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

by Adam Higginbotham

But for all this apparent care for its citizenry, the dark undertow of Soviet history was already tugging at the first victims of the accident. Just the day before, the Ukrainian health minister had received a telegram from his superior in Moscow. The message provided instructions on how to record diagnoses on patients exposed to radiation as a result of the accident. While those with severe radiation sickness and burns were to be described accordingly—“acute radiation sickness from cumulative radiation exposure”—the records of those with lower exposure and without severe symptoms were not to mention radioactivity at all. Instead, Moscow dictated that the hospital files of these patients were to state that they had been diagnosed with “vegetative-vascular dystonia.” This was a psychological complaint with physical manifestations—sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, and seizures—triggered by the nerves or “the environment,” unique to Soviet medicine but similar to the Western notion of neurasthenia. The memo decreed the same misleadingly vague diagnosis for liquidators who came for examination having received the maximum allowable dose of radiation for emergency workers.