Political Fallout: The Failure of Emergency

Management at Chernobyl΄
Edward Geist
Although the building above reactor 4 had exploded at 1:23 a.m. on Saturday, April 26, 1986, and was
clearly burning, the managers of the Chernobyl΄ Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) assured themselves that
both the reactor core and its radiation shielding remained intact. Plant director Viktor Briukhanov was so
confident that he left two of the facility’s other three reactors operating and informed Moscow that the
accident posed no threat to the surrounding countryside and would soon be under control. Only one figure
dissented from Briukhanov’s optimistic assessment—the plant’s civil defense director, Serafim Vorob΄ev.
Shortly following his arrival at the site an hour after the explosion, Vorob΄ev began pestering Briukhanov
with reports of sharply increasing radiation levels. Alarmed, Vorob΄ev recommended informing the
population of the neighboring city of Pripiat΄. Dismissing these concerns as panic mongering, Briukhanov
assured himself that Vorob΄ev’s measurements were wrong and ordered the disconnection of Vorob΄ev’s
telephones to ensure he refrained from discussing the matter with civil defense authorities in Kiev and
Moscow—keeping the rulers of the USSR in the dark about the unfolding disaster.

Following the Chernobyl΄ accident, both Soviet citizens and westerners wondered why evacuations began
more than a day after the explosion. May 1986 Communist Party reports cited Ukrainians wondering,
“Why was the city of Pripiat΄ not evacuated immediately?” and furthermore, “Why was the response of
civil defense to the accident so slow? When, if not now, was it supposed to demonstrate its competence?”
Western observers shared this bewilderment as to the apparent failure of the country’s civil defense after
Chernobyl΄, especially given the widespread impression that the USSR possessed a large, well-funded
civil defense program. Subsequent analyses disagree as to whether the Chernobyl΄ disaster and the Soviet
government’s flawed attempts to mitigate it should be attributed to circumstantial causes or to deeper,
structural factors. The historiography largely concurs that the Soviet response to Chernobyl΄ constituted a
general failure of emergency management, but these works base their conclusions largely on memoir
literature and anecdote. In this article, I provide the first account of the response to the Chernobyl΄
disaster based on archival sources. The contradictions between Soviet institutions’ hierarchies of risk, as I
term them, prevented the USSR’s government from responding appropriately during the Chernobyl΄
disaster. By “hierarchy of risk,” I mean the order in which various organizations prioritized particular
risks over others. Soviet institutions not only harbored incompatible notions of risk and emphasized
certain hazards instead of others but the secretiveness and insularity characteristic of the Soviet system
also prevented the communication of these risk perceptions within and between organizations. The
dysfunction of the Soviet government’s response to the Chernobyl΄ disaster resulted not only from its
constituent institutions’ differing perceptions of risk but also from the absence of a definite hierarchy of
authority and accurate information about the unfolding accident. While some Soviet organizations, such
as civil defense, measured risk from the accident largely in terms of physical damage to Soviet lives and
property, others, such as the KGB, preoccupied themselves with more nebulous threats, such as
embarrassing revelations about the failures and oversights of the Soviet government. Due to misleading
reports about the seriousness of the accident, Soviet leaders initially elected to emphasize the latter
concern and rejected calls by civil defense for a prompt evacuation, only to reverse course a day later. Not
only did this delay result in lamentable health consequences for the USSR’s population, it also caused
catastrophic damage to the legitimacy of the Soviet state, hastening its subsequent demise.
The Soviet government’s response to the Chernobyl΄ accident progressed in three phases. During the first
phase, which lasted from the explosion of reactor 4 early on April 26 until that evening, political
authorities failed to comprehend the nature of the emergency, preventing them from formulating an
appropriate response. During the second phase, which lasted from April 27 until May 14, Soviet leaders
took steps to protect their citizens, particularly through evacuations, while simultaneously attempting to
keep news of the disaster as secret as possible to protect themselves from criticism. This strategy, which
the Soviet government had utilized successfully in earlier nuclear disasters, failed spectacularly due to the
discovery of radioactive contamination by western observers, whose exaggerated reports reached Soviet
citizens and undermined official accounts. Mikhail Gorbachev’s televised address on May 14 inaugurated
the final phase, during which the government begrudgingly adopted a policy of increasing candor as
heroic efforts to contain the consequences of the accident proceeded. Unfortunately, this attitude shift
could not undo the effects of the government’s earlier dishonesty, the consequences of which continued to
haunt it for years to come.

Soviet Ideology and Nuclear Disaster

The problem with the Soviet nuclear energy sector was not that it considered accidents impossible but that
it regarded minor accidents as acceptable. Decades of propaganda asserted that the USSR’s nuclear power
plants demonstrated he country’s high level of technological mastery, fulfilling decades old Bolshevik
promises to “electrify the entire country” and “bring fairy tales to life.” To suggest that these facilities
might threaten citizens’ health and well-being constituted not merely a contradiction of the party line but a
challenge to the legitimizing myths of Soviet power. While developing its civilian nuclear reactors, the
Soviet Union sought to minimize cost at the expense of safety. In designing the water-graphite reactors
used at Chernobyl΄, Soviet nuclear engineers chose specific design features that made serious—albeit not
catastrophic—accidents all but inevitable. These flaws resulted in accidents that occurred at unit 1 of the
Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant in 1975 and unit 1 of the Chernobyl΄ Nuclear Power Plant in 1982. Both
these incidents seriously contaminated their reactor buildings and resulted in radioactivity releases into
the environment, but in each case, the reactors were subsequently repaired and returned to service.
Prior to the meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, in 1979, the USSR essentially ignored the
possibility of a catastrophic accident at one of its nuclear plants. During that incident, operator error
resulted in a loss-of-coolant accident that destroyed the reactor’s fuel assemblies but did not result in a
catastrophic radiation release due to the presence of a containment building. The extent to which Three
Mile Island impacted the Soviet nuclear industry remains unclear. Anatoli Aleksandrov, president of the
USSR Academy of Sciences, lamented publicly that Three Mile Island inspired “irrational” opposition to
nuclear power. Furthermore, the official response to Three Mile Island within the Soviet nuclear industry
emphasized that this accident was unthinkable under the qualitatively different conditions of socialism.
