Borderland by Anna Reid Page A

spreading ‘malicious mountains of lies’. The day before Pravda had published an interview with one of the country’s top nuclear scientists, in which he told a horrified world that the reactor core might burn its way down through the station’s foundations, poisoning the groundwater of the entire Dnieper valley and setting off a second, even larger, steam explosion – the so-called ‘China Syndrome’. It was still touch and go, he admitted, whether the reactor could be brought under control at all.
    Meanwhile, six days after the explosion, Kiev’s May Day celebrations went ahead as normal. Trade-union representatives marched under embroidered banners, children waved flowers, military bands tootled patriotic airs. Ukrainian First Party Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky reviewed the parade from a podium on Khreshchatyk; people noticed that although it was raining, he wasn’t wearing a hat. The day before, the wind had swung round to the north, and it was on May Day itself that fallout over Kiev peaked. A British student who flew home just as the heavy fallout was beginning was found to have a piece of nuclear fuel attached to his shoe; a Dutch tourist had fragments of nuclear fuel on his trousers.
    On 6 May, after repeated assurances that the accident posed no danger to human health, the Ukrainian health minister suddenly went on local television with instructions that Kie-vans should not eat green vegetables or drink milk, should stay indoors if possible, wash thoroughly, and sweep out their flats. Better-informed Kievans had already begun leaving the city,-now the exodus was general. Cars jammed the roads and frightened crowds mobbed the railway station. The big Univer-mag store on Khreshchatyk ran out of suitcases, and Aeroflot set up special ticket offices in the ministries and Party offices, so that the nomenklatura could get out first. The interior ministry posted policemen armed with automatic rifles on the main roads out of town, with orders to turn back all vehicles without official passes.
    The week after May Day, tens of thousands of military reservists started arriving in the Chernobyl area, conscripts in the Soviet Union’s biggest manpower round-up since the Afghan war. Mostly teenage boys, their job was to sluice down streets, houses and trees, and to shovel topsoil into loiries for burial. They lived outdoors in tents, often without showers or protective clothing. According to a report in an Estonian newspaper, some were to be found washing in contaminated streams and ponds.
    The most dangerous work was at Chernobyl itself, clearing away highly radioactive rubble from inside the reactor core. Groups of conscripts were ordered to run up on to the reactor-block roof, fling one shovelful each of deadly debris back through the hole in the roof on to the exposed reactor, and run down again, the whole operation not to last more than forty seconds. The boys involved dubbed themselves ‘bio-robots’, perfectly summing up the Soviet regime’s attitude towards its citizenry. The official upper limit radiation dose for clean-up workers was twenty-five ‘body-equivalent roentgen’ or ‘reins’ – five times the annual limit for an ordinary Soviet nuclear power worker. But in practice even this high limit was frequently exceeded. Since radiation levels near the station were one rem per hour, conscripts should not have worked on the site for more than two days. In reality many stayed for months. Better-off reservists could avoid being sent to Chernobyl altogether by paying bribes, the relevant price being 500 roubles – half that of a deferment from Afghanistan. 11
    Sluggish, chaotic, profligate with human life and bolstered by the crudest propaganda, the Soviet system’s response to Chernobyl has been likened to its behaviour during the Second World War. People involved in the disaster even refer to it as ‘the war’; the clean-up operations were a ‘campaign’ and the official result a ‘victory’.