Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘And when should the operation commence, Comrade Minister?’ asked Antoshkin.

  Scherbina looked astonished. ‘Why, at once.’

  3

  Antoshkin had never been to Chernobyl before and had not yet seen the reactor, having arrived by car in the dark. It was still dark, and the only helicopters at his disposal equipped for night flying were two Mi-6s at the Chernigov airfield. He would have to establish a flight path, a landing pad and a control tower. But where? He asked for advice. From where could he get the best view of the power station? Someone suggested the Hotel Polessia next door. Antoshkin crossed to the hotel from the party headquarters and went up onto the roof. From there he looked out towards the glowing reactor. Then he looked down to the square below. That could be the landing pad, and this would be the control tower. He went back to the party headquarters and proposed this to Scherbina, who grumbled that the noise would interfere with the work of the commission. But Arttoshkin insisted, and the minister agreed.

  At 4.00 a.m. Scherbina and the members of his commission finally retired to snatch some rest in the Hotel Polessia, only to be awoken two hours later by the roar of the huge Mi-8 helicopters that Antoshkin had ordered up from Chernigov at first light. The first, piloted by a Colonel Serebryakov, immediately set off on a reconnaissance mission over the reactor.

  Meanwhile Antoshkin asked Scherbina where he could obtain the sand. With his natural impatience turned to exasperation by a short night’s sleep and the sudden appearance of a dry throat and irritating cough, Scherbina lambasted the air force commander in true Soviet style. Why turn to him? Had he not men under his command? Tell them to dig up the blasted sand! His men were pilots, Antoshkin replied. If they had to dig up the sand, their hands might shake as they flew over the reactor. Scherbina looked around him furiously and saw two deputy ministers, Shasharin from the Ministry of Energy and Meshkov from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. ‘Here, General,’ he said. ‘Here are two comrades who will do the loading for you. Find some shovels and bags and sand. There must be plenty of sand around; the whole place is built on it. Find some, dig it up and drop it on the damned reactor!’

  There was no arguing with a deputy prime minister. Meshkov, Shasharin and Antoshkin left the party headquarters to look for sand. They walked towards the river and there, next to a café, they found some that had been dredged out of the river for the construction of a nearby block of flats. Sacks were brought from a warehouse, and finally shovels, whereupon the general and the two deputy ministers set to work to fill the bags with sand.

  Back at the party headquarters, Scherbina called for Kizima to summon a brigade of his construction workers, but the men were not to be found. Therefore he turned to three experts who were standing by, the manager of one of the construction combines for the atomic industry, Nikolai Antonshchuk, and his chief engineer, Anatoly Zayat, along with the head of the country’s hydroelectric operations, and ordered them to help. The three men ran down to the river. The sun had risen, and it was already hot; they found Meshkov, Shasharin and Antoshkin bathed in sweat. As they worked, Antonshchuk asked Shasharin whether the Ministry of Energy would pay out bonuses for those engaged in hazardous work. Shasharin, who already realized how dangerous it was simply to be in Pripyat, wearily said yes.

  It quickly became apparent that six men were not going to be able to bag three thousand tons of sand, so rather than wait for Kizima and his men, Antonshchuk and Zayat drove off to the nearby Friendship collective farm. On this sunny Sunday morning, some of the peasants were working in the fields, others digging and planting on their private plots of land. Suddenly two sweating executives drove up and told them that they were wasting their time, that the reactor was damaged, that the land was contaminated, and that their help was needed to smother the reactor with sand. The peasants laughed at them and went on with their work. The two men drove on to a second group working in the fields. Again they told the same story and again they were ignored. They drove to the village to find the director of the farm and the party secretary. Slowly the truth sank in, and soon one hundred men and women from the Friendship farm drove to Pripyat to fill bags with sand.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Serebryakov had returned from his reconnaissance mission over the reactor. The plan was to drop the sand from as low an altitude as possible to reduce the clouds of radioactive dust that it would raise. The colonel was also warned that the work would have to be done quickly; at a level of 250 metres the level of radioactivity was three hundred rems per hour.

