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But Valery Alekseyevich Stayed

"He had the right to leave, and no one would have blamed him. But
Valery Alekseyevich stayed. Those who were in Chernobyl then, in
April-May, understand the price of this act!" - Nikolai Dmitrievich
Tarakanov

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The Chernobyl Tragedy - From the Memoirs of Nikolai Ryzhkov

reactorcore Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Valery
Legasov, Yuri Israel June 7, 2021July 23, 2021 36 Minutes

Below is the chapter on Chernobyl from Desiat' let velikikh potriasenii
(Ten Years of Great Upheavals), which is the memoirs of Nikolai
Ryzhov, first published in 1995. Ryzhkov was the Soviet Premier from
1985 to 1990 and the head of the Politburo Commission for handling
the accident at Chernobyl NPP. Valery Legasov directly reported to
him, Ryzhkov has traveled to the disaster scene for the first time on
May 2, 1986 and spent two days on road trips visiting the
contaminated villages of Ukraine and Belarus. He gives a striking
eyewitness account from the head of government perspective, quoting
from Legasov's tape memoirs at times.

[screen-sho]turn

--

The 27th Party Congress ended in early March 1986. It didn't pass
without routine speeches and habitually loud phrases. But
businesslike in general. I could already feel the turn from splendor
and hype to comprehending the real situation in the country. It was
not done loudly and with anguish -which became almost mandatory in
the future- but the first attempts were made to answer the classic
question: "What to do?"

What to do with the economy, which could no longer tolerate the
transfusion from bare to empty: the bare needed to be given at least
some content, and the empty filled at the very least. However, the
answer to this question, as I have already said, was prepared by us
long ago. So the Congress itself for us, economists and production
workers, was simply a milestone from which we could start our lap.

And everything would have gone according to plan - even with
inevitable adjustments on the side of the party and life. Yes, only
fate once again sent the country a terrible ordeal. It is not for me
to judge whether it is fair or not. Let me be subjective, but I am
still sure: It did not deserve this, no! I always considered myself
far from church rituals, and today I do not really understand the
former party leaders who have taken the fashion to come to church on
major religious holidays, to stand with long faces in front of
images. If it dawned on you and you revised your philosophy of life
so quickly, then believe in it internally, do not blaspheme. But then
it seriously popped up: Why are you doing this to us, Lord!

April 26 fell on a Saturday. I was about to leave early in the
morning for work, when the sharp bell of the "chopper" slowed me
down. Energy Minister Anatoly Ivanovich Mayorets was calling.

"Sorry to bother you", he said excitedly, "but it seems that there is
an emergency at the Chernobyl nuclear...
"It seems to be an emergency?" I interrupted. "Can you give more
details?"

"I don't know the details yet. We are contacting Chernobyl."

I glanced at my watch.
"In half an hour I'll be in my office. I hope you have enough time to
make the call and find out everything?"

They say that in the moment of danger, the sixth sense turns on.

I don't know what switch flipped in me, but I drove to Kremlin and
only thought about this call, counted the options. Alas, they all
turned out to be immeasurably far from reality. Evidently a person
subconsciously seeks to get away from the worst...

I entered the office and immediately pressed the button for a direct
link to Mayorets.

"What happened there?"

"At 01:23 a powerful explosion occurred at the fourth block of the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant, after which a fire started."

I specified, still hoping for the best:

"Where is the explosion? In the engine room?"
"No", answered Mayorets, "In the reactor."

The explosion in the reactor was scary. The fire in the reactor is
even scarier. The night code signal from the station read: "One, two,
three, four." These numbers meant all types of danger: nuclear,
radiation, fire, explosive. The consequences -immediate and outlying-
were impossible to predict.

The still ambiguous situation in the small Ukrainian town so far
demanded immediate action. Therefore, I ordered Mayorets to fly to
Kiev without delay to get to the disaster site, and I myself summoned
the Council of Ministers' specialists.

At 11 am the decree for the creation of the Commission was signed.
Meanwhile, the assistants were looking for the chairman of the Bureau
for the Fuel and Energy Complex, my deputy Boris Evdokimovich
Shcherbina, who had left for gas fields in the Orenburg region the
day before. An emergency is an emergency: Shcherbina was found
quickly. I briefly informed him about the explosion and the
composition of the commission:

"Fly to Moscow urgently! The members of the commission will be
waiting for you at the airfield, the plane is already being prepared,
so to Chernobyl at once."

At 16.00, a special flight left for Kiev from Vnukovo airport.

Here is what Academician Valery Alekseevich Legasov who also flew
into the catastrophe on that hurried special flight dictated to the
magnetic tape then:

"...It did not even occur to me then that we were moving towards an
event of a planetary scale, an event that, apparently, will go down
in the history of mankind forever, like the eruptions of the famous
volcanoes, the death of Pompeii, or something close to that."

It hadn't occured to anyone yet, there was too little information,
which, as it is believed, is the mother of intuition. However, my
intuition (that same sixth, seventh, sixteenth sense!) was already
hideously freezing my heart. Waiting and catching up are agonizing
affairs. That evening I had to wait.

The commission got to Chernobyl at about eight in the evening.
Shcherbina called me very late, told me about what had happened
wearily and with anguish. In short: during a non-staff test of a
turbine unit at the fourth unit of the nuclear power plant, two
explosions occurred in succession. The reactor room was destroyed,
several hundred people were hit by radiation, two were killed, the
radiation situation was complex and still completely unclear.

