CHERNOBYL: A DOCUMENTARY STORY

Chernobyl: A Documentary Story

Iurii Shcherbak

Translated from the Ukrainian by lan Press

Foreword by David R. Marples

Palgrave Macmillan

Translation © Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies University of Albena, 1989

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1989

All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, S!. Manin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1989 Reprinted 1990

ISBN 978-0-312-03097-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shcherbak, Iurii, 1934-Chemobyl: a documentary story / Iurri Shcherbak ; translated from the Ukrainian by lan Press. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-312-03097-1 I. Chemobyl Nuclear Accident, Chemobyl', Ukraine, 1986. I. Title. TK 1362.S65S47 1989 363.1'79-<1cI9 88-38509

CIP

ISBN 978-0-333-49667-1 ISBN 978-1-349-19858-0 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19858-0

Contents

Fort'word Translator's Note Author's Prel'ace Relleetions

2 That Bitter Word 'Chernobyl' 3 Before the Accident

VII

XI

XIII

1 9

15 1· The Accident 23 5 The Entire Guard Followed Pravyk 27 (} Bilokin From the Ambulance Service 39 7 The Extraordinary Convoy 49 H Before the Evacuation 55 9 The Evacuation 61

10 One From the 'Little Football Team' 79 11 The View Over Kiev 89 12 "The Danger 01' an Explosion Has Been Eliminated" 97 13 The Flight Over the Reactor 105 14 Dr. Hammer and Dr. Gale 115 15 By What Are People Tested? 129 16 The Last Warning 141

Foreword

David R. Marples

Yurii Shcherbak's Chernobyl was published in the Soviet monthly journal, Iunost, in two issues in the summer of 1987, and also in the Ukrainian journal, Vitchyzna, in the spring of 1988. This English version appears as a result of an agreement negotiated between the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) and the USSR Copyright Agency in Moscow. Although a second volume is now being issued by Dr. Shcherbak, it was feit by CIUS that the first is com­plete in itself and that its appearance before the Western public should not be delayed further. This remarkable litde book represents our first eyewitness testimony to the events of and succeeding the Chernobyl disaster of April and May 1986.

To the Western mind, the word Chernobyl brings to mind specifically the week or several weeks that followed the nuclear accident of April 26, 1986. Our attention span is guided by the media, often by the headlines in several selected newspapers. Chernobyl as an event was notable in dominating those headlines for perhaps longer than any other event in the memory of a postwar generation. Yet, in early May, its extensive coverage ended. It had other effects: anti-nuclear groups in the West were revitalized by the dis­aster. Several countries whose governments had wavered

viii CHERNOBYL

over the choice of nuclear or non-nuclear energy finally gravitated toward the laUer course. Thereafter, the main concern in the West about Chernobyl was the state of im­ported food in North America, and in Western Europe, the radioactive fallout and its effect on this same food chain.

For the Soviet Union, however, the real drama of Cherno­byl had yet to unfold. A dramatic battle had begun to counter the fallout of the raging atom that continues today. It is being fought by various means, some successful, others less so. While some areas were successfully decontaminated, others that appeared to be weIl beyond the danger area were found to be irradiated. The population appeared to be often confused, fearful of the effects of radiation, known and un­known. It is symptomatic that as late as the summer of 1988, the two main newspapers in Kiev began to publish figures on the radiation background, to assure citizens that it was within the norms of safety.

Chernobyl occurred during the General Secretaryship of Mikhail Gorbachev, aleader and statesman who had quickly earned the respect of the West, particularly through one of his twin policies, glasnost, or openness (the other is perestroika, or restructuring). Glasnost, somewhat belatedly, played its own individual role in the sphere of nuclear en­ergy, particularly after the summer of 1987, when a concern for the ecology spilled over into the nuclear sphere. In Ukraine, through the vehicle of the weekly newspaper Liter­atuma Ukraina, the Ukrainian Writers' Union questioned the viability of a programme for nuclear power development that had not taken into account its effect upon the natural environment. It was feit that the republic lacked the neces­sary water supply for a major capacity expansion, while in areas such as Chyhyryn, the planned nuclear power plant was to have been built in a famous historical area, the for­mer seat of the seventeenth-century Hetman state.

By the fall of 1988, the Soviet nuclear power programme had been modified considerably. At the time of writing, it has just been announced on Radio Moscow that a Commis­sion headed by Vice-President of the Academy of Seien ces,

Foreword IX

Evgenii Velikhov, has concluded that the Crimean nuclear plant should not be built because i~ is located in an area of high seismic activity. Velikhov's name appears in the pages of this book. Public feeling in the republic is so sensitive about the subject of nuclear power plants that several other plants in Ukraine have also been shelved or abandoned: Odessa, Kiev, Chyhyryn and Kharkiv.

