Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  The man called upon to advise the commission on what to make of this information was the director of the Institute of Biophysics, Academician Leonid Ilyn. The son of an engineer and the grandson of an engine driver, Ilyn had served five years in the navy as a medical officer attached to the Black Sea fleet after graduating from the Leningrad Medical Institute. In 1963 he had returned to Leningrad to do research at the Institute of Radiological Hygiene. It was from here that he had travelled to Mayak to study the aftereffects of that accident, and to the nuclear testing grounds in Kazakhstan. In a safe in his office, Ilyn kept a lead box that held a wooden Russian doll containing the little black pearls formed by the melting of sand at the epicentre of a nuclear explosion.

  The field of Ilyn’s research was the protection of human beings from radioactivity, and frequently he and his colleagues would conduct experiments on themselves to test the efficacy of stable iodine against contamination by radioactive iodine 131. He was also an able administrator; at the age of only thirty-three, he was appointed a deputy director of the Institute of Radiological Hygiene, and in 1967, before he was forty, he was chosen by Slavsky, the minister of medium machine building, to head the ministry’s Institute of Biophysics in Moscow.

  A man of medium height, with strong features and a robust voice, Ilyn had kept the commanding manner of a naval officer. It was not difficult to imagine him as a provincial governor in czarist times. He was a member of the Communist party, but he was less of an ideological zealot than a Russian patriot, proud to have been born in Smolensk, where the armies of both Napoleon and Hitler had been routed; proud, too, of the achievements of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Lenin, who had thrust his backward nation into the vanguard of mankind. A huge portrait of Lenin in inlaid wood hung on the wall of his office, which looked out over the Moscow River.

  For all his qualities as a leader, Ilyn remained a scientist, and he continued his research into the effects of radiation. His work was classified, but his achievements were recognized, and in 1974 he was elected to the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences. As his institute was funded by the rich Ministry of Medium Machine Building, much of its research related to defence – in particular, the provision of data on the possible consequences of a nuclear war. In 1970, soon after he had become director of the institute, Ilyn had cowritten and published a circular entitled ‘Temporary Instructions on Measures to Be Taken to Protect the Population in the Event of Nuclear Explosions’. The circular’s main point was the need to protect the thyroid gland from radioactive iodine 131 by taking pills of stable iodine. It also envisaged a serious leak of radioactivity from a civilian reactor, recommending a detailed contingency plan at every nuclear power station.

  It was this document that specified the norms for evacuation, as well as recommending doses of iodine. It was approved by the deputy chief medical officer of the Soviet Union, but only a thousand copies were printed. It was updated in 1984 under the Commission of Radiation Safety, headed by Academician Ilyn, with only some minor amendments, but was given no wider circulation. To prepare too well for an accident might lead people to believe that it could happen.

  More plausible was a war, and here Ilyn had been drawn into the propaganda battle with NATO strategists in the West. Because of the Soviet advantage in conventionally armed forces, it was said that the West would have to defend itself with nuclear weapons, using short-range rockets like the Minutemen and Cruise missiles against the Soviets’ wave of tanks.

  Inevitably, the advantage of Soviet conventional superiority would be retained if public opinion in the West could be convinced that a nuclear war of any kind would have disastrous consequences for both sides. In March 1981, with Brezhnev’s personal physician, the cardiologist Yevgeni Chazov, later the minister of health, Ilyn attended the First Congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, in Airlie, Virginia. In 1984, with Chazov and Angelina Guskova, he published a book in both Russian and English called Nuclear War: The Medical and Biological Consequences: Soviet Physicians’ Viewpoint. Although peppered with Cold War rhetoric (‘There is truly no limit to the cynicism of top Washington officials and their NATO accomplices’), essentially it was an extrapolation of the research done on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which showed the extensive and long-lasting harm done by radiation.

