What was to be done? Huge monopolistic structures like the Ministry of Medium Machine Building must be split up into smaller entities competing in a form of internal market. In the construction of nuclear reactors, there must be a clear distinction between supplier and client. So too, huge institutes like the Kurchatov, employing ten thousand scientists, all for life, and many working on projects of dubious validity, should be broken up into smaller units, each with its own scientific leader, who would employ scientists for particular research projects and for only a limited period of time. Moreover, the state should become more discriminating in its allocation of funds. No longer should a block grant be paid to institutes like the Kurchatov simply because they were there. Nor should funds be allocated by old men who held their posts by virtue of their appointment by the party. Youth must take the helm. Each team should have to justify its expenditures, and the millions being spent on prestigious but essentially fanciful schemes like Velikhov’s research into nuclear fusion might be reallocated to less dramatic but more urgent projects, such as decontaminating the territory around Chernobyl, ensuring the safety of nuclear reactors and protecting the environment.
Confident that his analysis was correct and impatient to implement the reforms he proposed, Legasov presented his report to the Academy of Sciences. He had good reason to think that it would be well received. As a convinced Communist, as well as a scientist of great distinction, he had devoted his life to the service of the party. He had risked his life at Chernobyl, his reputation at Vienna and had now risen to the challenge of perestroika.
Legasov’s report was neither accepted nor rejected: it was ignored. A coalition of forces combined to put his proposals for reform in limbo. His fellow scientists at the Kurchatov, who saw their own projects placed in jeopardy by the proposed reallocation of resources, were outraged. Legasov was not a physicist but a chemist. Like many others who had led comfortable and privileged lives under the aegis of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, these men were unwilling to lose their sinecures without a struggle. Alexandrov, despite his affection and respect for Legasov, was implicitly blamed by the report for the shortcomings of the status quo. L. D. Riabev, who had replaced Slavsky as the minister responsible for atomic power, while sympathetic to Legasov’s point of view, thought his proposals went too far and too fast.
Nor were the advocates of perestroika willing to let Legasov, the favoured protégé of the Central Committee, change horses in midstream. His eminence had aroused envy. Rather than being regarded as the hero of Chernobyl, he was seen by many of his colleagues as a typical product of the era of stagnation, a man who owed his position to the kind of political nepotism that had led to the disaster in the first place. There were also the Jewish scientists, who felt that Legasov had discriminated against them when allocating research funds or authorizing trips to the West.
All these various forces opposing Legasov were given a chance to humble him when, in the spring of 1987, as a measure to foster perestroika, the Central Committee ordered that there be elections to a supervisory Works Council in all Soviet enterprises and institutions. Too late, Legasov realized the dangers he faced if he were to run. Despite the influence he might possess in the Politburo or the secretariat of the Central Committee, he could hardly be appointed director of the Kurchatov Institute in succession to Alexandrov if it were shown that he did not enjoy the confidence of the 229 eminent scientists who were qualified to vote.
Pleading ill health, Legasov told Alexandrov that he would prefer not to be considered as a candidate for the council, but his mentor insisted that he run; it was impossible for the first deputy director not to do so. Other colleagues agreed; even his enemies encouraged Legasov, nurturing the pride that comes before the fall. When the vote was counted, 100 were for Legasov and 129 against.
Despite his premonitions, Legasov was dumbfounded by this evidence of his unpopularity. It was the first setback he had ever encountered, but not the last. Some weeks later, on 10 June, after a meeting of the party cell at the Kurchatov, Alexandrov told his colleagues that they should congratulate Legasov. He had seen the final list of those to be decorated for their heroic deeds at Chernobyl. The highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union, was reserved for the three commanders, Teliatnikov, Antoshkin and Pikalov, but just beneath them, and deservedly so, came the name of Legasov. ‘Tomorrow our first deputy director will be proclaimed a hero of socialist labour,’ Alexandrov said.
