Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

  Despite the grandiose title of a judge of the Supreme Court, Brize was in fact a man of lesser stature than the prosecutor, Shadrin; in the Soviet Union, it required some ingenuity to present a tricky case, but none to deliver a verdict that had been decided elsewhere. Thus Shadrin rated a large office with four telephones, Brize a small one with only two. A Latvian from Riga, the son of a railway engineer, Brize was then fifty-five years old. With the bluff, straightforward manner of a worker, he also had to sift through forty-eight volumes of evidence, half of which were moderately contaminated with beta particles, and twelve so highly contaminated that he had to wear protective clothing to read them.

  Outside in the streets of Chernobyl, it was hot and dusty. Dosimetrists could be seen checking the levels of radiation in a desultory manner, but none of the groups of liquidators in the town wore masks or respirators. They were advised to wear hats, but no one bothered; despite warnings about beta radiation, there were girls wearing T-shirts and young soldiers with rolled-up sleeves. There were pans of water at the entrance to every building where those who entered were meant to wash the soles of their shoes, and the lawyers were advised to take a shower twice a day (which many did), and change their clothes once a day (which was impractical). Brize and Shadrin had lodgings on the first floor of a vacant building; Brize’s two assessors were on the ground floor below. They ate at either the army canteen or that of the Kombinat enterprise that had been formed to clean up the zone. Shadrin was offered a gigantic cucumber that a botanist named Grodzinski from Kiev had grown on contaminated soil. Assured that it was safe, he accepted it; his more cautious colleagues, offered others, refused.

  The idea that vodka was an antidote to radiation was widely accepted even by educated people; a week after his arrival, Shadrin was brought a crate of vodka by an old friend, the deputy public prosecutor of the Ukraine, who prescribed a tumbler morning and night. The only one of the judges who refused this preventive medicine died soon after the trial.

  7

  Shortly before the trial was due to start on 18 March, Nikolai Fomin attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with the lenses of his glasses. Psychiatrists reported to the court that he was in a depressed state and was in no condition to stand trial. Brize decided that the trial could not proceed without him and postponed it until July, when Fomin’s mental condition had improved.

  The trial began on 7 July 1987, in the auditorium of Chernobyl’s House of Culture in the presence of foreign correspondents. Dressed in a dark blue uniform with gold trimmings, showing the two stars of a state prosecutor (second class) on his epaulettes, Yuri Shadrin read out the charges. Brukhanov, Fomin, Dyatlov, Kovalenko and Rogozhkin were all prosecuted under Article 220, Section 2, of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Union, which covered ‘breach of safety regulations at explosive-prone enterprises or in explosive-prone workshops’. Brukhanov and Fomin were further charged under Article 165, Section 2, of abusing their power for personal advantage in knowingly signing a false statement on the radiation levels at the plant and in its vicinity. A further charge of negligence was brought against Laushkin and Rogozhkin under Article 167.

  After the reading of the charges on the first day, foreign correspondents were bussed out of the zone. Only selected Soviet journalists were admitted to the trial itself. The number of victims who had a legal right of access to the court was limited to ninety-three, of which sixty-seven were from the nuclear power station. However, only twenty-six were in court. They remained under constant surveillance, and any notes they took were later confiscated by the KGB.

  The evidence against Brukhanov and Fomin went back to the building of the fourth unit. It was said, in evidence by officials, that the tests on the turbines should have been completed before the start-up, but that Brukhanov had agreed to the units’ certification before they were done. Along with Fomin, he was accused of also overlooking breaches in the regulations and of failing to arrange for on-site training for engineers as prescribed by the ministry’s instructions. Laushkin was similarly charged with negligence as an inspector. Witnesses described how they had seen workers playing cards on their shifts; there was a general laxity in the plant, ‘an atmosphere of uncontrollability and irresponsibility under which gross violations of the safety rules were neither prevented nor brought to light.’ It had been discovered from the logs that in the short period between 17 January and 2 February 1986, the automatic safety systems at the fourth unit had been switched off six times, and Laushkin had done nothing about it.

  When it came to the night of 26 April, Metlenko, the turbine engineer from Donenergo, was exonerated because he could not have been expected to know about running the reactor. Dyatlov, who drew up the programme, was the principal culprit, but Brukhanov, Fomin and Kovalenko were also blamed for authorizing a programme that contained numerous breaches of the rules. A representative of the department of nuclear safety should have been present at the tests; the programme should have been approved by the scientific manager (Alexandrov), the chief builder (Dollezhal), the state energy supervisor, and the deputy chief scientific engineer on site (Lyutov), but none had been informed.

  The case presented by Shadrin was plausible; undoubtedly there had been carelessness in conducting the tests on the turbines and false statements of the levels of radiation after the accident, but the trial proceeded as if in Soviet society legality was the norm. The actual state of affairs – the arbitrary exercise of power by the party and the necessity for improvisation in an economy where planning did not work – was never allowed to spoil the picture of things as they were supposed to be. There could be no admission of failure in the system; therefore the fault had to be with the accused.