Another prominent name that features regularly in these pages is that of Valerii Legasov, the First Deputy Chairman of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the head of the Soviet delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in August 1986. In April 1988, Dr. Legasov committed suicide. His memoirs, published posthu­mously in Pravda, reveal a deep concern far the way in which nuclear power plants were being built and operated. His tragic and untimely death cannot be divorced from the accident at Chernobyl, as Shcherbak reveals in his interviews with the late scientist in these pages.

This is not to say that Yurii Shcherbak and his colleagues are opposed to nuclear power or are fundamentally at odds with the Soviet energy programme per se. As the text reveals, Chernobyl has had a profound psychological impact on the Soviet people. Many feel, like Shcherbak, that if pitfalls are to be avoided in the future, its lessons must be learned. Through the interviews held with participants in the Cherno­byl tragedy throughout this book, Shcherbak reveals both the good and the bad. The underlying statement, which surfaces in the final chapter, is that this is "The Last Warning." An­other mistake with the atom could be the last. It is fair to say that generally this attitude pervades the Soviet rather than the Western public, but that is not to deny its validity.

Shcherbak hirnself is a trained doctor, and the author of some nine acclaimed novels. He is also chairman of a group within the Ukrainian Writers' Union known as Zelenyi svit (Green World) that is concerned with the protection of na­ture. This combination of talents and interests has enabled hirn to produce a unique historical document; an eyewitness testimony to Chernobyl that is interspersed with the author's

x CHERNOBYL

frank and perceptive comments. The immediacy of the dis­aster is illuminated in these pages by those who lived through it: firemen, doctors, scientists, party and government workers, helicopter pilots and journalists. There is the con­trast between those collapsing from radiation sickness after fighting the graphite fire in the building of reactor No. 4 and the final chapter in which the author comments on the simple joys of lying on an uncontaminated bank aside a peaceful river. We can either take care of this land, Shcher­bak seems to say, or see it turned into an unpopulated and uninhabitable desert.

Translator's Note

Iurii Shcherbak's Chernobyl is an important event in Ukrainian, Soviet and world literature. The views and re ac­tions of people of all walks of life are represented here, as they spoke, shaped by the art of a considerable writer. I have done my best to give a reasonable rendering of the text as printed in two issues of Vitchyzna, including the preliminary section Vid avtora, which follows this as the Author's Preface and explains better than I could aspects of the history of the work and the writing of Book 2.

So me preliminary notes on the translation are appropriate. First, the title. It is, we all know, Chornobyl, but the world knows it as Chernobyl and I have decided to use this form. Prypiat, however, remains Prypiat and all other pi ace and personal names follow CIUS style. Secondly, abbreviations are either expanded or left as they are, with explanation as appropriate. Where an acronym has an internationally recog­nized form, e.g., CPSU for Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I have used that. I have used USSR for the Soviet Union and UKrSSR for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Repub­lic. Thirdly, to make matters absolutely clear, this translation has been made directly from the Ukrainian text, excepting the Russian song by Vysotsky and a reference to the Russian texts of Gubarev's The Sarcophagus and Gogol's Mirgorod. I am

XlI CHERNOBYL

very grateful to David Marples and CIUS for resolving the difficulties with which lieft them.

The experience of Chernobyl is unique in the history of the world in revealing to us the potential scale of a catastrophe involving the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the dangers of the appeal of 'technology for technology's sake.' There is much to learn, and Shcherbak, in his insistence on the need, everywhere, for openness and international co-operation, sets us weil on the way to a more secure future.

lan Press Queen Mary College

University of London

Author's Preface

T here is one particular question among the many with which readers of the documentary story Chernobyl un­failingly confront me, whether it be in letters or in the course of numerous encounters: Why did I first publish this story not in Ukraine but in Moscow, in the magazine Iunost?

And almost always the questions simultaneously carry within them a sort of answer: 'We, of course, understand that in Ukraine you could hardly have managed to p~blish it in fuH, but ... '

I consider it a duty to give a truthful answer, bearing in mind that the story reaches the Ukrainian reader after a year's delay. Like any Ukrainian writer, I bear a sense of deep responsibility for my native language and literature and their development, and so it is not appropriate to avoid fun­damental, burning and highly topical questions. Particularly today, when we are living through a moment of truth ..

