Knowing how intergovernmental agreements were bedevilled by the posturing of the Cold War, Gale decided to extend the offer through his friend Armand Hammer. Hammer was in Washington for the opening of an exhibition, which he had arranged, of paintings from the Pushkin and Hermitage museums, but Gale reached him by telephone that afternoon, and he agreed to be the conduit. By the end of the day, Gale’s proposal had been approved by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hammer then wrote a letter to Gorbachev offering the doctor’s assistance and the resources of the transplantation registry:
Dr Gale is prepared to come immediately to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet nuclear scientists and hematologists to assess the situation and decide the optimal course of action with the hope of saving the lives of those at risk. I will bear all the costs of his efforts, which can be so important to saving the lives of those citizens who have been exposed.
The letter was delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Washington and also telexed to Anatoli Dubrynin, a member of the Central Committee and a close confidant of Gorbachev’s. At 7.00 a.m. on 1 May, Gale received a call from the acting Soviet ambassador in Washington, Oleg Sokolov, extending an invitation to fly to Moscow.
Gale telephoned colleagues around the United States, asking them to be prepared to assemble all the necessary equipment for tissue-typing and bone-marrow transplants. Already a UPI report had been published in the U.S. press that quoted ‘a Kiev resident with hospital and rescue team contacts’ as saying that ‘eighty people died immediately and some 2,000 died on the way to hospitals.’ This led Gale to fear that whole families might have been irradiated, making it impossible to find donors from among the near relatives of the victims. Therefore he alerted colleagues as far apart as London and Seattle to register possible donors.
It took Gale only a moment to pack; he travelled often and light. Outside his house, there was already a crowd of reporters: somehow the press had found out what was going on. He caught an afternoon flight to Europe from Los Angeles airport and reached Moscow at 6.00 p.m. the next day.
4
Obedient to the political imperatives that for a good Communist took precedence over the demands of his profession, Dr Baranov was diverted from the care of his patients to exchange his white hospital overalls for a shirt, tie and dark suit and proceed to the Sovietskaya Hotel to welcome Dr Gale. Protocol was protocol. He waited in the grandiose lobby, whose thick red carpets, antique furniture, oil paintings, chandeliers and marble staircase were a marked contrast to the utilitarian surroundings of the Hospital No. 6, until Gale arrived from the airport. Gale was flanked by two ‘minders’, Victor Voskresenski, a former medical attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington, who acted as his interpreter, and Nikolai Fetisov, an official from the Ministry of Health. If Baranov was taken aback by the sight of the trim American wearing wooden clogs he did not show it. The four men went up to the suite that had been reserved for Gale, and over supper Baranov briefed him on the patients in his care.
At nine the next morning, after breakfasting with him at the hotel, Baranov brought Gale to the hospital. The American had risen at six and jogged eight miles; the chain-smoking Baranov took him up to his office on the sixth floor, where he was introduced to Angelina Guskova.
Guskova was disappointed. Vorobyov had led her to believe that Gale would arrive with much-needed equipment provided by Hammer, but she saw only an American doctor carrying a small bag. Nevertheless, she welcomed him as protocol and party discipline required, before, accompanied by Voskresenski, the interpreter, she left Baranov to take Gale on a tour of the wards. Later that morning the American attended a conference chaired by Guskova on the condition of the various patients. She had a brisk, abrupt manner and was impatient with any dissension among her subordinates; the need to translate what was said into English irritated her because it protracted the proceedings, but she was satisfied by Gale’s modest demeanour.
After lunch at the Sovietskaya with his two minders, Gale returned to the hospital, where Baranov invited him to assist in the extraction of bone marrow from a donor. Before Gale’s arrival Baranov had already performed four transplants, and another was scheduled for later that day, but after the one operation he insisted that Gale had done enough and brought him back to his office on the sixth floor.
There Gale drew up a number of recommendations, which were then presented to Guskova and by Guskova to the medical commission. They should invite two of Gale’s colleagues from California – Paul Terasaki (who would bring a mobile tissue-typing laboratory to Moscow) and Dick Champlin, a clinical specialist – and a third specialist from Israel, Yair Reisner. Gale also gave Guskova a list of equipment that should be sent from the United States.
