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

by Adam Higginbotham

designed to be held in place by gravity alone—a massive steel house of cards.

The batiskaf—bathyscaphe—was a twenty-tonne lead cabin, with a single porthole of leaded glass thirty centimeters thick, which dangled on a five-meter cable from the hook of a Demag crane. With enough space inside to accommodate four men, the bathyscaphe, lifted a hundred meters in the air, could be “flown” by crane over Unit Four and allowed the engineers to descend into even the most radioactive areas of the site in relative

cassette player or watch?

Of the thirteen patients who had been treated with bone marrow transplants by Robert Gale and the Soviet specialists, all but one had died—so many that Guskova would eventually dismiss the technique as useless for managing ARS.

Their belief in the power of vodka to protect the body against radiation led them to break down the doors of the settlement’s liquor store,

Valentina Brukhanov, by now living at the riverbank Zeleny Mys settlement and working double shifts in her job at the plant while her husband sat in a KGB holding cell in Kiev, recovered her most treasured possessions: a pair of crystal glasses they had been given for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary;

a flat payment of 4,000 rubles for a single person and 7,000 for a family of two.

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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. That autumn, the furniture stores of Kiev experienced a prolonged boom in trade, as evacuees attempted to rebuild their lives, beginning with a hollow quest to replace almost every major possession they had ever owned.

In May a charity rock concert—the first ever in the Soviet Union—was held in the Olympic Stadium in Moscow before an audience of thirty thousand people, with a live TV link to a studio in Kiev, where miners, plant operators, and other liquidators gathered, and firefighters recited the names of their comrades who had died in the wards of Hospital Number Six.

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 apartment blocks in Troieshchyna were soon found to be hundreds of times higher than elsewhere in Kiev.

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.

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.

what had been regarded as one of the best and most advanced nuclear installations in the USSR had, in fact, operated constantly on the edge of catastrophe as a result of its lax and incompetent management. There was no mention of any faults in the design of the RBMK-1000 reactor.

Legasov would be granted the one award that had so far eluded him and made a Hero of Socialist Labor. But when the final list was published, Legasov’s name was no longer on it.

“I’m coming from the Academy of Sciences,” he said. “I just dropped by for a moment to look at you.” It was the last time she saw him alive.

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?”

$128 billion—equivalent

The bleeding was slow but proved impossible to stanch—one more open wound that the state could no longer shrug off as the Soviet colossus sank slowly to its knees.

In acknowledgment of their service, many were issued special identity cards and an enameled medal depicting the Greek letters for alpha, beta, and gamma surrounding a scarlet drop of blood. All understood that, as with the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, their sacrifices

had earned them a lifetime of care from their motherland.

But as the first of the demobilized liquidators began to fall ill, arriving in clinics with complaints that seemed inexplicable, unpredictable, or premature, they found the state’s doctors reluctant to connect their symptoms to the conditions they had endured inside the thirty-kilometer zone.

The bankrupt state could ill afford to provide the specialist care it had promised to more than a half million new potential invalids, and so doctors wrote up their notes in code; their medical records were classified as secret. All but the most extreme cases were dismissed

with the same diagnosis given to Maria Protsenko: “Ordinary illness: not related...

The liquidators who lived on did so with the fear that they’d returned from the battlefield with fatal wounds no one could ever see. “We know that the invisible enemy is eating away inside us like a worm,” said General Nikolai Antoshkin, whose helicopter crews fought to extinguish the nuclear inferno. “For us, the war continues, and, little by little, we are slipping away from this world.”

So their son, Kirill, then studying to become a doctor, remained an only child, and they had adopted a Siamese cat named Charlie—born on April 26, which they agreed was a good omen.