  The intention of the book was to alert the public to the catastrophic aftermath of a nuclear war, and so to put pressure on Western strategists to abandon their ‘cynical’ first-strike option. Therefore it made the most of Japanese research, which established ‘a greater number of identifications of certain types of cancer’ among those who received ‘a more than 100-rad irradiation dose’:

  Leukosis, especially in its acute forms, is one of the diseases that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt to stem from nuclear explosion effects. Leukaemic transformations of haemopoiesis are most likely to occur within 5 to 10 years following irradiation resulting in that period in a greater (fivefold to tenfold) increase of leukaemia, as against reference groups of persons who received a less than 10-rad dose. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation publications over a number of years also contain strong evidence of excessive mortality from leukosis among men and women of all ages who as a result of nuclear explosion received doses of 50–200 rads, as compared with groups with less than a 10-rad dose and nationwide statistics.

  For those who received a dose of more than two hundred rads, the probability of developing other forms of cancer was doubled; only for uterine and pancreatic cancer was it the same, and for rectal cancer the risk was reduced. Nor were smaller doses necessarily harmless; in his invective against the neutron bomb, Ilyn warned that ‘even small radiation doses will affect people very seriously.’ A dose of fifteen rads would not lead to radiation sickness, but ‘subsequently some of those irradiated are likely to develop malignant tumours or leukaemia. Negative genetic consequences may occur in several generations of the descendants of those initially exposed.’

  VI

  1

  On 29 April, on Ryzhkov’s instructions, Academician Leonid Ilyn flew to Kiev. That very day, the direction of the wind changed. Instead of blowing from the southeast, carrying the millions of curies of radioactive isotopes still spewing out of Chernobyl towards the relatively sparsely populated territory to the north, it now carried them back across the Ukraine towards its capital city, Kiev.

  Upon landing at Juliana airport, Ilyn was immediately besieged by anxious officials desperate to know what danger they faced. This filled him with a sense of foreboding; suddenly he realized how few people were qualified to assess the risk. In the entire Soviet Union, the number of real experts could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The level of radioactivity in the city of Kiev was 2.2 millirems per hour; if it remained at this level, it would take more than a year to reach the minimum dose of twenty-five rems. However, he knew that even a small dose received by a large number of people could have serious consequences for a few. There was no absolute safety but only an element of risk that had to be weighed in the balance, not so much by scientists as by political leaders.

  The city was in full bloom. Built on a bluff overlooking the Dnieper River, with the golden domes of its many monasteries glinting in the sun, it reminded visiting Muscovites that it had been the first capital of the Christian kingdom of Rus. Lying in the midst of rich farmland stretching to the Black Sea, it had for a millennium been the trading centre for the exchange of exotic fruits from the warmer climate of the southern Ukraine for furs and timber from the forests to the north. Despite the destruction wrought by war and revolution, and the heavy monuments to socialism and the Motherland that had been built in parts of the city, the undulating, tree-lined boulevards and the great curve of the wide Khreshchatyk still suggested a lightness and vitality that contrasted with the dour thoroughfares of Moscow and Minsk. It was a city for spring, when all at once, throughout the Ukraine, the fruit trees came into blossom and the long gre
y winter was transformed into a colourful, fragrant world. This particular spring was the finest that any could remember. The sun was as hot as in midsummer, and the whole city of three million people was in a state of high excitement as it prepared for the festivities surrounding the May Day parade – to celebrate the triumphs of socialism, of course, but also an improvised festival that served as an excuse to drink up stocks of vodka before the new laws against alcoholism came into force.

  Everyone was busy. Carpenters were building the dais on the Khreshchatyk from which the party leaders would watch the parade; municipal workers were winching up the huge portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin; young Komsomol activists raised the red bunting and banners with the slogan PROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

  The journalists prepared their copy for the May Day editions of their papers:

  Soviet people are celebrating this May Day – the day of the working people’s international solidarity – as a drastic turning point in the dynamics of the substantial acceleration of the country’s development. The emotional content of the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – a congress of Party principledness, exactingness and Bolshevik truth, the optimism and businesslike nature of its life-giving ideas, the grandeur and realism of the plans it put forward – that is what is the all-embracing determining basis for the sociopolitical and moral atmosphere in which Soviet society is now living and which also dominates today’s celebrations.

