Sasha Yuvchenko, who in the wake of the accident had first helped his superior, Valeri Perevozchenko, to open the valves in the fruitless attempt to get water to the reactor, had bad beta burns on his arms where his skin had come into contact with the radioactive water. Fortunately he had built up considerable muscle from rowing on the Pripyat, so in performing skin grafts the doctors were able to cut out tissue 3 to 4 centimetres thick and thus save his arms from amputation. Razim Davletbayev’s condition grew worse; his temperature rose, he felt weak and he was constantly shivering with cold. Sores appeared on the inside of his mouth; blood seeped out of his nose. His hair turned grey but did not fall out.
The huge Piotr Palamarchuk, who had carried the injured Shashenok from the ruins of the fourth unit, had atrocious beta burns on his shoulders where they had touched the body of the wounded man, soaked in radioactive water. The prognosis for Piotr was poor; besides the beta burns, he had received a dose of 780 rems. His wife, Tatiana, was asked to find a donor from within the family; although terrified, his sister volunteered and came to Moscow from Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. Gale performed the transplant on the night of 8 May. Thereafter Piotr lay under intensive care in one of the aseptic units. His skin grew dark, his eyelashes and hair fell out, huge ulcers grew where the beta burns rotted his skin and in the first week of June he went blind.
On 12 June, Valeri Perevozchenko died from collapsed lungs and water on the brain. This brought particular sorrow not just to his family but also to Sasha Yuvchenko. He remembered how this former officer in the marines, when they were attempting to lower the control rods, had refused to allow Sasha to look down into the reactor, and in so doing had undoubtedly saved his life. Georgi Popov, the engineer from Kharkov who had come to witness the tests on the turbines, died on the same day from his body’s inability to resist infection.
For the next four weeks there were no more deaths, but as Guskova and Baranov knew well, the danger to their patients was not over. Acute radiation sickness follows a well-defined course lasting between two and two-and-a-half months, and until the body has regenerated its own ability to resist disease, a patient can succumb to the slightest infection. Sure enough, on 20 July an operator from Chernobyl died from an ancillary disease; so too did a locksmith from the power station, five days later.
On 30 July it was the turn of Klavdia Luzganova, a sad, middle-aged woman with apparently no relatives or friends, who had worked as a security guard and had never left her post. Her death put an end to her suffering, which had lasted ninety-six days.
Like those who had gone before her, she was buried in the Mitinko cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow. Special concrete slabs were built beneath the coffins of the victims to prevent radionuclides from seeping into the soil from their decomposing bodies.
Luzganova was the last from Chernobyl to die at Hospital No. 6. Together with Shashenok in Pripyat, Lelechenko in Kiev, an unidentified man found dead under a bridge in Pripyat, and Khodemchuk, whose body lay interred in the ruins of the fourth unit, she brought to thirty-one the number of fatalities that could be ascribed directly and unquestionably to the accident at Chernobyl. For the government’s medical commission, which had suppressed the news of admissions to other Moscow hospitals and were vague about casualties in Kiev, it became the official statistic. Any higher figure was dismissed as bourgeois falsification and Western propaganda.
To Guskova and Baranov, the disappointment at their failure to save the lives of twenty-seven of their patients was balanced by the recovery of a hundred others. One had a leg amputated, and many still had open sores, but one after another, they were released from the hospital and sent to nursing homes and sanatoriums, either in the Moscow region or in the Baltic states (it was thought important to avoid the strong sunshine in the Crimea). Some went to the sanatoriums of the KGB and were astonished at the luxurious appointments. They were all bald. Arkadi Uskov wore a hat and delayed visiting his mother until his hair had started to grow again. Later in the summer he had to return to Chernobyl to establish his right to receive sick pay. There the trade union gave him compensation for what he had suffered – fifty rubles and an umbrella.
Nina Chugunov, appalled when she had first seen her bald and shrivelled husband, now laughed so much at the way his ears stuck out that he felt obliged to wear a beret despite the hot summer sun. He was sent to a sanatorium on the Baltic, but after a couple of days was so bored that he insisted on going back to work. He went first to a non-nuclear power station in Minsk but then, by choice, back to Chernobyl. Four months after he left the hospital, the hair on his head and his body began to grow again.
