Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl by Piers Paul Read
In the second half of 1988, Knijnikov wrote a lengthy and considered article on the subject that he had studied for so long. At last he dared to warn his readers of the dangers of a low collective dose of radiation, predicting that over the next sixty years there might be as many as twenty thousand additional deaths from cancer as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. When he submitted the article to Pravda it was turned down, and he was told that they had a surfeit of articles on this subject. If he had predicted, say, two million deaths, it might have been of interest to Pravda’s readers: as it was, what he had written said nothing new.
A further blow to the official position came from the Soviet Union’s most distinguished haematologist, Professor Andrei Vorobyov – the same Vorobyov who had served as the government’s principal expert on the hazards of radiation on its own medical commission, and who, in the first days after the accident, had told ministry officials that a dose of up to one hundred rems would not lead to leukaemia. Now, in an article in Novy Mir, he warned his readers that even a dose of a single rem could have unfortunate consequences, and that in some zones the dose from Chernobyl had been ten times higher than the official figures suggested. Using a sophisticated process that included electronic paramagnetic resonance tests on tooth enamel, Vorobyov had discovered this in people living in the Gomel region of Belorussia. Moreover, the government had only given the figures for strontium and caesium, when there were many other radioisotopes that should be taken into consideration.
Government scientists retaliated, suggesting that political animosity coloured Vorobyov’s attack on Ilyn. The process of biological dosimetry used by the Institute of Biophysics was accepted as accurate all over the world. Vorobyov’s method was too complex and expensive to be widely used, and the extrapolations made from a sample were inevitably open to doubt. While Vorobyov charged that Ilyn and his team were dishonest, deliberately lowering their estimates of the dose for political expediency, the scientists at the Institute of Biophysics and his former colleagues at Hospital No. 6 felt that Vorobyov’s judgment was clouded by rancour and ambition. Certainly he had good reason to hate a regime under which his father had been shot and his mother imprisoned for eighteen years, but this should not lead him to feed false facts to the populace or democratic politicians or to turn against those who had helped him in the past.
3
It was too late for reasoned debate. In the course of the summer of 1988, to the consternation of its author, Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost had taken on a life of its own. Treated at first with profound cynicism by the mass of the Soviet people as just another empty slogan, it had been gradually and cautiously tested and found to have more substance than was at first supposed. In the vanguard of those who hoped for a genuinely more open and democratic society was a group among the licensed intellectuals of the Writers’ Union, and the primary issue that they used to test the limits was the critical condition of the environment.
This had several advantages. The subject had not been treated by either Marx or Lenin, and so had no counterrevolutionary connotations. It was also a palpable by-product of the era of stagnation – more vivid in its effects than falling production or inadequate investment. Moreover, it aroused real fear, particularly after Chernobyl, which became greater than citizens’ habitual dread of the KGB. When it became apparent that people were more likely to suffer from the effects of radiation, pollution or pesticides in their own homes than from imprisonment in the gulags, a new resolve entered the hearts of those who until then had been cowed by the residual menace of the regime.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in those republics that had never willingly joined the Soviet Union. Lithuania was a good example; once an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and, like Latvia and Estonia, having more in common with Scandinavia than Muscovy, it had been the last nation in Europe to adopt Christianity, converting en masse in the fifteenth century from pagan tree worship to Roman Catholicism, not Russian Orthodoxy. Part of the Russian empire until 1918, it became independent in the wake of World War I, but was seized by Stalin in 1940 after Hitler had conceded it to the Soviet sphere of influence in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Never resigned to its fate, anti-Soviet partisans had remained active for some years after the end of World War II. Even forty years later, at the time of Chernobyl, the nonindigenous population was smaller there than in any other non-Soviet republic, and the few Lithuanians who lived in other parts of the Soviet Union had mostly been deported there against their will.
The first test of glasnost in Lithuania came on 12 February 1988, when a small group held a rally to celebrate the Independence Day of the prewar state. This provoked an angry reaction from the Communist authorities; administrative sanctions were taken against many of the offenders, and a media campaign was mounted against this reactionary nostalgia for the ‘bourgeois’ state.
It failed. Protected by their membership in the Writers’ Union, Lithuanian intellectuals formed a number of unofficial clubs to discuss and reevaluate their recent history. A revisionist article appeared in a newspaper for young people; the author was vilified by the party, but the intellectuals took his side. Following news that a Popular Front had been formed in Estonia, five hundred members of the intelligentsia – authors, artists, scientists and academics – held a meeting at the Academy of Sciences on 3 June to launch a movement known as Sajudis to promote ‘openness, democracy and sovereignty’.
Throughout that summer, Sajudis organized demonstrations to promote its agenda: democratic elections, access to the media, the national flag, but also the dangers of nuclear power. On 15 July, about two thousand people protested in front of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet against the construction of a third fifteen-hundred-megawatt RBMK reactor at the Ignalina nuclear power station, which had proved to be an issue of acute popular concern. Two months later, on 16 September, two hundred thousand people formed a human chain around the Ignalina plant to stop work on the third unit, and pickets were formed in different Lithuanian cities to call for an international investigation into the management of the power station.
