Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT THE LIMITLESS POWER ONE PERSON CAN HAVE OVER ANOTHER

I’m not a literary person, I’m a physicist, so I’m going to give you the facts, only facts.

Someone’s eventually going to have to answer for Chernobyl. The time will come when they’ll have to answer for it, just like for 1937. It might be in fifty years, everyone might be old, they might be dead. They’re criminals! [Quiet.] We need to leave facts behind us. They’ll need them.

On that day, April 26, I was in Moscow on business. That’s where I learned about the accident.

I called Nikolai Slyunkov, the General Secretary of the Central Committee Belarussian Communist Party, in Minsk. I called once, twice, three times, but they wouldn’t connect me. I reached his assistant, he knew me well.

“I’m calling from Moscow. Get me Slyunkov, I have information he needs to hear right away. Emergency information.”

I’m calling over a government line, but they’re already blocking things. As soon as you start talking about the accident, the line goes dead. So they’re listening, obviously! I hope it’s clear who’s listening—the appropriate agency. The government within the government. And this is despite the fact that I’m calling the First Secretary of the Central Committee. And me? I’m the director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Science. Professor, member-correspondent of the Academy. But even I was blocked.

It took me about two hours to finally reach Slyunkov. I tell him: “It’s a serious accident. According to my calculations”—and I’d had a chance by then to talk with some people in Moscow and figure some things out—“the radioactive cloud is moving toward us, toward Belarus. We need to immediately perform an iodine prophylaxis of the population and evacuate everyone near the station. No man or animal should be within 100 kilometers of the place.”

“I’ve already received reports,” says Slyunkov. “There was a fire, but they’ve put it out.”

I can’t hold it in. “That’s a lie! It’s a blatant lie! Any physicist will tell you that graphite burns at something like five tons per hour. Think of how long it’s going to burn!”

I get on the first train to Minsk. I don’t sleep the whole night there. In the morning I’m home. I measure my son’s thyroid—that was the ideal dosimeter then—it’s at 180 micro-roentgen per hour. He needed potassium iodine. This was ordinary iodine. A child needed two to three drops in half a glass of solvent, an adult needed three to four. The reactor burned for ten days, and this should have been done for ten days. But no one listened to us! No one listened to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did! We shouldn’t forget the background to this, what we were like then, what we were like ten years ago. The KGB was working, making secret searches. “Western voices” were being shut out. There were a thousand taboos, Party and military secrets. And in addition everyone was raised to think that the peaceful Soviet atom was as safe as peat or coal. We were people chained by fear and prejudices. We had the superstition of our faith.

But, all right, the facts. That next day, April 27, I decided to go to the Gomel region on the border with the Ukraine. I went to the major towns—Bragin, Khoyniki, Narovlya, they’re all just twenty, thirty kilometers from the station. I needed more information, I took all the instruments to measure the background radiation. The background was this: in Bragin, 30,000 micro-roentgen per hour; in Narovlya: 28,000. But people are out in the fields sowing, mowing, getting ready for Easter. They’re coloring eggs, baking Easter cakes. They say, What radiation? What’s that? We haven’t received any orders. The only thing we’re getting from above is: how is the harvest, what’s the pace now? They look at me like I’m crazy. “What do you mean, Professor?” Roentgen, micro-roentgen—this is the language of someone from another planet.

So we come back to Minsk. Everyone’s out on the streets, people are selling pies, ice cream, sandwiches, pastries. And overhead there’s a radioactive cloud.

On April 29—I remember everything exactly, by the dates—at 8 A.M. I was already sitting in Slyunkov’s reception area. I’m trying to get in, and trying. They don’t let me in. I sit there until half past five. At half past five, a famous poet walks out of Slyunkov’s office. I know him. He says to me, “Comrade Slyunkov and I discussed Belarussian culture.”

I explode: “There won’t be any Belarussian culture or anyone to read your books, if we don’t evacuate everyone from Chernobyl right away! If we don’t save them!”

“What do you mean? They’ve already put it out.”

I finally get in to see Slyunkov. I tell him what I saw the day before. We have to save these people! In the Ukraine—I’d called there—they’re already evacuating.

“Why are your men” (from the Institute) “running around town with their dosimeters, scaring everyone? I’ve already consulted with Moscow, with Professor Ilyin, Chairman of the Soviet Radiological Protection Board. He says everything’s normal. And there’s a Government commission at the station, and the prosecutor’s office is there. We’ve thrown the army, all our military equipment, into the breach.”

We already had thousands of tons of cesium, iodine, lead, circonium, cadmium, berillium, borium, an unknown amount of plutonium (the uranium-graphite reactors of the Chernobyl variety also produced weapons-grade plutonium, for nuclear bombs)—450 types of radionuclides in all. It was the equivalent of 350 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. They needed to talk about physics, about the laws of physics, but instead they talked about enemies, about looking for enemies.

Sooner or later, someone will have to answer for this. “You’re going to say that you’re a tractor specialist,” I said to Slyunkov, he’d been a director of a tractor factory, “and that you didn’t understand what radiation could do, but I’m a physicist, I know what the consequences are.” But from his point of view, what was this? Some professor, a bunch of physicists, were going to tell the Central Committee what to do? No, they weren’t a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience. The principle of their lives, the one thing the Party machine had taught them, was never to stick their necks out. Better to keep everyone happy. Slyunkov was just then being called to Moscow for a promotion. He was so close! I’d bet there’d been a call from the Kremlin, right from Gorbachev, saying, you know, I hope you Belarussians can keep from starting a panic, the West is already making all kinds of noises. And of course if you didn’t please your higher-ups, you didn’t get that promotion, that trip abroad, that dacha. If we were still a closed system, behind the Iron Curtain, people would still be living next to the station. They’d have covered it up! Remember—Kytrym, Semipalatinsk—we’re still Stalin’s country, you know.

