When Steinberg left Chernobyl, about thirty other specialists went with him, realizing that they could expect no promotion under the new regime. This demoralized many of those who remained behind – not just the pretty Katya Litovsky, whom Steinberg had brought into the turbine unit, but some of the more open-minded engineers who disliked the dogmatic and dictatorial style of both Fomin and Dyatlov.
Of the two, Fomin, with his deep voice and pleasant smile, had the more agreeable manner. He could, however, be brusque, and he disliked criticism. ‘We’re not at a party meeting here,’ he would say to any subordinate who dared to question his instructions. In the opinion of some of the nuclear specialists from Komsomolsk, he was overconfident about his own abilities in their sphere of expertise. He certainly had no doubts whatsoever about the safety of the reactors. He often reassured visitors by comparing the reactors to samovars; when the Ukrainian minister of health, Anatoli Romanenko, visited Chernobyl Fomin told him that the chances of an accident there were much the same as being hit by a comet. ‘How many comets hit the earth? One almost every hour. Yet we know of only two cases where they caused fatalities: one hit a man going for a walk, and the other fell into the washtub where a German woman was doing her laundry. No, Comrade Minister, the chances of a serious accident with a reactor are about the same as being hit by a comet.’
Fomin spoke in all sincerity, for though he knew that there had been an accident at the recommissioning of the first unit, he also knew that the emergency systems had done the job for which they were designed. Certainly there were minor accidents, as there were in any industry – on building sites, at steel works and in power stations burning coal. But even the disaster at Three Mile Island, where the profit-hungry capitalists had been indifferent to the fate of the workers, had injured no one, and it was only as a result of the sensational reporting of the accident in the irresponsible capitalist press that people living in the vicinity had panicked and fled from their homes.
Dyatlov was a more complex character. A tall, wiry man with high cheekbones and a receding hairline, his quizzical expression made him resemble the celebrated bust of Voltaire. An unhappy childhood spent near the penal settlements in the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia seemed to have left him with a gloomy outlook on life. As with many self-made men, he was impatient with the failings of others. He was also tormented by the conflicts inherent in the system. On the one hand he was an active party member, carrying the banner of his section at the May Day parades in Pripyat, and he was grateful to a social system that had enabled him to rise from a poverty-stricken background in the remotest corner of Asia to his position as a prominent and powerful engineer.
Yet Dyatlov could not hide from himself the deficiencies of the system, or fail to notice the shroud of falsehood that concealed them from the outside world. This was particularly evident in the work he was engaged in, the construction of the fourth reactor. The plans were inadequate and called for materials that were either unobtainable or were delivered late and were frequently defective when they finally did arrive. The fireproof roofing and electrical cable specified in the plan were not to be found, and so the builders had to improvise, and the supervisors to turn a blind eye to violations of the regulations. In the middle of the unit there was a ‘dead zone’ where nothing could be built because the plans had not arrived; yet construction continued around it in the hope that the two different sections would eventually fit together.
This chasm between rhetoric and reality was like a painful fissure in Dyatlov’s own personality. He had done everything the system expected him to do; he had read every book in the Library of World Literature and knew Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin by heart; yet neither the science nor the culture that he had acquired so diligently had made him a happy man. As a result he was irascible and domineering, and the younger operators feared him. Even his friends from Komsomolsk, whom he saw on his time off, were often uncomfortable in his presence. He inspired their respect but not their affection. Only Anatoli Sitnikov, who had started with him all those years ago installing reactors in nuclear submarines, could talk to him on an equal footing. His wife adored him – or so it seemed to their friends – but she was a small, cosy woman, not the type to tame the tyrannical traits in her husband, and there was the shadow of a shared sorrow between them: their second child had died in infancy in Komsomolsk.
Dyatlov was also getting older, and many men in their middle fifties begin to feel the strain of a demanding profession. He delegated certain duties, such as the training of personnel, and during the laborious months leading to the start-up of reactor No. 4, many of the operators felt that he gave them no real guidance but left it to the section leaders to settle matters between themselves.
8
As the autumn of 1983 turned to winter, pressure built on the engineers at Chernobyl to complete reactor No. 4 by the end of the year. To do so would mean that they were a year ahead of schedule and would be eligible for numerous bonuses and awards – not just for the workers, but for everyone involved, including Dyatlov, Fomin, Brukhanov, and those above Brukhanov in the Ministry of Energy and Electrification.
As the year drew to a close, what held the engineers back was not the construction but the numerous tests that had to be carried out by the government commission responsible for certifying the safety of the plant. In particular there was the vexing question of how to deal with an unexpected cut in the supply of electricity to the control-rod drive mechanism, and both the main circulating pumps and the emergency core-cooling system. Earlier tests had not proved satisfactory.
Unknown to the operators, there had been two further accidents since the destruction of the fuel assembly in reactor No. 1 in September 1982. Only a month later there had been an explosion in a generator at the Armyansk nuclear power station, after which the turbine hall had burned to the ground; and in June 1985 there had been a horrific accident at the pressurized-water nuclear power station at Balakovsky, to which Taras Plochy and Nikolai Steinberg had gone from Chernobyl. Because of mistakes made by operators under Plochy’s command, during the recommissioning of reactor No. 1, a valve had burst and sent steam at 300°C (572°F) into the area around the well of the reactor, where fourteen men were working. All were poached alive.
