The story about the Chernobyl disaster is short. Black story

Almost 25 years have passed since the terrible event that shocked the whole world. The echoes of this catastrophe of the century will stir the souls of people for a long time to come, and its consequences will touch people more than once. The catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - why did it happen and what are its consequences for us?

Why did the Chernobyl disaster happen?

Until now, there is no unambiguous opinion about what caused the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Some argue that the reason is defective equipment and gross errors during the construction of nuclear power plants. Others see the cause of the explosion in the failure of the circulating water supply system, which provided cooling for the reactor. Still others are convinced that the experiments carried out at the station on that ominous night on the permissible load, during which there was a gross violation of the rules of operation, were to blame. Still others are sure that if there had been a protective concrete cap over the reactor, the construction of which had been neglected, there would not have been such a spread of radiation that occurred as a result of the explosion.

Most likely, this terrible event occurred due to a combination of these factors - after all, each of them had a place to be. Human irresponsibility, acting "at random" in matters relating to life and death, and the deliberate concealment of information about what happened by the Soviet authorities led to consequences, the results of which will long echo back to more than one generation of people around the world.

Chernobyl disaster. Chronicle of events

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant happened late at night on April 26, 1986. A fire brigade was called to the scene. Courageous and courageous people, they were shocked by what they saw and immediately guessed what had happened from the off-scale radiation meters. However, there was no time to think - and a team of 30 people rushed to fight the disaster. From protective clothing, they were wearing ordinary helmets and boots - of course, they could in no way protect firefighters from huge doses of radiation. These people have long been dead, they are all in different time died a painful death from a cancer that struck them.

By morning the fire was extinguished. However, pieces of uranium and graphite emitting radiation were scattered throughout the territory of the nuclear power plant. The worst thing is that the Soviet people did not immediately learn about the disaster that occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This allowed them to remain calm and prevent panic - this is exactly what the authorities wanted, turning a blind eye to the cost of their ignorance for people. The ignorant population, for two whole days after the explosion, calmly rested in the territory, which had become deadly dangerous, went out into nature, to the river, on a warm spring day, children were outside for a long time. And everyone absorbed huge doses of radiation.

And on April 28, a complete evacuation was announced. 1100 buses in a column took out the population of Chernobyl, Pripyat and other nearby settlements. People abandoned their houses and everything in them - they were allowed to take only identification cards and food for a couple of days with them.

A zone with a radius of 30 km was recognized as an exclusion zone unsuitable for human life. The water, livestock and vegetation in the area were deemed unfit for consumption and a health hazard.

The temperature in the reactor in the first days reached 5000 degrees - it was impossible to approach it. A radioactive cloud hung over the nuclear power plant, which circled the Earth three times. To nail it to the ground, the reactor was bombed from helicopters with sand and water, but the effect of these actions was meager. There were 77 kg of radiation in the air - as if a hundred atomic bombs were simultaneously dropped on Chernobyl.

A huge ditch was dug near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was filled with the remains of the reactor, pieces of concrete walls, the clothes of the workers who liquidated the disaster. Within a month and a half, the reactor was completely sealed with concrete (the so-called sarcophagus) to prevent radiation leakage.

In 2000, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was closed. Until now, work is underway on the Shelter project. However, Ukraine, for which Chernobyl became a sad "legacy" from the USSR, does not have the required money for it.

The tragedy of the century that they wanted to hide

Who knows how long the Soviet government would have covered up the "incident" if it hadn't been for the weather. Strong winds and rains, so inopportunely passed through Europe, carried the radiation around the world. Ukraine, Belarus and the south-western regions of Russia, as well as Finland, Sweden, Germany, and the UK most of all “got it”.

For the first time, unprecedented figures on the radiation level meters were seen by employees of the nuclear power plant in Forsmark (Sweden). Unlike the Soviet government, they rushed to immediately evacuate all people living in the surrounding area before establishing that the problem was not in their reactor, but the USSR was the alleged source of the outgoing threat.

And exactly two days after the Forsmark scientists announced a radioactive alarm, US President Ronald Reagan was holding pictures of the Chernobyl disaster site taken by artificial satellite CIA. What was depicted on them would make even a person with a very stable psyche horrified.

While periodicals around the world trumpeted the danger posed by the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet press got off with a modest statement that there had been an "accident" at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Chernobyl disaster and its consequences

The consequences of the Chernobyl disaster made themselves felt in the very first months after the explosion. People living in the territories adjacent to the site of the tragedy died from hemorrhages and apoplexy.

The liquidators of the consequences of the accident suffered: from total number liquidators in 600,000 about 100,000 people are no longer alive - they died from malignant tumors and destruction of the hematopoietic system. The existence of other liquidators cannot be called cloudless - they suffer from numerous diseases, including cancer, disorders of the nervous and endocrine systems. The same health problems have many evacuees, the affected population of the adjacent territories.

The consequences of the Chernobyl disaster for children are terrible. Developmental delay, thyroid cancer, mental disorders and a decrease in the body's resistance to all kinds of diseases - that's what awaited children who were exposed to radiation.

However, the most terrible thing is that the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster affected not only people living at that time. Problems with pregnancy, frequent miscarriages, stillborn children, frequent birth of children with genetic abnormalities (Down's syndrome, etc.), weakened immunity, a striking number of children with leukemia, an increase in the number of cancer patients - all these are echoes of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the end of which will come yet not soon. If it comes...

Not only people suffered from the Chernobyl disaster - all life on Earth felt the deadly force of radiation on itself. As a result of the Chernobyl disaster, mutants appeared - the descendants of people and animals born with various deformations. A foal with five legs, a calf with two heads, fish and birds of unnaturally large size, giant mushrooms, newborns with deformities of the head and limbs - photos of the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster are horrific evidence of human negligence.

The lesson presented to humanity by the Chernobyl disaster was not appreciated by people. Still careless we treat own life, still striving to squeeze to the maximum out of the riches bestowed on us by nature, everything we need "here and now". Who knows, perhaps the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was the beginning, to which humanity is moving slowly but surely...

Film about the Chernobyl disaster
We advise everyone who is interested to watch the full-length documentary film "The Battle for Chernobyl". This video can be watched right here online and for free. Happy viewing!

"Pripyat, April 26, 1986, 3 hours 55 minutes, Lenin St., 32/13, apt. 76. Woke up phone call. Waiting for the next signal. No, it didn't. Slapped to the phone. The voice of Vyacheslav Orlov, my boss - deputy. Head of the reactor shop N1 for operation.

Arkady, hello. I give you Chugunov's command: all commanders urgently arrive at the station in their workshop.

There was anxiety in my heart.

Vyacheslav Alekseevich, what happened? Anything serious?

I don’t really know anything myself, they said that there was an accident. Where, how, why - I do not know. I'm running to the garage now to get my car, and we'll meet at the Rainbow at 4:30.

Got it, I'm getting dressed.

He hung up the phone and returned to the bedroom. The dream was gone. The thought came to mind: "Marina (wife) is now at the station. They are waiting for the shutdown of the fourth block for the experiment."

He dressed quickly and chewed on a piece of bread with butter. Jumped out into the street. Towards a pair of police patrol with gas masks (!!!) over his shoulder. I got into the car of Orlov who drove up, drove to Lenin Avenue. To the left, from the medical unit, two ambulances under blue flashing lights broke out at breakneck speed and quickly went ahead.

At the crossroads of the Chernobyl - Chernobyl road - police with a walkie-talkie. An inquiry about our persons, and again Orlov's "Moskvich" is picking up speed. They broke out of the forest, all the blocks are clearly visible from the road. We look in both ... and we do not believe our eyes. Where the central hall of the fourth block (TsZ-4) should be, there is a black hole ... Horror ... From the inside of the TsZ-4 there is a red glow, as if something is burning in the middle. It was later that we learned that the graphite of the reactor core was burning, which at a temperature of 750 degrees. C burns very well in the presence of oxygen. However, at first there was no thought that the reactor gasped. Such a thing could not have occurred to us.

4 hours 50 minutes ABK-1. We drove up to ABK-1. We almost ran into the lobby. At ABK-1 - the car of the city party committee, at the entrance to the civil defense bunker - workers (mostly commanders) of all workshops. In the bunker, Viktor Petrovich, director of the Chernobyl NPP, is on the phones, and there is no chief engineer Fomin.

We ask. Answer: explosion on the fourth block at the time of shutdown. This is so clear. No one knows anything in detail. The fire that started was extinguished: on the roof of the engine room and the roof of TsZ-3 - by the fire brigade, inside the engine room - by shift personnel of the 5th shift of the turbine shop. All possible work is underway to prevent re-ignition: oil is drained from the oil systems into tanks, hydrogen is displaced from generators N7 and 8.

Flashed by Igor Petrovich Alexandrov, the head of the Marina. According to him, she is not on the list of those withdrawn (injured) from the territory of the station. There was no more anxiety, because I understood that it should not be on the 4th block, but what if?! Almost at a run, he rushed to the sanitary inspection room. We quickly changed into white clothes - at the crossing I saw Sasha Chumakov - Marina's partner. He immediately reported that Marina was changing clothes.

The stone fell from my soul.

We quickly reached the possessions of the shift chief of the first unit. What happened, they don't know. Heard two muffled explosions. Both RTs-1 blocks bear the rated load. There are no equipment failures. All work on the reactor and systems has been stopped. Mode of operation - with increased vigilance and attention. I looked into the TsZ-2. People in the field. Calm, although alarmed, - the radiological danger alarm is yelling in the hall. The armored doors of the TsZ-2 are battened down.

A call from the shift supervisor of the reactor shop-1 (NS RTs-1) Chugunov. A wonderful man, I will say more than once about him. Chugunov has just come from Unit 4. Things seem to be crap. Everywhere high background. Devices with a scale of 1000 microroentgen per second go off scale. There are failures, many ruins.

Chugunov and Anatoly Andreyevich Sitnikov, deputy chief engineer for the operation of the 1st stage (that is, the 1st and 2nd units), together tried to open the cut-off valves of the reactor cooling system. The two of them couldn't break it. It dragged on.

We need healthy, strong guys. And on the block shield-4 (BSHU-4) there are no reliable ones. Blockers are already running out of steam. To be honest, it's scary. We open the emergency complex of "personal protection equipment". I drink potassium iodide, I drink water. Ugh, what a mess! But we have to. Orlov is well - he took potassium iodide in a tablet. We dress silently. We put on shoe covers made of plastic on our feet, double gloves, "petals". We lay out documents and cigarettes from our pockets. It's like we're on a reconnaissance mission. They took a miner's lantern. We checked the light. "Petals" are put on, tied. Helmets on heads.

Remember their names. The names of those who went to help their comrades in trouble. I went not under orders, without any receipt, without knowing the true dose situation. Having acted as prompted by professional, human decency, the conscience of a communist:

Chugunov Vladimir Alexandrovich CPSU, head of the reactor operation shop.

Orlov Vyacheslav Alekseevich CPSU, deputy. head of the reactor shop for operation.

Nekhaev Alexander Alekseevich CPSU, senior mechanical engineer RTs-1.

Uskov Arkady Gennadievich CPSU, Art. RC-1 operation engineer.

Maybe it's written too loudly and immodestly. I am absolutely sure that the motives for helping were the most disinterested, lofty. And remember our names, maybe not necessary. Maybe even a high commission will say: "Why did you go there, eh ???"

6 hours 15 minutes, Chernobyl, corridor 301. We went out into the corridor, moved towards the 4th block. I'm a little behind. On the shoulder - "breadwinner" - a special armature to increase the lever when opening the valve.

Opposite the control room-2 - the head of the decontamination shop Kurochkin. In overalls, helmet, boots. On the chest there are crosswise straps from a gas mask and a bag. Equipment - even now into battle. Nervously paces the corridor. Back and forth... Why is he here? Unclear…

We moved to the territory of the 3rd and 4th blocks, looked at the radiation safety control panel. Samoylenko shift supervisor at the entrance. I asked him about individual dosimeters.

What dosimeters? Do you know what background?

Comrade seems to be in shock. Everything is clear with him. I tell him:

We went to control room-4. Do you know the fix?

He no longer listens to us. The man is deeply confused. And behind the shields they pour obscenities on each other: his boss V.P. Kaplun and his deputy - G.I. Krasnozhen. From the flow of mats, it is clear that they do not have dose control devices for a solid background. And devices with a scale of 1000 microroentgen / sec. - minuscule. A fun situation to say the least.

In front of the control room-4 itself, a suspended ceiling has collapsed, water is pouring from above. All crouched - passed. The door to the control room-4 is wide open. Come in. A. A. Sitnikov is sitting at the table of the head of the block shift. Near NSB-4 Sasha Akimov. The technological schemes are laid out on the table. Sitnikov, apparently, is not feeling well. He dropped his head on the table. He sat for a while, asked Chugunov:

Never mind.

And again, nausea sets in (Sitnikov and Chugunov have been on the block since 2 o'clock in the morning!).

We look at the devices of the SIUR console. Don't drink anything. The SIUR console is dead, all devices are silent. The caller is not working. Nearby - SIUR, Lenya Toptunov, a thin, young guy with glasses. Confused, depressed. It stands silently.

The phone is constantly ringing. A group of commanders decides where to supply water. It's decided. We supply water through drum-separators to the outlet pipes of the main circulation pumps for core cooling.

