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

by Adam Higginbotham

Two weeks later, on May 22, Brukhanov submitted a request to the nuclear energy minister, Anatoly Mayorets, seeking permission to take time off to visit his wife, Valentina, and their son, Oleg, who had been evacuated to the Crimea. Mayorets gave his approval, and Brukhanov flew south for a week’s holiday. In his absence, the minister made arrangements to have Brukhanov permanently removed from his position as director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

The conflict was hardly an even match: on one side was the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the nuclear design bureau NIKIET, and the Kurchatov Institute, each headed by its respective octogenarian Titan of Socialist science, all veteran apparatchiks of the old guard: former revolutionary cavalryman Efim Slavsky; Nikolai Dollezhal, designer of the first-ever Soviet reactor; and Anatoly Aleksandrov, the massive, bald-headed Buddha of the Atom himself. These were the men who had created the RBMK, but had also ignored more than ten years of warnings about its shortcomings. On the other side was the Ministry of Energy, represented by the fifty-six-year-old nuclear neophyte Anatoly Mayorets. His ministry had built the plant, operated the reactor—and was responsible for the training and discipline of the staff who had blown it up.

The disputes began almost at once, with the completion of the commission’s preliminary report on the causes of the disaster, just ten days after the explosion, on May 5. Overseen by Meshkov, Slavsky’s deputy at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, it unsurprisingly laid the blame for the accident on the operators: they had disabled key safety systems, flouted the regulations, and conducted the test without consulting with the reactor designers; Senior Reactor Control Operator Leonid Toptunov had pressed the AZ-5 button in a desperate and futile bid to stop the accident after it had begun, triggered as a result of his and his colleagues’ simple incompetence. Toptunov and Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov were unlikely to contest this version of events: both would be conveniently dead within ten days.

But the specialists from the Ministry of Energy refused to put their signatures on the joint investigation report. Instead, they produced a separate appendix, based upon their own independent investigation. This opinion suggested that—whatever the operators’ mistakes—Reactor Number Four could never have exploded were it not for the profound defects in its design, including the positive void coefficient and the faulty control rods that made reactivity increase rather than decrease. Their detailed technical analysis raised the possib...

Viktor Brukhanov returned from the visit to his family in Crimea at the end of May. On arriving in Kiev, he phoned the power plant and asked for a car to collect him from the airport. There was an awkward pause on the line, and he knew something was wrong. When he reached the plant, Brukhanov went up to his office on the third floor of the administrative building. There, he found the windows covered with sheets of lead and another man sitting behind his desk. In the first of what would be many public humiliations for the beleaguered manager, no one had bothered to inform him that he was no longer in charge. “What are we going to do with Brukhanov?” the new director asked his chief engineer. The two men decided to invent a position for him: deputy head of the Industrial-Technical Department, a sinecure in a back office where he could be kept busy while he awaited his fate. They both knew it was only a matter of time before he would be called to answer for his crimes.

On Wednesday, July 2, Viktor Brukhanov was called back to Kiev and handed a plane ticket to Moscow, where his presence was required the next day at a meeting of the Politburo. Before leaving, he went to bid farewell to Malomuzh, the deputy Party secretary for the region. The secretary had never before treated Brukhanov with anything but icy formality yet now seized him in a sudden embrace. It wasn’t a good sign, but by now, the deposed director had resigned himself to his fate.

the Party leaders faulted Brukhanov and the chief engineer, Fomin, for tolerating rule breaking and “criminal negligence” inside the plant and for failing to safely prepare for the test during which the accident took place. They criticized the Ministry of Energy for its slipshod management, neglect of staff training, and for becoming complacent about the number of equipment accidents inside the nuclear plants under its jurisdiction. Finally, they attacked the state nuclear regulatory authority for its lack of effective oversight.

But the Politburo resolution also plainly recognized the true origins of the accident that destroyed Reactor Number Four. The catastrophe occurred “due to deficiencies in the construction of the RBMK reactor, which does not fully meet safety demands,” it stated. Furthermore, although Efim Slavsky was well aware of these shortcomings and received numerous warnings, he had done nothing to address the failings of the reactor design.