That evening, Baranov, Gale and his entourage dined with the cardiologist Yevgeni Chazov, chairman of the Soviet committee of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. After caviar, sturgeon and innumerable toasts in brandy and vodka to peace, friendship and the smallness of the world, Chazov took Gale to the Orthodox Easter Vigil – a glimpse of Russian folk culture for a distinguished guest.
Back at his hotel at 2.00 a.m., Gale unwound by listening to Beethoven’s music on his portable hi-fi and musing over the momentous events of the day.
Gale’s recommendations were accepted, and in the days that followed Terasaki, Champlin, and finally Reisner arrived – uneasy, because he was an Israeli citizen and there were no diplomatic relations between Israel and the Soviet Union. Although none had any experience in the treatment of radiation sickness, they had developed the most sophisticated techniques for bone-marrow transplants and could both operate and obtain the most advanced drugs and equipment available on the world markets, which, because of their cost in hard currency, had hitherto been beyond Baranov and Guskova’s wildest dreams. Now, after a call from Gale to Hammer’s assistant in Los Angeles, state-of-the-art equipment was being flown to Moscow.
The equipment was of more value to the Soviet doctors than the skills of the foreign physicians. On 4 May the French ambassador offered the services of Professor Georges Mathé. The deputy minister of health, Shepin, alarmed by the arrival of Gale’s colleagues, insisted that no more foreigners should be invited without the commission’s approval. Vorobyov told the medical commission that Gale was a better haematologist than Mathé, so the French government’s offer was turned down.
At Hospital No. 6, an amicable working arrangement was quickly established between the Soviet doctors and Gale’s team. Guskova was impressed by Gale’s ability to get things done, and she liked Terasaki’s quiet, modest manner, as well as his Japanese equipment. His work was invaluable in testing the blood of the hundred potential donors required for thirteen transplants and in checking the analyses already made by their own labs. Baranov got on well with Champlin; they vied with one another about who could best remember various articles published in specialist journals. Both Baranov and Guskova were encouraged by the arrival of foreign drugs, equipment and expertise to perform bone-marrow transplants on patients, even where their diagnosis suggested that they were likely to die anyway as a result of extensive burns and internal radiation.
5
There was a tragic correlation between the heroism of the injured and the seriousness of their disease. The two young lieutenants of the fire brigade, Pravik and Kibenok, were horribly irradiated. Before the arrival of his commander, Major Teliatnikov, Pravik had directed his men in extinguishing the many fires that broke out in the wake of the accident. Wearing nothing but the standard-issue uniform of a Soviet fireman, he and his men had spent several hours exposed to the radioactive eruption – first on the roof of the turbine hall, then in the reactor hall and finally when turning their hoses on the burning reactor itself. With their boots sticking to the melting tar on the roofs, breathing in smoke from the burning graphite, they were neither warned nor sought to discover what risks they ran in fighting the fire. They had done their duty until they had succumbed to faintness and nausea and were ta
ken to the hospital in Pripyat.
Of the 129 patients admitted to Hospital No. 6, 111 developed acute radiation sickness. The most severely afflicted, such as Pravik and Kibenok, were placed in individual wards on the eighth floor, which were subject to a rigorous antiseptic regime; there was ultraviolet sterilization of the air and strict rules for the nursing and medical staff, including washing their hands before entering the ward, wearing individual overalls and masks, and treating their shoes on a mat soaked in an antiseptic solution. As the disease progressed, the firemen’s bodies became dark and swollen, and the painful blisters of herpes simplex appeared on their faces, lips and the inside of their mouths. They could not eat or drink, their temperatures rose and they suffered atrocious pain before passing into a coma.