He said that the Commission was working divided into small groups,
each according to its own profile, but it was already obvious that it
couldn't be managed without the military. Helicopters were urgently
needed, preferably heavy ones, chemical troops were needed, and as
soon as possible...

It is important to note that the Commission found a completely
demoralized leadership of the power plant and from that hour took
over the entire management of the work. An iron will and
professionalism was needed. A few years later, the jaunty TV
journalist persistently drew out the "moment of truth" from the
former director of the power plant in front of the TV camera, who
agreed that those who violated the rules and instructions should have
been imprisoned: Not he, but those who were in the Kremlin at that
time. That's it!

Defense Minister S. L. Sokolov was not there: He was on a business
trip. I phoned the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal S. F.
Akhromeev. I was glad he just took over the organization of the
transfer of the required military units to the nuclear power plant. I
liked his pedantic clarity, his reticence, the ability to get away
from rushing and panic even in the most tragic situations, to do what
is needed right away, and not to waste time on trifles. What was
there to be surprised about? He was a military man! Unfortunately, I
met other military men... I do not know to whom and what orders he
gave, but by Sunday morning helicopter pilots and chemists were in
Chernobyl. In the morning, the commander of the chemical forces,
General V.K.Pikalov, flew there. Afterwards, for the elimination of
this accident, he deservedly received the title of Hero of the Soviet
Union. Going forward, I will note that Sergei Fedorovich Akhromeev
and I have gone through our entire "Chernobyl epic". I thank my lucky
stars that it was he, and not someone else, who actually led the
operation of the army, although formally the leadership was
exercised, of course, by the Minister of Defense. But I have learned
from my own experience the difference between the formal and the
real.

I'm running ahead again - even further, much further...

I am ashamed to even remember how the well-known "Warrior with
privileges" at the Supreme Council of the USSR mocked this old man, a
participant in the Patriotic War,[WW2] Hero of the Soviet Union. Was
it only she, mocked only him? Doesn't she dream about him at night
now? Forgive them, Sergei Fedorovich, maybe they really didn't know
what they were doing? How unfair it is that a combat marshal,
battle-worn, who knew everything and understood everything, an
intelligent and honest man, had to die so terribly in August 1991! Or
was he forced to die? [Akhromeev committed suicide, which was
speculated to be a murder, after the failed August coup in 1991. See
here for the details]

... At night, B. E. Shcherbina called again. I told him about the
conversation with Akhromeev, in response he informed about the
decision of the Commission to urgently evacuate the residents of
Pripyat, a city raised next to the power plant: the background
radiation there exceeded the norm. I didn't even think about sleep
that night. Fortunately, the damned state of passive expectation was
interrupted by Shcherbina's business calls, which I downright rushed
to, scaring my wife.

And at this time, buses were going along the night roads to Pripyat,
more than a thousand of them. Ukrainian railroad workers brought
three special trains to Pripyat. The commission, which included
representatives of the regions neighboring Chernobyl on site, hastily
determined the nearest points for the temporary resettlement of the
evacuees.

The evacuation began on Sunday at 14.00, and exactly three hours
later there was no one left in Pripyat. Forty thousand people left
their inhabited homes, abandoned their households, properties
collected for years, and went into the unknown.

On Monday the 28th a meeting of the Politburo took place. I reported
on the first results of the work of the Government Commission.
Naturally I talked about the evacuation. About the situation at the
power plant: The fourth unit was destroyed, the third was shut down,
the first and the second were working, although the radioactive
contamination was quite high there.

The helicopter pilots, led by General Antoshkin, began to fly around
the exploded block. They established that the reactor and the reactor
hall were completely destroyed, pieces of graphite blocks were thrown
by the explosion into open areas. A white column of smoke rose from
the mouth of the reactor hundreds of meters up - apparently from the
burning graphite - and a crimson glow was clearly visible inside the
remains of the reactor.

The main question - whether the reactor continued to operate, that
is, whether the process of accumulation of radioactive isotopes was
going on - got answered negatively: Legasov got to the reactor in an
armored vehicle and personally made sure that the reactor was
"quiet". But the graphite continued to burn, this process is long and
extremely dangerous. The search was on for a means for reliable
extinguishing...

It was clear to everyone that the situation was indeed an emergency,
dangerous not just for Chernobyl. The ecology of the countries in the
entire European zone was in grave danger. The next day, the Politburo
Task Force was formed, taking control of the situation. I was
assigned to lead the Task Force.

Now they can probably throw another stone at us: Saying another
party-state bureaucratic formation instead of action. Saying it is
not necessary to meet, but to act... Let me remind you once again: the
trouble happened at the beginning of 1986, the authority of the
Politburo was indisputable. Only its name could involve everything
and everyone in the country, and the events, we understood, were
moving towards that.

One example. Quite quickly, Shcherbina's Commission (again, Legasov
proposed) found a way to extinguish the reactor: Pelt it with lead
from the air. And one phone call from me made all the trains carrying
lead on the railroads of the country turn to Chernobyl. At once! And
no one dared to object...

Yes, in trouble, in catastrophe conditions we know how to work, we
know how to do everything that is necessary, without further ado.
But, firstly, the country then in the last days of April 86 still had
a poor idea of what the Chernobyl hell would bring along with it, it
was still just beginning. The emergency in those hours existed only
for those who understood the true state of affairs.

Even in Pripyat, the city of power engineers, weddings were
celebrated on Saturday night,and the evacuation itself went easy,
without much drama. Some of them even left in their cars: There was
no radiation monitoring on the roads yet. In all fairness, I will add
that by the day of the evacuation, the level of contamination in the
city was still not too dangerous.