In the civil defense instructions we had then, you were supposed to carry out an iodine prophylaxis for the entire population if there was the threat of a nuclear accident or nuclear attack. That was in the event of a threat. Here we had three thousand micro-roentgen per hour. But they’re worried about their authority, not about the people. It was a country of authority, not people. The State always came first, and the value of a human life was zero. Because they might have found ways—without any announcements, without any panic. They could simply have introduced iodine into the freshwater reservoirs, or added it to the milk. The city had 700 kilograms of iodine concentrate for that very purpose—but it just stayed where it was. People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom. Everyone was waiting for the order, for a call, but no one did anything himself.

I carried a dosimeter in my briefcase. Why? Because they’d stopped letting me in to see the important people, they were sick of me. So I’d take my dosimeter along and put it up to the thyroids of the secretaries or the personal chauffeurs sitting in the reception rooms. They’d get scared, and sometimes that would help, they’d let me through. And then people would say to me: “Professor, why are you going around scaring everyone? Do you think you’re the only one worried about the Belarussian people? And, anyway, people have to die of something, whether it’s smoking, or an auto accident, or suicide.” They laughed at the Ukrainians. They were on their knees at the Kremlin asking for more money, medicine, radiation-measuring equipment (there wasn’t enough). Meanwhile our man, Slyunkov, had taken fifteen minutes to lay out the situation. “Everything’s fine. We’ll handle it ourselves.” They praised him: “That’s how it’s done, our Belarussian brothers!” How many lives did that bit of praise cost?

I have information indicating that the bosses were taking iodine. When my colleagues at the Institute gave them checkups, their thyroids were clean. Without iodine that’s impossible. And they quietly got their kids out of there, too, just in case. And when they went into the area themselves they had gas masks and special robes—the very things everyone else lacked. And it’s no secret that they had a special herd near Minsk—every cow had a number and was watched over. They had special lands, special seedbeds, special oversight. And the most disgusting thing—no one’s ever answered for it.

So they stopped receiving me in their offices. I bombarded them with letters instead. Official reports. I sent around maps, figures, to the entire chain of command. Four folders with 250 pages in each, filled with facts, just facts. I made two copies of everything, just in case—one was in my office at the Institute, the other I hid at home. My wife hid it. Why did I make the copies? That’s the sort of country we live in. Now, I always locked up my office myself, but I came back from one trip, the folders were gone. But I grew up in the Ukraine, my grandfathers were Cossacks, I have a Cossack character. I kept writing. I kept speaking out. You need to save people! They need to be evacuated immediately! We kept making trips out there. Our institute was the first to put together a map of the contaminated areas. The whole south was red.

This is already history—the history of a crime.

They took away all the Institute’s radiation-measuring equipment. They just confiscated it, without any explanations. I began receiving threatening phone calls at home. “Quit scaring people, Professor. You’ll end up in a bad place. Want to know how bad? We can tell you all about it.” There was pressure on scientists at the Institute, scare tactics.

I wrote to Moscow.

After that, Platonov, the president of the Academy of Sciences, called me in. “The Belarussian people will remember you someday, you’ve done a lot for them, but you shouldn’t have written to Moscow. That was very bad. They’re demanding that I relieve you of your post. Why did you write? Don’t you understand who you’re going up against?”

Well, I have maps and figures. What do they have? They can put me in a mental hospital. They threatened to. And they could make sure I had a car accident—they warned me about that, also. They could drag me into court for anti-Soviet propaganda. Or for a box of nails missing from the Institute’s inventory.

So they dragged me into court.

And they got what they wanted. I had a heart attack. [Silent.]

I wrote everything down. It’s all in the folder. It’s facts, only facts.

We’re checking the kids in the villages, the boys and girls. They have fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand micro-roentgen. More than three thousand. These girls—they can’t give birth to anyone. They have genetic mutations. The tractor is plowing. I ask the Party worker who’s with us: “Does the tractor driver at least wear a gas mask?”

“No, they don’t wear them.”

“What, you didn’t get them?”

“Oh, we got plenty! We have enough to last until the year 2000. We just don’t give them out, otherwise there’d be a panic. Everyone would run off, they’d leave.”

“How can you do that?”

“Easy for you to say, Professor. If you lose your job, you’ll find another one. Where am I going to go?”

What power! This limitless power that one person could have over another. This isn’t a trick or lie anymore, it’s just a war against the innocent.

Like when we’re driving along the Pripyat. People have set up tents, they’re camping out with their families. They’re swimming, tanning. They don’t know that for several weeks now they’ve been swimming and tanning underneath a nuclear cloud. Talking to them was strictly forbidden. But I see children, and I go over and start explaining. They don’t believe me. “How come the radio and television haven’t said anything?” My escort—someone from the local Party office was always with us—he doesn’t say anything. I can follow his thoughts on his face: should he report this or not? But at the same time he feels for these people! He’s a normal guy, after all. But I don’t know what’s going to win out when we get back. Will he report it or not? Everyone made his own choice. [Extended silence.]

What do we do with this truth now? How do we handle it? If it blows up again, the same thing will happen again. We’re still Stalin’s country. We’re still Stalin’s people.

Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko, former director of the

Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences