WE’RE ALL FINE HERE, NOW, THANK YOU: EXAMINING THE INTERNAL RESPONSES TO CHERNOBYL

By

WESLEY PAYNE WHITE

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2017

© 2017 Wesley White

To Hailee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I want to thank Doctors Alice Freifeld and Stuart Finkel for guiding me through my graduate education. Both of you helped to guide and develop me in my craft and, when I entertained the thought of returning to finish, accepted me back and were willing to help without an ounce of hesitation. I also want to thank Doctor Michael

Schuering for agreeing to help me with my thesis and serve on my committee without having ever spoken to me. Your knowledge about this subject was truly helpful (if only we’d had more time!) and your willingness to help what amounted to a stranger is absolutely the professional example I hope to carry forward into my career. Thank you all for your guidance and the personal growth you fostered within me, and thank you for helping me recover this goal which has, at times, seemed all-too-lost.

Thank you to Jennifer A. Lyon for calling me lazy at my 2016 Christmas party; more than anything else, it was that conversation that led me to working on this thesis again. An honest and true friend, your words were the inspirational Sherpa I needed to guide me to the summit of my degree.

A special thank you is reserved for Johanna Mellis, my mentor and friend, who helped me hammer a convoluted mess of disparate documents into a thesis. I can absolutely say that your help and guidance in this process was invaluable, and this project would not have come to fruition without your willingness to spend your own free time on me. I’m also sorry you read that first draft. This one is significantly better.

For my parents, who don’t always understand what it is that I am doing with my life, from studying Soviet history to doing “computer stuff” with the government, this is for you. My mother always told me, “can’t never could.” I am proud to report to her that I, in fact, did.

4 For Eliot and Sophia, remember that “better late than never,” holds true almost every time.

And to Hailee, Wife, Best: thank you for taking my seemingly half-cocked plan to join the Army seriously, even though I pitched it to you on a laptop I had balanced on top of a washing machine. Your support for my (and eventually our) varied adventures has been constant and unwavering and I couldn’t ask for a better partner in it. I find it oddly fitting to be finishing this degree while we are concurrently finishing our Army adventure. I wouldn’t change anything – well, no, I would probably finish this degree earlier – and I love you.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

2 HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE NUCLEAR LANDSCAPE ...... 18

The Nuclear Landscape ...... 30 Working Definitions ...... 35

3 CHELIABINSK ...... 37

4 CHERNOBYL ...... 49

What Happened ...... 55 What Was Known about the Plant ...... 70 What Was Said ...... 76

5 CONCLUSION ...... 92

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 98

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 102

6 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

WE’RE ALL FINE HERE, NOW, THANK YOU: EXAMINING THE INTERNAL RESPONSES TO CHERNOBYL

By

Wesley White

December 2017

Chair: Stuart Finkel Major: History

This thesis contends that Chernobyl was an unintended test-case for glasnost’ at the end of the Soviet era. Using newspaper and journal articles contemporary to the era, as well as secondary literature written in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, it contends that far from being covered up by the Soviet government, many efforts were made to inform the citizenry, take responsibility on the world stage, and minimize the effects of the Chernobyl event as it unfolded in April 1986 and beyond. As a counterweight to this argument, the thesis investigates the Cheliabinsk nuclear event of 1957, which in fact was covered up, and required a dissident Soviet émigré and a team of scientists from Oak Ridge Laboratories to bring to light. In order to better understand the specific events of Chernobyl, it is investigated from three distinct angles: what was known about the specific type of power plant, what was said in the domestic and international press about the Chernobyl event, and what happened on 26 April,

1986. By juxtaposing the Cheliabisnk cover-up and the events that took place in the wake of Chernobyl, the thesis will show that the larger Soviet government acted in good faith in their attempts to contain, control, and correct the literal and figurative fallout from

Chernobyl.

7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Chernobyl was a tragedy which played itself out in real time on the world stage; it unfolded, real-time, in the press, both domestic and foreign; it was on television and radio and newsreels, in papers and journals and books, and in conversation. It happened to a society, reeling from economic pressure on the heels of an oil crash and a quagmire of an invasion in Afghanistan, while also feeling social pressure radiating from the eastern bloc inwards for more freedom – of speech, of the press, of choice in people’s own lives. It happened to a government with a relatively young leader – Mikhail

Gorbachev, 55 years old in 1986 – who was trying to shrug off the Soviet gerontocracy and their secretive, old-Soviet types of attitudes which were choking the life from a system he believed in. Most importantly, it happened (and it still happening) to the people of Ukraine and Belarus.

Today, approximately 8.9 percent of Ukraine and nearly 23 percent of Belarus is considered contaminated from the Chernobyl incident. Nearly five percent of Ukraine's entire state budget is spent on Chernobyl-related expenses, including costs related to environmental cleanup and technical support on the destroyed reactor, as well as compensations and other financial considerations to the Chernobyl public health and science apparatus.1 It has been thirty years since the event and Chernobyl still dominates the lives and minds of many people in eastern Europe.

Briefly, this is the premise of my research and this paper: Chernobyl was an accident borne of its specific time and place at the end of the USSR, but credit is due

1 Adriana Petryna, Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations in Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 19, pg. 255

8 and should be given to the Soviet response, for it is in the aftershock of Chernobyl that we see the Soviet government at-large opening up, both to the world and, more importantly, to its own citizens.

Chernobyl was the initial, put-up-or-shut-up test for glasnost’. In the discussion of

Chernobyl – flowing from top to bottom, state to citizen – one can see a fair amount of misinformation; however, there is also the presence of actual discussion of the events, of solid factual information being disseminated. This duality is important: a society trending closer to closed than open cannot be expected to immediately uncloister the truth and allow free press and free discussion, agnostic of the “party line” or the desires of the State. Instead, what one would hope to see is a gradual lessening of state control, a freer flow of information, building towards an eventual loosening of internal controls and a free(er) flow of information. In a vacuum, this is a years-long process, wherein those in control of the media slowly learn to ease control, the consumers of that media slowly begin to learn to trust the flow of information from the press. Chernobyl denied the Soviet government and the Soviet people that opportunity; in full view of the rest of the world, the Soviet government had to figure out what it meant to tell the truth and take ownership of mistakes – a painful process, rife with pitfalls in the most ideal circumstances, compounded even further as the watchful eyes of the Western press focused with a laser intensity on the Soviet Union and its own press, pouncing on inaccuracy and, where the Soviet party line was not sufficiently outlandish or headline grabbing, sometimes inventing headlines of their own.2

2 We will discuss UPI and its false story, as well as the retraction, later.

9 For many, especially those that experienced it, Chernobyl is eternal; the anger at and sense of betrayal from the now-defunct Soviet government has never burned away.

The simmering anger at Chernobyl and the Soviet response has spawned numerous scathing monographs and articles, many from those affected by the event. Movies have been made chronicling the survivors of the event, oral histories conducted with those who lived in Pripyat and in the exclusion zone at-large, and the overarching sense that one comes away from first-hand encounters is a sense of betrayal, that the Soviet government misinformed its populace and the world about what happened and did its best to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A quick perusal of books on Chernobyl offers up such titles as Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment and Chernobyl: Nuclear Gulag.

Historians and authors line up to tell interested readers of the horrors of Chernobyl, the

“worst nuclear disaster in history.”3 Anniversaries are ticked off one by one, commemorations come and go, and yet the anger, fear, and resentment from those affected never seems to dissipate. “Chernobyl,” says Ludmilla Isurin, “still is fresh in their memory, and the government's betrayal in deceiving their people or downplaying the real danger of the nuclear fallout rightly seems not to be forgiven.”4 Perhaps this is because there was never an outlet for those emotions for the people affected; there was no society to other, no nation, group, or idea to declare war against. It could not be blamed on an extremist ideology or a military strike. With no exterior perpetrator to

3 Chernobyl 01:23:40: The incredible true story of the world's worst nuclear disaster, by Andrew Leatherbarrow; Chernobyl and Three Mile Island: The History and Legacy of The World's Most Notorious Nuclear Accidents, by Charles River; The Worst Accident in the World: Chernobyl, the End of the Nuclear Dream, by Nigel Hawkes; The Children of Chernobyl: Human Cost of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster, by Adi Roche; The Aftermath of Chernobyl: History's Worst Nuclear Power Reactor Accident, by C.C. Bailey

4 Ludmila Isurin, Collective Remembering: Memory in the World and in the Mind (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 260.

10 place blame on, the anger turned internal, to the Soviet system and those in power.

Discord and discontent was rampant in the USSR by April 1986. The oil boom that had bolstered the Soviet economy for most of the 1970s and early 1980s had ground to a halt5; seemingly instantly, the full coffers from the oil disappeared.6 Soviet émigrés derided the USSR as a land of kleptocracy.7 The ability of Soviet citizens to view

Western television and listen to Western radio served to break the insular hold the

Soviet state had on its own citizens and served to show the stark contrasts between citizens of the societies. Blame for Chernobyl was realistically one more thing on the pile at the feet of the Soviet government. Senseless tragedy wonts nothing more than an outlet and a reason. The Soviet government, secretive and nigh-ruinous as it was, offered those two things to the affected.

Morbid popular fascination around and about the event has reared its head in popular culture, as well.8 There has been seemingly no down-time, no time to reflect; the world has never forgotten completely about Chernobyl, and as such it has never been private or personal to those involved. Every looming potential nuclear disaster – or every in-fact disaster such as Fukushima – calls the echoes of Chernobyl forward and into popular consciousness again. Chernobyl is constantly used as a too-easy

5 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2009), 16.

6 Ibid, 17. See also Thane Gustafson, Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 2014), 47.

7 Ibid., 28. See also Konstantin M. Simis, USSR--the Corrupt Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 248.

8 See the Chernobyl Diaries (film, 2012); S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (video game, 2007); S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (video game, 2010)

11 comparison for any kind of impending disaster; it serves as a bogeyman which can be wielded, without any great understanding of the event itself, to scare one’s opponents on a variety of issues.9 Chernobyl was in fact a disaster, a tragedy, one of the worst accidents of all time. Suggesting that one can “stop the next Chernobyl,” or that the

“next Chernobyl may be intentional”10 does two things: first, it performs a grave disservice to the memory of the event. It cheapens the lives of the plant workers lost in the accident at large; of the populace who died as a direct or indirect result of the accident; and of those who died working valorously to impede, mitigate, or correct the disaster in any way they could. Second, it suggests that Chernobyl itself was less of a disaster, less of an awful accident, by cheapening the impact and memory of the event to society at-large, akin to the way words like “awesome” or “terrible” have lost their initial linguistic meaning and power.

There exists a control case for what “sweeping under the rug” looks like, however: a large-scale nuclear event that infected a large swath of land in central

USSR, during the Khrushchev period, when glasnost’ was but an unstated dream of the future. This work will present a variety of ideas and information: it will discuss the

Cheliabinsk-40 nuclear event in the late 1950s in the context of what a true Soviet governmental cover-up looked like, up to and including the extraordinary steps required

9 Timothy Jorgensen, "Who Will Prevent the Next Chernobyl? (Op-Ed)," LiveScience, April 25, 2016, section goes here, accessed July 12, 2017, http://www.livescience.com/54550-preventing-another- nuclear-meltdown.html; Monica Horton, "Early Warning for the next Chernobyl," New Scientist, September 18, 1993, section goes here, accessed July 12, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13918914-100.; Gordon G. Chang, "Will China Export The Next Chernobyl?" Forbes, June 22, 2014, section goes here, accessed July 12, 2017, http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2014/06/22/will-china-export-the-next-chernobyl/.

10 Bennett Ramberg, "The next Chernobyl May Be Intentional," Reuters, April 26, 2016, section goes here, accessed July 12, 2017, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2016/04/25/the-next-chernobyl-may- be-intentional/.

12 by researchers at places like the Oak Ridge Laboratories to uncover that the event even happened; this will be followed by an in-depth and technical look at what actually happened in reactor number 4 at Chernobyl and what the Soviet government knew about the RBMK reactors, such as the one used at Chernobyl; finally, I will present what was said publicly by the USSR, both domestically and internationally, with care being taken to note where official information channels strayed from the truth but, perhaps more importantly, where the truth was told, blame was apportioned, and responsibility was accepted.

Many aspects of the Chernobyl response were ill-handled, but also in the response we see a fledgling open society trying its hand at being forthright without a prior “training wheel test.” Chernobyl was the first step – stumbling and off-balance as it was – away from the disinformation dominated previous Soviet years.

One of the main popular culture themes that I write against in this work is that the

Soviet response was somehow uniquely bungled; that the United States, England,

France – any of them likely might have responded differently and with a more accurate and timely flow of information, depending on how one takes Kate Brown’s conclusions.

She writes:

Hanford [an American plutonium production town] scientists and their superiors could not admit to having no contingency plans, no way to safeguard the populace ... To do so would have meant shutting down, and since ceasing plutonium production would be a national security risk, that was not an option. Instead, public figures and corporate scientists carried on as if nuclear technology had not just changed the calculations of risk management irrevocably, rendering the notion of public safety meaningless when it came to nuclear affairs.11

11 Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 189.

13

That said, the poor flow of information is not even a specifically Soviet enterprise.

Kate Brown suggests that while “it might be tempting to view Chernobyl as merely a chapter from the history of the failed Soviet state and believe that today more developed countries would respond better and more comprehensively,”12 especially when it relates to responses to a nuclear accident. The Japanese government and Tepco, the corporation that owns Fukushima Diachii, failed to acknowledge the meltdown and release of radioactive isotopes for two full months after the tsunami. Steven Becker writes:

The situation at Fukushima is also a reminder of one of the most crucial lessons learnt from earlier nuclear accidents: that the provision of timely, accurate, clear, and credible information may be the single most important way to save lives, reduce injuries and illnesses, prevent psychosocial effects, and help maintain people's trust and confidence. Inadequate and conflicting information given after the Three Mile Island incident resulted in mass flight of the population. After Chernobyl, the failure of authorities to warn the population not to consume milk and milk products contaminated by the disaster caused many people to ingest substantial quantities of iodine- 131. Subsequently the result was a dramatic increase in thyroid cancer in children. The response to the nuclear emergency at Fukushima has already shown communication problems. In particular, soon after the incident, information provided by the power company (and to some extent the government) was seen by many as inadequate, confusing, and unclear. The immediate result has been public mistrust and anger, fear, and anxiety. More recently, government agencies have stepped up efforts to improve the provision of information.13

We cannot fault the Soviet government at-large for not responding as another society would have, especially when it not entirely clear from other nuclear responses

12 Kate Brown, “Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl,” April 2016: Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, April 2016, accessed November 11, 2017, http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/april-2016-eating-you-food-and-chernobyl.

13 S. M. Becker, “Protecting Public Health after Major Radiation Emergencies,” Bmj 342, no. Mar25 1 (2011): 717, accessed October 1, 2017, doi:10.1136/bmj.d1968.

14 worldwide that other ‘societal’ responses would have been any different. Problems existed in the pre-Chernobyl Three Mile Island accident, and problems still existed some twenty-five years after Chernobyl, even with the benefit of hindsight and lessons learned, at Fukushima Daiichi. The Japanese government report, “Towards

Reconstruction: 'Hope Beyond the Disaster'” drew criticism from all sides for its emphasis on the future course of action instead of on victims’ immediate conditions.14

Alexis Dudden suggests that, “in part because of TEPCO's [Tokyo Electric Power

Company] willful untruths from the start, differences in awareness and knowledge about the dangers that people escaped then and since in and around the Fukushima plant have created a divide between these refugees and their supporters and those drinking what might be called the TEPCO Kool-Aid.”15 According to Dudden, there is a public discussion that as much as an 80-kilometer radius of the plant should be sealed off for years (if not generations), even though hundreds of thousands remain there now – including in Fukushima City itself.16 This hearkens to the response of the Chernobyl residents as captured by Alexievich: “we're not moving anywhere. There's no store, no hospital. No electricity. We sit next to a kerosene lamp and under the moonlight. And we like it! Because we're home.,”17 and, “even if it’s poisoned, it’s home. There’s no place else they need us,”18 and, “My husband came come from the collective farm meeting,

14 Alexis Dudden, "The Ongoing Disaster," The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 02 (2012): 348, doi:10.1017/s002191181200006x.

15 Ibid., 346.

16 Ibid., 347.

17 Svetlana Aleksievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Bridgewater, NJ: Distributed by Paw Prints/Baker & Taylor, 2008), 71.