No, believe me, an experienced production worker who knew how to deal
with the level of governing orders: If it is known that the Politburo
is at the head, any executor of any rank will do everything
unquestioningly and precisely. This is the "second" and the main
thing... And no matter what they say now about the Politburo, it was a
collective body. Its decisions were were subject to mandatory
enforcement. Yes, the system was such. But forgive me for the
sacrilege, thank God that Chernobyl happened not now, but back then...

The task force met daily, and in the first days, twice a day. In the
meeting room, HF radio was equipped with amplifiers so that all those
present could hear the communications with Chernobyl. Any issue from
this zone was resolved immediately. Everyone who could help us or
suggest something, worked with us. Any request was satisfied at once.
Today I look through the notes that I kept at every meeting according
to my old habit: We have resolved more than four hundred specific
issues. Or, to be more precise: Helped to resolve, made the solution
possible.

I cannot help but quote the tape-recorder "diary" of Academician
Legasov once again:

"I do not know of a single major or minor event that would not have
been in the field of vision of the Politburo Task Force. I must say
that its meetings, its decisions were of very calm and reserved
character, with the maximum desire to rely on the point of view of
specialists, but comparing the points of view of various specialists
in every possible way. For me, it was an example of a properly
organized work... At the same time, in its decisions, the Task Force
always sought to follow the path of maximum protection of the
interests of people."

I daresay, the loyal love the academician who had untimely passed
away held for the formal party body could hardly be doubted.
Legasov's words still remain the best reward for me personally.

Alas, but in the early days, civilian authorities very badly coped
with the "protection of the interests of the people." Medicine turned
out to be simply unprepared for working in extreme conditions, when
we had not even hours, but minutes. [Ryzhkov's critical account can
be seen in the Politburo meeting transcript from May 5, 1986] And
again the military came to the rescue: the mobilization of reservists
began, as is customary in our army, in the mothballed medical
battalions, ready to instantly deploy in a state of emergency. It
already was- they did not remember a bigger emergency. Five fully
manned battalions have managed to do much of what civilian medics
were supposed to do.

Was it sad for who entered the reserve battalions? Yes, the civilian
doctors entered! What are we -let the military forgive me for the
frank term- What are we, do we not know how to work without a stick?
Is it the lack of composure? Responsibility? Discipline? It is good
that the army has not yet lost all these qualities. However, now it
is going towards the point of catastrophically losing these
traditional properties. In it, as in all of our society, theft,
corruption, and laxity are thriving. The army is part of society and
cannot exist outside of it. And the defects of society are also its
defects.

But this did not happen by itself. For several years now, the Russian
army has been subject to purposeful discrediting and disintegration.
A man in uniform has always been the last hope, mainstay and symbol
of the protection of compatriots in our country. Now the army tanks
are firing point-blank, direct shots at their own parliament... [He is
referring to the Russian constitutional crisis in 1993]

Let's return to the topic of the chapter. Our illustrious civil
defense has just as ineptly slipped up. All these notorious
activities with trying on gas masks and regarding the poorly drawn
posters turned out to be unnecessary. It is rightly said: it was
smooth on paper... In theory, our "geoshniks" were as established as
they were, but in reality they drove sprinklers out of the infected
streets to scrub the dust with brushes. We had to increase the number
of military chemists in the affected area, and they did not
disappoint.

There was, as one would expect, a frightening shortage of medicines.
On May 1, if I am not mistaken, we decided to purchase them abroad.
On May 5, the sellers were already found, and medicines began to flow
into the country. I will allow myself to make a small digression from
the chronology of events. We have just mentioned the purchase of
medicines. Similar decisions were made on the acquisition of
equipment abroad: robots, special cranes, chemical reagents, etc. And
all this had to be paid for in foreign currency. We spent about 60
million foreign exchange rubles, or at the then exchange rate of 100
million dollars. [Ryzhkov is being modest and making a passing
mention of it, however he did an epic act, which is detailed in this
documentary.]

I was oppressed and resented by the overt cynicism of the Western
"civilized" society. Not only did they not provide material support,
but they did not even express sympathy. At that time they treated us
like lepers. And only individual organizations, specialists and
entrepreneurs offered their help.

A little later, in a conversation with Swedish Prime Minister I.
Karlsson, I expressed my bewilderment. "You in the West must thank
us," I said. "No one is ever insured against planetary disasters,
including in nuclear affairs. Our country and people have experienced
all this horror, but we have accumulated invaluable experience that
is needed by everyone, the whole world. What happened with us is our
cross, and the fact that the West stood aside at that time is a
matter of your conscience."

... I do not like to lead only from a commanding chair, as is customary
in our country. I always want to see with my own eyes what is being
done. Information from Chernobyl was in a continuous stream. It was
unlikely that anyone could have thought of hiding something. But
information is just documents, telephone conversations... But some kind
of anxiety did not leave me, sharpening without tiring: Do we know
all, are we doing everything right? And then - just on May 1 -
Ligachev, -he was a member of the Task Force of the Politburo-
approached me with the same doubts. We decided to fly to Kiev the
next day. Observing the chain of command, we reported our decision to
the Secretary General. He immediately and actively supported us: Go,
you will see everything on the spot.

To be honest, I expected that he -the head of the party and state-
would also want to fly with us. But he did not even express any such
desire. Even in the form of an assumption, he did not...