The congratulations were premature. When the list was published, Legasov’s name was not on it. At the last moment, it was said, Gorbachev had thought it inappropriate to honour any of the scientists from the Kurchatov for their role in a disaster for which they were partly to blame.
The next day, Legasov telephoned his secretary from his home, and at the end of their conversation asked her to keep an eye on his two children. This strange request made her fearful and she raised the alarm. Legasov was found semiconscious, an empty vial of sleeping tablets by his side. An ambulance took him to the hospital, the drug was pumped out of his stomach, and he survived.
5
Legasov returned to his duties at the Kurchatov a broken man. He was isolated by his high office; even the friends of his youth could not help him. Nikolai Protzenko, who had once taught Legasov and had been with him in Tomsk in the 1960s, continued to admire him as a scientist and felt affection for him as a friend. But he had become estranged from Legasov, the ‘scientific leader’, who had surrounded himself with secretaries and hobnobbed with members of the Central Committee. The old Russian saying ‘You can come in without knocking at the door’ had long since ceased to apply.
As Legasov’s spirits sank, his health declined. Arriving one day at the entrance to the administrative block, Yuri Sivintsev found him shuffling up the stairs as if he were as old as Alexandrov. All his zest seemed to have left him, even on those coveted trips abroad. Attending a conference in London that summer, Legasov ran into Gubarev, who had come to see a performance of his play Sarcophagus at the National Theatre. To try to raise his spirits, Gubarev suggested going to the musical Cats or finding a couple of girls, but Legasov preferred to return to his hotel.
In October, Legasov went into the hospital to be treated for his kidney disease. Alerted by Margarita Legasov to her Faust’s unhappy condition, Leonid Ilyn visited him at his bedside. ‘Leonid Andreevich,’ Legasov asked him, ‘how is it that after Chernobyl I got dozens of invitations from different countries to go and work there with my family – they offered me a house, a car and every other Western luxury – but here in Russia I am frustrated at every turn. No one supports me within the institute, the ministry or the Academy of Sciences. I am ostracized.’ Ilyn could not answer. In his own institute, he might have had enemies, but he also had a group of friends and colleagues who had been with him from the beginning and would stand by him to the end.
Tormented by his thoughts and unable to sleep, Legasov took another overdose of sleeping pills, but again was saved by doctors. News of what had happened was leaked to the press, which, if it was not yet free in the Western sense, was capable of Fleet Street innuendo. The magazine Moscow News, an advanced proponent of glasnost, published an unsigned interview with Legasov and beneath it an article entitled ‘Give Me Poison’.
In an attempt to revive Legasov’s interest in life, Gubarev asked him while he was still in hospital to develop his ideas on industrial safety in an article for Pravda. Legasov went to work with his habitual zeal and finished the article in a week. Every day after it was published he telephoned Gubarev for a report on the reaction to what he had written. There was none.
Stung by official indifference to his warnings, Legasov became more strident in what he said. From his hospital bed he gave an interview to a Belorussian writer and filmmaker, Ales Adamovich, for the liberal journal Novy Mir, warning him that ‘another Chernobyl could happen at any station of that type, in any sequence.’
Astonished that Alexandrov’s deputy would make such an al
legation, Adamovich asked if he could tape the interview, and Legasov agreed. ‘It’s not so easy,’ he went on, ‘to completely eliminate the major components of the Chernobyl catastrophe. They include the fact that no principles for creating completely reliable emergency systems for such stations have yet been developed. They include the impossibility of building containment structures over them, even now. Therefore, a repetition of what happened is not ruled out …’
‘Do other scientists understand this?’
‘Many do.’
‘Why don’t they tell the government?’
‘Apparently the old notions are still at work. No one will listen if they are told since they follow the official line. The inertia, the orientation towards atomic stations no matter what, is too great. We began their wholesale construction ten years late, and so we set off at a gallop, not fully equipped, economizing on containment structures and other things, just so that there would be a little more money. It’s hard to stop. But the main thing is that behind all this are departmental interests, the interests of individuals, officials and groups, including the interests of various scientific sectors.’