Many of the families of the victims who had followed them to Moscow stayed in a hostel built for the relatives of patients opposite the hospital. The facilities were basic, and because there were so many family members visiting, they slept four or five to a room. As a rule, they were not allowed into the wards, but would congregate every morning in the single-storey building at the entrance to the hospital precincts. Many of the wives were distraught. Their husbands were suffering; some would certainly die. They had also lost their homes and belongings, and their children were scattered, staying either with grandparents or in holiday camps. Most of their clothes had been left in Pripyat, and they had difficulty in getting hold of any money; they either had to borrow from friends or go begging to the Ministry of Energy.
Some had ailments of their own. The woman who had gone to work at the power station after the accident suffering from an unusually heavy period and had inadvertently dropped a length of cotton wool in the radioactive dust on the corridor floor and then used the cotton as a sanitary napkin now found that the skin of her groin was peeling away and her pubic hair was falling out.
The lobby at the entrance to the hospital became a concourse for the exchange of sympathy and information. Here families would be given the most recent bulletins on the health of their relatives or would discuss their condition with the doctors. Unofficial intelligence was supplied to the wives by Anatoli Sitnikov’s wife, Elvira, who had managed to get a job in the hospital. She would take messages and newspapers to the patients and would later report on their condition to their wives.
During the first few days in Moscow, some of the patients had felt well enough to get out of their beds and talk to their friends, or to uninvited visitors who found their way into the wards. Sasha Yuvchenko awoke one morning to find an officer of the KGB waiting to interrogate him.
Since smoking was not permitted in the wards, many of the patients went out onto the landing. There Dyatlov met up with Sitnikov, Chugunov and Orlov, three of his old friends from Komsomolsk, and with some of the younger engineers, such as Alexander Akimov and Razim Davletbayev, who had been with him in the control room of the fourth unit. They discussed the accident, but no one raised the question of who was to blame. They could not understand what had happened. ‘We are open to any suggestion, lads,’ Dyatlov said to the young operators. ‘Don’t be afraid to come out with even the most farfetched ideas.’
Young Leonid Toptunov, who had been at the controls at the time, had his father constantly by his side, but since he had only followed instructions, he had less reason to be tormented by misgivings than either Dyatlov or Alexander Akimov, the head of the shift. However, the older and more experienced Dyatlov not only had received a lesser dose of radiation, but also had better built-in protection against scruples and self-doubt than the unfortunate Akimov, who, though he kept repeating that he did not know what had gone wrong, nevertheless felt responsible and confessed to the shift foreman, Victor Smagin, that his conscience hurt him more than the pain.
Akimov’s condition quickly deteriorated, but even as it worsened he was tormented by not knowing what had gone wrong. ‘How could it have happened?’ he asked his friend Razim Davletbayev, who visited him in his sterile room. ‘What did we do wrong? Everything went well until we pushed the AZ button.’ Akimov knew he might die. ‘My chances are slim,’ he said to Razim, and to prove it he pulled out a tuft of his hair. ‘But if I do survive, one thing is for sure: I’ll never go back to work in the nuclear field. I’ll do anything … I’ll start my life from scratch, but I’ll never go back to reactors.’
Although no visitors were supposed to enter the antiseptic zone, individual doctors made exceptions for those who were likely to die. Akimov’s mother brought him a thermos of chicken broth, but when she saw him she fainted. The first time his wife, Luba, came to visit him she found him methodically pulling out the hair from his head and throwing it in a bin. She tried to raise his spirits by describing how, when he got better, they would live by a river and earn their living, like Dyatlov’s father, by regulating navigation and checking buoys. She had brought drawings by their children to distract him, and she told him how well they were doing in school. Once she looked back from the window and saw that her husband was now pulling out tufts of his moustache.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said to her, ‘it doesn’t hurt.’
To witness so much suffering in those they loved took a terrible toll. Luba, aged thirty-three, suddenly looked old; once a nurse took her for Akimov’s mother. The only consolation came from the companionship of the other wives. Luba was an old friend of Inze Davletbayev’s, she had invited Inze to stay in her dormitory in Moscow when she had come from Bawly in Tatary to marry Razim, and when Inze had fallen ill, she had nursed her. Now, every morning, the two women heard from Elvira Sitnikov about their husbands’ worsening condition. A doctor had told Luba that radiation harmed the reproductive organs. Luba thought that they might be unable to have more children, and she told Inze how one evening she had seen her husband naked, his skin now dark, his penis rotting and black.