The Politburo reserved the harshest discipline for the middle ranks of the apparat. Meshkov, deputy head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, and Shasharin, the deputy minister responsible for nuclear power at the Ministry of Energy, together with the deputy head of the nuclear design bureau, NIKIET, were all dismissed from their posts. Viktor...

On his arrival in Kiev, Viktor Brukhanov was taken to the Leningrad Hotel and summoned the next morning to give a statement in the offices of the public prosecutor. The investigator gave him a list of questions, and Brukhanov wrote out his answers by hand. The statement eventually filled ninety pages, and when it was finished, he was driven back to the Fairy Tale Pioneer camp. On the evening of Saturday, July 19, the official version of the Politburo’s verdict was announced on Vremya. It was unequivocal and damning. Through the findings of the government commission, the anchor said, “it was established that the accident had been caused by a series of gross breaches of the operational regulations of the reactor by workers at the atomic power station. . . . Irresponsibility, negligence, and indiscipline led to grave consequences.” The statement included a list of the ministers who had been dismissed and concluded with the news that Brukhanov had been expelled from the Party. The Prosecutor General’s Office of the USSR had launched an investigation, and court proceedings would follow. There was no mention of any design faults in the reactor.

On August 12 the deputy chief engineer of the plant came back from a trip to Kiev bearing a summons with Brukhanov’s name on it, instructing him to report, at 10:00 a.m. the next day, to room 205 of the prosecutor’s office, on Reznitskaya Street in Kiev. There, after three further hours of interrogation and an hour’s break for lunch, Brukhanov was formally charged, under Article 220, paragraph 2, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, with “a breach of safety regulations in explosion-prone plants or facilities” and arrested. Led out through the back door by two men in civilian clothes, he was driven to a KGB holding cell, where he would spend much of the next year.

defect of the system was that the designers did not foresee the awkward and silly actions by the operators.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that “about half” of the USSR’s fourteen remaining RBMK reactors had already been shut down for technical modification, “to increase their safety.”

In the four months since Ivan Silayev had appeared on Soviet television and announced plans to build a sarcophagus to forever entomb the remains of Reactor Number Four, a fresh army of architects, engineers, and construction troops had been mustered in the zone and begun toiling around the clock to make the idea a reality.

On June 5 Gorbachev gave Slavsky and his men until September to complete the new building: less than four months to accomplish one of the most dangerous and ambitious civil engineering feats in history. Work began at the site even before the engineers and architects in Moscow had agreed on a viable design.

While the Sredmash engineers were at work on the Sarcophagus, a scientific task force from the Kurchatov Institute began trying to unravel the mystery of what had happened to the 180 tonnes of nuclear fuel they believed still lay somewhere within its rising walls. At first, the scientists had believed that most of the uranium had been blown out of the reactor vessel by the explosion and must be scattered inside what remained of the machine hall. But radiation detectors lowered into the ruins by helicopter revealed no evidence of it there.

Yet all their initial efforts to find the uranium fuel inside the reactor hall itself had failed. The members of the Kurchatov task force measured radiation exposure of thousands of roentgen an hour on all available routes through the debris toward the reactor vessel—from below, above, and both sides; they searched for molten lead and the melted residue of the sand, the boron carbide, or the dolomite thrown from the helicopters. But they found no evidence of any of it, and certainly no sign of the fuel.

As the Kurchatov task force continued its search for the fuel, and the Sredmash teams toiled to complete the Sarcophagus, the technicians of the Ministry of Energy raced to meet their own deadline: the Politburo had publicly promised that the first two of the three remaining Chernobyl reactors would be restored to life before winter set in. But now that the truth of the design faults in the RBMK had finally begun to emerge, the specialists first had to modify the reactors to make them safe to operate, improving their performance by altering the steam void coefficient and the functioning of the control rods. At the same time, they had to decontaminate the entire station from top to bottom, until the fabric of the building itself no longer endangered the operators who would work inside it.

