imprisonment, under Brezhnev with oblivion. Writers in Russia had the status of prophets, and every political leader was afraid that a Samuel might appear to depose a Saul. Whether in the hands of a Pushkin or a Solzhenitsyn, no ruler in Russia could remain indifferent to the power of the pen.
Yakovlev knew better than most the dangers of alienating the Soviet intelligentsia. In the late 1960s he had served temporarily as acting head of the department he now controlled, and in this capacity had written a ten-thousand-word article attacking the Komsomol journal Molodaya Gvardiya for its reactionary, chauvinistic line. Entitled ‘Against Anti-Historicism’, it took various authors to task for idealizing the ‘stagnating daily life’ of the Russian village. This piece had not met with the approval of Ligachev’s predecessor as secretary for ideology, Mikhail Suslov, and Yakovlev’s appointment was not confirmed; instead he was made Soviet ambassador to Canada, where he remained for the next ten years.
Brought back by Gorbachev in 1983, and later confirmed as secretary for propaganda, Yakovlev used his powers of patronage to install his supporters on the editorial boards of literary journals and publishing houses. Sergei Zalygin became editor-in-chief of the Union’s literary journal, Novy Mir, and Vitaly Korotich, a Ukrainian, was named editor of the weekly Ogonyok. Yakovlev also enlisted well-known writers like Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky to call for more glasnost in Soviet literature. This was not welcomed by the leaders of the Writers’ Union, frequently talentless time-servers who perceived their privileges as being threatened. In April 1986, the very month of the accident at Chernobyl, the Cinematographers’ Union held a congress at which liberals replaced reactionaries in the leadership; among them was Elem Klimov, who had been nominated by Yakovlev himself. The realization that the Writers’ Union would be a harder nut to crack led Gorbachev to invite a group of its leaders for a chat in the Kremlin shortly before its own congress opened in June of the same year. There he gave them an impassioned defence of his policy of perestroika, and, as a graphic image of the kind of inertia that had led to Chernobyl, told them of the sacks of documents on scientific and technical problems that had remained unopened, intended for a special assembly that Brezhnev had at first ordered and then forgotten.
Gorbachev attacked the ‘layer of apparatchiks’ in the ministries and party apparatus, particularly in the monolithic ministry of planning, Gosplan, who served only their own interests. ‘In our country, nothing is exploited quite so much as official position,’ the secretary general said. Why was this? Because they were protected from criticism. ‘We have no opposition. How then are we to control ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism, but most importantly through glasnost. No society can exist without glasnost.’
On this particular evening, Gorbachev’s words fell on deaf ears. At the Eighth Congress of the Writers’ Union that followed three days later, the old guard either held onto their posts or, as in the case of the first secretary, were replaced by men of the same hue. However, Voznesensky spoke out uncompromisingly for glasnost in literature, and it was clear that in so doing he had the support of at least some of the party’s leaders. The reactionaries might be a majority in the Writers’ Union, but the liberals seemed in the ascendant in the Politburo.
Soon after the close of the congress, Gubarev wrote his play Sarcophagus, and Volodomyr Yavorivsky started his novel The Star Called Wormwood. Another Ukrainian, Yuri Shcherbak, while a delegate at the congress, was asked to write an account of the accident at Chernobyl for the magazine Ionost. The son of an official in the highways division of the NKVD, th
e precursor of the KGB, and a party member, Shcherbak was a man of many talents who had won prizes for his films as well as his novels. But he was also a doctor working for the Kiev Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiological and Infectious Diseases, and as such had cared for those evacuated from the thirty-kilometre zone.
Realizing that he would be less constrained by censorship writing for Ionost in Moscow than for Literaturnaya Ukraina in his home city of Kiev, Shcherbak returned to the zone equipped with a tape recorder, and within a year had completed a book in which different protagonists describe the roles they played in the disaster. Interspersed with these transcripts were expressions of his own feelings, which were similar to those of Yakovlev’s department of propaganda. The principal culprits were not the scientists who had designed a faulty reactor, but ‘Brukhanov, who earlier than others and better than others, understood what had really happened at the station and around it.’ Shcherbak named the second secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee, Malomuzh, who had allowed life to proceed normally in Pripyat on the day after the accident, and the directors of the hospital who had known about the high levels of radiation but had done nothing to raise the alarm.
