Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘No.’

  ‘Something exploded in the turbine hall. My husband went pale when he heard, and ran off to the station.’

  Lubov Lelechenko immediately rang her husband’s office but was told he was not there. She reached the central switchboard and eventually found him. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘I heard that there’s been an accident.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine.’

  Lubov Lelechenko could not get back to sleep and waited for the dawn. At 7.00 a.m. she set off for the primary school where she was the headmistress and teacher of maths. Normally, she passed old peasant babushkas selling carrots and radishes, but this morning there seemed to be few of them around. She was the first to arrive at the school building, and because it was stuffy she opened all the windows. Later, a lady janitor appeared and asked for her son. ‘They’re going to evacuate all the children and I wanted to take my son out of school because he isn’t well.’

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘The reactor exploded. People have been killed.’

  The telephone rang. It was the head of the educational service, who told Lubov Lelechenko to close all the windows of the school. ‘The children must be kept indoors. Wash the floors. Put wet cloths across the entrances to keep the air out.’

  Soon the children trooped in, prattling rumours. Some said their fathers had been working on the construction site of the new reactors during the night and had seen the explosion. Lubov Lelechenko went to her office and telephoned her flat. Her husband had returned. ‘They say the reactor has exploded,’ she said.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Are you telling the truth?’

  There was a pause; then he said, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.’

  Lubov was impatient to get home. She bought some food from the school canteen and hurried back to the flat at 3.00 p.m. It was dark inside; the curtains had been drawn. She went to the kitchen and prepared some lunch, then crept into the bedroom. Her husband was awake and looked worn and troubled. She offered him lunch. He said he was not hungry but would like a drink. She brought him some mineral water and put it next to his bed. A few moments later, when he came into the kitchen, she saw at once that the skin of his face, his hands and his legs was all red, and that the flesh on his hands was swollen. She imagined that he had washed himself at the power station and had scrubbed too hard. She asked him how he felt; he said it was as though he had spent too much time in the sun.

  ‘Shouldn’t you see a doctor?’

  ‘I went to the hospital. They took a blood test, but I got fed up with waiting.’

  Lelechenko went back to bed but could not sleep. At four in the afternoon, he got up to go back to the station.

  ‘Has there been an accident?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. The reactor has exploded.’

  ‘Please stay.’

  ‘No. I must go back to the station. My men are still there.’

  Women also went to the power station for the eight o’clock shift. On her way to her workshop, one looked in at the medical centre for some cotton wool because of an unusually heavy flow of menstrual blood. As she came out, she dropped it in the hallway; she picked it up, brushed off the dust, and went to work.

  Nina Chugunov was awakened at 6.00 a.m. by a friend who worked in a storeroom at the power station. When she heard that there had been an accident, she began to cry, but an hour later she sent her son off to school. She telephoned her friend Ylena Grishenka whose husband, Vadim, deputy chief engineer for reactor No. 5, had left as usual for work. Like Nina, Ylena was anxious for her husband and sent her daughter, Alyona, off to school.

  There all the windows had been opened because of the glorious weather but halfway through the morning were closed. Iodine tablets were given to the pupils, which made some of them vomit. One little girl started to cry when she was told by a fellow pupil that her father had been killed in the station; her friends tried to comfort her and then she was told by her teacher that it was untrue.

  Lessons continued as usual, but before leaving for home the teachers told the children to cover their mouths and noses with their hands on their way home. Once out in the street, however, they saw young mothers pushing their babies in prams and younger children playing in sandpits; as Alyona reached her own block she saw her mother on the balcony, hanging the wash out to dry.

  Natasha Yuvchenko had slept badly that night. It had been stuffy and Kirill had kept crying; she could not seem to calm him down. She went into the kitchen, then back into the bedroom, quieted Kirill for a moment and snatched some fitful sleep. Finally she got up at 7.00 a.m. and was getting ready to go to work when the nurse who lived on their block came back from the hospital. She told Natasha that there had been an accident at the station and that Sasha was in the hospital. Natasha swayed; she felt weak. The nurse assured her that it was nothing serious, but Natasha wanted to find out for herself. She left Kirill with her neighbours and ran to the hospital. She saw Sasha at the window and he waved to her. She went to the entrance but was not allowed in.