The Soviet nuclear sector’s official 1983 radiation safety manual went so far as to argue that “all the
developed and implemented measures for the reliability and safety of nuclear power plants have acquitted
themselves brilliantly” and that the accident at Three Mile Island was “convincing proof” of the
effectiveness of safety systems at nuclear power plants. Yet even if attitudes changed little, after 1979, the
Soviet government began quietly planning for a nuclear accident, albeit one smaller than Chernobyl΄, and
significantly improving plant safety. Soviet nuclear plants then in development received major safety
related design upgrades, although in the case of water-graphite plants, these did not correct the reactors’
catastrophic stability problems or provide containment buildings. Soviet civil defense began planning for
nuclear power plant accidents after it expanded its purview to include peacetime disasters during the
1970s. Prior to 1961, Soviet civil defense was a subdivision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs concerned
solely with the threat of enemy air attack. Following the 1961 Berlin crisis, civil defense became the
responsibility of the Ministry of Defense and reemerged as Grazhdanskaia oborona (GO, literally “civil
defense”), under the command of World War II hero General Vasilii Chuikov. After Chuikov’s retirement,
in 1972, decorated WWII veteran Colonel-General Aleksandr Altunin took his place. Shortly after taking
command of civil defense, General Altunin began involving the organization in responses to natural and
technological disasters. Altunin’s first significant step in this direction consisted of taking part in attempts
to control the large forest fires that struck the Moscow area in the summer of 1972. Due to their lack of
relevant training, civil defense personnel performed poorly in these efforts. Witnessing this disheartening
incompetence, General Altunin purportedly asked an aged, experienced forester for a lesson in fighting
forest fires. Subsequently, Altunin sought to integrate such skills into civil defense training, authoring a
1976 textbook on the subject. GO units took increasingly prominent roles in responses to peacetime
emergencies throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. In comparison with other Soviet institutions, GO
placed a relatively low priority on keeping these disasters secret from ordinary citizens. Unlike the KGB
or Communist Party, which feared that news of such events would compromise Soviet citizens’ esteem for
their government, civil defense stood to gain from publicizing them because they would legitimize the
organization. GO’s primary mission of enabling the USSR to survive nuclear war elicited increasing
skepticism both inside and outside the Soviet government by the 1980s, and, like its U.S. counterpart, it
became something of a laughingstock. Taking an active role in managing more quotidian emergencies
justified GO’s continued existence, but it also meant that failing to respond effectively to a disaster such
as a nuclear power plant accident would imperil its institutional legitimacy. Party authorities, meanwhile,
believed that keeping accidents secret would protect their legitimacy while posing little attendant political
risk because they had successfully utilized this strategy in the aftermath of several nuclear disasters. In the
early years of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, irresponsible waste management practices at the
Maiak plutonium plant in the southern Urals contaminated a large part of the nearby area so badly that
local villagers soon began falling ill from radiation-related ailments. Normally cavalier in its attitude to
radiation hazards, the extreme circumstances around Maiak compelled the Soviet government to begin
relocating populations in the mid-1950s. While party leaders belatedly evacuated the worst affected
communities, public health always remained a lower priority than protecting themselves from criticism.
The remoteness of the contaminated zones along with the closed nature of Soviet society allowed
authorities to keep these catastrophes from becoming public knowledge. Although rumors about the
abandoned zones circulated, the party successfully evaded domestic and international political
consequences. Believing that this precedent would hold true in other nuclear accidents, the party
attempted the same gambit after Chernobyl΄, only to have it rapidly backfire. As Kate Brown points out,
“The new feature in 1986 was that the catastrophe occurred while the cameras were running. ”Party
authorities’ longstanding determination to cover up nuclear mishaps suited the needs of the Soviet civilian
nuclear energy industry, which also prioritized its need to duck embarrassing questions about its mistakes
in public safety. Divided between organizations embedded in the military nuclear complex, which
designed nuclear plants, and civilian ministries such as the Ministry of Energy, which operated them, the
Soviet nuclear industry considered safety concerns a distraction from its main goal of expanding the
USSR’s reactor fleet. Although prior to 1986 it had avoided a disaster comparable to that at Maiak,
worrisome accidents occurred with disturbing frequency in the rapidly growing civilian nuclear energy
sector. To avoid tarnishing their image, the industry’s leaders kept these events secret not only from the
public but also from the operators of similar plants at other sites in the USSR. More over, the Ukrainian
Ministry of Energy and Electrification made clear that it regarded economic losses due to repair
shutdowns, rather than health risks, the main hazard of accidents such as that at ChNPP unit 1 in 1982.
Like GO and the Communist Party, the nuclear industry constructed a hierarchy of risk for nuclear
accidents that suited its institutional interests. Unlike party and industry officials, General Altunin saw a
proactive stance toward nuclear power plant safety as a means to shore up GO’s flagging institutional
fortunes, and he set its hierarchy of risk accordingly. In late 1980, GO issued the “Directive of the Head
of USSR Civil Defense № 6–1980” (DNGO-6), which ordered that civil defense begin planning for the
protection of plant personnel and residents within a thirty-kilometer radius around nuclear power stations.