Digressing from the course of events, I want to ask myself a
question: Why did Gorbachev show such a strange personal passivity?
Why was he never in the burning Chernobyl? Why did he not come to the
"hot spots" when they really became such? Neither Karabakh, nor
Tbilisi, nor Sumgait, nor Baku, nor Vilnius...

After all, from the very first days of his reign, he intensively and
successfully molded his own image as the people's favorite. He
approached people, talked to them right on the streets, although, to
be honest, these conversations soon became boring in their monotony
of a tape. He did not shy from press conferences. He felt easy under
the telephoto lenses pointed at close range. He was able to, and
wanted to please everyone.

And then, like something in the hedges... After all, it is clear to
anyone how much human sympathy even a short -just a few hours-
appearance in the very Chernobyl would have brought him! How much, by
the way, would it add confidence to the Chernobyl victims themselves!
Look, the "iron" Margaret Thatcher, so in love with Gorbachev - she
never missed a single emergency in Great Britain: at the plane crash
site, or the gunned down street of Belfast, her frail figure appeared
everywhere. Her - a woman!

All the more, it happened just once - when a gas pipeline stretched
next to the railway exploded in Bashkiria, and the explosion claimed
hundreds of lives, crippled dozens of destinies. Right then
Gorbachev, after my information, volunteered to fly with me to the
disaster site! Why only once?

By the way, when Ligachev and I flew to Kiev, it turned out that
neither the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Ukraine, Vladimir Vasilyevich Shcherbitsky, nor his closest
associates had ever bothered to visit the disaster zone for all these
long days! We were expected? The only higher authority who had
visited the zone before us was Valentina Semyonovna Shevchenko,
Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the republic.
Evidently women respond faster to trouble. [Ryzhkov is apparently a
feminist, which becomes obvious in this interview with Inga Legasova,
daughter of Valery Legasov.]

We, I repeat, have arrived. And then I had to refuse to visit Kiev
and insist on an immediate trip to Chernobyl. The faster, the better.

However, it didn't work out like that. On the way, we stopped in
those ecologically clean settlements where some of the inhabitants of
Pripyat were evacuated. There were any questions from their side,
naturally. But I will note a fact that now may surprise you: A
distinct sense of calmness. Today, not without bitterness, I think:
Calmness is just a child of ignorance. The explosion was outwardly
terrible, but instantaneous. The main danger entered people's lives
slowly, not evasively, but absolutely invisibly. Discreetly. People
were yet to realize the trouble.

I remember an old woman who sincerely complained to me: "I had to
throw away such good potatoes! I wanted to take at least a bag - they
didn't give it, "dirty ", they said. And how is it dirty? Potatoes
are potatoes... " However, maybe I met this old woman the wrong time,
maybe on my next visit. What's the difference... How many people still
do not understand in our country, underestimating the threat of
radiation contamination! The current commercial operations with
radioactive materials alone are worth something!

The headquarters of the Government Commission settled in the building
of the district party committee. They were already waiting for us.
Shcherbina, Legasov, Mayorets, Velikhov, Chairman of the State
Hydromet Izrael, briefly spoke about the situation. Then the doctors
spoke, the chemists spoke about their problems, or rather, about
general ones.

Legasov is absolutely right in his memoirs: We were guided in
everything only by the opinions of specialists. But there was one
issue that had to be solved by us. By me. A large-scale map lay on
the table, on which there was an uneven, unsightly blot - the Zone of
dangerous radioactive damage, from where the inhabitants had to be
evacuated. If you poked a compass needle into the point with the
inscription "Chernobyl" and draw a circle with a radius of 30
kilometers, then the longest and thinnest "tongues" of the Zone would
have touched it. It is true, within the outlined circle there were
also places that did not fall into the Zone, where the radiation
level, according to the information provided, made it possible to
live...

Everyone was waiting for the decision. You could not afford to make a
mistake. "We will evacuate people from the thirty-kilometer Zone."

"All of it?" someone asked.

Until then, they have argued, proposed: Let's not rush, let's specify
the boundaries of the Zone once again. They were nevertheless
determined with some margins. In addition, the radiation
reconnaissance by helicopter -and it could not have been done
otherwise- was not the most accurate.

I always loved the saying: Measure seven times ... Alas, but at that
moment it did not fit the situation. There was no time left to
measure seven times, we had to hurry. Saving money, cutting corners
on the evacuations, on people's health -This I could neither
understand, nor accept. Better to play it safe, otherwise it's not
just more expensive, but worse for the people, it wouldn't do.

"All of it!" - I resolutely finalized, "And start at once."

When we returned to Kiev a few hours later, hundreds of empty buses
were en route to the Zone: It seemed that the entire road from
Chernobyl to Kiev was occupied by them. In the Zone, 186 settlements
were to be depopulated.

Shcherbina left a day later. By that time, he had received a
substantial dose of radiation. Then he would fly there more than
once, he would fly until 1989, would add new Roentgens to that dark
sum... Did they not ultimately shorten his life?

The so-called changeable composition of the Commission remained in
the Zone. And it was headed in turn, after Shcherbina, Silaev, then
Voronin, Maslyukov, Gusev, Vedernikov, Tolstykh, the Ukrainians
Masol, Mostovoy... If I have forgotten anyone, do not blame me.

When the radiation situation stabilized by the fall of 86, and the
work in the Zone entered an organized phase, the shift "vigils" have
ceased.

In 1989, all those who, as they say, were not too lazy, who wanted to
make a big political name for themselves out of the nationwide
misfortune, were already "on duty" at Chernobyl. Their legion - "on
duty", competing in a childish game called "Who will shout louder"...

