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

by Adam Higginbotham

“I don’t agree with what Comrade Boris Evdokimovich is saying,” Sklyarov said. “We need to evacuate everyone.” Scherbina snatched the phone from the energy minister’s hand. “He’s a panicker!” he yelled at Scherbitsky. “How are you going to evacuate all these people? We’ll be humiliated in front of the whole world!”

Protsenko was a small but formidable forty-year-old who wore her dark, curly hair cropped sensibly short, born in China to Sino-Russian parents, yet forged in the crucible of the USSR. Her grandfather had been arrested and disappeared into the Gulag during Stalin’s purges; when she was a baby, both her older brothers died from diphtheria because they were kept from seeing a doctor by the curfew in the Chinese border town where they lived.

But at the plant, the nuclear engineers on the morning shift recognized all too clearly the danger the city was facing and tried to warn their families. Some managed to reach them by telephone and told them to stay indoors. Knowing that the KGB was monitoring the calls, one tried to use coded language to prepare his wife to escape the city. Another persuaded Director Brukhanov to let him go home for lunch and then packed his family into the car to take them to safety, only to be turned back at the end of Lenina Prospekt by an armed militsia officer manning a roadblock. The city had been sealed off. No one would be permitted to leave without official clearance.

Prianichnikov suspected the accident was a catastrophic failure of the reactor, but without a dosimeter, he found it hard to convince his neighbors of such a heretical idea. He couldn’t make them listen, and—as someone whose father and grandfather had both died at the hands of the Party—he knew that it could be dangerous to try too hard.

The boxes—radio-tochki, or “radio points”—hung on the walls of homes throughout the Soviet Union, piping in propaganda just like gas and electricity, over three channels: all-Union, republic, and city. Broadcasts began every morning at six with the Soviet anthem and the cheerless greeting Govorit Moskva—“Moscow speaking.” Many people left the radio on constantly—at one time, switching it off was regarded with suspicion—a susurrating trickle of Party enlightenment in every kitchen.

That night, Korol and other senior engineers from the plant gathered in groups in one another’s homes, drinking beer and discussing what might have caused the accident. There were many theories, but no answers. They turned on the TV hoping for some news, but there was no mention of the plant or an accident.

Ordinary firefighting techniques were useless. The graphite and nuclear fuel were burning at such high temperatures that neither water nor foam could possibly quench them: so hot that water would not only evaporate instantly into steam, further distributing radioactive aerosols in a cloud of toxic vapor, but also could separate into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen, creating the possibility of a further explosion.

The emergency proclamation was worded carefully: it didn’t tell the citizens how long they would endure their enforced absence, but deliberately led them to believe it would be a short time. They were told to pack only their important documents and enough clothing and food for two or three days.

Lifted skyward on a pillar of fierce heat from the shattered core, convoyed by obliging winds, the invisible cloud of radiation had traveled thousands of kilometers since its escape from the carcass of Unit Four. Unleashed in the violence of the explosion, it had soared aloft into the still night air, until it reached an altitude of around 1,500 meters, where it was snatched by powerful wind currents blowing from the south and southeast, pulled away at speeds of between fifty and a hundred kilometers an hour, and flew northwest across the USSR toward the Baltic Sea.

That evening, a soldier at the Finnish National Defense Forces’ measuring station in Kajaani, southern Finland, recorded an abnormal increase in background radiation. He reported it to the operational center in Helsinki, but no further action was taken. Late that night, the plume encountered rain clouds over Sweden, and the moisture in them began to scavenge and concentrate the contaminants it contained. When the rain finally fell from the clouds, around the city of Gävle, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, it had become heavily radioactive.

As the deputy prime minister of the USSR, Aliyev was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. Once the head of the Azerbaijani KGB, and one of only twelve voting members of the Politburo, he held joint responsibility for making the most profound decisions affecting the course of the empire. Yet by Monday morning, even Aliyev knew only the vaguest details about a nuclear accident in Ukraine. Not one word about Chernobyl had appeared in the Soviet press or been reported on radio or television. Authorities in Kiev, without prompting from Moscow, had already acted to suppress awareness of the situation by scientists. On Saturday, after instruments at the Kiev Institute of Botany registered a sharp increase in radiation, KGB officers arrived and sealed the devices “to avoid panic and the spreading of provocative rumors.”