  To link the wonderful weather to the promise of perestroika was irresistible:

  Each May Day has its peculiar distinctive features. This year it had a powerful ideopolitical and revolutionary incentive: the 27th CPSU Congress was held and it opened for the Soviet people a path to new accomplishments, to new qualities of life, to an accelerated socioeconomic development of our society.

  But international ramifications were not to be forgotten:

  An important feature of this May Day, too, was the fact that it marked a jubilee. A hundred years have passed since the day when the authorities cruelly suppressed a general strike by the American workers, a day that initiated the celebration of the day of the Working People’s International Solidarity. The red banners waving in the May breeze seemed to converse with the red calico of slogans and posters. By the side of the Central Tribune fly the state flags of the USSR and all Soviet republics, in whose family the Soviet Ukraine has also won its happiness.

  Presiding over the celebrations was Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. One of the last survivors of the Brezhnev era, he had been obliged to dismiss nine of his twenty-five regional secretaries during Andropov’s drive against corruption, though he himself had survived.

  Alerted to the accident at Chernobyl, the various forces at the disposal of the Ukrainian government had been dispatched with exemplary speed and skill. The militia, the civil defence and the troops of the Ministry of the Interior and the KGB had sealed off the stricken area before sunrise on 26 April. No one had worn protective clothing of any kind.

  Less alert were the officials of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, who, like their counterparts in Belorussia and the Russian Federation, were caught totally unprepared by the accident. Assuming, like everyone else, that Soviet nuclear reactors were safe, they had made no contingency plans for mass protection against radiation. Moreover, the power station and the city of Pripyat were outside Ukrainian jurisdiction. Chernobyl was an All-Union facility whose medical services were the responsibility of the Third Division of the Soviet Ministry of Health.

  An added misfortune was the absence at the time of the accident of the Ukrainian Minister of Health, Anatoli Romanenko; he was at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia. When the scale of the catastrophe became apparent, his officials prepared to cater to the evacuees from Pripyat and the ten-kilometre zone. Up to one hundred teams were formed to take care of them, but treatment was circumscribed by the available resources. The supplies of stable iodine were quite inadequate for it to be distributed to the whole population, and there were no clear guidelines as to whether or not it was required, or what threat was posed by the escaping radiation.

  While many senior figures in the party and the administration with private knowledge of the gravity of the accident at Chernobyl sent their children and grandchildren out of the city, the Ukrainian leaders accepted Ilyn’s judgment that the people of Kiev were not at risk, and preparations continued for the May Day parade.

  2

  Ilyn now flew north to Chernobyl and had the plane circle above the fourth unit. Once again, as with Scherbina, Legasov and Pikalov, it took the sight of the destroyed reactor to make him appreciate the magnitude of the disaster. As the plane flew over the deserted town of Pripyat, he noticed a line of nappies strung across a balcony on the top floor of a nine-storey block of flats, and just above, on the roof, a red and black banner proclaiming, ‘LONG LIVE 1 MAY!’ The sight brought home to him that this industrial catastrophe was also a human tragedy. But his faith in the Soviet system was not shaken. When he arrived at Party Headquarters and saw the resources that had been marshalled to contain the accident, he felt that it could only have been done so rapidly and effectively under a centralized, authoritarian form of government.

  Everywhere there were signs of vigorous activity. The decision had been made that day by Scherbina and the commission to move its headquarters from Pripyat to the town of Chernobyl, twenty kilometres from the power station. The hospital, too, was to be evacuated and the contaminated town abandoned. A holiday camp for young Pioneers – the Boy Scouts of the Communist party – had been requisitioned to provide living quarters for the doctors, nurses and power station personnel. Pikalov’s troops were housed under canvas in uncontaminated territory, sixty to a tent; others were billeted as far away as Ivankov, sixty kilometres from Chernobyl.