And in those early days, even the journalists who broke through into
the Zone wrote about the tragedy mainly as only a grievous incident.

It, as many believed, would end well enough. Unfortunately, they were
wrong. Should they be blamed? Or, according to the newest habit, will
we call the partocrats to answer, who with all their might hid the
bitter truth from the people?

Even a former prominent partocrat, and later on dressed in democratic
clothes in time, Shevardnadze in his memoirs throws stones at his
colleagues -members of the Politburo. Because of their inertia, in
the first days of the catastrophe he could not immediately report
everything about it to the world. Apparently he knew everything in
those days, unlike us, those who every hour, every day, bit by bit,
collected data, analyzed it and made conclusions.

One should not be surprised at such a statement. This man had gone
through all the imaginable and unimaginable steps of climbing "up",
he is indeed an aerobatics ace -from the nationwide demonstration of
kisses with the infirm Brezhnev at the congress to chaos and human
blood in his native Georgia. He's always right!

Recently it became known to me that Yuri Antonievich Israel was
almost "slaughtered" at the elections in the Russian Academy of
Sciences, only because at that time he was the chairman of the State
Hydromet Committee and supposedly he was hiding the true radiation
state from his superiors. And such games are being played by more
than grown up uncles? Yes, even if he wanted to do it (I don't know
why?) it wouldn't have worked out. Rechecking of all radiation data
was carried out by the military, geologists, atomic scientists, etc.
Take, dear doubting sirs, maps of the radiation situation for each
day -and you will be assured. I think they have survived at the
General Staff. And it was on the basis of such verified and rechecked
data that the necessary decisions were made both in the Center and in
the affected republics.

For example, I did not even think that "Aunt Klava" from a distant
Siberian village needed to have data on radiation in Rems in some
Belarusian village. I had no time to think about that erstwhile.
Another "Aunt Klava" was a pain in my head. Thousands of them had to
be taken from the Zone, settled more or less reasonably, clothed,
fed, helped for rebuilding their lives.

Nor should we forget that it was only May '86. No one has ever heard
of such a cunning thing as "Glasnost", although, by the way, this
term was adopted as early as the February Revolution of 1917.
[Glasnost was a term used for transparency, popularized by Gorbachev]

Subsequently, there were many complaints about the fact that data on
the radiation situation in this or that area, in a particular
locality, were communicated only to the leadership of these
republics, and not published in the Far Eastern press, for example.
They say to me: If there was Glasnost, how many lives could have been
saved, how much human health could have been preserved! I wonder in
response: How so? And so, they say that powerful public opinion would
strongly influence all the high up bosses, so that they act faster
and more efficiently. Having learned about the national disaster, the
volunteers would rush to help Chernobyl from all over the country.

I can't agree with that. There was no end of the volunteers in those
days. There were thousands of letters asking to be sent to work in
the Zone. Did miners and builders, power engineers and meliorators,
physicists and geologists come to Chernobyl under a gun? Is it
possible to count all of them ?! Who forced the participant of the
Patriotic War, the "Afghan" General Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov and
other generals, officers and soldiers to swallow the contaminated
dust? It was not the lack of transparency, but human misfortune that
pushed them there, to the detriment of their health.

Only a year or two later, the press started talking seriously and a
lot about Chernobyl, albeit with "brute force", with outright lies.
Numerous public funds began to be created to help the Chernobyl
victims, and people's deputies of all stripes from different tribunes
started to scream on top of their lungs at the entire television
audience of the country that it was impossible to live not only in
the thirty-kilometer Zone, but also in the three-hundred-kilometer
one. A quote from the "Revelations of John the Theologian" about the
star of Wormwood became known, as it were for the first time, since
the publicist needed the place...

Let us stop! This is about the Chelyabinsk nuclear disaster in the
distant and silent 50s, not only the country, but we, the neighbors
in Sverdlovsk, knew nothing of. Fortunately, Chernobyl has never been
a secret. And then, when it was completely opened wide... Are there
enough volunteer doctors, and not volunteers - just doctors in
district children's hospitals somewhere in Belarusian Khoiniki near
the Zone? Have sovereign states now have more houses, apartments,
jobs for Chernobyl refugees? Has the current Glasnost put a stop to
the theft of funds allocated for the victims by the Russian
Government?

No, Glasnost alone cannot decide anything on its own. It alone
-pardon me- is ranting. And those who want and can are doing the
work, scream or don't... Yes, we did not scream about Chernobyl that
year. Perhaps in vain. Maybe it was indeed necessary to speak out:
The people's misfortune in all ages had been shouted out until the
screamers got tired and took up axes and saws, to rebuild what was
destroyed.

Now I look back ,thinking: What was not done? There are many things
that cannot be enumerated! And what has not been fulfilled, out of
what was needed to be absolutely, first and foremost fulfilled? I
can't remember: Everything was done! I will list it very briefly, no
need for longer -volumes have been written about Chernobyl.

Putting out the fire in the reactor... Done already on May 10. The
helicopter pilots threw sacks of lead exactly into the burning mouth,
worked as snipers, countless tons of metal went into the fire, and
there was a lot of it -trains arrived on time.

Academician Velikhov predicted the danger of molten combustion
products penetrating into the ground, and then into the groundwater.
Volunteer miners in just forty-five days, together with their
minister Mikhail Ivanovich Shchadov, laid an underground passage
under the base of the block and dug a huge space under it, for
filling with concrete and constructing a cooling system. Fortunately,
this was not necessary. But do I have the right to consider the work
of miners superfluous? Never!