The truth about incidents of any kind that might undermine Soviet prestige or provoke public panic had always been suppressed: even three decades after it had happened, the 1957 explosion in Mayak had still, officially, never taken place; when a Soviet air force pilot mistakenly shot down a Korean Air jumbo jet in 1983, killing all 269 people on board, the USSR initially denied any knowledge of the incident.

The assembled Party elders drafted an unrevealing twenty-three-word statement to be issued by the state news agency, TASS—and designed to combat what the Central Committee’s official spokesman called “bourgeois falsification . . . propaganda and inventions.”

By 2:00 p.m. in Stockholm, Swedish state authorities were in unanimous agreement: the country had been contaminated as the result of a major nuclear accident abroad. Just over an hour later, the country’s Foreign Ministry approached the governments of East Germany, Poland, and the USSR to ask if such an incident had taken place on their territory. Soon afterward, the Swedes sent an identical communiqué to their representatives at the International Atomic Energy Agency. By that time, both Finnish and Danish governments had confirmed that they, too, had detected radioactive contamination inside their borders.

Yet the Soviet authorities assured the Swedes that they had no information about any kind of nuclear accident within the USSR.

In its brevity and frugality with the truth, the bulletin was typical of Soviet news reports, a continuation of the way the state had covered conventional industrial accidents for decades.

Meanwhile, the radioactive cloud had continued north and spread west to envelop all of Scandinavia—before the weather stagnated and the contamination drifted south over Poland, forming a wedge that moved down into Germany. Heavy rain then deposited a dense band of radiation that reached all the way from Czechoslovakia into southeastern France. The West German and Swedish governments lodged furious complaints with Moscow over its failure to promptly notify them of the accident and requested more information about what had happened, but to no avail.

In Denmark, pharmacies quickly sold out of potassium iodide tablets. In Sweden, imports of food from the USSR and five Eastern European countries were banned, a radioactive particle was reportedly discovered in a nursing mother’s breast milk, and government switchboards jammed with calls from people asking if it was safe to drink water or even go outside. In Communist Poland, where state television assured the public that they were not in danger, authorities nonetheless distributed stable iodine to children and restricted the sale of dairy products.

“The world has no idea of the catastrophe,” the Ukrainian pleaded through the static. “Help us.” Soviet spokesmen dismissed these stories as opportunistic Western propaganda but, confounded by the state’s reflexive secrecy, had few facts with which to fight back.

Meanwhile, KGB chief Chebrikov notified his superiors that he was battling the bourgeois conspiracy at its source. He was, he told the Party Central Committee, undertaking “measures to control the activities of foreign diplomats and correspondents, limit their ability to gather information on the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and foil attempts to use it for stoking the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign in the West.”

He tried to convince Scherbitsky to cancel the big May Day parade they had scheduled to pass through the center of the city the following morning. But the first secretary told him that the orders had come down from Moscow. Not only would the parade take place, but they were all expected to attend and to bring their families with them—to demonstrate that there was no reason for anyone in Kiev to panic.

Later, when the wind changed direction again, threatening to carry the plume of radionuclides north toward Moscow, Soviet pilots flew repeated missions to seed the clouds with silver iodide, designed to precipitate moisture from the air. The capital was spared. But three hundred kilometers to the south, peasants watched as hundreds of square kilometers of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain.

The academicians now feared that the uranium dioxide fuel and zirconium cladding remaining inside the vault of Reactor Number Four had become so hot that they had started to fuse into a mass of radioactive lava in what amounted to a total core meltdown. Worse still, the 4,600 tonnes of sand, lead, and dolomite that had been flung into the damaged building from two hundred meters in the air, combined with the impact of the initial explosions a week before, might have fatally compromised the foundations of the reactor.

But Soviet physicists had been so confident of the safety of their own reactors that they had never bothered indulging in the heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents.

From high-resolution spy satellite photographs taken over Ukraine, in which they could make out details as small as individual fire hoses laid in the direction of the reactor cooling canals around the plant, CIA analysts knew that the scale of the catastrophe was far greater than Moscow acknowledged.

Yet Moscow had rebuffed Reagan’s public offer of medical and technical assistance, and American nuclear experts could only speculate about what was really happening at the crippled plant.

Reagan reiterated his sympathy for the victims of the accident and his offer of assistance, but then his tone hardened. He contrasted the openness of “free nations” with the “secrecy and stubborn refusal” of the Soviet government to inform the international community of the risks they shared from the disaster. “A nuclear accident that results in contaminating a number of countries with radioactive material is not simply an internal matter,” Reagan said in his folksy rasp. “The Soviets owe the world an explanation.” That day, radioactive rain fell on Japan before being carried eastward by the jet stream—out across the Pacific at an altitude of 9,000 meters and a speed of 160 kilometers an hour—toward the coasts of Alaska and California.