The same explosive mix of ecological anxiety and patriotic feeling was evident in the Ukraine. Second only in size to the Russian Republic among those that made up the Soviet Union, it had never received its due. Its black earth was celebrated for its fertility, it had developed a considerable industrial capacity and its population was as large as that of France, but it had failed to impress its identity on the outside world. Divided in the nineteenth century between the Russian and the Austrian empires, its large estates, as at Chernobyl, were often owned by Poles. By and large a peasant people whose language was not taught in schools or used by the educated classes, it nevertheless produced great poetry, like that of the liberated serf Taras Shevchenko.
In the Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainian peasantry rose against the Polish aristocracy, often slaughtering land owners and burning down their palaces and country houses. Ragged but brutal armies fought for the Reds and the Whites in the civil war. The soldiers of Hetman Petlyura and the anarchist Makhno indulged in atrocious pogroms of Jews, while Trotsky’s troops massacred Pilsudski’s Poles, the nationalist Ukrainians and anyone else they deemed a ‘bourgeois’ or an enemy of the people. Between 1918 and 1920, the people of Kiev were governed by fifteen different regimes. The final triumph of the Bolsheviks was followed by the horrors of their collectivization of agriculture and the extermination and deportation of millions, succeeded by the death from starvation of many millions more.
No sooner had one vile episode in Ukrainian history come to an end than another started. In the 1930s came Stalin’s terror, and when this ended, the Ukraine was invaded by the German army and, in its wake, the murderous Einsatzgruppen, or action units. Ukrainian Jews were exterminated, some to be buried in a ravine known as Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev. So too were their gentile compatriots, accused of collaborating with the Soviet partisans. Twenty million Soviets were killed during World War II, a large pr
Given these thirty years of unparalleled disruption and slaughter from 1915 to 1945, and the totalitarian tyranny imposed during the four decades that followed, it is hardly surprising that the Ukrainian people reacted cautiously to the promise of glasnost and perestroika. Earlier there had been a false dawn under Khrushchev, considered a liberal in the West, but to the Ukrainians Stalin’s Gauleiter in Kiev, noted for his zealous persecution of the Christian religion. What else should they expect from a Gorbachev or a Ryzhkov? Once bitten, twice shy.
Little by little, however, it became clear that while the old guard could still count on Yegor Ligachev and his group in the Central Committee, they were by no means all-powerful. The failure of Ligachev’s move against Gorbachev in the spring of 1988 was followed by a formal reorganization of the Politburo at the end of September – Gorbachev’s ‘coup’ from above – in which Ligachev lost control of ideology and was given the poisoned chalice of agriculture. Indeed, the very department of ideology within the Central Committee was abolished, being replaced by a commission headed by Vadim Medvedev, at one time Yakovlev’s deputy in the department of propaganda.
The earliest manifestation of any kind of opposition in the Ukraine came, as mentioned earlier, in a letter in Literaturnaya Ukraina soon after the accident at Chernobyl, protesting against the building of a nuclear power station at Chigirin. At the same time authors like Vladimir Gubarev, Yuri Shcherbak, and Volodomyr Yavorivsky began to write books blaming the disaster on the operators and the era of stagnation. In late 1986 and 1987, the debate about nuclear power continued in the pages of Literaturnaya Ukraina, and there were even conferences and seminars on the question, but no criticism of the government’s programme was allowed to appear in the mass media.
In December 1987 a group from the writers’ and the cinematographers’ unions founded a club in Kiev to discuss environmental issues. They called it Zelenij Svit, or Green World. Among the thirty or so founding members was Yuri Shcherbak. In March 1988, at a conference held by the Writers’ Union, the club was expanded into a pan-Ukrainian ecological association with opposition to nuclear power as the main plank of its programme. As it became apparent that these pioneers had got away with this form of protest – indeed, that it was encouraged at the highest levels in the party – thousands of others joined. In July 1988, twenty thousand signed a petition against the continuing construction of a nuclear power station in the Crimea. The membership of Green World grew from thirty to five hundred thousand, and in the spring of 1989 Yuri Shcherbak, running against the officially sponsored candidate of the Communist party, was elected on a Green World ticket to the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow.
Even before Shcherbak’s election, the government in Moscow had slowly but inexorably given in to popular pressure to cut back its programme for nuclear power. As early as 1987, plans for further nuclear power stations in Kiev and Odessa had been abandoned. In January 1988, construction was halted at the Krasnodar station, and that autumn it was announced that a planned nuclear power station in Minsk would be converted to fossil fuel, while reactors in Armenia and Azerbaijan were closed.
In the spring of 1989, when the elections had established decisively the public’s ecological anxieties, expansion was halted at the South Ukraine, Kursk, Smolensk, Khmelnitsky and Rovno nuclear power stations. The power station in the Crimea was converted into a training centre – Velikhov had agreed that the site was susceptible to earthquakes – and a decision was made to convert the Chigirin power station to fossil fuel. In the autumn of 1989, Green World organized mass demonstrations in Kiev against nuclear power, and in the spring of 1990, plans for the expansion or construction of nuclear power stations were abandoned at Gorky, Archangelsk, Karelia, Ivanova, Tataria and Rostov.