7 hours 15 minutes They moved in two groups. Akimov, Toptunov, Nekhaev will open one regulator. Orlov and I, like healthy men, will stand on the other. Sasha Akimov leads us to the place of work. We climbed the stairs to mark 27. We jumped into the corridor, dived to the left. Somewhere ahead, steam hoots. Where? I can not see anything. All have one miner's lantern. Sasha Akimov brought Orlov and me to the place, showed the regulator. Returned to his group. He needs a flashlight. Ten meters from us, there is a torn opening without a door, there is enough light for us: it was already dawn. The floor is full of water, water gushing from above. A very uncomfortable place. We work with Orlov without interruption. One turns the wheel, the other rests. Work is going fast. The first signs of water consumption appeared: a slight hiss in the regulator, then noise. The water is gone!

Almost at the same time I feel how the water went into my left shoe cover. Looks like it caught and broke somewhere. Then this trifle did not honor with his attention. But later it turned into a radiation burn of the 2nd degree, very painful and did not heal for a long time.

Moved to the first group. Things are unimportant there. The regulator is open, but not completely. But Lena Toptunov feels bad - he vomits, Sasha Akimov can barely hold on. We helped the guys get out of this gloomy corridor. Again on the stairs. Sasha still vomited - apparently, not for the first time, and therefore there is only bile. The "breadwinner" was left outside the door.

7 hours 45 minutes The whole group returned to the control room-4. Reported - water is supplied. Just now they relaxed, I felt - the whole back was wet, the clothes were wet, it was squelching in the left shoe cover, the “petal” was wet, it was very hard to breathe. Immediately changed the "petals". Akimov and Toptunov are in the toilet opposite - vomiting does not stop. We need the guys urgently to the medical center. Entering control room-4 Lenya Toptunov. All pale, eyes red, tears still dry. It twisted him hard.

How do you feel?

It's okay, it's getting better. I can still work.

That's enough for you. Let's go with Akimov to the first-aid post.

It's time for Sasha Nekhaev to turn in his shift. Orlov points to Akimov and Toptunov:

Come along with the guys, help them get to the first-aid post and come back to hand over the shift. Don't come here.

On the speakerphone, they announce the gathering of all the heads of the shops in the civil defense bunker. Sitnikov and Chugunov leave.

Just now I noticed: "fresh people" have already arrived at the control room-4. All the "old" have already been sent. Reasonable. No one knows the dosing situation, but vomiting indicates a high dose! How much - I do not remember.

9 hours 20 minutes Replaced a torn boot. We rested a little - and again forward. Again on the same ladder, the same mark 27 Our group is already being led by Akimov's replacement - NSB Smagin. Here are the valves. Tightened from the heart. Again, I am paired with Orlov, together we begin to "undermine" the valves at the full power of our muscles. Slowly things went on.

There is no water noise. The gloves are all wet. The palms are on fire. We open the second one - there is no water noise.

We returned to the control room-4, changed the "petals". I really want to smoke. I look around. Everyone is busy with their work. Okay, I'll survive, especially since there is absolutely no need to shoot the "petal". The devil knows what is in the air now, what you will inhale along with tobacco smoke. And we don’t know the dose situation for the control room-4. A stupid situation - at least one "dose" (dosimetrist) ran in with the device! Scouts, fuck them! I just thought - and then just the "dose" ran in. Some kind of small, crushed. Measured something - and go. But Orlov quickly caught him by the collar. Asks:

Who are you?

Dosimetrist.

Once a dosimetrist - measure the situation and report, as expected - where and how much.

"Dozik" is back again. Measures. You can see in the face that you want to get out of here as soon as possible. He calls the numbers. Wow! Device on the scale! Phonite is clearly from the corridor. Behind the concrete columns of the control room, the dose is less. And the "dose" fled in the meantime. Jackal!

I looked out into the corridor. It's a clear sunny morning outside. Against the Eagles. Waving hand. From the corridor we go into a small room. There are shields and remotes in the room. The glass on the windows is broken. Without leaning out of the window, carefully look down.

We see the end of the 4th block ... Everywhere there are piles of debris, torn off slabs, wall panels, mangled air conditioners hang on wires ... Water is gushing from broken fire mains ... Noticeable immediately - everywhere is gloomy dark gray dust. Under our windows is also full of debris. Fragments of a regular square section stand out noticeably. That is why Orlov called me to look at these wreckage. It's reactor graphite!

We have not yet had time to assess all the consequences, we are returning to the control room-4. What we see is so terrible that we are afraid to say it out loud. We call to see the deputy chief engineer of the station for science Lyutov. Lyutov looks where we are pointing. Silent. Orlov says:

It's reactor graphite!

Come on, guys, what kind of graphite is this, this is "assembly-eleven".

It is also square in shape. Weighs about 80 kg! Even if it's "build-eleven", radish horseradish isn't sweeter. She flew off the "nickle" of the reactor with no holy spirit and ended up on the street. But this, unfortunately, is not an assembly, dear Mikhail Alekseevich! As deputy for science, you need to know this as well as we do. But Lyutov does not want to believe his eyes, Orlov asks standing next to Smagina:

Maybe you had graphite here before? (We also cling to straws.)

No, all Saturdays have already passed. It was clean and tidy here, not a single graphite block was here until tonight.

Everything fell into place.

Sailed.

And over these ruins, over this terrible, invisible danger, the generous spring sun shines. The mind refuses to believe that the worst thing that could happen has happened. But this is already a reality, a fact.

* Reactor explosion. 190 tons of fuel, in whole or in part, with fission products, with reactor graphite, reactor materials, was thrown out of the reactor shaft, and no one knows where this muck is now, where it settled, where it settles! *

We all silently enter the control room-4. The phone rings, they call Orlov. Chugunov feels bad, he is sent to the hospital. Sitnikov is already in the hospital. Transfer the management of the shop to Orlov as a senior.

10:00 a.m. Orlov is already in the rank of and. about. the head of RC-1 receives the "go-ahead" to go to the control room-3.

With a quick step we leave towards the control room-3. Finally we see a normal dosimetrist. Warns not to approach the windows - very high background. Already understood without him. How? They themselves do not know, all the instruments go off scale. Instruments with high sensitivity. And now we don’t need sensitivity, but a large measurement limit! Ah, shame...

We are tired hard. Almost five hours without eating, at the work of the draft. We go to the control room-3. The third unit was urgently stopped after the explosion, there is an emergency cooldown. We go to our "home" - to the first block. There is already a portable sanitary lock at the border. Immediately noted - our sanchute, from RC-1 Well done guys, they work well. Without touching his hands, he took off his shoe covers. I rinsed the soles, wiped my feet. Orlov showed signs of vomiting. Run to the men's restroom. I don't have anything yet, but somehow it's disgusting. We crawl like sleepy flies. Forces are running out.

We reached the room in which the entire command staff of RC-1 sits. Took off the petal. Gave me a cigarette, lit it. Two puffs and I had nausea in my throat. He put out the cigarette. We are all wet, we must urgently go to change. And if in a good way - we do not need to change clothes, but to the first-aid post. I look at Orlov - he is sick, me too. And this is already bad. Probably, we look very tortured, because no one asks us about anything. They said themselves:

The thing is rubbish. Reactor collapsed. We saw fragments of graphite on the street.

We go to the sanitary inspection room to wash and change. This is where it broke me. Turned upside down and across every 3-5 minutes. I saw Orlov slam a magazine shut. Yeah ... "Civil Defense", of course.

Well, what did you read?

Nothing good. Went to surrender to the infirmary.

Later, Orlov said what was written in that magazine: the appearance of vomiting is already a sign of radiation sickness, which corresponds to a dose of more than 100 rem (X-ray). The annual rate is 5 rems.

In the bunker

Sergey Konstantinovich Parashin, former secretary of the party committee of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (now S.K. Parashin - head of the shift of block N1 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, chairman of the council of the plant's labor collective):

“They called me about half an hour after the accident. In a choking voice, the telephone operator told my wife (I myself was sleeping) that something very serious had happened there. Judging by the intonation, my wife immediately believed, so I quickly jumped up and ran out into the street. with headlights on, I raised my hand. It was Vorobyov, the head of the civil defense staff of the station, who was also raised at the alarm signal.

At about 2.10-2.15 am we were at the station. By the time we got there, the fire was gone. But the change in the block configuration itself brought me to the appropriate state. We went into the office of NPP Director Bryukhanov. Here I saw the second secretary of the Pripyat city committee, Veselovsky, there was a deputy director for the regime, me and Vorobyov.

When we got to the office, Bryukhanov immediately said that we were moving to control the bunker. He apparently realized that there was an explosion, and therefore gave such a command. That's the way it's supposed to be in civil defense. Bryukhanov was in a depressed state. I asked him, "What happened?" - "I do not know". He was generally laconic even at the usual time, but that night ... I think he was in a state of shock, inhibited. I myself was in a state of shock for almost six months after the accident. And another year - in complete decline.

We moved to the bunker, located here, under the ABK-1 building. This is a low room filled with desks and chairs. One table with telephones and a small console. Bryukhanov sat down at this table. The table is poorly placed - next to the front door. And Bryukhanov was, as it were, isolated from us. All the time people walked past him, the front door slammed. Plus fan noise. All the heads of shops and shifts, their deputies began to flock. Chugunov and Sitnikov came.

From a conversation with Bryukhanov, I realized that he called the regional committee. He said: there is a collapse, but it is not yet clear what happened. Dyatlov understands there ... Three hours later Dyatlov came, talked with Bryukhanov, then I sat him at the table and began to ask. "I don't know, I don't understand anything."

I'm afraid no one reported to the director that the reactor had been blown up. The wording "the reactor is blown up" was not given by any deputy chief engineer. And the chief engineer Fomin did not give it. Bryukhanov himself went to the area of ​​the fourth block - and also did not understand this. Here is the paradox. People did not believe in the possibility of a reactor explosion, they developed their own versions and obeyed them.

I also formulated for myself what happened there. I assumed that the separator drum had exploded. The whole ideology of the first night was built on the fact that everyone was sure that it was not the reactor that exploded, but something - it is not clear yet.

There were about thirty or forty people in the bunker. There was noise and din - everyone on his phone negotiated with his shop. Everything revolved around one thing - supplying water to cool the reactor and pumping out water. Everyone was busy with this work.

The second secretary of the Kyiv Regional Committee, Malomuzh, arrived at the station somewhere between seven and nine o'clock in the morning. He came with a group of people. The discussion turned to the need to draw up a single document that would go through all channels. Either Bryukhanov instructed me, or I volunteered myself - it's hard to say now - but I took up the preparation of the document.

I thought I was in control of the situation. I started writing this paper. I got rough. Then another took over. Wrote a draft. The five of us agreed - this way and that. The collapse of the roof was indicated there, the level of radiation in the city was still low at that time, and it was said that further study of the problem was underway.

And before that it was such an unpleasant thing. It's hard for me to explain now. The head of civil defense, Vorobyov, with whom we arrived, approached me a couple of hours later and reported: he went around the station and found very large radiation fields near the fourth unit, about 200 roentgens. Why didn’t I believe him? Vorobyov is by nature a very emotional person, and when he said this, it was terrible to look at him ... And I did not believe it. I told him: "Go, prove to the director." And then I asked Bryukhanov: "How?" - "Badly". Unfortunately, I did not bring the conversation with the director to the end, did not demand a detailed answer from him.

Sitting in the bunker, did you think about your wife and children?

But do you know what I thought? If I had fully known and imagined what had happened, of course, I would have done the wrong thing. But I thought that the radiation was due to the release of water from the separator drum. I started sounding the alarm too late - on the second night, when the reactor flared up. Then I began to call the city committee, saying: it is necessary to evacuate the children. Only then it dawned on me that I needed to urgently evacuate. But by that time, a lot of high officials had already come to the city. The director was not invited to the meeting of the Government Commission, no one asked him. The arrival of the chiefs had a great psychological effect. And they are all very serious - these big ranks. Inspire confidence. Like, here come people who know everything, understand everything. Only much later, when I talked to them, did this belief pass. We didn't make any decisions. All right and wrong decisions were made from outside. We, the staff, did something mechanically, like sleepy flies. The stress was too great, and our belief that the reactor could not explode was too great. Mass blindness. Many see what happened, but do not believe.

And now I'm haunted by guilt - for life, I think. I did very badly that night in the bunker. I had to say in court that I was afraid - otherwise I could not explain my behavior. After all, it was I who sent Sitnikov, Chugunov, Uskov and others to the fourth block. This tragedy hangs over me. After all, Sitnikov died ... They ask me: "Why didn't you go to the fourth block yourself?" Then I went there, but not that night... What can I say? No, I don't think I'm afraid. I just didn't understand then. But I know this alone with myself, but how can I explain it to people? Like, everyone was there, everyone was irradiated, and you, my dear, are standing alive in front of us, although you should ...

And everything is explained simply. I myself did not know the fourth block. Worked on the first. If it happened on the first - would go himself. And here in front of me are Chugunov, the former head of the shop, and Sitnikov. Both worked there only six months ago. I tell the director: "We need to send them, no one will understand them better, will not help Dyatlov." And they both went. And even they, the most honest people who were not responsible for the explosion, even they, having returned, did not say what happened there ... If Sitnikov had understood what had happened, he would not have died. After all, he is a top professional.