First. The magazine Iunost played a significant role in my literary life: it was precisely in its pages, starting in 1961, that my first articles were published, and in 1966 the editor­in-chief, Boris Mikhailovich Polevoi, supported my candida­ture for the Union of Soviet Writers. I shaH always remember this with pride and gratitude.

And so, when at the VIII Congress of Soviet Writers in

xiv CHERNOBYL

Moscow in June 1986 the editor-in-chief of funost, Andrei Dementiev and his editorial colleague Iurii Zerchaninov came to me and proposed that I write a documentary story about Chernobyl for the magazine, how was I to refuse? And was it necessary for me to refuse? Particularly since not a single Ukrainian magazine had at that time rushed to me with such a proposal. Moreover, I am not at all convinced that I would have written this story had it not been for the in­itiative of funost. I had given no thought to it over that anx­ious summer, and could quite easily have limited myself to articles in Literaturna Ukraina and Literaturnaia gazeta.

Secondly. WeIl aware that it was a very important all­Union vehicle (the circulation of funost amounts to over three million copies!), I very consciously wrote the story pre­cisely for this magazine, wanting its numerous readers in the remotest corners of our land and abroad (the magazine is read all over the world) to find out as quickly as possible ab out the true course of events and the real dimensions of the national calamity which befell us in April 1986. I became convinced that I had Qone the right thing when, during my recent journey to Venezuela and Peru, I met people who had read the story; and this is also clear from the letters which I receive from all over the Soviet Union and other countries.

And, thirdly and last. I will not go against what I really feel. The further my work on the text proceeded, the more clearly I understood that its fate in Ukraine might not be an easy one. I have considerable experience of work in Ukrain­ian literature and, in the past, have experienced for myself that braking mechanism which in the years of stagnation I would automatically apply. I could imagine how. I knew pre­cisely in which 'hot spots' of the text someone's cold and pitiless red pencil might pass, smoothing over, embellishing and softening that which could not be softened if one wanted to bring back a sense of worth to oneself and one's words.

At that time, in the summer of 1986, the struggle for glas­nost was only just beginning to unfold, and many areas, Chernobyl among them, remained beyond the bounds of criticism. The tradition of regulating and rationing the

Author's Preface xv

Truth, as if it were something in short supply, was still alive. One thing was permitted 'in the centre' and another-far less of it and far worse-in the localities. And I was con­vinced: there was one Truth for everyone, our Truth, the Soviet Truth. There wasn't and couldn't be a 'republican,' 'regional' or 'distriet' truth. This was an absurd fiction of people who were against a breath of fresh air, who naively feit that it was possible, at the end of the end of the twentieth century, to get rid of awkward problems which had devel­oped in our society by means of prohibitions and silen ce ... Perhaps I was wrong in my pessimistic forecasts regarding the amount of glasnost in Ukraine. Perhaps my story would have been published without the slightest cuts. Who knows ...

Upon reflection, when I gave my work to the magazine Iunost I had before me the example of Oles Honchar, who first published his story of warning The Black Ravine in Mos­kovskaia pravda. In their time the same thing was done by Chingiz Aitmatov, Vasil Bykov and Ion Drutse.

And all the same, even as I tried to persuade the reader of the rightness of my choice and decision, all the time I feit pangs of conscience: Chernobyl had to become a fact of Ukrainian literature.

And I am very grateful to the magazine Vitchyzna for proposing to publish the Ukrainian text of the story, all the more as apart of the sections was originally written in Ukrainian.

At this moment I am working on the second part of Cher­nobyl, and I hope that this year it will be published simulta­neously in the pages of Vitchyzna and Iunost. A great deal of material has been gathered: the testimony of witnesses, let­ters, recollections and documents. I want to believe that this will give me a chance to reveal unknown aspects of the acci­dent to the reader, to recreate objectively the atmosphere of those tragic days, to demonstrate the greatness of the people who i~ improbably difficuIt conditions struggled with the ef­feets of the accident; I want, in Book 2 of Chernobyl, to hear the voices of prominent writers and scientists ring out with

XVI CHERNOBYL

their reflections on the future of humanity in the anxious light of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station.

It is the readers' attention and support which inspires me to this.

That's it, the Zone! And immediately such achilI over my skin ...

Every time it's that chill, and even now I still don't know if that's how the Zone receives me or

if it's the Stalker's liule nerves playing tricks.

Reason is the ability to use the powers of the surrounding world without ruining that world.

O. Strugatsky, B. Strugatsky, Picnie by the Roadside, 1972.