Most extraordinary – almost miraculous – was the gradual regeneration of bone marrow in both Piotr Palamarchuk and another severely irradiated engineer, Anatoli Tormozin. Each had rejected the donated cells but gradually had recovered the ability to produce blood cells from his own resources. Piotr still had open sores on his legs, back, buttocks, and above all on his shoulders, which had carried the radioactive body of Shashenok. He required further skin grafts and constant medication, but he regained his sight, his healthy skin lost its ‘nuclear tan’ and his eyelashes, fingernails, toenails and hair grew again. Ascribing his recovery to his childhood in a Ukrainian village, this huge, courageous ox of a man pushed back by 180 rems the previously accepted limit of 600 rems for human survival from radiation.
When Razim Davletbayev left the hospital, he went with Inze to the centre of Moscow. They thought of all that they had lost in Pripyat – the easy life in a pleasant city set in such beautiful natural surroundings – and knew that it was gone forever. But it seemed insignificant now, when compared to the invisible and intangible good they had encountered in the wake of the disaster – the dedication of the doctors and nurses, the solicitude of their friends, the kindness of complete strangers and the wonder of life itself.
Once again Inze felt compelled to seek some altar at which she could express her gratitude for Razim’s recovery, but rather than return to the tomb of Lenin they went to Pushkin Square in the middle of Moscow. There, as they stood in front of the statue to Russia’s greatest poet, tears ran down the cheeks of the Tatar engineer. Inze was astonished; she had never before seen Razim cry. He was reading the lines inscribed on the side of the base: ‘He called on us to be merciful to those in distress.’
VIII
1
For Mikhail Gorbachev, the accident at Chernobyl could not have come at a worse time. It was a little over a year since he had been appointed general secretary, and only three months since he had embarked upon the hazardous strategies of glasnost and perestroika at the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party. He might have the same title as Leonid Brezhnev or, for that matter, Joseph Stalin, but he had by no means the same power and had gained office by the skin of his teeth. Grigori Romanov, the party boss of Leningrad, had proposed seventy-year-old Victor Grishin, the party boss of Moscow, and it was only at the insistence of the octogenarian foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, that Gorbachev had been elected.
Once in power, Gorbachev had moved swiftly to prune the dead wood; before the end of the year, Romanov had resigned ‘for reasons of health’, Grishin had been pensioned off, and Gromyko himself was pushed upstairs as head of state. With them had gone sixteen of the Soviet Union’s sixty-four ministers, 20 per cent of the party’s officials and, in their wake, a legion of dependants in the nomenklatura – a potent source of opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms.
It was not these old Brezhnevites, however, who caused Gorbachev concern, but his own ally and second-in-command Yegor Ligachev. A protégé, like Gorbachev, of Yuri Andropov’s and brought onto the Central Committee at the same time, he was older than the general secretary and held two posts, which qualified him as a credible rival for power. As the Central Committee secretary responsible for the appointment of party officials since 1983, he could call upon the support of those he had put in power, and as secretary for ideology he was the Grand Inquisitor of
communism – both the guardian and the interpreter of the dogma upon which the legitimacy of the government depended.
If the first post had created dependants in the nomenklatura, the second gave Ligachev exceptional influence in a nation still conditioned by the terror of the 1930s, when any ideological deviation led to imprisonment in a gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck. It also suited his puritanical personality. While Gorbachev’s style was relaxed, edging towards that of a Western politician, Ligachev retained the severe and formal manner of the party leader. He delivered his speeches in a loud and monotonous tone of voice, but unlike comparable officials from the Brezhnev era, he actually meant what he said. He was just as zealous as Gorbachev and Prime Minister Ryzhkov in the drive for reform, not just of the political habits and economic structures of the country, but of ‘Soviet Man’ himself. Even before Gorbachev came to power, Ligachev had begun the campaign against alcoholism under the slogan ‘For a sober leadership and a sober population’.