I'm trying to justify myself, but this excuse is weak .. "

Nikolai Vasilyevich Karpan (now N.V. Karpan, deputy chief engineer of the station for science), deputy head of the nuclear physics laboratory.

“The day before the accident, I returned from Moscow, I was not at work. I found out about the accident at seven o’clock in the morning, when a relative from Chernobyl called. She asked what happened at the station? She was told terrible things about some kind of explosion. I assured her I called the station in the evening and found out that Unit 4 was going to shutdown, and before the shutdown, they usually do some work related to opening the safety valves and releasing a large amount of steam into the atmosphere.This creates noise effects. I calmed her down, nevertheless, some anxiety remained. I started calling the station - the fourth block. None of the phones answered. I called the third block - I was told that there was practically no central hall above the third and fourth blocks. I went outside and saw ... the changed contours of the second stage.

Then I called my boss and asked - did he make an attempt to get into the station? "Yes, but I was detained by the posts of the Ministry of Internal Affairs." The head of the nuclear safety department... was not allowed into the station! My boss and I went out to a small round square before leaving the city, we decided to take a passing car. We saw the head of the adjustment shop there, who said that the director's car had left and we could all get to the station together.

We arrived at the station at eight o'clock in the morning. So I ended up in a bunker.

The director, the chief engineer, the party organizer, the deputy chief engineer for science, the head of the spectrometry laboratory and his deputy were there. By this time, they managed to take samples of air and water and do tests. Up to 17% of the activity due to neptunium was found in air samples, and neptunium is a transitional isotope from uranium-238 to plutonium-239. They are just particles of fuel… Water activity was also extremely high.

The first thing I encountered in the bunker and what seemed very strange to me was that no one told us anything about what had happened, about the details of the accident. Yes, there was an explosion. And about the people and their actions committed that night, we had no idea. Although work on the localization of the accident has been going on since the moment of the explosion. Then, later that morning, I tried to restore the painting myself. I started asking people.

But then, in the bunker, we were not told anything about what was happening in the central hall, in the turbine hall, which of the people were there, how many people were evacuated to the medical unit, what doses there, at least presumably ...

Everyone present in the bunker was divided into two parts. People who were in a stupor - the director, the chief engineer were clearly in shock. And those who tried to somehow influence the situation, actively influence it. Change it to better side. There were fewer of them. Among them, I include, first of all, the party organizer of the station, Sergei Konstantinovich Parashin. Of course, Parashin did not try to entrust himself with making technical decisions, but he continued to work with people, he dealt with personnel, solved numerous problems ... What happened that night? Here's what I was able to find out.

When the explosion happened, there were several dozen people near the station. This includes security guards, builders, and fishermen who fished in the cooling pond and in the supply channel. With those who were in close proximity, I talked, asked them - what did they see, what did they hear? The explosion completely demolished the roof, the western wall of the central hall, collapsed the wall in the area of ​​the turbine hall, pierced the roof of the turbine hall with fragments of reinforced concrete structures, and caused a fire in the roof. Everyone knows about the fire on the roof. But very few people know that fires also started inside the engine room. But there were turbogenerators filled with hydrogen, tens of tons of oil. It was this internal fire that represented the greatest danger.

The first thing the reactor workers did was to close the door to the central hall, or rather, to that open-air space that was left of the hall. They gathered all the people - with the exception of the deceased Khodemchuk - they took them out of the danger zone, from the destruction zone, carried out the wounded Shashenok, and the fifth shift, led by Sasha Akimov, began to do everything to remove explosive hydrogen from the generators and replace it with nitrogen, turn off the burning electric assemblies and mechanisms in the turbine hall, to pump over oil so that, God forbid, the fire does not spread here.

After all, firefighters worked on the roof, and the staff did everything else inside. Their merit is the suppression of fires in the turbine hall and the prevention of explosions. And here is the ratio of the danger and the volume of work performed in such conditions, and gave such losses: firefighters working on the roof, six people died, and those who worked inside, twenty-three people died.

Of course, the feat of firefighters has entered the centuries, and the degree of heroism and risk is not measured by numbers. But nevertheless, what the personnel did in the first minutes after the accident should also be known to people. I am convinced of the highest professional competence of the fifth shift operators. It was Alexander Akimov who first understood what had happened: already at 3:40 he told the head of the station shift, Vladimir Alekseevich Babichev, who arrived at the station on the call of the director, that a general radiation accident had occurred.

Does this mean that the primary link understood what really happened already at night?

Of course. Moreover, he reported this to the management. He assessed the size of the accident, perfectly imagined the danger of what had happened. He did not leave the zone, doing everything to ensure the cooling of the power unit. And he remained a man. Here is an example. You know that under normal conditions three operators and a shift supervisor work at the control room. So, the youngest of them, Kirshenbaum's senior turbine control engineer, who did not know the layout of the building, was urgently expelled from the control room by Akimov. Kirshenbaum was told: "You're superfluous here, you can't help us in any way, go away."

All the information that was taken out of the Dyatlov, Sitnikov, Chugunov, Akimov zone, all of it settled in the bunker at the level of the director and chief engineer, was cemented here and was not allowed to pass further. Of course, I cannot say with certainty that she did not go to the upper floors of the leadership of our central office. But this information did not reach us. All subsequent knowledge about what happened was obtained independently.

By 10 o'clock in the morning with the head of our laboratory, I managed to visit the control room-3, ABK-2, I was in the central hall of the third unit and in the area of ​​the control room-4, in the area of ​​the seventh and eighth turbogenerators. From the territory of the industrial site, he examined the affected block. One circumstance alarmed me very much: the protection control rods entered the zone by an average of 3-3.5 meters, that is, half. The core loading was approximately fifty critical masses, and half the effectiveness of the protection rods could not serve as a reliable guarantee ... I calculated that by about 17-19 hours the block could go from a subcritical state to a state close to critical. Critical state - when a self-sustaining chain reaction is possible.

Could this mean an atomic explosion?

No. If the zone is open, then there will be no explosion, because there will be no pressure. I did not expect an explosion as such. But it was supposed to overheat. Therefore, it was necessary to develop such technical solutions that could prevent the unit from exiting the subcritical state.

Did the station management meet and discuss this problem?

No. This was done by specialists - the head of the nuclear safety department, the head of the nuclear physics laboratory. There was no one from Moscow yet. The most acceptable solution in those conditions was to muffle the apparatus with a solution of boric acid. This could be done as follows: pour bags of boric acid into tanks of clean condensate and use pumps to pump water from these tanks into the core. It was possible to stir boric acid in the tank of a fire engine and use a hydraulic gun to throw the solution into the reactor.

It was necessary to "poison" the reactor with boric acid. By about 10 am, the deputy chief engineer for science handed over this idea to the chief engineer of the station, Fomin. By the same time, there was a complete idea of ​​what needs to be done urgently and what awaits us at the end of the day, and at the same time the demand was born to prepare the evacuation of the city's residents. Because if a self-sustaining chain reaction starts, then hard radiation can be directed towards the city. After all, there is no biological protection, demolished by an explosion. Unfortunately, there was no boric acid at the station, although there are documents according to which a certain supply of boric acid should have been stored ... "

Column special purpose

Alexander Yuryevich Esaulov, 34 years old, deputy chairman of the city executive committee of the city of Pripyat:

“At night, I was awakened, on the twenty-sixth, somewhere at four o'clock. Maria Grigorievna, our secretary, called, said: “Accident at the nuclear power plant.” Some acquaintance of hers worked at the station, he came at night, woke her up and told her.

At ten minutes to four I was in the executive committee. The chairman has already been informed, and he went to the nuclear power plant. I immediately called our chief of staff of civil defense, raised him with a gun. He lived in a hostel. Arrived right away. Then the chairman of the city executive committee arrived, Vladimir Pavlovich Voloshko. We all got together and began to figure out what to do.

Of course, we didn't quite know what to do. This, as they say, until the roasted rooster pecks. In general, I think that our civil defense turned out to be not up to par. But here the miscalculation is not only ours. Give me the name of a city where GO is set to its proper height. Before that, we had the usual exercises, and even then everything was played in the office. There is also such a moment to take into account: even theoretically, such an accident was ruled out. And it was inspired constantly and regularly ...

I am the chairman of the planning commission in the executive committee, I am in charge of transport, medicine, communications, roads, employment offices, distribution of building materials, and pensioners. Actually, I am a young deputy chairman of the city executive committee, only on November 18, 1985 I was elected. On my birthday. Lived in a two-room apartment. The wife with children at the time of the accident was not in Pripyat - she went to her parents, because she was on postnatal leave. My son was born in November 1985. Daughter is six years old.

Here you go. I went to our ATP, I decided to organize a city wash. I called the executive committee Kononykhin, asked to send a washing machine. Came. It's the same song! For the whole city we had - you won’t believe it - four watering and washing machines! For fifty thousand inhabitants! This is despite the fact that the executive committee and the city committee - we had very cocky both of them - went to the ministry, asked for cars. Not foreseeing an accident, but simply to keep the city clean.

A car arrived with a tank, where they dug it up - I don't know. The driver was not her native and did not know how to turn on the pump. Water from the hose flowed only by gravity. I drove him back, he arrived in about twenty minutes, he had already learned how to turn on this pump. We began to wash the road near the gas station. Now I already understand in hindsight that this was one of the first dust suppression procedures. Water came with soapy water. Then it turned out that it was just a very polluted place.

At ten in the morning there was a meeting in the city committee, a very short one, fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no time for talking. After the meeting, I immediately went to the medical unit.

I am sitting in the medical unit. As I remember now: the block is like on the palm of your hand. Near, right in front of us. Three kilometers from us Smoke was coming from the block. It's not exactly black... it's a puff of smoke. As from an extinguished fire, only from an extinguished fire it is gray-gray, and this one is so dark. Well, then graphite caught fire. It was already late in the evening, the glow, of course, was what we needed. There is so much graphite ... No joke. And we - can you imagine? - spent the whole day with the windows open.

After dinner, I was invited by the second secretary of the Kyiv regional committee, V. Malomuzh, and instructed me to organize the evacuation of the most seriously ill patients to Kyiv, to the airport, to be sent to Moscow.

From the headquarters of the civil defense of the country was the Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel-General Ivanov. He arrived by plane. I gave this plane for transportation.

It was not easy to form a column. It's not easy: to immerse people. It was necessary to prepare documents, case histories, test results for each. The main delay was precisely in the processing of personal files. Even such moments arose - a seal is needed, and a seal is needed at a nuclear power plant. They hushed up this case, sent it without a seal.

We were carrying twenty-six people, this is one bus, a red intercity Ikarus. But I said to give two buses. Whether it is not enough that can be. God forbid, what a delay ... And two ambulances, because there were two sick patients, heavy, stretchers, with thirty percent burns.

I asked not to go through Kyiv. Because those guys on the buses, they were all wearing pajamas. The spectacle, of course, is wild. But for some reason we drove through Khreshchatyk, then to the left along Petrovsky Alley and drove to Boryspil. We've arrived. The gates are closed. It was at night, at three o'clock, at the beginning of four. We're buzzing. Finally, a sight worthy of the gods. Someone comes out in slippers, riding breeches, without a belt and opens the gate. We drove straight to the field, to the plane. There, the crew was already warming up the engine.

And another episode hit me right in the heart. The pilot approached me. And he says, "How much did these guys get?" I ask: "What?" - X-ray. I say: "That's enough. But in principle - what's the matter?" And he told me: “I also want to live, I don’t want to get extra x-rays, I have a wife, I have children.”

Can you imagine?

They flew away. Goodbye, wishing you a speedy recovery...

We drove to Pripyat. It's already the second day that I haven't slept - and sleep didn't take me. At night, when we were still driving to Borispol, I saw columns of buses that were going to Pripyat. Towards us. It was already preparing the evacuation of the city.

It was the morning of the twenty-seventh of April, Sunday.

We arrived, I had breakfast and went to Malomuzh. Reported. He says: "We need to evacuate everyone who is hospitalized." The first time I took out the heaviest, but now I had to take them all. During this time that I was absent, more people arrived. Malomuzh told me to be in Boryspil at twelve o'clock. And the conversation went on about ten in the morning. It was clearly unrealistic. It is necessary to prepare all the people, draw up all the documents. Moreover, the first time I carried twenty-six people, and now I need to take out one hundred and six.

We collected this entire "delegation", all issued and left already at twelve o'clock in the afternoon. There were three buses, the fourth was reserve. "Ikarus". Here the wives stand, say goodbye, cry, the lads are all walking, in pajamas, I beg: "Boys, do not disperse so that I do not look for you." I completed one bus, the second, the third, now everyone is getting on, I am running to the escort car, now the traffic police have worked clearly, I sit down, I wait five minutes, ten, fifteen - there is no third bus!

It turns out that three more victims were admitted, then another ...

Finally let's go. There was a stop in Zalesye. Agreed, if

Flashing lights. Let's go to Zalesye - time! The driver brakes hard. The buses have become The last bus from the first - eighty or ninety meters. The last bus has stopped. A nurse takes off from there - and to the first bus. It turned out that there were medical workers in all the buses, but only the first one carried medicines. Runs up: "The patient is ill!" And that was the only time I saw Belokon then. True, at that time I did not know his last name. I was later told that it was Belokon. Himself in pajamas, he ran with a bag to provide assistance.

