April 1986: The Big Bang
No economy, least of all the Soviet one, could stand the strain of the Chernobyl disaster — and it didn’t. No political system that first made the disaster possible and then bungled the rescue effort, with reckless disregard for the expectations, feelings and very lives of millions, could stand the debacle, either — and the Soviet system didn’t. It was plain doomed. By Sergei Roy.
There fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. Revelation 8:10,11
Paradise that was Chernobyl. Chernobyl, or better Chornobyl, indeed means “wormwood” in Ukrainian, and since the nuclear explosion at that Ukrainian power plant the word has indeed acquired a most sinister connotation and an association with the gloomy prophetic verses of The Revelation of St. John the Divine. In the pre-explosion era, though, it would be hard to imagine a more peaceful and less sinister landscape.
The place lies roughly on the same latitude as New York, with a climate to match, with mild, spring-like winters, delightful in spring and summer — the envy of much of the rest of the Soviet Union, snowbound for up to six months a year and more. The nuclear station stands on the bank of the Pripyat, a beautiful river swiftly flowing from the marshes of Belorussia toward the Dnieper, densely wooded, sparsely populated, and well stocked with fish. Before 1917, it marked the boundary of the Jewish Pale, and the Jews of Chernobyl, a mestechko “borough” eighteen kilometers south-east of the then non-existent power station, used to eye longingly the northern bank of the river that was out of bounds for them.
At the time of the explosion, Chernobyl, the administrative district center, had just 13,000 residents. Most of the district’s population, some 50,000 people, lived in the town named after the river, Pripyat, three kilometers east of the nuclear station’s sanitary zone. It was a wonderful little town, brand-new, quiet, clean and cozy. The air was so fresh and pure it almost made one drunk. If there was a paradise in the Soviet Union, that was it.
(snip)
Effect of the disaster on the Soviet system. It wasn’t just Gorbachev, of course, but the whole nomenklatura setup that suffered a severe, self-inflicted moral blow due to its instinctive reaction to save its own — and to hell with the beloved workers and peasants, not to mention the intelligentsia. The conduct of the Ukrainian top nomenklatura was particularly disgusting. All of a sudden there were quite a few empty desks in Kiev schools: that was the nomenklatura sending their children away while keeping the lid on information about the disaster. The warning to stock up on potassium iodide tablets went to the Kiev nomenklatura only: that was the Fourth Department of the Health Ministry taking care of its charges, the Party-and-state brass. The Ukrainian Party bosses, having packed off their own offspring to safety, calmly allowed the traditional May Day parades and celebrations to proceed, smiling benignly on thousands of children marching past on a sunny spring day, amid flowers, music and flags, through heavily contaminated streets. It was later widely commented on that Ukraine’s First Secretary Vladimir Shcherbitsky kept glancing at his watch, between smiles and hand-waving, probably calculating the dose of radioactivity he was getting[xxiii].
>From then on, hatred for the ruling nomenklatura among
the masses soared. It was probably in those days that
the jingle, so often chanted later at mass rallies,
was made up:
Pust zhivyot KPSS
Na Chernobylskoy AES!
Long live the Communist Party
at Chernobyl Power Plant!
A couple of years later, all sorts of damning facts about the antecedents of the disaster surfaced in the press. Some of the plant's construction defects were said to be due to the universal practice of doing things in a hurry in order to report to the Party superiors completion of construction by some red-letter day, like November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. True, plant manager Bryukhanov insisted later that not one of the Chernobyl plant’s units had been commissioned earlier than planned — and he may have been telling the truth: even releasing certain facts to the press was yet another move in the cover-up campaign to conceal the deficiencies of all nuclear reactors of the Chernobyl type, not just the one in Chernobyl. According to Bryukhanov again, a group of independent experts concluded that there were 32 major flaws in Chernobyl type reactors: “Our staff made one mistake — I will admit that. For this, we got ten years [in the labor camps]. And for 32 errors — nothing!”[xxiv]
Valery Legasov, the prominent nuclear physicist I mentioned above, committed suicide on the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to convince the top leadership of the threat the RBMKs posed, insisting that unless certain measures to change the design were swiftly taken, the world could expect more Chernobyls in the near future.
I may sound inhuman, but I sometimes catch myself thinking it was a pity that some “nuclear” academicians had not followed suit. But they wouldn’t, of course, considering the sort of callousness they displayed after the disaster. During the May 6 press conference mentioned above, Academician A. Petrosyants, chairman of the USSR State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy, said something that a dogcatcher might find tactless and unfeeling: “Science demands sacrifices!”[xxv] The country’s highest-paid official, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Anatoly Aleksandrov, who headed the designers of the RBMK reactor, and Yefim Slavsky, minister for “medium machine building” (a code name for the nuclear weapons industry), were not much better: at a Politburo meeting immediately after the blast, they both told the high assembly that “nothing terrible has happened, things like that occurred at industrial reactors — you’d drink a glass or two of vodka, have a good snack, and — no consequences at all!”[xxvi]
According to some estimates, the Chernobyl disaster cost the country, in all the years since it happened, about $200 billion, although Gorbachev would have us believe that “the liquidation of the consequences of the disaster cost 14 billion rubles, and then a further several billion”[xxvii]. No economy, least of all the Soviet one, could stand the strain — and it didn't. No political system that first made the disaster possible and then bungled the rescue effort, with reckless disregard for the expectations, feelings and very lives of millions, could stand the debacle, either — and the Soviet system didn't. It was plain doomed.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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