Chernobyl (edició 2019)

Then came the horrors of World War II. The Germans entered Chernobyl on August 25, 1941.

The communist-organized guerrilla groups, which enlisted local Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants, were active in the region from the fall of 1941. But the low-intensity war between the communist-backed partisans and the German-organized police (including local cadres) turned into a bloody vendetta. The executions of partisans, and, once the tide of the war turned, of policemen, took place in public, further brutalizing the local population. The settling of accounts among the relatives of those involved in the conflict would continue long after the end of the war.9 The Red Army recaptured Chernobyl and its environs from the Germans in the fall of 1943

For the locals, the long-awaited liberation from the Nazis brought more death and hardship. With the Red Army in control of the region, the local male population was immediately called up and enlisted in the army. Many of those who survived the occupation were thrown into battle without arms, training, or even uniforms, dying on the outskirts of their villages and towns.

The tips of the rods, however, were made of graphite, and the graphite tips appear to have tipped the already highly unstable reactor toward catastrophe. As the rods began to descend into the core of the reactor, the tips replaced neutron-absorbing water in the top part of the active zone, thus not decreasing, but further increasing, the rate of the reaction. This was the positive void effect—the deadly design problem of RBMK reactors that had almost destroyed one of them at the Leningrad power station in 1975. Now the positive void effect was once again at work.

Soviet managers and bureaucrats tended to do what years of party rule had trained them to do—avoid responsibility. Everyone was afraid of being accused of spreading panic, and everyone was glad to defer to the higher authorities to make a decision. They were company men, the “company” being the Soviet system.

“coverage of the Chernobyl disaster marked a turning point in the history of Soviet communications. For the first time, television… began to meet people’s demands for ‘bad news,’ to abandon the silence about domestic disasters.”28 The turning point would prove critical for the development of the Soviet media, Soviet-American relations, and the incipient collapse of the USSR. The Soviet Union was living out its final years. There would be a great deal of bad news to come, and, after Chernobyl, no way for the Soviet regime to hide it from its own people and the world.

Coming up with quick, cost-efficient, and almost always temporary fixes for complex problems—achieved with the help of invariably limited technical resources and usually unlimited human ones—had been the essence of Slavsky’s whole career and of the Soviet nuclear industry in general since its inception.

In the long run, the deal turned out to be disastrous for Ukraine. Twenty years later, in March 2014, nuclear-free Ukraine became an object of aggression by one of the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum when Russia, now led by President Vladimir Putin, annexed Ukraine’s Crimea and unleashed a hybrid war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The Ukrainian parliament appealed to the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum but did not get very far, as the memorandum did not require any military action on the part of the signatories.

Moscow, the former capital of the empire responsible for the design and operation of the damaged reactor, disappeared behind the borders of the Russian Federation, leaving it to Ukraine and the international community to clean up the mess. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 brought the fighting within 322 kilometers of the city of Enerhodar, the site of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which operates six reactors. The war also interrupted the nuclear cycle whereby Ukraine received its nuclear fuel from Russia and sent its spent fuel back there. In 2016, Ukraine began the construction of its own spent-fuel facility and declared plans to reduce its almost total dependence on Russian fuel by covering 40 percent of its needs with purchases from the US-based Westinghouse Electric Company. While the war and the disruption of the traditional nuclear cycle brought new challenges to the struggling Ukrainian economy, the nuclear industry of the land of Chernobyl took another important step away from its Soviet legacy.20 What remained unchanged and impervious to remedy by any amount of internal mobilization or outside assistance were the long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.