Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  Lyutov answered that this was impossible. Smagin led him out into a passage and, with the air burning his throat and his eyes, pointed to the pile of black rock strewn around the ruins of the central hall. Lyutov seemed unwilling to believe that it could be graphite. Exasperated, Smagin pointed out the holes bored in the graphite for the fuel channels. Still Lyutov seemed unconvinced, but he returned to report to Fomin that it was within the realm of possibility that the reactor had been destroyed.

  Fomin was equally incredulous. He turned to Sitnikov and asked him, as a nuclear specialist, to find out exactly what had happened to the reactor.

  Sitnikov, Dyatlov’s oldest friend from Komsomolsk, set out on a tour of inspection. He had arrived at the station soon after Chugunov, and in the ruins of the central hall he had seen Valeri Perevozchenko and Sasha Yuvchenko, who had reported what they had seen. Still, Sitnikov, as an older and more experienced specialist, felt that he must follow Fomin’s instructions and take a look for himself.

  Deciding that the best view he could get of the reactor was from the water-treatment plant, he climbed out onto the roof and looked down on the ruins of the reactor. A hot, gaseous blast hit him as he made a mental inventory of the destruction. Much of the piping and many of the tanks that had surrounded the reactor had been blown away by the explosion, and the huge concrete lid – the upper biological shield – had been pushed aside, leaving a crescent-shaped opening to the reactor core, through which came the dreadful glow of a fire.

  To a man whose life had been spent cherishing nuclear reactors, this was clear evidence of an unimaginable catastrophe; already choking from the effects of the radionuclides that he had breathed into his lungs, Sitnikov went back to report to Fomin what he had seen. On the way down, he ran into Smagin and told him that the reactor had been destroyed. Smagin noticed that Sitnikov was retching, and that his skin had turned brown.

  Down below, knee-deep in radioactive water, the head of the electrical workshop, Alexander Lelechenko, worked with some of his men to repair the electrical circuits and give power to the pumps. Noticing that the pipe bringing hydrogen to the turbines had been ruptured, he had seen the danger of a new fire breaking out in the electrolysis plant. With the help of another electrician, Lopatuk, he had groped his way along the dark, dusty passages to the entrance opposite the hydrogen tanks; there, unsheltered from the burning reactor, they rushed out to close the valves.

  Another of the engineers from Komsomolsk, Vadim Grishenka, learned about the accident shortly before he left for work that Saturday morning. He was a handsome man, with a lean, youthful face, as taciturn as his wife, Ylena, was chatty. Their closest friends were the Chugunovs, and it was Nina Chugunov who had telephoned to say that her husband, Vladimir, had been called to the station because of an accident.

  On his way to the bus stop, Vadim noticed a tanker sluicing the streets. He thought little of it and went as usual to the fifth unit, where he was deputy chief engineer. The unit was now close to completion, and to try and keep to the schedule construction went on around the clock. As the bus passed the fourth block, he saw the destruction and his heart sank, but it did not occur to him to worry about radiation or to take iodine tablets. However, when he reached his office he called Ylena and told her to shut all the windows and stay in the flat.

  As they clocked off, some of Vadim’s colleagues from the earlier shift said that they had seen the explosion but had not stopped work. Nor did Vadim or the 268 men on the construction site. At about 10.00 a.m. he was told to report to Brukhanov in the bunker beneath the administration block, and was asked by him to take charge of the third and fourth units since Dyatlov, Chugunov and Sitnikov had all been taken to the hospital in Pripyat. Vadim could see that both Brukhanov and Fomin were frightened and were clearly at a loss about what to do.

  In the bunker, throughout that Saturday morning, as more vomiting men were brought to the dormitory, and firemen and operators were being ferried to the hospital in Pripyat, both Fomin and Brukhanov had assured their superiors in Kiev and Moscow that everything was under control. Was it morning or night? Brukhanov had lost all sense of time, but like one of Pavlov’s dogs simply reacted to each crisis according to his training. Admittedly there had been an accident, but it could not be serious, because Soviet reactors were totally safe. What had happened? No one seemed to know. What was certain in such circumstances was that secrecy was paramount and that superiors must be reassured.