At first, Captain Zborovsky wasn’t afraid of what lay ahead. After all, he thought, his commanders would never have given him an assignment that they knew was certain to kill him. Only when he had entered the plant did he begin to comprehend the threat he faced. The staff there had already seen many of their friends flown out for treatment in the special clinic in Moscow, and they looked at him with the pity reserved for a condemned man.

At 8:00 p.m., the technicians reported to Silayev that pumping could begin as soon as the nitrogen arrived. It was due that night, but the next morning there was still no sign of it. The operators waited all day. At 11:00 p.m., Director Brukhanov received a phone call from Silayev. “Find the nitrogen,” the commission chairman said, “or you’ll be shot.”

Finally, on Tuesday, May 6—ten days after the crisis began—the Ukrainian health minister appeared on local radio and TV to warn Kievans to take precautions against radiation: to remain indoors, close their windows, and protect themselves against drafts. By then, word had gone around that senior Party members had quietly sent their children and grandchildren to the safety of Pioneer camps and sanatoria in the south.

As befits a disease created unwittingly by mankind, acute radiation syndrome is a cruel, complex, and poorly understood affliction that tests modern medicine to its limits.

But its destructive effects begin immediately, as the high-energy rays and particles of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation snap strands of DNA, and the exposed cells start to die. Nausea and vomiting set in, with a speed and intensity contingent on the dose, and the skin may redden. But the nausea eventually passes, the discoloration of all but the most severe burns fades within eighteen hours, and the patient enters a comfortable latency period.

Internal damage was just as hard to discern but would eventually prove equally grievous, affecting the parts of the body where cells naturally multiply the fastest, especially the lungs and airways, intestines, and bone marrow.

The civilian nuclear industry specialists arriving from other atomic plants across the USSR to help in the cleanup were horrified by the lack of preparation around them. They found too few trained dosimetrists to effectively monitor their radiation exposure. No comprehensive survey had yet been made of the area, and the volume of radionuclides belching from the reactor changed constantly, so reliable radiation information was almost impossible to obtain. There was a chronic shortage of dosimeters. A platoon of thirty soldiers often had to share a single monitoring device: the dose registered by the man wearing it was simply attributed to the others equally, regardless of where they had been or what work they had done.

But it was clear that the cleanup operation would need yet more manpower. The Politburo now recognized that if the Union’s young draftees—already plagued by alcoholism and drug abuse—continued to be sent into the high-radiation zone, the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined, rendering the country incapable of defending itself in the event of an attack from the West. On May 29 the Politburo and the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a decree unprecedented in peacetime: calling up hundreds of thousands more military reservists—men aged twenty-four to fifty—for a mobilization of up to six months. They were told they were required for special military exercises; many discovered the truth only when they were already in uniform. By the beginning of July, more than forty thousand of these troops were encamped around the perimeter of the Exclusion Zone, sleeping in rows of tents and driven toward the Special Zone each morning in convoys of open trucks.

In public, the Soviet government continued to assure its people that the catastrophe was under control and that the radiation already released posed no long-term threat. But in its secret sessions within the Kremlin, the Politburo Operations Group heard that the direct effect of the disaster on the population of the USSR was already reaching alarming heights. On Saturday, May 10, Ryzhkov learned that a total of almost 9,500 people had already been hospitalized in connection with the accident, at least 4,000 of them in the previous forty-eight hours alone. More than half of that number were children, 26 of whom had been diagnosed with radiation sickness. The levels of contamination in four of Russia’s western regions had begun a rise that had yet to be explained, and the Soviet Hydrometeorology Department had decided to fly weather control missions over Kiev, using aircraft to release more cloud-seeding materials into the atmosphere in the hope of preventing radioactive rain from falling on the city.

The Kremlin’s chief scientists on radiation medicine and meteorology—Leonid Ilyin and Yuri Izrael—refused to provide a definitive answer about the long-term effect of the spreading contamination. Summoned from Chernobyl to an urgent meeting with the Ukrainian government task force, the experts said that the reactor had been covered and radioactive emissions steeply reduced; soon they would cease altogether. They insisted that current radiation levels didn’t warrant an evacuation and recommended merely that the republic take further steps to keep the population informed of the ongoing measures to manage the crisis. But the Ukrainian leaders suspected that—whatever their true beliefs—Ilyin and Izrael also didn’t want to take responsibility for endorsing an evacuation.

