Revolution 1989 (29 page)

 

Romanians, with typical gallows wit, called it socialism in one family. Ceauescu filled the top posts in the country and the ruling Party with his siblings, nephews, nieces and in-laws. An elder brother, Nicolae Andruta, was a Lieutenant-General and key link-man in the Interior Ministry and security service. Another brother, Ilie, was Deputy Defence Minister, who along with yet another brother, Marian, ran a highly secret arms business: they sold Soviet-made rocket and electronic communications systems to the Americans, who in return provided Romania with Western weaponry, which it then passed on to the Soviets. Another brother, Florea, was the leader’s eyes and ears in the Party newspaper, as an editor on
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. His favourite brother-in law, Gheorghe Petrescu, was a Deputy Prime Minister. Brothers-in-law Ilie Verde and Manea Manescu had top Party posts. His favourite niece, Maria, was made head of Romania’s Red Cross organisation. But his closest adviser was always Elena, who was given increasing power. By the early 1980s she was placed in charge of the country when he was away on tours abroad. Romania never was a shared dictatorship - Elena was number two - but she became more shrewish, adopted grander airs and he grew ever more reliant on her. She frequently said in other people’s hearing: ‘I am the only person you can truly trust.’ There were signs that he could be scared of her rages. ‘He was afraid of her, I am sure of that,’ said the Party historian Ion Ardeleanu, who knew them both well. ‘If he was late for a meal, or a meeting with her he would look at his watch and start sweating and stammering.’
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They were unfortunate with their children. The eldest, Valentin, was adopted as a baby in 1948 and tried from an early age to keep a calculated distance from his parents. He was a physicist, fairly distinguished, who obtained a good degree from Imperial College in London. His parents disapproved of his marriage to Iordana Boril, partly because she was Jewish but, worse, because she was the daughter of one of Ceauescu’s rivals during the power struggle inside the Party in the 1960s. Petre Boril had a romantic past as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, while Ceauescu was languishing in a series of jails. Valentin and his wife lived in a modest two-room apartment in an unfashionable part of Bucharest, like average Romanians, and had all their nomenklatura privileges withdrawn. He worked quietly in the Institute of Physics. The marriage did not last, but Valentin was never forgiven. He kept out of politics, though he did once say of his compatriots, ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but submission corrupts too’.

Their natural daughter, Zoia, born in 1950, tried rebellion too, but her story was sadder. She was a bright mathematician and, while a student at Bucharest University, had her eyes opened to the conditions for most people in Romania. She became appalled. In 1974 she attempted to run away with a boyfriend. The long reach of the Securitate tracked her down.
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After that, as Zoia told friends, she was trapped.

There was a bizarre twist to the fury and revenge of the First Couple. They blamed Bucharest’s Mathematical Institute, where Zoia was studying for a PhD. The Ceauescus were convinced it was encouraging a ‘bohemian mentality’ in their only daughter, so they simply closed the Institute down, dispersing the staff elsewhere. Uncharacteristically, they allowed some of the Institute’s best minds to leave the country. Maths was one of the few scientific specialities where Romanians were conducting high-level work. All that disappeared, as more than 100 leading mathematicians fled to the West. Zoia returned to the family fold, reluctantly, and on occasion tried to talk to her parents about the food queues and the general misery in the country, ‘but they would never listen to me’, she said. She became a lonely and reclusive character and turned to drink.

The crown prince was Nicu, another natural son, born in 1951. He was far less serious than his siblings and seemed to care for little in his early years other than to enjoy the privileges that went with his birth. He was a playboy who in his youth whored his way around Bucharest and foreign capitals, enjoyed driving fast cars, and like his sister developed a serious drink problem. But he was the Ceausescus’ favourite and they lavished attention on him. He calmed down his habits as he grew older, though he continued to drink heavily, a weakness that eventually killed him. He was given political duties and handed an entire province of northern Romania to run. He was being groomed by his doting parents to take over as head, so they hoped, of a ruling Communist dynasty.
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Women suffered the most in People’s Romania. In 1986, to coincide with his birthday, Ceausescu announced a new law forbidding abortion to women under forty-five. For the past twenty years the ban had applied to all women under forty, but the law was toughened up because the old one was not working, the leader thought. The Ceausescus had a dream of increasing Romania’s population from twenty-three million to thirty million. He launched the campaign in 1966 with a decree that made pregnancy a state policy. In the mid-1980s he said: ‘The foetus is the property of the entire society. Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity. ’ Romania was the only country in the socialist bloc with laws against abortion, which throughout Eastern Europe was widely used as the main form of birth control. In Romania contraception was banned, there was no sex education in schools, and the minimum marriage age for girls was reduced to fifteen.