  From the hospital, Dr Ben looked out with growing alarm at the people of Pripyat going about their business as if nothing had happened. He could see a young man stripped to the waist strumming his guitar in the sun, and across the river people were sunbathing on the beach. He telephoned his wife, Tanya, for a second time to ask her to warn her neighbours of the danger. She went downstairs to give some iodine to the family who lived below and to tell them to keep their children indoors. One of the women laughed. ‘I know all about the accident. My husband was fishing in one of the reservoirs. He saw it happen, and he’s brought a whole load of radioactive dirt back into the flat.’

  Later that afternoon, Dr Ben again looked across towards the river to the café by the jetty. There sat a young bride and groom, surrounded by their family and friends, celebrating their wedding. He slipped out of the hospital and crossed to the café to warn them about the radiation. The young people smiled. They looked at the clear blue sky, the gentle sun, the lazy flow of the river. ‘It could be dangerous,’ Ben repeated, and ran back to the hospital. When he looked down again from the window of the ward on the second floor, the wedding party was still where he had left them, laughing and raising their glasses to toast the happy couple.

  7

  Georgi Seredovkin, who with his team of specialists was now measuring the radiation received by the casualties from the power station, had been sent from Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Like the hospital in Pripyat, this came under the secret Third Division of the Ministry of Health; however, the department on the top floor, which specialized in radiation-related accidents, was in fact the in-patient department of the Institute of Biophysics, financed and administered by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building.

  The director of the institute was Academician Leonid Ilyn, who as a young man had done his research in the aftermath of the terrible accident at Mayak, and the head of the institute’s in-patient department at Hospital No. 6 was a redoubtable woman of sixty-two, Angelina Guskova, who thirty years before had been Igor Kurchatov’s personal doctor. A convinced Communist as well as a dedicated physician, she had devoted her life to her country and her calling. Unmarried, she was recognized both at home and abroad as one of the world’s leading authorities on radiation sickness.

  Within an hour of the accident at Chernobyl, Dr Guskova was summoned by the duty officer to the Ministry of Health. A car was sent to fetch her from Hospital No. 6, where she lived, and half an hour later she was conferring by telephone with the director of the medical services in Pripyat. The information she received was confusing; on the one hand she was told that the accident was not serious – a minor explosion and a fire – but on the other the number of casualties kept rising. The symptoms reported by the doctors suggested that some were victims of radiation sickness, yet the information from the power station was that levels were relatively low.

  By 5.00 a.m. it had become cle
ar to her that a considerable number of people were seriously ill. She returned to Hospital No. 6 and asked the director to evacuate patients from the other wards; she might need all of the hospital’s six hundred beds. Then she alerted the necessary medical personnel, and Dr Seredovkin and his team of experts left for the airport at 7.00 a.m.

  The alarm that went out on the reserved telephone circuits to the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Health was also received at the headquarters in Moscow of the civil defence, the code ‘one-two-three-four’ meaning nuclear-radiation-fire-explosive accident. General Altunin, the commander, was in Lvov, summoned to a conference along with other senior officers of the Soviet armed forces by the minister of defence, Marshal Sokolov. A call was therefore made at 3.00 a.m. to his deputy, General Ivanov. In the absence of General Altunin, he was in charge.

  The son of a brewery worker in Leningrad, Ivanov was a jovial, thick-set officer in the Zhukov mould. He had left school at the age of seventeen to enrol in the tank academy and prepare for war. In 1940, as a young lieutenant, he had taken delivery of a tank from the factory in Stalingrad. Four years later, after being wounded on four separate occasions, he fought in the final offensive on Berlin.

