Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

by David Remnick

From the moment that the engineers in the control room of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl reported a disaster beyond imagining, their superiors refused to act. The top bureaucrats at Chernobyl kept repeating the same fiction: that there had been a “mishap,” but nothing terrible, the reactor had not been destroyed. They quickly passed on this fiction to the leadership in Moscow. The next day, the people of Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the neighboring villages acted out their lives under a radioactive cloud. Children played soccer in radioactive dust. There were sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Young Communist League. Old men fished in a contaminated river and ate the contaminated fish. When he was told by his engineers that the radiation at the plant was millions of times higher than normal, the plant director, Viktor Bryuchanov, said the meter was obviously defective and must be thrown away. For more than a day, Boris Shcherbina, a deputy prime minister, refused suggestions to carry out a mass evacuation. “Panic is worse than radiation,” he said. The world got word of the seriousness of the accident only when Scandinavian scientists reported dramatic increases in radiation levels. Even as they were evacuating their own families, Ukrainian Communist Party officials insisted on holding the annual May Day parade; the children of Kiev kicked up radioactive dust to celebrate the victories of socialism. After a long filibuster in the Politburo and strict controls on public inform...