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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