Midnight in Chernobyl Read online

  Sitting alone on his hotel bed, the young engineer confronted his responsibility for conjuring from an empty field a project expected to cost almost 400 million rubles. He drew up lists of the materials to begin building and, using his slide rule, calculated their attendant costs. Then he delivered his estimates to the state bank in Kiev. He traveled to the city almost every day by bus; when there wasn’t a bus, he thumbed a ride. As the project had no accountant, there was no payroll, so he received no wages.

  Before Brukhanov could start building the station itself, he had to create the infrastructure he’d need to bring materials and equipment to the site: a rail spur from the station in nearby Yanov; a new dock on the river to receive gravel and reinforced concrete. He hired construction workers, and soon a growing army of men and women at the controls of caterpillar-tracked excavators and massive BelAZ dump trucks began to tear pathways through the forest and scrape a plateau from the dun landscape. To house himself, a newly hired bookkeeper, and the handful of workers who lived on the site, Brukhanov organized a temporary village in a forest clearing nearby. A cluster of wooden huts on wheels, each equipped with a small kitchen and a log-burning stove, the settlement was named simply Lesnoy—“of the woods”—by its new inhabitants. As the weather warmed, Brukhanov had a schoolhouse built where children could be educated up to fourth grade. In August 1970 he was joined in Lesnoy by his young family: his wife, Valentina, their six-year-old daughter, Lilia, and infant son, Oleg.

  Valentina and Viktor Brukhanov had spent the first decade of their lives together helping fulfill the dream of Socialist electrification. Chernobyl was the family’s third power plant start-up in six years; Valentina and Viktor had met as young specialists working on the building of the Angren hydroelectric project, a hundred kilometers from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. Valentina had been the assistant to a turbine engineer, and Viktor, fresh from university, had been a trainee. He was still planning to return to university to finish his master’s degree when the head of his department at the plant encouraged him to stay: “Wait,” he told him, “you’ll meet your future wife here!” Mutual friends introduced Viktor and Valentina in the winter of 1959: “You’ll drown in her eyes,” they promised. The couple had been dating for barely a year when, in December 1960, they were married in Tashkent; Lilia was born in 1964.

  To Valentina, Lesnoy seemed a magical place, with fewer than a dozen families gathered in the huddle of makeshift cottages; at night, when the roar of the bulldozers and excavators subsided, a velvet silence fell on the glade, the darkness pierced by a single lantern and the screeching of owls. Every once in a while, to inspire the workers to help them achieve their construction targets, Moscow sent down Soviet celebrities, including the Gypsy superstar Nikolai Slichenko and his troupe, to perform shows and concerts. The family remained in the forest settlement for another two years, as shock-work brigades excavated the first reactor pit and carved a giant reservoir—an artificial lake 11 kilometers long and 2.5 kilometers wide that would provide the millions of cubic meters of cooling water crucial to operating four massive reactors—from the sandy soil.

  Meanwhile, Viktor oversaw the genesis of an entirely new settlement—an atomgrad, or “atomic city”—beside the river. The planners designed the settlement, eventually named Pripyat, to house the thousands of staff who would one day run the nuclear complex, along with their families. A handful of dormitories and apartment buildings reached completion in 1972. The new town went up so quickly that at first there were no paved roads and no municipal heating plant to serve the apartment buildings. But its citizens were young and enthusiastic. The first group of specialists to arrive on the site were idealists, pioneers of the nuclear future, keen to transform their homeland with new technology. To them, these problems were trifles: to keep warm at night, they slept with their coats on.

  Valentina and Viktor were among the first to move in, taking a three-bedroom apartment in 6 Lenina Prospekt, right at the entrance to the new town, in the winter of 1972. While they waited for the city’s first school to be completed, every day their daughter, Lilia, hitched a ride in a truck or car back to Lesnoy, where she attended lessons in the forest schoolhouse.

  According to Soviet planning regulations, Pripyat was separated from the plant itself by a “sanitary zone” in which building was prohibited, to ensure that the population would not be exposed to fields of low-level ionizing radiation. But Pripyat remained close enough to the plant to be reached by road in less than ten minutes—just three kilometers as the crow flies. And as the city grew, its residents began to build summer houses in the sanitary zone, each happy to disregard the rules in exchange for a makeshift dacha and a small vegetable garden.

  * * *

  Viktor Brukhanov’s initial instructions for the Chernobyl plant called for the construction of a pair of nuclear reactors—a new model known by the acronym RBMK, for reaktor bolshoy moschnosti kanalnyy, or high-power channel-type reactor. In keeping with the Soviet weakness for gigantomania, the RBMK was both physically larger and more powerful than almost any reactor yet built in the West, each one theoretically capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve at least a million modern homes. The deadlines set by his bosses in Moscow and Kiev required Brukhanov to work with superhuman dispatch: according to the details of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, the first was due to come online in December 1975, with the second to follow before the end of 1979. Brukhanov quickly realized that this timetable was impossible.