  In this sense, it was to be the last of the show trials, which had first been staged by Stalin in the 1930s. There was no question of using either torture or blackmail to persuade the five men to plead guilty. All pleaded not guilty to some of the charges, but they were sufficiently creatures of the system to play according to the rules of the game.

  The pleas entered by the defence lawyers were mixed. Brukhanov accepted a certain measure of responsibility for the shortcomings in the running of the plant but claimed that the extent of his responsibilities (for the city of Pripyat as well as the power station) had obliged him to delegate such matters to Fomin, his chief engineer. He denied knowing that the fourth unit had been put into operation before certain safety tests had been carried out; however, he admitted signing documents that understated the levels of radiation and failing to initiate contingency plans for the protection of the personnel and the inhabitants of Pripyat.

  As presented, this was indeed a heinous crime. In the vain hope that he might somehow conceal the gravity of the accident from his superiors and salvage the award of Hero of Socialist Labour that would come his way when the next two units came on line, Brukhanov had not only left the children of Pripyat to receive a dangerous dose of radioactive iodine but had knowingly condemned members of his own staff to a lingering and painful death – men like Sitnikov, sent by Fomin to inspect the reactor, and humble guards like Klavdia Luzganova, who had remained at her post in the open air.

  But everyone knew it was not quite this simple. Whatever his theoretical powers as director of Chernobyl, Brukhanov was a subordinate figure in the hierarchy of the state and the party. Both the party secretary at the plant, Parashin, and the local commander of the KGB arrived at the bunker soon after the director, and by the time Brukhanov signed the incriminating document misstating the levels of radioactivity, regional party leaders had arrived from Kiev. They knew as well as he did the true state of affairs. Brukhanov felt let down at the time of the trial by Vladimir Voloshko, head of the Pripyat town council, and by the two party secretaries, Parashin at the plant and A. S. Gamanyuk in Pripyat, both of whom were merely ‘rebuked’ by the party for the role they had played. However, Brukhanov made no attempt to blame them for what he had done, and Shadrin, who suspected that he had merely followed the advice of the re
gional secretary in signing the incriminating document, considered that the director had behaved ‘like a gentleman’.

  Fomin also confessed to partial guilt. He admitted that there were flaws in the test programme that he had approved but insisted that these would not have led to an accident if there had not been subsequent breaches of other regulations. He agreed that both he and Brukhanov should have ensured on-site training for engineers but denied any part in preparing the documents that distorted the levels of radiation.

  Dyatlov, too, pleaded guilty to certain technical violations of some regulations but denied that safety had been neglected in drawing up the programme. He also denied giving the order to raise the power of the reactor after Toptunov had allowed it to fall; against the evidence of various witnesses, among them Razim Davletbayev, he insisted that he was absent from the control panel at the time. Only the young turbine engineer, Igor Kirschenbaum, who felt that Dyatlov had saved his life by insisting upon his being sent home soon after the accident, said he had not noticed whether Dyatlov had left the control room or not.

  Central to Dyatlov’s defence, however, was his contention that breaching the regulations was not the cause of the accident. Rather, it had been a fault in the design of the reactor itself, which neither he nor the operators could have known about. The government commission, whose findings were used as irrefutable evidence of the operators’ culpability, had no operators serving on it. Moreover, some of its members had the benefit not merely of hindsight but of foresight too – of physically problematic characteristics of the RBMK-1000 reactors that were known to the scientists in Moscow but had never been imparted to the operators who ran them. The documentation, originally drawn up in the 1960s and barely amended since, made no mention of any potential hazard. How could Akimov have known, as the government commission itself had concluded, that by pressing the emergency shutdown button he would actually precipitate an explosion?

  Dyatlov’s case seemed to be strengthened when, in the course of the trial, it emerged that the reactor had failed to meet the safety requirements on thirty-two different counts. However, in presenting his case, Shadrin ignored the question of the designers’ culpability. If there was a case against them, it would be a matter for possible further prosecutions at a later stage. Other RBMK-1000 reactors had functioned for years without serious accidents. He took the line established by Legasov at Vienna: that the accident had been caused by human error. He regarded Dyatlov as a ‘nuclear hooligan’.

  Still, the report by the government commission obliged Shadrin to take a somewhat contradictory stand. He depended upon its findings to convict the operators but had to avoid its conclusions about faults in the design, which might have aided Dyatlov’s defence. These were referred to simply as ‘certain peculiarities and shortcomings inherent in the reactor’, which played certain ‘not very well-defined roles’. Nor would he allow others to stray into this area; when Nikolai Steinberg, who was called as an expert witness, started to say that the operators could not have known about the positive void coefficient, he was told abruptly by Shadrin that there were no more questions.

  Dyatlov, who in the course of the trial had learned much about the RBMK-1000 reactors that he had not known and could not have known before, submitted twenty-four written questions to Judge Brize to be put to the expert witnesses. These were chiefly about the reactor’s specifications and whether it met with the requirements laid down by the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry. After all, if the reactor had been ‘prone to explosion’, as the prosecution suggested, how could it have been certified as safe? Without providing any explanation, Brize ruled these questions out of order.

