Throughout the winter of 1986, disgraced Chernobyl plant director Viktor Brukhanov remained in his KGB jail in Kiev, awaiting his impending trial. He was permitted no visitors, but once a month his wife, Valentina, could bring him a five-kilogram parcel of food, which she packed with sausages, cheese, and butter. Occasionally Brukhanov had a cellmate—a counterfeiter or a burglar—but mostly he spent endless weeks in solitude and passed the time reading books from the prison library and learning English. For a while, Valentina was allowed to bring him English-language newspapers, until their son
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