  By the time the young director began work in Chernobyl in 1970, the Socialist economic experiment was going into reverse. The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry. Nuclear engineering was no exception. From the beginning, Brukhanov lacked construction equipment. Key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late, or not at all, and those that did were often defective. Steel and zirconium—essential for the miles of tubing and hundreds of fuel assemblies that would be plumbed through the heart of the giant reactors—were both in short supply; pipework and reinforced concrete intended for nuclear use often turned out to be so poorly made it had to be thrown away. The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.” Upon delivery from the factory, each piece of new equipment—transformers, turbines, switching gear—was stripped down to the last nut and bolt, checked for faults, repaired, and then reassembled according to the original specifications, as it should have been in the first place. Only then could it be safely installed. Such wasteful duplication of labor added months of delays and millions of rubles in costs to any construction project.

  Throughout late 1971 and early 1972, Brukhanov struggled with labor disputes and infighting among his construction managers and faced steady reprimands from his Communist Party bosses in Kiev. The workers complained about food shortages and the lines at the site canteen; he had failed to provide cost estimates and design documents; he missed deadlines and fell pathetically short of the monthly work quotas dictated by Moscow. And still there was more: the new citizens of Pripyat required a bakery, a hospital, a palace of culture, a shopping center. There were hundreds of apartments to be built.

  Finally, in July 1972, exhausted and disillusioned, Viktor Brukhanov drove to Kiev for an appointment with his boss from the Ministry of Energy and Electrification. He had been director of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station for less than three years, and the plant had not yet emerged from the ground. But now he planned to resign.

  * * *

  Behind all the catastrophic failures of the USSR during the Era of Stagnation—beneath the kleptocratic bungling, the nepotism, the surly inefficiencies, and the ruinous waste of th
e planned economy—lay the monolithic power of the Communist Party. The Party had originated as a single faction among those grappling for power in Russia following the Revolution of 1917, ostensibly to represent the will of the workers, but quickly establishing control of a single-party state—intended to lead the proletariat toward “True Communism.”

  Distinct from mere Socialism, True Communism was the Marxist utopia: “a classless society that contains limitless possibilities for human achievement,” an egalitarian dream of self-government by the people. As revolution was supplanted by political repression, the deadline for realizing this meritocratic Shangri-la was pushed repeatedly off into the future. Yet the Party clung to its role enforcing the dictates of Marxism-Leninism, ossifying into an ideological apparatus of full-time paid officials—the apparat—nominally separate from the government but that in reality controlled decision-making at every level of society.

  Decades later, the Party had established its own rigid hierarchy of personal patronage and held the power of appointment over an entire class of influential positions, known collectively as the nomenklatura. There were also Party managers to oversee every workshop, civil or military enterprise, industry, and ministry: the apparatchiks, who formed a shadow bureaucracy of political functionaries throughout the Soviet empire. While officially every one of the fifteen republics of the USSR was run by its own Ministerial Council, led by a prime minister, in practice it was the national leader of each republican Communist Party—the first secretary—who was in control. Above them all, handing down directives from Moscow, sat Leonid Brezhnev, granite-faced general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, chairman of the Politburo, and de facto ruler of 242 million people. This institutionalized meddling proved confusing and counterproductive to the smooth running of a modern state, but the Party always had the final word.

  Party membership was not open to everyone. It required an exhaustive process of candidacy and approval, the support of existing members, and the payment of regular dues. By 1970, fewer than one in fifteen Soviet citizens had been admitted. But membership brought perks and advantages available only to the elite, including access to restricted stores and foreign journals, a separate class of medical care, and the possibility of travel abroad. Above all, professional advancement in any kind of senior role was difficult without a Party card, and exceptions were rare. By the time Viktor Brukhanov joined in 1966, the Party was everywhere. In the workplace, he answered to two masters: both his immediate managers and the committee of the local Communist Party. When he became director of a nuclear power station, it was no different. He received directives from the Ministry of Energy in Moscow but was also tyrannized by the demands of the regional Party committee in Kiev.

  Although by the early seventies many in the Party still believed in the principles of Marxism–Leninism, under the baleful gaze of Brezhnev and his claque of geriatric cronies, ideology had become little more than window dressing. The mass purges and the random executions of the three decades under Stalin were over, but across the USSR, Party leaders and the heads of large enterprises—collective farms and tank factories, power stations and hospitals—governed their staff by bullying and intimidation. These were the thuggish bureaucrats who, according to the novelist and historian Piers Paul Read, “had the face of a truck driver but the hands of a pianist.” The humiliation of enduring an expletive-spattered dressing-down delivered at screaming pitch was a ritual repeated daily in offices everywhere. It engendered a top-down culture of toadying yes-men who learned to anticipate the whims of their superiors and agree with whatever they said, while threatening their own underlings. When the boss put his own proposals to the vote, he could reasonably expect them to be carried unanimously every time, a triumph of brute force over reason.

  Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the midseventies, this blind conformism had smothered individual decision-making at all levels of the state and Party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too. Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.

  Seated at the top of a teetering pyramid of falsehood, poring over reams of figures that had little basis in reality, were the economic mandarins of the State General Planning Committee—Gosplan—in Moscow. The brain of the “command economy,” Gosplan managed the centralized distribution of resources throughout the USSR, from toothbrushes to tractors, reinforced concrete to platform boots. Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

  Shortages and apparently inexplicable gluts of goods and materials were part of the grim routine of daily life, and shopping became a game of chance played with a string avoska, or “what-if” bag, carried in the hope of stumbling upon a store recently stocked with anything useful—whether sugar, toilet paper, or canned ratatouille from Czechoslovakia. Eventually the supply problems of the centrally planned economy became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields, and Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.

  * * *

  Soft spoken but sure of himself, Viktor Brukhanov was not like most Soviet managers. He was mild mannered and well liked by many of those beneath him. With his prodigious memory and shrewd financial sense, his excellent grasp of many technical aspects of his job—including chemistry and physics—he impressed his superiors. And at first, he was confident enough in his opinions to openly disagree with them. So when the pressures of the mammoth task he faced in Chernobyl became too much for him, he simply decided to quit.

  Yet when Brukhanov arrived in Kiev that day in July 1972, his Party-appointed supervisor from the Energy Ministry took his letter of resignation, tore it up in front of him, and told him to get back to work. After that, the young director recognized that there was no escape. Whatever else his job might require, his most important task was simply to obey the Party—and to implement their plan by any means he could. The next month, construction workers poured the first cubic meter of concrete into the foundations of the plant.

  * * *

  Thirteen years later, on November 7, 1985, Brukhanov stood silently on the reviewing stand in front of the new Pripyat Palace of Culture, where the windows had been hung with hand-painted portraits of state and Party leaders. Power station and construction workers paraded through the square below, carrying banners and placards. And in speeches marking the anniversary of the Great October Revolution, the director was hailed for his illustrious achievements: his successful fulfillment of the Party’s plans, his benevolent leadership of the city, and the power plant it served.

  Brukhanov had now dedicated the prime of his life to the creation of an empire in white reinforced concrete, encompassing a town of nearly fifty thousand people and four giant 1,000-megawatt reactors. Construction was also well under way on two more reactors, which were scheduled for completion within two years. When Units Five and Six of the Chernobyl station came online in 1988, Brukhanov would preside over the largest nuclear power complex on earth.

  Under his direction, the Chernobyl plant—by then formally known as the V. I. Lenin Nuclear power station—had become a prize posting for nuclear specialists from all over the Soviet Union. Many of them came straight from MEPhI–the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, the Soviet counte
rpart to MIT. The USSR, hopelessly backward in developing computer technology, lacked simulators with which to train its nuclear engineers, so the young engineers’ work at Chernobyl would be their first practical experience in atomic power.

  To trumpet the wonders of the atomic town of Pripyat, the city council—the ispolkom—had prepared a glossy book, filled with vivid color photographs of its happy citizens at play. The average age of the population was twenty-six, and more than a third of them were children. The young families had access to five schools, three swimming pools, thirty-five playgrounds, and beaches on the sandy banks of the river. The town planners had taken care to preserve the city’s sylvan environment, and each new apartment block was surrounded by trees. The buildings and open spaces were decorated with sculptures and spectacular mosaics celebrating science and technology. For all its modernity and sophistication, the city remained encircled by wilderness, offering a sometimes enchanting proximity to nature. One summer day, Brukhanov’s wife, Valentina, watched as a pair of elk swam out of the Pripyat and slouched up the beach before disappearing into the forest, apparently heedless of the bathers gawping from the sand.

  As an atomgrad, the city and everything in it—from the hospital to the fifteen kindergartens—was considered an extension of the nuclear plant it served, financed directly from Moscow by the Ministry of Energy. It existed in an economic bubble; an oasis of plenty in a desert of shortages and deprivation. The food stores were better stocked than those even in Kiev, with pork and veal, fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, and more than five different types of sausage. In the Raduga—or Rainbow—department store, Austrian-made dining sets and even French perfume were available to shoppers, all without having to spend years on a waiting list. There was a cinema, a music school, a beauty parlor, and a yacht club.