  Brukhanov was not alone in making such judgments; at his side were party officials. The telephone never stopped ringing; he took calls from ministries, institutes, state committees and party leaders. Senior officials appeared in the bunker, among them the head of the KGB in Pripyat and the second secretary of the Party Committee in Kiev. Brukhanov was asked for a written report on the levels of radiation. His advisers prepared a draft incorporating the figures they had been given by the chief dosimetrist, 3.6 rems per hour in the plant and between eight and fifteen millirems per hour in the town of Pripyat.

  Brukhanov signed it. It was among his last acts as the man in charge. All around him operators and engineers were doing what they could with no overall sense of direction. With every hour that passed, Fomin seemed closer to disintegration. No one consulted Dyatlov, who ran hither and thither, cringing like a singed cat from the reactor that had let him down. The whole security apparatus had taken on a life of its own, encircling both the power station and the fourth unit, and at times preventing the engineers from getting in.

  So, too, had the civil defence; at 5.00 a.m. a general in the militia, Gennadi Berdov, had arrived from Kiev in full uniform to take command. However, neither he, the KGB or the local party leaders dared any more than Brukhanov to make major decisions. None felt authorized to close down the first two reactors, to order the evacuation of the surrounding area or even to warn the people of Pripyat, as they awoke that morning, to remain in their flats with their windows closed. The system of democratic centralism had taught them all that only the all-knowing and all-powerful Central Committee could make decisions of this kind.

  Early Saturday morning Brukhanov was informed by Moscow that experts were on their way from the Kurchatov Institute, and that a government commission had been appointed and would arrive in Chernobyl that day. It was to be headed by a deputy prime minister, Boris Scherbina. No decision on evacuation was to be made until he arrived. In the meantime, avoid panic and cool the reactor!

  5

  Among the recipients of the emergency call at 1.30 a.m. was Vitali Leonenko, the director of the hospital in Pripyat. He was a man with twenty years of experience of health care in the nuclear industry, and he went at once to the power station. As soon as he saw the seriousness of the accident, he telephoned the Third Division of the Ministry of Health in Moscow.

  In Pripyat, a general alert went out to all medical personnel. A young surgeon, Anatoli Ben, reached the hospital by 1.50 a.m. He went up to his department on the second floor, changed into his overalls, and then went to the window from which there was a clear view of the power station a kilometre away. He could see that the roof and the walls of the fourth unit had been destroyed, and that the glow of a fire came from the ruins, together with a thin wisp of smoke. He immediately telephoned his wife, Tatiana, also a doctor, and told her to prepare herself and their neighbours for an evacuation.

  Anatoli came down into the reception area just as the first two patients arrived from the station. Both had terrible burns and blisters all over their bodies. One, Anatoli Kurguz, had pushed through powerful jets of scalding steam to close a fire door to protect his friends. He was in a state of shock. He had once been a submariner, and as Anatoli Ben cut off his clothes and bandaged his wounds, he sang songs from his navy days. Every now and then he would stop abruptly and say, ‘There was a bang, and everything went …’ Then he would begin to sing again.

  Further patients followed in quick succession: the firemen, among them Lieutenants Pravik and Kibenok, and later their comm
ander, Major Teliatnikov. Some were semiconscious; many were vomiting. They were all undressed, washed down, given hospital pyjamas and attached to drips. A siren was heard as an ambulance approached at speed. Dr Ben, who had removed his rubber gloves after bandaging Kurguz, now saw the driver of the ambulance, Gumarov, bring in a severely wounded man. This was Shashenok, who had been carried out of the power station on the shoulders of Piotr Palamarchuk. Ben helped undress him; his body was a raw mess of blisters and burns. Moreover, his rib cage had caved in and his back was so twisted that it was almost certainly broken.