  Serebryakov reported to Antoshkin that the lowest they could safely fly over the reactor was two hundred metres; any lower and the hot air would foul the engines. The approach should be made at a speed of fifty kilometres an hour. The first batch of bags was brought up from the river and loaded onto the helicopter under the lash of Scherbina’s tongue. Shouting over the roar of the helicopter’s engines, he commented acidly on how good they were at blowing up power stations and how lousy at loading sand. Finally the helicopter took off with Colonel Serebryakov at the controls. Guided by a ground controller on the roof of the hotel and by his navigator, on board the helicopter, he hovered over the target while two members of the crew opened the door. As a blast of hot air hit their faces, they lowered the six sacks of sand over the side. It took seven long seconds for them to fall, but they finally disappeared with a puff into the white eye of the crater.

  As the day wore on, Colonel Serebryakov and his crew flew twenty-two missions over the reactor; another twenty-two were flown by a second team under Lieutenant Colonel Yakovlev. By 4.00 p.m. a new squadron had arrived in Chernigov from Torzhuk. At 7.00 p.m. Antoshkin and Shasharin reported to Scherbina with some satisfaction that 150 tons of sand, as well as some boron, dolomite and lead, had been dropped on the reactor. Scherbina was furious. What was 150 tons? A drop in the ocean! They would have to do better than that.

  All that afternoon, while the helicopters were flying back and forth from Pripyat to the reactor, the long line of six hundred buses moved through the town to evacuate the population.

  When the commission had reconvened at 7.00 a.m. on 27 April it had again received conflicting advice. Pikalov reported that there had been a slight rise in the levels of radiation in the town, but that there was little danger as yet of anyone receiving a dose of twenty-five rems. However, contamination north of the reactor was much higher, so there would be some danger if the wind changed. Some argued that since the norms existed, they should stick to them; others that while the whole-body dose might be well within the limits, the actual dose received by the thyroid would be many times greater, and that Pripyat was a young town with seventeen thousand children. In such a volatile situation, it was better to be safe than sorry. Scherbina was persuaded. At 10.00 a.m. he ordered General Berdov to proceed with the evacuation.

  4

  An energetic, good-looking, dark-haired man of medium height whose whole life had been spent in the militia, Berdov now put into effect the plan he had drawn up the day before. He faced a considerable task: to move fifty thousand people in a matter of hours, with minimum exposure to the open air. He had read in a Soviet newspaper that after the accident at Three Mile Island, the evacuation had taken five days and that eighty-seven people had died in the rush. He was determined not to make the same mistakes. Therefore he drew up a schedule for the buses to pick up people from their homes so that no one would have to wait in the open air, and to move them out in a coordinated convoy before dispersing to the neighbouring towns and villages that he had alerted to prepare for the refugees.

  Already that morning, members of the Komsomol Youth Movement had gone from block to block in Pripyat handing out iodine tablets for the children and advising people to stay indoors. Some took their advice; others did not. It was such a beautiful day that it was difficult to confine children to stuffy flats. However, at midday the announcement was made over the loudspeakers that the town would be evacuated. Everyone was to return to his or her block of flats and
to prepare for an absence of three days. A guard was put at the entrance of every block, and no one was to be allowed to clog the roads by leaving in their own cars.

  Some of the families had been forewarned. The taciturn Vadim Grishenka had already told his wife, Ylena, to pack a suitcase because evacuation was inevitable.

  ‘For how long?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably forever.’

  ‘But what about the May Day parade?’

  ‘There won’t be a May Day parade.’