The chief of the radiation scouts overseeing the cleanup operation above Unit Three spoke first. Yuri Samoilenko, a thickset Ukrainian with a shaggy mop of dark hair and a brooding gaze, looked haggard. His eyes were dark and pouchy. He chain-smoked constantly. Using a sketch plan of the rooftops, annotated densely with numbered radiation readings and marked with red flags and stars to indicate the most acute hazards, he explained the situation they faced. All technical and automated means to clear the debris field had failed. Radiation levels were enormous. But the roofs had to be cleared before the Sarcophagus was sealed and the sole repository chosen for the most contaminated pieces of reactor debris was thus closed forever. Every other option had been exhausted. It was time, he said, to send in men to do the job by hand. There was a heavy silence. The campaign of the bio-roboty—the bio-robots—had begun. Tarakanov’s soldiers launched their operation three days later, on the afternoon of September 19.

For twelve days, Tarakanov’s army of bio-robots relayed onto the roofs from eight in the morning until eight at night: 3,828 men in all, each of them eventually given a printed certificate and a small cash bonus, admitted for decontamination, and sent home.

On October 1 the general declared the operation complete. At a quarter to five that afternoon, following months of repairs, modification, and safety tests, the reactor of Unit One came back online at last. For the first time in five months, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was once again generating electricity.

Bocharov’s task in Chernobyl was the most demanding yet faced by the Sredmash engineers at the site. It was his responsibility to close the steel coffin around Unit Four—by roofing over the wrecked central hall and completing a thick concrete wall between Units Three and Four. This would isolate the ruined section of the building from the rest of the plant and allow the remaining reactors to resume normal operation. But the project had already fallen behind schedule, and the revised completion dates were as absurd as ever.

By late autumn, tens of thousands of middle-aged partizans had been drafted from across the Soviet Union and put to work in the high-radiation areas of the zone until they reached their 25 rem limit. Afterward, they were decontaminated and demobilized and told to sign a pledge of secrecy before being sent back to where they had come from, clutching a small cardboard booklet: the official record of their total accumulated dose. Few regarded this document as accurate.

when reservists received the draft notice summoning them for “special training,” they increasingly knew what it meant. Some bribed the draft officer to stay at home: while a deferment from the war in Afghanistan could reportedly be bought for 1,000 rubles, escaping from duty in Chernobyl cost only half as much. And inside some tented encampments on the perimeter of the zone, commanders faced mutiny from their troops. One group of two hundred Estonian partizans, told that their tour was being extended from two to six months, gathered in a furious mob and refused to go back to work. Military police patrols in Kiev picked up senior officers who had deserted their men, drunkenly attempting to flee the city by train.

At last, when given the command to work inside a room right beside the reactor—where, after a single minute, their dosimeters reached their maximum readings—Usatenko and his men rebelled. They went toward the room, but then pushed over the camera monitoring the entrance and hid in safety until the time allotted for the task was up. It took the US-605 technicians ten days to install a new video camera. By then, Usatenko and his men were gone.

In September, Dr. Angelina Guskova announced that a total of thirty-one men and women were now dead as a direct result of the explosion and fire in Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This number would henceforth be regarded as the official death toll of the accident. Anything higher was treated as evidence of bourgeois Western propaganda.

In May the Soviet Red Cross Society contributed a one-off payment of 50 rubles per person to every refugee from the catastrophe. Later that month, the Soviet government provided a further lump sum of 200 rubles for every member of each family of displaced people. Fifteen cashiers distributed the millions of rubles this required, the cash brought in bags from the bank to a municipal office in Polesskoye each morning, under the eyes of militsia officers armed with machine guns. And still, throughout June and July, the people returned to the offices of their city-council-in-exile on Sovietskaya Street in the town of Chernobyl to ask: “When can I go home?”

On July 25 they received an answer: that morning, the first busloads of Pripyat evacuees set out to return to their city—but only as part of an official program to reclaim what they could from their apartments and seek compensation for what they could not. Arriving at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, they were issued cotton overalls, shoe covers, petal respirators, and thick polyethylene bags. After a document check at the entrance to Pripyat, they were permitted to spend three or four hours in their abandoned apartments and walking the streets of the city, where yellow sand banked against the curbs and grass was already sprouting through cracks in the chalky asphalt. Sixty-nine men and women stepped off the buses that first morning, and hundreds more returned every day for months after that, to salvage what they could from their former homes.

A state decree provided for compensation for lost property to be paid to the displaced: a flat payment of 4,000 rubles for a single person and 7,000 for a family of two. At the time, a new car—for anyone lucky enough to find one—cost 5,000 rubles. The ispolkom received hundreds of applications for compensation every day throughout the summer, and by the end of the year, the claims for the domestic property lost by the residents of Pripyat to the ravages of the peaceful atom—and excluding cars, garages, dachas, and motorboats—had reached a total of 130 million rubles.