Developed on the basis of Council of Ministers resolution № 883–283 of September 25, 1980, this
document planned for accidents akin to a larger version of the 1975 accident at the Leningrad Nuclear
Power Plant or the one at Three Mile Island and therefore did not envision circumstances as extreme as
the 1986 Chernobyl΄ disaster. Starting in 1981, Soviet civil defense began conducting exercises at nuclear
plants in Russia on the basis on DNGO-6. While GO took the problem of nuclear power plant safety
seriously, the government organization responsible for these facilities’ construction and operation,
Soiuzatomenergo, did not. Unfortunately, DNGO-6 made nuclear plants responsible for their own
accident planning, and their administrators, including Viktor Briukhanov, the director of the Chernobyl΄
Nuclear Power Plant, often neglected civil defense instructions and training. Although DNGO-6 remained
a classified state secret, references to preparations for civilian nuclear accidents soon began creeping into
Soviet civil defense literature. One notable example of this appeared in a 1981 civil defense manual,
which, while largely focused on nuclear weapons, included a frank admission of the hazards of nuclear
technology uncharacteristic of Soviet state publications. Drawing attention to the growing civilian
applications of nuclear materials, the author asserted that “the possibility of an accident that might present
a danger of contaminating personnel cannot be ruled out.” Nor did GO share Soviet nuclear engineers’
sanguine attitude as to the potential consequences of such a mishap: according to the manual, “as a rule,
the result of an accident does not create so large a zone of radioactive contamination as that of a nuclear
weapon, but the danger it poses to people is not less.” Even so, it argued “this danger can be eliminated or
lessened if civil defense and the population undertake a complex of measures for the mitigation of the
consequences of radioactive contamination” and outlined what these efforts might include. GO hoped that
by informing people of radiation hazards, controlling the amount of radioactivity they ingested in food
and water, providing them with prophylactic measures such as potassium iodide tablets, and evacuating
them if necessary, civilians would escape significant exposure altogether. These steps would rapidly lose
their effectiveness, however, if authorities hesitated to implement them. Civil defense could only reduce
the cumulative exposure of the population, not mitigate radiation effects after the fact. Civil Defense at
Chernobyl΄ Emergency management arrangements in Pripiat΄ reflected the low priority the Soviet state
placed on preparing for a nuclear power plant accident. Built to accommodate the employees of the
ChNPP, the city rose along with its patron facility. In April 1986, it had forty-five thousand inhabitants,
six thousand of whom worked at the nuclear plant. Located in the northern part of Kiev oblast, close to
the Belarusian border, Pripiat΄ was merely one of many such planned cities built to house nuclear plant
workers throughout the USSR. Its excellent housing and cultural facilities as well as its proximity to Kiev
made it a highly desirable place to live. Civil defense preparations in Pripiat΄ anticipated nuclear attack
rather than an accident at the nearby power plant. The city’s largest employer after the ChNPP, the Jupiter
electronics factory, ostensibly made parts for reel-to-reel audio tape players but in fact built electronics for
the Soviet military. Less obscure was the nearby Duga over-the-horizon radar, whose huge antenna arrays
were clearly visible from the taller buildings in the city. The most elaborate emergency management
infrastructure in the area, as in other parts of the Soviet Union, consisted of hardened bomb shelters
designed to survive nuclear explosions. However, there were only two such shelters for civilians in
Pripiat΄. One of these was located under the administration building at the power plant. The ChNPP was
supposed to have a second shelter, but despite regular protests from GO, the plant administration
neglected to complete it prior to the accident. The second, much larger shelter in Pripiat΄ was beneath the
Jupiter plant, whose workers it was intended to accommodate. This facility not only boasted space for
thousands of people but also a number of laboratories and a large stockpile of civil defense supplies. Gas
masks and other civil defense equipment were also stored in the city’s many schools for distribution in
case of imminent nuclear war. Compared to its peers, Pripiat΄ possessed relatively thorough civil defense
preparations. A post-accident survey conducted by the KGB of civil defense in Soviet Ukraine’s nuclear
cities revealed that many of them had no shelters, gas masks, or other civil defense supplies whatsoever,
in flagrant violation of longstanding government regulations. Ironically, it was an ill-advised safety test
that caused the accident at unit 4. An experiment intended to determine if the reactor’s main circulation
pumps could be operated from inertia in the turbine-generator set during an emergency together with
violations of safety regulations and the inherent instability of the reactor resulted in a power excursion
and subsequent explosion at 1:23 a.m. on April 26. This blast destroyed the reactor as well as the
confinement structure intended to retain radionuclides in the case of a less severe accident. The explosion
ejected a significant fraction of the reactor core, including both graphite and fuel elements, into the
adjacent turbine hall as well as onto the plant grounds. These highly radioactive materials produced
hazards in the area surrounding the power plant that could cause illness or death in minutes. The extent of
the damage, while clearly vast, was not apparent at first. Following the explosion, the instruments in the
unit 4 control room went dead, as did the system of radiation detectors throughout the unit. This
necessitated that plant staff investigate the damage in person—a task that led to several deaths. Ironically,
the nuclear plant had a limited supply of radiological instruments, most of which were designed to detect
only relatively low levels of radiation. Of the two Geiger counters on hand capable of detecting higher
levels, one was in a locked safe buried in the explosion and the other failed immediately. Without better
equipment, the extent of the damage to unit 4 remained unclear, even though the ambient radiation maxed
out all available instruments. The deputy chief engineer for units 3 and 4, Anatoli Diatlov, the highest-
ranking individual in the control room of unit 4 during the accident, hypothesized in the subsequent panic
that the explosion had occurred in a tank above the reactor and that the core of unit 4 remained intact. He
ordered efforts to restore emergency cooling to the core on the assumption that this would prevent the
meltdown that was in fact already beginning. Learning of the explosion from Diatlov, plant director
Briukhanov elected to believe his optimistic assumptions about the extent of the accident. Briukhanov
informed Moscow and Kiev of the explosion but qualified this news with his earnest conviction that the
reactor itself was basically intact. The first individual to recognize the true seriousness of the radiation
hazards around the power plant was Serafim Vorob΄ev, the station’s civil defense director. A military
veteran trained as a dosimetrist, Vorob΄ev arrived at the scene around 2:30 a.m. carrying an army-issue
Geiger counter. Beginning with a measurement of the radiation level in the bomb shelter at the plant,
which he found to be 30 milliroentgen an hour, Vorob΄ev went out to the street, where his instrument
indicated 150 milliroentgen an hour. (The roentgen is a measure of ionizing radiation exposure, now
supplanted by the SI unit grey. The average human background radiation exposure is about 200
milliroentgen a year, while a full-body exposure of 100 roentgen over a short period causes acute
radiation poisoning. An acute 500 roentgen exposure generally results in death.) At 2:40, Briukhanov
agreed to collect the plant’s civil defense organization, which comprised five to six hundred of the
facility’s employees. Too impatient to wait for radiological surveillance teams’ findings, Vorob΄ev got the
plant director’s permission to carry out a radiological survey of the site by car. To his horror, Vorob΄ev
discovered that radiation levels increased dramatically the closer he got to unit 4 and that next to the
workers’ cafeteria, his Geiger counter pegged at 200 roentgens an hour. Returning to the bomb shelter,
Vorob΄ev told Briukhanov it was necessary to immediately inform the people of Pripiat΄ of the alarming
situation. The incredulous director insisted that the head of the plant’s external dosimetry laboratory, V.