  Not knowing when she would return, or how secure the flat would be in their absence, Ylena put together all the things she prized most: her leather coat, her fur coat, her gold bracelets, her Italian shoes and her ice skates. Her daughter had a new rucksack, which she filled mostly with her party dress. By contrast, Lubov Lelechenko, assuming that they were to be taken out into the surrounding forest, put on her oldest clothes. Luba Akimov, who had spent the morning trying to keep her children away from the windows, along with Inze Davletbayev, Natasha Yuvchenko and the other wives of the injured operators who had been flown to Moscow, obediently packed their bags and waited for the buses.

  Katya Litovsky, the pretty girl whom Nikolai Steinberg had recruited into the turbine hall in the early days of the Chernobyl power station, had to prepare not just her ten-year-old daughter, but her daughter’s friend, who was visiting. Lubov Lelechenko got a call from her daughter in Kiev, who wanted to know if they were going to Poltava for the May Day holiday, as planned, or should she come to Pripyat? Lubov dared not tell her daughter what had happened, so she handed the telephone to her husband. ‘We won’t be going to Poltava,’ he said. ‘But don’t come here.’

  The editor of Tribuna Energetica, Lubov Kovalevskaya, told her mother that she was sure she would never return. Like Ylena Grishenka, she packed her best clothes, her party dresses and an expensive woollen shawl. She told her daughter and her niece who was staying at the time to change into clean clothes, and while they did so she packed their rucksacks, but failed to notice, as they went down to the entrance of their block of flats, that her old mother was still wearing her slippers.

  One by one, the families climbed into buses, and when each was ready the policeman in charge reported by radio to the central controller. The numbers were fewer than expected: from a population of about fifty thousand only twenty-one thousand were loaded onto the buses and trains – an indication of how many had already fled. Flats were checked to make sure they were empty; and finally the signal was given for the convoy to move out.

  After only two hours, General Berdov could report to Scherbina that the operation was complete. It was a remarkable achievement, a tribute to Berdov’s abilities and to the docility of the people. There was no hysteria and few complaints. But looking out of the window of the bus at the stricken power station, Lubov Lelechenko remembered the sense of doom she had felt when she had first caught sight of it on the hydrofoil coming from Kiev.

  At Ivankov, forty miles from Chernobyl, the convoy split up, some buses going southeast towards Kiev, others northwest towards the towns of Narodici and Polesskoe. Katya Litovsky, with her daughter and her daughter’s friend, was set down in a village three miles from Polesskoe. The director of the local collective farm, responsible for finding the evacuees somewhere to stay, invited the peasant women who had surrounded them to make their choices. It was like a cattle market, the peasants with their gnarled faces, gold-capped teeth and tight headscarves staring at the crowd of urban folks in their best clothes. An old babushka invited Katya Litovsky and the girls back to her cottage, muttering as she went that it was just like the war. When they reached her cottage, they were given some food and then retired for the night, the three of them in one bed.

  The cheerful Ylena Grishenka in her elegant leather coat was given a friendly welcome by a family of poor peasants in the village of Pukhovka, where she shared a bed with her daughter. There was no bathroom, but the next day some soldiers came to the village and rigged up an outside shower with water pumped from the pond. Everyone assumed that they were outside the zone of contamination. When their hosts asked Ylena if she would like to milk the cows, she said she was frightened of them. Nor could she help dig up potatoes; she had brought only her jewellery and Italian shoes.

  Lubov Lelechenko, who had come with only a single change of clothes, was billeted in the house of the local collective-farm director in a village near Ivankov, together with the wife and daughter of Lyutov, the station’s scientific deputy chief engineer. The wife of the collective’s director was a teacher like Lubov, and the next morning took her to the village council because the teachers from Pripyat had been told to continue with their classes. But when Lubov stood up in front of the children and tried to teach them mathematics, she found that she was so disoriented she could not add the simplest sums, and her pupils had to help her.

  Further dispersal of the evacuees was strictly controlled; members of the Communist party had their cards confiscated ‘for safekeeping’. Many left anyway, particularly those who, like Tatiana Palamarchuk or Katya Litovsky, had families in the Ukraine. It was difficult to get permits or money, and some parents lost their children in the confusion. Many people had a dry throat, some a hacking cough, and all were drawn and exhausted after being torn so abruptly from their beautiful town and comfortable homes. The very backwardness and isolation of the villages of the Polessia made them realize how agreeable life in Pripyat had been. As the old peasants kept repeating, it was just like the war.

