Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl by Piers Paul Read
Even among the fraternal Socialist democracies of Eastern Europe there were signs of unease. The Polish government announced restrictions on the sale of milk and warned its people of the absolute necessity of washing all fresh vegetables to remove radioactive particles. Iodine was given to all Polish children under the age of sixteen, and queues formed outside pharmacies in the centre of Warsaw.
But there were also more moderate voices in the West. Dr Thomas Marsham, the director of the northern division of the British Atomic Energy Authority, said he would be surprised if the Soviets did not evacuate people within an area of ten miles, but that he could see good reasons to avoid panic. ‘You can cause more casualties if you panic. If you were to suddenly say everyone should get out of Kiev, you’d probably have two hundred people killed on the roads. But there’s a difference,’ he added, ‘between causing panic and telling people what’s going on.’
Although they were not privy to the proceedings of the Politburo on 28 April, it was quite clear to Western journalists and diplomats what was going on in government circles. The fallibility of the system had been exposed, and the politburo’s commitment to glasnost and perestroika was too recent to impede the reflex secrecy and evasion with which the Soviet Union had always hidden its failings from its enemies – and its own people. A pre-eminence in science and technology had been presented as a proof of the superiority of scientific socialism. More recently, Gorbachev had added a commitment to an unpolluted environment and a nuclear-free world. To come clean about the disastrous consequences of the accident would not only arm the nation’s ideological enemies abroad, but expose the fallibility of the system to those at home.
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Deciding that the best defence was to counterattack, Academician Alexandrov called a meeting of senior scientists in his office in the Kurchatov Institute. Among them was Yuri Sivintsev, a dapper, fast-talking expert on nuclear safety who had been brought to the institute by Kurchatov himself in 1948. He knew about the accident and had reason to believe that it was serious, having heard that the existing patients had been evacuated from the nearby Hospital No. 6 to make way for the casualties.
Sivintsev found Velikhov with Alexandrov, and assumed at first that he had been summoned to advise on the accident itself; instead, he was asked by Alexandrov about accidents in nuclear power stations abroad. He told him about the fire at Windscale in Britain and the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States. He was told nothing about what had happened at Chernobyl, but assumed the accident there was on a similar scale.
The accidents at Western reactors were now repeatedly cited in the Soviet press, while the Western reaction to Chernobyl was presented as a deliberate attempt to escalate the Cold War. Wrote Yuri Zhukhov, a commentator, in Pravda:
The United States leaps at any excuse to heat up further an already tense situation, sow distrust and discord among the peoples, and poison the political climate. And the purpose of it all is to divert attention from the criminal aggressive actions of the United States, like the recent bombing of Libya and the undeclared wars against Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua, to justify the intensification of the arms race, the continuation of nuclear tests, and the refusal to accept Soviet peace initiatives.
Zhukhov charged that the escalation of these provocative actions had reached a new peak as ‘the U.S. state apparatus and the news media which do its bidding put out some fabrications about the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl AES.’
It was only senior figures in Washington and in the capitals of some other NATO states who immediately latched on to the news of the Chernobyl accident in order to exploit it for their own hostile political ends. The fuelling of hysteria and panic began. Cock-and-bull stories were concocted about ‘thousands of dead’ and about the possibility of the population of Western Europe and, in all likelihood, the United States being affected by radioactivity. Prompted by Washington’s special propaganda services, the West European gutter press started concocting fabrications, each one more awful than the one before. Expert panic-mongers began the forced evacuation of Western students, specialists and tourists from the USSR, even if they were in Siberia.
The same line was taken in Soviet broadcasts on radio and television, and in other Soviet journals, such as Izvestia and Literaturnaya Gazeta. In Hamburg Boris Yeltsin had been giving a reasonably accurate account of the accident, denouncing reports of widespread damage to crops and the contamination of water and milk throughout the Ukraine:
This whole propaganda campaign can only arouse indignation. This campaign follows political motives. And you can note that this campaign is carried on in countries whose governments stubbornly refuse to cooperate in the programme of abolishing nuclear arms and means of mass destruction.
At the very moment when the medical commission was ordering checks for radioactive contamination of all passengers travelling on trains passing through the Ukraine, TASS was denouncing the ‘humiliating examination’ for radioactive contamination of a troupe of Ukrainian actors at a border crossing from East into West Germany:
Unleashing a campaign of this kind was promoted by the FRG official authorities’ stand, who wittingly gave distorted information on the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl AES. The extremely right-wing forces in the FRG, gambling on this misfortune, were trying to make use of it to extirpate the shoots of détente appearing in Europe.
The counterattack failed. Despite the gruesome exaggerations in the Western press, it was impossible to sustain the outrage and at the same time retain the old policy of secrecy, which the Politburo had adopted at Ligachev’s insistence. It was coming under strain both at home and abroad. The governments of the Scandinavian countries made repeated demands for further information, and the Politburo’s own medical commission asked that the facts about radiation be broadcast on television. There was evidence of growing panic. After the discovery that several trains had been contaminated, dosimetric controls had been ordered by the government’s medical commission on all passengers arriving from Kiev, Gomel and Minsk. This had caused such alarm that the order had been rescinded.