Korobeinikov, confirm these readings. Several hours later, Korobeinikov arrived and informed
Briukhanov that the radiation level outside was a mere 14 micro-roentgens a second and that he had made
an analysis of the ambient radioisotopes and found that they were all short-lived. This account pleased
Briukhanov, who remarked to Vorob΄ev, “Some people here do not understand what is really going on and
are inciting panic.” Conditioned by the institutional culture of the Soviet nuclear industry, Briukhanov
acted in accordance with a hierarchy of risk that prioritized the political danger of acknowledging
accidents over potential health hazards. On the advice of the Kiev oblast civil defense director, Vorob΄ev
conducted a second survey using different instruments, this time also traveling into the city of Pripiat΄.
Unfortunately, this excursion confirmed his initial results. Alarmed residents were already gathering to
wait for buses to Kiev, and Vorob΄ev discovered that the city streets had ambient radiation fields of up to
5 roentgens an hour while the road to the power plant gave measurements of over 100 roentgens an hour.
Deciding that any attempt to hide the situation was impossible, Vorob΄ev began telling people he
encountered that the plant had suffered an extreme accident and that they should leave the city
immediately. Returning to Briukhanov, he pressed again for decisive action to warn the population of the
radiation hazards and order protective measures. The director refused, stating that Korobeinikov’s results
were good enough for him. Disturbed by Briukhanov’s blasé attitude, Vorob΄ev attempted to contact the
civil defense command of the Kiev Military District and the civil defense staff of adjacent Gomel΄ oblast,
but Briukhanov had ordered outgoing phone calls be cut off to prevent news of the accident from
spreading. Vorob΄ev succeeded in reaching the civil defense staff of Kiev oblast only because he had a
direct telephone line that his superiors had neglected to disconnect. Tragically, the director of the Kiev
oblast civil defense staff admitted later that he thought these calls were some kind of unreal hoax: “I
thought Vorob΄ev was joking. I figured it was some kind of exercise.” As it happened, April 25 also
marked the beginning of a major civil defense exercise in Kiev oblast—an unfortunate coincidence that
undermined the initial response to the Chernobyl΄ accident. V. I. Sigalov, an official in the Kiev oblast
party committee (obkom), was on duty at the night desk that evening, sitting in for G. I. Revenko, the first
party secretary of Kiev oblast. Sigalov recalled that the civil defense exercise was an unusual event and
that he felt some unease when he gave official permission for it to proceed at 11:00 on Friday evening.
The next few hours passed uneventfully, but then Sigalov received a strange phone call from the Kiev
oblast civil defense staff reporting that there had been “an explosion at the fourth unit of the nuclear
plant,” that “radioactivity at the station is 15–20 roentgen an hour,” and that these events needed to be
reported to First Secretary Revenko as quickly as possible. Confused, Sigalov assumed that these events
were part of the civil defense exercise, but the caller clarified that “this is an actual situation” demanding
the first secretary’s immediate attention. A veteran of the Soviet army’s radiation and chemical defense
force, Sigalov recognized the seriousness of the radiation figures and began trying, and failing, to reach
Revenko at his dacha. In the meantime, the many phones on his desk began to ring with calls from the
KGB and the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee asking for clarification. At last, Sigalov
managed to reach Revenko and was able to repeat the information he had received from GO to his boss.
The drowsy Revenko was silent for forty seconds, then asked Sigalov to repeat his report, which he did.
After confirming with Sigalov that the radiation figures were not exaggerated, he sat speechless for
another fifteen seconds and then ordered that a car be sent to pick him up. Vorob΄ev’s desperate message,
therefore, had its desired effect. The Communist Party quickly swung into action to mobilize a
proportionate response to the explosion, but it soon reversed course after receiving disinformation from
the power plant minimizing the radiation hazards. Revenko arrived at the obkom thirty minutes later and
began organizing a whirlwind of activity. Sigalov recalled that his shirt soaked through with sweat as
officers from the security services came and went. A few hours later, however, another call came in from
the GO staff with a “correction” of the radiation measurements, alleging that instead of 15–20 roentgen an
hour, it was 15–20 milliroentgen. Satisfied that the situation was not so serious after all, Revenko reported
to the Central Committee that as of 6:50, radiation levels at the plant were a mere 100 micro-roentgen per
second. Revenko advised his underlings to “forget everything you have heard and seen here,” and Sigalov
left to go sunbathing along the banks of the Dnieper. Due to the incompetence of those responsible for
confirming Briukhanov’s version of events, government authorities took it at face value. A few hours after
the explosion, the Ukrainian branch of the KGB dispatched to the ChNPP a group of investigators led by
G. O. Sivets, who compiled a report repeating the grossly minimized radiation reading given by the plant
director. Missing the fact that circumstances at the plant were vastly direr than Briukhanov asserted, the
KGB occupied itself with investigating the possibility that the accident resulted from sabotage.
Briukhanov’s disinformation convinced both party and civil defense authorities that the accident was
minor, and, assured that the explosion posed little further physical threat, party officials emphasized the
risk its public acknowledgment might pose to their legitimacy over the hazards it might pose for the local
population. The civil defense exercise went ahead as planned, commanding the attention of Kiev oblast’s
civil defense personnel. Revenko sent V. G. Malomuzh, vice secretary of the Kiev obkom, along with
several GO officers to deal with what they expected to be a fairly serious, but not extraordinary, situation.
The GO officers informed Vorob΄ev that Malomuzh had forbidden them to take steps that might sow
panic and that they were supposed to somehow carry out radiological surveys of the city in secret.
