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

by Adam Higginbotham

But as the summer days began to shorten, and Protsenko continued to conduct the work of the city ispolkom from exile in Chernobyl, her responsibilities focused more and more on the developing bureaucracy of the nuclear no-man’s-land; she learned to sense which of the specialists visiting her office had come directly from the Special Zone around the reactor—by the scent of ozone rising from their clothes. At the same time, she received official instructions to help arrange for the evacuated citizens to visit their apartments and collect their furniture and personal belongings. A twelve-person committee met to agree on what could be removed and how it might be done. They made plans to summon 150 furniture trucks from all over the oblast, to deploy a team of 50 dosimetrists to take radiation measurements in people’s apartments and at checkpoints, to find buses to transport the visitors across the zone, and to requisition a half million polyethylene bags to contain their effects. After two weeks of planning, the operation was ready to begin when someone pointed out that completing it was impossible: the citizens of Pripyat remained homeless and therefore had nowhere to put any of the belongings they would remove from the abandoned city. Eventually, Protsenko befriended a group of physicists from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences who had come to monitor levels of radiation in the zone, and it was they who finally told her the truth. General Pikalov’s chemical troops would go on...