There was further evidence of panic in the queues formed at pharmacies for iodine prophylactics. Initially the commission had accepted Professor Vorobyov’s assurance on 2 May that it was too late for stable iodine to provide protection, and offers of supplies from abroad were turned down. However, Ilyn in Kiev sent a coded telex to Mikhail Gorbachev warning him to expect serious consequences in the middle future from the radioactive iodine that had accumulated in the thyroids of children, and when, on 6 May, it was reported that ‘the level of radiation did require iodine prophylaxis,’ the commission changed its mind. It was estimated that 218 tons would be required in the Russian federation alone, and a request was made to the Ministry of Chemical Production to convert a factory for its production. The commission vacillated about who should take stable iodine. The Soviet ambassador in Romania was told firmly that no Soviet diplomats were to accept the iodine being offered in Bucharest, but while one member of the commission suggested that tests on patients in Hospital No. 7 had shown that only the citizens of Pripyat had received significant doses, another reminded his colleagues that whether or not the iodine prophylactic was needed, doctors must respond to the appeals of any citizen for whatever reason, in particular for medical assistance. People’s psyches were disturbed and doctors had no right to refuse them treatment, even if for all practical purposes it was of no use.
It was the same when it came to information. The first instinct of the commission was to keep all data secret, and a request was sent to a Comrade Zorin to make sure that no information about the medical aspects of the crisis was published in the press without its consent. Information about the condition of patients in Hospital No. 6 could be released because Gale and his friends would have it anyway, but none was to be released from Hospitals No. 7 and 12.
On the other hand, with the evidence of growing panic, the medical commission made a req
That morning stories appeared in Pravda and were put out over the wires of the Soviet news agencies describing, with some accuracy, the accident and the measures being taken to monitor radioactive contamination. The same relative candour was evident at the press conference in the briefing hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was opened by the deputy foreign minister, Anatoly Kovalev, and then addressed by the chairman of the first government commission, Boris Scherbina himself.
It was a relative novelty for Soviet officials to hold Western-style press conferences of this kind, and its proceedings were strictly controlled. The room was packed not just with reporters from many nations, but also with foreign diplomats, including several ambassadors, and the spectacle was filmed by more than a dozen television cameras. However, questions were only taken from Soviet reporters or foreign correspondents from Communist papers, and they were paraphrased to suit the prepared replies.
Scherbina gave an account of the accident that, though it passed over the graver aspects of the crisis and gave a misleading impression of the competence of his commission, at least contained no outright lies. His estimate of casualties was based on the initially optimistic figures given by Baranov and Guskova. He suggested that the accident was being exploited by Cold Warriors in the West to frustrate the peace initiatives of Mikhail Gorbachev.
When asked by foreign journalists whether there was any danger to the population of other countries from the fallout from Chernobyl, Y. S. Sedunov, Yuri Israel’s deputy on the State Committee of Hydrometeorology, said, ‘In our opinion, there was no direct threat to the population either in our areas that are far away from the site of emission, or of foreign countries.’ He admitted enhanced levels of radiation in neighbouring countries, but felt that ‘this emission is shortlived, insignificant, not high.’
To a follow-up question about levels of radioactivity, Sedunov painted a reassuring picture by carefully selecting the statistics he chose to reveal. In Moscow there was no change to the background level. In Chernobyl the level had risen to fifteen milliroentgens an hour but had already dropped threefold. In Kiev the level at the time of the explosion did not exceed background levels, and three days ago was 0.2 milliroentgens an hour. In Minsk there was no substantial increase over the natural background level. In Gomel the situation was approximately the same as in Kiev.
There were further questions about the safety of Soviet nuclear power stations, which Petrosyants defended with vigour. Forty-one units had been working safely for the past thirty years. The technology was young, complex, and in a number of ways problematic, but other countries had faced similar problems. Look at Windscale, Idaho and Three Mile Island!
After only an hour, with the hands of many Western reporters still raised to ask questions, the conference was brought abruptly to an end. However, excerpts from the news conference were shown on television, both on ‘Vremya’ and in a special bulletin that followed. All references to the possible dangers from radiation had been removed.
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In the days that followed, the different approaches of Ligachev, the Central Committee secretary for ideology, and Yakovlev, the secretary for propaganda, were apparent in the tone taken by journalists loyal to different masters. On 7 May Sovetskaya Rossiya mentioned merely a ‘lack of coordination’ in the evacuation of the population of the contaminated area; on 12 May, Pravda named officials guilty of grave dereliction of duty. Sometimes contradictory stances even appeared in the same paper. In a front-page article on 18 May, Pravda criticized those who refused to take the Soviet people into their confidence; on 21 May this was contradicted by a second article saying that criticism in the West of the dissemination of information was totally unjustified, since collecting accurate data inevitably takes time.
