Down with Big Brother (29 page)

In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the government blamed the disaster on Bryukhanov, Dyatlov, and their subordinates. It was true that they had ignored safety rules and made serious errors of judgment. The investigation showed that the operators had switched off the emergency cooling system to Reactor No. 4 so that it would not interfere with the turbine experiment. They had failed to observe proper shutdown procedures. At a secret trial in July 1987 both Dyatlov and Bryukhanov were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for “violations of discipline.” Four other operators received prison sentences ranging from two to ten years. The prosecution described the defendants as “nuclear hooligans.”

By producing a few scapegoats, the court neatly absolved everybody else of responsibility. The verdict deflected attention away from a series of major design flaws in the Chernobyl type of reactor, such as the lack of a containment structure to prevent leaks of radioactivity. It turned out that such reactors were chronically unstable at low levels of power, but no one had bothered to inform the operators about this defect. The operators were also unaware that under certain circumstances, the emergency shutdown mechanism
could trigger a fatal surge of power. This is precisely what happened at Chernobyl. To have admitted all this at the time would have raised questions about the whole future of the nuclear power industry. It was much easier to blame “operator error.”

The real villain of Chernobyl was not the operators or even the designers of the flawed reactor, but the Soviet system itself. It was a system that valued conformity over individual responsibility, concerned with today rather than tomorrow, a system that treated both man and nature as “factors of production” that could be mercilessly exploited. Eventually something had to break.

The violation of safety procedures was the norm, rather than the exception, in Soviet factories. So too was the obsession with secrecy that deprived the operators of the Chernobyl plant of basic information about the design of the reactor and previous nuclear accidents. But perhaps the gravest shortcoming of the system was the way it suppressed the notion of individual responsibility. The physical bravery displayed by many of the six hundred thousand “liquidators” who took part in the Chernobyl cleanup efforts—beginning with the operators themselves and the firemen who fought the blaze on the roof of the turbine hall—was remarkable. Equally remarkable was the moral cowardice that caused otherwise decent individuals to go along with senseless and reprehensible decisions, including a fatal delay in the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from heavily contaminated areas. When the Ukrainian Communist Party chief insisted that May Day parades go ahead in Kiev despite the fact that radioactive winds were blowing in the direction of the capital, hardly anyone stood up to protest.

This moral failing was eventually recognized by one of the leaders of the Soviet nuclear industry, academician Valery Legasov, who committed suicide on the second anniversary of the disaster. Shortly before his death he gave an interview in which he complained that technology had been permitted to outpace morality. He explained that the previous generation of Soviet scientists—men like Sakharov, Kurchatov, and Kapitsa—had stood “on the shoulders of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.” They had been educated in the spirit of beautiful literature, great art, and a “correct moral sense.” But somewhere along the line the connection with Russia’s prerevolutionary traditions had been broken. “Soviet man” was technically developed but morally stunted.

“We will not cope with anything if we do not renew our moral attitude to work,” Legasov concluded.
¹¹¹

The Soviet system made a catastrophe like Chernobyl unavoidable. It then compounded the tragedy by an insistence on secrecy so absurd that it
was ultimately self-defeating. The attempted cover-up was all the more grotesque because it came when the rest of the world was in the throes of an information revolution that rapidly revealed the magnitude of the disaster.

O
NE OF THE FIRST DECISIONS
taken by Bryukhanov in the early-morning hours of Saturday, April 26, was to order nonessential telephone lines around Chernobyl to be cut.
¹¹²
It was an apparatchik’s instinctive reaction to a major disaster. To the Communist bureaucratic mind, there is nothing more frightening than loss of control. Panic could be avoided by keeping the population in the dark.

During those first few hours after the explosion, thousands of people living in the immediate vicinity of the power plant received potentially fatal doses of radiation. Unaware of the danger, people took advantage of the warm weather to tend their gardens, visit friends, and play outside with their children. Local officials later boasted that sixteen couples were married in Pripyat that day, proving how “normal” everything was less than two miles away from the burning reactor.

Years later the people of Pripyat would have reason to curse the lack of information. Thousands died because of mysterious illnesses. The health of tens of thousands of others was permanently ruined. Leukemia rates soared. “If we had known what had happened, of course we would have remained indoors and taken precautions. God knows how much radiation we might have been spared,” said Nadezhda Spachenko, a Chernobyl engineer, whose children soon began to suffer chronic headaches, nosebleeds, swollen thyroid glands, and general fatigue.
¹¹³

In the best Soviet tradition, the investigation of the Chernobyl disaster was entrusted to the very people who were largely responsible for the tragedy. The first government commission arrived on the scene eighteen hours after the explosion. It was headed by Deputy Prime Minister Boris Shcherbina and included the designers of the failed reactor. Shcherbina was a leader of the old school, a little Napoleon who could instill terror in his subordinates with a harsh remark or withering glance. He had served as minister of oil and gas, a job that involved relentless cracking of the whip to ensure the fulfillment of planned targets. Promoted to the post of deputy prime minister in charge of the entire energy sector, he had attempted to apply similar methods to the building of nuclear power stations, a policy that had resulted in a sharp fall in safety standards. His handling of the emergency was summed up by a phrase that he used soon after his arrival in Pripyat: “Panic is worse than radiation.”
¹¹⁴

The evacuation of Pripyat finally got under way at 1:30 p.m. on April 27, thirty-six hours after the disaster. Believing they would be allowed to return in a few days, after the emergency was over, the residents left most of their belongings behind. Within a couple of hours a city of forty-eight thousand people had been turned into a ghost town. Pets had to be left behind because their hair was dangerously radioactive. For a few days packs of sick and hungry dogs roamed the streets, turning increasingly ferocious as it became clear that their masters would never return. Eventually they were rounded up and shot. In later years Pripyat became an eerie testimonial to the early Gorbachev era, with faded propaganda banners hailing the forthcoming May Day holiday.