  Now, as deputy head of the civil defence, he moved into action. He sent for a car to take him to civil defence headquarters, and there summoned their expert on nuclear matters, General Maximov. Of course General Ivanov had his own views on the dangers of radiation; he had served for a while at the nuclear testing grounds in Kazakhstan and had received a fair dose of radiation, but nothing, he thought, that could not be flushed out by a bottle of vodka followed by a good sweat in a sauna.

  Ivanov left for a military airport outside Moscow where an A-26 was waiting to take off, but there was told to wait for experts from the Ministry of Energy and the Kurchatov Institute.

  An emergency call came through to the Central Command Post at the Ministry of Defence about an hour after the accident occurred. The duty officer immediately contacted the chief of the general staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, to report the explosion, which had possibly released radionuclides into the atmosphere. At 3.30 a.m. Marshal Akhromeev called a conference of senior officers at the Ministry of Defence. There was still no accurate information about what had happened, but Akhromeev deemed the situation serious enough to send a mobile radiation reconnaissance unit to the area, and to direct military transport aircraft to the Privolzhsky military district near Kuibyshev on the Volga. There a specialized detachment of the chemical troops was stationed which was equipped to deal with nuclear accidents – in particular the inadvertent re-entry of satellites powered with nuclear reactors.

  At 6.00 a.m., Akhromeev was told by the commander of the Kiev Military District that while the fires had been extinguished on the roof of the reactor, the explosion appeared to have occurred in the reactor itself and that the situation was now out of control. With the accident appearing more serious by the hour, General Akhromeev now ordered a full military alert, and the entire general staff was summoned to the command centre. The management of the railway system was ordered to organize rolling stock in Kuibyshev to transport the heavy equipment of the specialist brigade. Helicopters and specially equipped reconnaissance planes were ordered to Chernigov, the nearest airport to Chernobyl. A report was made to the minister of defence in Lvov, and finally Akhromeev ordered the commander of the chemical war division of the Soviet armed forces, Colonel General Pikalov, to go at once to the scene of the disaster.

  Armen Abagyan, the jovial Armenian who directed the All-Union Research Institute for Nuclear Power Plant Operation (VNIIAES), was awakened at 3.00 a.m. by a call from the Ministry of Energy and Electrification. Despite the code, he asked the operator whether this was not in fact a civil defence exercise. She said it was not, so he quickly packed a bag and drove to the ministry. Some minutes later, the minister, Mayorets, arrived together with Veretennikov, the head of the All-Union Industrial Department for Nuclear Energy. Sitting around the minister’s desk, they put a call through to Chernobyl. Brukhanov spoke to Veretennikov and reported that there had been an explosion but that they did not yet know what had caused it. The local fire brigade was dealing with the fire in the turbine hall and all possible measures were being taken to cool the reactor.

  Despite Brukhanov’s reassurance, there was a growing sense at the ministry that an extremely serious accident had occurred. A team was chosen to fly to Chernobyl at once: the minister of energy and electrification, Mayorets; his shadow in the Central Committee, Vladimir Marin; Slavsky’s deputy at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, A. G. Meshkov; Nikolai Poloshkin from Dollezhal’s institute, NIKYET, which had designed the reactor; and Armen Abagyan from VNIIAES. Professor Ryzantzev, the head of nuclear safety, was summoned from the Kurchatov Institute, and attempts were made to find Dr Kalugin, the institute’s expert on RBMK reactors. Kalugin could not be found, and Ryzantzev arrived late for the meeting because he had gone first to the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Shortly before 10.00 a.m. the group finally assembled at the military airport, where an impatient General Ivanov was waiting for them. There were two women in the group, which was unusual when there was danger, but they were needed to take samples of blood. At 10.00 a.m. the A-26 took off for Kiev.