Furthermore, with Malomuzh’s arrival, Briukhanov ordered Vorob΄ev “not to give any reports to anyone,
either up or down.” Informing the Populace Contradictory Soviet government regulations for informing
the population about a nuclear accident contributed to the paralysis that followed the explosion of reactor
4. The Ministry of Health had issued recommendations that if projected average radiation exposure of the
population did not exceed 25 roentgens, no steps be taken to inform citizens. GO, meanwhile, stipulated
that the public receive a “radiation hazard” signal in case of a reactor accident. This regulation ordered
that the signal be sounded when the radiation level at the plant site exceeded 200 milliroentgen an hour,
with the permission of the plant director. 47 Korobeinikov’s spurious measurements did not meet this
threshold, but as the actual radiation hazard became increasingly undeniable, the conflicting regulations
offered a convenient excuse to deny the truth to the residents of Pripiat΄. In this case, and many others, the
institutional fractionalization that plagued the Soviet system generally forestalled the government’s acting
appropriately to protect its citizens. The KGB appears to have decided that the Ministry of Health would
take precedence over civil defense in crafting the accident response. Both organizations claimed
jurisdiction over the question of how much radiation exposure was acceptable for civilians and had
drafted conflicting regulations on the topic. GO permitted a one-time dose of 50–70 roentgens for military
personnel and 17 for civilians. However, the Ministry of Health’s radiation safety standards (Norm
radiatsionnoi bezopasnosti, NRB-76) allowed the Primary Sanitary-Epidemiological Directorate to set
temporary radiation exposure norms during an emergency. An April 1986 document from the Ukrainian
KGB includes an attachment summarizing NRB-76 that states unequivocally that regulatory control of
civilian radiation exposure “falls within the competency of the Ministry of Health.” Following the
Chernobyl΄ accident, this ministry developed a plan stipulating that evacuation would take place within
the thirty-kilometer zone around the nuclear plant once cumulative radiation doses reached 30 rem
(roentgen equivalent in man). The decisions made by the Ministry of Health had the effect of delaying the
evacuation of the civilian population later than GO wanted—a choice that significantly increased the
health and political consequences of the accident. The tensions between Vorob΄ev and Briukhanov boiled
over at a meeting in the director’s office from 6 to 7 in the morning that included Malomuzh,
Korobeinikov, and other plant and local officials. On hearing a report that numerous plant personnel and
firefighters who had been working around unit 4 were clearly suffering from advanced radiation
poisoning, one to the point of death, Malomuzh asked point-blank if these developments necessitated
evacuation. Korobeinikov replied that they did not, at which point Vorob΄ev butted in. “The director
cannot make the decision about evacuation, but it is essential to warn the population,” he said, before
Malomuzh cut him off: “Sit down! Informing the populace—that is none of your business.”50 Vorob΄ev
explained in a subsequent interview that regulations gave the plant director the right to initiate evacuation
in some circumstances and the head of the oblast executive committee in others, and while technically
Briukhanov still possessed this authority, Vorob΄ev had hoped somehow to bypass him. At noon on April
26, the Kiev oblast civil defense staff officers attempted to convince Malomuzh to take measures to
inform the population of the radioactivity releases, in light of Pripiat΄’s sizable child population.
Malomuzh’s face darkened, and he reminded them that they were not to incite panic under any
circumstances. Thanks to institutional fractionalization, state and party leaders in Kiev and Moscow as
well as the troops and government employees arriving in Pripiat΄ all possessed only a limited
understanding of the evolving situation. Taking Briukhanov’s word at face value, the KGB, party,
military, and Ministry of Health all took steps to mobilize a proportionate response. Among the
organizations taken in by Briukhanov was the Soviet GO general staff in Moscow. Civil defense officials
there heard of the accident at around 3:30 on the morning of April 26. Deputy Chief of the GO General
Staff General Boris Ivanov recalled that his phone rang at 3:35 and he learned that there had been an
“explosion in the gas storage system of the Chernobyl΄ Nuclear Power Plant and a fire in the fourth unit.”
In 1988, Ivanov noted that at that moment, “here in Moscow, nobody yet knew of the extent of the
accident, its true causes, while in Chernobyl΄, many had already suffered the lethal effects of radiation.”
Trusting Briukhanov’s report, Altunin ordered Ivanov to travel to Chernobyl΄ and direct the participation
of GO personnel and units in the cleanup and remediation effort, in accordance with the established plan
for addressing nuclear power plant accidents. While Ivanov traveled to Pripiat΄ from Moscow, additional
civil defense personnel arrived in the city from the Kiev Military District. In the morning, at about 10:00,
a mobile GO sanitary protection unit reached the city, closely following Lieutenant-General N. S.
Bondarchuk, head of the Kiev Military District GO staff. This unit proceeded to the power plant’s
administration building, which Korobeinikov and Briukhanov claimed to be safe. The troops withdrew
after quickly detecting significant radiation hazards. Reports of this development were the first clear
indication received by GO that the accident was much more serious than Briukhanov had indicated. Eager
both to protect the local population and demonstrate their competence in a radiation emergency, civil
defense officers pressured political authorities to inform the local population of the accident. At 2:00 p.m.
on April 26, GO and military personnel began to assemble in Pripiat΄ in earnest. General Ivanov arrived in
the city at that time. Simultaneously, Colonel-General Vladimir Pikalov of the Soviet Army Chemical
Troops landed in Kiev along with his unit and proceeded toward the plant. 54 On hearing General
Bondarchuk’s report, Ivanov ordered expanded, more vigilant radiological surveillance of Pripiat΄ and
nearby population centers. This done, he verified local blast and fallout shelters’ readiness for use by the
population as well as the availability of potassium iodide pills and the organization of their distribution to
the populace. Furthermore, Ivanov personally proposed to the head of the Pripiat΄ city party committee,
A. S. Gamanyk, that he inform the city’s inhabitants via radio of the mounting radiological hazards. 55
Ivanov also expressed his opinion that the population should be told to take radiation protection measures
to Bondarchuk, who replied that he had confidence that this would be done. Despite the incessant
prodding of Vorob΄ev, Ivanov, and other civil defense officers to convince party authorities to inform the
population about the accident, their advice was ignored. Throughout April 26, both observers in Pripiat΄
and the central leadership in Moscow failed to comprehend the seriousness of the disaster at the ChNPP.
