Revolution 1989 (30 page)

Officials in Moscow knew the reactor core was still burning. Gorbachev had sent a commission headed by the Prime Minister to take on-the-spot control and provide honest reports back to the Kremlin. They arrived late on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning, more than a day and a half after the explosions, the local authorities finally decided that it was time to evacuate Pripyat, the dormitory town of around 45,000 people just three kilometres from the Chernobyl plant. It was, by Soviet standards, a well-built industrial town, in a lovely setting that had not been entirely spoilt by the sight of the reactor domes, or the slight humming sound that the plant emitted. Pripyat was clean, the apartment blocks were solid and there were excellent recreational facilities for inhabitants, most of whom worked at Chernobyl. The surrounding countryside was beautiful woodland, pine trees beside a meandering river. It was a fine and warm spring weekend. From the edge of town, a favourite place for walks, people could see the damage to the power plant and the emergency services hard at work. But they had been told throughout the Saturday that there was no danger, that radiation levels were barely higher than normal, and there was nothing to worry about. So they took advantage of the warm weather. They took country walks. Children played outside. Sixteen couples were married. It was a normal spring day.

By mid-morning on the Sunday the inhabitants were told to leave in a hurry, most of them expecting that it would be safe to return in a few days. They left most of their belongings behind. By 1.30 p.m. all of them had left and Pripyat looked like a ghost town, its only inhabitants the domestic pets left to fend for themselves. They either died or turned wild. The evacuation was too late. If people had been moved earlier they might have been saved from long exposure to high levels of radiation. Or if within a few hours they had received iodine they might have been spared the tumours to the thyroid gland from which thousands of Pripyat residents suffered later. Many hundreds died from cancers and leukaemia within three years - many more within a decade.
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By Sunday afternoon the rest of the world was beginning to know about Chernobyl. A radioactive cloud blew north-west, dusting eastern Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavia. By Sunday afternoon in Helsinki a laboratory reported that it was seeing radiation levels of six times higher than normal background. By dawn on Monday 28 April the Studsvik energy laboratory on the Baltic coast in Sweden and the Forsmark nuclear power plant around eighty kilometres north of Stockholm recorded radiation levels 150 times higher than background. Initially it was thought that the contamination might have come from a missile test or a nuclear weapon that had accidentally blown up in its launch silo. But soon the Swedes discovered that the cloud must have come from a power plant - nuclear weapons and nuclear energy produce distinct kinds of fission material. Calculating wind direction and velocity, Sweden officially announced that there must have been a large explosion at a Soviet nuclear power plant that was spreading radiation across northern Europe. It was the front-page story throughout the world for the next several days.

The Soviets had said nothing. They did not inform governments of the countries that were being contaminated, or their own people in Ukraine, Russia or Byelorussia. They did not tell the comrades in the ‘socialist commonwealth’. This was not the first nuclear disaster in Soviet history. Unknown to the rest of the world and the Soviet public, there had been at least one accident at a weapons-testing site and thirteen serious power-reactor accidents since the Soviet Union had become a nuclear nation in the late 1940s. In the earlier accident at Chernobyl Number 1 reactor in 1982 the central fuel assembly had ruptured and relatively low levels of radiation had leaked out. In 1975 the core of the Leningrad plant, an RBMK reactor similar to the four at Chernobyl, partly melted down, spewing radiation into the atmosphere. But the wind carried the radioactive cloud over Siberia. In 1985, fourteen workers at the Balakovo plant on the Volga River near Samara were killed when jetting steam of 500°C burst through the reactor hall when they were restarting the core following routine maintenance.
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Always the Soviet Union’s reaction had been to keep silent, or if asked any questions to deny that any accident had happened. The instinct on this occasion was to follow the traditional pattern. This was the first major test of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost - and he flunked it badly. On Sunday, the day after the explosion, the newspaper
Izvestia
was told not to mention the accident. Gorbachev did not give the gagging order directly, but he knew it had been issued and he did not overturn the instruction. By Monday morning the world’s media was jamming the phone lines to the USSR with official inquiries. The Soviet government was still saying nothing. At 11 a.m. the senior magnates met in the Kremlin for the first time since the disaster. The military still proposed staying silent and issuing denials, arguing that Chernobyl should be treated like a state secret. There was a long debate about the accident. Most of it concerned how much information to release. Amazingly, Shevardnadze had not heard anything about the accident until early that morning, more than forty-eight hours after the explosions. Soon world leaders and foreign embassies would be protesting about Soviet behaviour. But such was the culture of secrecy, that nobody thought to tell the Foreign Minister that he would soon be required to handle a diplomatic crisis.