At first the birth rate soared, but after about three years it began to drop sharply and Ceausescu resorted to barbaric forms of coercion. Women were forced to undergo compulsory medical examinations every one to three months. They were rounded up from their workplaces and taken to clinics by armed squads of officials - dubbed the menstrual police. There, usually in the presence of a Securitate officer, they were examined for signs of pregnancy, or for evidence that they may have had pregnancies terminated. A pregnant woman who failed to give birth at the proper time could expect to be summoned by the police for questioning. Women who miscarried were suspected of having arranged an abortion. Doctors were punished in districts where the birth rates declined, so naturally they resorted to fiddling the figures. ‘If a child died in our district, we lost 10 to 25 per cent of our salaries, but it wasn’t our fault,’ said a Bucharest doctor, Geta Stnescu.
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Predictably, abortions were driven underground. The death rate from terminations was higher than anywhere else in Europe. Back-street abortions were performed in terrible conditions. Bucharest Municipal Hospital dealt with around 3,000 failed abortions every year, including about 200 women who needed major surgery. Many other women were too frightened to go to hospital. More than a thousand women died in Bucharest every year from bungled terminations. Illegal abortions usually cost between two and four months’ average wages. If they went wrong, fear often prevented women from seeking medical help. ‘Usually women were so terrified to come to the hospital that by the time we saw them it was too late,’ said the Municipal Hospital’s Dr Alexander Anca. ‘Often they died at home.’ As conditions worsened in the 1980s and the country was driven to destitution, infant mortality grew rapidly - to twenty-five deaths per 1,000 live births, more than three times the European average. Tragically, the other increase was in the opening of state orphanages, filled in the mid-1980s with around 100,000 abandoned children whom families did not want or could not cope with. Privately, among trusted intimates, people would often refer to Bucharest as ‘Paranopolis’. But the hungrier Romanians became, while they froze in winter, the louder they were expected to sing the praises of the man who was inflicting the misery on them.
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SEVENTEEN

Pripyat, Ukraine, Saturday 26 April 1986

 

FOR THREE DAYS engineers had been conducting a supposedly routine experiment on Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant around 140 kilometres north of Kiev. They were trying to establish whether the reactor could operate under electricity produced by its own turbines. It should not have been complicated or in any way dangerous. The procedure was regularly performed on the scores of similar water-cooled RBMK reactors which the Soviets had built since the 1950s. But the engineers had made a series of errors and were lax in monitoring how the experiment was progressing. Nobody spotted that they had allowed the power in the reactor to fall to a critically low level. The mistake was finally noticed late the previous afternoon. Scientists at the plant considered cancelling the procedure and trying again at some future date. There was no urgency about the experiment. But the Deputy Director of the plant, Anatoli Dyatlov, felt assured that all the earlier mistakes had been corrected and he decided to proceed as scheduled.

Just after 1 a.m., engineers noticed that again power had fallen, dangerously low to 1 per cent of its normal level. This meant that the pumps which were supposed to circulate the water to cool the reactor core were no longer working. The third of a kilogram of nuclear fuel in 1,661 pressurised steel rods was overheating wildly. The engineers tried to push the emergency shutdown button, but it was too late. At 1.23 a.m. a tremendous blast ripped through the domed roof of the reactor hall, spewing red-hot splinters of nuclear fuel, chunks of cement and steel upwards into the night sky. It was a radioactive release ten times more powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb. Four seconds later another huge explosion demolished two of Reactor 4’s walls and started a fire that shot flames and tiny particles of highly radioactive graphite 1,200 metres into the air. A radioactive cloud immediately headed north-west with the wind. About five minutes later, the first of the engineers who tried to control the reaction were sent on a desperate errand without any protective clothing or breathing equipment in a vain attempt to shut down the reactor manually. Two workers who were in the reactor room during the blast suffered excruciating burns. They were taken to the plant’s first aid unit, which had been closed down some years earlier. Managers had thought it would never be needed, so smoothly had the plant been operating. For many hours nobody at Chernobyl had any idea how much radioactivity had been released. The Geiger counters they used inside the building were designed to measure low radiation levels. They were off the gauge. The more powerful machines to measure high atmospheric levels had been locked away in a safe, on the basis that they would never be necessary.