After the accident, Moscow assembled a special investigatory commission that flew into Kiev at about
5:40 p.m. The relatively low stature of its members reflected the government’s optimistic impression of
the accident, and they expected to remain in Pripiat΄ for only two or three days. The director of this
commission, Boris Shcherbina, was a little-known deputy prime minister with a background in the Soviet
petroleum sector. When the members of this commission assembled at Pripiat΄ party committee
headquarters at about 8:00, Briukhanov remained in denial that unit 4 had been destroyed. After sunset,
General Pikalov, increasingly frustrated with the lack of information, decided to take matters into his own
hands. Approaching the plant in an ordinary car, Pikalov saw an eerie blue glow above the remains of unit
4. Returning with a BRDM-2RKhB armored chemical surveillance vehicle, Pikalov personally took the
wheel and crashed through the closed plant gates, driving up to the side of unit 4 to take radiation
measurements. These established unequivocally that the reactor had been destroyed and that the graphite
fire was spreading massive amounts of radioactivity. At 7:00 a.m. on April 27, Pikalov and the members
of the investigatory commission reported these dire findings to Moscow. Evacuating Pripiat΄ Even as the
need to evacuate grew increasingly apparent, many of the officials in Pripiat΄ thought it could be delayed,
either because the radioactivity might dissipate or because they felt that news of the accident needed to be
contained at all costs. Professor L. A. Il΄in, a member of the investigatory commission, chairman of the
Soviet National Radiological Protection Board, and author of the regulations addressing the medical
response to nuclear accidents, advocated putting off evacuation in the hope that the radiation level might
improve. As long as the local inhabitants did not receive radiation doses exceeding the 25 roentgens
stipulated by the Ministry of Health, he reasoned, why not leave them in place? As regulations stated that
evacuation be carried out only with the ministry’s permission, his opposition posed a major obstacle to
those advocating immediate evacuation. Since 1982, GO had lobbied to change this regulation to allow
local party officials to order an evacuation without sanction from the Ministry of Health but to no avail. In
his frustration, at about 10:00 p.m. on April 26, Ivanov suggested to Shcherbina that as director of the
investigatory commission, he might simply bypass the Ministry of Health and order an evacuation. In
response, Shcherbina decided to go ahead and make preparations for the evacuation but wait until
morning to make a final decision. Buses departed Kiev and other nearby cities for Pripiat΄ at 12:50 a.m.
on April 27, but the residents of the city received no formal announcement of the impending evacuation.
As a result, they did not take steps to prepare that would have allowed them to make a quick departure the
next day, which would in turn have decreased their radiation exposure. Despite continuing skepticism
about the need to evacuate the city, on the advice of civil defense, Shcherbina decided to order the
evacuation of Pripiat΄ at 7:00 a.m. on April 27. When Shcherbina asked for Ivanov’s opinion on the
matter, he replied that radiation levels had either remained constant or increased overnight and that
therefore evacuation should go ahead. General Bondarchuk echoed Ivanov’s sentiments, but surprisingly,
General Pikalov still opposed evacuation at this time. Over Pikalov’s objections, Shcherbina decided that
the evacuation of Pripiat΄ would begin that afternoon. At a 10:00 meeting, he informed local officials that
the evacuation was to start at 2:00 p.m. It was only on the morning of April 27 that wired speakers
instructed Pripiat΄’s residents to remain indoors and stay away from windows, and at midday they
announced the evacuation. Komsomol members went from apartment to apartment distributing potassium
iodide tablets from civil defense stockpiles, and at 2:00 p.m. the buses, most of which had been parked
along the road to Pripiat΄ for most of the morning, pulled up in front of each building to pick up its
residents. Shcherbina’s investigatory commission recognized belatedly that the increasing radiation
hazards required drastic measures to protect the local population, but they still allowed political
considerations to dominate their decision making. Even following the evacuation of Pripiat΄, the
commission remained reluctant to move the populations of other towns and villages in the area around the
Chernobyl΄ Nuclear Power Plant, despite pleading by civil defense officers. Widening the evacuation
would make the disaster harder to obscure, and party authorities planned to keep public revelations to a
minimum. On April 28, General Bondarchuk and Colonel V. Dolgopolov, the USSR civil defense deputy
chief of management, made a formal proposal to Ivan Pliushch, the head of the Kiev oblast government,
for the evacuation of the Chernobyl΄ district, particularly the area within ten kilometers of the power
plant. Pliushch concurred, and on April 29, civil defense made the requisite preparations to carry out the
evacuation. Unfortunately, when Pliushch presented this decision to Shcherbina, the head of the special
investigatory commission denied permission to go ahead. Pliushch subsequently made clear his
dissatisfaction with Bondarchuk and Dolgopolov’s placing him in this politically uncomfortable situation.
Due to GO’s belief that secrecy was bad both for Soviet citizens and its own interests, it increasingly
clashed with other Soviet institutions during the days following the explosion at unit 4. Civil defense
officers, beginning with Vorob΄ev mere hours after the explosion, pleaded with officials to warn citizens
of the growing radiation hazards surrounding them. Soviet civil defense plans for both war- and
peacetime disasters relied on the media to coordinate the actions of the populace and enable citizens to
protect themselves. GO needed to publicize the accident to carry out its institutional mission, and failing
to act in the face of a bona fide nuclear disaster jeopardized the organization’s legitimacy. Yet any
broadcast by radio or television would make the accident public, resulting in massive embarrassment for
the regime. In actuality, hiding the catastrophe proved impossible, as the prevailing winds carried
radioactive contamination outside the borders of the Soviet Union on April 27. Soon, western media
began reporting that a radiological disaster had occurred within the USSR. The Soviet penchant for
obfuscation completely backfired: not only had officials prevented GO from protecting their citizens, they
made fools of themselves in the process. A Media Disaster On April 29, United Press International
announced to the world not only that an unprecedented accident had occurred at the ChNPP but that it had
resulted in thousands of deaths. It quoted a “Kiev woman who has long provided accurate information,”
who declared that “eighty people died immediately and some 2,000 people died on the way to hospitals.”
Those who perished were interred “not in ordinary cemeteries but in the village of Pirogovichi, where
radioactive wastes are usually buried”; meanwhile, “the whole October Hospital in Kiev is packed with
people who suffer from radiation sickness.” However this rumor originated, its circulation by western
media was an unwelcome development for the Soviet government, which had hoped to avoid confessing
to the scale of the accident. However alarming the situation in Pripiat΄, it paled in comparison to the
accounts that western news sources now promulgated around the globe—including into millions of Soviet
households via shortwave radio. The prevailing policy of downplaying the accident while keeping any
details secret merely affirmed the inclination of many western and Soviet citizens to believe the worst.
