Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

Within the borders of the USSR, ethnic division and opposition to Moscow rule gathered pace amid chronic shortages and an imploding economy. Riots and civil disobedience roiled through the fifteen Soviet republics. In Lithuania, six thousand people encircled the Ignalina nuclear power plant, where the two new RBMK-1500 reactors had become a target of nationalist anger, triggering the start of protests that soon led the three Baltic states to declare independence from the Union. In Minsk, a reported eighty thousand people marched on the headquarters of the Belarusian government, demanding to be relocated from contaminated territory. “Our leaders have been lying to us for three years,” one participant told a Soviet reporter. “And now they have deserted this land damned by God and Chernobyl.”