Chernobyl

1

CONGRESS

IT WAS a big day—many in Moscow and throughout the Soviet Union believed that it signaled the dawn of a new era. On the cold winter morning of February 25, 1986—the temperature during the previous night had fallen to minus two degrees Fahrenheit—close to 5,000 warmly dressed men and women, including senior Communist Party and state officials, military officers, scientists, directors of the large state companies, and representatives of workers and collective farmers (the “toiling masses”), descended on Red Square in downtown Moscow, which was decorated with a huge portrait of Vladimir Lenin. They were delegates to the Communist Party Congress, the twenty-seventh since the founding of the party by a handful of idealistic social democrats in the late nineteenth century. Their mission was to chart a new course for the country for the next five years.¹

Once they reached the Kremlin, the crowds moved toward the Palace of Congresses, a modern glass-and-concrete building decorated with white marble plates. It had been erected in 1961 on the site of buildings belonging to the sixteenth-century tsar Boris Godunov. The Soviet premier at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to rival the Great Hall of the People that Mao Zedong had opened in Beijing in 1959. The Chinese palace could seat 10,000 people. The envious Soviets increased the seating capacity of their palace from 4,000 to 6,000 by putting almost half the building underground, where most of the seats of the meeting hall are located—only the balcony seats with boxes are above ground level. When it came to party congresses, which convened every five years, the Soviet leaders imposed a limit of 5,000 participants no matter how large the membership of the Communist Party became—and it was growing quickly—since filling the hall to capacity would have meant sacrificing the comfort of those in attendance. There was no venue in the Soviet Union, short of sports arenas, that could have seated more.²

Khrushchev inaugurated the new Palace of Congresses in October 1961, in time for the Twenty-second Party Congress. The congress decided to remove the corpse of Joseph Stalin from the mausoleum it then shared with that of Lenin, and it adopted a new program for building a communist society, with its foundations to be in place by the early 1980s. Now, in 1986, the delegates to the Twenty-seventh Congress had to take stock of what had been accomplished. The record was dismal, to say the least. As the population had increased, the economy had slowed, and the possibility of a complete breakdown was becoming ever more likely. The growth of national income, which Soviet economists had estimated at 10 percent in the 1950s, had fallen to barely 4 percent in 1985. The Central Intelligence Agency in the United States had made even grimmer estimates, putting the growth rate at 2 to 3 percent, and later reducing even that estimate to approximately 1 percent.³

With its goals for communism nowhere in sight, the economy in a tailspin, the Chinese launching their economic reforms by introducing market mechanisms, and the Americans rushing ahead not only in economic development but also in the arms race, under the leadership of the unfailingly optimistic Ronald Reagan, the Soviet leadership had lost its way. The people, ever more disillusioned with the communist experiment, had become despondent. And yet, with the communist religion in crisis, it suddenly appeared to have found a new messiah in a relatively young, energetic, and charismatic leader: Mikhail Gorbachev.

This was to be the fifty-four-year-old Gorbachev’s first congress as general secretary of the party, and he was well aware that the eyes of the party leadership, of Soviet citizens—and indeed, of the entire world—were on him. The previous three years had become known as the era of Kremlin funerals. Leonid Brezhnev, who had ruled the Soviet Union since 1964, died a sick man in November 1982; the former head of the KGB, Yurii Andropov, who had inherited his position, spent half his brief tenure in a hospital bed and died in February 1984; his sickly successor, Konstantin Chernenko, followed suit in March 1985. It looked as if the leaders were about to take the country to the grave with them. Economic difficulties aside, they kept sending young boys to Afghanistan, where the Soviet Army had been bogged down since 1979, and preparing for nuclear confrontation with the West. KGB stations abroad were instructed to drop everything and look for signs of imminent nuclear attack.