There was -no longer theoretically predicted, but absolutely real
danger- of a washout of radioactive dust by summer and autumn rains,
and subsequently by spring floods, from the surface layer of the
earth into many rivers, rivulets and, most importantly, into Pripyat,
and beyond it -the Dnieper.

The "condemned by all" Ministry of Water Resources and one of its
leaders, P.A. Polad-Zade, (it was he who was "hacked to death" as the
minister by the People's Deputies in 1989) presented a plan of
nothing less than incredible finesse for the embankment of all
waterways of the huge region. And together with the army he carried
it out! 130 large and small dams were built on an area of 1.5
thousand square kilometers. Pripyat and Dnieper stayed clean.

It was necessary to figure out to where the thousands of evacuated
families would live. In Kiev itself, 7,500 apartments were allocated
(alas, but the queue was suspended), in Chernigov - 500, in the Kiev
region - 6,000 detached houses.

It was necessary to firmly bury the explosion site oozing death. The
construction was designed, aptly named afterwards "The sarcophagus".
My deputy, Yuri Petrovich Batalin, was eager to go to Chernobyl, but
at the insistence of the doctors, we did not allow him to go there.
It was he who submitted the project with such an ancient Greek name.

For the first time in the world, in the most difficult radiation
conditions, a truly fantastic structure was built, which took 400
thousand cubic meters of concrete, 7 thousand tons of steel
structures. The most accurate radiation sensors in its giant body
began to work already at the end of 86th. Essentially, the builders
of the sarcophagus had sacrificed themselves. Now many of them have
already passed away.

Medicine ... We understood that Chernobyl was long-lasting, for
generations. We were in a desperate hurry, trying to make it. 5.4
million underwent initial compulsory prophylaxis, half a million
people were put on permanent dispensary registration.

Do not take this dry and well-known information for an attempt to
convince the reader that everything was done in general. We perfectly
understood that there is much more to be done than done.

Chernobyl hit the just reviving economy on a grand scale, hit it
mercilessly. Let me remind you: Then there was Armenia. [Spitak
earthquake disaster, see here for the videos] It is a whole different
conversation. Later, the country began to fall apart. Plans and
conceptions collapsed. Politics and the elements attacked the
economy, strangled it, tore it to pieces ...

But I am talking about the first days and the first months of
trouble, I remember them, I sort through them like pebbles in my
palm, and I cannot find out: Where did we go wrong then? What was not
picked up? Where did we not step? Once again, I'm talking about the
beginning. Another digression.

I have already written here that time and again life has laid "firing
points" on our way, the embrasures we had to protect our chests from.
Often they were created by our leaden fate: The civil war, the Great
Patriotic War -that is from a number of global catastrophes. And
there were the lesser: Crop failures, droughts, earthquakes, floods.
But many, too many we have built against ourselves: Mass
collectivization, "state economic activity", ubiquitous sowing of
corn... All this was one way or another on the people. Chernobyl
combined both options: We built it ourselves, we treated it
disrespectfully and it took revenge on us with a catastrophe that
tragically affected both people and nature, and continues to threaten
not only the present, but also future generations, the flora and
fauna of many countries...

"N. I. Ryzhkov said in his speech on July 14 that it seems to him
that the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was not
accidental, that the nuclear power industry was heading with some
inevitability towards such a difficult event." I quote not from my
notes, but from the memoirs of Legasov.

Yes, indeed, I said it at the Politburo. I said and had grounds for
that. The Chernobyl disaster happened six months into my premiership.
But before that, I had often attended meetings of the government, got
acquainted with various notes, publications of scientists and
specialists, and felt that the vigilance of scientists, builders, and
operators had dulled. With this terrible energy they stopped talking
in "you". It punished us.

And as soon as the country heard the Chernobyl thunder, as soon as
another embrasure breathing death appeared on the way, we rushed once
more to close it with the whole world, as if nothing else existed.
People did not think about money, or themselves, or even their loved
ones. Quarrels and strife were immediately forgotten, everyone
rallied and fought hand in hand.

I have already told how the trains turned to Chernobyl on a phone
call, how our foreign trade instantly worked, when it was necessary
to urgently purchase medicines and equipment. I can give dozens of
examples of accurate, fast and coordinated work of all republics,
different ministries, departments, factories.

But why does this precision, speed, and consistency necessarily
require trouble? Why, as soon as the order "Don't retreat!" loses its
relevance, everyone immediately calms down and works wibbly-wobbly as
usual? Why aren't we able to work conscientiously in peace and quiet?
What is it? Is it the fault of socialism again? Or the
command-and-control system? Or an indestructible sign of national
character? Then again, in many respects these are rhetorical
questions...

I again flew to Chernobyl on August 8 with a member of the
Commission, Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov.[Head of the KGB] Now we
have already thought about tomorrow. Together with scientists and
specialists, we planned when it would be possible to start up the
first and second blocks of the station, when the third block would
start working - and whether it would work at all. We were already
looking for a place to build a new city of power engineers in place
of Pripyat, which would be named Slavutich.

In those days, I was not only on the Ukrainian territory of the
disaster, but also on the Belarusian one, which suffered even more.
We watched the construction of settlements for the evacuees, and were
already openly happy that -to quote the words of Gorbachev from his
much belated May 15 speech -"the worst is over." But then no one
really knew how painfully Chernobyl would affect the health of
thousands of Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians tomorrow. The
understanding had not yet come that almost none of those deprived of
their home would ever be as happy anywhere as they were in their
home.

