“Meanwhile the reactor was burning away,” wrote Grigori Medvedev, an engineer who once worked at Chernobyl. “The graphite was burning, belching into the sky millions of curies of radioactivity. However, the reactor was not all that was finished. An abscess, long hidden within our society, had just burst: the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, of corruption and protectionism, of narrow-mindedness and self-serving privilege. Now, as it rotted, the corpse of a bygone era—the age of lies and spiritual decay—filled the air with the stench of radiation.” In the aftermath of the accident,
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