Now hopes ran high, in both party and society, that Gorbachev, who was full of ideas, would be able to reverse the deadly trend. Hopes of rapprochement were rising in the West as well. In the United States, Reagan, tired of Soviet leaders dying on him, was looking for someone with whom he could do business. His close ally Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain told him that Gorbachev was such a man. Reagan’s first meeting with Gorbachev, in Geneva in December 1985, was not without tension, but it opened the door to more productive subsequent dialogue, which was conducted not only by personal meetings and diplomatic channels but also by public pronouncements. In January 1986, Gorbachev surprised Reagan by putting forward a Soviet program for nuclear disarmament. It was expected that he would further challenge the American president on disarmament in his forthcoming speech to the party congress.⁴

Gorbachev, preoccupied with finding solutions to the multiple Soviet crises, put considerable thought and effort into his report to the congress. In the late fall of 1985, he summoned his two closest advisers—his chief assistant, Valerii Boldin, and Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Soviet ambassador to Canada—to the state resort near Sochi on the Black Sea Coast. Perestroika—the radical restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system—still lay ahead; eventually, Yakovlev would become known as the grandfather of the movement. The key concept at the time was uskorenie, or acceleration. It was believed that the system was basically sound and simply needed a boost by means of “scientific and technical progress,” the Soviet term for technological innovation.

In the days leading up to the congress, Gorbachev shut himself up at home, reading his long speech aloud and timing it. Read without a break or interruptions, it would be more than six hours in length. As Gorbachev practiced his oratorical skills, the delegates to the congress kept themselves busy visiting the stores of Moscow rather than galleries and museums. “Having come from all over the country, they were preoccupied with their own affairs,” wrote Gorbachev’s aide, Boldin, who had coauthored the speech. “They had to buy many things for themselves, their family members, and acquaintances, who had ordered so much that it would be hard to transport even by train.”⁵

Most of the delegates came from the provinces, which were dogged by the shortages of agricultural products and consumer goods that had become a constant feature of Soviet life in the 1980s. The party leadership, unable to alleviate the shortages for the general population, did its best to supply the party elite. In hotels designated for congress delegates, party officials opened special branches of grocery and department stores, to which hard-to-get products were brought from all parts of the Soviet Union. There were stylish suits and dresses, shoes, caviar, cured meat, sausages, and, last but not least, bananas—all items desired by average Soviet citizens not only in the provinces but also in the much better supplied metropolitan centers such as Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv. The post office administration opened a special branch to handle all the merchandise that the delegates shipped back from Moscow.

For high-ranking party officials from the provinces and directors of large enterprises who had access to scarce goods at home because of their political power and connections, participation in the congress offered a different kind of opportunity. They used the time to lobby Moscow’s potentates and ministers, asking for money and resources for their regions and firms. They also worked hard to maintain old networks of friends and acquaintances and make useful new connections. Networking meant drinking, often to excess—a hallmark and curse of the Soviet managerial style. The previous year, Gorbachev, alarmed by the level of alcoholism among the general population, had launched an anti-alcohol campaign. Party and state officials, in particular, were liable to prosecution for drunkenness.

Vitalii Vrublevsky, a close aide to the all-powerful party boss of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, head of the Ukrainian delegation, recalled an episode in which KGB guards charged with checking passes to the congress smelled alcohol on one of the delegates and reported him to senior officials. The case, which involved a regional secretary in Ukraine’s mining area of Luhansk, was reported all the way to the top of the party apparatus. “The secretary was expelled from the party on the spot,” recalled Vrublevsky, who had barely avoided detection himself after spending a night drinking with some of the first cosmonauts—the Soviet equivalent of rock stars. “Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, sitting at the head table, kept glancing at his delegation,” recalled Vrublevsky. “And, as ill luck would have it, my head kept drooping.” He was saved by a friend who would squeeze his knee from time to time to wake him up in the middle of the speeches.⁶