V. Belokon:

“The first batch of the injured left on the twenty-sixth in the evening, at eleven o’clock in the evening, straight to Kyiv. The operators were taken out, Pravik, Kibenok, Telyatnikov. And we stayed for the night. We were instructed to take out for dinner. "When they took us on buses, I felt nothing. We even stopped somewhere behind Chernobyl, someone got sick, I ran out and tried to help the nurse"

A. Esaulov:

“Belokon ran, they grabbed him by the hands. “Where are you, you’re sick.” He was amazed ... He rushed off with a bag. And the most interesting thing is that when they started digging in this bag, they couldn’t find ammonia. from the escort I ask: “Do you have ammonia in the first-aid kit?” - “Yes.” We turn around, jump to the bus, Belokon to that guy once an ampoule - under his nose. It became easier.

And one more moment in Zalesye was remembered. The patients got off the buses - someone to smoke, stretch, tyry-pyry, and suddenly a woman runs with a wild cry and uproar. Her son is on the bus. Is that necessary? Such a docking ... Do you understand? .. Where did it come from? - I did not understand. He "mamo", "mamo" to her, reassures her.

A plane was already waiting for us at the Boryspil airport. There was the head of the airport, Polivanov. We went to the field to drive right up to the plane, because the guys are all in pajamas, and this is April, it's not hot. We drove through the gate, onto the field, and behind us a yellow "rafik" was blowing, swearing that we had left without permission. At first, we didn’t drive up to that plane at all. Rafik led us through.

And another episode. We sit comfortably with Polivanov, a bunch of high-frequency phones, draw up documents for the transportation of patients. I gave them a receipt on behalf of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a letter of guarantee that the station would pay for the flight - it was TU-154. A pretty woman enters, offering coffee. And her eyes are like those of Jesus Christ, she, you see, already knows what the matter is. He looks at me like I'm from Dante's hell. We walked for the second day, I didn’t sleep, I was brutally tired ... Brings coffee. Such a small cup. I drank this pindyurochka in one gulp. Brings a second one. The coffee is wonderful. We settled all the cases, I get up, and she says: "Fifty-six kopecks from you." I look at her - I do not understand anything. She says: "Sorry, we do these things for money." I was so detached from money, from all this ... As if I had come from another world.

We washed the buses again, took a shower - and went to Pripyat. We left Boryspil somewhere at sixteen zero zero. On the way, we already met buses ...

Pripyat residents were taken out.

We arrived in Pripyat - already an empty city."

I have been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone many times and brought back impressions and photographs from there. I can say that from the inside, everything looks completely different from what it looks like after reading articles or watching videos. Chernobyl is completely different. And each time is different.

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the most terrible man-made accident in the history of the Earth, I am publishing a selection of my best photographic materials about Chernobyl. After this series of materials, you will look at Chernobyl with different eyes.

Posts are available by clicking on the title or photo.

Post-retrospective of the life of a young worker nuclear power plant in 1985. In the spring of Pripyat, even now, the very atmosphere of the city of youth, spring and hope that was there in the early eighties has been preserved.

Try to see Pripyat just like that.

In Pripyat, you can’t enter buildings now, but I managed to walk around one abandoned city house. From the material you can find out what the typical apartments of the residents of Pripyat looked like, what was left in them after the work of disinfectants and marauders, and also what the entrance looks like after almost thirty years of the power of nature.

Pripyat has become a symbol of the Chernobyl tragedy, the whole world knows about this city. But dozens of small towns and villages, which no one remembers now, turned out to be at the site of the passage of the nuclear wind. The village of Kopachi was at the epicenter of a nuclear tragedy and was so heavily polluted that it was completely destroyed - the houses were destroyed by bulldozers and military WRIs and covered with earth.

Only the building remained on the periphery of the village kindergarten, where you can still see traces of pre-accident life and childhood in the mid-eighties.

Pripyat sixteen-story buildings are perhaps the most famous residential buildings in the city. There were exactly five such houses in Pripyat. It’s not very safe to enter the sixteen-pieces with coats of arms that are located on the main square of the city now, but it’s quite possible to visit the buildings on the Heroes of Stalingrad Street - I just visited one of them.

In the post - a story about the house, its apartments and views of Pripyat and the Sarcophagus from above.

How and how to deal with the consequences nuclear disaster? What equipment helped people in the fight against radiation pollution, how did they clean the territories adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant? Most of the "dirty" special equipment of the liquidators has long been buried in special burial grounds, but something can still be seen in a small museum near the city of Chernobyl. About this - the story in the post.

Many do not know this, but the city of Chernobyl now continues to live its very peculiar life - from an ordinary regional town, it has turned into a closed city for the life of modern workers of Chernobyl. Residential buildings have been turned into dormitories for workers who live there on a rotational basis for several months, from time to time leaving for " big land". The city has a curfew, almost like in wartime.

I managed to get into one of the dormitories of modern accident liquidators and see how they live. About all this story in the material about the apartments of Chernobyl.

What does Chernobyl look like now? Is it true that mutant catfish live in the cooling pond?

Truth. Read about it in a post about a walk around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant :)

The Thirty-Kilometer Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is known not only for cities and villages. There are also amazing military facilities there - for example, the famous ZGRLS "Duga", also known as "Chernobyl-2" - a once top-secret antenna complex designed for long-range monitoring of nuclear missile launches by a "probable enemy".

Usually, only the antennas themselves are shown at the Chernobyl-2 facility, since many of the internal premises of the complex are still classified. I managed to get into several military barracks as well as
premises where top-secret equipment was previously located.

In this post - a story about the interior of the military complex - something that will never be shown to you on any excursion.

A question that worries a lot of people - what is the level of radiation now in Chernobyl? On one of my trips to the ChEZ, I took a tuned dosimeter with me and conducted detailed measurements of radiation in different parts of the Zone, including Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself. About this - a detailed photo story in the post.

The city of Slavutich became the second life of the city of Pripyat. There will never be life in Pripyat itself, but its former inhabitants had the strength to start all over again. A post about how spring always conquers winter, and life conquers death.

________________________________________ ______

Arthur Shigapov

ISBN 978-5-699-38637-6

Introduction

What you see, write in a book and send it to the churches in Asia...

So, write what you saw, and what is, and what will happen after this.

Apocalypse 1

Before you - perhaps the most unusual of all the guidebooks published in the world. He talks about how to go where you don't need to go. Where no “sane” person will go voluntarily. There, where there was a catastrophe of a universal scale, completely discarding the usual ideas about good and evil. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant changed the existing system of coordinates and became a kind of Rubicon for the whole country. This is a symbol of a new troubled time, when the usual way of life is collapsing, and it is replaced by a cold emptiness and border posts with barbed wire on yesterday's busy roads. The decline of one of the great empires of the 20th century did not begin in Belovezhskaya Pushcha in 1991, or even in the Baltic States, which declared itself free three years earlier. It all started here, on a warm April night in 1986, when a radioactive rainbow rose into the sky over Ukraine, and with it over the entire country. Chernobyl is a zone of transition to a new time, where the ruins of the Soviet past are absorbed by a new environment, perceptible only with special devices. This is no longer a future post-nuclear era, but a post-human era.

It is all the more interesting to look beyond the edge of being and realize the scale of the tragedy that befell this once fertile land and the people who inhabited it.

"You are crazy? Are you tired of living? If not about yourself, then think about the children!”

How many times have I heard these exhortations from relatives and friends, going on another "extreme" trip, be it the mountains of Afghanistan, the vast Iraqi villages or the ruins of the Lebanese capital immediately after the Israeli bombing. A long time ago, when the trees were big and the soda from the machine was real, we young boys climbed dark basements and abandoned dusty attics in search of imaginary dangers. Years have passed, and now matured stalkers - adventurers on their own head - can be seen in the most uncomfortable corners of the planet, such as the Somali wilderness or a pass in mountainous Chechnya. But every time the danger can be seen or felt, whether it's fog on the famous "road of death" in Bolivia, which winds serpentine over the abyss, or bearded Taliban with machine guns at the ready, from which I once had to flee in the Afghan gorge of Tora Bora. The Chernobyl enemy is invisible, inaudible, intangible. It is recognized only by the crackle of the dosimeter, and this crackle dispassionately announces that the enemy is already here and has begun his destructive work. You cannot negotiate with him, you cannot pity him, he does not take payoffs and does not warn of an attack. You just need to know what he is, where he is hiding and how dangerous he is. Together with knowledge, fear recedes, the fear of radiation disappears - the so-called radiophobia. There is a desire to refute the philistine ideas about the Chernobyl zone as the territory of two-headed mutants and birch trees with fir cones instead of leaves.

This guide will answer many of your questions. It will help to gain an understanding of what happened here 23 years ago and how events developed further. He will talk about the dangers, imaginary and real. He will become a guide to the most interesting places associated with the accident, and will tell you how to get around obstacles - real radiation and artificial ones that timid officials piled up.

On one of my visits to the Zone, I rode incognito in an electric train carrying workers to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. “Welcome to hell!” read the inscription on the wall of an abandoned house a few kilometers from the final stop. What for some means an extreme foray into the radioactive hell, for others is just a daily commute to and from work. For some, exceeding the daily allowable dose of radiation is a reason for panic, but for someone it is a good reason for taking time off. Shift of coordinates or a new post-accident reality? Read this book and then try to see everything with your own eyes. Good luck with your travels!

Although this guide is out of line with ordinary guides to "city-countries", its structure is simple and clear. First, the author will introduce you to the history of the Chernobyl accident, and not from the moment the fatal atomic chain was launched, but much earlier - when decisions were only being made to build a new energy monster. This narrative least of all resembles a dry chronology of events and is rather a story-remembrance of the past, present and future. Only by realizing the scale and depth of the tragedy that has occurred, you can make a decision about the trip, otherwise it will turn into wasted time and money.

Radiation is invisible and intangible, its danger can be assessed only by clearly understanding its structure, dimensions and methods of influence, as well as by owning measuring instruments. To do this, you are presented with the relevant section, which tells about the basics of radiation safety in a simple and accessible form. There is also a list of actually sold dosimeters. The author is in no way connected with the manufacturers and considers only popular models tested by many stalkers, whose advantages and disadvantages were discussed in detail on specialized sites.

The practical part included the most interesting places, significant from a historical and visual point of view. The cost of excursions and trips are real, published on the websites of firms, clarified through negotiations or paid by the author personally. The cost of hotels is given as of the summer of 2009, their description is the author's. In the "Informpracticum" section you will find all the necessary timetables and prices for travel by trains, electric trains and buses leading to and around the Exclusion Zone. The names of some villages and settlements are given in Russian and local interpretation.

In general, the author conceived this guide as an interesting and useful book for the widest range of readers who are going to visit the site of the tragedy or are simply interested in the Chernobyl issue. The monotonous scientific and academic style is left for other, specialized publications; it also expresses a deeply personal position, gained through suffering in the course of perfect travels, studied literature, viewed photo and video materials, meetings with employees of the nuclear power plant and the Exclusion Zone, self-settlers and representatives of state bodies operating in the resettled territories.

Story. How it was, how it is and how it will be

In the beginning was the Word...

Chernobyl(lat.- Artemisia vulgaris, English “ mugwort”) is a species of perennial herbaceous plants of the genus Wormwood. The name "Chernobyl" comes from a blackish stem - a blade of grass (material from the free Internet encyclopedia "Wikipedia", website)

“The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a lamp, and fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of this star is Wormwood, and a third of the waters became wormwood, and many of the people died from behold, because they became bitter ...

And I saw and heard one Angel flying in the middle of the sky and saying with a loud voice: “Woe, woe, woe to those who live on earth from the rest of the difficult voices of the three Angels who will trumpet!”

Apocalypse 8

Apocalypse Today. What does he look like?

Eyewitnesses of each era give the answer in different ways. The Holy Apostle John, who mystically predicted the events of the distant future, does not spare colors and amazes the reader with the scale of disasters:

“The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven to earth, and the key was given to it from the treasury of the abyss. She opened the well of the abyss, and smoke came out of the well, like smoke from a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke from the well. And the locusts came out of the smoke to the earth, and power was given to them, such as the scorpions of the earth have. And she was told not to harm the grass of the earth, and no greenery, and no tree, but only to one people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. And it was given to her not to kill them, but only to torment them for five months; and its torment is like the torment of a scorpion when it stings a man.”

Two thousand years later, an eyewitness to the man-made apocalypse, Yuri Tregub (shift supervisor of the 4th unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant), will describe what is happening in a language much more ordinary and much more terrible in this routine:

“April 25, 1986, I took over the shift. At first I was not ready for the tests ... only after two hours, when I got into the essence of the program. When accepting the shift, it was said that the security systems had been removed. Well, of course, I asked Kazachkov: “How did they get you out?” He says: "On the basis of the program, although I objected." With whom did he speak with Dyatlov (deputy chief engineer of the station), or what? It was not possible to convince him. Well, the program is the program, it was developed by the people responsible for the implementation, after all ... Only after I carefully read the program, only then did I have a lot of questions about it. And in order to talk with management, you need to deeply study the documentation, otherwise you can always be left in the cold. When I had all these questions, it was already 6 pm - and there was no one to contact. I did not like the program for its vagueness. It was evident that it was made up by an electrician - Metlenko or someone from Dontekhenergo ... Sasha Akimov (the head of the next shift) came at the beginning of the twelfth, at half past eleven he was already in place. I tell Akimov: “I have a lot of questions about this program. In particular, where to take the extra power, it should be written in the program.” When the turbine is cut off from the reactor, the excess thermal power must be put somewhere. We have a special system that, in addition to the turbine, provides steam intake ... And I already realized that this test will not take place on my shift. I had no moral right to interfere in this - after all, Akimov took over the shift. But I told him all my doubts. Lots of questions about the program. And he stayed to be present at the trials ... If only he knew how it would end ...

