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

by Adam Higginbotham

But once the Party relaxed its rigid grip on information, it proved impossible to fully regain its former levels of control. What began with more open reporting from Chernobyl—the news stories in Pravda and Izvestia were followed by TV documentaries and personal testimonies in popular magazines—widened to include open discussion of long-censored social issues, including drug addiction, the abortion epidemic, the Afghan war, and the horrors of Stalinism. 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.