Every rain shower washed radiation from the clouds and flushed more long-lived nuclear isotopes into the ponds and streams. The arrival of autumn would send radioactive leaves skittering across the ground. The Pripyat marshes—the largest swamp in Europe—had become a massive sponge for strontium and cesium, and the vast stretches of agricultural land proved too large to be scraped clean even by squadrons of earth-moving machines.

In September, Dr. Angelina Guskova announced that a total of thirty-one men and women were now dead as a direct result of the explosion and fire in Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This number would henceforth be regarded as the official death toll of the accident. Anything higher was treated as evidence of bourgeois Western propaganda.

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 wrote a furtive four-word message to his father inside one of them: “I love you, Daddy.” Then that privilege, too, was revoked.

As the cleanup inside the thirty-kilometer zone ground on, morale among the tens of thousands of liquidators who had been shipped in to perform the dangerous and apparently inexorable task sank ever lower. Dust from highly contaminated areas continued to blow into those that had been cleaned, rendering weeks of work pointless; Kombinat appeared to have been making progress in Pripyat until the KGB learned that their specialists had been reporting readings from only the cleanest areas, and thus underestimating the true levels of radiation in the city by more than ten times. The secret policemen also noted that the liquidators’ food was bad, radiation safety was lacking, workers weren’t even being paid on time, and one radioactive waste dump was being flooded regularly with river water. The Kombinat leaders would eventually be reprimanded by the Party for tolerating nepotism, theft, and drunkenness. In the meantime, looting from inside the zone had begun on an industrial scale, often initiated by the liquidators themselves and sometimes with the collusion of their commanders.

But it soon became clear that neither the design of the reactor nor the long trail of accidents and institutional cover-ups that preceded the disaster would be considered by the court.

At the Chernobyl plant, the operators manning the three remaining reactors were also demoralized by the way their dead colleagues had been blamed for the accident. Although they went to work dutifully every day, many believed the true causes of the disaster had not been properly considered; some remained convinced that the same thing could easily happen to them.

Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.

He pleaded for patience with the growing shortages and the faltering economy and warned that any Soviet republics thinking of leaving the Union were “playing with fire.” But environmental issues were already becoming a focal point for nascent independence movements in Latvia and Estonia and would soon provide a platform for Zelenyi Svit, the Green World opposition party in Ukraine.

Inside the zone, as thousands of soldiers continued to scour the landscape of radionuclides, bulldoze ancient settlements into the ground, and toss contaminated furniture from the windows of apartments in Pripyat, scientists began to notice strange new phenomena in the wildlife they found there. Hedgehogs, voles, and shrews had become radioactive, and mallards had developed genetic abnormalities; in the cooling reservoir of the plant, silver carp grew to monstrous sizes; the leaves of the trees around the Red Forest had swelled to supernatural proportions, including giant conifers with pine needles ten times their usual size and acacias with “blades as large as a child’s palm.”

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.”

Opinion polls suggested that, since Chernobyl, two-thirds of people around the world opposed any further development of nuclear energy. The United States faced a complete collapse in reactor building, and the very name of the Ukrainian plant became embedded in the international lexicon as shorthand for the failings of technology and a well-justified suspicion of official information.

But the warren of nuclear dumps had been hurriedly excavated and poorly maintained. Nobody had bothered to keep track of what had been buried where, and by the beginning of 1990, the liquidation was being starved of manpower. Even offered twice the average Soviet salary and bonus payments paid directly into their bank accounts, when military reservists were told they were being sent to Chernobyl, many refused to go. The continued mobilizations created a public outcry, and, at last, the Soviet military authorities decided to stop sending troops to the zone. In December 1990 the liquidation effectively came to a halt.

In Kiev, the Soviet Ministry of Health set up a dedicated clinic—the All-Union Radiation Medicine Research Center—to provide treatment for everyone who had been exposed to radiation. But as the first of the demobilized liquidators began to fall ill, arriving in clinics with complaints that seemed inexplicable, unpredictable, or premature, they found the state’s doctors reluctant to connect their symptoms to the conditions they had endured inside the thirty-kilometer zone. The bankrupt state could ill afford to provide the specialist care it had promised to more than a half million new potential invalids, and so doctors wrote up their notes in code; their medical records were classified as secret. All but the most extreme cases were dismissed with the same diagnosis given to Maria Protsenko: “Ordinary illness: not related to ionizing radiation.”