The running experiment begins. The turbine is disconnected from the steam and at this time they look at how long its run-out (mechanical rotation) will last. And then the command was given, Akimov gave it. We didn't know how the coast-down equipment worked, so in the first seconds I perceived… there was some kind of bad sound. I thought it was the sound of a braked turbine. I remember how I described it in the first days of the accident: as if the Volga at full speed began to slow down and skid. Such a sound: doo-doo-doo-doo ... Turning into a roar. The building vibrates. The control room (panel control unit) was trembling. Then a blow sounded. Kirshenbaum shouted: "Water hammer in the deaerators!" This blow was not very good. Compared to what happened next. Although a strong blow. The control room shook. I jumped back, and at that time a second blow followed. That was a very strong blow. The plaster crumbled, the whole building went down ... the light went out, then the emergency power was restored. I jumped back from where I was standing because I couldn't see anything there. I only saw that the main safety valves were open. The opening of one GPA is an emergency, and eight GPAs - it was already such ... something supernatural ...

Everyone was in shock. All stood with long faces. I was very scared. Full shock. Such a blow is the most natural earthquake. True, I still thought that there might be something with the turbine. Akimov gives me the command to open the manual valves of the reactor cooling system. I shout to Gazin - he is the only one who is free, everyone on the watch is busy: "Let's run, we will help." We jumped out into the corridor, there is such an extension.

They ran up the stairs. There is some kind of blue fumes ... we simply did not pay attention to it, because we understood how serious everything was ... I returned and reported that the room was steamed up. Then… ah, that's what happened. As soon as I reported this, SIUB (senior unit control engineer) shouts that the fittings on the process capacitors have failed. Well, I-I'm free again. I should have gone to the turbine hall ... I open the door - there are fragments here, it seems that I will have to be a climber, large fragments are lying around, there is no roof ... The roof of the turbine hall has fallen - something must have fallen on it ... I see the sky and stars in these holes, I see that underfoot pieces of the roof and black bitumen, so ... dusty. I think - wow ... where does this blackness come from? Then I understood. It was graphite (the filling of a nuclear reactor. - Approx. Aut.). Later, at the third block, I was informed that a dosimetrist came and said that on the fourth block, 1000 microroentgens per second, and on the third - 250.

I meet Proskuryakov in the corridor. He says: "Do you remember the glow that was on the street?" - "I remember." “Why is nothing being done? Probably, the zone has melted ... "I say:" I think so too. If there is no water in the separator drum, then this is probably the “E” circuit heated up, and from it such an ominous light. I went up to Dyatlov and once again pointed out to him at this moment. He says, "Let's go." And we went down the corridor further. We went out into the street and went past the fourth block ... to determine. Underfoot - some kind of black soot, slippery. We passed near the blockage ... I pointed to this radiance ... showed under my feet. He said to Dyatlov: "This is Hiroshima." He was silent for a long time ... we moved on ... Then he said: “I never dreamed of such a thing even in a terrible dream.” He, apparently, was ... well, what can I say ... An accident of enormous proportions.

I am Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End

Apocalypse 1

The city of Chernobyl, which gave the name to the nuclear power plant, actually has practically nothing to do with it.

This town, known since 1127 as Strezhev, received its current name under the son of the Kyiv prince Rurik at the end of the 12th century. As a small county center, it remained until recently, passing from hand to hand. In the 19th century, a large Jewish community appeared in the town, and a couple of its representatives (Menahem and Mordechai of Chernobyl) were even canonized by the Jewish Church as saints. The last owners of the district - the Polish moneybags Khodkevich - were driven out by the Bolsheviks. It would have been so easy for a provincial town of Polissya to perish in historical obscurity, like thousands of its twins, if in 1969 the then authorities did not decide to build the largest nuclear power plant in Europe in its vicinity (at first, the state district power station appeared in the project). It received the name of Chernobyl, although it is located at a distance of 18 km from the "progenitor" city. The provincial log village was not suitable for the role of the capital of Ukrainian nuclear scientists, and on February 4, 1970, the builders solemnly drove the first peg into the foundation of the new city, named after the local deep river Pripyat. It was to become a "showcase of socialism" and its most advanced industry.

For you say: “I am rich, I have grown rich, and I have need of nothing,” but you don’t know that you are unfortunate and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.

Apocalypse 3

The city was built in a complex, according to a pre-approved master plan. Moscow architect Nikolai Ostozhenko developed the so-called "triangular building type" with houses of different heights. Neighborhoods, similar to their Togliatti and Volgodonsk twins, surrounded the administrative center with its district executive committee, the Palace of Culture, the Polesie hotel, a children's park and other objects, as they said then, "social and cultural life." In terms of their diversity and number per capita, Pripyat had no equal in the Soviet Union. In defiance of the cramped streets of old cities, the avenues of the newcomer turned out to be wide and spacious. The system of their location excluded the appearance of traffic jams, still unseen at that time. Residential houses formed cozy green courtyards where children frolicked and adults rested. All this made it possible to call Pripyat "the standard of Soviet urban planning", according to the title of the book by architect V. Dvorzhetsky, published in 1985.

The city was originally planned to accommodate 75-80 thousand people, so those 49 thousand that were actually registered at the time of the accident felt quite spacious. The station workers, of course, received separate apartments in the first place. Bachelor visitors relied on dormitories (there were as many as 18 in total), there were "hostels" and hotel-type houses for young married couples. There were almost no others in the city - the average age of Pripyat residents did not exceed 26 years. At their service, the builders handed over a large cinema, kindergartens, 2 stadiums, many gyms and swimming pools. By the May Day holidays of 1986, a "Ferris wheel" was supposed to be launched in the park. He was never destined to roll happy kids ...

In a word, Pripyat, according to the plan of its creators, was to become an exemplary city, where crime, greed, conflicts and other "vices characteristic of the decaying West" are completely absent. The apologists of a bright communist future did not take into account one thing - that along with new residents, old ones will come to this oasis social problems. And although former Pripyat residents usually characterize their former life as “happy and serene,” it was not much different from the widespread Soviet reality. It is not true that there was almost no crime in the city of nuclear scientists. The kids were really fearlessly let out on the street, and the doors of the apartments were often not locked, but theft of personal property was common. Bicycles and boats were especially popular with thieves. In V. Gubarev's play "Sarcophagus", a burglar named Cyclist robbed an apartment on the night of the accident and fled the scene of the crime in a two-wheeled vehicle. He was later covered by a radioactive cloud. “We doubt,” the locals grin, “while he was cleaning the apartment, his bicycle would have been stolen.” There were also murders in the city, mainly on domestic grounds, on the day of receiving a salary and its “washing”. The most high-profile crimes were the hanging of two young people on a horizontal bar in 1974 (the butcher of the Beryozka store was detained in this case) and the death of a young Komsomol girl in hostel No. 10 ten years later. She began to drive out the young guys who came to her and received a fatal blow to the head with a fist. The show trial was held at the Palace of Culture, where the killer received capital punishment. The old-timers also remember the armed robberies of the savings bank at the local Yanov railway station and the department store on Friendship of Peoples Street (1975). The youth also did not have a meek disposition: mass fights between local lads and visiting "Rex" happened all the time. This was the name of the builders, who, as a rule, came from Ukrainian villages who lived in hostels. The police did not remain in debt and since 1980 they have been intensively chasing companies of more than three people. Pripyat even had its own exhibitionist, who frightened the girls with his dubious "merits".

In the evenings, the audience walked along the local Broadway - Lenin Street, arranged gatherings in the Pripyat cafe and drank culturally on the river bank near the pier. The youth was torn to the legendary disco "Edison-2" by Alexander Demidov, held in the local recreation center "Energetik". Tickets were often not enough, and then the unfortunate palace was subjected to a real storm of excited dance lovers. This disco survived Pripyat for a whole five-year period, gathering in the new Slavutich.

Surprisingly for such a regime city, there were also dissatisfied people in it. Soviet power. In 1970 there was a certain riot, which remained without visible consequences. In 1985, a crowd of young people overturned several cars and seriously clashed with law enforcement, which was even reported by "enemy voices." Self-made printouts of dissidents circulated around the city, and the population listened with might and main to the Voice of America and the Air Force radio stations. The fact is all the more surprising when you consider that the largest radio tracking station Chernobyl-2, which will be discussed below, was located very close by. And yet, on the whole, local life was much calmer than in any other provincial town. The basis of the population was made up of highly skilled workers and engineers, in whose interests prestigious job at a nuclear power plant, where people with a tarnished reputation were not allowed.

In parallel with the construction of city blocks, the construction of four blocks of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was carried out. The site for it was chosen for a long time, since 1966, considering also alternative options in the Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa and Kyiv regions. The floodplain of the Pripyat River near the village of Kopachi was recognized as the most suitable due to the low fertility of the expropriated lands, the presence railway, river communication and unlimited water resources. In 1970, the builders of Yuzhatomenergostroy began to dig a foundation pit for the first power unit. It was commissioned on December 14, 1977, the second one a year later. The construction, as usual, faced a shortage of materials and equipment, which was the reason for the appeal of the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine V. Shcherbytsky to Kosygin. In 1982, a fairly large accident occurred at the station - a rupture of one of the fuel elements (fuel rod), which caused the first power unit to stand idle for a long time. The scandal was hushed up at the cost of removing the chief engineer Akinfeev from his post, but all plans were fulfilled, and following the results of the five-year plan, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was presented for awarding the Order of Lenin. The first call went unanswered...

The launches of the 3rd and 4th power units are dated 1981 and 1983. The station was expanding, the project already included the launches of the 5th and 6th units, which meant constant well-paid work for thousands of new citizens. A large area has already been cleared for future residential microdistricts in Pripyat.

Antenna ZGRLS "Chernobyl-2"

Few people then knew that quite close, literally a few kilometers away, there lives another city, the super-secret Chernobyl-2, which serves the over-the-horizon radar tracking station (ZGRLS). It is located in the forest northwest of the real Chernobyl, 9 km from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and is not marked on any map. However, its giant steel radar, called the "Arc" by the military, has a height of almost 140 m and is perfectly visible from everywhere in the district. About a thousand people served such a colossus, and an urban-type settlement was built especially for them with a single street named after Kurchatov. Naturally, it was fenced along the perimeter with a “thorn”, and warning signs were installed another 5 km before the restricted area. Sometimes they didn’t help either - the most mushroom places are located here, and KGB officers had to run through the forests for mushroom pickers, taking crops and screwing license plates from cars. Of course, such secrecy gave rise to a lot of rumors and rumors. The most popular one said that psychotronic weapons were being tested here in order to turn hostile Europeans into friendly zombies with the help of radio waves at X-hour. This version was seriously discussed even in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine in 1993.

In fact, the only purpose of the ZGRLS was to track NATO ballistic missile launches, the direction of capture was the countries of Northern Europe and the USA. Similar stations were built in Nikolaev and Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The Duga itself, unique in its size and complexity, was assembled in 1976 and tested in 1979. In the Chernihiv region, there is a powerful source of short waves that passed through the entire territory of the United States, were reflected and caught by the Chernobyl radar. The data was received by the most powerful computers at that time and processed. The complex also included the TsKS - the center of space communications. For its service, a whole complex with residential and technical premises was erected. After the Chernobyl accident, it was used to shelter soldiers who worked as liquidators.

Tracking station, Chernobyl-2

The proximity of Chernobyl-2 to the nuclear power plant is not accidental - the object devoured a colossal amount of electricity. Despite all its uniqueness, the radar had a lot of shortcomings. It was useless for detecting pinpoint missile launches and could only "catch" massive attacks, typical for nuclear war. In addition, its powerful emitters jammed the conversations of aircraft and ships. European countries which sparked violent protests. The operating frequencies had to be changed, and the equipment had to be finalized. New commissioning was planned for 1986 ...

Was there any predestination for the events that crossed out the smooth course of peaceful pre-accident life? It is known that the inhabitants of nearby villages said: "There is a time when it will be green, but not fun." Eyewitnesses claim that some old women prophesied: “There will be everything, but there will be no one. And on the site of the city, feather grass will grow. You can condescendingly treat these "grandmother's tales", but there is a description of the dream of the master of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant Alexander Krasin. In 1984, he dreamed of an explosion at the 4th unit, he dreamed in all the details that took place two years later. He warned all his relatives about a future accident, but he did not dare to go to the authorities with this idea. The most famous such case of "prophetic dream" occurred a hundred years ago, when a reporter for the Boston Globe newspaper, Ed Sampson, dreamed of a terrible explosion on a distant native island. He wrote down his dream on paper, and by mistake the message was printed in all the newspapers. The reporter was fired for lying, and only a week later, battered ships brought news of the catastrophic eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, several thousand kilometers from Boston. Even the name of the island coincided ...

Be that as it may, the countdown was started, and "green, but gloomy times" were not long in coming.

