Borderland by Anna Reid

be no safety warnings, and no explanations. All that day – while local Party bosses were arranging for their own children to leave for holiday camps in Crimea – life in the town went on as normal. Families went shopping and walked their dogs; fishermen lugged their tackle off to the Prypyat river; couples sunbathed round the power station’s cooling ponds. Football matches went ahead, as did sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Communist Youth League. The schools debated whether or not to go ahead with a planned ‘Health Run’, and settled on outdoor gymnastics instead. Off-duty station-workers who rang up the town hall asking for instructions were told that the fire was none of their business, and that all decisions would be taken by Moscow. The town’s schoolchildren had been put through their ‘civil defence’ routines, designed for nuclear attack from the West, only days before. But with a nuclear explosion on their own doorstep none of the safety procedures, not even the simplest, were carried out.
    Lyubov Kovalevska, a journalist on the local paper, had sat up all night writing a poem. Setting off for her literary club on the Saturday morning, she noticed two odd things: white cleaning-fluid flooding the streets, and lots of policemen about. A few weeks previously she had written an article exposing the shoddy work going into the construction of Chernobyl’s fifth reactor. She could have said much more – station-workers had told her of corruption, of faulty equipment and supply shortages – but she had been afraid of losing her job. ‘At the time I just hadn’t the courage to write about it,’ she told Shcherbak afterwards. ‘I knew it had no chance at all of being published.’ 9 But even she didn’t realise there had been a serious accident: ‘The whole day we knew nothing, and no one said anything. Well, it was a fire. But as for the radiation, that there were radioactive emissions, nothing was said about that.’ 10
    On Sunday morning, Boris Shcherbina arrived in Prypyat, head of a secret emergency commission pulled together by Moscow the day before. Taking a map and a pair of compasses, he drew an arbitrary ten-kilometre circle round the station and ordered a general evacuation. The buses – yellow Icaruses from Kiev – started leaving the town at two in the afternoon, thirty-six hours after the initial explosion. Evacuees were told they would be back soon, so took few belongings with them. Though it was obvious that wind and rainfall would spread fallout over a far wider area, evacuation was not extended elsewhere for another five days.
    All Sunday, there was no official announcement of any sort about the accident. Sixty miles south in Kiev, the public was completely ignorant of what had happened, noticing only that all the city’s buses had mysteriously disappeared. When an announcement was finally made, it was under pressure from abroad. At 9 a.m. on Monday morning a nuclear power station in Sweden detected abnormal radiation levels in the air: a nuclear dust cloud seemed to be drifting northwards from somewhere inside the Soviet Union. All that afternoon Swedish diplomats badgered the Russian foreign ministry for information, meeting outright denials that anything was wrong. Finally, at nine o’clock in the evening, there was a short bulletin at the end of the regular television news:
    An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up.
    The head of Moscow’s state-run Novosti news agency later admitted that he had known of the accident since Sunday, but, for the same reasons as Kovalevska in Prypyat, had failed to make it public. Gorbachev himself made no public statement on Chernobyl for two weeks, and when he did go on television, it was to accuse the Western media of