Borderland (29 page)

Lyubov Kovalevska, a journalist on the local paper, had sat up all night writing a poem. Setting off for her literary club on the Saturday morning, she noticed two odd things: white cleaning-fluid flooding the streets, and lots of policemen about. A few weeks previously she had written an article exposing the shoddy work going into the construction of Chernobyl’s fifth reactor. She could have said much more – station-workers had told her of corruption, of faulty equipment and supply shortages – but she had been afraid of losing her job. ‘At the time I just hadn’t the courage to write about it,’ she told Shcherbak afterwards. ‘I knew it had no chance at all of being published.’
⁹
But even she didn’t realise there had been a serious accident: ‘The whole day we knew nothing, and no one said anything. Well, it was a fire. But as for the radiation, that there were radioactive emissions, nothing was said about that.’
¹⁰

On Sunday morning, Boris Shcherbina arrived in Prypyat, head of a secret emergency commission pulled together by Moscow the day before. Taking a map and a pair of compasses, he drew an arbitrary ten-kilometre circle round the station and ordered a general evacuation. The buses – yellow Icaruses from Kiev – started leaving the town at two in the afternoon, thirty-six hours after the initial explosion. Evacuees were told they would be back soon, so took few belongings with them. Though it was obvious that wind and rainfall would spread fallout over a far wider area, evacuation was not extended elsewhere for another five days.

All Sunday, there was no official announcement of any sort about the accident. Sixty miles south in Kiev, the public was completely ignorant of what had happened, noticing only that all the city’s buses had mysteriously disappeared. When an announcement was finally made, it was under pressure from abroad. At 9 a.m. on Monday morning a nuclear power station in Sweden detected abnormal radiation levels in the air: a nuclear dust cloud seemed to be drifting northwards from somewhere inside the Soviet Union. All that afternoon Swedish diplomats badgered the Russian foreign ministry for information, meeting outright denials that anything was wrong. Finally, at nine o’clock in the evening, there was a short bulletin at the end of the regular television news:

The head of Moscow’s state-run Novosti news agency later admitted that he had known of the accident since Sunday, but, for the same reasons as Kovalevska in Prypyat, had failed to make it public. Gorbachev himself made no public statement on Chernobyl for two weeks, and when he did go on television, it was to accuse the Western media of spreading ‘malicious mountains of lies’. The day before
Pravda
had published an interview with one of the country’s top nuclear scientists, in which he told a horrified world that the reactor core might burn its way down through the station’s foundations, poisoning the groundwater of the entire Dnieper valley and setting off a second, even larger, steam explosion – the so-called ‘China Syndrome’. It was still touch and go, he admitted, whether the reactor could be brought under control at all.

Meanwhile, six days after the explosion, Kiev’s May Day celebrations went ahead as normal. Trade-union representatives marched under embroidered banners, children waved flowers, military bands tootled patriotic airs. Ukrainian First Party Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky reviewed the parade from a podium on Khreshchatyk; people noticed that although it was raining, he wasn’t wearing a hat. The day before, the wind had swung round to the north, and it was on May Day itself that fallout over Kiev peaked. A British student who flew home just as the heavy fallout was beginning was found to have a piece of nuclear fuel attached to his shoe; a Dutch tourist had fragments of nuclear fuel on his trousers.

On 6 May, after repeated assurances that the accident posed no danger to human health, the Ukrainian health minister suddenly went on local television with instructions that Kie-vans should not eat green vegetables or drink milk, should stay indoors if possible, wash thoroughly, and sweep out their flats. Better-informed Kievans had already begun leaving the city,-now the exodus was general. Cars jammed the roads and frightened crowds mobbed the railway station. The big Univer-mag store on Khreshchatyk ran out of suitcases, and Aeroflot set up special ticket offices in the ministries and Party offices, so that the
nomenklatura
could get out first. The interior ministry posted policemen armed with automatic rifles on the main roads out of town, with orders to turn back all vehicles without official passes.