Judgment Day

What preceded the blow that Yuri Tregub witnessed? And could it have been avoided? Who is guilty? - these issues were actively discussed both immediately after the accident and two decades later. There are two camps of irreconcilable opponents. The former argue that the main cause of the disaster was the design flaws of the reactor itself and an imperfect protection system. The latter blame the operators for everything and point to unprofessionalism and a low culture of radiation safety. Both those and others have strong arguments in the form of expert opinions, conclusions of various examinations and commissions. As a rule, the version of the "human factor" is put forward by designers who defend the honor of the uniform. They are opposed by exploiters who are no less interested in saving face. Let's try to break up a third, independent camp between them, to assess the causes and consequences from the outside.

The reactor installed at the 4th block of the Chernobyl NPP was developed in the 60s by the Research Institute of Power Engineering of the USSR Minsredmash, and the scientific management was carried out by the Institute of Atomic Energy. Kurchatov. It was named RBMK-1000 (high power channel reactor for 1000 electric megawatts). It uses graphite as a moderator, and water as a coolant. The fuel is uranium, compressed into pellets and placed in fuel rods made of uranium dioxide and zirconium cladding. Energy nuclear reaction heats the water, which is put through the pipelines, the water boils, the steam is separated and fed to the turbine. It rotates and generates much-needed electricity for the country. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant became the third station where this type of reactor was installed, before that they were "made happy" with the Kursk and Leningrad nuclear power plants. It was a time of economy - earlier in the USSR, and throughout the world, they used reactors enclosed in cases made of superalloys. RBMK did not have such protection, which made it possible to significantly save on construction - alas, at the expense of safety. In addition, the fuel on it could be reloaded without stopping, which also promised considerable benefits. The reactor was created on the basis of the military, which produced weapons-grade plutonium for defense needs. He had a congenital defect in the form of those same rods that regulate the chain reaction - they are introduced too slowly into the active zone (in 18 seconds instead of 3 required). As a result, the reactor gets too much time for self-acceleration on prompt neutrons, which the rods are designed to absorb. In addition, during the construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in order to save concrete, the height of the under-reactor room was reduced by 2 meters, as a result of which the length of the rods also decreased - from 7 to 4 meters. But the most important imperfection of the protection turned out to be the complete ignorance by the designers of the effect of steam on the power of the reactor. In its transitional modes, the working channels were filled with steam instead of "dense" water. Then it was believed that in this case the power should fall, and there were no reliable calculation programs and opportunities for laboratory experiments. Only much later, practice showed that steam gives such a jump in reactivity, and in a matter of seconds, that the power increases a hundredfold, and the slow control rods remain halfway at the moment when the atomic genie is already breaking out of the bottle.

Simultaneously with the construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the city department of the KGB was deployed in Pripyat. The 3rd Division of the 2nd Directorate of Counterintelligence was engaged in affairs at the facility itself. His competence included collecting data on the construction of the station, its work, employees and the possibilities of sabotage and other activities of enemy intelligence. The first document of the Department, which had great analysts, was a certificate dated September 19, 1971, which assessed the technical characteristics of the future Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It noted that the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine had no experience in operating such facilities, a low level of personnel selection, and shortcomings in construction. Then no one began to listen to the Chekists. In 1976, the Kiev KGB sent a special message to the leadership of the department about "systematic violations of the technology of construction and installation work at certain construction sites." It contains deadly data: technical documentation from designers is not delivered on time, welded pipes of the Kurakhovsky KMZ are completely unsuitable, but accepted by the station management, Buchan brick for building premises has a strength 2 times lower than the standard, etc. The concrete for the liquid radioactive waste tank (!) was laid with violations that threatened to leak, and its lining turned out to be deformed. The message ended, as usual, with the imperfection of protection from possible saboteurs, which was entrusted entirely to pensioners - Vokhrovites. But the "voice of the crying security officer" drowned in the desert of inaction. The first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and in fact the owner of the republic, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, reacted very sluggishly to the warnings of the chairman of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR Vitaliy Fedorchuk, sending another "duty" commission to the station. Well, by God, don't stop construction because the welded equipment of our Yugoslav friends from Energoinvest and Djura Dzhurovich turned out to be defective! And the fact that at high temperatures a threat of an accident is created - this still needs to be proven ...

Meanwhile, in 1983-1985, there were 5 accidents and 63 failures of the main equipment at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And a whole group of KGB workers who warned of possible consequences received penalties for "alarming and disinformation." The last report was dated February 26, 1986, exactly 2 months before the accident, about the unacceptably low quality of the floors of the 5th power unit.

There were also warnings from scientists. Professor Dubovsky, one of the best experts in the USSR on nuclear safety, warned back in the 70s about the danger of operating a reactor of this type, which was confirmed during the accident at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant in 1975. At that time, only an accident saved the city from disaster. Employee of the Institute of Atomic Energy V.P. Volkov bombarded the leadership with reports on the unreliability of the protection of the RBMK reactor and proposed measures to improve it. Management was inactive. Then the stubborn scientist reached the director of the Institute, Academician Aleksandrov. He appointed an emergency meeting on this issue, which for some reason did not take place. Volkov had nowhere else to turn, since his all-powerful boss then headed the Academy of Sciences at the same time, that is, he was the highest scientific authority. Another great opportunity to overhaul security has been missed. Later, after the accident, Volkov with his report will make his way to Gorbachev himself and become an outcast in his Institute ...

On March 27, 1986, the Literaturna Ukraina newspaper published an article by Lyubov Kovalevskaya “Not a Private Matter”, which was hardly noticed by anyone. It is then that she will make a splash in the West and serve as proof of the non-randomness of the events that have taken place, but for now the young journalist, with the ardor characteristic of those perestroika years, scourged negligent suppliers: “326 tons of slotted coating for the storage of spent nuclear fuel arrived defective from the Volzhsky metalwork plant. About 220 tons of defective columns were sent to the installation of the storage by the Kashinsky ZMK. But it’s unacceptable to work like that!” Kovalevskaya saw the main cause of the accident in the nepotism and mutual responsibility that flourished at the station, in which mistakes and negligence got away with the authorities. She, as usual, was accused of incompetence and the desire to make a name for herself. There were only a few weeks left before the adventurous experiment at Unit 4…

And Az saw that the Lamb had opened the first of the seven seals, and Az heard one of the four animals saying, as it were with a voice of thunder: "Come and see."

Apocalypse 6

His program, scheduled for April 25, was also designed to save money - it was about using the energy of the turbine's rotation at the moment the reactor was shut down. The conditions for the conduction provided for the shutdown of the emergency reactor cooling system (ECCS) and power reduction. The creators did not work out the issues of the reactor behavior and its protection in such modes to the end, leaving the prerogative of decision-making to the station personnel. The personnel acted as best they could, obeying the test conditions approved at the top, and making fatal mistakes. But can a simple engineer be blamed for consequences that are not foreseen by physicists and design academics? Be that as it may, the countdown had already begun, and the chronicle of the experiment turned into a chronicle of an undeclared tragedy:

01 h 06 min. The beginning of the reduction of power unit.

03 h 47 min. The thermal power of the reactor was reduced and stabilized at the level of 50% (1600 MW).

14h00. ECCS (Reactor Emergency Cooling System) is disconnected from the circulation circuit. Postponement of the test program at the request of the Kievenergo dispatcher (the ECCS was not put into operation, the reactor continued to operate at a thermal power of 1600 MW).

15 h 20 min. - 23 h 10 min. The preparation of the power unit for testing has begun. They are led by Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, a tough, strong-willed boss and one of the country's leading nuclear specialists. He is aiming for the chair of his boss Nikolai Fomin - a party nominee who is going to be promoted, and a successful experiment can bring him closer to the goal.

Curriculum vitae

Dyatlov, Anatoly Stepanovich(03/03/1931 - 12/13/1995). A native of the village of Atamanovo, Krasnoyarsk Territory. In 1959 he graduated from MEPhI with honors. He worked in Siberia at the installation of nuclear submarine reactors, where a major accident occurred. He received a radiation dose of 200 rems, and his son died of leukemia. At the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - since 1973. He reached the rank of deputy chief engineer and was considered one of the strongest specialists of the station. Convicted in 1986 under article 220 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for a period of 10 years as one of the perpetrators of the accident at the fourth block. He received a radiation dose of 550 rem, but survived. Released after 4 years for health reasons. He died of heart failure caused by radiation sickness. Author of the book "Chernobyl. How it was”, where he blamed the reactor designers for the accident. He was awarded the Orders of the Red Banner of Labor and the Badge of Honor.

00 h 28 min. With a thermal power of the reactor of about 500 MW, in the process of switching to an automatic power regulator, a decrease in thermal power, not provided for by the program, was allowed to approximately 30 MW. There was a conflict between Dyatlov and cameraman Leonid Toptunov, who believed that it was impossible to continue the experiment at such a low power. The opinion of the boss, who decided to go all the way, won. Started power up. The dispute in the control room does not stop. Akimov is trying to persuade Dyatlov to raise the power to 700 safe megawatts. So it is fixed in the program signed by the chief engineer.

00 h 39 min. - 00 h 43 min. The personnel, in accordance with the test regulations, blocked the emergency protection signal to stop two heat generators.

01 h 03 min. The thermal power of the reactor was raised to 200 MW and stabilized. Dyatlov still decides to test at low values. The boiling in the boilers weakened and xenon poisoning of the core began. The personnel hurriedly removed the automatic control rods from it.

01 h 03 min. - 01 h 07 min. In addition to the six operating hydraulic pumps, two standby MCPs have been put into operation. The water flow increased sharply, steam formation weakened, the water level in the separator drums dropped to an emergency level.

01 h 19 min. The personnel blocked the emergency shutdown signal of the reactor due to insufficient water level, violating technical regulation operation. Their actions had their own logic: this happened quite often, and never led to negative consequences. Operator Stolyarchuk simply did not pay any attention to the signals. The experiment had to go on. Due to the large influx of water into the core, steam generation almost stopped. The power dropped sharply, and the operator, in addition to the automatic control rods, removed the manual control rods from the core, preventing the decrease in reactivity. The height of the RBMK is 7 meters, and the speed of the removal of the rods is 40 cm / sec. The active zone was left without protection - in fact, left to itself.

01 h 22 min. The Skala system issued a record of the parameters, according to which it was necessary to immediately shut down the reactor - the reactivity increased, and the rods simply did not have time to return to the core to adjust it. Passions flared up again on the control room control panel. Head Akimov did not turn off the reactor, but decided to start testing. The operators obeyed - no one wanted to argue with the authorities and lose a prestigious job.

01 h 23 min. Start of testing. The steam supply to turbine No. 8 was shut off and its run-out started. Contrary to the regulations, the personnel blocked the emergency shutdown signal of the reactor when both turbines were turned off. Four hydraulic pumps have started running. They began to slow down, the flow of cooling water decreased sharply, and the temperature at the entrance to the reactor increased. The rods no longer had time to overcome the fatal 7 meters and return to the active zone. Then the count went on for seconds.

01 h 23 min. 40 sec. The shift supervisor presses the AZ-5 (reactor emergency protection) button to speed up the introduction of the rods. A sharp increase in the volume of steam and a jump in power are recorded. The rods passed 2-3 meters and stopped. The reactor began to self-accelerate, its power exceeded 500 megawatts and continued to grow sharply. Two protection systems worked, but they did not change anything.

01 h 23 min. 44 sec. Chain reaction became uncontrollable. The power of the reactor exceeded the nominal by 100 times, the pressure in it increased many times and displaced the water. The fuel rods became red-hot and shattered, filling the graphite filler with uranium. The pipelines collapsed, and water gushed onto the graphite. Chemical interaction reactions formed "explosive" gases, and the first explosion was heard. The thousand-ton metal cover of the Elena reactor jumped up like on a boiling kettle and turned around its axis, cutting off pipelines and supply channels. Air rushed into the active zone.

01 h 23 min. 46 sec. The resulting "explosive" mixture of oxygen, carbon monoxide and hydrogen detonated and destroyed the reactor with a repeated explosion, throwing out fragments of graphite, destroyed fuel rods, particles of nuclear fuel and equipment fragments. Hot gases rose to a height of several kilometers in the form of a cloud, revealing to the world a new post-nuclear era. For Pripyat, Chernobyl and hundreds of villages around, a new, post-accident countdown began.

The accident took its victims in the first seconds. Operator Valery Khodemchuk was cut off from the exit and remained forever buried in the fourth block. His colleague Vladimir Shashenok was crushed by fallen structures. He managed to send a signal to the computer center, but he could no longer answer: his spine was crushed, his ribs were broken. The operators carried Vladimir out of the rubble, and a few hours later he died in the hospital.

Fires broke out on the roofs of the third unit and the turbine hall. The hall of the fourth block was blazing with might and main. To the credit of the people who worked on that fateful night, they did not leave the situation to chance and immediately began to fight for the survivability of the station. Computing center engineers saved the Skala system from floods pouring from the ninth floor. The shift operators restored the operation of the feed pumps of the third unit. The workers of the nitrogen-oxygen station did not leave their place and supplied liquid nitrogen all night to cool the reactors. Stunned by the explosion, Vladimir Palagel, junior inspector of the preventive monitoring service, transmitted an alarm signal to the nuclear power plant fire station.

