Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (22 page)

And at this point the internal radio announces that workers are advised not to leave the building. The area between our separate buildings grows deserted. Not a single person. It was frightening and strange.

The dosimetrists check my office—the desk is “glowing,” my clothes are glowing, the walls are glowing. I get up, I don’t even want to sit down in my chair. I wash my hair over the sink, check the dosimeter—it’s gotten better. So is it possible that there's an emergency at our institute? Some leak? So how are we going to clean up the buses that take us around the city? We'll have to break our heads thinking of something. And I was very proud of our reactor, I’d studied every millimeter of it.

We call up the nearby Ignalinsk nuclear plant. Their instruments are also going crazy. They’re also panicking. Then we call Chernobyl—and no one answers. By lunchtime we find out there’s a radioactive cloud over all of Minsk. We determined that the activity was iodine in nature. That means the accident was at a reactor.

My first reaction was to call my wife, to warn her. But all our telephones at the Institute were bugged. Oh, that ancient fear, they’d been raising us on it for decades. But they don’t know anything at home. My daughter is walking around with her friends after her music lesson at the conservatory. She's eating ice cream. Do I call? But that could lead to unpleasantness. They won't allow me to work on classified projects. But I can’t take it, I pick up the phone.

“Listen to me carefully.”

“What are you talking about?” my wife asks loudly.

“Not so loud. Close the windows, put all the food in plastic. Put on rubber gloves and wipe everything down with a wet cloth. Put the rag in a bag and throw it out. If there's laundry drying on the balcony, put it back in the wash.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not so loud. Dissolve two drops of iodine in a glass of water. Wash your hair with it.”

“What—” But I don’t let her finish, I put down the phone. She should understand, she works at the Institute herself.

At 15:30, we learned that there’d been an accident at the Chernobyl reactor.

That evening on the way back to Minsk on the institute bus we rode for half an hour in silence, or talking of other things. Everyone was afraid to talk about what happened. Everyone had his Party card in his pocket.

There was a wet rag in front of my apartment door—so my wife understood everything. I came in, threw off my jacket, and then my shirt, my pants, stripped down to my underwear. And suddenly this fury took hold of me. The hell with this secrecy! This fear! I took the city phone directory, and my daughter's address book and my wife’s, and began calling everybody one by one. I'd say: I work at the Institute for Nuclear Physics. There is a radioactive cloud over Minsk. And then I’d tell them what they needed to do: Wash their hair, close their windows, take the laundry off the balcony and wash it again, drink iodine, how to drink it correctly. People’s reaction was: Thank you. They didn't question me, they didn't get scared. I think they didn't believe me, or maybe they didn’t understand the importance of what was taking place. No one became frightened. It was a surprising reaction.

That evening my friend calls. He was a nuclear physicist. We were all so careless! We lived with such belief! Only now can you see with
what
belief. He calls and says that, by the way, he’s hoping to spend the May holidays at his in-laws’ near Gomel. It's a stone's throw from Chernobyl. And he’s bringing his little kids. “Great idea!" I yell at him. “You’ve lost your mind!” That’s a tale of professionalism. And of our faith. But I yelled at him. He probably doesn't remember that I saved his children.
[Takes a break.]

We—I mean all of us—we haven’t forgotten Chernobyl. We never understood it. What do savages understand about lightning?

There’s a moment in Ales Adamovich’s book, when he's talking to Andrei Sakharov about the atom bomb. “Do you know," says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, “how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?" There is a lot of romance in those words. For me, for my generation—I'm sorry, I see by your reaction, you think I am celebrating something terrible, instead of human genius. But it's only now that nuclear energy has fallen so low and been shamed. But for my generation—in 1945, when they first dropped the atom bomb, I was seventeen years old. I loved science fiction, I dreamt of traveling to other planets, and I decided that nuclear energy would take us into the cosmos. I enrolled at the Moscow Energy Institute and learned that the most top-secret department was the nuclear energy department. In the fifties and sixties, nuclear physicists were the elite, they were the best and brightest. The humanities were pushed aside. Our teacher back in school would say, In three little coins there is enough energy to fuel an electrical power station. Your head could spin! I read the American, Smith, who described how they invented the atomic bomb, tested it, what the explosions were like. In our world everything was a secret. The physicists got the high salaries, and the secrecy added to the romance. It was the cult of physics, the era of physics! Even when Chernobyl blew up, it took a long time to part with that cult. They’d call up scientists, scientists would fly into Chernobyl on a special charter, but many of them didn’t even bring their shaving kits, they thought they'd be there just a few hours. Just a few hours, even though they knew a reactor had blown up. They believed in their physics, they were of the generation that believed in it. But the era of physics ended at Chernobyl.

Your generation already sees the world differently. I recently read a passage in Konstantin Leontiev in which he writes that

the results of man’s physical-chemical experiments will lead a higher power to intervene in our earthly affairs. But we were raised under Stalin, we couldn’t imagine the possibility of some supernatural power. I only read the Bible afterward. I married the same woman twice. I left and then came back—we met each other again in the same world. Life is a surprising thing! A mysterious thing! Now I believe. I believe that the three-dimensional world has become crowded for mankind. Why is there such an interest in science fiction? Man is trying to tear himself away from the earth. He is trying to master different categories of time, different planets, not just this one. The apocalypse—nuclear winter—has already all been described in Western literature, as if they were rehearsing it, preparing for the future. The explosion of a large number of nuclear warheads will result in enormous fires. The atmosphere will be saturated with smoke. Sunlight won’t be able to reach the earth, and this will ignite a chain reaction—from cold to colder to colder still. This man-made version of the end of the world has been taught since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. But atom bombs won’t disappear even after they destroy the last warhead. There will still be the knowledge of atom bombs.