This battle was not so much about the aftermath of the accident as over what meaning was to be given to glasnost. Gorbachev had launched the policy, but seemed uncertain about how far it should be allowed to go. In theory he saw the need for it, but as a Soviet patriot he was loath to wash his country’s dirty linen in public, and as he revealed to Armand Hammer and Robert Gale when he received them in the Kremlin, he was genuinely angry about the way the Western media had gloated over this misfortune.
Throughout the party apparatus, and particularly in the media, the wily watched and waited to see which way things would go. Both Ligachev and Yakovlev had their supporters, and cautious editors hedged their bets by giving space to each. In Pravda, commentators like Yuri Zhukhov hammered away at the wickedness of the West, but Yakovlev had both a friend and an ally in the science editor, Vladimir Gubarev. A balding, handsome man, he had the kind of tough, chiselled face given to ‘positive’ Soviet heroes in paintings of the Stalinist era. With two degrees, one in physics from Moscow University, the other from the Institute of Construction and Development, Gubarev was well qualified as a scientist. But he was also the director of television films and the author of half a dozen plays and two dozen books, several of which had been published abroad. In the company of journalists he said he was an artist; in the company of artists he said he was a journalist. In both roles, he was a Communist, and in over thirty years at Pravda had grown adept at following the different twists and turns of the party line.
On 26 April, Gubarev had been tipped off about the accident by a physicist from the Kurchatov Institute. He had immediately telephoned the Pravda correspondent in Kiev, Mikhail Odinets, and told him to investigate. Odinets rang back later that day and said that there had been roadblocks on the way to Chernobyl; the militia had let him through, but later the KGB had sent him back. Three days later, on 29 April, after the TASS communiqué about the accident, Gubarev went to see his editor with his suspicion that the accident must have been much more serious than they had been led to believe. When the editor telephoned the Central Committee, he was told to drop the matter and not to interfere. This confirmed Gubarev’s suspicions. He himself telephoned Yakovlev, but his friend, bound by the decision of the Politburo, fobbed him off. ‘I’m told it’s nothing serious. Don’t get involved.’
On 2 May, after Ryzhkov and Ligachev had returned from Chernobyl, six trusted journalists were authorized by the Politburo to visit the scene. With the local correspondent, Odinets, Gubarev boarded a hydrofoil that was to take samples of water where the Pripyat River entered the Kiev reservoir.
In a leisurely, almost literary dispatch that was later published in Pravda, Gubarev and Odinets described their journey. The article was filled with facts: the Kiev reservoir was a man-made sea occupying an area in excess of 920 square kilometres and containing 3.7 cubic kilometres of water. Polesskpe and Ivankov regions had sown over 650,000 hectares of crops that spring, which was 100,000 more than the year before, including 150,000 of corn, which was 40,000 hectares more than the year before. Chernobyl was the repair base of the Dnieper Steamship Company as well as a centre for pig-iron production, cheese and mixed-feed factories, with an industrial combine, a consumer-services combine, medical and agricultural vocational and technical colleges, four general education schools, a musical school, a hospital, a polyclinic, a culture centre, a cinema and a library.
There were uplifting interviews. ‘We people belong to one family,’ said an Estonian engineer. ‘If the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl has suffered a misfortune, we are ready to come to its assistance.’ ‘Soviet people have the same joys and the same concerns,’ said another, from Kirghizia. ‘We have a sacred principle,’ said a third, from B
At the headquarters of the commission in Chernobyl, Gubarev and Odinets interviewed Velikhov, who described the efficiency with which they were dealing with the crisis. ‘Previously it took months to reach agreement, but now a night is enough to decide virtually any problem. There is not a single person who refuses to work. Everyone is acting selflessly.’ He conceded that the problem they faced was unusual and ‘requires solutions that neither scientists nor specialists have ever had to deal with before,’ but the main lesson to be learned was ‘how catastrophic nuclear war is.’ The accident was trifling by comparison. ‘Over there in the West, particularly in Europe, people are shouting and making a din about Chernobyl, but they themselves are keeping quiet about or are trying to belittle the danger that the Pershings’ nuclear charge contains. So it is worthwhile for Western propagandists to consider: should they gloat over an accident that has occurred or would it be better to prevent a worldwide catastrophe?’
Despite its prosaic presentation and ideological dressing, Gubarev’s article gave several indications to the careful reader of the gravity of the accident at Chernobyl. He did not interview Legasov, who was loyal to Ligachev, head of the department in which his father had served in the secretariat of the Central Committee. Velikhov, however, was willing to give substance to glasnost, and for Yakovlev, Gubarev’s visit presented an opportunity to present information to Gorbachev that might not be reaching him through official channels. When Gubarev returned to Moscow, he was summoned to the Kremlin by Yakovlev, who then took him to see Gorbachev in his study. There Gubarev told the party leader of the chaos and incompetence he had witnessed, and warned him that the aftermath of the accident would be with them for many years to come. The general secretary seemed taken aback at the pessimism of his account.