VIKTOR BRIUKHANOV, the fifty-year-old director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, was a member of the 1986 Ukrainian delegation. It was the first congress that Briukhanov was attending after many years as a loyal party member and high-ranking manager. Three-quarters of the other delegates were also there for the first time, but managers such as Briukhanov accounted for slightly more than 350 of the party delegates, roughly 7 percent of the total. Below average in height, slim and erect, with curly black hair that he combed back and a somewhat awkward smile, Briukhanov made the impression of a kind and fair man. His subordinates valued him as a good engineer and effective manager. He was hardly a drinker. If anything, Briukhanov was a workaholic. He put in long hours, spoke little, and was known as one of a rare breed: a Soviet manager who got things done while showing consideration to his subordinates.⁷

The privilege of becoming a delegate was recognition for the work Briukhanov had done at the helm of the third most powerful nuclear power station in the world. He had built it from scratch, and now it had four nuclear reactors running, each producing 1 million megawatts of electrical energy (MWe). Two more reactors were under construction, and the station had overfulfilled its plan targets for 1985, producing 29 billion MWe. Briukhanov had received two high Soviet awards for his work, and many believed that he was poised to receive an even higher distinction, the Order of Lenin, as well as the gold star of a Hero of Socialist Labor. In late November 1985, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in Kyiv had marked his fiftieth birthday with a commendation. His selection as a delegate, with the corresponding lapel pin, was a distinction in its own right, equal if not superior to most government awards.

When on the eve of Briukhanov’s birthday a reporter came from Kyiv to Prypiat, where the Chernobyl plant was located, to interview him about his accomplishments and plans for the future, Briukhanov, usually a man of few words, suddenly opened up to the visitor. He recalled a cold winter day in 1970 when he had come to Chernobyl and rented a room in the local hotel. Only thirty-five years old at the time, he had been appointed director of a power plant that was yet to be built. “To be frank, it was scary at first,” Briukhanov told the reporter. That was then. Now Briukhanov was running an enterprise with thousands of highly qualified managers, engineers, and workers. He also bore de facto responsibility for running the company town of Prypiat, which housed close to 50,000 construction workers and plant personnel. He even complained to the reporter about the need to divert people and resources from the nuclear station to ensure the smooth running of the city’s infrastructure. But there were also payoffs from the “father of the city” status that had been thrust upon him. Before and during the congress, photographs and profiles of Briukhanov were published in local and regional newspapers, including the one in Chernobyl.⁸

Photos of the Kyiv regional delegation taken in Red Square during the congress and then upon the group’s return to Ukraine show Briukhanov dressed in a fancy muskrat fur hat and short sheepskin coat with a mohair scarf around his neck—all expensive and hard to get in the Soviet Union at the time, tokens of the prestige and power of their owner. Briukhanov did not need the shops set up for rank-and-file congress delegates, but time in Moscow gave him the opportunity to meet with colleagues in the industry and lobby the party’s Central Committee and the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, which supervised his plant. The task was relatively easy, given that many officials in both places had once worked at the Chernobyl plant that Briukhanov ran.⁹

ON THE morning of February 25, 1986, Viktor Briukhanov and his fellow deputies took their seats in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses in the center of the hall before the podium. For those like Briukhanov who were attending their first party congress, the ritual opening presented an interesting spectacle whose main features went back to Stalin’s times.

At ten in the morning, the party’s Politburo members, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, marched to the podium. Like most people, Briukhanov knew them from their portraits, which were displayed on public buildings all over the Soviet Union. Among them was the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, whose portrait would survive for decades in the Prypiat palace of culture. Like everyone else, Briukhanov rose to his feet to welcome the leaders with applause. Once it subsided, Gorbachev made his way to the podium. “Comrade delegates,” declared the general secretary, his voice betraying his excitement. “At Communist Party congresses of Union republics and territorial and oblast party conferences, 5,000 delegates were chosen to attend the 27th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU]. There are 4,993 delegates attending the congress. Seven people are absent for valid reasons. This gives us a basis to commence the work of the congress.” There were no objections. The congress began its proceedings.¹⁰