  Rogozhkin denied the charges against him altogether. As the head of the shift, he had been told about the tests on the turbines but had not been shown a copy of the programme. Instead, he and Akimov had referred to an old test programme, which had been used when the tests had been tried before. He was not in charge of the tests and had not been informed of any deviations made by those operating the fourth reactor. He agreed that in the wake of the accident he had been told of the high levels of radiation by the head of the plant’s civil defence, Vorobyov, but insisted that he had behaved as the regulations prescribed.

  Kovalenko also pleaded not guilty. He had given a quick look at the test programme, scanning it for about a quarter of an hour, but had seen little in it that affected the reactor. It had not been among his duties to ensure the presence of a representative of the atomic safety department. Laushkin also pleaded not guilty as charged. He insisted that he had performed his duties conscientiously and had been justified in making the assumption that those who were responsible for the test on the turbines would ensure the safe running of the reactor.

  Most of the operators who gave evidence at the trial, or who were permitted to attend it, were convinced that their former bosses were being made scapegoats for mistakes that were the fault of the physicists who had supervised the reactor’s design. All of them were conscious that they might well have made the same mistakes as Dyatlov, and they had been equally horrified to discover that they had been running such risks for so long. Many of them were also outraged at the way the staff at the Chernobyl power station was portrayed in the trial as lax and undisciplined. Certainly a witness had come forward to say that he had seen shift workers playing cards or writing letters, but these were not the specialized engineers who actually ran the station; rather, they were superfluous workers foisted off by the state onto the already overmanned plant.

  Sasha Yuvchenko was angered by the way technical breaches of the regulations – which in fact were permitted on the authority of a deputy chief engineer and which had no bearing whatsoever on the accident – had been accepted as its cause by those who were technically ignorant. Vladimir Babichev, who gave evidence that Brukhanov had failed to protect his own workers from the high levels of radiation, felt that the real culprit was the scientific deputy chief engineer, Lyutov, who ought to have known about the danger presented by the reactor’s design. Nikolai Steinberg was also shocked to realize that all the operators of the RBMK-1000s had been deceived about the risks they ran in the course of their work: the very fact that modifications were under way to reduce the time taken for the control rods to descend into the core from eighteen seconds to four proved that the original design had been at fault.

  To the technically ignorant, however, the case against the ‘nuclear hooligans’ was proved. During a break in the trial, Brukhanov’s wife, Valentina, went to see Judge Brize in Kiev to get permission to visit her husband in jail. Early for her appointment, she was sitting on a bench in a small public garden when an old man, a war veteran, sat down next to her and started to talk about the trial. People speculated, he said, that they would be sent to prison, but as far as he was concerned, they should be shot.

  On 27 July 1987 the court reached its verdict:

  The legal college finds that the defendants Brukhanov, Fomin, Dyatlov, Rogozhkin and Kovalenko are guilty of violations of discipline and regulations guaranteeing safety at plants where there is a potential danger of nuclear explosion, thereby causing human injury and other grievous consequences, in complete contravention of Article 220, Section 2, of the Criminal Code. They find Laushkin guilty of dereliction of duty resulting from a lax attitude about his obligations, which has caused harm to the government’s interests and staff in complete contravention of Article 167 of the Criminal Code.

  Brukhanov was also found guilty of abuse of his position for personal advantage under Article 165, and Rogozhkin of criminal negligence under Article 167. The only acquittal was of Fomin on the charge under Article 165 that he had colluded with Brukhanov in falsifying the level of radiation; nevertheless he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. So too were Brukhanov and Dyatlov. Rogozhkin received a sentence of five years, Kovalenko of three, and Laushkin of two. Each was ordered to pay costs of 247 rubles and 17 kopeks. Under Article 44 of the law, no appeal was allowed.
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  PART THREE

  RADIOPHOBIA

  Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years, but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.

  Alexander Herzen

  My Past and Thoughts (1861)

  X

  1

  In May 1988, a little more than two years after the accident at Chernobyl, a conference was convened in Kiev by the Soviet Ministry of Health and the All-Union Scientific Centre of Radiation Medicine of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences to discuss the medical aspects of the disaster. It was attended by over 310 Soviet specialists and 60 from abroad, including representatives from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization. Hans Blix, the director general of the IAEA, addressed the first session, which was opened by the cardiologist, Yevgeni Chazov, who was now minister of health.

  Since the first dramatic meeting with experts in Vienna in August of 1986, there had been a second gathering in October 1987, also at the headquarters of the IAEA. Not only had Gorbachev promised candour about Chernobyl, but the Soviet delegation at the first conference had promised to return to answer the four hundred questions that had been raised by nuclear experts from the West. In the interim, the IAEA’s own International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) had produced a report based on the information provided by the Soviets. At the October meeting, although Abagyan had moved towards an admission that the design of the reactors was not faultless, he had declined repeated requests to go into details. Nor would Ilyn do more than enumerate the collective dose of radiation received by the population of the Soviet Union, which, he had insisted, would not cause any sizeable change in the development of cancer.