Shcherbak also revealed for the first time that the grandchildren and grandmothers of some senior Communist party officials in Kiev had been dispatched to sanatoriums as early as 1 May while the children of workers were marching in the May Day parade. These wretched ‘common cowards and scum’, relics from the era of stagnation, should be exposed. ‘It seems to me that the interests of glasnost – this very important factor in the restructuring of our society in the spirit of the decision of the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Party – require a fundamental and open review of this problem.’ To Shcherbak, ‘one of the most strict lessons of the first month (and of the following ones as well) of the “Chernobyl era” was given to our mass media, which did not manage to restructure themselves in the spirit of the Twenty-seventh Party Congress … Don’t let us mitigate our shortcomings with lies.’
To those who knew of the deliberations in the Politburo in the aftermath of the accident, this attack was aimed clearly at Yakovlev’s enemy on the Politburo, Yegor Ligachev. But by directing their aim at the commander, the crack troops of glasnost inevitably threatened others in their field of fire. If the doctors in Pripyat should have ‘shouted out loud to the assembly that Saturday morning about the calamity that was drawing near,’ as Shcherbak suggested, what about Alexandrov, Legasov, Petrosyants, Marin, Mayorets, Israel and Ilyn?
Most of these were sufficiently secure to ignore any implicit criticism of their conduct by a minor novelist in the Ukraine – secure not merely in their posts in the upper echelons of the state but also in their self-esteem and in their view of their own conduct at the time. It was not that they were unaffected by the disaster and the suffering that it had caused, but as Petrosyants succinctly put it at a press conference, ‘Science must have its victims.’ In public, all of them subscribed to the idea that the operators had been to blame; in private, those at the Ministry of Energy blamed the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which had developed the reactor, while those at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building blamed the Ministry of Energy for the poor training of their personnel. The scientists at the Kurchatov Institute blamed Dollezhal’s bureau, NIKYET, and those at NIKYET blamed the Kurchatov Institute, but since the investigations into this question promised by the public prosecutor’s office had now been shelved and all matters relating to atomic power remained classified, it seemed unlikely that the issue would ever be decided one way or the other.
In the still more private recesses of their own consciences, many of these people undoubtedly suffered from remorse. The two eminent old academicians, Alexandrov and Dollezhal, had seen their life’s achievements reduced to ashes in the graphite fire of the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Although he had escaped censure himself, Dollezhal had seen his deputy Ivan Yemelyanov punished by the party. Alexandrov, already sorrowing at the time of the accident because of his wife’s terminal illness, was stricken by the disaster. Publicly he denied responsibility for what had happened. Even while RBMK reactors were being modified, and both his scientists and Dollezhal’s designers were working frantically to develop devices that would ensure that such a mishap could never happen again, he robustly insisted that the RBMKs were entirely safe as long as the operators complied with the regulations.
4
Less sanguine was Alexandrov’s first deputy director, Valeri Legasov. Distracted in the aftermath of the accident, first by the Herculean task of bringing the reactor under control, then by the preparation of an ideologically acceptable explanation for the International Atomic Energy Agency conference in Vienna, he had subsequently turned his energetic intellect to a more penetrating analysis of what had gone wrong.
As always, Legasov had great confidence in his qualifications for the task. It was not simply a question of understanding the technical and scientific issues involved; there were others who knew more than he did about nuclear power. Rather it was his unique mix of qualities – scientific, political and psychological – that led to an audacity and an originality denied to others. Throughout his working life, the security provided by his political pedigree had enabled him to take risks that others would have balked at for fear of ending their careers. Of the ten projects he had initiated, five had failed, costing the Soviet state as much as twenty-five million rubles. A further two were still in progress and might possibly fail, but three had proved successful, and one alone had already earned back the twenty-five million rubles with interest.