18 Ibid., 69.

15 he says, 'Tomorrow we get evacuated.' …'We are not going, period. We lived through the war, now it is radiation.' Even if we have to bury ourselves, we're not going!”19

Without diving too deep into Fukushima and its response, Chernobyl and Fukushima

Daiichi appear to share similarities that makes them more alike than different.

There is a vast area in the study of Chernobyl where I could position my research and despite the issue being covered, to a moderate extent, by some monographs and articles, I feel it important that this work be a study of the Soviet response itself. Greatly informed by the works of the Medvedevs, Marples, and Alexievich, while also in concurrence with Geist, whose research I combine with articles from primarily Soviet newspapers, I mean to bring about a firmer understanding of how the Soviet government responded, and what informed that response. My argument is relatively straightforward: the Soviet government responded generally correctly, if slowly, but a

‘proper response’ was often indirectly sabotaged by self-serving bureaucrats looking out for themselves and their own careers, journalists and minor, local government officials not embracing the ideals of glasnost’, and finally by the sheer scope and horror of the event, and the baggage that came with such a large-scale event whose main effect – namely, radiation – was so ill-understood by the public at large.

Let me be clear: this is not an attempt to rehabilitate Chernobyl, nor a condescending attempt to offer an historical participation ribbon to the Soviet Union in the vein of “at least they tried.” It is instead an attempt to better contextualize Chernobyl in the light of the fact that yes, there seemed to be a communication breakdown between those on site at the Chernobyl plant and those in power at Moscow. There

19 Ibid., 68.

16 even seemed to be a local effort in place to misinform decision makers and deny response groups the authority to help the populace of the immediate area. Where there were local failures, however, the macroscopic of the Chernobyl event is one which trends toward openness and honesty. The Soviet government and its agents admitted what happened, evacuated the affected, worked to repair what they could, and then talked about it openly and (generally) honestly on the world stage. This (generally) open, (generally) honest discussion is a jarring departure from previous crises and tragedies under the Soviet purview – Red Terror, Great Terror, Holodomor, the gulag system, and the Cheliabinsk nuclear incident as examples. Chernobyl was the first test of the Soviet government’s commitment to making the Soviet Union a more transparent, open place, and could easily be argued to be too much, too fast.

17 CHAPTER 2 HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE NUCLEAR LANDSCAPE

There is a large swath of literature available on the Chernobyl disaster, ranging from investigations of the social and cultural problems that Chernobyl left in its wake to the effect of Chernobyl on woodcocks and earthworms. Whether written temporally close to the Chernobyl accident or not, much of the writing about Chernobyl seems to share one central theme: Chernobyl was a malicious cover-up. One can understand this; many who have felt compelled to write about Chernobyl were Ukrainians or

Belarussians or other eastern Europeans who were in some manner directly affected by the tragedy. Some authors feel strongly that justice was or still has not been served for the victims or Chernobyl, and still yet others want to add their interpretation to the understanding of the event. What follows is a discussion of a sampling of the literature about Chernobyl so that I might better explain where this work fits into the historiography and literature of the event. This is by no means a comprehensive list of the literature on Chernobyl, but instead what I consider a good sampling across the width and breadth of reading available on the incident – from personal and angry to cold and scientific.

Alla Yaroshinkaya is a Ukrainian journalist and politician who has made a career campaigning for awareness of the plight of the Chernobyl victims. In her book,

Chernobyl: the Forbidden Truth, she writes that the Soviet system beg, “with the secret execution in the cellar of the Ipatyev house of children whose only crime was to have been born into the imperial family.” She continues on to say that, “Chernobyl, slow death by radioactivity, is part of this same list of crimes of the System against its own

18 people.”1 Between The Forbidden Truth and another of her monographs, Chernobyl:

Crime Without Punishment, Yaroshinskaya never answers what seems to me to be the overarching question: what would an appropriate response look like? Much of her time is devoted to the things that went wrong, and the things that are still not being done for the Chernobyl effected areas and peoples. The reader is never led to an understanding of how things should have been different, except that they should have been done “not the way they were.” Moreover, she seems given to assuming the worst, most malicious intent behind events that she describes as a cover-up. In Crime Without Punishment, she presents an official Soviet document, the “List of Data on Issues of the Chernobyl

Accident Not to Be Circulated by the Press, Radio and Television,” which states that information about radioactive contamination levels in separate localities in excess of the maximum permissible concentrations, and information about the “indices of physical deterioration in work capacity and loss of professional skills by the operative personnel working in special conditions at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, or by persons employed in eliminating the consequences of the accident,” should be classified at a secret level.2

Alla Yaroshinkaya’s passion for the event, and especially for those affected by it, whom she feels did not and are not receiving the attention and help they deserve, are admirable; in my opinion, however, her anger and passion cloud her judgement and her writing. Her books come off as particularly anti-Soviet and tend to position her as a lone

1 Alla Yaroshinskaya and David R. Marples, Chernobyl, The Forbidden Truth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 133.

2 Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2011), 46.

19 hero, locked in a Sisyphean struggle against the then-Soviet and now-Russian government.

Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet émigré scientist, wrote The Legacy of Chernobyl, one of the more expansive and technical looks at Chernobyl. He writes about the chaotic post-accident days, when not even the most basic health and safety norms were followed. He refers to a special kind of sausage that was made with radioactive meat from the Chernobyl region. He also includes a technical breakout of the accident, what happened, and why. One of the main takeaways is that had corners not been cut in the construction and operation of the Chernobyl plant, and had an ill-advised functionality test not been ran, the Chernobyl event would not have occurred. Much less a looming inevitability of the Soviet nuclear system, Chernobyl happened because the people in charge of Chernobyl caused it to happen. Overall, Medvedev brings to bear his intimate understanding of the Chernobyl event as a former member of the Soviet nuclear power industry to present a calm, seemingly objective picture of the Chernobyl crisis and its effect on the Soviet Union, the satellite states, and indeed the world at large. He concludes, rightly in my opinion, that in addition to having an adverse impact on the

Soviet energy program, Chernobyl affected the entire Soviet economy in history-altering ways.3

Svetlana Alexievich wrote what is perhaps the best -- if not the most haunting -- book on the event: Voices from Chernobyl. It is an oral history in which she interviews

(in an unattributed manner) station workers, evacuees, firefighters, responders, members of the military, and government workers from Moscow and beyond. Medical

3 Zhores A. Medvedev, The Legacy of Chernobyl (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 2011), 312.

20 personnel share their stories alongside the liquidators. As with any other catastrophic event, the opinions, memories, and feelings about Chernobyl she presents are varied.

She asked one of the responders what Chernobyl was, and he responded, “[Chernobyl is] a lot of military hardware and soldiers. Wash posts. A real military situation. … If we had to do it, we had to do it. The motherland called and we went. That’s just how we are.”4 She asks a journalist about the difficulties in writing about Chernobyl and is told,

“Stalin’s old vocabulary has sprung up again: ‘agents of the Western secret services,’

‘the cursed enemies of socialist,’ ‘an undermining of the indestructible union of the

Soviet peoples.’ Everyone talks about spies and provocateurs sent here, and no one talks about iodine protection. Any unofficial information is considered foreign ideology.”5

And then, interviewing people that decided not to evacuate from the area, Alexievich herself is asked, “Why did that Chernobyl break down? Some people say it was the scientists’ fault. They grabbed God by the beard, and now he’s laughing. But we’re the ones that pay for it.”6

To Alexievich, Chernobyl is not a monolithic event, with one catastrophe and one cause and one meaning. Some of the people that she interviewed could not have cared less that the reactor exploded; their main concern was that they had to leave their family homes, or that their animals were killed by the liquidators, or that the event recalled the second World War and made them feel patriotic and proud. The actual events at the

4 Aleksievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 156.

5 Ibid., 124.

6 Ibid., 78.

21 power plant were less important than the second or third order effects of the Chernobyl situation.

Voices from Chernobyl puts the reader face to face with the reality of the

Chernobyl tragedy: the people whose lives were derailed, ruined, or ended. In the historiographical back and forth about what did or did not happen, about who is or is not at fault – in the general scurry to blame the Soviet government for a cover-up ala

Yaraoshinskaya – the actual stories of the people most affected are often the ones least represented.

David Marples’ first book on the event, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the

Soviet Union, focused on the background of the disaster and what was known about the

Chernobyl event at the time of the books publication in 1987. His contention – one with which I agree wholeheartedly, and really lies at the core of this work – is that due to the pressure to reform and the influence of glasnost’, the Soviet government released far more information, and were more open and honest in their discussions about Chernobyl than they otherwise would have been (or, in fact, actually had been in the past). Marples has no issue believing that Gorbachev was not apprised of the situation until two days after the explosion; when one considers the quality and volume of information that was flowing from the Chernobyl site back to Moscow – information that eventually caused

Viktor Bryukhanov to be sentenced to a ten-year stint in prison – it does not seem that large of an intellectual leap to make. However, documentary evidence does show that the first deputy minister of energy and electrification sent a secret cable to the Central

Committee on April 26, the same day as the accident, detailing that an accident had occurred, that evacuation was not necessary, and that measures were being taken to

22 minimize the situation.7 That said, there is no “to” line on this cable, so there is not any way to tell whether Gorbachev was made aware of its existence; the characterization of the event through this cable, as well as Fomin and Briukhanov’s reporting from the power plant, lead one to believe that the full scope of the event was not necessarily understood by Party leadership until a day or two later – the point in time when the

Soviet response starts to accelerate.

His second book, in spirit with Alexievich if not in execution, works to put a more human face on the event. Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster looks at the contradictory statements that were issued in the Soviet press in the wake of the

Chernobyl event, up to and including discussions and accusations of radiophobia – essentially, accusing people that were complaining of radiation sickness type symptoms of hypochondria.8 One of the takeaways from these books is that, unsurprisingly, the tide of public opinion was turning against nuclear power in the Soviet Union and within the eastern bloc states. Marples also speaks to the mythologizing as heroes the first responders and those that worked in the exclusion zone, reminiscent to the treatment of high performers in World War II.

Grigori Medvedev’s Truth About Chernobyl is a personal account from a former chief engineer of the Chernobyl plant. It is, in a way, an early version of Voices from

Chernobyl, in that its account is based on interviews with first responders, plant

7 Diane Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman, Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation (Washington: Library of Congress, 1997), 503.

8 David R. Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 48. See also Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 116-118.

23 employees, and medical professionals who worked to stem the tide of causalities from the plant explosion and subsequent radiation illnesses.

There exists a further, separate historiography for the Soviet nuclear industry.

Kate Brown, in Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and

American Plutonium Disasters examines two different plutonium producing towns --

Richland, in the Pacific Northwest, and Ozersk, an unmapped town in the Urals. It is an interesting overview of how plutonium harvesting and the nuclear industry developed in the two countries, and the steps that needed to be taken in order to ensure effectiveness of the nuclear cities. Richland trended far more state-operated than the rest of the United States, reminiscent of a factory town in the mid-1800s. Ozersk and

Richland were both state run. To quote Brown, “Richland was unusual on the American landscape because it had no private property, no free market or local self-government.

Ozersk was one of ten nuclear cities in the Soviet Union that existed secretly, off the map, behind fencing; every resident required a special pass to live there.” 9 In Ozersk, meanwhile, residents were tempted with Western-style consumer goods to tempt them to come and stay in the plutonium producing town. In her work, Brown examines the width and breadth of the development of the nuclear industry and lifestyle in the Soviet

Union and America, including discussions on what the Ozersk experts could offer the liquidators in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, as well as the political fallout and ramifications domestically of Chernobyl. Where I will rely on Brown the most is in her discussion of “nuclear glasnost’,” or how Chernobyl helped to inadvertently usher in

Gorbachev’s era of openness.

9 Kate Brown, Plutopia, 4.

24 Paul Johnson, in Red Atom: Russia' Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to

Today, takes a more nuanced look at the entirety of the Soviet nuclear power program.

Introducing the reader to prominent scientists, programs, propaganda, and follies (like the Atommash engineering facility sinking into a swamp), Johnson gives an excellent overview of the width and breadth of the Soviet nuclear industry; his work does more than almost any other to lay out to the reader precisely how the Soviet nuclear industry functioned, which is particularly important in the understanding of the interplay between different departments, messaging elements, and missions of the Soviet nuclear apparatus.

Sonja Schmid's work Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet

Nuclear Industry takes a look at the inception and implementation of the Soviet nuclear power industry. She rejects chalking Chernobyl up to some particularly Soviet failing, and instead seeks to introduce the reader to the width and breadth of the Soviet nuclear power system, with all its merits and flaws.

Schmid begins her book with the trial of Fomin, Bryukhanov, et al, in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. I disagree with her conclusion that this trial was some sort of kangaroo court, that “expertise itself was on trial.”10 As will be shown later, those that were on trial, and eventually sentenced, were the actors that made the specific choices which led to the Chernobyl event and its immediate aftermath playing out in the particularly disastrous way it did. Suggesting that the trial was some sort of grand plan to further obfuscate the Chernobyl event and to disabuse the public (domestic and international) that the Soviet governemtn at-large was in any way complicit in the events

10 Schmid, Producing Power, 10.

25 surrounding or causing Chernobyl is, to me, disingenuous. The Soviet government at a variety of levels – from the local to the Politburo – was at least moderately open about what had happened and why it happened. That, in fact, is the essence of this paper.

That said, the rest of Schmid’s book is enlightening about the particular structure of the nuclear power industry in the Soviet Union. She discusses the convoluted and confusing (and ever-shifting) organization of nuclear power; the specific reactor design of the RBMK, its peculiarities, and how this type of reactor played into the Chernobyl event; and concludes that Chernobyl – as with any event under historical scrutiny, but especially with Chernobyl – must be considered as a totality of events, with an almost infinite number of moving pieces, actions, and actors, each of which introduced their own entropic butterfly effect, with which I agree. Chernobyl is not a product of the RBMK reactor, or of Fomin’s criminal negligence, or of evacuation failures and resettlement problems, but instead a confluence of all these, and a variety of other internal and international factors, some of which we might not have even thought to connect to the disastrous night in April of 1986.

Moving from monographs to a journal article, Edward Geist wrote an excellent article entitled “Political Fallout: The Failure of Emergency Management at Chernobyl,” wherein he makes a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. “The contradictions,” says

Geist, “between Soviet institutions’ hierarchies of risk prevented the USSR’s government from responding appropriately during the Chernobyl disaster.”11 What he means here is that because different departments working within the Soviet government

11 Edward Geist, "Political Fallout: The Failure of Emergency Management at Chernobyl'," Slavic Review 74, no. 01 (2015): 106, accessed August 26, 2017, doi:10.5612/slavicreview.74.1.104.

26 classified different items at different levels of danger, risk, or necessity, gridlock became a problem as interagency squabbling became an issue in the aftermath of Chernobyl, a point I believe is key to understanding at least part of the perceived lack of immediate response. This point gets at the main thrust of his article, namely that the

Grazhdanskaia oborona (abbreviated GO) tried valiantly to increase the general awareness of the Chernobyl incident both amongst the populace of the affected area and with the decision makers in Moscow. GO was unsuccessful in its attempts to inform

– and perhaps save – the population due to what Geist describes as, “the institutional fractionalization that plagued the Soviet system” which, “generally forestalled the government’s acting appropriately to protect its citizens.”12 This was because, according to Geist, “protecting legitimacy and prestige always took priority over public health and safety.”13

Beyond Geist’s article, there are of course many articles which deal with the

Soviet response and how it played out, but many more deal with the scientific, health, and personal damage that the disaster took on the environment and people. Especially as we move temporally away from April 26, 1986, the focus of research and writing seems to shift from what the Soviet government did or said and more to the survivors, sometimes second and third order (children of Chernobyl survivors, and now even their children). Articles on cancers and birth defects dominate any non-specific search in academic article repositories. Peppered in those results one will find research on down

12 Ibid., 115.

13 Ibid., 126.

27 syndrome clusters, plant absorption of radionuclides, albinism, cesium density in the

Greenland ice sheets, and the list goes on.