It was not this tragedy, however, that called for the tests on the turbines at Chernobyl, but rather an earlier and potentially more disastrous power cut at the Kursk nuclear power station in 1980. In the RBMK reactors, electricity was required to drive both the control rods and the water pumps. In the event of an unexpected power cut, certain standby measures could be taken: the control rods could be disconnected from the power drive and allowed to drop into the reactor under their own weight, and also standby diesel generators had been installed that could provide an alternative source of power for the pumps.
The danger occurred during the forty seconds between the power cut and the start-up of the generators. At Kursk, in 1980, the natural circulation of the water had proved sufficient to prevent an uncontrolled power surge, but it was impossible to count on this. The turbine manufacturers hoped to be able to modify the generators to squeeze sufficient power for those few crucial seconds from the turbines themselves while they were spinning to a halt. However, it was clear that it would be impossible to conduct tests to verify the efficacity of this modification if the reactor was to be commissioned before the end of the year, and since the likelihood of a power cut was remote and the outcome at Kursk had been satisfactory, the tests on the turbines were postponed.
There was a further anomaly that had first been noticed by scientists from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building during the physical start-up of the first unit of the Ignalina nuclear power station that year. As the control rods were inserted into the reactor core, instead of an immediate decrease in reactivity, there was a momentary surge before the decrease began. This seemed to be caused by a flaw in the design of the control rods, and although it was also noted at the start-up of the fourth unit at Chernobyl ??
? again by scientists from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, who inspected the finished reactor – it was not thought sufficiently hazardous to be mentioned to the operators or written into the documentation.
On 21 December 1983, the fourth reactor was commissioned, and on 31 December, at the eleventh hour, Brukhanov signed a receipt for the completed reactor. The SPC certificate was signed by an official from the Ministry of Energy and Electrification. The bonuses were secure and the awards followed: for Brukhanov a Hero of Socialist Labour, for Fomin a medal for Valorous Labour, for Dyatlov an Order of the Red Banner.
On 27 March of the following year, three months ahead of schedule, and amid a fanfare of congratulatory publicity in the press, the fourth unit at Chernobyl went into commercial operation. For the opening, potted palm trees were laid out in the turbine hall, and not only the minister of energy and electrification and all the party leaders from Kiev, but also the president of the Academy of Sciences, Anatoli Alexandrov himself, came to Pripyat. He could look upon what he saw with some satisfaction. Four units, all powered by RBMK reactors, were now generating four thousand megawatts of electricity for homes and industries throughout the western republics of the Soviet Union, and for the grid of the neighbouring fraternal socialist republics in Eastern Europe. It was a triumph for Soviet science, for Soviet technology, and a significant contribution to the construction of the new Socialist civilization. While the Americans were faltering over nuclear power after Three Mile Island, the Soviets forged ahead to establish an undisputed ascendancy in the field. In the middle distance, Alexandrov could see the foundations of units 5 and 6, then under construction. When they were built and went on line, the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station at Chernobyl would be the largest power station in the world.
III
1
If the shortcomings of the Soviet system were apparent to Anatoli Dyatlov, they were also evident to many political leaders. The rule of Leonid Brezhnev and his satraps in the provinces, like Slyunkov in Belorussia and Shcherbitsky in the Ukraine, with their corruption and incompetence, had led to a stagnant economy. The insatiable defence industries continued to take an exorbitant share of the nation’s resources. If there were shortages in the nuclear construction industry, there was also a dearth in the supply of consumer goods, and while censorship and an omnipresent KGB might suppress any overt expression of discontent, there was a malaise in the work force and an inefficiency in administration that no amount of propaganda could conceal.
In the last years of the Brezhnev era, and during the brief tenure of General Secretary Yuri Andropov, some of the elder statesmen – notably Andrei Gromyko, Mikhail Suslov and Andropov himself – recognized the need to promote younger, more energetic and open-minded leaders, and brought into the Central Committee the party boss of the Stavropol region, Mikhail Gorbachev. When Andropov died, the old guard on the Central Committee chose one of Brezhnev’s old cronies, Konstantin Chernenko, as general secretary, but his period in office was brief, and when he died in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen to replace him.
Gorbachev immediately resumed the programme of reform that had been started under Andropov. Assisted by like-minded allies on the Central Committee, such as Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, he sought to revive the Soviet economy by replacing corrupt and complacent officials. Henceforth no official or institution was to be regarded as beyond criticism, nor were party members to be immune from prosecution. Under the slogan ‘glasnost i perestroika’ – openness and restructuring – these policies were adopted at the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party in February 1986.
It was one thing to endorse reform and another to achieve it. Throughout the Soviet Union, the vast party apparatus had a vested interest in the status quo. Gorbachev could remove sixteen of the Soviet Union’s sixty-four ministers and 20 per cent of local party officials by the end of his first year in power, but at the grass-roots level his reforms depended upon local initiatives, and it still took a brave man to criticize a party boss. The style of leadership established by the Bolsheviks, which mixed threats with Marxist slogans, was still the norm.
