Yet some heroes would prove more equal than others. There was still no public acknowledgment for the engineers and operators of the Chernobyl station who had put out the fires and prevented further explosions inside the turbine hall, or for those who had toiled in vain amid lethal fields of gamma radiation to cool the doomed reactor. The few awards granted to plant workers were processed in total secrecy. At one point, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Central Committee secretary in charge of foreign affairs, came to visit the injured operators in the wards of Hospital Number Six, but the trip went
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