But the permanent resettlement of 116,000 people—the specialists and their families evacuated from Pripyat, the residents of Chernobyl, and the farmers from the dozens of small settlements that now fell within the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, all of whom needed new jobs, schools, and homes—was more complicated.

But the Politburo task force in Moscow also requisitioned an additional 13,000 newly completed apartments in Kiev and other cities across Ukraine—snatching them from under the noses of families who had spent years on waiting lists—and handed the keys to evacuees from Pripyat. Specialists from the Chernobyl plant and their families were transferred to the remaining three Ukrainian nuclear stations in Konstantinovka, Zaporizhia and Rovno, where they were given new jobs and moved into brand-new flats. When they arrived, they were not all welcomed warmly by their colleagues, who saw no justice in having to give up their hard-won places in line to fellow nuclear specialists apparently chased out of their homes by the consequences of their own incompetence. In Kiev, several large apartment construction projects that had been due for completion by winter—and would have been ripe for requisition for the evacuees—mysteriously came to a halt. In the end, many of the former residents of Pripyat were found homes in the same sprawling complex of high-rise buildings in Troieshchyna, a remote and isolated suburb on the northeastern edge of the city. There, they were shunned by their new neighbors, who both resented the refugees and feared the invisible contagion of radioactivity. At school, other children were forbidden by their parents from sharing desks with pupils evacuated from Pripyat—and not without good reason. The radiation readings in the stairwells and hallways of the new apart...

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 unreported in the press. Instead of recognition of their loved ones’ heroism, the families of Alexander Akimov and Leonid Toptunov were notified that, under Article 6, paragraph 8, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, the accused would escape criminal prosecution for their crimes only on account of their recent deaths.

them. Brukhanov—along with four other senior members of the plant staff, including Dyatlov and Fomin—was charged formally under Article 220, paragraph 2, of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, under which he was accused of “a breach of safety regulations” resulting in loss of life or other serious consequences at “explosion-prone plants or facilities.” This was an inventive legal gambit—never before had Soviet jurists considered a nuclear power station an installation likely to explode—and the first of many logical contortions necessary to confine responsibility for the accident to the handful of selected scapegoats. To bolster the case, Brukhanov and Fomin were also charged under Article 165 of the Criminal Code with abuse of power. Brukhanov was accused of deliberately underreporting the radiation readings at the station on the morning of the accident, thereby delaying the evacuation of the station and of Pripyat, and knowingly sending men into the most dangerously contaminated areas of the reactor building. If found guilty, the three most senior members of the plant staff each faced a maximum of ten years in prison.

On April 18 that year, local council elections were held for the new atomgrad in Slavutych, the Pripyat administration was formally dissolved, and the city bureaucratically ceased to exist. After working for almost a full year inside the Exclusion Zone with barely a day off, Protsenko was now transferred to a new job in Kiev. In recognition of everything she had endured in the long months since the accident, she was finally permitted to apply for membership in the Communist Party. At the end of the year, Protsenko checked in to a hospital in Kiev and stayed there for more than a month, suffering the symptoms of what the doctors described as “nervous tension” related to overwork. They marked her medical records with the diagnosis “Ordinary illness: not related to ionizing radiation.”

So, in spite of the increasing freedoms afforded to the editors and producers of the Party-controlled media by Gorbachev’s glasnost, in this case, the truth would not be allowed to impede a directive to “smash the hostile, prejudiced statements in the Western press.”

Here, more than a year after the accident, the streetlights still came on at night, and operatic music sometimes crackled from the speakers mounted along Kurchatov Street. But the bright pennants that twitched in the breeze above the central square were sun-bleached and tattered, and the laundry on the apartment balconies had begun to rot. Yet still the authorities maintained the illusion that the city was not dead but only sleeping and one morning would be awoken by the footsteps of its returning population.

Collectively, the six men stood accused of negligence in conducting a dangerous and unsanctioned experiment on Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, resulting in the total destruction of the unit, the release of radioactive fallout, the evacuation of 116,000 individuals from two separate cities and dozens of villages, and the hospitalization of more than two hundred victims of radiation sickness, of whom at least thirty were already dead.