From his office in the Kurchatov Institute Legasov also spoke to the Ukrainian writer Yuri Shcherbak, who was gathering material for his book on the disaster. Now Legasov’s ruminations took him deeper into the tormenting conundrum of Chernobyl. Certainly, Legasov thought, as the Politburo’s commission of inquiry had established, there had been ‘a certain incompleteness, even slovenliness in our work. At all stages, from the creation to the running … And all the time I thought: why does this happen? And, do you know, I come to a paradoxical conclusion … that this happens because we have got too carried away with technology. We have become too pragmatic with naked technology. This embraces many questions, not only of safety. Let us think for a moment: when we were far poorer, and the international situation was far more complex, why in a historically short period, from the thirties to the fifties, did we manage to astonish the whole world with the rate of creation of new types of technology and be admired for its quality?’
What Legasov had come to realize, he told Shcherbak, was that ‘the technology of which our people are proud, which ended with Gagarin’s flight, was created by people who stood on the shoulders of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky … The creators of the technology of that time were educated in the spirit of the greatest humanitarian ideas. In the spirit of beautiful literature. In the spirit of great art. In the spirit of a beautiful and correct moral sense. And in the spirit of a clear political idea of the structure of the new society, the idea that this society was the most advanced in the world. This high moral sense was there in everything: in the attitude of one person to another, in the attitude to man, to technology, to one’s duties. All this was there in the education of these people. And technology for them was simply a means of expression of moral qualities, placed in them … which Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov taught them to have towards everything in the world.
‘For a prolonged period,’ Legasov went on, ‘we have been ignoring the role of the moral principle, the role of our history and our culture.’ What was the result? A generation of young men and women who, like the operators at Chernobyl, were technically proficient but morally indifferent. ‘We will not cope with anything,’ he told Shcherbak, ‘if we do not renew our moral attitude to the work that is being done, whatever sort of work it is – medical or chemical, biological or to do with reactors.’
‘But how can this moral attitude be renewed?’
A sigh, then after a long pause, ‘Well … I can’t be a prophet.’
6
Well aware by now that there was little chance that he would succeed Alexandrov, Legasov drew up a plan to set up his own institute of industrial safety and submitted it to the Academy of Sciences. There was a good chance that it would be approved. Even if they could not be acknowledged by a decoration, his heroic achievements at Chernobyl must surely count for something, and his patron, Yegor Ligachev, remained second only to Gorbachev in the hierarchy of the party.
A decision was to be made at a meeting of the Academy at the end of April. In March, however, Ligachev staged a rear-guard action against the forces of glasnost and perestroika. Taking advantage of Gorbachev’s absence abroad, he authorized the publication in the Russian nationalist paper, Sovetskaya Rossiya, of an apparently unsolicited letter from a chemistry teacher in Leningrad, one Nina Andreyeva. Entitled ‘I Cannot Give Up My Principles’, it attacked the programme of reforms as being inspired by Western values and implemented principally by Jews. Further, the attacks on Stalin’s reputation, which Yakovlev had authorized, were feints against communism itself, and the proponents of reform were, like the Jews Trotsky and Martov, covert enemies of Lenin and the October Revolution.
For a month thereafter, it remained uncertain whether this outspoken attack had rallied the conservative opposition on the Central Committee. On 15 April, however, Pravda published a detailed rebuttal of the charges made by Nina Andreyeva entitled ‘The Principles of Perestroika’. Said to have been written by Yakovlev himself, its anonymity enhanced its authority. The party had spoken, and Ligachev was discredited. In falling back upon chauvinism and anti-Semitism, the secretary for ideology on the Central Committee, the Grand Inquisitor of world communism, had exposed both the bankruptcy of his beliefs and the limits of his power.