At first, only Shevardnadze and Yakovlev suggested saying anything about Chernobyl. Shevardnadze quoted a speech Gorbachev had given about ‘openness’ just a few days earlier in which he said: ‘We categorically oppose those who call for releasing public information in doses. There can never be too much truth.’ Shevardnadze’s comment did not raise even the slightest ironic eyebrow. Then he said it was impossible to deny Chernobyl. ‘It’s an affront to common sense, it’s absurd. How can you conceal something that can’t be hidden? How could people [here] complain that we are washing our dirty linen in public, when it is radioactive and had slipped out in spite of us?’ Gorbachev was convinced. ‘We must issue an announcement as soon as possible. We must not delay,’ he said. But the military and the conservative bureaucracy were unhappy. For hours nothing happened and then late in the afternoon all that appeared was a bland announcement: ‘From the Council of Ministers of the USSR. An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. One of the four atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Victims are being helped. A Government commission has been created.’
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It was a next-to-useless statement that raised far more questions than it answered. Predictably, as the world’s media was getting so little officially from Moscow, and no Western journalists were allowed anywhere near the disaster site, some stories were becoming increasingly lurid. Reports told of thousands of deaths from the explosion and vast numbers more from radiation poisoning in Ukraine. Some in the Soviet leadership seemed more concerned with the press coverage in the West than the radiation cloud. The KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov thought there was a plot to ‘smear’ the USSR and he proposed to use traditional methods to deal with it. He reported to Gorbachev on Tuesday 30 April, four days after the disaster: ‘Measures are being taken ... to control the behaviour of foreign diplomats and correspondents, limiting their opportunities to collect information about . . . Chernobyl and to break up their efforts to use it for mounting an anti-Soviet campaign in the West.’

That Tuesday
Pravda
was allowed to report on the disaster for the first time, but the story was carefully censored and brief. It claimed that ‘eighteen people are in a serious condition’. On the same day a secret report to Kremlin officials said that 1,882 people were treated in hospital and that 204 people (sixty-four of them children) were suffering from high levels of radiation poisoning. The Soviets were losing the propaganda war. The aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster was not Gorbachev’s finest hour. He did not go there to meet and greet victims, or to show that he was in charge. He did not ensure that his policy of openness was followed. Rather, he conspired to keep the truth from the public and the outside world. He did not say anything about it until eighteen days after the accident - and then he gave a lacklustre performance. He spoke of a ‘great misfortune that has befallen us’, but misled the public about the casualty figures and about efforts to control the damage. When he spoke on TV on 18 May the reactor core was still burning and would do so for another three weeks. He did not mention that as he lambasted the West, with old-fashioned Cold War rhetoric, for attempting ‘to defame the Soviet Union . . . with a wanton anti-Soviet campaign . . . and a mountain of lies’. This did not sound like ‘new thinking’.

 

Chernobyl had a profound effect on Gorbachev. It was a devastating blow to the public’s trust in him, and to his trust in those who worked for him. It was a tragic reminder of how badly the Soviet system functioned, and spurred him on to try reforming it with renewed vigour. He handled the crisis poorly, but he was determined to learn from it. He had been lied to by complacent officials who were protecting their own backs. Three key managers at Chernobyl were tried and sent to jail for periods of up to ten years for their misjudgements, errors and deceptions on that fatal night: the Director of the plant, Bryukhanov, his deputy, Dyatlov and the chief engineer Nikolai Fomin. But the entire system was to blame, as Gorbachev well knew: the plant had been rushed into service too quickly under pressure to fulfil the Plan; safety regulations had been abandoned; the reactors had a defective design. A concrete and steel containment structure around the reactor, such as American, West European and Japanese plants possessed, would almost certainly have confined the explosion. But Soviet reactors were not built with them. They were too expensive and took too long to construct. Chernobyl was a failure of the Soviet way of doing things. Nevertheless, he needed to blame some more individuals. He was seething against the scientific establishment and the nuclear chieftains who were refusing to accept any of the responsibility, and officials in the Energy and Planning ministries whom he thought incompetent. Nine weeks after the explosion, on Monday 3 July 1986, he summoned a group of about twenty of them for a dressing-down. He did not mince his words:

He said the scientists, and the military, would require some independent control and they would have to learn to explain themselves.
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Chernobyl turned Gorbachev into a far more passionate nuclear disarmer. From now on a constant refrain was how nuclear war would be ‘infinitely worse than a thousand Chernobyls’. He redoubled efforts to reach arms limitations deals with the Americans. ‘Its effect was the single biggest event on the Soviet leadership since the Cuban Missile Crisis,’ one of Gorbachev’s aides said. For the first time the most secret, most sacrosanct, impenetrable part of the Soviet system - its nuclear programme - became the target of criticism.

It had a deep personal impact on Gorbachev, too. There were officials around Reagan who doubted whether he would push the nuclear button under any circumstances. There were soldiers in the Soviet Union who knew Gorbachev would not, and some of them had contempt for him as a result. Shortly after the Chernobyl disaster Gorbachev was taking part in a simulated war games exercise in the Kremlin bunker. It came to the point when a Soviet response was required to a supposed American attack. As he told one of his officials later, ‘From a central control panel came the signal: missiles are flying towards our country, make a decision. Several minutes passed. Information pours in. I have to give the command for a strike of retaliation. I said “No. I will not press the button even for training purposes.’”
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EIGHTEEN

Sofia, June 1987

 

THEY USED TO COME at the dead of night. Bulgarian armoured vehicles would circle a village, the bright glare of searchlights and the shouts of soldiers would wake peacefully sleeping people from their beds, and then the terror would start. Militiamen, as witnesses recorded later, would burst into every home occupied by ethnic Turks. Guns at the ready, they would thrust a piece of paper in front of the man of the house. It was a form on which he was ordered to write a new Slavic name for himself and the rest of his family to replace the Muslim names they were born with. If the men refused or visibly hesitated they were beaten. In many cases they were made to watch as their wives or daughters were raped. If they still refused - for Islamic names are considered holy - they were taken away to prison camps or simply murdered on the spot. This was all necessary, as the Bulgarian Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov said in private to other Communist Party chiefs in Sofia, ‘in order to finish with the Turkish question, by flame and by sword, once and for all’.
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