Akimov had two younger twin brothers; one of them gave bone marrow for a transplant, but new bone marrow could not arrest the disintegration of his flesh. He had atrocious beta burns and because radioactive vapour had rotted his lungs, he had great difficulty in breathing. His bowels and intestines disintegrated too; excrement oozed out of his body as a bloody diarrhoea. Other operators suffered from the same dreadful condition. Brazhik’s body was also rotting. A tall, well-built young man with curly hair, he had been a keen sportsman back in Pripyat. Too shy to ask a nurse for a bedpan, he had got out of bed one morning and found that the skin of one leg slipped down to his ankle like a loose sock.
Hooked up to drips giving intravenous antibiotics, the patients required constant nursing, the burns and blisters on their skin needing antibacterial, fungicidal and antiviral therapy. The severely irradiated patients were themselves radioactive, and the nurses in the wards more than earned their extra pay. As the disease progressed, the victims’ temperature rose – whether from infection or radiation it was hard to tell – and finally they lapsed into a coma.
The first to die, on 10 May, were Kibenok, Pravik and another fireman. Akimov followed soon after, Luba at his side. Anatoli Kurguz, an operator scalded by radioactive steam, died on 11 May; on 12 May, Alexander Orlov, Chugunov’s deputy, and one more fireman died; three more men followed on 13 May, including Alexander Kudriatsev, one of the two young operators who had been sent by Dyatlov to lower the control rods. On 14 May, twenty-six-year-old Leonid Toptunov died. He had been at the controls of the reactor and afterwards had followed Akimov in his fruitless quest to get water into the reactor. Another fireman followed the next day.
Few of those who were doomed knew that they were going to die, and Guskova did not tell them. Arkadi Uskov learned that Akimov was dead from one of the soldiers cleaning his ward. Razim Davletbayev read about it in the papers some days later. Inze Davletbayev, who had had to leave Moscow for Bawly because one of her sons was ill, returned to the hostel to find that Luba Akimov had left. She telephoned Elvira Sitnikov, who told her that Alexander had died.
As a result Inze became distraught; she was sur
e that Razim, too, was going to die and felt well up inside her a longing for spiritual solace. She took a – tram to the centre of Moscow, then walked to the Tretyakov Gallery, hoping to find some consolation in its magnificent works of art. The gallery was closed. She walked back towards the centre of the city and found herself under the walls of the Kremlin. Without considering what she was doing, she joined the queue to visit Lenin’s tomb. She waited for two hours, tears trickling down her lovely Tatar face. Finally she came to the mausoleum and went past the erect guards and down the black marble stairs to the burial chamber of polished red-flecked granite. There, in a glass coffin, lay the mummified body of Lenin, his eyes closed, his features in repose. Four soldiers with fixed bayonets stood at the corners of the marble bier. Inze shuffled past, staring at the waxen face of her country’s legendary leader, and then, without premeditation, found herself praying to Lenin that all would be well.
6
Baranov’s original estimate of ten deaths had been proved wrong, and even the revised figure of thirty began to seem optimistic. Many remained seriously ill – not only personnel from Chernobyl like Razim Davletbayev, Vladimir Chugunov, Anatoli Sitnikov, Piotr Palamarchuk and Victor Proskuriakov, but also accidental bystanders like Georgi Popov, a turbine engineer from Kharkov who had waited for an hour outside the power station for a bus to take him to Pripyat, and a solitary middle-aged woman, Klavdia Luzganova, a security guard who had remained at her post.
None of the deaths was due directly to the destruction of bone marrow: 70 per cent came either from extensive burns – both thermal from escaping steam and beta from radioactive water – or from the disintegration of the lungs and intestines. Had the first victims survived these injuries, the bone-marrow transplants might have saved their lives, but there were only nineteen patients whose doses warranted the complex operation, and by 12 May the last had been performed.