Ten days later, on 25 April, a meeting of the Academy of Sciences considered Legasov’s proposal to set up an autonomous institute for industrial safety. Alexandrov’s support was lukewarm, and it was turned down. Legasov learned of the result on the evening of 26 April, two years to the day after the accident at Chernobyl. The next day, when Legasov’s son returned from work he found his father’s dead body hanging from the balustrade in the stairwell of their home, a rope around his neck.
At the conference in Kiev a fortnight later, Academician Ilyn was congratulated on the award he had received to mark his sixtieth birthday a few days before the death of Legasov; he was now a Hero of Socialist Labour. Legasov was not forgotten. In his address to the participants, Hans Blix, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke of ‘the excellent example set by the Soviet Union when, after the Chernobyl accident, it produced an extensive report on the causes and course of the accident and submitted it to international discussion with some five hundred nuclear experts in Vienna in August 1986. We regret today the untimely death of Valeri Legasov, who stood with several Soviet colleagues at the centre of this discussion, which enabled the nuclear world to learn from the tragic experiences of Chernobyl.’
At the Kurchatov Institute some weeks later, Yuri Sivintsev asked his director, Academician Anatoli Alexandrov, who should now sign the letters sent out by the Council on Ecology, which Legasov had set up before he died. Tears came into the old man’s eyes, and he embraced Sivintsev and sobbed. ‘Why did he abandon me?’ he asked. ‘Oh, why did he abandon me?’
XI
1
Less than a month after Legasov’s death, Gubarev published the scientist’s memoirs in Pravda: a brief account of what he had done at Chernobyl, which he had dictated into a tape recorder, followed by an analysis of what had gone wrong. ‘Valeri Alekseyevich’s departure from this life is hard to explain or understand,’ wrote Gubarev in the introduction, ‘why at the height of his powers he should kill himself. This tragedy should be a lesson to all of us and a reproach to those for whom tranquillity and well-being come first.’ He quoted the panegyric of Legasov’s fellow academician, Yuri Tretyakov: ‘Legasov is Don Quixote and Joan of Arc at the same time. An inconvenient and difficult person for those around him, but without him you have a sense of emptiness and loss of something close to the meaning of life.’
By publishing this memoir, and Legasov’s conclusion that ‘Chernobyl was the apotheosis, the summit, of all the incorrect running of the economy that had been going on in our country for many decades,’ Pravda at least ensured that the man had not died in vain; t
he voice from the grave unequivocally endorsed glasnost and perestroika.
However, Legasov’s posthumous admission of such dire inadequacy in the nuclear industry not only supported the case for political reform but also justified the increasing alarm of the population about the safety of other reactors. As early as August 1987, a letter was published in Literaturnaya Ukraina from seven Ukrainian writers protesting against the construction of another nuclear power station on the banks of the Dnieper near the city of Chigirin. This project had a background of particular incompetence, but the significance of their letter was not simply that it was published, or that it revealed yet another fiasco from the era of stagnation, but that the writers included Vasili Zakharchenko, a former dissident who at one time had been imprisoned in a labour camp in Perm, as well as Fedir Morhun, the first secretary of the Poltava District Party Committee. Former ideological adversaries had sunk their differences to ask, ‘Can it be that the Chernobyl tragedy has taught us nothing?’
Exacerbating these fears of a second disaster were numerous unofficial reports of sickness among those who had been exposed to radiation at Chernobyl. Rumours spread that many of the six hundred thousand men and women who had worked as liquidators in the thirty-kilometre zone had either died or fallen ill. In 1987, an association, the Chernobyl Union, was formed to provide aid and information for all those who had suffered from the accident. At once, complaints were received from its members about chronic ill health. For example, Eduard Korotkov, one of the pilots of the experimental Ka-27 helicopter, suffered first from appendicitis, then peritonitis and finally gangrene of the gall bladder. Recovering from the last operation, he had a heart attack. Suspecting that exposure to radiation had damaged his immune system, the surgeons sent him to be examined at Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. There Guskova insisted that his maladies had nothing to do with radiation.