Kate Brown, the same author of Plutopia, wrote an excellent article in 2016 entitled “Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl.” Brown’s contention is that there was a certain degree of cover-up that occurred in the wake of Chernobyl – that the medical effects in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster were less publicized than some of the other consequences. She writes, “medical investigators showed that villagers had been gradually absorbing radioactive isotopes from contaminated food, and were suffering from multiple disorders caused by long-term exposure to low doses of radiation. In the most contaminated areas, 80-90% of children had one or more chronic illness.”14 The discussion of the cover-up (or not) of the medical ramifcations of Chernobyl lies outside the scope of this work; another idea that Brown posits, while also lying outside the scope of this writing, is just as interesting. She writes:

officials wrote more directives, ordering the gasification of towns and villages so people would not burn contaminated wood. They ordered roads be asphalted so they did not churn up radioactive dust. They called for comprehensive school lunch and breakfast programs that required outfitting rural schools with modern kitchen facilities. Instead of playing in radioactive fields, lakes, and forests, children needed playgrounds, gyms and swimming pools. The nuclear accident basically mandated the full- scale modernization of the Soviet countryside.15

In the end, Brown suggests – rightly so – that Chernobyl was impossible to deal with for the structure of the Soviet Union due to Chernobyl’s temporal proximity to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. “People exposed to Chernobyl

14 Brown, “Eating at You.”

15 Ibid.

28 fallout,” Brown writes, “were left gradually to fend for themselves as the Soviet state and economy crumbled around them.”16 There were many facets of the

Chernobyl event, many of which find echoes in the events and responses to

Fukushima Daiichi; Brown closes her article pithily, better quoted than summarized: “in 1939, the physicist Neils Bohr famously observed that it would take ‘an entire country’ to develop nuclear reactors for an atomic bomb. He could not have known at the time that it would prove beyond the means of entire countries to manage the remnants of the massive energy unleashed from the nuclei of atoms.”17

Before we delve into the inner workings of Chernobyl, I wanted to briefly lay out the landscape of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union – or, perhaps more correctly, frame the narrative by discussing other, less tragic events. This is important for two reasons: first, I want to illustrate that nuclear accidents (overall) were not as uncommon as one might think. As with any other complicated piece of technology or machinery, things often can and do go wrong – luckily, almost never as wrong as they went during

Chernobyl, but accidents and mistakes do happen. Second, I think it important to introduce the idea that the Soviet government was, if not well-practiced, then at least versed with what a response to a nuclear incident should look like. I also want to take a moment and lay out working definitions and ideas for terms that will feature prominently in this paper: ideas such as misinformation versus information, glasnost’, and what it means to be an open or closed society, and the inherent expectations of each. Later,

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

29 as I discuss Chernobyl, I will show that a sound response eventually occurred, regardless of how the events around the response played out.

The Nuclear Landscape

The Soviet RBMK-1000 reactor series was built by formula rather than by required specificity.18 What I mean by this is that the RBMK-1000 series of nuclear reactors was built in a mass-production-like, one-size-fits all manner, akin to auto parts or toys; clearly, in dealing with the dreadful power of nuclear energy, each case should have been studied, engineered, and adapted to separate specifications – the power output required of that specific station, for instance. Instead, there was little to no additional configuration to fit the RBMK-1000 plants to the areas in which they were being built and proceeded with a ready-made, pre-engineered design in their implementation.

What follows below will be a list and brief overview of nuclear events in the

USSR prior to Chernobyl, through which I mean to show that, though not nearly as publicized or catastrophic as the Chernobyl disaster, there had been a variety of instances over the course of the Soviet nuclear power program for the interested entities like Grazhdanskaia oborona (GO), literally “civil defense,” to try and create standard operating procedures to quickly and efficiently respond to an event in the same vein as Chernobyl, if not the same scope.19 One should understand that there was no singular overarching authority in charge of “nuclear” in the Soviet Union.

18 Both INSAG-1/7 and David Marples talk about the Soviets treating the building of the RBMK reactors as a one-size fits all operation. Marples, The Social Impact of Chernobyl, 122.

19 Edward Geist, “Political Fallout,” 108.

30 Instead, reactors and the rest of the nuclear plant were kept under different ministries jurisdictions; attempts by one ministry to standardize the regulation of the industry while the other tried continuously to change and improve created an ambiguous process that put the two ministries at loggerheads.20 One ministry was responsible for planning, management, construction, assembly, and operation of the nuclear power plants; a second conducted research, designed and developed reactors, and provided technical documentation for the plants. A third ministry coordinated between the two.21 This means that in times of crisis or disaster, there was not a singular ultimate authority in charge of leading the response. Where GO “placed a relatively low priority on keeping these disasters secret from ordinary citizens,”22 the “KGB or Communist Party feared that news of such events would compromise Soviet citizens’ esteem for their government.”23 I think this idea should be taken farther than Geist does – more than comprising internal esteem for the government, I also think that one of the driving forces behind any such obfuscation was retaining esteem on the international stage.

In September 29, 1957, an accident occurred at a reactor near Cheliabinsk, a town about one-thousand miles due west of Moscow, on the Kazakhstan border. A spontaneous nuclear reaction occurred in the spent fuel, causing a “substantial release” of radioactive material. An underground storage tank holding highly radioactive waste that overheated and blew, belching up a 160-ton cement cap buried twenty-four feet

20 Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 15.

21 Ibid.

22 Geist, “Political Fallout,” 108.

23 Ibid.

31 below the ground and tossing it seventy-five feet in the air. The blast smashed windows in nearby barracks. A column of radioactive dust and smoke rocketed skyward a half mile, blossoming into a distinct mushroom shape.24 Radiation spread over a wide area; the radioactive area was delineated merely by a barbed wire fence and a drainage ditch. The population of Cheliabinsk was evacuated, the top soil from the area was removed, and livestock were killed and buried in pits. This event rated a level six out of seven possible levels on the International Nuclear Events (INES) scale. Only the

Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters rated higher, both at the maximum level of seven.

It is this event, officially recognized in June of 198925 by the Soviet government, that I intend to compare with Chernobyl; in looking at the extraordinary effort it took for a dissident Soviet scientist and his American counterparts in the 1970s to uncover and prove on the world stage that the Kyshtym even actually occurred, versus the (ever shifting and sometimes contradictory) public dialogue that took place in the wake of

Chernobyl, I intend to show that, though perhaps not intentionally, Chernobyl acted as a catalyst for the sea change of glasnost’. Where Chernobyl happened nearer the border of the Soviet Union, Kyshtym happened in the central part of the country, and during a time with less communication and press openness. Kyshtym is a case study for a cover- up – especially given that it took the Soviet government thirty-two years to officially admit to it – where in Chernobyl’s response one can see a struggle akin to the one between GO and the KGB and Communist party: articles informing citizens of the danger ran side-by-side in newspapers and journals with articles calling for calm and

24 Kate Brown, Plutopia, 232-233.

25 Ibid., 319.

32 downplaying the events to not cause a panic. While perhaps not intentionally framed as the inauguration of glasnost’, the scope of Chernobyl’s events nevertheless required that the government and press be generally forthright, something that had not been required with Kyshtym, which ended up with almost the direct opposite result.

Additional nuclear accidents are listed below. I do not list every one of these to suggest that every one of these was a cover-up but instead to introduce two ideas: first,

I would like to illustrate a point put forward by Edward Geist that “the problem with the

Soviet nuclear energy sector was not that it considered accidents impossible but that it regarded minor accidents as acceptable.”26 Second, I would like to raise the idea that, through these smaller incidents and accidents, the Soviet nuclear program had time and opportunity to develop a standard set of operations orders for dealing with a nuclear incident which might have been extrapolated to deal with something as large as

Chernobyl. These events, chosen from the same two sources, will be footnoted at the end, rather than citing each event from the same page of the same book(s).

On May 7, 1966, a neutron power surge occurred at a nuclear power station in the town of Melekess. A dosimetrist and the shift foreman were exposed to radiation.

Over a period of fifteen years, the fuel assemblies in reactor 1 at Byeloyarsk nuclear power station were persistently damaged by overheating. During repair work on the core, the operational staff were often over-radiated.

On January 7, 1974, an explosion of the concrete gasholder for the retention of radioactive gases at reactor 1 of the Leningrad nuclear power station occurred; though there were no casualties, this event marked the beginning of a very hard year and a half

26 Edward Geist, “Political Fallout,” 106.

33 for this power plant. On February 6, 1974, there was a rupture of the intermediate loop in reactor 1 at the nuclear power station due to the boiling of water. Three people were killed and highly radioactive water with pulp from filter powder was discharged into the environment. Then, in October of 1975, a partial meltdown of the core occurred at the same reactor 1 of the same nuclear power station. Within 24 hours, liquid nitrogen was pumped into the damaged core as a cooling measure, but was then discharged as a gas. About one and a half million curies of highly radioactive radionuclides discharged into the environment, but there were no casualties.

The following year was quiet but then, in 1977, there was a partial meltdown of half the fuel assemblies in reactor 2 at Byeloyarsk. Repairs, exposing the staff to radiation, lasted about a year. On New Year’s Eve, 1978, reactor 2 at Byeloyarsk nuclear power station was the site of another incident, as it became heavily damaged by a fire started when a roof panel in the turbine hall fell onto a fuel tank. The entire control cable was burned out; the reactor was out of control. Eight people were exposed to severe doses of radiation.

In September 1982, only five years after it was completed, the central fuel assembly of reactor 1 at Chernobyl nuclear power station was destroyed as the result of a partial core meltdown. Radioactivity was released into the immediate area of the plant and into the town of Pripyat, and plant employees who performed repairs were exposed to severe radiation.

A little less than a month later, in October of 1982, the generator in reactor 1 at the Armyanskaya nuclear power station exploded. The turbine hall burned down, and

34 an emergency group had to be flown in from Kolsk nuclear power station to save the core from meltdown.

On June 27, 1985, the last accident in the USSR before the Chernobyl event of

April 26, 1986, there was an accident in reactor 1 of the Balakovo nuclear power station.

During start-up activities, a relief valve burst, flooding a room with 300-degree Celsius

(573 degrees Fahrenheit) steam; fourteen people were killed.27

Working Definitions

Glasnost’ is an ambiguous term, not easily defined. Because the premise of my paper is that the Chernobyl response, however clumsy, was glasnost’ in action, I felt it best to set forth what I mean by using the word and what my expectations are for its understanding by the reader.

Simply, glasnost’ is openness or transparency. A more fulfilling definition might be “greater openness, and publicity of the political machine that ran the country and greater pluralism of opinions in the political arena.”28 Michael Gorham suggests in his

After Newspeak that glasnost’ can be understood as both, “state-sanctioned access to information and outright ‘freedom of speech.’”29 A less fulfilling definition, but more to the heart of how I mean to use the term in this paper would be, “an end to intentional, if not malicious, obfuscation and intentional purveying of mistruths to disinform.”

27 Zhores Medvedev, The Legacy of Chernobyl, 263-288. See also Grigorii Medvedev, The Truth about Chernobyl (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 17-19.

28 David S. Mason, "Glasnost, Perestroika and Eastern Europe," International Affairs 64, no. 3 (1988): 431, doi:10.2307/2622850.

29 Michael S. Gorham, After Newspeak: Language, Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 54.

35 I intentionally use the term disinform vice misinform in my definition because I use the idea of misinformation during this work and want to be very specific about the distinction between the two: disinformation had a far more negative context, suggestive of a conscious effort to put out bad information for those on the receiving end acting on that erroneous information, if not to the gain of the disinformer then certainly to the loss of the person acting on the information. When I use the word misinform, rather, I mean to suggest an benign mistake, or good information being released and clashing with incorrect information that has also been released – the latter of which was often the case in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl.

36 CHAPTER 3 CHELIABINSK

Zhores Medvedev, dissident Soviet scientist, had been expelled from the Soviet

Union in 1973. In 1976, he received a letter from the editor of the journal New Science.

As the journal was celebrating its 20th anniversary, and 1976 was also the 20th anniversary of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the editor was soliciting articles from prominent scientists and academics about development in the varied Soviet scientific fields over the previous twenty years. Medvedev choose to write an article on “the role of scientists in the dissident movement,” because their training encouraged

“independent thought and/or because science at the time was attracting the most independent and creative minds.”1

In his article “Two Decades of Dissidence,” Medvedev talked about Stalin's anti- intellectualism, Khrushchev's Secret Speech, and Lysenkoism. He also spent about a quarter of his 849 words for the piece on the Cheliabinsk event of 1958, an event which brought atomic physicists together with persecuted geneticists; Lysenkoism – the bizarre and wholly unscientific Soviet answer to the “bourgeois” science of genetics – offered no answers to what could or would happen to those affected by the Cheliabinsk event. Medvedev contended that the event caused the death of “several hundred persons,” and that investigating the consequences of the event required genetics in an age of Lysenkoism.

What follows is the Cheliabinsk-related portion of the New Scientist article:

It was suppressed geneticists who in 1955 - 56 made a number of attempts to arouse nuclear physicists to the genetic dangers of radioactivity. Then, a tragic catastrophe occurred in 1958, which made

1 Michael S. Gorham, After Newspeak: Language, Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 4.

37 nuclear physicists extremely sensitive to the radiobiological and genetics issue. For many years nuclear reactor waste had been buried in a deserted area a few dozen miles from the Urals town of Blagovehsnesk. The waste was not buried very deep. Nuclear scientists had often warned about the dangers involved in this primitive method of wasted disposal, but nobody listened. Suddenly there was an enormous explosion. The nuclear reactions had led to overheating in the burial grounds. The explosion poured radioactive materials high into the sky. It was just the wrong weather for such a tragedy. Strong winds blew the radioactive clouds hundreds of miles away.

Tens of thousands of people were affected, hundreds dying, though the real figures have never been made public. Many villages and towns were only ordered to evacuate when the symptoms of radiation sickness were already apparent. The irradiated population was distributed over many clinics. But no one really knew how to treat the different stages of radiation sickness, how to measure the radiation dose received by the patients and their offspring. Radiation genetics and radiology could have provided the answer, but neither of them was available.2

Medvedev recounts a catastrophe here that should have been all over magazines, radio, newspapers, and journals worldwide. Hundreds of people died, and a vast swath of the interior of the USSR was irradiated. Surely, Medvedev must have thought, that this was an event known the world over – if not by the general populace then certainly by the scientific communities of the world. Medvedev claims that he had no idea Western experts were uninformed about the event, which is why he found the response to his article so astounding.3

It is important that one understands the sheer amount of academic effort that went into the public unshrouding of the Cheliabinsk incident. Understanding precisely how Kyshtym was unveiled in the press shows how hard it is to change a narrative

(even if, in this case, the change is simply from “lack of a narrative” to “an actual

2 New Scientist, November 4, 1976, 265.

3 Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, 4.

38 narrative). There are echoes of this in the public response to Chernobyl. The first newspaper stories downplayed the seriousness of the event; later, the same newspapers ran stories that were more in-line with the actuality of what was happening in and around Chernobyl, but some Soviet citizens had a hard time accepting this changed narrative, much like how some of the public respondents to

Medvedev’s article struggled against the narrative he set forth, either because they did not believe him or did not want to believe him.

On November 8, 1976, an article ran in the London Times entitled, “Soviet nuclear disaster discounted.” In it, Sir John Hill, chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic

Energy Authority, dismissed Medvedev’s article in New Science was “pure science fiction,” and completely dismissed the fact that hundreds of people died in a nuclear catastrophe in the Soviet Union in 1958. Hill went on to doubled down on his attack of

Medvedev’s account, calling it “rubbish,” and a “figment of the imagination.” Hill’s argument was simply this: the sort of waste being stored in the Urals had “a very, very low activity and could not possibly give that sort of explosion.”4

The British nuclear industry had a pretty good idea of what was happening in other countries, and there had been no suggestion that such an incident had taken place, according to Hill. Beyond that, the IAEA in Vienna had no previous hint of a disaster in the Urals.5 Medvedev, and the idea of a nuclear disaster in the Urals, was taking a beating in the press. Part of this, I believe, is less an attack on Medvedev and his story and more of a spirited, if animous, defense of the nuclear industry itself.

4 London Times, November 8, 1976, page 5.

5 Ibid.

39 Nuclear energy was a burgeoning industry with a terrifying past – two small bombs harnessing nuclear power had nearly annihilated two Japanese cities at the end of

World War II, more than thirty years before this venomous back and forth between

Medvedev and Hill took place. Without Hill rising to nuclear energy’s defense in the wake of Medvedev’s article, a public groundswell may have started against an industry that was trying to find its legs. Medvedev’s story could easily have been turned into a too-effective bogeyman by those opposed to the nuclear industry: “radioactive waste, removed from an active nuclear site and buried in the ground, exploded of its own accord. Hundreds died, thousands more are sick! Do you want that in your neighborhood? Vote no on the proposition to allow the construction of a power plant!”