The week after May Day, tens of thousands of military reservists started arriving in the Chernobyl area, conscripts in the Soviet Union’s biggest manpower round-up since the Afghan war. Mostly teenage boys, their job was to sluice down streets, houses and trees, and to shovel topsoil into loiries for burial. They lived outdoors in tents, often without showers or protective clothing. According to a report in an Estonian newspaper, some were to be found washing in contaminated streams and ponds.

The most dangerous work was at Chernobyl itself, clearing away highly radioactive rubble from inside the reactor core. Groups of conscripts were ordered to run up on to the reactor-block roof, fling one shovelful each of deadly debris back through the hole in the roof on to the exposed reactor, and run down again, the whole operation not to last more than forty seconds. The boys involved dubbed themselves ‘bio-robots’, perfectly summing up the Soviet regime’s attitude towards its citizenry. The official upper limit radiation dose for clean-up workers was twenty-five ‘body-equivalent roentgen’ or ‘reins’ – five times the annual limit for an ordinary Soviet nuclear power worker. But in practice even this high limit was frequently exceeded. Since radiation levels near the station were one rem per hour, conscripts should not have worked on the site for more than two days. In reality many stayed for months. Better-off reservists could avoid being sent to Chernobyl altogether by paying bribes, the relevant price being 500 roubles – half that of a deferment from Afghanistan.
¹¹

Sluggish, chaotic, profligate with human life and bolstered by the crudest propaganda, the Soviet system’s response to Chernobyl has been likened to its behaviour during the Second World War. People involved in the disaster even refer to it as ‘the war’; the clean-up operations were a ‘campaign’ and the official result a ‘victory’. The old men and women who refused to leave Prypyat, holing up in their blacked-out flats with gas-masks and biscuits, were nicknamed ‘partisans’.

A war maybe, but Chernobyl was no victory. Just how many people have been killed by Chernobyl to date nobody knows. Two people died in the explosion itself; another twenty-eight, mostly firemen and engineers, of radiation sickness soon afterward. Estimates of the total number of subsequent deaths attributable to the disaster range from around 6,000 to 8,000. This does not take into account deformed births, genetic disorders, and early deaths still to come through cancer and leukaemia. A World Health Organisation report of 1995 noted a hundred-fold increase in thyroid cancers in Ukrainian and Belarussian children, but oddly, none in leukaemia or other blood disorders. If the 120 million curies of radioactive material released in the explosion – almost a hundred times more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined – had not been pushed high into the atmosphere, spreading thinly over a wide area, the death toll would already be much higher.

Today’s uncertainty over the health consequences of Chernobyl is largely the fault of a deliberate cover-up by the Soviet authorities. Registers of clean-up workers and evacuees were left hopelessly incomplete, making post-Chernobyl medical histories hard to track, and in 1988 Shcherbina issued a decree forbidding doctors from citing ‘radiation’ on death certificates. Instead, deaths were put down to ‘rare toxins’, ‘debility’ and the like. (When Shcherbina himself died in 1990, having suffered a large dose of radiation organising the evacuation of Prypyat, the cause of death was marked as ‘unspecified’.)

Independent research on the effects of the accident was derided or hushed up. In 1988 a group of journalists made a short film on events at collective farms round Narodychy, a small town thirty-eight miles west of Chernobyl. A foal had been born with eight legs, piglets without eyes, calves without heads or ribs. More than half the children in the district had swollen thyroids, and cancers of the lip and mouth had doubled. The government response was an outburst of vilification and denial, choreographed via Kiev’s Centre for Radiation Medicine. Scientists from the Centre lambasted the film as ‘incompetent’. Deformities were due to inbreeding, they said; mouth cancers to poor dental work, thyroid problems to a shortage of iodine in the diet. Eventually, after a series of angry meetings in Narodychy, fourteen villages were evacuated – all the fault, the scientists continued to assert, of the media in stirring up irrational ‘radiophobia’. Later, records turned up showing that radiation levels in the area in the months after the explosion had been three times higher than round the power station itself.