There was no mention of any faults in the design of the RBMK-1000 reactor.

All five men accused of breaching the safety regulations of an “explosion-prone facility”—including Boris Rogozhkin, the chief of the night shift at the time of the accident, and Alexander Kovalenko, the head of the workshop who had signed off on the test—entered pleas of not guilty. But Brukhanov and Fomin admitted to criminal failures in their performance of official duties, under Article 165—the lesser offense, which carried a sentence of five years in prison. “I think I’m not guilty of the charges brought against me,” Brukhanov told the court. “But as a manager, I was negligent in some ways.”

Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin,

He admitted that he had approved the fateful test program for Reactor Number Four without notifying the nuclear safety authorities or the reactor designers in Moscow and had not even told Brukhanov it was taking place.

From the beginning, Dyatlov contended that the Chernobyl operators bore no blame for what had happened to Reactor Number Four and addressed in detail every one of the charges brought against him. He said responsibility for the accident rested with those who had failed to warn the plant staff that they were operating a potentially explosive reactor and that he personally had given no instructions that violated any regulations. Despite being contradicted by several witnesses, Dyatlov also insisted that he had not been present in the control room of Unit Four at the crucial moment when Leonid Toptunov let the power of the reactor fall almost to zero before the test, that he had not given orders to raise it, and that he did not send the two now deceased trainees to the reactor hall to lower the control rods by hand. But it soon became clear that neither the design of the reactor nor the long trail of accidents and institutional cover-ups that preceded the disaster would be considered by the court.

Unsurprisingly, the physicists absolved themselves of blame, arguing that the quirks of their reactor became dangerous only in the hands of incompetent operators. The court stifled any dissent from this view.

On Tuesday, July 29, another fiercely hot day, Judge Brize delivered his verdict. All six men were found guilty: Yuri Laushkin was given two years in prison; Alexander Kovalenko, three; and Boris Rogozhkin, five. All three were taken into custody in the courtroom. Brukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov each received the maximum sentence: ten years’ confinement in a penal colony. Every one of them remained stoic except Fomin, who wept in the dock. Valentina Brukhanov fainted. Afterward, one of the investigators told her, “Now you can terminate your marriage at any time.”

On December 4, 1987, after more than eighteen months of decontamination, repairs, and modifications, the last of the three surviving reactors of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station once again began providing electricity to the Soviet grid. Unit Three, although now separated from its entombed twin by a wall of concrete and lead, remained so radioactive that reluctant engineers were rotated in from other reactors—to prevent them being overexposed during the course of their shifts. Despite the sacrifices of General Tarakanov and his bio-robots, uranium fuel pellets were still scattered on the roof of the building, and the turbine operators who worked in the machine hall below did so from protective concrete cabins fitted with portholes of lead glass.

Turning his back on every political orthodoxy he had believed in since he was a teenager, the academician said that Soviet science had lost its way.

At lunchtime the next day, Legasov’s son, Alexey, returned from work to the family home at Pekhotnaya 26 and discovered his father’s body hanging in the stairwell, a noose around his neck. He had left no note. When a colleague from the Kurchatov Institute checked Legasov’s office for radioactivity, he found every one of his belongings too contaminated to be returned to his family. Gathered into a series of large plastic bags, they were buried instead. Soon afterward, when an official visited Anatoly Aleksandrov in his office to discuss candidates to assume some of Legasov’s duties, the eighty-five-year-old director broke down and cried. “Why did he abandon me?” he said. “Oh, why did he abandon me?”

Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31. The health minister said that they had not discovered a single case of injury in the general population due to radiation. “One must say definitely,” he told the assembled delegates, “that we can today be certain there are no effects of the Chernobyl accident on human health.”

But the citizens of the Soviet Union no longer trusted their scientists. In Kiev, even two years after the accident, young couples were afraid to have children, and people ascribed every kind of minor illness to the effects of radiation.

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.

In February 1989, almost three years after the accident, a prime-time report on Vremya revealed to the Soviet people that the true extent of radioactive contamination beyond the perimeter of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone had been covered up—and that the total area of contamination outside the zone was, in fact, even larger than that within it.