  Shashenok was able to talk. ‘Khodemchuk,’ he kept saying. ‘Khodemchuk is still there.’ He looked in anguish at his wife, a nurse at the hospital, who now stood at his side, but he was so severely injured that he was sent into the intensive-care unit, and there she could not follow him.

  Soon after Shashenok came the man who had saved him, Piotr Palamarchuk. He was vomiting and felt faint; he was washed, laid down and attached to a drip. Then came Sasha Yuvchenko, who, though occasionally sick and dizzy, felt unnaturally excited. After he was washed and given hospital clothes, he fell asleep despite his excitement. He was awakened an hour or two later by a nurse in order to be attached to a drip. It turned out that she lived in the same block as he did, so he asked her to reassure his wife when she went home and tell her that he would be home soon.

  By about 5.00 a.m., the ambulances were working a shuttle service to bring patients to the hospital. One of the patients was Gumarov, an ambulance driver, who appeared to have been affected by the radiation emanating from the casualties themselves. This made Anatoli Ben realize just how many dangerous radionuclides must have escaped from the reactor. Some of the patients were well enough to be sent home.

  Then Anatoli saw a friend, the head of the electrical workshop, Alexander Lelechenko, waiting for treatment in the reception area. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked him.

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Are they looking after you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m waiting to be sent to one of the wards.’

  When Anatoli Dyatlov arrived, he refused to be put on a drip and said that he only wanted to sleep. However, the nurse insisted, and after he was on the drip he started to feel better. Indeed, it was common to many of the patients that after the initial dizziness and nausea, they felt reasonably well. It began to look as if only those who had been crushed by falling debris or badly scalded by escaping steam were in any danger. Khodemchuk had been lost in the wreckage of the fourth reactor – no one had been able to reach his body – and at five that morning, Shashenok died.

  Inze Davletbayev was telephoned by her husband, Razim, at 6.00 a.m. When he told her that there had been an accident and that he was in the hospital, her legs went weak beneath her. She stood still for a couple of minutes, and then got dressed and went to the hospital. There she found that no visitors were allowed. She asked after her husband, but was told that he was not there. She wandered around to the back and stood looking up at the window: suddenly, she saw Razim and he saw her. He waved, and the others in the ward waved too. They all seemed cheerful, and so Inze felt enormously relieved. She stood looking up at Razim’s curly black hair, thinking how handsome he looked in the weak sun of the dawn. Beside him was a doctor with whom they had often played tennis, and from the window Razim shouted down that he would send out a letter. She went back to the entrance; the note from the doctor warned her to return home, remove her shoes, close all the windows and keep the children indoors.

  Valentina Dyatlov had been woken by the emergency call at 2.00 a.m. Since her husband was already at the station, she hung up the telephone and went to sleep. At a quarter to seven, Dyatlov himself telephoned from the hospital. He said she should not worry, that he was well enough, that he was going to rest for a while and would see her soon.

  At 7.00 a.m. Valentina set off with her granddaughter to walk to their dacha outside Pripyat. It took them forty minutes to get there. They stayed there working in the garden, planting onions and peas. Then her daughter, the little girl’s mother, appeared. ‘Apparently there’s been a serious accident at the station.’

  ‘Nonsense. Look. It’s perfectly all right.’ They could see the huge white power station from the dacha; only the fourth unit was shielded from their view. ‘Anyway,’ Valentina added, ‘I’ve spoken to Anatoli. If anything serious had happened, he would have told me.’

  Later that morning, Valentina went to the hospital in Pripyat with some cigarettes for her husband. She was not allowed in. She waylaid an oculist she knew, asking him to deliver the cigarettes, but he said he would not be admitted to Dyatlov’s ward. Finally a nurse agreed to smuggle them in.

  Going round to the back of the hospital, Valentina joined the group of women waving to their husbands at the window. She saw Dyatlov, who shouted down to her to send in some milk, cucumbers and mineral water. She rushed back to her flat to get them, and then returned to the hospital where a woman with a granddaughter at the same kindergarten as Valentina’s smuggled in a rope which Dyatlov lowered from the window of the ward to lift up the bag with his supplies.