At Chernobyl, the first sign of glasnost was an article in the journal of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, Literaturnaya Ukraina. It was not unusual for a literary magazine of this kind to show an interest in industry. In the Soviet state, writers played a special role; as if recognizing that socialism itself came from the fertile minds of intellectuals, the expression of ideas was strictly controlled. Writers whose work met with approval were admitted to the Union and given the kind of privileges that came with membership in the Academy of Sciences; the work of writers who were critical of communism was not published, and if printed surreptitiously would count as evidence of criminal anti-Soviet propaganda. Like a covey of poet laureates, the pampered members of the Writers’ Union were expected to play their part in building a Socialist state. The proletariat had no patience with art for art’s sake. Thus, Literaturnaya Ukraina had for some years shown a lively interest in industry, with a regular column entitled ‘Eye on the Chernobyl Power Station’.
Before the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, this eye had only seen laudable achievements by heroic workers and engineers, but with the advent of glasnost and anxiety in the highest quarters about the shortcomings in construction, it was decided to invite a journalist on the spot to take a critical look at the empire of Comrade Kizima, the head of construction at Chernobyl.
It was a measure of the way Pripyat had developed into a flourishing community that it now had its own newspaper, Tribuna Energetica, edited by a young woman named Lubov Kovalevskaya. She had first come to Pripyat as the wife of a lathe operator at the power station, and had worked as a schoolteacher while writing poetry in her spare time. In 1981 she was given a job on the staff of Tribuna Energetica and became a probationary member of the Communist party, which she joined in 1983.
Lubov had been born among the prison camps on the Black River near Sverdlovsk, the granddaughter of a Polish landowner who had been deported from Belorussia in the late 1920s as an enemy of the people. Her maternal grandfather had been shot because a passerby had heard him make a derogatory remark about Stalin; her grandmother, a kulak, had been sent to Siberia for hiding grain in the pocket of her dress. The flat where Lubov had grown up was in a wooden block built by the convicts of the prison where her father worked as an accountant. She had been something of a tomboy, but with beautiful grey eyes and a trusting, affectionate nature. She had met her husband, Sergei, while she was training as a teacher at Nizni Novgorod and, after they were married, went with him to Chernobyl.
In 1983, Sergei left the power station to take seasonal work on construction sites in the Arctic Circle. He spent the summer in the north and the winter in Pripyat. Meanwhile, Lubov’s career flourished on Tribuna Energetica. She became the paper’s acting editor and published poems about unhappy love. When foreign delegations came to visit the power station, she was invited by the management to entertain them at receptions, where she met such luminaries as Brukhanov, Kizima and Fomin.
When Lubov was asked by the editor of Literaturnaya Ukraina to write articles on the station, she found that many of those who knew of the shortcomings of the nuclear power station would only discuss them off the record. No one wanted their criticisms to appear under their own name. However, all the material she needed was close at hand. Only a few minutes’ walk from the office of Tribuna Energetica there was the information centre for the power station. Here all the records were stored on a computer. A friend of Lubov’s who worked there could call up all the faults and delays that had taken place over the years. The pattern Lubov established was clear; the quality of the construction had deteriorated as time went on, reaching its lowest point with the fifth and sixth reactors now being built. The first four reactors were now producing four thousand megawatts of electricity, and the initial successes had been rewarded with various government awards, but because of these achievements ‘the lagging beh
ind in the construction of the fifth power set is particularly noticeable. The plans and specifications for building and assembly work in 1985 have not been fulfilled. Is this slump a coincidence? Of course not. But it is not enough to give us a simple answer either.’
In her article, Lubov went on to describe what had been apparent for many years but had never been expressed in public: the ‘late release and design and costing documentation’ made by Hydroprojekt made it impossible to arrange the timely delivery of supplies, so the structures due in the summer only arrived in the winter, when the weather made it impossible to install them. Lubov went on:
Lack of organization weakened not only discipline, but also the responsibility of each and every one for the result of the work. The impossibility, or even unwillingness, of technical engineering workers to organize the teams’ work lowered expectations …
There is yet another problem, a considerably more serious one. Due to the unscrupulousness of the supplier, the customer cannot rid himself of defective material and of disruption in supply. Thus, in 1985, 45,500 cubic metres of prefabricated reinforced concrete was ordered, 3,200 metres was missing, and of the 42,300 received 6,000 was faulty. Thus the reinforced concrete is there but it cannot be assembled …
I do not wish to suggest that the producer factories do not have problems of their own and complications, nor do I want to deliver any lectures. All the same, I consider it to be an abnormal situation when contract obligations are constantly violated.
Lubov then proceeded to name the organizations that had undersupplied sections for the cooling towers, wall panels for the machine hall, concrete slabs and pumping channels. She wrote that 326 tons of fissure sealant for the nuclear-fuel waste depository were defective, as were girders for the machine hall. Such faults, she argued, were inadmissible, above all in a nuclear power station,