History books This article is more than 5 years oldRevisiting Chernobyl: 'It is a huge cemetery of dreams'
This article is more than 5 years oldThe 1986 nuclear disaster blighted Ukraine and changed the world. Serhii Plokhy, who won the Baillie Gifford prize for his history of the tragedy, returns to the once sought-after Soviet town
‘These buildings are the tombstones of the dreams and lives that were lived here. It’s a huge cemetery of dreams, if not of people.” From the top of an old Soviet apartment block, Serhii Plokhy looks over Pripyat. “On the one hand it looks like a normal city; on the other hand you see windows without glass, streets without people and town squares taken over by forests.” Now the ghost town is used by the Ukrainian army for sniper practice and has also become a tourist attraction.
It’s a far cry from the Pripyat founded in 1970 to support the Soviet Union’s burgeoning nuclear industry. Then, the city had a population of 50,000 and supplied the construction workers and operators for the nearby Chernobyl plant, which opened in 1977. “The nuclear power plant was a major technological innovation at the time,” says Plokhy. “It was the way to go for the entire world, a symbol of the future of humankind.”
Workers flocked to Pripyat from all over the Soviet Union. Ukraine was a sought-after place to live and the government prioritised food (scarce at the time) and facilities for “nuclear cities”. Plokhy reels off a list: cheese and decent meat; theatre and literary clubs; at least two discos and state-of-the-art sporting facilities.
But at 1.23am on 26 April 1986 an explosion at the Chernobyl Unit Four plant changed everything for the people of Pripyat – and the entire world. The blast was due to a turbine test that went badly wrong. In his book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, Plokhy describes how, initially, the authorities were in denial and blamed human error in their attempts to cover up the disaster. Through meticulous research of memoirs and KGB files he shows that, while mistakes were made, the roots of the disaster lay in the Soviet system. Specifically, the authoritarian character of the Communist party and how it prioritised economic development over humanitarian and ecological concerns.
We stop for lunch at a canteen for the current workers in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the 30km area around the nuclear plant that visitors need a permit to enter. Over a meal of vegetable soup, rice and pork, rounded off by pancakes with cottage cheese, Plokhy recalls his fears that the radiation would contaminate the water supply. Now a history professor at Harvard University, back then he was 29 and living in Ukraine. “The city where I grew up is on the Dnieper. The Pripyat River, from which the city takes its name, flows into the Dnieper. Around 30 million people depend on this river for their water and there was a real concern that it would not be drinkable.” The information vacuum led to some unscientific solutions. His friends in Kiev acted on rumours that vodka could help fight radiation by holding drinking parties.
For years, Plokhy’s feelings remained raw, which is why he needed time to reflect before writing the book. “I felt I was ready. I wanted to do it a little bit earlier and I started, but decided emotionally I couldn’t do it. The distance in time gives us a better scientific understanding of what happened, and more perspective. Also, we have access to archives, which we didn’t have in the 80s and 90s – including the KGB archives.”
There are heroes and villains in his book. The heroic efforts of the firefighters who were brought in to lift radioactive material from the roof of the reactor stand out. Many received fatal doses of radiation in their efforts to stop the fires spreading to the other reactors. It wasn’t just the firefighters: close to 600,000 people were drafted in from all over the Soviet Union to help limit the damage caused by the explosion and the emission of radiation. Without this help, the results could have been catastrophic. In a chilling reminder, Plokhy says in his book: “If the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet.”
They don’t know how to remove the fuel because people will die ... They are waiting for a geniusSerhii PlokhyAs we pass a ferris wheel that was completed two weeks before the explosion but never used, Plokhy says: “The authorities did the best they could. The big issue and the big problem was that they kept silent when it came to releasing information to the world and to their own people, even people here in Pripyat.” He paints the scene of the evacuation of Pripyat, a full day-and-a-half after the explosion. “It was a weekend, the farmers’ market was working two hours before the evacuation, there were weddings in the city and children were playing in the sand. After the explosion the KGB took complete control of information between the city and the rest of the world. It was top secret.”
Glasnost, the political programme to accelerate openness in the USSR, later helped lift the veil of secrecy. But Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was slow to act after the nuclear disaster. “Chernobyl wasn’t his finest hour, to put it mildly. He was very much part of the old Soviet thinking. It took him two weeks to address the nation in his first and last Chernobyl speech and almost three years to visit the plant,” Plokhy says. “We shouldn’t attribute all the blame to Gorbachev, because he represented the system. Stalin only visited the frontlines of the second world war once. Soviet leaders were not supposed to go to dangerous places.”
Thirty-three years and billions of pounds later, Ukraine is still dealing with the radioactive fallout. We look at the giant concrete and metal arch, 110 metres high and weighing 36,000 tonnes, that seals off the radioactive “sarcophagus”. The structure is estimated to have cost €1.5 bn (£1.2 bn). “It doesn’t address the issue because we don’t know what reactions are happening within the fuel in the power plant,” says Plokhy. “The real way to deal with that is to get the fuel out, but that would cost billions and billions more. The arch is covering the problem without solving the problem.” To put this in perspective, the half-life of the plutonium-239 that was released by the blast is 24,000 years. The challenge isn’t just financial. “They don’t know how to remove the fuel because people will die and the equipment doesn’t work in the reactor [the radiation is still too intense]. They are waiting for a genius,” he adds.
As we drive away from Chernobyl, the conversation turns to nationalism. The blast had a profound impact on the Soviet Union. It became a rallying cry for the early opposition movement in Ukraine, which mobilised around ecological issues.
“Chernobyl is important for the broader history of the Soviet Union,” Plokhy says. “Ukraine’s vote for independence killed the Soviet Union. It was the second largest economy, the second largest republic. Maybe it would have happened later under different circumstances but you can’t remove Chernobyl from the story. That’s where the beginning is.”
We pass more deserted houses covered in snow and swamped by the forest of birch and pine trees. We stop and look at one of only two remaining statues of Lenin in Ukraine, both of which are in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (there were once more than 5,000 statues of him in Ukraine). It’s another reminder that the zone is frozen in a Soviet time warp.
Our guide brings out her radiation counter again and says that, during our seven-hour visit to the zone, we were exposed to less radiation than we would encounter on a normal two-hour plane journey. I’m not sure if this is reassuring or not, as my thoughts turn to the flight home.
Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy is published by Penguin, priced £9.99. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.
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