While Ligachev may have embodied Communist orthodoxy, he was not alone in being limited by ideological constraints. Every member of the Politburo had been raised under the Soviet system: there was nobody like Slavsky, Alexandrov or Dollezhal who could remember life before the October Revolution. Though those of Gorbachev’s generation were only too aware of the problems that beset their country, it remained inconceivable to them that socialism itself could be at fault. If Marx had been God the Father, Lenin was God the Son, the redeemer whose portrait, like an icon, hung on every wall. His word could not be doubted; his church, the party, could not err; and those who had known him, like Efim Slavsky or Armand Hammer, were venerated as the last survivors of the apostolic age.
Equally revered were the heroes of Soviet mythology – men like Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atom bomb, and his surviving disciples, Alexandrov and Dollezhal. When they had said that Soviet reactors were safe, there had been no reason why Gorbachev or Ligachev, any more than Brukhanov or Dyatlov, should doubt them. Nor had they questioned the blanket of secrecy that had covered the huge state within a state, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. The rules that had been inherited from an earlier era were the Talmud if not the Torah; canon law, if not holy writ, and glasnost, the policy of openness that they themselves had so recently imposed upon a naturally sceptical people, was meant not to question socialism but to expose such sins against it as sloth, inefficiency, drunkenness and corruption.
For a credible heaven there must be a hell, and the Soviet leaders’ conditioning had taught them that evil emanated from the capitalist West. Brought up to believe that their ideological enemies were conspiring to destroy their workers’ state, even the younger members of the Politburo were by reflex ready for a fight. Had not the American president, Reagan, described their country as ‘an evil empire’? Was he not planning a massive escalation of the arms race with his Strategic Defense Initiative? One of Gorbachev’s closest allies, Alexander Yakovlev, knew America well. He had been an exchange student at Columbia in the 1960s and had served as ambassador to Canada. Now he was the member of the Politburo who knew most about American foreign policy, and less than a year before had written in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, ‘If the political and military leadership in the U.S. views the balance of power as favourable to such a solution, the Americans do not rule out the direct unleashing of a war against the Soviet Union in their calculations and plans.’
With the gradual but growing realization that even if glasnost and perestroika succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, even if Homo sovieticus sobered up after centuries of tippling and worked as diligently and skilfully as socialist ideology suggested he should, the Soviet Union would be hard-pressed to match the technological pyrotechnics of America’s star wars, and it still did not enter the head of any member of the Central Committee or the Politburo that it was time to throw in the towel and admit defeat. In head and heart, all of them remained loyal to the cause, including the burly giant from Siberia who had replaced the discredited Grishin as party boss of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin. (At the time of the accident at Chernobyl, he was in Hamburg as a fraternal delegate at the congress of the diminutive Communist party of West Germany.)
As a result not just of this conditioning, but of the classified nature of any information about nuclear power, news of the accident at Chernobyl had remained secret. At first the Soviet leaders were informed that it was merely a fire that had been brought under control, and thereafter they were prevented from discovering the gravity of the disaster by the habitual reluctance of lesser officials to be the bearers of bad tidings – or their vain hope that their incompetence could somehow be covered up. It was only when the leaders learned of the furious protests by the Swedes about the cloud of radionuclides that had crossed the Baltic Sea that they appreciated both the gravity of the crisis and its implications for their country’s prestige abroad.
On the morning of Monday 28 April Mikhail Gorbachev had called the members of the Politburo to his office for an emergency meeting. Few of them knew what had happened. Geydar Aliev, at one time chairman of the KGB in Azerbaijan and now a deputy prime minister, had heard rumours of the accident but had not been officially informed. Even now the crisis that faced the Politburo was not so much the accident itself as whether or not to admit that it had taken place. The practical and the political were inextricably mixed. The whole population might panic, which would offer an unparalleled opportunity in the West for bourgeois falsification and anti-Soviet propaganda. Yet what was the point of a policy of glasnost if it fell at this first hurdle?
