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

by Adam Higginbotham

That evening, crowds gathered at the railway station as thousands of people attempted to escape the city. Men and women spent the night sleeping on the concourse to keep their places in line for tickets. The Soviet internal passport system prevented most citizens from leaving their areas of registration without good reason, so many workers hurriedly applied for vacations; some who were refused simply quit their jobs in desperation. Fleets of orange street-cleaning trucks soon appeared, to start what would become an incessant effort to wash hot fallout from the city streets. By then, crowds had begun to form outside the city’s banks, some of which were forced to close just a few hours after opening; others limited withdrawals to 100 rubles per person. By afternoon, many banks had run out of money. When the pharmacies sold out of stable iodine pills, people resorted to drinking tincture of iodine, intended for use as an external antiseptic, burning their throats. Lines outside liquor stores quadrupled in length as people sought protection from radioactivity with red wine and vodka, forcing the Ukrainian deputy minister of health to announce, “There is no truth to the rumor that alcohol is useful against radiation.”