It was not until the radioactive cloud reached Sweden on April 28, two and a half days after the explosion, that the rest of the world found out that a major nuclear disaster had occurred. An emergency Politburo session was convened in Moscow to consider how to respond to inquiries from Western governments and media organizations. After some debate, the Politburo decided to provide as little information as possible. That evening, a television announcer read a terse four-line communiqué from the Soviet government: “An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up.” Censors instructed Soviet editors to refrain from publishing anything about Chernobyl other than the official government communiqué.

Deprived of information, Soviets living in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl exposed themselves to further danger, at a time when people thousands of miles away, in Western Europe, were drinking powdered milk and scrubbing vegetables. On Tuesday, April 29, U.S. intelligence analysts were stunned to see satellite pictures of an open-air soccer game taking place less than a mile from the smoldering reactor. A barge was sailing peacefully down the Pripyat River as if nothing had happened.
¹¹⁵
The second stage of the evacuation, affecting eighty-five thousand people living within an eighteen-mile radius of the power plant, did not begin until May 5, more than a week after the explosion. Apart from a few privileged officials, scarcely anyone in the zone received potassium iodide pills that might have afforded some protection against fast-decaying radioisotopes, such as iodine 131.

By insisting on secrecy, the government commission exposed many more people than necessary to high doses of radiation. Hundreds of thousands of “liquidators”—mainly young people of child-bearing age—were ordered to
take part in the cleanup effort. Many evacuees ended up in places that were only a little less dangerous than those they had left. Shcherbina ignored expert advice and ordered a new city, Slavutich, to be built on contaminated ground, to house Chernobyl workers and their families. In order to reduce the numbers of people requiring medical treatment, the government secretly approved a tenfold increase in “safe” radiation levels two weeks after the accident. For three years meat and milk from the contaminated region were mixed with clean meat and milk from other regions and sold all over the country.
¹¹⁶

Chernobyl was a symbol of the failure of the command-and-administer system. But in an ironic way, it was also an instrument of retribution against the system and its hitherto untouchable representatives. Most of the senior officials involved in the Chernobyl cleanup understood very little about radiation or nuclear physics. Through a combination of ignorance and bravado, they took needless risks. One deputy minister received a fatal dose of radiation in a top Moscow clinic after being assigned a bed previously used by a Chernobyl firefighter.
¹¹⁷
A later investigation showed that the nursing staff had failed to change the bed linen, so patients were contaminating one another.

Shcherbina himself died under mysterious circumstances in August 1990, at the age of seventy, after what the Soviet press described as “a serious illness.” He had exposed himself to needless risks by eating contaminated food and flying over the reactor without protective clothing, but it was unclear whether his death was caused by radiation. In 1988 he had issued a secret decree forbidding doctors from citing radiation as a cause of death or illness.
¹¹⁸

THE KREMLIN
July 3, 1986

T
HE
S
OVIET
U
NION’S
most eminent nuclear scientists sat at little desks in front of Mikhail Gorbachev, like disobedient schoolchildren summoned to explain themselves before the headmaster. A portrait of Lenin gazed down severely from the walls of the Kremlin conference hall. Politburo members and ministers shifted uneasily in their chairs, uncertain who would be the next target of the general secretary’s wrath.

Under Brezhnev, Politburo meetings had been pro forma affairs, often lasting little more than twenty or thirty minutes. By long-established ritual, they took place every Thursday, on the third floor of the government building in the Kremlin, beginning on the stroke of 11:00 a.m. Many crucial decisions, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, were made by a handful of Brezhnev cronies and not even discussed by the full Politburo. After Gorbachev came to power, there was a complete change of routine. Politburo meetings turned into marathon brainstorming sessions that frequently lasted for eight or ten hours. The new
gensek
liked to include as many people as possible in the decision-making process. At times of crisis seventy or eighty people might crowd into the gloomy Politburo conference hall, to be subjected to long harangues by Gorbachev.
¹¹⁹

“For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe,” the Soviet leader fumed, addressing the nuclear barons. “You assumed we would
look up to you as gods. That’s the reason why all this happened, why it ended in disaster. There was nobody controlling the ministries and scientific centers. And for the moment, I can see no signs that you have drawn the necessary conclusions. In fact, it seems that you are attempting to cover everything up.”
¹²⁰

Rage and frustration had been building up inside Gorbachev for weeks. Apart from the immense destruction and suffering that it had caused, Chernobyl had been a public relations catastrophe. It could not have occurred at a worse time. Naturally the West had seized on the catastrophe, and the initial cover-up, as evidence that nothing had really changed in the Soviet Union. His own reputation as a dynamic new leader was in tatters. Western commentators had made much of the fact that it had taken eighteen days for him to go on Soviet television with a personal account of the disaster. They had described his eighteen-minute speech as “defensive” and “uninformative.”

Gorbachev was angry with the Western media and the Reagan administration for criticizing his performance and questioning his commitment to reform. He was depressed by the stories of bureaucratic heartlessness and incompetence that had come to his attention. Most of all, he was furious about the difficulty of obtaining fast and accurate information from his own subordinates. He believed that the leadership had been misled about the reliability of the Chernobyl type of reactor, radioactivity levels in the disaster zone, and much more. He accused the nuclear chieftains of using a cult of secrecy to safeguard their vested interests, refusing to share information even with the Central Committee and the government. Free from outside control, they had created a mini-empire riddled with “the spirit of servility, sycophancy, persecution of dissidents, window-dressing, personal connections, and clans.”