This fictive account appears to be the very idea that opponents of Medvedev were fighting against. From a survival-of-the-industry perspective, the defense levied against

Medvedev and his account needed to be unambiguous, whether or not it was truthful, which is exactly what Sir John Hill provided.

Writing to the Jerusalem Post on December 7, 1976, Professor L. Tumerman corroborated Medvedev's account of a nuclear disaster in the Urals. Though he was

“not certain whether the accident was caused by buried nuclear waste or by the explosion if a plutonium producing plant,” Tumerman did go into detail describing a car trip from near Cheliabinsk, in the southern Urals, to Sverdlovsk, in the north. “On both sides of the road as far as one could see the land was dead: no villages, no towns, only the chimneys of destroyed houses, no cultivated fields or pastures, no herds, no people... I was later told that this was the site of the famous 'Kyshtim [sic] catastrophe.”6

6 London Times, December 8, 1976, page 1. Medvedev’s claim was that the explosion came from buried nuclear material overheating, not that a plutonium producing facility had exploded.

40 In a Sunday Times article on December 12, 1976 entitled “The Mystery of Kyshtym,” suggested that the heat from buried radiation sources could have turned the groundwater in the area to steam, which would then have caused an explosion on the order that Medvedev described.7

Medvedev’s account in his New Science article came at a very tumultuous time for the nuclear energy industry. Concerned citizens were aligning themselves into lobbies – for and against nuclear industry – and there were some that believed that

Medvedev’s casually bringing up the topic of a nuclear calamity which killed hundreds and hurt thousands more was his way of throwing his hat into the ring, as it were.

Medvedev had not meant to align himself with any lobby, anti-nuclear or otherwise, and he had certainly not meant to contribute to the stark politicization of the Cheliabinsk event outside of the USSR. Those that were for nuclear power touted the Cheliabinsk event as something that could only happen in the USSR; to those whom nuclear power was anathema, a Cheliabinsk event (or, later, a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl) was right around the corner in England, America, France – anywhere nuclear power was being used. As covered earlier, Medvedev had no idea that Western experts were even unaware of the event, and could not have foreseen what his three hundred words in

New Science would cause.

Sir John Hill, however, would not believe that, and continued to deny that

Cheliabinsk was possible, even after Tumerman’s letter to the editor, which had essentially validated everything that Medvedev had said in his article.8

7 Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, 142-143.

8 Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, 13.

41 The Kyshtym accident, whose existence Sir John Hill objected, was the result of unsafe storage of unprocessed nuclear waste from military reactors and reprocessing plants which were in operation from about 1948 in the area between the two old Ural towns Kyshtym and Kasli, in the Cheliabinsk region. This site was selected by Igor

Kurchatov for the first plutonium-producing industrial facility,9 and should not be confused with the experimental plutonium producing facility that was built near Moscow in 1947.10 Medvedev also notes that it is entirely possible that all nuclear waste from

1945-1954 was stored near Cheliabinsk-40, near the town of Kyshtym.11 Why this is important was alluded to earlier in the Sunday Times article, but I will go into more detail here: it takes multiple thousands of pounds of uranium to produce a few grams of plutonium, and it takes tens of pounds of plutonium to make a military-grade nuclear device (even the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, as primitive as it was, had somewhere between ten and fifteen pounds of plutonium in it)12. These hundreds or thousands of pounds of uranium produce an immense amount of waste which has to be dealt with; the Soviet Union was not the most environmentally conscious polity (nor were the

Americans, then or now, when they thought they could get away with it), and the most

9 Zhores Medvedev, The Legacy of Chernobyl, 279.

10 Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster, 155.

11 Ibid., 156.

12 "Little Boy and Fat Man," Atomic Heritage Foundation, July 23, 2014, section goes here, accessed July 25, 2017, http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/little-boy-and-fat-man.

42 expedient way to deal with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of gallons of hot nuclear waste was to simply put it in the ground.13

One Khrushchev’s changes when he came to power was a decentralization of both nuclear waste storage and nuclear weapons production; part of this was the introduction pre-fabricated concrete structures for nuclear waste storage, which could

(and did) result in many leaks. Though these structures did not work, they were at least a step in the right direction; the USSR had previously tried methods as diverse as damming a gulley and pouring their waste into the untreated ground or, in what was probably done that resulted in the Cheliabinsk event, the Soviet government simply drilled into the side of the Urals and poured the waste into the holes. Much of the waste flowed to the bottom of these holes in the mountain range, except for residual plutonium: that was filtered out and selectively absorbed by the clay strata. If enough of this was absorbed from the run-off – which it would have been – and if the heat given off by the absorbed plutonium was high enough – again, which it would have been – then it would have worked to vaporize the groundwater in the area, resulting in an explosion like the one Medvedev described.14

Though the evidence for Medvedev’s event was mounting, the public contention over the Cheliabinsk event would not be resolved until 1980, when a team of scientists from the Oak Ridge Laboratory turned their attention to the issue.

The Oak Ridge Report

13 The term “hot” here has dual meanings: hot in the temperature sense, but also hot in the “extremely radioactive, won’t-be-safe-for-hundreds-or-thousands-of-years” sense.

14 Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, 156-163.

43 In 1979, John R. Trabalka, L. Dean Eyman, and Stanley I. Auerbach of the Oak

Ridge Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, set out to put the discussion of Medvedev’s incident to rest. Incorporating over one hundred separate sources in a ten-page paper published in the journal Science in July of 1980. I have provided an abridged version of their findings below.

The disaster in the Urals occurred in a heavily populated area and over a large swath of land – the area generally given is 386 square miles, or about 1000 square kilometers. The Oak Ridge Team did not have the ability to determine whether or not the contamination was due to a single catastrophic accident, several events, or complex releases over a period of time associated with a single accident.15 Their findings suggested that the most likely cause of contamination was a chemical explosion of high- level radioactive wastes associated with a Soviet military plutonium production site.16

Furthermore, was hard to pin down the location of the event that Medvedev described because, in the papers that the Oakridge team analyzed, the site of the event was referenced but never named – which is extraordinarily out of the ordinary in ecological research.17 Furthermore, the team contended that due to the population density of the industrial Urals, and the reported levels of Strontium-90 contamination in

15 Trabalka, L. Eyman, and S. Auerbach, "Analysis of the 1957--1958 Soviet Nuclear Accident," Science 209, no. 4454 (1980): 345, accessed April 10, 2012, doi:10.1126/science.7384809.

16 This fits with Medvedev’s original article in New Science, his first book on the issue, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, and his second book, which was on Chernobyl but dealt in small part with the Cheliabinsk event, The Legacy of Chernobyl.

17 Trabalka et al, Analysis of the 1957-1958 Soviet Nuclear Accident, 346. What I mean by this being out of the ordinary In ecological research is that In ecology – in all of science, honestly – research has its foundation in repeatable observation or testing. Without naming the area where the accident took place, there was no way for a secondary, impartial (read: not beholden to the government of the Soviet Union) scientist or team of scientists to reproduce the research or observations.

44 the Soviet journals and articles at the time, an evacuation and relocation of the human population from a “significant area” would have had to take place. When the team compared high resolution maps of the area between Cheliabinsk and Sverdlovsk, with the original maps dating 1936-1954, and the second dating 1973-1974, the deletion of some 30 villages and towns was readily apparent. All of the deleted villages and towns had populations at or below 2000 people; most of these village disappearances occurred in a corridor running southwest to northeast, or the path of radiation and fallout from the Cheliabinsk event. Also, as the Soviet Union published its fish stocking records in open literature, the Oak Ridge team found that the lakes in the area suspected of having an atomic incident were no longer receiving stocks of fish. While the popular conception of fish stocking is that the practice is for recreational or trophy fishing, the object of stocking these lakes in the Urals was to provide food for people that lived in the area; simply stopping fish stocking could indicate either that the Soviet government at-large was trying to punish the area through a forced food shortage, or perhaps that there had been an (atomic) event and resulting evacuation of an area, and thus the lakes no longer needed (or simply were not safe) to be stocked.18

The village deletion could be construed to indicate a relocation consistent with a contamination incident, much akin to the famous airbrushing of dead cosmonauts out of photos when their missions failed;19 in both cases, it seems likely that the Soviet

18 Ibid., 347-348.

19 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/how-the-soviet-union-airbrushed-some- cosmonauts-out-of-history/237276/. Nasa scientist James Oberg is quoted in a different article, saying “The Soviet Union's string of space triumphs over the United States was tarnished by a series of falsifications that surfaced and cast doubt on all their accomplishments, even the genuine ones,” which can be found at https://www.wired.com/2011/04/soviet-space-propaganda.

45 government was attempting an “out of sight, out of mind” strategy with their failures: if people could not find evidence of it, it never happened. Moreover, the event occurred during an “intense period of development of nuclear weapons and reactor technology.”20

The intensity of development was higher in the USSR than in the United States because, the Oakridge team rightly concludes, of the USSRs attempt to achieve parity.21

Much of the storage of nuclear waste in the USSR, as previous covered, was in open, earthen pits (both lined and unlined), and this appears to have been both seriously explored and then implemented by the USSR because of economic considerations. In one Soviet field test of an unlined, earthen storage system (which was a failure), a gully some three kilometers long was simply dammed and nuclear wastes were directly discharged into it for years. Only later were the leaks in the system discovered. Though the Cheliabinsk nuclear incident occurred during a period of intense atmospheric testing, the extensive evidence gathered by the Oak Ridge team suggested that none of these tests were the source of the fallout in the area. The Oak

Ridge team was firmly convinced that the Cheliabinsk event happened, whatever the cause.22 And despite the contention of Sir John Hill, the International Atomic Energy

Agency, and others with a vested interest in the survival of nuclear energy as an

20 Trabalka et al, Analysis of the 1957-1958 Soviet Nuclear Accident, 349.

21 Ibid. Ironically, the USSR’s attempt to achieve parity was only necessitated by the United States’ strive to achieve parity, especially after 1957. In that year, the Gaither Committee and the United States Air Force brought the idea of the “Missile Gap” to life, even though agencies like the CIA had information that suggested the “gap” was much smaller than the Gaither Committee and the USAF would lead those in power in Washington to believe. As a result, the United States ramped up production to keep up with the USSR, which in turn had to ramp its own production up.

22 Ibid., 349-351.

46 industry, this was exactly the type of investigation that it took to pierce the secrecy of the Iron Curtain. After all, the Soviet authorities never released railroad, highway, earthquake, or air travel casualty numbers; there was no way that atomic accident numbers were going to be released.23 By not releasing these numbers, the Soviet authorities manufactured an illusion of safety.

After Medvedev published his article in New Science and before the Oak Ridge report, the CIA contended that the Cheliabinsk event was due to a plutonium fueled nuclear reactor accident, not waste storage. If this had been the prevailing thought in the CIA, it goes to help explain why precisely Gary Francis Powers was flying over the area, and what information he was trying to glean. Writing in 1976, one CIA official said that the Cheliabinsk incident was the only event in Soviet history which could be considered a “nuclear disaster... Hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries is hard to imagine.” The CIA's take-away was that the Soviet Union simply piled dirt over the reactor and moved on to the next crisis.24

An area of about one thousand square kilometers was contaminated to the extent of making it necessary to evacuate 10,180 people. But only 600 of those people were evacuated immediately. The remaining 9,580 were moved during subsequent months, some up to a year and a half after the accident. Citizens were evacuated from territory where the concentration of strontium-90 was higher than 3.1 curies of radiation per square kilometer. However, there was a larger area, some 15,000 square kilometers and with a population of about 270,000, where the contamination was between .1 and 3

23 Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, 164.

24 Ibid., 6-7.

47 curies per square kilometer;25 there is no real appreciable difference between three curies of background radiation and 3.1 curies, or even between one and three curies because of how the body processes and defends against radiation (as will be explored in the Chernobyl section). Almost thirty times more people needed to be evacuated from this incident than actually were. In a way, it was very much like the Soviet Union had just piled dirt on the problem: bulldozers destroyed villages and fixed three percent of the problem, and dirt pushed over the eventual graves of those abandoned fixed the other ninety-seven percent. Without an open and honest discussion in the press, without services and education available for those affected, and without a public acknowledgement of what happened and why, the events surrounding the Cheliabinsk disaster literally (with the bulldozers) and figuratively meet the definition requirements of a cover-up.

25 Medvedev, Legacy of Chernobyl, 284-285.

48 CHAPTER 4 CHERNOBYL

Chernobyl is perhaps the unwitting inauguration of glasnost’. This theory may be contentious to others who have written on the subject and were also affected by the

Chernobyl disaster. Some authors and historians who will be featured prominently in the section below, including Grigori Medvedev and Alla Yaroshinskaya, were then and remain critical now of the Soviet regime and the way it handled Chernobyl: children were allowed to play soccer outside in Pripyat on April 26th, schools and stores were told to remain open in the town and later, on May Day, children were forced to march in parades in the affected area in order to try and preserve a sense of normalcy.1 In 1987, members of the articles came out in several newspapers with the idea of “radiophobia,” essentially suggesting that many of the lasting effects and illnesses that people had contracted from the Chernobyl event were instead all in their head; like hypochondriacs, they felt like they should be ill, and so they were. The people feared the effects of radiation on milk, vegetables, and fruit, and so they did not eat them. They did not know how radiation worked, and so they saw its effects everywhere. Very real conditions were trivialized because some Soviet authorities believed people were succumbing more to attacks of paranoia than radiation assaults on their bodies.2

Criticism has been laid at the feet of Gorbachev, glasnost’, and anyone who was in a decision-making capacity for the USSR at the time for Chernobyl: the evacuation of

Pripyat did not occur until thirty-six hours after the Chernobyl event; there was a forty-

1 Marples, Social Impact of Chernobyl, 28-30.

2 Pravda Ukrainy, July 16, 1987. See also Marples, Social Impact, 49.

49 eight hour period of silence after the disaster at reactor 4; The first official announcement came on April 30th, but even that was only four sentences long and conveyed no useful information – “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Atomic

Power Station; one of the nuclear reactors has been damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to the victims. A government commission has been established.”3 At first reading and without context, this can be classified as an unsensational blurb, tepid and intentionally misleading regarding the danger posed to the area and the people. Combined with the fact that the initial response to Chernobyl seems rather slow and focused more on image than safety

(allowing children to play in the fallout rather than immediately ordering evacuations, for example), there is of course room for criticism about the handling of the event. The sluggish response official response, as will be shown later, does not reverberate throughout the entirety of the Soviet response to Chernobyl, though, and the difference between the local response and the official response bears investigation.

Quickly after the Chernobyl event, Swedish scientists – and soon after, everyone else – had noticed the cloud of radiation emanating from the Soviet Union. Pripyat was evacuated, and Gorbachev himself took to television, admitting that “a misfortune has befallen us - the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It has painfully affected

Soviet people.”4 When one faults the Soviet Union for not reacting in the “correct” manner, we are overlooking the fact that the Soviet Union was not an open society.

3 The text of which reads: “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station; one of the nuclear reactors has been damaged. measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to the victims. A government commission has been established.” (Izvestiia, p.1, April 30, 1986).