  The bombing of the reactor with sandbags had now reached a rate of over 180 runs a day. The drivers of the Atomic Energy Transport Association had been organized to dig up clay from a quarry near the village of Chistogalovka, only five kilometres from the power station, and to deliver it in sacks to the helicopter pads. Major General Antoshkin, the air force commander, now had at his disposal the heavier Mi-6 and Mi-26 helicopters, which had flown in from Torzhok. The pilots, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan, were required to exercise great skill in horrific conditions. Guided by the controller on the roof of the Hotel Polessia, they had to fly low enough to hit their target, yet avoid the many pylons and cables close to the power station and the tall chimney that rose from the fourth unit.

  It was very hot, but they dared not switch on the fans to ventilate the cabins for fear of drawing in radioactive dust, so they sweated profusely with both heat and tension. They kept the crews to a minimum – usually no more than two pilots and a navigator. Some rudimentary measures were taken to protect them. Before setting off from Chernigov airport at 4.00 a.m., they were given iodine pills with their breakfast, and they were instructed to take more when they returned at 11.00 p.m., but most were too exhausted to remember. Some sheets of lead were placed beneath the seats of the helicopters, but any added weight detracted from the load each helicopter could carry.

  The airmen carried dosimeters and were withdrawn from duty when they had received a dose of twenty-five rems. However, because of the war in Afghanistan, there was a limited number of people available. Knowing the danger, many were afraid. Party zealots among the pilots formed a group to raise morale, using the slogan ‘Any effort, energy and, if necessary, one’s life to fulfil the government’s tasks!’, but it did not always work. A young pilot from the Torzhok squadron at first refused to fly but was finally persuaded by a companion that the job had to be done. Others summoned up Dutch courage, calming their nerves when they returned at night by drinking the alcohol stored on board the helicopters as a defreezing agent. It helped them sleep and was still on their breath in the morning. Their commanders smelled it but made no objection.
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  In the first days Scherbina complained to Pikalov and Ivanov that Antoshkin was incompetent, but subsequently he recognized the efficacy of the calm young commander’s operation. On 28 April Antoshkin’s helicopters made 93 sorties over the reactor; on the 29th this had increased to 186, and the payloads had grown larger by using upturned parachutes as nets to hold between six and eight sacks at a time. On the 30th they estimated that they had dropped over a thousand tons of sand, clay, boron and lead. Moreover, the strategy seemed to be succeeding: the emission of radionuclides was decreasing from an estimated 12 million curies on the day of the accident to 4 million on the 27th, 3.75 on the 28th, 3 million on the 29th and little over 2 million on 30 April. On the eve of May Day, Valeri Legasov could feel satisfied that he had given Scherbina the right advice.

  3

  Not everyone agreed. On 27 April, the two experts on the RBMK reactors from the Kurchatov Institute had arrived at Chernobyl. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Legasov’s Hamlet, Alexander Kalugin and Konstantin Fedulenko had been brought from Kiev’s Juliana airport in a minibus carrying nine or ten scientists, their measuring equipment and a special camera from NIKYET. Beyond Ivankov, they were held up by the long line of buses coming from Pripyat, and only reached their destinations in the evening.

  Checking into the Hotel Polessia, they were asked to pay two rubles in advance for their room. The hotel’s restaurant was closed, so they went out into the streets to look for some supper. They came to a café surrounded by a crowd of people; everything in it was being given away free. All the food was gone, but there were packs of cigarettes, even the coveted BTs (Bulgarian Tobacco), which were normally hard to find. The scientists filled their pockets and sauntered on. Some people were in uniform, others in civilian clothes. A dosimetrist they knew advised them to remain indoors, and so, despairing of supper, they returned to their rooms in the hotel, where, on the advice of the dosimetrist, they moved the beds away from the window.