  5

  That Monday morning, 28 April, a thousand miles to the north, the alarm went off at the Fosmark nuclear power station one hundred kilometres from Stockholm when a worker passed through the dosimetric control at the end of his shift. The levels of radioactive contamination on his clothes greatly exceeded the norm. Fearing that there was a leak from the Swedish reactor, evacuation was ordered of all inessential personnel.

  Before the leak could be traced, meteorological stations in other parts of Sweden reported radioactive particles in the wind blowing across the Baltic from the Soviet Union. At first it was assumed that despite the test-ban treaty there had been an experimental detonation of a nuclear weapon, but an analysis of the isotopes soon established that the radionuclides must have come from a nuclear reactor. Although five times higher than background level, this radioactive contamination was not thought hazardous for the Swedish population, but it did suggest that there had been some kind of accident, possibly in the Ignalina plant in Lithuania. Swedish diplomats were instructed to make urgent inquiries to Moscow. Calls were made to three government agencies, including the Atomic Energy Commission; all denied that an accident had taken place. It was only at 9.00 p.m. that a statement was issued by the Soviet government’s official news agency, TASS:

  An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Plant. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.

  The same statement was broadcast on the Moscow television news programme ‘Vremya’. It was the seventh item of news.

  6

  The brief admission that there had been an accident at Chernobyl had been agreed to after a long debate at a meeting of the Politburo that Monday morning. The news that fallout had been detected in Sweden told the Soviet leaders what their own subordinates had tried to conceal – that the explosion in the fourth reactor was not an industrial accident but a major disaster. The entire resources of the nation would have to be mobilized to deal with the catastrophe, and to do this a second commission was formed within the Politburo. It was headed by the prime minister himself, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and included among its members Yegor Ligachev, Vitali Vorotnikov, and the ministers of the interior and defence.

  The Soviet leaders were acutely aware of the political as well as the ecological consequences of the disaster: not only the accident but the delay in announcing it had damaged their
country’s prestige abroad. It had been humiliating to have had the truth forced out of them by Swedish diplomats. To be able to counter the malevolent exaggerations of Western propaganda, it was vital to have precise data from Soviet sources.

  Measurements within ten kilometres of the reactor were supplied by General Pikalov. Already, on 29 April, he had sent in three groups of specially equipped helicopters, staggered at heights from fifty metres to two kilometres. Every two minutes each helicopter sucked in a sample of the air. By measuring the radioactivity, Pikalov was able to form an accurate picture of the level of contamination, and he reported to Ryzhkov and Scherbina that the active emission every twenty-four hours was about one hundred times higher than that estimated by the physicists on the ground.

  To measure contamination over a wider area, Ryzhkov summoned the chief of the State Committee of Hydrometeorology, Yuri Israel. A tall man with a burly Russian look that belied the Semitic connotations of his family name, Israel had been a student of the eminent geophysicist Fedorov, and later his deputy director at the Institute of Hydrometeorology. He had considerable experience in measuring the levels of radioactivity in the atmosphere; at the time of the test-ban treaty, he and his colleagues had set up four thousand observation stations on land, in the air and on satellites in space to measure the different parameters in the earth’s atmosphere.

  Alerted by Ryzhkov on 29 April, Israel assembled the same group of specialists and set off for Kiev. Eight aeroplanes and helicopters equipped with measuring equipment took off to track the plume of short-lived isotopes emanating from the reactor, while teams set out to measure ground contamination by the long-lived isotopes like caesium 137, strontium 90 and plutonium 239. At first it was difficult to distinguish between the radioactivity in the air and on the surface; but still, they were able to produce rough maps to show the contaminated areas by 1 May.