Local firefighters were at the scene within ten minutes, but without any special equipment. Military firemen were called up as reinforcements and arrived around half an hour later. Between them, they got the fire in the radiator hall under control by 3.30 a.m., but the reactor itself was still burning and belching radioactive dust. Chernobyl’s Director, Viktor Bryukhanov, reported at dawn to his superiors in Moscow that there had been some minor problems but that Reactor Number 4 was still working and that radiation levels at the plant ‘were within normal levels’. It was a lie. Bryukhanov had not reached his position by telling his bosses news they did not want to hear.

A high-flying bureaucrat, originally trained as an engineer though not in nuclear power, he was first appointed director of a nuclear plant at just thirty-five years old. It was astonishingly young in the Soviet system to have risen so fast. But he had always managed to meet his targets laid down in the Plan, which pleased his superiors - and his workers, who received extra bonuses. If he had to cut a few corners, so be it. By the time errors were uncovered he would probably be elsewhere, in a better job. There had been a minor accident in one of the plant’s other reactors four years earlier; Bryukhanov had managed to hush up any information about the incident and repair the damage before Moscow knew of it.

His first concern was to protect himself - not so much from radiation poisoning. He did not at first believe the problem was particularly serious. He wanted to shield himself from blame, in the manner that Soviet bureaucrats habitually did. One of his most senior engineers, Anatoli Sitnikov, told him that he believed the reactor had been destroyed. Bryukhanov did not believe him. Sitnikov went to look for himself and received a fatal dose of radiation. He told the Director what he had seen with his own eyes. Bryukhanov told him he was exaggerating. The Director did take some action, though: soon after that conversation with Sitnikov - who was already amongst the walking dead and knew it - the Director ordered that all the non-essential telephone lines around Chernobyl should be cut, so that ‘unauthorised’ information to the public could be kept minimal.
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The military were the first outsiders to hear about the disaster. Their instinct for secrecy was even more powerful than that of a mid-level Communist Party official. The absurd attempt to cover up the Chernobyl explosion - even when the rest of the world knew of it - was partly because in the Soviet Union all nuclear matters, civil or military, were in effect controlled by the armed forces. Army Chief of Staff Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev was told at around 2.20 a.m., though details were sketchy. He did not know the extent of the damage at Chernobyl, or that a plume of radioactive poison was spreading outside Soviet borders. The Soviet Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, was informed just after 6 a.m. and he immediately called Gorbachev. Both were misled; they had been assured that the fires were out, and that there had not been a significant radiation leak. They were told that nine people at the plant were seriously ill and twenty-five military had moderate injuries, but the recommendation of the army and the Energy Ministry was not to evacuate anybody from the area. That would cause panic.

Over the next few hours, the military became aware of the scale of the disaster. The reactor was still red-hot and on Sunday morning scientific experts decided that the only way of cooling it was to try smothering the reactor from the air with sand from a nearby quarry. It was a difficult and dangerous procedure, requiring courage and precision from pilots. A squadron of MiG-8 ‘workhorse’ helicopters were selected for the task. The heat and radiation levels were enormously high and pilots had to find a fast route to the crater, drop bags of sand at a carefully calculated spot and then manoeuvre away from the heat, all within seconds. They made ninety-three of these ‘bombing runs’, without protective clothing. One of the pilots remembered later that they stuffed lead plates under their seats and joked to each other, ‘If you want to be a dad, cover your balls up with lead.’ Joking did not prevent some of them developing cancers in later life.