Well, and, of course, no one probably imagined that the nationwide
misfortune could be used to create a name and fame for oneself, to
gain an unexpected position, replicating the misfortune in films and
books, making mad money - without doing anything for a particular
child, village or hospital.

Recently, a ponderous book by a writer and omnipresent lady from the
presidential entourage saw the light of day, in which she used the
minutes of the meetings of our Task Force. How much rage in this
"work" in relation to those who died prematurely, climbing into the
inferno of Chernobyl hell. Even enemies are more respectful towards
their most fierce adversary.

The ninth anniversary of the tragedy is behind. I hoped that during
this time there would be some rethinking of everything that had
happened. Nothing of the sort. And I promised myself that in such an
environment, this chapter of the book will be my last publication on
this topic. I just want to say: "Stop. Cool it down. You will hurt
your throat. And are you not ashamed?.." They are not ashamed. They
always "know how to do it." Did they bring the suicide of a person
whom I respected immensely, whose knowledge and talent I admired, who
in many respects solved the problem of block number four -
Academician V.A. Legasov?

If you want - call it another digression. A digression about
vileness.

The time had come to reward the heroes. There were many of them in
Chernobyl, as in every war. Helicopter pilots, chemists,
firefighters, nuclear scientists, workers, scientists. I do not know
what will become of our orders and medals, whether it will be
honorable or shameful to bear the title of Hero of Socialist Labor
tomorrow and whether the authorities will replace it with the title
of Hero of Capitalist Labor. And with the Order of the October
Revolution, everything is clear: It will become the Order of the
August or December Counter-Revolution, or even the Devil's October. I
am sure that someday such awards will not be a sign of honor and
heroism, but a symbol of betrayal and shame.

But at that time people still valued orders and medals. They rejoiced
when they had the honor to receive a government award for good work,
heroic deed, self-sacrifice. Lists of candidates for awards were
compiled locally. By tradition, the Politburo approved only awards
for "big bosses". But seriously, we have decided not to include
members of the Task Force and deputy chairmen of the Council of
Ministers among those to be awarded. Fortunately, the times when
members of the Politburo hung stars on each other's chests were gone.
How, tell me, was it possible not to reward the commander of the
"Chemists" General VK Pikalov, who spent day and night around the
fourth block? How could one not reward the "Miners' minister" MI
Shchadov, who himself did not get out of the tunnel under the block?

We began to look at the list. We read the names - what the hell?
There is no Legasov. Why? They vaguely explain to me that he is
supposedly the deputy director of the Institute of Atomic Energy,
which designed the exploded reactor. How, they say, can you reward
him... They will not understand, they say... Our commission would not
back down. When the team of Academician A.P. Aleksandrov designed
this reactor, Legasov was nowhere near the institute. He's been there
recently. He has nothing to do with the reactor at all, he is an
expert in physicochemical processes. He managed to extinguish this
reactor in the end! I convinced them. Everyone supported me. He was
included in the list and submitted to the Presidium of the Supreme
Council of the USSR.

And rumors cannot be held back. They said that at the Institute, they
already congratulated Legasov for the title of Hero of Socialist
Labor, which we submitted him for. And then the decree was published
in the newspapers with the list of the awardees, but Legasov was not
on that list.

I am a calm person in principle. I rarely explode, but this time I
could not help it. I went to see Gorbachev with a number of comrades:
Where did the academician disappear, who struck him out of the list?
Gorbachev, looking to the side, began to give all the same dusty
arguments: "They will not understand," "The time is wrong." Then he
kind of let it slip: The scientists themselves do not advise. And he
summed up the conversation: The train, as they say, has left, and we
will reward Legasov later for something else. By the way, on the
occasion of his 50th birthday, Minister Yefim Pavlovich Slavsky
expressed gratitude and presented him with a watch.

We, the participants in the conversation, left repressed. That is the
price of the Secretary General's heartfelt words about the people's
misfortune, human misery, the courage of heroes, the power of
science! Well, it was necessary to believe the "confidants" who were
deftly able to wash up under the wing of Man No. 1! I guess which of
the scientists close to Gorbachev at that time "did not advise" him
to reward Legasov. But I am silent about the guess. Alas, innocent
until proven guilty. [See this video interview where he recounts the
details]

As already mentioned, Chernobyl unexpectedly and powerfully hit our
still ailing economy. It was with Chernobyl that the attack on
nuclear energy began in essence. A senseless and extremely harmful
attack instead of deep analysis of the causes and sound problem
solving. In France, the USA, Japan and other countries, many nuclear
power plants operate quite successfully right in the cities.

Chernobyl has mercilessly swept through the fates of thousands of
people, and how many more will it find, catch, finish off! It left a
heavy mark in my life.

Not so long ago, the Ukrainians had decided to shut down and mothball
the power plant. The reason was an event that completely refuted the
theory, according to which the shell does not hit the same crater
twice. In our country, shells are aimed at one and the same crater:
There was a fire again at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Times are changing rapidly. Real life with its problems and hardships
forces us to reconsider seemingly removed questions. The
de-mothballing of the Armenian nuclear power plant is already
underway, the intensity of flames has decreased in Ukraine. But,
despite the "healing" properties of time, it will take many years for
the atomic fear syndrome to disappear.

Chernobyl is not only and not so much an explosion. Not only and not
so much radiation and everything inevitably and terribly associated
with it. Not only and not so much the issue of atomic energy.
Chernobyl is a moment of liberation for the dense human instincts,
abruptly involved in the primordial fear of the Invisible, the
Unfamiliar, the Unknown.