Different members of the Politburo argued the different points of view. Alexander Yakovlev, head of the propaganda department of the Central Committee, confessed that he did not know what to say. Yegor Ligachev argued forcefully for saying as little as possible. As head of the ideological department of the Central Committee, he had to consider the ideological implications if the full scale of the catastrophe became known. Science was the basis of communism, and communism was the religion of the Soviet state. Like the space programme, atomic power was one of their most dramatic achievements. To admit that it had failed – that rather than helping people it had harmed them – would undermine their trust in scientific socialism, not just in the Soviet Union but throughout the world.
Geydar Aliev disagreed. ‘Come off it,’ he said to Ligachev. ‘We can’t conceal this.’ The cat was out of the bag. Not just in Sweden but also in Poland and Germany there were reports of unusually high levels of radiation. Soon the whole world would suspect, and it was only by providing truthful, accurate information that they could prevent bourgeois falsification and give glasnost some credibility.
Yakovlev came around to Aliev’s point of view: it would be best to come clean. But when the vote was taken, Ligachev’s views prevailed. A statement was issued through TASS announcing that the accident had taken place and that a government commission had been appointed. A rider was to be added for Soviet newspapers that nothing was to be reported but this communiqué. The statement was broadcast that night to the Soviet people as the seventh item of news on ‘Vremya’.
Less than an hour later TASS issued a second statement:
The accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station is the first one in the Soviet Union. Similar accidents happened on several occasions in other countries. In the United States, 2,300 accidents, breakdowns and other faults were registered in 1979 alone, according to the public organization called Critical Mass. The major causes of the dangerous situation are the poor quality of reactors and other types of equipment, unsatisfactory control over the technical conditions of the equipment, non-observance of safety regulations and insufficient training of personnel.
The simple admission that an accident had taken place did nothing to assuage the anger and speculation abroad. An approach from the Kurchatov Institute to the Swedes for advice was leaked to the press and led foreign experts to conclude that there had been either a meltdown at Chernobyl or else an uncontrollable gra
phite fire. An admission by TASS on 29 April that two people had been killed in the accident was dismissed as improbable; it was reported by UPI on the same date that a source in Kiev ‘with hospital and rescue team contacts’ had said in a telephone interview that ‘eighty people died immediately and some 2,000 died on the way to hospitals.’ This figure found its way into the major papers in the U.S. and was reported by Dan Rather on ‘CBS News’. A short time later, UPI reported that Westerners had telephoned their embassies from Kiev to say that up to three thousand people were dead. These rumours gained credence on 30 April when Kenneth Adelman, the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, told a Congressional hearing in Washington that two thousand people lived in a village near the reactor, and that the Soviet claims of only two casualties ‘seemed preposterous … in terms of an accident of this magnitude.’
A lower estimate of casualties was given by a Dutch radio ham, who had heard from a Russian correspondent that there were ‘many hundreds of dead and injured and maybe many, many more.’ In a telephone interview, a Scottish schoolteacher living in Kiev told the London Times that local citizens with contacts in the energy ministry had said that up to three hundred people might have died. Plans were made by the British embassy in Moscow to evacuate the seventy British students and tourists in Kiev and the thirty in Minsk. The U.S. embassy advised all of its citizens in Kiev to leave at once. An Austrian firm building a metallurgical plant at Zhlobin, one hundred miles north of Chernobyl, chartered a plane to evacuate the fifty wives and children of their engineers.
The refusal of the Soviet government to release any concrete information made it difficult for responsible Western correspondents in Moscow to refute the rumours that were being relayed back by broadcasts from stations like Radio Liberty in Munich. It was not just professionally frustrating but personally disturbing; the New York Times correspondent Serge Schmemann had his wife and three children in Moscow. When it was feared that local produce might be contaminated, the U.S. embassy made its own dosimetric checks on local produce and permitted U.S. journalists and their families to buy supplies brought in from Finland for diplomatic personnel. This not only enraged the Russian government but led to awkward exchanges with Russian friends.
Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl Page 21