  8

  Valeri Legasov awoke that morning unaware that the accident had occurred. He had the choice, on a Saturday, of going to his department at the university, staying at home with his wife, Margarita, or attending a meeting of his Communist party cell at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. True to his ideological outlook, he chose to go to the party meeting. He was wearing a dark suit and, despite the warm weather, took along his smart leather overcoat.

  The meeting was held in the office of the octogenarian minister, Efim Slavsky, who told Legasov when he arrived that there had been some sort of accident at the Chernobyl power station. Then they sat down to listen to a report by the party secretary of the Kurchatov Institute, Andrei Gagarinski. Legasov had to stifle a yawn. Reports of this kind were always a catalogue of victories and triumphs, though Gagarinski did mention in passing the accident at the Chernobyl station which of course was not the responsibility of their ministry, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building but that of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, and in any case was not of sufficient gravity to affect the glorious future of nuclear power.

  At midday there was a break, and Legasov went up to the offices on the second floor to find out more about the accident. There he was told that the government had already appointed a commission to take command, that he was a member and that he was to fly to Chernobyl from Vnukovo Airport at 4.00 p.m.

  The chief of the nuclear safety department at the Kurchatov Institute was Professor Eugene Ryzantzev, a tall man with a deep voice, but his speciality was the small VVER reactor, used for nuclear icebreakers and submarines. The expert on RBMK reactors was Dr Alexander Kalugin, a genial man with a pudgy face who, when he awoke that morning and saw what a fine day it was, decided that it was the perfect occasion to let his wife stay in bed and to take his four-year-old daughter for a long walk. They went further than he had intended, and she toddled very slowly, stopping every now and then to look at a dog or balance on a wall.

  When they returned home at about 1.00 p.m., Dr Kalugin’s mother-in-law, who lived with him, complained that the telephone had never stopped ringing and that he was wanted by his office. Kalugin immediately rang a deputy director who said that a car was waiting for him at the entrance to the block of flats. Twenty-five minutes later he was at the Kurchatov Institute, where he was taken straight up to Legasov’s office.

  ‘There’s been a terrible accident at Chernobyl,’ Legasov told him; ‘the worst the world has ever known. Apparently the fourth reactor has exploded.’

  Kalugin was dumbfounded.

  ‘I have to be at the airport at four,’ said Legasov, ‘but I’d like your opinion on what might have happened.’

  Kalugin was confused. ‘
Without more information I don’t know how I can even make a guess.’

  After Legasov departed Kalugin went to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, where in Veretennikov’s office he found his boss, Professor Ryzantzev, and another colleague from the Kurchatov Institute, Dr Konstantin Fedulenko. As scraps of information came in from Chernobyl, they discussed what could possibly have happened. Apparently the operators had been conducting some sort of experiment and many of the safety devices had been disconnected. Still, they did not see how an RBMK reactor could actually have exploded: a VVER, perhaps, but not the workhorse of the industry, the RBMK. It seemed more likely that there had been an explosion of hydrogen in the bubbler pool, although even that seemed unlikely. Could it have been sabotage? Or were the operators so inadequately trained that they … What? The worst they could envisage was the kind of mishap that had occurred in 1984 – a blockage in the supply of water leading to a meltdown of one or two fuel elements – but not an explosion.

  As dusk fell reports came in of numerous casualties arriving in Hospital No. 6. Then at 10.00 p.m. a call came through from Poloshkin at Chernobyl. He had been above the reactor in a helicopter and could confirm that it had been completely destroyed, and that the graphite stacks were on fire. Blocks of graphite and nuclear fuel had spewed out around the power station, millions of curies of radionuclides were rising into the atmosphere, and preparations were under way for the evacuation of Pripyat.

  It was immediately decided that a second team would leave for Chernobyl the next day, including Ryzantzev, Kalugin and Fedulenko. They all returned home, but when Fedulenko reached his flat, the telephone rang; it was Alexandrov’s secretary at the Academy of Sciences. A moment later Fedulenko heard the old man’s tremulous voice. ‘Were you at the Ministry of Energy? What did you find out?’