4 New York Times, May 15, 1986

50 Glasnost’ was not a binary situation, and societies are not merely open or closed. Like so many other concepts that historians deal with, glasnost’ and openness operate across a gradient. We should not be so quick to assign blame that we give the USSR short shrift on the things that they did correctly, or at least tried to. We also need to be careful to take the totality of the situation into account: the regulation of nuclear power in the Soviet Union on April 26, 1986 was, at best, a hodgepodge; the initial reports that

Moscow was receiving about what was taking place were at best incorrect, and at worst self-servingly obfuscatory and reported to alleviate the political danger of the party representatives at the plant, not the existential danger of the Soviet citizens in the irradiated zone around Chernobyl. To quote Edward Geist:

Soviet institutions not only harbored incompatible notions of risk and emphasized certain hazards instead of others but the secretiveness and insularity characteristic of the Soviet system also prevented the communication of these risk perceptions within and between organizations. The dysfunction of the Soviet government’s response to the Chernobyl΄ disaster resulted not only from its constituent institutions’ differing perceptions of risk but also from the absence of a definite hierarchy of authority and accurate information about the unfolding accident. While some Soviet organizations, such as civil defense, measured risk from the accident largely in terms of physical damage to Soviet lives and property, others, such as the KGB, preoccupied themselves with more nebulous threats, such as embarrassing revelations about the failures and oversights of the Soviet government. Due to misleading reports about the seriousness of the accident, Soviet leaders initially elected to emphasize the latter concern and rejected calls by civil defense for a prompt evacuation, only to reverse course a day later. 5

Suggesting that the Soviet party leadership should have acted counter to the information they received is disingenuous; when the information being reported from the plant was discovered to be false, the response began in force. Eventually, those

5 Geist, "Political Fallout,” 106.

51 responsible for reporting incorrectly were punished with lengthy prison terms. Sonja

Schmid, in her book Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear

Industry, suggests that the trial which followed the Chernobyl accident was “one of the last show trials.”6 She goes on to say that, “[the judge] ruled that the practical expertise of the plant's director and reactor operators was inferior to that of the nuclear scientists and reactor designers at the Moscow-based research institutes and that the accident had occurred after the operators deliberately violated regulations. His ruling thus reaffirmed a social and institutional hierarchy that had contributed ... to the deficiencies in knowledge transfer in the first place.”7 Schmid’s assertion here is that the trial was used to scape-goat the defendants Viktor Briukhanov, Nikolai Fomin, Anatolii Dialatov,

Boris Rogozhkin, Alaksandr Kovalenko, and Yurii Laushkin. All were given maximum sentences – ten years for Briukhanov, Fomin, and Dialoatov, and five years for

Rogozhkin, Kovalendo, and Laushkin. The judge further found Briukhanov guilty of having conveyed distorted information about the accident and having been a poor plant manager. He also blamed Briukhanov for lax discipline at the plant; the judge sentenced

Briukhanov an additional five years for abuse of power.8 I take issue with her classification of this as a show trial, and that the judge was taking part in some sort of farce to pin the blame on this group of men without addressing the other issues with the

RBMK reactor that helped lead to the catastrophe. The concept of scale and scope comes into play here: without setting boundaries for the trial, it would be too easy to

6 Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power, 10.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 8-9.

52 confuse the issue of what was being investigated and tried. Further, the judge in this case was right: Briukhanov and Fomin, as discussed later, did hold a lot of blame on their shoulders for the response to the disaster and for the planning and execution of the test which directly led to the explosion, respectively.

I have collected and presented a width and breadth of reports, studies, articles, and books about Chernobyl to describe the event: some with an obvious bent

(Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment), where some may be more evenhanded and detached in their examination (Radiocesium (137Cs) from the Chernobyl Reactor in

Eurasian Woodcock and Earthworms in Norway). The key point that I hope to drive home is that, through it all, glasnost’ is about openness and transparency, and Moscow was both talking about this catastrophe and allowing it to be talked about, both domestically and internationally. At an IAEA conference in August 1986, the Soviet delegation stole the show by showing up, over-confessing to the point that many of the

Western attendees were uncomfortable with the blame and ramifications from

Chernobyl that the Soviet Union was attempting to shoulder, and then presenting all of the damning evidence about Chernobyl before the other attendees could get an accusation in: the Soviet delegation disclosed the RBMK-1000-type reactors (of which

Chernobyl was one), and about the lack of oversight in the nuclear power program in the USSR, and about the lessons learned from the repeatedly botched response, containment, and evacuation efforts at Chernobyl and Pripyat. Good quality stories and poor quality stories ran in Trud and Izvestiia and Pravda, and when the quality or content of a story regarding Chernobyl was particularly egregious, there were commonly rebuttals run in newspapers the very next day, and this was allowed to happen!

53 A violation of trust between the public and the government requires censorship, a concerted effort to mislead and alter the truth through propaganda campaigns, denials, and rebranding; these are tactics unseen as the Chernobyl saga plays out.

Misinformation through bad reporting is not the same as a concerted effort to suppress the truth; singular individuals in the press, speaking on behalf of the government because they work for the government, do not constitute the party line, especially when there are different officials of the same government, sometimes in the same paper, sometimes on the same page, quoted as saying something contradictory to the first government official. This was no Cheliabinsk, denied and ignored for 50 years.

Along this same vein, there are many articles and monographs on the Chernobyl incident. Overall, the historiography of the event is developing past the first-hand and journalistic accounts which were the most readily available in the initial twenty to twenty- five years after the Chernobyl accident. One of the ideas that I hope this section will help the reader to understand is that the Chernobyl event was purely a product of its time and place. Had it happened ten years earlier, the damage to the standing of the

Soviet Union, especially domestically, would have been less severe. The Soviet Union would have better been able to control the flow in external information into the country and, though the Brezhnev years were a time of stagnation and near-zero growth in the economy, the Soviet Union was not in Afghanistan yet (a military adventure which rapidly ate up the nation’s capital and quickly plunged the Soviet Union into a downward economic spiral from which they could not pull out). As it was, they simply could not deal with the flow of information, either internally or externally, in a secretive manner. In their July/August 1987 edition, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists described Chernobyl as

54 “a heart attack that struck a patient already suffering from cancer.”9 Outside factors, such as the detection of radioisotopes from Sweden to as far away as America, and wildly exaggerated claims of death and destruction appearing in the foreign press, necessarily shaped the Soviet response. Because of those factors, the Soviet government was forced to deal with Chernobyl on the radio, on television, and in the newspapers, both domestically and internationally. What follows is the Chernobyl story in three parts: what happened, what was known about the plant, and what was said to the public.

What Happened

When water began boiling in the lower portion of the reactor during maintenance procedure on reactor number four, somebody working inside the control room of

Chernobyl number 4 pressed the emergency stop button, which caused graphite absorber rods to be lowered into the reactor. This had the unfortunate side-effect of displacing all the coolant that was currently in the reactor, the temperature of which then spiked dramatically, causing a feedback loop of positive reactivity – or nearly uncontrolled fission – in the core, which only served to drive the temperature still higher,10 up to around 40,000 degrees Celsius, by some accounts.11 The sun, by contrast, burns at a balmy 5,600 degrees Celsius. This extraordinary rise in temperature caused the core of the Chernobyl reactor to be transformed into a rocket. The contents

9 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July/August 1987, page 26.

10 Mikhail V. Malko, "The Chernobyl Reactor: Design Features and Reasons for Accident," Joint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research, August 15, 2005, 24..

11 A. N. Kiselev and K. P. Checherov, Model of the Destruction of the Reactor in the No, 4 Unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Atomic Energy, Vol. 91, No. 6, 2001), 973. See also Atomnaya Énergiya, Vol. 91, No. 6, pp. 425–434, December, 2001

55 of the core – plutonium, water, coolant, and metal – vaporized almost instantly and began spewing out of the reactor’s side. It flew like a missile from the reactor vault to the central reactor hall, through at least two walls, propelled by a plasma jet of water, graphite, and nuclear fuel, before another plasma jet caused the reactor to lift some thirty meters in the air, where it detonated in the middle of the central hall.12

The test on April 26 was designed to discover the length of time that a spinning turbine could provide power. In the event of a catastrophic power loss at the power station, diesel engines would kick in to keep power supplied to the emergency generators (in the event of power loss, the reactor itself was supposed to have shut down immediately). There was, however, a 30 second gap between power loss and the diesel generators kicking in. The test was designed to see how much power could be provided by the inertial energy of the turbine, power which would then be used to keep the station online during some of the thirty second delay gap.13 This would have, in theory, gone a long way toward ensuring that the reactor at Chernobyl number 4 could remain stable in the event of a power loss. The important phrase there, however, is “in theory:” this experiment had been attempted the year before and had failed, though with less spectacular consequences. Speaking with the benefit of hindsight, Valeri Legasov, the USSR delegation leader to the August 1986 conference on exactly what happened at Chernobyl told the assembled IAEA delegates that performing the experiment was akin to the personnel of a plane, which was flying very high, suddenly deciding to see

12 Malko, 21.

13 David Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster, 12. See also Richard Mould, Chernobyl: The Real Story (Elmsford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 8, and Grigori Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, 32 -33.

56 what happens when doors and windows were opened, and various safety systems were turned off.14

Compounding the issue of trying to perform a risky experiment that had already failed once, the Chief Engineer of the Chernobyl Plant, Nikolai Fomin, made several decisions that were extraordinarily vexing: first, Fomin decided he wanted to prove that a nuclear power station could function safely without external sources of coolant (in other words, using only the coolant that was available at the time the experiment started), and therefore ordered the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) turned off.

Furthermore, in order to ensure that personnel of the Chernobyl number 4 unit did not panic and ruin his “pure experiment,” Fomin also ordered that the gate valves on the coolant delivery systems be de-energized and put under lock and key so that under no circumstances could coolant be delivered to the reactor.15 The ECCS was disconnected at around two in the afternoon on April 25, but the experiment was subjected to an unplanned delay as, by request of an electricity grid controller in Kiev, Chernobyl number 4 was ordered to stay connected to the Ukrainian power grid until almost midnight. The experiment was thus operating on a far shorter time frame, which meant that there was a smaller window of time during which to safely power down the reactor to the appropriate power level.16

At around eleven in the evening, the actual shutting down of the reactor began.

Ideally for Fomin’s experiment, the reactor was to be powered down to a point where

14 Richard Mould, Chernobyl: The Real Story, 12.

15 Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, 35 and 47-48. See also Mould, Chernobyl: The Real Story, 9.

16 Mould, 9.

57 the turbines being driven by the reactor were still providing between seven hundred and one thousand megawatts of thermal power. A little before one in the morning, the turbines had slowed to the point where they were only producing some thirty megawatts of power – drastically lower than the output required by the parameters of the experiment.17 Even though the experiment was dangerously off-course, the decision was made to continue.

By one in the morning, operators had successfully succeeded in upping the power production of the turbines to two hundred megawatts – a feat performed by removing nearly all the control rods – graphite absorbers which worked to keep the fission of the reactor under control – from the reactor.18 This had the side effect of creating an “iodine well” within the reactor, which poisoned the plutonium and made the reactions taking place within Chernobyl number 4 far harder to control.

What followed was a very specific set of circumstances that falls outside the purview of this work. It will suffice to say that, though the power to the turbine and the reactor was being drastically lowered, the amount of in-system coolant was allowed to remain the same.19 This caused havoc with the turbine generator and the steam pressure system to the point where, at 1:23:40 in the morning, on April 26, the emergency stop button was pressed. Because all of the control rods had been withdrawn from the reactor, and because of a clear deficiency in the design of the

17 Ibid, see also Medvedev, 50-51. The INSAG-1/7 report produced after the Chernobyl incident would later make comment on how one of the safety measures that the Soviets put in place after Chernobyl was that circulating pumps, which drive fission and allow the plant to produce power, would not function below a 700MW output. See also INSAG-7, 49.

18 Ibid.

19 INSAG-7, 64, 107. It is not enough to have steam and coolant in a closed system; they must be in the correct proportion both to each other and to the power output/heat generation by the power station.

58 Soviet RBMK reactors, it would take twenty seconds for the control rods to be fully reinserted back into the reactor core.

The reactor only had eighteen seconds left before detonation, however.

A neutron power surge occurred when the emergency stop button was pressed because of a design peculiarity with the Soviet RBMK reactors. The first meter and a half of the control rods would sometimes, instead of lowering power and radioactivity levels within the reactor, cause them to sharply spike. This had been a problem before in other RBMK power plants in the Soviet Union when only a handful of rods were being reinserted into the reactor; at Chernobyl number 4, at 1:23 in the morning on April 26, all of them were being inserted at the same time. Inserting all of the control rods at once also had the unfortunate side-effect of displacing all of the coolant that had been in the reactor.

By 1:23:43, 3 seconds after the emergency stopped button was pressed, the reactor power exceeded five hundred thirty megawatts – up from two hundred megawatts, a 265% increase, in a reactor whose fuel source had already been destabilized by an iodine well – with no coolant available.20 Had the ECCS still been connected, it would still have been possible at this point to salvage the situation;

20 Medvedev, 75. See also Mould, 10-12.

59 unfortunately, Fomin’s experiment remained “pure.”21 Loud banging could be heard coming from the direction of the central hall; the floor of the power plant was shaking.22

Walter Patterson summarized the Soviet position on what happened next for the

IAEA publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Experts postulated that the fierce power surge - perhaps as much as 100 times the nominal design power - had shattered the fuel into incandescent fragments; the fragments had transferred their heat almost instantaneously to the water coolant, flashing it to steam with a pressure shock violent enough to blast a gaping crater through the concrete above the reactor. This "steam explosion" exposed the red-hot core; air rushed in, mixing with the hydrogen formed when zirconium fuel cladding reacted with steam. Within two or three seconds a hydrogen explosion showered the refueling hall and the surroundings with blazing core material, starting about 30 fires.23

The explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945 released four and a half tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere; Chernobyl, by contrast, released fifty tons of evaporated fuel into the atmosphere, plus another seventy tons of fuel and seven hundred tons of radioactive graphite that were distributed to the surrounding area. Radioactivity in the area ranged from 1,000 to 20,000 roentgens per hour24, though a Moscow press conference on May 6 incorrectly stated that radioactivity was 15

21 This appears to be a point of contention between those that have studied the event. Though many sources – historians and scientists alike – contend that the ECCS being activated might have salvaged the plant, there are those like Malko who believe that the ECCS being turned off had no bearing on the pace of events. To wit: “Data recorded by the reactor control systems shows that no emergency signals came to the ECCS system during the development of the accident. They could not come because the sensors of the emergency core cooling system reacts on the events in the premise compartments, but not on the events in the core. This means that there was no difference, was this system switched off or in.” Malko, 23.

22 Ibid.

23 Walter Patterson, “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” November 1986.

24 Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, 79.

60 milliroentgens per hour.25 Per the World Health Organization, the maximum allotment of roentgens for a nuclear power plant worker was 5 per year. For a normal person, the allotment was .5 roentgens per year, or 1.3 milliroentgens per day.26 Even if the numbers which Moscow released had been correct, that level of radioactivity can easily be considered deadly. The residents of Pripyat would have been receiving their daily dose of roentgens within six minutes of stepping outside, and they certainly would have received their yearly allotment by the time the evacuation of Pripyat began some thirty- six hours later.

The radioactive cloud of fallout moved generally north by north-west away from the plant; evacuations from Chernobyl and Pripyat also moved north by north-west away from the plant, keeping those evacuated constantly inundated with radiation.27

Compounding this issue was the fact that the 1100-some buses used in the evacuation weren’t properly decontaminated, which then worked to distribute isotopes all over the evacuation path, deeper into parts of the Ukraine and Belorussia.28 While this boded poorly for those who lived in the destinations of the Chernobyl and Pripyat refugees, this additional radiation might have been considered a moot point for those directly affected by the plant explosion; as mentioned above, there was a thirty-six hour gap between the

Chernobyl event and the start of evacuation procedures. After determining that some of the people in the surrounding area were receiving three to five times the “harmful” dose

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 214.

27 Marples, Social Impact, 31.

28 Medvedev, Truth about Chernobyl, 181.

61 of radiation as early as April 26, the issue of evacuation was still tabled until the following day at the behest of Bryukhanov, so as not to cause a panic.29

The official, local response as to why there was a thirty-six hour gap between the

Chernobyl event and evacuation was that the radiation levels in the surrounding area were only “slowly” rising.30 David Marples suggests that this demonstrates a particular absence of glasnost’, the idea that, faced with empirical evidence of something very wrong occurring, the both the central and local Soviet authorities would only admit something part of the way – yes, there was radiation, but it was only slowly rising, so how much of a danger could it be? Less of being an absence of glasnost’, I am more inclined to agree with Geist on this point: there are differing accounts, sometimes in the same paper on the same day, because, “while some Soviet organizations, such as civil defense, measured risk from the accident largely in terms of physical damage to Soviet lives and property, others, such as the KGB, preoccupied themselves with more nebulous threats, such as embarrassing revelations about the failures and oversights of the Soviet government.”31 There is also something to be said for the idea that, taking

Marples’ idea at face value, and that the official, local response did in fact represent a particular lack of glasnost’, there is still the larger governmental response which unfolds in the days, months, and years after the initial thirty-six hours; that on a smaller, local level, those in charge of the plant were falling into old habits of reporting self-serving information to higher without regard to the consequences, where the response changes

29 Ibid., 165.

30 Marples, Social Impact, 28-29.

31 Edward Geist, “Political Fallout,” 106.

62 and morphs into more of a forthright one once the central government – and the rest of the USSR, as well as portions of the world – gets involved.