Ordinary heroism

Firefighters must show courage, courage, resourcefulness, perseverance and, despite any difficulties and even the threat to life itself, strive to complete the combat mission at all costs.

From the combat charter of the fire service

... That week was not warm in April. The trees are already painted green, the ground has long dried up and covered with grass. The traditional May holidays were already on the nose, and the inhabitants of Pripyat filled their refrigerators with food to capacity.

Curriculum vitae

Pravik, Vladimir Pavlovich(06/13/1962 - 05/11/1986) - head of the guard of the 2nd paramilitary fire department for the protection of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Born on June 13, 1962 in the city of Chernobyl, Kyiv region, Ukrainian SSR, in the family of an employee. Secondary education.

In the internal affairs bodies of the USSR since 1979. In 1982 he graduated from the Cherkasy fire-technical school of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. He loved radio work, photography. He was an active worker, chief of staff of the Komsomol Searchlight. My wife graduated from a music school and taught music in a kindergarten. A month before the accident, a daughter was born in the family.

While extinguishing a fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Pravik received a high dose of radiation. With poor health, he was sent to Moscow for treatment. He died in the 6th clinical hospital on May 11, 1986. He was buried in Moscow at the Mitinsky cemetery.

By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 25, 1986, for courage, heroism and selfless actions shown during the liquidation of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Awarded the Order of Lenin. Enlisted forever in the lists of personnel of the paramilitary fire brigade of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Kyiv Regional Executive Committee. The monument to the Hero was erected in the city of Irpin, Kyiv region. The name of the Hero is immortalized on the marble slab of the memorial "Chernobyl Heroes", erected in the park on the boulevard of the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv.

The city was sleeping and seeing its last peaceful dreams, when a bell rang on the control panel of the HPV-2 duty officer in charge of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik, who was in charge of the guard, immediately understood the seriousness of the situation and gave a regional fire danger signal (No. 3) on the radio.

The fact is that it was the second part that was directly responsible for the station, and the sixth served the city. At numerous exercises, the fighters tested the extinguishing technology at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to automaticity, but this level of complexity was considered only theoretically. The outfit of the sixth unit, led by Lieutenant Viktor Kibenok, arrived almost simultaneously with their colleagues, since the distance from Pripyat to the station is much shorter than from Chernobyl.

These two young guys once studied together at the same school, and now they were alone in front of the fire-breathing mouth of the underworld and were not afraid of him. They led their comrades behind them - 27 people in all - and not one flinched, did not hint at mortal danger. Pravik took command as the first officer to arrive at the fire site. At that time, the turbine hall was already burning with might and main, the roof was on fire, and the pieces of graphite thrown out of the active zone “shone” with death itself. According to the Combat Manual, the commander must conduct reconnaissance, identify the source of the fire and the method of suppressing it. The young lieutenant quickly climbed to the roof and stopped, dumbfounded by an unprecedented sight. Before him, the first man in history, a radioactive volcano opened its torn inside, spewing the otherworldly light of its red-hot bowels. It so happened that the first man was not afraid of almost inevitable death, did not step back, but stood with his comrades as a wall in the path of fire. The roof of the turbine hall of the third unit was flooded with combustible material - bitumen - it was hurriedly handed over to the next congress, the refractory coating was not delivered, and the builders used the one that was at hand, despite all the protests of the firefighters. Now it's time to take the rap for all the sins of that system, for the victorious reports of early surrenders, for the grossest violations of technology and a disregard for safety.

Curriculum vitae

Kibenok, Viktor Nikolaevich- head of the guard of the 6th paramilitary fire brigade for the protection of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, lieutenant of the internal service.

Born on February 17, 1963 in the village of Ivanovka, Nizhneserogozsky district, Kherson region, Ukrainian SSR, in the family of an employee. Ukrainian. Secondary education.

In the internal affairs bodies of the USSR since 1980. In 1984 he graduated from the Cherkasy fire-technical school of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR.

While extinguishing a fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, he received a high dose of radiation. With poor health, he was sent to Moscow for treatment. He died in the 6th clinical hospital on May 11, 1986. He was buried in Moscow at the Mitinsky cemetery.

By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 25, 1986, for courage, heroism and selfless actions shown during the liquidation of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Awarded the Order of Lenin, medals.

Forever enlisted in the lists of personnel of the paramilitary fire brigade of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Kyiv Regional Executive Committee. The name is immortalized on the marble slab of the memorial "Chernobyl Heroes", erected in the park on the boulevard of the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv.

Pravik took Tishchura and Titenok, fighters from the sixth part, with him to the roof. The roof burned in many places, boots got stuck in hot bitumen. The lieutenant took over the extinguishing from the fire barrel, and the soldiers began to throw down burning graphite.

Who knows whether they imagined the level of radiation emanating from these pieces or not.

Meanwhile, Kibenok went straight to the fourth reactor, where the fire danger was lower, but the radiation went off scale for hundreds of roentgens per hour - the level of imminent death. The fire threatened to spread to the third operating reactor, and then the consequences would become unpredictable. Subordinates took turns standing at the fire carriage, and only the commander did not leave his post for a minute.

• 26. 04. 2016

Nina Nazarova collected excerpts from books about the accident, its consequences, dead relatives, panic in Kyiv and the court

Accident

The book of two special correspondents of Izvestia, written in hot pursuit, went to press less than a year after the disaster. Reports from Kyiv and the affected area, educational program on the effects of radiation, cautious comments by doctors and indispensable for Soviet press conclusion "lessons of Chernobyl".

Duty on fire department The nuclear power plant carried the third guard. The whole day the guard spent time in accordance with the usual schedule: theoretical classes in the classroom, practical classes under the guidance of Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik at the fifth power unit under construction. Then they played volleyball and watched TV.

Vladimir Prishchepa was on duty in the third guard: “I went to bed at 11 pm, because later it was necessary to step in as orderlies. At night I heard an explosion, but did not attach any importance to it. After one or two minutes, a combat alarm sounded ... "

Ivan Shavrey, who at that moment was on duty near the control room, did not pay much attention to the rapidly developing events in the first seconds:

“The three of us were standing, talking, when suddenly - it seemed to me so - a strong burst of steam was heard. We did not take it seriously: similar sounds were heard more than once until that day. I was about to leave to rest, when suddenly the alarm went off. They rushed to the shield, and Legun tried to get in touch, but there was no connection ... And then there was an explosion. I rushed to the window. The explosion was followed immediately by another explosion. I saw fire ball, which soared over the roof of the fourth block ... "

(Andrey Illesh, Andrey Pralnikov. Report from Chernobyl. M., 1987.)

Relatives

The novel by Svetlana Aleksievich, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is built in the genre of the history of emotions on the oral testimonies of ordinary people. All of them, regardless of occupation and degree of involvement in the disaster, comprehended and experienced the tragedy.

“… We recently got married. They also walked down the street and held hands, even if they were going to the store. Always together. I told him: "I love you." But I still didn’t know how much I loved him ... I couldn’t imagine ... We lived in the hostel of the fire department, where he served. On the second floor. And there are three more young families, they all share the same kitchen. And below, on the first floor, there were cars. Red fire trucks. This was his service. I always know: where is he, what's wrong with him? In the middle of the night I hear some noise. Screams. She looked out the window. He saw me: “Close the windows and go to bed. The station is on fire. I will be right back".

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I didn't see the explosion itself. Only flame. Everything seemed to glow... The whole sky... A high flame. Soot. The heat is terrible. And he is not and is not. Soot from bitumen burning, the roof of the station was covered with bitumen. We walked, then I remembered, as if in tar. They shot down the fire, and he crawled. Got up. They kicked off burning graphite with their feet ... They left without canvas suits, as they were in the same shirts, and left. They were not warned, they were called to an ordinary fire ...

Four o'clock... Five o'clock... Six... At six we were going to go to his parents. Plant potatoes. From the city of Pripyat to the village of Sperizhye, where his parents lived, forty kilometers. Sow, plow... His favorite work... Mother often recalled how she and her father did not want to let him go to the city, they even built a new house. They took him to the army. He served in Moscow in the fire brigades and when he returned: only in firefighters! He didn't acknowledge anything else. ( Silent.)

A victim of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is being treated at the sixth clinical hospital of the USSR Ministry of HealthPhoto: Vladimir Vyatkin / RIA Novosti

Seven o'clock... At seven o'clock they told me that he was in the hospital. I ran, but the police were already standing in a ring around the hospital, they didn’t let anyone in. Some ambulances drove by. The policemen were shouting: the cars are over the top, don't get close. I am not alone, all the wives came running, all those who had husbands that night ended up at the station. I rushed to look for my friend, she worked as a doctor in this hospital. Grabbed her by the bathrobe as she got out of the car:

Let me pass!

I can not! It's bad with him. All of them are bad.

I keep it:

Just look.

Okay, - he says, - then we run. For fifteen or twenty minutes.

I saw him… He was swollen all over, swollen… There were almost no eyes…

- I need some milk. A lot of milk! a friend told me. - So that they drink at least three liters.

But he doesn't drink milk.

Now he will drink.

Many doctors, nurses, especially nurses of this hospital will fall ill after some time. Will die. But no one knew that then...

At ten in the morning, the operator Shishenok died… He was the first to die… On the first day… We learned that the second one, Valera Khodemchuk, remained under the ruins. So they didn't get him. Concreted. But we did not yet know that they were all the first.

I ask:

Vasenka, what to do?

Get out of here! Leave! You will have a child.

I am pregnant. But how can I leave it? Requests:

Leave! Save the child! -

First I must bring you milk, and then we will decide.”

(Svetlana Aleksievich. Chernobyl prayer. M., 2013)

Cleanup

Memoirs of a reserve officer called to eliminate the accident and who worked for 42 days at the epicenter of the explosion - at the third and fourth reactors. The process of eliminating the consequences is meticulously described - what, how, in what sequence and under what conditions people did, as well as, in the same restrained tone, all the petty meanness of the leadership: how they saved on protective equipment and their quality, did not want to pay bonuses to the liquidators and cynically bypassed with awards.

“We were called to be sent to military camps for a period of one hundred and eighty days, sending today at twelve o'clock. To my question, was it possible to warn at least a day in advance, because it’s not military time (I had to send my wife with a six-month-old child to her parents in the city of Ulyanovsk, Kirovograd region. Even for bread to the store, go one and a half kilometers across rough terrain - the road is unpaved , ascents, descents, and even a woman in a foreign village cannot cope with a small child), I was given the answer: “Consider that this is wartime - they take you to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.”<…>

The Chernobyl accident. Travel and passage prohibitedPhoto: Igor Kostin / RIA Novosti

We had to work in the premises of the fourth reactor. The task was set - to build two walls from bags of cement mortar.<…>We began to measure the level of radiation. The dosimeter needle deviated to the right and went off scale. The dosimetrist switched the device to the next graduation of the scale, at which higher levels of radiation are taken. The arrow still deviated to the right. Finally she stopped. We took measurements in several places. At the end, they approached the opposite wall and set up a tripod to measure to the opening. The arrow went off scale. We left the room. The average level of radiation was calculated below. It was forty roentgens per hour. We calculated the running time - it was three minutes.

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This is the time spent in the working room. It takes about twenty seconds to run in with a bag of cement, lay it down and run out of the room. Consequently, each of us had to appear in the working room ten times - to bring ten bags. In total, for eighty people - eight hundred bags.<…>With shovels they quickly put the solution into bags, tied it up, helped to lift it on the shoulders and ran upstairs. Supporting the bag on the shoulders right hand, with the left they clung to the railing and ran up the stairs to overcome the height of about an eight-nine-story building. The flight stairs here were very long. When I ran upstairs, my heart just jumped out of my chest. The solution seeped through the bag and dripped all over the body. Having run into the working room, the bags were stacked so that they overlapped each other. This is how bricks are laid when building a house. Having laid the bag, we run down one after another. Oncoming people run up, straining with all their might, clinging to the railing. And again everything repeated.<…>

The respirators were like dirty wet rags, but we didn't have them to replace. We asked for these for work. Almost everyone took off their respirators because it was impossible to breathe.<…>For the first time in my life I had to learn what a headache is. He asked how others were feeling. Those who have been there for two, three weeks or more said that by the end of the first week upon arrival at the station, everyone has constant headaches, weakness, and a sore throat. I noticed that when we were driving to the station, and it was already visible, there was always a lack of lubrication in the eyes of everyone. We squinted, our eyes seemed to dry up.

(Vladimir Gudov. 731 special battalion. M., 2009.)

Volunteers

There are a lot of online samizdat with memories of the liquidators and eyewitnesses of the nuclear reactor accident - such stories are collected, for example, on the site people-of-chernobil.ru. The author of the memoirs "Liquidator" Sergey Belyakov, a chemist by training, went to Chernobyl as a volunteer, spent 23 days there, and later received American citizenship and found work in Singapore.

“In early June, I voluntarily came to the draft board. As a "secret carrier with a degree," I had a reservation from the Chernobyl training camp. Later, when in 87-88 there was a problem with the cadres of reserve officers, they seized everyone indiscriminately, but the 86th was on, the country was still merciful to its aged sons ... The young captain on duty at the district military registration and enlistment office, not understanding at first, said, they say , I have nothing to worry about - I am not called and will not be called. But when I repeated that I wanted to go of my own free will, he looked at me as if I were crazy and pointed to the office door, where the tired major, pulling out my registration card, said without expression:

Why the hell are you going there, why can't you sit at home?
There was nothing to cover.