You merely asked, but I keep arguing with you. We’re having an argument between generations. Have you noticed? The history of the atom—it’s not just a military secret and a curse. It’s also our youth, our era, our religion. Fifty years have gone by, just fifty years. Now I also sometimes think that the world is being ruled by someone else, that we with our cannons and our spaceships are like children. But I haven’t convinced myself of this yet.

Life is such a surprising thing! I loved physics and thought that I wouldn’t ever do anything but physics. But now I want to write. I want to write, for example, about how man does not actually accommodate science very much—he gets in the way of it. Or about how a few physicists could change the world. About a new dictatorship of physics and math. A whole new life has opened up for me.

Valentin Borisevich, 
former
head of the Laboratory of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences

___

In those first days, there were mixed feelings. I remember two: fear and insult. Everything had happened and there was no information: the government was silent, the doctors were silent. The regions waited for directions from the
oblast,
the
oblast
from Minsk, and Minsk from Moscow. It was a long, long chain, and at the end of it a few people made the decisions. We turned out to be defenseless. That was the main feeling in those days. A few people were deciding our fate, the fate of millions.

At the same time, a few people could kill us all. They weren’t maniacs, and they weren't criminals. They were just ordinary workers at a nuclear power plant. When I understood that, I experienced a very strong shock. Chernobyl opened an abyss, something beyond Kolyma, Auschwitz, the Holocaust. A person with an ax and a bow, or a person with a grenade launcher and gas chambers, can't kill everyone. But with an atom . . .

I’m not a philosopher and I won’t philosophize. Better to tell you what I remember. There was the panic in the first days: some people ran to the pharmacy and bought up all the iodine, others stopped going to the market, buying milk, meat, and especially lamb. Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping that it would be made of good meat. Then we found out that it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it. We turned out to be defenseless. But you know that already. I want to tell about something else, about how we were a Soviet generation.

My friends—they were doctors and teachers, the local intelligentsia. We had our own circle, we'd get together at my house and drink coffee. Two old friends were there, one of them was a doctor, and they both had little kids.

“I’m leaving tomorrow to live with my parents," says the doctor. ‘‘I’m taking the kids with me. I’d never forgive myself if they got sick."

“But the papers say that in a few days the situation will be stabilized,” says the second. “Our troops are there. Helicopters, armored vehicles. They said so on the radio."

The first says, “You should take your kids, too. Get them away from here! Hide them! This isn’t a war. We can’t even imagine what’s happened."

And suddenly they took these tones with one another and it ended up in recriminations and accusations.

“What would happen if everyone behaved like you? Would we have won the war?"

“You’re a traitor to your children! Where is your maternal instinct? Fanatic!"

And everyone’s sense, including mine, was that my doctor friend was panicking. We needed to wait until someone told us, until they announced it. But she was a doctor, she knew more: “You can’t even defend your own children! No one's threatening them? But you're afraid anyway!” How we hated her at that moment, she ruined the whole evening for us. The next day she left, and we all dressed up our kids and took them to the May Day demonstration. We could go or not go, as we pleased. No one forced us to go, or demanded that we go. But we thought it was our duty. Of course! At such a time, on such a day—everyone should be together. We ran along the streets, in the crowd.

All the secretaries of the regional Party committee were up on the tribunal, next to the first secretary. And his little daughter was there, standing so that everyone could see her. She was wearing a raincoat and a hat, even though it was sunny out, and he was wearing a military trench-coat. But they were there. I remember that. It's not just the land that's contaminated, but our minds. And for many years, too.

From a letter from Lyudmila Polenkaya, village teacher, evacuated from the Chernobyl Zone

___

It was freedom. You felt like you were a free person there. That's not something you can understand, that's something only someone who's been in a war can understand. I’ve seen them, those guys—they get drunk, and they’ll start talking about how they still miss it—the freedom, the flight. Not one step backward! Stalin's order. The special forces. But you shoot, you survive, you receive the 100 grams you’re entitled to, a pouch of cheap tobacco. There are a thousand ways for you to die, to get blown to bits, but if you try hard enough, you can trick them—the devil, the senior officers, the combat, the one who’s in that coffin with that wound, the very Almighty—you can trick them all and survive!

There’s a loneliness to freedom. I know it, all the ones who were at the reactor know it. Like in a trench at the very front. Fear and freedom! You live for everything. That’s not something you who live an ordinary life can understand. Remember how they were always preparing us for war? But it turns out our minds weren’t ready. I wasn't ready. Two military guys came to the factory, called me out. “Can you tell the difference between gasoline and diesel?” I say: “Where are you sending me?" “What do you mean, where? As a volunteer for Chernobyl." My military specialty is rocket fuel. It’s a secret specialty. They took me straight from the factory, just in a T-shirt, they didn’t even let me go home. I said, “I need to tell my wife." “We’ll tell her ourselves." There were about fifteen of us on the bus, reserve officers. I liked them. If we had to, we went, if it was needed, we worked, if they told us to go to the reactor, we got up on the roof of that reactor.

Near the evacuated villages they’d set up elevated guard posts, soldiers sat there with their rifles. There were barriers. Signs that said, “The roadside is contaminated. Stopping or exiting is strictly forbidden." Gray trees, covered with decontamination-liquid. You start going crazy! Those first few days we were afraid to sit on the ground, on the grass; we didn’t walk anywhere, we ran; if a car passed us, we’d put on a gas mask right away for the dust. After our shifts we’d sit in the tents. Ha! After a few months, it all seemed normal. It was just where you lived. We tore plums off the trees, caught fish, the pike there is incredible. And breams—we dried them to eat with beer. People probably told you about this already? We played soccer. We went swimming! Ha.
[Laughs again.]
We believed in fate, at bottom we’re all fatalists, not pharmacists.