  Nina Chugunov knew of a better antidote to radiation than milk, cucumbers or mineral water. Since the early days in Komsomolsk, it had been believed that alcohol washed radionuclides out of the system. As luck would have it, stocks were high; she had laid in a good supply for the May Day holiday. Moreover, the Komsomolsk group were great friends of the Bens; they had all celebrated International Women’s Day together the month before, when Dyatlov had recited poetry and they had all had a cheerful time. Therefore Ben was unlikely to object to the bottles that were later raised in the basket; indeed, the hospital itself had supplies of pure alcohol.

  In the ward, Chugunov shared the vodka that his wife had sent in. Dyatlov came over, then Sitnikov and Akimov, and as they drank the supposedly cleansing alcohol they discussed the accident and tried to work out what could possibly have gone wrong.

  Among the firemen, too, alcohol was supplied for medicinal purposes by a nurse who happened to be Ivan Shavrey’s wife. Ivan shared it with a friend; they each drank fifty grams. At first it seemed to make them better, but then they became sick. As soon as he heard of the accident, Shavrey’s father came from the state farm on the other side of the Belorussian border with supplies of fresh milk, but that too made them vomit, and a bitter folk medicine, smuggled in by Ivan’s wife, did no better.

  At 10.00 a.m. on 26 April, while the victims of the accident administered these homespun remedies, the team of experts arrived from Moscow. It was headed by Georgi Seredovkin, a specialist in radiation illness. He knew only too well that appearances could be deceptive, and began collecting blood samples from the 120 patients so that through biological dosimetry he could judge which of them should be sent for special treatment in Moscow.

  6

  Despite the shuttle service of the ambulances and the increasing activity around the hospital, few awoke that morning in Pripyat with any premonition other than that it was going to be an exceptionally lovely day. The sun shone as strongly as it usually did in June, and the prospect of a weekend followed by the May Day holiday put the people of Pripyat in a festive mood. As was usual on a Saturday morning, the children set off for school while their mothers went shopping. Those who could left early for their dachas in the country.

  Lubov Kovalevskaya, the journalist whose article in Literaturnaya Ukraina had so outraged the management of the power station, had stayed up late the previous night working on a poem about Paganini. While writing, she had played his music, and at around midnight her work was completed. Exhausted, but with the phrases still spinning around in her head, she had taken a sleeping pill and gone to bed.

  When Lubov awoke the next morning her mother told her that there had been two explosions during the night from the direction of the power station. Wondering whether this had been more than a simple release of surplus steam, Lubov got dressed and walked towards the power station. She got as far as
the town hall when she suddenly suspected that something more serious might have happened; there was a whiff of ozone in the air and a taste of dust in her mouth. A group had gathered in the square in front of the offices of the city soviet. They asked what had happened and were told that there had been a fire at the station. Lubov went to her office and telephoned the Party Committee to ask for confirmation.

  ‘Who has been saying this?’ she was asked. ‘Do you want to cause panic spreading rumours of this kind?’

  Now Lubov went with another poet to the edge of the town, where on a raised piece of ground they could get a good view of the station. Paganini’s music was still ringing in her ears as she looked with increasing dismay at the ruined walls of the fourth unit. She was terrified by what she saw, but she could not turn away. At the same time she felt as ecstatic as she had when writing her poem. A bright sun shone in a clear blue sky; everywhere people were enjoying the radiant weather – swimming, sunbathing, boating, fishing, sitting in cafés, going on picnics, even holding a wedding in the open air – while she and her fellow poet stood mesmerized by the sight of an unimaginable disaster.

  On the way back to her flat Lubov passed policemen with walkie-talkies and tankers sluicing down the streets. When she got home, her daughter had returned from school and Lubov told her to remain indoors.

  Another Lubov, the wife of Alexander Lelechenko, had been awakened at 2.00 a.m. by the wife of a friend. ‘Haven’t you heard what’s happened?’ she asked.