The party’s inability to rein in rumors that greatly exaggerated the consequences of the accident, both
domestically and internationally, soon inverted its hierarchy of risk and impelled a shift toward increasing
candor. Robbed of the opportunity to keep news of the accident from reaching the public, secrecy quickly
became a massive liability that undermined Soviet citizens’ faith in their government. Aiming to restrict
the political consequences of the accident for their government’s prestige at home and abroad, party
officials soon adopted a policy of selective honesty and began holding press conferences that strove to
assuage the concerns of foreign observers and their own citizens while obscuring facts unflattering to
themselves, particularly their poor handling of the initial disaster response. This strategy took time to
emerge, however, and for the moment, Moscow continued trying to maintain an atmosphere of normality
—including ordering that May Day celebrations in Kiev continue as planned, despite the mounting
radiation hazards in the city. As Moscow gradually became more forthcoming in the early days of May,
confusion reigned surrounding the response to the catastrophe. As the pertinent authorities largely
disregarded preexisting plans for dealing with a nuclear power plant accident, various individuals and
organizations jockeyed to assume leadership as they sought to improvise. After the Politburo recognized
the seriousness of the events at Chernobyl΄, it decided that the original investigatory commission headed
by Shcherbina was inadequate, so it assembled another, more prestigious commission to supplant it
headed by Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov. Ideology and Evacuation Frustrated by the continuing
obstruction of further evacuations from the Chernobyl΄ area, General Ivanov took advantage of the first
available opportunity to order their initiation on his own accord. The Soviet government’s oft-
demonstrated propensity to scapegoat those who reported problems, in addition to or instead of those
actually responsible, created strong disincentives to take decisive action during the Chernobyl΄ disaster.
The fact that the party allowed catastrophes to occur at all posed a serious challenge to the Soviet system
and inspired a dangerous—and, in this case, deadly—ideological temptation to “kill the messenger.” On
May 1, Ivanov made the request to Shcherbina that ten highly contaminated population centers within ten
kilometers of the reactor be evacuated along with several selected towns and villages beyond that
boundary. Instead of acquiescing, Shcherbina elected to hold a meeting of competent specialists the next
day to evaluate the necessity of the evacuation. In light of the disquieting results of radiological surveys,
the meeting’s attendees concluded that the population of these communities needed to be moved to safer
areas. As it happened, Shcherbina was absent, so Ivanov took the initiative and ordered the evacuation on
his own. At 10:32 a.m., Ivanov sent written commands to the local government to begin evacuating the
Chernobyl΄ district, informing the military and Shcherbina of this decision after the fact. Perhaps relieved
that Ivanov’s actions spared them the possibility of being personally accused of “overreacting” by
initiating the evacuation, neither Shcherbina nor Ryzhkov objected at a meeting at 2:00 that afternoon. As
prevailing winds carried radiological contamination outside the borders of Ukraine to Belarus and Russia,
the governing authorities’ unwillingness to confess the true scale of the accident prevented those
republics’ civil defense organizations from acting effectively to protect their populations. In his memoirs,
the deputy chief of the RSFSR civil defense general staff, Dmitrii Krutskikh, wrote of his mounting
exasperation in the weeks after the accident with the lack of clarification he and his colleagues received
about the deteriorating situation. General Ivanov had sent a message to the staff at 8:00 a.m. on April 26
apprising them of the accident and ordering the initiation of radiological surveillance in the western part
of the RSFSR. To Krutskikh’s frustration, his efforts to elicit clarification about the evolving disaster all
proved fruitless. At first, he and his colleagues assumed that the silence signaled that the accident was
probably not all that serious and that as it occurred in Ukraine, its impact on Russia would be minor. The
results of their radiological surveys, however, swiftly shocked them out of their complacency. Within
hours, Smolensk oblast reported serious radioactive contamination, swiftly followed by similar reports
from Briansk oblast and Kaluga oblast. By the evening of April 26, Krutskikh and his staff had begun
working out improvised evacuation plans, with the approval of V. I. Vorotnikov, head of the RSFSR
Council of Ministers. Vorotnikov ordered the creation of a special operational group within the Council of
Ministers to address the consequences of the Chernobyl΄ accident which held its first meeting on April 28
and began practical work two days later. Similar to Bondarchuk’s and Ivanov’s lamentable experiences a
few days before, the RSFSR civil defense staff found that the political authorities hesitated to initiate
evacuations, even as radiological contamination reached hazardous levels. Detecting a sharp increase in
radiation levels in the Krasnogorsk and Novozybsk districts of Briansk oblast at the end of April, civil
defense proposed the rapid evacuation of dozens of towns and villages in those areas. The Council of
Ministers objected that this proposal was overly dramatic, questioning the results of the radiological
surveys and whether evacuation would be worth the estimated 35–50 million rubles it would cost. After
rejecting evacuations in Briansk oblast on May 2 and 3, the Council of Ministers finally approved them
on May 4. Starting that day and finishing on May 5, the government evacuated about ten thousand
residents of Briansk oblast. The “mistakes and failures” exemplified by the delay in evacuations,
Krutskikh lamented, resulted in decades of avoidable suffering in the areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and
Russia contaminated by the Chernobyl΄ disaster. Due to the party’s determination to avoid admitting the
scale of the accident, distribution of potassium iodide to Soviet citizens occurred only on a haphazard
basis, resulting in unnecessary internal radiation exposures. The Soviet government produced large
quantities of potassium iodide as part of its civil defense preparations for nuclear war, yet in many cases
the drug proved unavailable to local populations, either due to government reluctance to distribute it or
because civil defense stockpiled the supplies in central locations far from rural areas. Soviet civil defense
included potassium iodide as part of the “individual first-aid kit” planned for distribution to citizens in
anticipation of a nuclear attack. Fortunately, Pripiat΄ possessed supplies of potassium iodide, yet the
decision not to distribute it until the afternoon of April 27 allowed many residents of the city to ingest
considerable quantities of radioiodine before they took the tablets. Similar missteps transpired in areas
farther from the damaged reactor, with populations receiving potassium iodide only days after the
deposition of considerable radiological contamination or not at all. Briansk oblast proved a fortunate
exception, as civil defense distributed potassium iodide to 91,430 citizens there, including 20,390
children, and conducted thyroid examinations of 28,000 individuals, 15,000 of them children. The party
and KGB’s efforts to silence GO’s calls for evacuations worked so well that even some well-placed
observers blamed civil defense for the shortcomings of the initial response to the Chernobyl΄ disaster. V.