I posit that there were two things at work: a knee-jerk reaction to an unimaginable event on the part of Soviet officials who were putting forth the information – one can see this reaction in day to day life when catching someone (especially a child) doing something they are not supposed to be doing and they lie about it (before eventually telling the truth); or the marriage between a perceived lack of knowledge on the part of the populace who were the intended targets of the information, a lack of legal culpability for anyone in the local area regarding making decisions, and a desire to not look like the person in charge of this catastrophe, especially given that basic safety measure such as iodine tablets were not on hand as a precaution for the workers and citizenry in the immediate area.32 As Zhores Medvedev points out on the first two pages of his book,

“over the course of 35 years, on radio, television, and in the press, scientists have repeatedly told the general public about the peaceful atom – its safety, cleanliness, and reliability.”33 This, in fact, was the entire premise of the Pavilion for Atomic Energy at the

Exhibition of the Achievements of the People's Economy of the USSR (VDNKh), that nuclear energy was a safe and effective bridge to the future.34 There were those who appeared to be banking on the fact that their citizens who were affected by Chernobyl would not know enough to be worried, and that this pacification through half- understanding would allow the Soviet government to quickly and quietly contain the

32 INSAG-7, 87.

33 Medvedev, Truth About Chernobyl, 1-2.

34 Sonja D. Schmid, "Celebrating Tomorrow Today," Social Studies of Science 36, no. 3 (2006): 334-335, doi:10.1177/0306312706055534.

63 Chernobyl crisis before being forced to deal with it on a larger scale – this Harkens back to Edward Geist’s idea that different organizations were concerned with different flavors of damage control: the KGB, for instance, was worried about domestic and international embarrassment.

And so children were allowed to play soccer outside in Pripyat, and a wedding was allowed to take place outdoors on the evening of August 26.35 Three days went by before Moscow allowed something to be said to the USSR at-large, and even then, it only amounted to, “an accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Atomic power station; one of the nuclear reactors has been damaged.”36

The decision-makers in Moscow, as discussed earlier, were not receiving accurate and timely information from those in charge at Chernobyl and Pripyat; a correct flow of information up the chain would perhaps have allowed for orders to come from the Party seat which would countermand the local instructions and orders being given. According to Vladimir Pavlovich Voloshko, chairman of the Communist Party

Executive Committee at Pripyat, “Bryukhanov kept everybody in the dark by repeating that the radiation situation in the town was normal.”37 And according to Viktor

Grigoryevich Smagin, even though some places around the plant were receiving as many as 15,000 roentgens per hour, Moscow had no way of knowing because, “the version of events that Moscow was getting from them [Fomin and Bryukhanov] was that water was being fed into the reactor. Back from Moscow came the order to keep

35 Marples, Social Impact, 28. See also Medvedev, Truth About Chernobyl, 137-138.

36 Izvestiia, April 30, page 1.

37 Medvedev, 141. Bryukhanov was eventually tried and sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in the Chernobyl event, primarily owing to the misinformation he was reporting back to Moscow.

64 pumping water into the reactor. But they had run out of water.”38 Many of the initial decisions about what could have been done at Chernobyl were made with faulty information – namely, that the reactor was intact and being supplied with coolant.39

What is important about Smagin and Voloshko’s testimonies is that the Party members back in Moscow that could have been taking charge of the Chernobyl situation were instead relaying false information – information passed upward to mitigate the ramifications that Briukhanov, Fomin, Dialatov, among others, would face. It was this information which ultimately shaped the way Moscow chose to respond to the

Chernobyl event. In Pravda on 30 April and Izvestiia on 1 May, the same statement from the USSR Council of Ministers appeared: “Urgent measures have been taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. At present, the radiation situation at the power station and in the adjacent locality has stabilized; the victims are being given necessary medical assistance. The resident of the atomic power station settlement and three nearby communities have been evacuated.”40 If the information being relayed from

Chernobyl and Pripyat was that the reactor was in-tact, and that the radiation situation in the area was more-or-less normal, what reason did they have to rush and react, especially to such an out-of-the-way place as Chernobyl in western Ukraine? Allowing information to the contrary to be published would only have served to incite panic unnecessarily and to bring undue attention to those ultimately responsible for this event,

38 Ibid., 134.

39 Grigori Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, 152

40 Pravda, 30 April 1986, Izvestiia, 1 May 1986, “Two Dead in Accident, Some Radiation Released; Residents Evacuated, Victims Treated; Shcherbina Heads Government Commission.”

65 but who, due to the unorthodox manner in which the nuclear industry was structured in the USSR, were not actually legally culpable.

The silence from Moscow, based on the silence and bad information being reported back up, had the unsurprising effect of causing more panic than there might have been otherwise. Pravda Science editor B. Gubarev had this to say about the issue in his report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, regarding his visit from

May 4th to May 9th:

On May 5, the Ukrainian Minister of health made an unsuccessful television appearance, which only generated more panic. Basically, the television was showing only dance programs along with other unrelated subjects, when they could have been giving out very basic information about radiation conditions in the city and conducting elementary discussions with scientists and specialists, of whom there were plenty in Kiev, and therby lessening the tension, as was the case after the centralized newspapers [Pravda, Izvestiia, etc.] stepped in. In general, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party waited for instructions from Moscow ... we constantly heard the following phrase: “We did not receive those instructions from the center.”41

Gubarev notes that he was, “amazed by the slow response time exhibited by the local authorities,” that “propaganda from abroad was very influential,” because “not a single republic leader appeared on local radio or television stations,” and that overall panic increased when, in the vacuum of non-response, “it became known that the children and families of the leadership were being evacuated.”42

The IAEA closes their report with these findings:

The design parameters and characteristics of thee RBMK-1000 reactor on 26 April 1986 violated the safety standards and regulations so seriously that it could only be operated in a country where there was an inadequate

41 Diane Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman, Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation (Washington: Library of Congress, 1997), 510.

42 Ibid.

66 safety culture; the system of legal, economic and sociopolitical correlations that existed prior to the accident and still exists in the field of nuclear power has no legal basis, and did not and does not meet the requirements of ensuring the safe utilization of nuclear power in the USSR; ...[because] the regulatory bodies have no legal basis, no economic methods of control, and no human and financial resources, and since it is very difficult to set up and institute of independent experts in this country, the system that existed and still exists is one consisting of many links providing step by step control and finicky supervision of nuclear power plants, rather than a full blooded regulatory system for the safe use of nuclear energy in the interests of the whole population.43

Disinformation reaching the ears of the apparatchiks in charge seems to have resulted in misinformation – or a lack of information in any case – to be released to the public in the immediate aftermath. A situation arose where nobody was told that they were in charge, and nobody volunteered to be in charge; decisions were evaluated and made initially based on the potential for personal mitigation, and information was passed on and up which mirrored that mindset. Like teasing the real story out of an untruthful toddler, the self-preservation instincts of those in charge at Chernobyl (but not necessarily reflecting the leadership of the Soviet Union at-large) cost time, money, and lives.

Aside from actions being taken based on incorrectly reported information, the survivors and first responders of Chernobyl were also endangered by actions taken out of ignorance of their consequences. Gubarev notes that the “whole civil defense system was completely paralyzed.”44 Drivers and other first responders assisting with the evacuation were working without protective equipment, and due to low quality control

43 INSAG 7, 84-88.

44 Diane Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman, Revelations from the Russian Archives, 509.

67 standards for the Ministry of Energy, Chernobyl had received so many ill-functioning or otherwise defective monitoring and measuring devices that there were not enough to go around.45 To that point: there were two Geiger counters on hand capable of detecting high radiation levels: one was in a locked safe buried in the explosion and the other failed immediately.46

One of the plans implemented was dropping tons of lead (Medvedev says 40 tons; V.M. Chernousenko says 3,000 tons) onto the destroyed reactor. The lead liquefied from the heat of the reactor, and did not cover the reactor and stop the spread of radiation as had been planned. This could have ended very poorly, because if the lead had not liquefied from the heat of the reactor, the force of the impact of the lead might have driven the reactor down into the suppression tank of water beneath the station, which would have caused a massive thermal explosion, which may have doubled or tripled the irradiated area.47

Understanding that dropping tons of lead from helicopters did not work as intended, the plan was amended; on April 27, 150 tons of sand was dropped onto the reactor; on April 28, 300 tons of sand; on April 29, 750 tons; on April 30, 1,500 tons; and

May 1, 1,900 tons of sand was dropped onto the reactor 4. The violent impact of sandbags on the reactor core caused plumes of radioactive graphite and fission fragments to become unsettled, which were then carried around by wind currents causing a general re-irradiation.48 The plan to build a pipeline to deliver cement to the

45 Ibid.

46 Geist, Political Fallout, 112.

47 Grigori Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, 167

48 Ibid., 194-195.

68 Chernobyl site was delayed; one of the arguments against mobilizing welders in order to create the massive pipeline needed to deliver the cement that would eventually form the sarcophagus was that, if those welders were killed or injured by the radiation, there wouldn’t be enough welders to build nuclear power plants for the USSR in the future.49

On May 9, part of the graphite in the reactor burned through the floor. A cavity under the 5,000 tons of sand, clay, lead, and boron carbide formed, and the entirety of the pile collapsed into the hole – creating a radioactive volcano plume which effectively recoated an 18-mile radius in radioactive dust.50

Those in charge of the reactor were lamenting that they did not know how to bring the reactor under control,51 but by then the point was moot. All the lead and sand had been dropped, all the cave-ins that were going to happen had happened.

Nothing about what happened in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl suggests any type of concerted effort to keep people in the dark about what was happening. Poor information was being distributed, but it was poor information based on poor information being reported up from ground zero. Good faith efforts were made to contain, to limit the damage and the loss of life, and to remediate the situation; as the aphorism Hanlon’s law suggests, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” The important distinction, one which goes against Marples’ idea of glasnost’ betrayal, is that – “right” or “wrong,” thoughtful or bumbling, based on correct or incorrect information – Moscow was constantly asking that something be done about

49 Ibid., pg 209

50 Ibid., 245

51 Ibid., 186.

69 the crisis unfolding in the Ukraine, enlisting help and describing – albeit with varying levels of accuracy – what was going on to the citizens of the Soviet Union. The idea of a glasnost’ betrayal suggests a concerted, top-down effort to keep the maximum amount of people in the dark, for whatever reason, which is not what we see in an investigation of the Soviet response.

After a brief investigation into the peculiarities of Chernobyl’s RBMK-1000 plant and what made this catastrophe possible, I will take an extended look at precisely what that public description and discourse looked like.

What Was Known about the Plant

The design deficiencies and instability of the physical and thermal- hydraulic characteristics of the RBMK-1000 reactor had been theoretically and experimentally determined prior to the accident on 26 April 1986. However, no adequate remedial action was taken, firstly, to eliminate the defects and, secondly, to warn the personnel about the consequences of these dangerous characteristics and to provide them with appropriate training in the operation of the reactor, the parameters of which did not comply with the requirements of the technical standards archiveation.52

The RBMK (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalniy) type was a light water cooled, graphite moderated nuclear reactor designed in the Soviet Union, and was one of two different reactor models to find use in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. As this chapter will show, serious design flaws directly led to the Chernobyl event on April 26,

1986. Before beginning a critical discussion of the flaws of the RBMK-type reactor, we should first establish what sort of oversight existed over nuclear power in the Soviet

Union at the time.

52 The Chernobyl Accident: Updating of INSAG-1: INSAG-7: A report by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, (49-50).

70 According to the INSAG-7 report, “the system of legal, economic and sociopolitical correlations that existed prior to the accident and still exists in the field of nuclear power has no legal basis, and did not and does not meet the requirements of ensuring the safe utilization of nuclear power in the USSR.”53

What this means is that no one person or organization bore the full responsibilities for the safety of the nuclear power plants. Individual people, groups, and arms of the government were responsible for only the specific parts of the job which they performed themselves, or as a group – much akin to how no one person could be said to have developed the atomic weapons used on Japan at the end of World War II, since research and production was extraordinarily compartmentalized. This compartmentalization, however, did not fall in line with international standards and practices that the Soviet Union had not only agreed to, but also had helped to formulate.

International consensus was that, where nuclear power was to be used, there should have been an operating organization that bore the responsibility of safe implementation of nuclear power, either through safety checks at individual stations or through reviews of engineering plans to make sure that buildings were up to the standards levied by the

IAEA. The Soviet Union had no such singular organization. The result of which meant that, even in the direct aftermath of the Chernobyl incident, there were dangerous facilities for which no one person or organization was responsible.54 I will talk about this situation more later, but there were two different ministries overseeing the nuclear program in the Soviet Union, with a third ministry acting as an interlocutor between the

53 INSAG-7, 86-87.

54 Ibid., 87.

71 two. This unnecessarily bureaucratized an industry in which reaction is required, that reaction is usually required to be swift and decisive, lest an incident turn into a crisis and people die.

With engineers working within these strange parameters, the Chernobyl RBMK-

1000 type reactor was born. The RBMK-1000 at Chernobyl was designed seemingly without catastrophe in mind, which is an important point: no emergency or warning signals were provided in the design of the Chernobyl plant.55 Also within the Chernobyl design, and in RBMK designs more generally, if specific powering down instructions were not followed exactly, the powering down process could actually increase the power and radioactive output of the reactor. Part of this powering down process meant ensuring that there were at least thirty control rods in the reactor – if there were less, a number would have to be inserted into the reactor so that there were thirty, and the influx of control rods would cause a power flux.56 One can see how this would be especially troublesome if the protective shielding around a reactor was breached, as was the case with Chernobyl’s reactor number four – with a breached barrier, if the powering down process actually caused an acceleration of radioactive output from the reactor, any ecological, radiological, and humanitarian problem would certainly be exacerbated.57 Even if the powering down process had not caused an increase in fission in the Chernobyl reactor, disaster still was looming on the horizon: the control and emergency rods could only be inserted from the core at a speed of less than half a

55 Ibid., 38.

56 David Marples, The Social Impact, 15 and 22; See also: INSAG-7, 34-35.

57 INSAG-7, 34-35.

72 meter a second, and could also only be inserted from a very specific position. In addition to this, they could only be inserted into the core after a delay of twenty seconds. This setup was not adequate to shut down the core of reactor number four at

Chernobyl in an emergency like the one which occurred on April 26, 1986.58

The INSAG report continues to say that there was no safety analysis done of the void coefficient of reactivity in the RBMK-1000 design documentation. That is to say, all plants with RBMK-1000 reactors operated with values of their void coefficients having been obtained in practice, rather than having the values established in the design process and on a case by case basis.59 One possible danger of these types of plants lied in that they can trend into a positive feedback loop – where the amount and quality of the steam drove the amount and quantity of the reactivity taking place in the reactor, which drove the amount and quality of the steam which drove the amount and quantity of the reactivity.60 Soviet engineers, all the way up to those with a post at the Academy of Sciences, were designing and treating the RBMK nuclear reactors as if they were interchangeable pieces of farm equipment, rather than the always-active nuclear bombs.

58 Mikhail V. Malko, The Chernobyl Reactor: Design Features and Reasons for Accident (Joint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus), 17.

59 INSAG-7, 37. The void coefficient, or void coefficient of reactivity, is a number that can be used to estimate how much the reactivity of a nuclear reactor changes as steam bubbles, or voids, form in the reactor moderator or coolant. This is a very important number for engineers of a nuclear plant to have a firm grasp on, especially in an RBMK reactor, which had the ability to create with dangerously high positive coefficients. This means, essentially, that as more and more coolant evaporated, leaving steam bubbles or merely air pockets in its place, the more fission that was able to take place – less coolant, more power. The existence of this ability to stray into a high positive void coefficient makes the extraordinarily lax safety precautions at RBMK plants all the more perplexing. For a general overview of reactor types, and what specifically a coefficient of reactivity is, beyond this explanation, see V.G. Snell and J.Q. Howieson, Chernobyl: A Canadian Perspective (AECL, EACL, August 1991), 19-21.