In the spring of 1995, seven months after my trip to the Zone with Lyashenko, I got permission to visit Chernobyl. At the time, two of its four nuclear reactors were still operating, in the teeth of an international campaign to close the station down. The International Atomic Energy Agency had just issued a report lambasting its dangerous design, lack of back-up systems and fire-proofing, and general ‘poor safety culture’. The section of the reactor-block building nearest the wrecked Unit Four, the report said, was structurally unsound, and in ‘significant’ danger of collapse. Backed by the European Union and America, the IAEA wanted Chernobyl shut immediately. The Ukrainian government had agreed in principle, but argued that since it still provided 6 per cent of the country’s electricity, nothing could be done until the West came up with the money to complete three half-built reactors on other sites, the bill for which it put at an eye-popping $4 billion.

Again, the countryside looked uncannily peaceful, more like a nature reserve than the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Baby pines sprouted in the middle of untilled fields; brambles swamped the whitewashed cottages like the roses round Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Of one village nothing was left but a faded road sign and a row of grassy barrows where its buildings had been bulldozed underground. A few more years, and this would all turn back into forest.

Apart from the concrete ‘sarcophagus’ enclosing the remains of Unit Four, Chernobyl itself looked like any other run-down Soviet factory. On the pot-holed forecourt, men and women stood about in flapping blue cotton jackets, smoking and chatting, and a workman dabbed at a war memorial with a pot of yellow paint. A public relations man – an innovation this – led me upstairs, past maidenhair ferns in knobbly ceramic pots and a stained-glass window of heroic cosmonauts, to meet Vitaly Tolstonogov, the station’s chief engineer. The sound of ‘Radio Rocks’, the latest pop station from Moscow, drifted out from behind chipped plywood doors, and girls with frizzy perms and pantomime make-up stood about in the corridors staring at their nails. As we came in, Tolstonogov switched off his television.

‘So what do you think about the closure rumours?’

He drew himself up, stuck out his chin. T don’t think anything about them. The decision will be taken by the state. As a private soldier, I will implement its decisions.’

‘And the IAEA report?’

‘Incomplete, let us say one-sided.’

‘But what about the reactor block being close to collapse?’

‘The building is perfectly safe, it has been tested by the explosion already. Nothing about it has changed. It’s all just a pretext for another scandal.’

‘And your staffing problems; the engineers quitting for better pay in Russia?’

With the mention of cash, Tolstonogov’s military pose took a dent: ‘Once we knew that everyone throughout the Soviet Union got the same! But now, everyone gets different salaries even though they’re in the same job! It’s monkey business, monkey business!’

After lunch in a dingy caféteria, we changed into lab coats and went to see one of the control rooms. Lined with scratched metal panels and hundreds of paint-splodged buttons and old-fashioned circular dials, it looked more like the bridge of a decommissioned battleship than the nerve centre of a modern nuclear power station. The floor was covered in wrinkled lino, and the plastic upholstery on the controllers’ stools was slightly frayed. You didn’t have to be the IAEA to find it a less than confidence-inspiring place.

Elbowing aside a stub-filled ashtray, the shift controller told me that he had come out of retirement to work back at Chernobyl. During the ‘war’ he had been in this very room, helping shut down the three surviving reactors. So far he hadn’t fallen ill himself, but his daughter had problems with her bones and stomach: ‘She has to go and rest before and after classes – when she was a schoolgirl she didn’t need this.’ The weekend of the explosion, the family had been evacuated from Prypyat to a nearby village, only to find that it was contaminated too.

‘Why don’t you work somewhere else?’

One of the younger men, his cotton coat undone, interrupted angrily: ‘If you were Ukrainian, you’d be begging for a job here, because otherwise you wouldn’t survive! The bazaars are full of teachers, doctors – educated people, all out of work.’

‘Aren’t you afraid of getting cancer?’

‘And if I was a taxi-driver or a kiosk owner? I’d only get killed in a car crash, or by the mafia. We’re safer here.’ Like the rest, he wanted the station to stay open. ‘If the West wants to close the old Soviet reactors it’s because Western companies will get the orders for the new ones!’ As we turned to go he lifted his cotton hat derisively: ‘Success to you! Come back! And bring your children!’