A group of specialists is sent to the zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to eliminate the consequences of the accidentPhoto: Boris Prikhodko/RIA Novosti

Just as inexpressively, he said that the summons would come by mail, with it he would have to come here again, get an order, travel documents, and - go ahead.
My card has been moved to a brand new drawstring folder. The deed was done.
The days of waiting that followed were filled with a painful search for at least some news about a specific gathering place, about what the “partisans” were doing at the station, about their way of life ... Mother was mainly interested in the latter. However, having once taken a sip from the military "collection" bowler hat, I did not have rainbow illusions on this score.
But nothing new was reported about the participants of the special camps either in the press or on TV.”

(Sergey Belyakov. Liquidator. Lib.ru)

Life

"Chernobyl. We are alive as long as we are remembered” - on the one hand, a collection of later memoirs of the liquidators and scientists who worked in Chernobyl, notable for everyday details (scientist Irina Simanovskaya, for example, recalls that right up to 2005 she passed with an umbrella found in a pile of garbage in Pripyat) , and on the other - a photo report: what the zone looked like in the early 2010s.

After a short pause, the announcer continued: “But you can’t drink alcohol and wine,” again a short pause: “Because they cause intoxication.” The whole dining room was drowned in laughter.

« We arrived in Kyiv, celebrated business trips and went on a passenger boat to Chernobyl. Right there they changed into white overalls, which they took with them from the Kurchatov Institute. Comrades met us at the pier and took us to the local hospital, to the gynecology department, where the “Kurchatovites” and colleagues from the Kyiv Institute of Nuclear Research lived. Therefore, we were jokingly called gynecologists. It may be funny, but I settled in the antenatal ward number six.

Ukrainian SSR. Accident liquidatorsPhoto: Valery Zufarov/TASS

By the way, in the dining room Funny case. There were always a lot of people there, the radio always worked. And now the announcer is giving a lecture on products that contribute to the removal of radionucleotides from the human body, including, the announcer says: “alcohol-containing products, wine help to remove radionucleotides.” There was an instant silence in the dining room. Are waiting. What will he say next? After a short pause, the announcer continued: “But you can’t drink alcohol and wine,” again a short pause: “Because they cause intoxication.” The whole dining room was drowned in laughter. The cackle was incredible.”

(Alexander Kupny. Chernobyl. Alive as long as we are remembered. Kharkov, 2011)

Radiation reconnaissance

Memoirs of the radiation intelligence officer Sergei Mirny is a book in the rare genre of funny and cynical tales about Chernobyl. In particular, the memoirs begin with a five-page story about how radiation affects the intestines (hint: as a laxative), and what range of emotional experiences the author experienced at the same time.

« First of all, in Chernobyl, they “radiated reconnaissance” of the territory of the nuclear power plant, settlements, roads. Then, according to these data, settlements with high levels were evacuated, important roads were washed to a tolerable level, signs “High radiation!” where they should have been placed (they looked very ridiculous, these signs, inside the zone itself; they would already write “Especially high radiation!”, Or something), at the nuclear power plant, those places where people accumulate and move, outlined and washed ... And they took up other areas , for the work that became urgent at this stage.<…>

... The fence can be stretched this way, but it can be that way. “So” it will be shorter, but what are the levels? If high, then maybe stretch it differently - at low levels? We will spend more poles and barbed wire (to hell with it, with wood and iron!), but at the same time people will receive smaller doses? Or to hell with them, with people, they will send new ones, but there are not enough wood materials and thorns now? This is how all issues are resolved - should at least be resolved - in the zone of radioactive contamination.<…>

A car leaving the Chernobyl disaster zone is being decontaminated at a specially created pointPhoto: Vitaly Ankov / RIA Novosti

I'm not talking about the villages - for them the level of gamma radiation was then a matter of life and death - in the most direct sense: more than 0.7 milliroentgen per hour - death: the village is being evicted; less than 0.7 - well, live for now ...<…>

And how is it made, this card? And what does it look like?

Ordinary enough.

A point is plotted on an ordinary topographic map - the place of measurement on the ground. And it is inscribed what level of radiation at this point ...<…>Then points with the same radiation levels are connected and get “lines of the same radiation level”, similar to the usual horizontal lines on ordinary maps.

(Sergey Mirny. Living force. Diary of a liquidator. M., 2010)

Panic in Kyiv

« The thirst for information that was felt here, in Kyiv, and, probably, everywhere - the Chernobyl echo shook the country without exaggeration - was simply physical.<…>

Uncertainty of the situation... Anxiety - imaginary and real... Nervousness... Well, tell me, how could the same refugees from Kyiv be blamed for creating panic, when, by and large, the tension in the situation was born not least of all by ourselves, journalists. To be more precise, those who did not give us real information, who, strictly pointing with their fingers, said: “There is absolutely no need for newspapermen to know, say, in detail about the radiation background.”<…>

I especially remember an old woman sitting on a bench under the trees in the courtyard of a five-story building. Her chin was bright yellow - her grandmother drank iodine.

“What are you doing, mother?” - I rushed to her.

Evacuation of the population from the 30-kilometer zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Residents of the Kyiv region say goodbye to each other and to their homes, 1986Photo: Marushchenko/RIA Novosti

And she explained to me that she was being treated, that iodine was very useful and completely safe, because she washed it down with ... kefir. Granny handed me a half-empty bottle of kefir for persuasiveness. I couldn't explain anything to her.

On the same day, it turned out that there were more non-radiation patients in Kyiv clinics, there are many people who suffered from self-medication, including those with a burnt esophagus. How much effort it took later both newspapers and local television in order to dispel at least this absurdity.

(Andrey Illesh, Andrey Pralnikov. Report from Chernobyl)

City government of Pripyat

The Soviet leadership, both at the local and state levels, in the history of Chernobyl is usually scolded: for slow reaction, unpreparedness, concealment of information. "The Chronicle of the Dead City" is evidence from the other side. Alexander Esaulov at the time of the accident was deputy chairman of the Pripyat city executive committee - in other words, the mayor of Pripyat - and talks about the stupor, hard work and the specifics of managing the evacuated city.

« There were so many problems, they were so atypical that they simply gave up. We worked in unique, exceptional conditions, in which no city hall in the world worked: we worked in a city that does not exist, a city that existed only as administrative unit,

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as a certain number of residential buildings, shops, sports facilities that suddenly became uninhabited, from which the tart smell of human sweat very soon disappeared, and the deadening smell of abandonment and emptiness entered forever. In exceptional conditions, the questions were exceptional: how to ensure the protection of abandoned apartments, shops and other objects, if it is dangerous to be in the zone? How to prevent fires if you can’t turn off the electricity, because they didn’t know right away that they would leave the city forever, and there were a lot of food left in the refrigerators, after all, it was before the holidays. In addition, there were a lot of products in stores and commercial warehouses, and it was also unknown what to do with them. What if a person became ill and lost consciousness, as was the case with the telephone operator Miskevich, who worked at the communication center, if an abandoned paralyzed grandmother was found, and the medical unit had already been completely evacuated? What to do with the proceeds from stores that have been working since the morning, if the bank does not accept money, because it is “dirty”, and, by the way, it is doing it right. How to feed people if the last working cafe "Olympia" is abandoned, since the cooks have not been changed for more than a day, and they are also people, and they have children, and the cafe itself has been smashed and looted clean. There were a decent number of people left in Pripyat: the Jupiter plant was still working, fulfilling the monthly plan, then the unique equipment that could not be left was dismantled there. Many station workers remained and construction organizations who take an active part in the liquidation of the accident - so far they simply have nowhere to live.<…>

View of the city of Pripyat in the first days after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plantPhoto: RIA Novosti

How to refuel cars if coupons and vouchers remain in the zone with such high levels that it is not safe to enter there even for a minute, and the gas station driver arrived either from Polessky or from Borodyanka, and he will, of course, be required to report on the entire form - in the same place they don’t know yet that we have a real war! »

(Alexander Esaulov. Chernobyl. Chronicle of the Dead City. M., 2006)

Journalists "Pravda" in 1987

Reports by a Pravda journalist in 1987, notable as an uncomplicated example of the condo Soviet newspaper style and boundless faith in the Politburo - what is called, "so bad it's already good." Now they don't do that anymore.

« Soon we, the special correspondents of Pravda - M. Odinets, L. Nazarenko and the author - decided to organize fishing on the Dnieper ourselves, given the current situation, for purely scientific basis. Now you can’t do without scientists and specialists, they won’t believe it, and therefore a candidate gathered on board the Finval technical sciences V. Pyzhov, senior ichthyologist from the Research Institute of Fisheries O. Toporovsky, inspectors S. Miropolsky, V. Zavorotny and correspondents. Our expedition was headed by Petr Ivanovich Yurchenko - a man known in Kyiv as a storm of poachers, who, unfortunately, are still quite a few on the river.

We are armed with last word technology. Unfortunately, not with fishing rods and spinning rods, but with dosimeters.<…>

Our task is still special - to check whether it is possible for anglers who have the opening of the season in mid-June to calmly do what they love - to fish, sunbathe, swim, in short, relax. And what could be more beautiful than fishing on the Dnieper?!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of rumors… Like, “you can’t go into the water”, “the river is poisoned”, “the fish is now radioactive”, “it needs to cut off its head and fins”, etc. etc.<…>

In 1986, a group of foreign correspondents visited the Makarovsky district of the Kyiv region, to whose settlements residents were evacuated from the area of ​​the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In the photo: foreign journalists observe how dosimetric control is carried out on open water bodiesPhoto: Alexey Poddubny / TASS

From the first days of the accident, being in its zone, we could thoroughly study everything related to radiation, we perfectly understood that it was not worth risking our health in vain. We knew that the Ministry of Health of the Ukrainian SSR allowed swimming, and therefore, before going fishing, we bathed in the Dnieper with pleasure. And they swam, and had fun, and took pictures for memory, however, they did not dare to publish these pictures: it is not customary to show correspondents in this form on the pages of the newspaper ...<…>

And now the fish are already laid out on a table standing near the stern of the ship. And Toporovsky begins to rite over them with his instruments. Dosimetric studies show that neither in the gills, nor in the insides of pike, catfish, pike perch, tench, crucian carp, nor in their fins, tail, there are any traces of increased radiation.

“But this is only a part of the operation,” the district fish inspector S. Miropolsky, who took an active part in fish dosimetry, cheerfully clarifies. “Now they need to be boiled, fried and eaten.”

“But this is only a part of the operation,” the district fish inspector S. Miropolsky, who took an active part in fish dosimetry, cheerfully clarifies. “Now they need to be boiled, fried and eaten.”

And now from the galley comes the appetizing aroma of yushka. We eat two, three bowls, but we can't stop. Fried pike perch, crucian carp, tench are also good ...

I don’t want to leave the island, but we have to - in the evening we agreed to meet in Chernobyl. We are returning to Kyiv... And a few days later we are talking with Yu. A. Izrael, chairman of the USSR State Committee for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Control.

“We were also tortured with questions: is it possible to swim? To fish? It is possible and necessary! .. And it is a pity that you report your fishing after it, and not in advance - I would definitely go with you! »

(Vladimir Gubarev. Glow over Pripyat. Notes of a journalist. M., 1987)

The trial of the leadership of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

In July 1987, a trial took place - six members of the management of the nuclear power plant were brought to justice (the hearings were held in a semi-closed mode, the materials were partly posted on pripyat-city.ru). Anatoly Dyatlov, Deputy Chief Engineer of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, on the one hand, was injured in the accident - due to exposure, he developed radiation sickness, and on the other hand, he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison. In his memoirs, he tells what the Chernobyl tragedy looked like for him.

« Judgment is like a court. Ordinary Soviet. Everything was predetermined. After two meetings in June 1986, the Interdepartmental Scientific and Technical Council chaired by Academician A.P. Aleksandrov, where employees of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building dominated - the authors of the reactor project - an unambiguous version was announced about the guilt of the operational personnel. Other considerations, and they were then, were discarded as unnecessary.<…>

Here by the way to mention the article. I was convicted under article 220 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR for improper operation of explosive enterprises. Nuclear power plants are not included in the list of explosive enterprises in the USSR. The forensic-technical expert commission retroactively classified the nuclear power plant as a potentially explosive enterprise. For the court, this was enough to apply the article. This is not the place to disassemble explosive or not nuclear power plants - it is clearly illegal to establish retroactively and apply an article of the Criminal Code. But who will tell the Supreme Court? There was someone, and he acted on their orders. Anything will be explosive if the design rules are not followed.

And then, what does potentially explosive mean? Here, Soviet televisions regularly explode, several dozen people die every year. Where to take them? Who is guilty?

Defendants in the case of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (from left to right): Chernobyl director Viktor Bryukhanov, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, chief engineer Nikolai Fomin during the trialPhoto: Igor Kostin / RIA Novosti

A stumbling block for the Soviet court would be a lawsuit for the death of viewers. After all, with all the desire, you can’t blame the viewers for sitting in front of the TV without helmets and bulletproof vests. Blame the company? State? Does this mean the state is to blame? Soviet something? The court will not tolerate such a perversion of principles. A person is guilty before the state - yes. And if not, then no one. For seven decades, our courts have only turned the nut in one direction. How many recent years there has been a talk about independence, independence of the courts, serving the law and only the law.