Lastly, on 1 June 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine decided to decommission, at some unspecified future date, the three working reactors at Chernobyl.
4
Among other successful candidates on the democratic ticket in the election to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, the first since the Revolution with a measure of genuine democracy, was Professor Andrei Vorobyov, Academician Yevgeni Velikhov and the author who had made his name because of Chernobyl, Volodomyr Yavorivsky. His novel, The Star Called Wormwood, which had so bitterly offended those who had worked at the power station, had been a great popular success. Its portrayal of slovenliness and corruption among the personnel satisfied not only the party line but also the public’s long-suppressed appetite for controversy and sensation. Although written in complete conformity with the government’s new policies of glasnost and perestroika, it had the paradoxical effect of earning a reputation for its author as a radical critic of the Soviet system.
If the book altered Yavorivsky’s public image, it also changed the inner man. The son of peasants from around Vinnitsa in the southwest Ukraine, he had been shaken by what he had seen while interviewing the operators and liquidators in the thirty-kilometre zone for his book. The need for change became more than a policy of the Twenty-seventh Party Congress; it became a cause to which Yavorivsky would devote his life. When RUKH was formed – the Association for the Promotion of Perestroika in the Ukraine – he became a member. A talented orator, he delivered an inspiring speech to the first congress of RUKH, looking back over Ukrainian history, then asking, ‘What sort of people are we? What kind of people have we become?’
Earlier than many latter-day nationalists, Yavorivsky resigned from the Communist party and abandoned his career as a writer to become a full-time politician. In appearance he was handsome, even romantic, and his second wife was an actress. Some who sympathized with his objectives saw Yavorivsky as a long-winded poseur, but these qualities have never impeded the career of a politician, and they did not prevent his triumph. Running on the platform of RUKH, he was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, and a year later to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in Kiev.
Once, elected to the republican assembly, Yavorivsky set to work to frame a ‘Chernobyl law’ that would provide aid and compensation to the victims of the accident. To accomplish this he allied himself with the president of the Chernobyl Union, Volodomyr Shovkovshytny.
Like Yavorivsky, Shovkovshytny was the son of peasants from a village south of Kiev. Nominally members of a state-owned farm in which five hundred people worked three thousand hectares of land, his parents were largely self-sufficient, with their own painted wooden cottage, fruit trees, eight pigs, eighteen geese, thirty hens and a private plot of land. They had few happy memories of the Communist era. His mother’s family had been forced to cut down their fruit trees because they made them liable for a tax they could not pay. His father’s family, which had owned a horse, a cow and a pig, had been denounced as kulaks, thrown off their land and evicted from their home. His maternal grandfather had been sentenced to ten years in a gulag for resisting collectivization; his father’s mother had died in the famine. Two great uncles had died in the war and a third had returned from a German camp only to die in one of Stalin’s gulags in Siberia.
Volodomyr had therefore been raised with a secret loathing of the regime. Although his parents were upright and god-fearing, their passion was for a Ukrainian nation, and the small shrine in their living room was to their national poet, Taras Shevchenko. Young Volodomyr had inherited this love for Shevchenko’s verse, and after reading all the books in the village library, dreamed of becoming a writer himself. It remained a dream. After serving in the army, studying geology in Kiev, and prospecting for uranium in Siberia, he took a job at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, where his brother was already employed as a dosimetrist.
Never a high-flying engineer, Volodomyr Shovkovshytny worked first in the chemical workshops, and later for Nikolai Steinberg in the turbine hall. His principal interests were outside his work; he liked sports and, above all, literature. He wrote light verse and humorous stories which were published in Pripyat, played
At the time of the accident, Shovkovshytny had been away in Moscow taking exams to obtain higher qualifications. He returned to Pripyat only to be evacuated with his wife and children. That autumn, he resumed work at the power station but he still wanted to be a writer and a year later he was offered a place at the Literary Institute in Moscow.
The two years Shovkovshytny spent in Moscow opened his mind. He had an opportunity to study the great works of Russian and Ukrainian literature, to see the contemporary plays and to listen to the new political ideas circulating in the capital city, where glasnost had advanced further than it had in Kiev. Just as his dream of becoming a writer had now come true, so the dream of a Ukraine that was free of both Communism and the tyranny of the Kremlin had suddenly ceased to be absurd. Certainly the ecological question was still the subject of the most urgent agitation, but to Shovkovshytny green remained a mix of blue and yellow, the traditional colours of the Ukraine.
Like Yavorivsky, Shovkovshytny was a dashing figure, with a drooping moustache and unquestionable charm, and he soon gained a reputation in Kiev both for his personal integrity and his political ideas. In Moscow at the time of the elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies, he was asked by his friends in the Chernobyl Union to run for election to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet a year later. It was a long shot; the party still had great influence, and on the list of his opponents was a deputy minister, a first secretary and the mayor of the residential district on the east bank of the Dnieper where he lived. But many of the former residents of Pripyat had been rehoused in this suburb, among them one thousand members of the Chernobyl Union, and on the second round of voting, Shovkovshytny won the seat.