Legasov was encouraged by the new party policy of glasnost and perestroika to think more radically than might have been wise before, and even to offer a certain measure of self-criticism. He felt a small twinge of bad conscience about his role in blaming the operators for the disaster; ‘I told the truth in Vienna,’ he told a friend, ‘but not the whole truth.’ Yet he knew as well as anyone how difficult it had been to be allowed to say anything at all. More troubling was the part he had played in the years before the accident to counter any criticism of nuclear power. As Alexandrov’s first deputy director, it had come under his theoretical jurisdiction and had been included in the inquiry he had conducted into the whole question of industrial safety. It seemed incredible now that at that time nuclear reactors had seemed to pose less of a threat to human health than the fossil-fuel power stations that spewed large quantities of carcinogenic chemicals into the atmosphere.
Legasov remembered feeling a certain unease when he had considered the RBMK reactors: as a chemist, he was disturbed that their design incorporated large quantities of graphite, zirconium and water. He was also uneasy about the safety systems and knew that modifications had been proposed that, because of the cost of their implementation, the designers had neither accepted nor rejected but left pending. Why had he been so complacent? Why had he been so emphatic in supporting Alexandrov’s contention that there was nothing to fear from nuclear power? Because it had never occurred to him that men as eminent and experienced as Alexandrov and Dollezhal could be mistaken. The discussions he had had with Alexandrov were conceptual, not technical. Criticisms had been made of the RBMK reactors on the grounds of their cost and efficiency, not of their safety.
Why had they been so confident that everything would go according to plan? Undoubtedly the excellence of the scientists working at the Kurchatov Institute had lulled them into a false sense that the same quality was to be found among the operators and engineers. Looking back, he now remembered the instances of shoddy workmanship that had come to light – for example, the flawed seams in the piping where welding, although certified, had never taken place. But what had shocked him more than almost anything else at Chernobyl had been the tape of the operators’ conversation prior to the accident, which he now kept locked in his safe. Seeing that a section of the programme for testing the turbines had been crossed out, one had telephoned a colleague to ask what he
should do. The second operator appeared to hesitate, then said, ‘Follow the deleted instructions.’ All the while, the safety supervisors were on the site, unaware that the tests were going on.
The personnel had been punished; had they survived the accident, Akimov and Toptunov would have joined Dyatlov and Rogozhkin in jail. Yet Legasov knew that he had done them an injustice at Vienna by suggesting that they alone were to blame. There were no specific culprits for what had happened at Chernobyl. There were failings: the designers had dragged their feet about modifying the safety systems; the operators had developed casual procedures, neglecting the regulations. But when he looked at the precise chain of events and at the particular motive for each action, it was impossible to define the sin. If the operators made mistakes, it was because they considered it a matter of honour to complete the tests on the turbines. The accident, then, was not the consequence of dereliction of duty, but rather of going beyond the call of duty to finish the job on time. It was not so much an isolated case of negligence as an attitude of mind, the apotheosis of all the inefficiency and incompetence that had bedevilled the Soviet economy in recent decades. Truly, as Ryzhkov had said, the nuclear power industry had been moving towards this terrible event with a certain degree of inevitability.
Before he went to Chernobyl, Legasov had suffered from a recurrent kidney disease. His heroic work at the reactor – sleeping only a few hours a night, subject to constant stress and significant doses of radiation – had not improved his condition, but with demonic energy he shrugged off this ill health to work on his inquiry into the causes of the disaster. What caused the slovenly habits that had become endemic to Soviet life? He thought back to the heroic age of Soviet nuclear power when Kurchatov, Alexandrov and Dollezhal had astonished the world with their achievements. What had changed? Only the size of the enterprise. To have a single group of men designing and building a reactor was fine when it was small, but once each had his own institute employing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, accountability was lost in a maze of departmental and interdepartmental committees. Collective responsibility meant, effectively, that there was none.
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