We could not imagine much when we extinguished the fire in the
reactor and rescued those who obviously could have suffered. Well,
for example, you could hardly imagine such an incredible intensity of
political struggle, which at some moments would grasp huge masses of
people, even small children. But in the heat of this struggle, the
powers that be of this world are not about the common man, even if
his fate and life are in danger. Everything is in motion. Anything
can become a trump card - even fear, which, of course, was born in
those truly tragic April-May days. To quiet it down, to calm people
down - psychotherapy as a branch of medicine, even the current
destroyers of everything -and they have not yet been able to abolish
all- do they really care about human peace in the political struggle?
Well, them fighters, fight for high ideals!

Fear was noticed and adopted by them, spun into an extraordinary,
incredible force. Attributed to all imaginable and unimaginable
enemies of the "democrats", the communists first of all, who, they
say, have always led the country to catastrophe. Especially if it is
man-made. And the name of that fear was given once and for all:
Chernobyl.

In 1992, I was invited to see an investigator from the General
Prosecutor's Office. It turns out that I was not quite right when I
said that the "democrats" are confronting the communists for what
happened in Chernobyl. It turned out that the case was initiated on
the instructions of the communist Gorbachev against the wrongdoers
-communists, who, having gone through Chernobyl, had the audacity to
stay alive. By inheritance from the USSR, the case passed on to
Russia. At the necessary moment, this topic is activated. I don't
know how long to wait for the new surge.

The interrogation lasted for about five hours. Dozens of questions
rained down on me. Whom do I personally blame for insufficient
measures to eliminate the accident? Nobody! Meaning the system is to
blame? The people who incompetently operated the power plant are to
blame! [Ryzhkov was literally tortured in these interrogations, see
my notes below]

The baton was taken up by the prosecutors of the CPSU at the
Constitutional Court. The presidential prosecutor "mister" Colonel
Kotenkov, who had overlaid himself above the top of his head with
volumes on Chernobyl, in a rehearsed army voice, persistently asked
questions about Rems and Curies in general and in specific villages
in particular.

I stood in front of him and thought: Where were you at that time? Why
didn't you volunteer there, into the hell? Maybe he wouldn't ask me
stupid questions right now. He and his ilk had no moral right to be
accusers of those people who considered it their civic duty to calm
down the element that had escaped from the hands of man. I answered
this audience for several hours. But soon after the trial I saw
Kotenkov on television, already in a general's uniform. After all, he
received his silver coins for the length of service at the trial.

Years have passed, and from the height of what I have learned, been
through and considered, I ask myself the questions today: Maybe it
was not worth striving to make the Chernobyl power plant work at all
costs? Maybe there was no need to spend a lot of money on its
restoration, on the construction of Slavutich - a new, from scratch,
city? Maybe these marginalized power engineers should have found
other jobs or been placed at other nuclear power plants? Maybe we
should have made a strong-willed decision: To extinguish the reactor,
erect a sarcophagus over the block and... close the Chernobyl nuclear
power plant? Forget about it. Put it behind.

And there would be no need to constantly prove to anyone -as if
making excuses- that the power plant itself is safe. That nuclear
energy is promising, and the world experience here is highly evident.
That in lousy hands, a moonshine apparatus can still explode. That
those lousy hands can happen to conservatives, democrats, communists
and anarchists alike. And no regime, no system has any guarantee
against misfortune born of chance or stupidity, fate or
mismanagement...

And fear would not rise to heaven. And it would not become an
instrument in evil and ruthless unclean hands. And people would live,
forgetting about past nightmares.

Questions, questions...

I wonder how the blessed memory of Valery Alekseevich Legasov would
answer them?

My notes: First of all, it was no easy task to translate this
chapter. Google translate, which can be used as a crutch to speed
things up, has failed half of the time, therefore it required a lot
of manual typing and carefully searching for the correct expressions
to avoid ruining the flow. Ryzhkov writes in an artistic literary,
and at times poetic style, which can be difficult to translate in
places. It wouldn't sit right with me not to make an effort to do the
proper justice to his stellar writing. It is a real shame this book
was never translated to any language, it merits translation not only
for being a priceless historical record offering a unique perspective
personally written by the second top authority of the Soviet Union,
but also for its incredible literary value, evoking the medieval
Byzantine chronicles of distinguished literary quality.

Ryzhkov quotes from the Legasov tapes in this chapter and also some
interviews where Chernobyl is discussed. Legasov also quotes Ryzhkov
in his tape memoirs and gives high praise to his articulation. They
were in complete agreement that Chernobyl was no accident, but the
Soviet Nuclear industry in its complacence and laxity was headed
there, it was inevitable. It is quite evident in the damning 1979
report by the late Secretary general and former KGB Chairman Yuri
Andropov, which you can read here.

Ryzkov answers the unfair criticism his administration and the
scientists involved in the liquidation had received in this chapter,
also in more detail in this two part video interview filmed in 1998.
See part 1 and part 2.

As for the hours long interrogation where he was accused with bogus
things, he details that in another chapter in the book, and quotes
the dialogues he had with the prosecutor. I can't recall if it was
this or an earlier interrogation, but he had barely recovered from a
heart attack and was forced to stand for hours, not allowed to have a
lunch break, psychologically tormented with a flood of accusatory
questions. Perhaps this should also be translated, at least in part,
to reflect the attitudes and general atmosphere regarding Chernobyl
in the beginning of post-Soviet era.

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Published June 7, 2021July 23, 2021

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