60 Walter C. Patterson, “Chernobyl – the official story,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1986

73 The INSAG report also notes:

The void coefficient of reactivity varied over a wide range from negative to positive values as a function of the composition of the core and the operating regime of the reactor, the fast power coefficient remained negative under normal operating conditions. At the time of the accident, the void and power coefficients of reactivity were both positive.61

The fact that both coefficients of reactivity had strayed into the realm of the positive at the time of the accident, instigating a positive feedback loop as referenced above, further serves to highlight the fact that no emergency or warning signals were provided in the design of the Chernobyl plant. Also of note in this specific situation is the fact that the operating algorithm of the emergency protection system prioritized the efficient operation in terms of supplying power over the ability to ensure nuclear safety; that is to say, rather than acting as a safeguard in the event of a possible nuclear disaster, the emergency protection system had been calibrated to keep the maximum amount of electricity flowing from the power station at all times.62 Moreover, even if the proper emergency management system had been in place, and had alarms and warning systems been allowed for in the design of the Chernobyl station, it is likely that the event still may have occurred: according to the IAEA, “three dimensional, non- stationary neutron-thermal-hydraulic models are required to calculate the physical parameters of the RBMK reactors… such models became available shortly before the

Chernobyl accident and were not really [well] developed until after.”63 These are both

61 INSAG-7, 3.

62 Ibid., 45.

63 Ibid., 37. See also information concerning SPRINT and TITAN, in Russian Academy of Sciences: Nuclear Safety Institute, Russian RBMK Reactor Design Information, (Moscow: November, 1993), 7.

74 separate safety considerations from the sheer amount of time it took to initiate emergency shutdown procedures.

Perhaps it was as INSAG suggested and the reactor designers “were well aware of the possible dangerous consequences of the reactor characteristics and understood how the safety of the RBMK reactor could be improved.64” Less than a month and a half following the Chernobyl incident, measures to improve the safety of what the IAEA classified as the “main technical measures” were announced. Some of the changes recommended were as follows: installation of 30 additional absorber rods; an increase in the number of overall control rods; and a ban on the operation of the four main circulating pumps below a certain reactor power threshold; better pre-positioning of control rods within the system.65 As it is unlikely, if not impossible, for any investigation to have been carried out in the immediate aftermath of the event at reactor four,

INSAG’s reasoning seems solid: the engineers of the RBMK, and especially at

Chernobyl, were familiar with the design weaknesses of the RBMK-1000 reactors.66

As part of its summation of the way in which the Chernobyl plant was managed – and so too the entirety of nuclear power in the USSR – INSAG had this to say:

According to the current standards and regulations, these organizations are not empowered to make any crucial decisions (and after the Chernobyl accident also not any less important ones; in fact, to all intents and purposes, no decisions) without clearance by the Chief Design Engineer, the Scientific Administrator, the General Designer, and the regulatory body. At the same time, all these organizations which force owners [of the plants] to make decisions and do not allow them any choice apart from termination of the operation of the plant in the case of a

64 Ibid., 49.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

75 disagreement, carry no responsibility themselves for the decisions made (except for the regulatory body, which is also wrong).67

In short, there was not a singular governing body allowed to make any decisions of importance regarding the operations of the power plant, other than to order the plant be shut down. The positions and organizations to whom the power plant was answerable were not in a position to be held culpable for any decisions made or lake thereof; in short, there was no oversight or accountability for what was happening at

Chernobyl, nor any other nuclear power plant in the USSR at the time.

What Was Said

Work is continuing at Chernobyl Atomic Power Station to eliminate the consequences of the accident that has occurred. As a result of the measures taken over the past 24 hours, the emission of radioactive substances has decreased, and radiation levels in the area of the atomic power station and in the station settlement have gone down.68

This quote from Pravda is part of a larger theme that emerges in the newspapers immediately after the Chernobyl incident: while not an outright denial of anything having taken place, the Soviet press played down the enormity of what had happened at reactor number four. Stories and headlines such as, “radioactivity on the grounds of the atomic power station and in the power-station settlement has decreased by one-third to one-half,”69 are certainly representative of the general tone of the press during the initial reaction to Chernobyl, but just as important is the tone and tack the press took in the weeks, months, and even years after the event.

67 INSAG-7, 87.

68 Pravda, May 1, 1986, page 2.

69 Pravda, May 2, 1986, page 2.

76 However, it is also fair to say that, in controlling the stream of information released to the public, Soviet leadership hoped to control the public’s reaction to what was at that time the biggest nuclear accident in history. This was achieved less through outright omission of information and more by framing information in a way to downplay the severity of the matter, as evidenced by newspapers printing information such as, “at present, the radiation situation at the power station and in the adjacent locality has stabilized,”70 and “an accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Atomic power station; one of the nuclear reactors has been damaged.”71 This tactic continued, even three weeks into the future, when Trud cited a report that radiation levels had fallen again by seventy-five percent, with the suggestion that they would “chase this genie back into the bottle yet.”72 There is not a discussion of where the radiation went, though, or what caused it to fall by such a large number: strontium-90 has a half-life of 28.8 years73 ; cesium-137 (the predominant source of radiation in fallout from the Chernobyl explosion afer iodine-13174) has a half-life of 30.17 years75; iodine-131, the apparent primary

70 Pravda, April 30, 1986, page 2.

71 Izvestiia, April 30, 1986, page 1.

72 Trud, May 16, 1986, page 4

73 "Strontium-90," Radioactivity : Strontium-90, accessed July 6, 2012, http://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Strontium_90.htm.

74 Cesium-137: A Deadly Hazard, accessed July 6, 2012, http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/wessells1/.

75 "Radionuclide Basics: Cesium-137," EPA, May 04, 2017, accessed July 21, 2017, https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclide-basics-cesium-137.

77 irradiator, only has a half-life of 8 days, however76, which would account for the seventy- five percent number offered in the Trud article.77

The front-page blurb from Izvestiia (“an accident has occurred”), while not misleading, clearly is not meant to tell the whole story. The article itself makes no mention of radiation being released, the evacuation of Chernobyl and Pripyat or, most tellingly, when the accident occurred at the plant. At no point during the initial press coverage do the newspapers give April 26th as the date of the accident; coverage merely begins on April 30th with an almost glib, “there was an accident, but everything is under control.”78 An article run the same day in Pravda, and the next day in Izvestiia does make some mention of the towns being evacuated, and also of radiation leaking from the damaged reactor,79 but as will be discussed later, making mention of radiation does not necessarily mean that the residents were being warned of the danger. For a good many people in the Soviet Union, especially the less educated rural citizens and collective farm workers in the Ukraine, radiation was an abstract concept that did not mean anything. Sightless, soundless, odorless, and tasteless, many people seemed to take its intangibility to mean that it was imaginary, a view which only continue to be reinforced by the frankly blasé fashion with which the Soviet government was handling

76 "Radionuclide Basics: Iodine," EPA, May 04, 2017, accessed July 21, 2017, https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclide-basics-iodine.

77 Using the measurement of 10kg of iodine-131 (which has no relation to how much iodine-131 was released into the environment) for mathematic simplicity: 8 days after release, 10kg would have decayed into 5kg; 8 days further on, the 5kg of iodine-131 would have decayed into 2.5kg, which meets the 75% number set forth in the Trud article.

78 Trud, May 16, 1986, page 4

79 Pravda, April 30, 1986, page 1. See also Izvestiia, May 1, 1986.

78 the situation in the national press.80 The insular system of the Soviet nuclear program almost guaranteed that if a disaster struck, as it did in the early morning hours of April

26th, the Soviet Union would need to take valuable hours and days to coordinate their efforts and deal with it. Two different ministries oversaw the nuclear program and coordinated through a third while, as Geist points out, some organizations measured risk from the accident largely in terms of physical damage to Soviet lives and property, and others preoccupied themselves with threats such as embarrassing revelations about the failures and oversights of the Soviet government.81 It does not take much imagination to see how those two world-views ended up at cross-purposes.

On May 6th, Pravda buried an account of the events of April 26th on the sixth page of the newspaper.82 Two things of note about this article: the first is that there is still no mention of April 26th as the date of the accident.83 One of the reasons for this may be that the residents in the most immediate danger from the radiation emissions from the damaged number four reactor, those of Pripyat and Chernobyl, had not been evacuated from the area until thirty-six hours had elapsed. This seems to be primarily due to the incorrect reports that Briukhanov and Fomin, among others, were sending back to Moscow, which painted a less than calamitous picture of what was happening at

Chernobyl. It was not until relatively impartial (as in, persons that would not be found directly responsible for the catastrophe) observers arrived that accurate reports started

80 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 51 – 54, an interview with Anna Badaeva, a Chernobyl resettler.

81 Geist, Political Fallout, 106.

82 Pravda, May 6, 1986, page 6.

83 Ibid.

79 to make their way back to Moscow and to the Central Committee84 – a process which was still made harder than it needed to be because, as the INSAG report pointed out, there was no singular governing body specifically trained to deal with nuclear power and any situations that may have arisen from its use.85 To quote the INSAG report, “there is no law governing the utilization of nuclear power, no one bears the full responsibility for the safety of operating nuclear power plants. All those involved in the development and operation of nuclear power plants are responsible only for those parts of the job which they perform themselves.” The report goes on to say that, “according to international standards and practices this overall responsibility should be borne by the operating organizations. So far, the USSR does not have any such organizations.”86

What the INSAG report is saying here is not that there were literally no operating organizations, but that there was no ultimately responsible organization that could or would claim responsibility for Chernobyl – or other nuclear occurrences in the Soviet

Union. Sonja Schmid says, succinctly, that “because reactors and the rest of the nuclear plant were kept under different ministries jurisdictions, the attempts by one ministry to standardize while the other tried continuously to change and improve created an ambiguous process that almost by definition could not reach stabilization.”87 One ministry was responsible for planning, management, construction, assembly, and operation of the nuclear power plants; a second conducted research, designed and

84 Koenker and Bachman, Revelations from the Russian Archives, 509-511.

85 INSAG-7, 86.

86 Ibid. Geist also refers to his in his “Political Fallout” article, on page 109.

87 Schmid, Producing Power, 15.

80 developed reactors, and provided technical documentation for the plants. A third ministry coordinated between the two.88 There was oversight of the nuclear plants and programs; the way that the oversight and responsibility was delegated out, however, often put the responsible ministries at loggerheads and, rather than being able to interact with each other, issues of jurisdiction and responsibility had to be communicated through a third, separate ministry – not an ideal situation in any circumstance, but definitely not with something as powerful and dangerous as the nuclear industry of a nation-state.

The second item of note in this article is that it is one of the first to conjure up the military imagery and an innate sense of Russian heroism which would also be a recurring theme throughout the course of the Chernobyl incident, a fact which really stands out as one begins reading through the memoirs and oral histories of the event.

The first responders and those who had to be evacuated were portrayed in the press as heroes, either serving to vanquish this existential threat to the Soviet Union or having bravely survived its ravages, despite the fact that the refugees – the Chernobylites – whom, contrary to reports in the newspapers and on television and radio, were untrusted by the general population and begrudged even food and shelter.89

After the explosion, the roof of the machine room began to burn, and they directed all their efforts toward extinguishing the fire. They battled the blaze, which reached a height of thirty meters. The firemen's boots got stuck in the bitumen, which melted from the high temperature; it was hard to breathe because of soot and smoke, but the courageous fellows bravely fought on.... to the credit of the thousands of people who work at the

88 Ibid., 52.

89 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 193-195.

81 atomic power station and live nearby, there was no panic, although there were isolated cases of individuals panicking.90

By mid-August 1986, 117,500,000 rubles had been spent on new houses alone; another 223,250,000 was slated to be spent by October 1st. By mid-December, 12,000 new homes had been built, more than 4,000 of which were in Belorussia. Only 102 of these were occupied by January 1987. This low number may have had something to do with the fact that builders often left things incomplete: doors and windows left unpainted, linoleum laid across piles of trash and debris, heating systems only warming homes to

50 degrees and, perhaps worst of all, no hot water. The host of this new, unused housing ran the USSR upwards of 320 million rubles, on top of the other, more expensive costs of the Chernobyl cleanup.91

As the event progressed, and more and more people became involved, more accurate information began to appear in force. Articles reporting on the story then began to weave selective framing and hero narrative together; opening with the byline

“Battlefield Operations,” one article let the reader know that “only a few people have been exposed to a high – but not dangerous – level of radiation. I am not referring to the heroes of the first hours and days of the struggle, though who performed feats of valor while risking their health in order to save thousands of others.”92 An article entitled “Two power station workers recount selfless heroism of dead friend,” and bylined, “Days of

Heroism: Communists were in the front ranks!” tells the story of Sasha Lelechenko, who

90 Sotsialistcheskaya industria, May 16, 1986, page 4.

91 Marples, Social Impact, pp. 197-202

92 Pravda, May 20, 1986, pages 1 and 6.

82 went into a section of the disabled fourth reactor to shut off hydrogen feed valves which were providing fuel to the already melting-down reactor. An article in Komsomolskaya pravda told the story of Anelia Perkovskaya, a member of the Komsomol who “provided an example of courage,” by “leading hundreds of people out of Pripyat, and helped those evacuated.” The article then admonishes Yuri Zagalsky and Galina Lupy, who were deficient in their duties as members of the Komsomol and either were not seen during the days of the accident or ran away entirely.93 Izvestiia ran an article memorializing six of the first-responding firefighters who died in the early morning of

April 26 (even though, once again, this date is never used to identify the accident) on

May 19th;94 an article in Trud eschewed the Stakhanovite tack and spent nearly three- thousand words spreading generic accolades for pilots, power plant workers, telephone switchboard operators and, amazingly (at least in light of the INSAG reports) engineers from Chernobyl.95 The message here is clear: even if a person could not fight the fires raging in the reactor core, or help with evacuations, or even take in one of the many

Chernobylites who needed a place to stay in the wake of the catastrophe, the ways in which the everyday Soviet citizen could help the cause were legion.

Other articles focus on Soviet citizens selflessly accepting refugees into their own homes; first-hand accounts of refugees differ on precisely how they were treated as they had to leave their homes – in some cases, homes that had been in their family for generations – and make their way to the unfamiliar surroundings of Belarus and

93 Komsomolskaya pravda, May 17, 1986, page 4.

94 Izvestiia, May 19, 1986, page 6.

95 Trud, May 16, 1986, pages 1 and 4.

83 Moscow and sometimes even farther. With the byline “One's own calamity becomes everyone's,” an article in Izvestiia opines about how difficult it is for a “peasant to abandon his familiar quarters, his family home,” and “the neighborhood he's known since childhood.” It goes on to talk about the evacuations that took place and how everyone, “down to the last person,” had found a place to eat and sleep in a matter of hours.96 Yet more articles, even in the midst of the Chernobyl crisis, took the time to lay accusations against western Europe, suggesting that “certain Western politicians have pursued the specific goal of sowing the seeds of distrust and suspicion with respect to the socialist countries," in the case of a western European ban on food imports from the affected area, going so far as to say that the ban on imports was an “insidious plan to damage those economies as much as possible;”97 Izvestiia ran an article about a United

States atomic submarine running aground, beleaguering the point that this was the second such incident in two months;98 and, in what would become a sticking point for the Soviet press until a retraction was run, Pravda began its assault on United Press

International for saying that at least two thousand people were dead as a direct result of the explosion at the Chernobyl plant.99

96 Izvestiia, May 20, 1986, page 3

97 Pravda, May 18, 1986, page 4.

98 Izvestiia, May 2, 1986, page 4.

99 Pravda, May 4, 1986, page 4. UPI would later admit that it had no basis for the claim that thousands of people had died at Chernobyl. "UPI can no longer stand by its article on the incident at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station, in which it was indicated, citing unconfirmed reports, that 2,000 people had died as a result of the accident" (See Pravda, May 24, page 5). The Soviet press saw this as the West taking yet another opportunity to discredit the Soviet Union as a polity.

84 While the articles, publications, and press inside the Soviet Union tracked along a gradient, from simply “this is a thing that happened,” to “we will all stand together in the face of this great catastrophe,” there were certainly calls to keep the discussion honest, un-obfuscated, and above all, public.

On May 21, 1986, Literaturnaya gazeta ran an article attempting to bring to light the cognitive dissonance of a nuclear disaster, saying that, “it is very hard for the human mind to accept the absurd situation in which mortal danger has no external form -- neither taste nor color or odor – and be measured only with special instruments.”100 It went on to suggesting that openness and honesty were what was required of those in charge, not obfuscation of the truth, and that the real way to engender confidence and trust from those in danger was to take the protective measures necessary – and to instruct those affected what those measures were and why they were in place.101

Literaturnaya gazeta, a weekly culture and political newspaper, differentiated itself from papers such as Pravda and Izvestiia in that it was not an “organ” of the party – it was a place that a reader would see the Soviet government, its leaders, or both, called to task before any such article would be run in the state papers such as Pravda or Izvestiia.

