Gorbachev was furious. His anger and frustration had been building for weeks as the catastrophe bloomed. He had struggled to find accurate information about what was happening, and his personal reputation in the West—as a reformer, a man one could do business with—had been tarnished by the fumbled attempts at a cover-up. He now accused Slavsky and Aleksandrov of presiding over a secret state and deliberately concealing from him the truth about why the accident had happened in the first place. “For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you
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