A. Legasov, a chemist and member of the presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences sent to
Chernobyl΄ shortly after the accident, characterized the GO’s efforts under General Ivanov’s leadership as
“simply unsuccessful.” He wrote later that “they both did not know what to do, and then, after they
received instructions and means of action, they did not demonstrate an ability to respond to the
circumstances.” However, Legasov qualified his sweeping condemnation of civil defense’s performance
with a very telling comment: “It is my personal impression that, due to the chekists’ effective labors,
some things may have been done imperceptibly—that the positive work of civil defense was invisible
while their negative, ineffective efforts were apparent in the early days. And I would not have been able to
tell.” In actuality, Ivanov knew exactly what to do—inform the population of the accident and begin
evacuations and begged repeatedly to do it, but the KGB censored these proposals so effectively that even
well-placed observers such as Legasov remained in the dark about them. It was the fact that Soviet
institutions generally prioritized political risks over physical ones, not GO’s supposed incompetence, that
lay at the root of the USSR’s lackluster initial response to the Chernobyl΄ disaster. GO suffered from
paralysis since its plans for minimizing the effects of a nuclear power plant accident depended on
preventative measures and could not be implemented after the delay imposed on it by party authorities,
who feared the disaster’s threat to the legitimacy of their rule more than the health threats it might pose.
While the state and party leadership initially had the excuse of their own ignorance, after April 27 this no
longer applied, yet they continued to oppose taking necessary steps to protect the population. Indefensible
decisions, such as holding the May Day parade in Kiev despite encroaching radiological contamination
and delaying evacuations, wasted transient opportunities to limit the human impact of the accident. Once
populations received meaningful radiation exposure, technical realities forestalled GO from improvising a
backup plan, especially since its hands were still tied by Moscow’s desire to obscure the true extent of the
disaster. The possibilities for civil defense to limit the human consequences of the radiological release
rapidly dissipated as the days passed, with aftereffects that are still being felt today. The Chernobyl΄
disaster resulted in the acceleration of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, which had remained largely
rhetorical in early 1986. In the days after events forced the Soviet government to admit an accident had
occurred at Chernobyl΄, spokesmen maintained, absurdly, that they were providing the public with
complete information. This position grew less disingenuous as the government released additional details
about the accident in the following weeks. A May 6 press conference with technical specialists, and
particularly Gorbachev’s televised May 14 address, marked a dramatic reversal from the earlier position
of obfuscation and denial. The main motivation for this shift, however, was the desire of Gorbachev’s
government to save face rather than a sudden penchant for truthfulness. In accordance with this, it kept
particularly damning details about its role in the disaster, particularly regarding the delay in evacuating
Pripiat΄, shrouded in secrecy until the collapse of Soviet power. The fact that the Chernobyl΄ catastrophe
transpired during Gorbachev’s rule contributed significantly to the ultimate failure of his reforms.
Whereas Gorbachev believed that the regime’s past mistakes resulted from relatively superficial
deficiencies that glasnost would help identify, his government’s deficient response to the Chernobyl΄
disaster called into question not merely his leadership but also the legitimacy of the Soviet system itself.
Ironically, Gorbachev’s policy of “openness” therefore hastened the collapse of the very state it was
supposed to save. The Chernobyl΄ disaster and its aftermath displayed both the worst and best aspects of
Soviet civilization. Numerous observers have blamed the accident as well as the failure to protect citizens
from its consequences on the Soviet system’s deeply entrenched propensity for secrecy and mendacity
and its general disregard for the health and safety of its citizens. Some have even gone so far as to assign
Chernobyl΄ an instrumental role in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet in some respects, the
Soviet response to Chernobyl΄ compares favorably to the Japanese government’s handling of the
Fukushima Daiichi accident a quarter-century later. As the liquidation effort progressed, the USSR’s
culture of mass mobilization and individual sacrifice along with the ability of the Soviet command
economy to reallocate resources on an immense scale enabled remarkable achievements to limit the
further consequences of the accident. These successes included the construction of the “sarcophagus”
around the destroyed reactor as well as the provision of housing and employment for the thousands of
evacuees. 81 Despite these triumphs, however, the Soviet state never managed to live down the missteps
that both enabled the accident and forestalled prompt measures to prevent harm to the population. Soviet
emergency management’s poor performance in the Chernobyl΄ disaster resulted from the involved
institutions’ incompatible perceptions of risk. The failure to act promptly following the accident seriously
threatened the legitimacy of civil defense, giving it a different hierarchy of risk than the party and
Ministry of Energy had. GO was ostensibly created to allow the Soviet state to survive a nuclear war, so
its failure to take decisive action in the face of a much more limited challenge threatened its standing with
both the Soviet government and population, particularly given that civil defense had begun planning for
civilian nuclear accidents years earlier. Therefore, both institutional and moral considerations impelled
civil defense officials to press for evacuations and other emergency measures. The Communist Party and
nuclear industry, however, hoped to follow the example of earlier Soviet radiological disasters and keep
the accident secret, even if this increased the health risks to Soviet citizens. Precedent and habit both
recommended this strategy, but the proximity of the crippled plant to the west along with changing
political conditions within the USSR soon forced the Soviet Union’s leaders to reverse course. Chastened
by damning rumors and foreign criticism, the Soviet government found itself compelled to begin
implementing Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost both sooner and more expansively than expected. Political
self-interest rather than lofty ideological ideals impelled this change in stance. Protecting legitimacy and
prestige always took priority over public health and safety, as for the Soviet leadership, the most
worrisome fallout from Chernobyl΄ always remained the political rather than the radioactive kind.