In this Literaturnaya gazeta article, there is an understanding that many of the people who would be most affected by the Chernobyl incident would not understand what was happening. Sightless, soundless, odorless, and tasteless radiation might seem, to an uneducated farmer or fisherman or lumberjack, like nothing more than a ghost story. Svetlana Alexievich interviewed one such person:

100 Literaturnaya gazeta, May 21, 1986, p10

101 Ibid.

85 Sometimes I turn on the radio. They scare us with the radiation. But our lives have gotten better since they radiation came. I swear! Look around: they brought oranges, three kinds of salami, whatever you want. And to the village! My grandchildren have been all over the world. The littlest just came back from France, that's where Napoleon attacked from once -- "Grandma, I saw a pineapple!" My nephew, her brother, they took him to Berlin for the doctors. That's where Hitler started from on his tanks. It's a new world. Everything's different. Is that the radiation's fault, or what?

What's it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it's black. Like earth. But if it's colorless, then it's like God. God is everywhere, but you can't see Him. They scare us! The apples are hanging in the garden, the leaves are on the threes, the potatoes are in the fields. I don't think there was any Chernobyl, they made it up. They tricked people. My sister left with her husband. Not far from here, twenty kilometers. They lived there two months, and the neighbor comes running: “Your cow sent radiation to my cow! She’s falling down.” “How’d she send it?” “Through the air, that’s how, like dust. It flies.” Just fairy tales. Stories and more stories.102

Attitudes like this were reinforced by coverage in the press about “official” admonishments against hypochondria: in a Pravda Ukrainy story on July 16, 1987,

Leonid Ilyin warned against succumbing to radiophobia, which he described as a

“marked decrease in dairy, fruit, and vegetable intake, an increase in paranoia about radiation, and a general ignorance of what radiation was and how it worked.”103

Svetlana Alexevich interviewed Vladimir Ivanov, the former First Secretary of the

Stagorod Regional Party Committee, who said, “the ones up top didn’t really see the whole picture. At a meeting of the Politburo one of the generals explained: “what’s radiation? At the testing grounds, after an atomic blast, they drink a bottle of wine and that’s that. It’ll be fine. They talked about Chernobyl like it was an accident, an ordinary

102 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 52-53.

103 David Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster, 49.

86 accident.”104 Another interviewee, Katya P., said, “everyone was talking about the accident: at home, in school, on the bus, in the street. People compared it to Hiroshima.

But no one believed it. How can you believe in something incomprehensible?”105

Meanwhile, despite the presence of this developing cognitive dissonance about whether Chernobyl was a real issue or not, actions were being taken to start to control the disaster. Military reservists were conscripted without warning; some were over 45, or had families of three or more, which should have disqualified them from service.

Many were rounded up in the middle of the night on May 6 and 7, recalling (for those old enough to remember) what had occurred during collectivization and the later purges of the Terror. In late June, the work period for the Estonians that had been conscripted to deal with the disaster was extended from 30 days to six months; 200 to 300 men were involved in a scuffle with authorities. A strike commenced which may or may not have resulted in the execution of 12 Estonians.106 If the stories of strikes, executions, and involuntary extensions of service happened to scare a draftee or conscript away from doing their patriotic duty, it was also those that refused to go to Chernobyl could have been cited under Article 80 of the Penal Code of Law to a 5 year imprisonment. And if one went, unwillingly, to the worksite and decided there to not work? Also under per the authorities granted under Article 80, a striker could be immediately executed.107 At least

104 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 196.

105 Ibid., 103.

106 David Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster, 182-193.

107 Moscow News, No. 20, May 17, 1987, p. 2; Radiation levels were so high in some areas that some jobs only allowed men to work for 40 seconds at a time, which probably didn’t further tempt draftees and conscripts to report to Chernobyl. See Marples, Social Impact, 189.

87 one person attempted to make his fortune off the plight of Chernobyl conscripts:

Estonian Major-General Roomet Kiudmaa was accused of selling deferments from duty

– 1,000 rubles bought a person’s way out of Afghanistan, where 500 rubles was required to shirk going to the Chernobyl zone.108 Those that did not ignore the conscription to come to Chernobyl, did not purchase a duty deferment, did not strike, were not executed, and were not imprisoned, were then likely to not be the most useful workers mostly due to the large quantities of vodka they were drinking in order to

“decontaminate.”109

How did the Soviet Union deal with the incident on the international stage, though?

Walter C. Patterson, a journalist attended an August 1986 IAEA conference which convened in Vienna to investigate the issue of the Chernobyl event and nuclear power itself. With some 600 nuclear experts from 62 countries and 21 organizations, national and international, present, the gathering was nominally a "technical working conference"; but intensive diplomacy by the IAEA won agreement for both the opening and closing days of the conference to be open to the media, represented by more than

200 journalists. He wrote about the experience for the November 1986 Bulletin of

Atomic Scientists:

Western suspicions that the Soviet authorities would resort to obfuscation and cover-up were swept aside by a deluge of information -- explicit, vivid, and chilling. The official Soviet report ran to 388 pages. In a five hour tour de force the head of the Soviet delegation, Academician Valery Legasov,

108 Marples, Social Impact, 191. See also Izvestiia, October 3, 1986.

109 Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, pp. 206-207; see also Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 85. “I come home and I can’t take my little boy in my arms,” relates one of the men Alexievich interviewed, “without drinking 50-100 grams of vodka [1 to 3 shots] in order to pick him up.”

88 deputy chairman of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, introduced the report. Even in translation his speech was gripping; his description of the final hours, minutes, and seconds before the Chernobyl explosion left both delegates and journalists very disturbed.110

Patterson goes on to say that Legasov also brought with him a presentation entitled “26 April,” which was shown at the IAEA conference on the opening morning and then twice again by demand. The film ran counter to the near-propaganda being shown in the delegates’ lounge. The more upbeat documentary primarily highlighted the efforts of the workers at the site and at Hospital 6 in Moscow – paralleling the hero narrative which was being printed and distributed in the Soviet Union discussed previously. Legasov's videotape focused on the events of April 25th and 26th that had made all the subsequent heroics and cleanup necessary. It described the Chernobyl plant and the RBMK-1000 reactor design; it then followed the course of Fomin’s last experiment on Chernobyl Unit 4, to its catastrophic denouement.

By the end of the conference, delegates from Western countries seemed unwilling or unable to mount an assault on the Soviet nuclear program, in part because the Soviet contingent demanded that any questions or concerns the Western delegation had about Soviet nuclear power and capabilities be submitted to the Soviet Union delegates themselves, rather than being mentioned first to the press, which would have required Legasov and his retinue to answer comments and concerns in an unhelpful game of telephone.111 Patterson even reports on the Soviet Union’s apparent need to

110 Walter C. Patterson, “Chernobyl – the official story,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Volume 42, Number 9, November 1986, pages 34-36.

111 Ibid.

89 over-estimate the potential damage and danger to human life: the Soviet estimates implied over 20,000 fatal cases of cancer and hundreds of thousands of other cancers, numbers which were discounted my attendees from the West, who were convinced that the Soviet estimates were unnecessarily high. Some thought the number might be only

2,000 in a population of many millions over a 70-year lifetime.”112

While in the Vienna conference one can see an abundance of forthrightness – to the point that Western members of the congress were finding fault and dialing back

Soviet estimates -- there is also proof that “public opinion [was] being closely studied.

Party activists and the population [were] informed on a regular basis. Fabrications by bourgeois propaganda [were] being exposed [as were] various rumors.”113 To be sure, there are some fabrications which can be cast aside as run-of-the-mill Soviet prevarications – for even though Gorbachev espoused the idea that the more honestly the Soviet government behaved, the better, he also ordered that, when news of the explosion at reactor number four was released, it should be done so in a manner so as to make it known that the plant was undergoing maintenance, so as to “not cast a shadow on our equipment.”114 While the Soviet government was trying on the mantle of honesty and openness, how do we reconcile clear cases of falsehoods being passed as

112 Ibid. The IAEA put out a report in September of 2005 announcing that the Chernobyl Forum of 2003 had determined that only "up to 4,000" people could eventually die as a result of radiation exposure from the incident. This number was 'hailed by members of the nuclear establishment' as having settled the debate on 'how many deaths and how much disease really resulted from the accident.' Other, unofficial numbers have been released, with Greenepeace's 2006 estimate of 93,000 confirmed or impending deaths being the highest, a number which far outstrips the most liberal estimates brought forth at the time of the accident. For more information about this, please see Economic and Political Weekly, May 6, 2006, pg. 1744.

113 Alla A. Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment, 252. The claim about various rumors or bourgeois propaganda being exposed is borne out when looking at the events circulating around the UPI retraction.

114 Ibid, 248.

90 truth? I would posit that for an explanation, one might need look no further than a simple, “old habits die hard,” that if they Soviets were actually intent on covering the event up and providing a false narrative, then the Soviet delegation would have not been so forthcoming at the IAEA conference, Gorbachev would not have appeared on television and given such a full account of the Chernobyl event, and newspapers would not have talked openly about the event, about the survivors and the victims, and used the stories of loss and heroism in the wake of the event as a patriotic rallying cry.

It was the Soviet government themselves that sought to summon the spirit of

World War II. Interestingly, if (more than likely) unintentionally, this happened: a full eighteen days passed before Gorbachev would make a public, television pronouncement about the accident – an oddly fitting, if unintentional, parallel to Stalin’s silence during the initial days of the German invasion during World War II.

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CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

There were warning signs about the Chernobyl reactor and the RBMK family from which Chernobyl came. Information was released slowly at first, followed by an increase in pace and voluminousity. Where there was incorrect and controversial information released, there was also accurate and timely information not only released to the Soviet public, but to the world at large. They were not denied or, perhaps worse, covered up and ignored, as had been the case with Kyshtym.

The USSR did not do everything correctly, to be sure: an evacuation of the affected area should have been ordered sooner, and better steps should have been taken to ensure a decontamination of the evacuation vehicles as they made their way from Pripyat and the greater affected area; a larger area should have been evacuated, expanding farther into Russia and Belorussia; an education system should have been in place to teach those in the irradiated area what the dangers were, what steps could be taken, and what warning signs to watch for in case medical attention was necessary.

Most glaring, Nikolai Fomin’s test should have been postponed after the requirement for

Chernobyl to stay online and providing power came down from Fomin’s superiors, and both Fomin and Briukhanov obviously should have sent up accurate reports in the early hours after the Chernobyl event, not self-serving reports looking to mitigate the political danger each of them faced for their role in the accident. It is not too far outside the realm of possibility to suggest that has the Soviet Union not been reeling from a variety of other factors – economic downturn, facilitated a great deal by their disastrous adventurism in Afghanistan, as well as a gradual opening of the Soviet society to

Western media – that the Chernobyl disaster, and its thousands of victims, might have

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been denied both internally and externally. One does wonder what the response would have looked like had Chernobyl happened in the Cheliabinsk region, or any other remote location where days or perhaps weeks would have passed without any questions from the international community. Excuses and explanations may well have been fabricated for the radiation that might have found its way to the Nordic countries, to Greece, and, eventually, perhaps in the United States. Like so much of Soviet history, thought games about what could have happened, what should have happened, and what needed to happen can easily run wild. And again, like so much of Soviet history, historical analysis of a particular event often finds itself battling against recency biases, cultural biases, or perhaps an overarching bias against the Soviet Union as a whole with the expectation that whatever way the USSR performed in or reacted to a situation was the wrong way.

There never was a concerted, government-backed effort to produce disinformation favorable to the Soviet government, though. Articles were written and information was passed out to those affected. While it is true that sometimes conflicting information came out in two different articles, sometimes in the same newspaper, even on the same day, this lacks the concerted governmental thrust that one would expect with a traditionally closed society that controlled the ebb and flow of information – a society akin to what one sees when he or she looks at the Soviet Union earlier in its history. Entire populations were moved; there was some attempt to integrate these victims into existing communities and, where that did not work, entire communities were constructed from scratch for these radiological refugees. In reports, both internal and external, up to and including testimony at the United Nations, the Soviet Union

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acknowledged that this was an event that happened and explained its size and scope, that other countries who found themselves affected might better deal with the literal and figurative fallout.

However, this was a far different response than would have come under

Brezhnev, Khrushchev, or Stalin. Stalin outwardly denied the existence of famines ravaging the USSR, and himself oversaw both the policy directives on how and what foreign reporters were allowed to see and tell of the Holodomor, as well as orchestrating the Great Terror and the media reports of the kangaroo courts that were the hallmark of the time – both of which killed more people than the primary and secondary effects of

Chernobyl, combined. Khrushchev, of course, was in power during the Kyshtym nuclear accident, discussed above, which took such an academic and public effort to bring to light that I posit it can hardly be called anything besides a cover-up. I certainly do not mean to end this paper with a patronizing, “well, they tried!” while hanging the

Chernobyl response on the historical refrigerator. More correctly, I mean to highlight the importance that the effort at Chernobyl looked markedly different from what one observes as the response to Cheliabinsk.

Unlike other catastrophic events in the history of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government did respond to this. A job done poorly is not a job left unperformed. I find that the Chernobyl event was the first, biggest challenge of glasnost’. Using what

Michael Gorham describes as glasnost’, some sort of gradient between “the state- sanctioned access to information and outright ‘freedom of speech,’” then one runs into the question of why Chernobyl was allowed to play out in the press the way it did – moderately openly, with dueling perceptions in some of the party organs, openly critical

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(or at least party-line questioning) in other papers and journals, and with admissions of guilt and fault on the international stage. The Cheliabisnk event demonstrated what a nuclear disaster looked like under a more closed Soviet Union, one able to control the discourse in the press and sweep the event under the rug. That is what a cover-up looks like, not Chernobyl, where there were discussions of the event in the newspapers, journals, and on the televisions and radios of Soviet citizens, as well as citizens around the world. The information flow was poor, sometimes intentionally so – but then again, those responsible for sending up incorrect information to Moscow, stalling the disaster relief efforts, and generally making the Chernobyl disaster worse than it needed to be were summarily publicly tried and imprisoned for their role. Conflicting information may have been put out, but it was often printed alongside correct information, and the degree of malice, forethought, or decision to actively disinform the public does not appear to be clear from the articles in and of themselves, though Fomin and

Briukhanov, among others, did certainly actively try to misinform the Party leadership in an attempt to save themselves for their lion’s share of blame for the situation.

I sometimes think of the aphorism Hanlon’s razor when I think of Chernobyl, which advises one, “don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.”1

To break what is clearly a rather complex event down in a simple manner: a disaster happened, on a scale which nobody in the Soviet Union was prepared to respond to; there was no centralized command and control for the nuclear industry in the Soviet

1 Andrew S. Wigodsky, RAPID: Value Management for the Business Cost of Ownership (Milton Keynes UK: Lightning Source UK, 2010), 5. This is more than likely a take on Goethe’s “misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent,” or Jane West’s, “Let us not attribute to malice and cruelty what may be referred to less criminal motives,” or even Bernard Ingham’s, “Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock- up theory.”

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Union and, as such, it was possible for a variety of conflicting instructions to be issued at the same time, to the same people; the people immediately in charge of the situation at Chernobyl and Pripyat panicked and lied in their reports back to Moscow, saying that the event was under control when it was not, which cost valuable time and lives;

Moscow, upon finally learning that everything was not fine, had to react to a disorganized situation without a disaster plan and a centralized way to control what was happened, leading to haphazard spending of billions of rubles on projects that might not have been the most effective use of the money (see the previous sections about housing complexes built poorly and then never used).

And still, Pravda and Izvestiia and Trud and other domestic newspapers were allowed to run stories about the event, both the positive and negative aspects of it.

Gorbachev himself went on the television and the radio to address the issues to the population at large, and at large-scale international conferences, the Soviet government was more open and honest than expected about what had happened, what they knew, and the steps that should be taken to both contain this event and to prevent similar ones in the future. While the response was not perfectly transparent, neither was it self- servingly obfuscatory.

It was not a perfect response, but it was a response that did, in fact, take place in the public eye, without a conspiracy to cover-up the event; it was not even necessarily even a response specific to the Soviet Union, in that there are parallels between the

Japanese government handled Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl was the first true test for the idea of glasnost’ in the Soviet Union, handled differently in the micro and macro

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senses, and shows the struggles of a society being forced to shed some of the arcane and cloistered tendencies of its past on the world stage.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Wesley White graduated from the University of South Florida with a Bachelor of

Arts in history in 2010. Prior to finishing his master’s degree, he enlisted in the United

States Army as a Cryptologic Network Warfare specialist. He currently resides in Glen

Burnie, Maryland, where he continues his work in the cryptologic and cyber communities. Wesley lives with his wife, Hailee, two children, Sophie and Eliot, and

Frida the corgi.

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