The speech was brief: there was no need to dramatise even more an event whose significance no one understood at the time. However, this was not the first disaster related to a nuclear power plant. Previously, incidents had been reported in several countries, including the United States. Nevertheless, the Three-Mile Island accident was not comparable. In Chernobyl, we were making history. The Soviet Union was facing one of the worst crises of its existence and the whole world was watching. The subject was the focus of all European and international news agencies. It hypnotised the ordinary citizens who were suspended in his twists and turns. The Soviet Union was in a delicate situation. It censored information for its own people, but was accountable to the rest of the world.
On 29 April, Kiev was banned from foreign journalists and diplomats. The USSR was seeking to avoid the global panic that was spreading and would harm it. News of overcrowded hospitals and tens of thousands of deaths had reached the ears of several European newsrooms, raising fears and suspicions that would weaken the eastern bloc.
Internationally, the reaction was organised. Many measures were taken, particularly in Poland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where it was recommended not to expose children to the outside world and to administer them certain preventive treatments. In Germany, the panic was vivid and skilfully exploited by some politicians leading thousands of women to seek abortions as precautionary measure. As for France, the misinformation scandal that had shaken it is still held up today as an example of the necessary mistrust of the media. While Switzerland was on alert, a French television presenter announced unreservedly that the radioactive cloud had not penetrated the territory and had moved to the German border by some meteorological miracle. Weeks of cacophony followed, decades of legal proceedings were launched, some of which were recently concluded.
In the Soviet Union, the fight continued to rage. Although Boris Yeltsin announced the end of the fire on May 5, 1986, the reactor was not yet out of trouble. The heat inside was still reaching 200°C, making the containment and assembly of the temporary sarcophagus considerably more complex. In particular, Soviet engineers had been forced to build a huge underground pipeline several hundred metres long to supply nitrogen to be injected for cooling purposes. The challenge was daunting. Men were fighting against a real monster that they themselves had desired, given birth to and feared.
In the years that followed, thousands of workers were sent to the collapsed part of the roof of Reactor No. 4 to attempt a major decontamination. The approach was almost desperate, the means derisory. Each of them had 90 seconds, not one more. The intensity of the radiation was too high, they could die within minutes.
Armed with simple shovels, they had to climb the ladder, do their job while counting in their heads, they knew that a misjudgment would reduce their life expectancy even further. Most of them died in the years following their mission. Others, still alive, had escaped at the cost of disability and incurable illness. Today their struggle has been illustrated by many films and historical documents. A monument has even been erected in recognition of them. Located in the heart of the exclusion zone, it is one of the first stops on the various tourist excursions. Thus the visitor has the opportunity to contemplate a rather confusing grey structure enveloping a replica of the famous evacuation chimney. Liquidators had been carved on the side, armed with shovels, helmets and water hoses. They were anonymous heroes who had been sacrificed at the altar of an apocalyptic emergency.
If there was an unknown episode of this event, it was the trial that followed. In the summer of 1987, plant personnel were forced to appear before a specially constituted court. Foreign journalists were invited to attend the hearings. The process was strictly regulated and their access time was limited. For some, the trial was a farce. Thus, no international observer had the privilege of being present for the entire procedure.
To meet the requirements of the law in force, the trial took place in the exclusion zone, at about fifteen kilometres southeast of the destroyed reactor. The hearings lasted three weeks and left little written evidence. The Board of Inquiry concluded that the staff were negligent and that they had violated the rules and instructions regarding the management of the reactor. Of course, the inhabitants of the Soviet Union were not informed of the progress of the trial. To do so, they had to manage to listen to western radio broadcasts, particularly those of the BBC.
Although the disaster had been investigated, explained and judged, its impact remained unchanged. My family had fled like all the others. The question of return was never asked.
My father had been in the front row and had been exposed to huge amounts of radiation. He was admitted to a hospital in Moscow where a special unit had been set up to treat the victims of the accident. The facility was overcrowded, the doctors overwhelmed. More than the number, it was the incurability of patients that was the problem. Soviet nurses tried to reassure them with desperate promises and forced smiles. Every day new liquidators were welcomed. They were cared for by comforting their wives. Some cried, others hoped.
My father suspected he was condemned. He had accepted the idea of his own death with almost suicidal ease. Faced with the certainty of the outcome, the doctors allowed him to return to Ukraine. He wanted to see his native land one last time. His fate was sealed, his departure would free up places to receive new wounded. I was confused by his courage, but my mother didn’t seem surprised. She had always known him like that. Yet she avoided his presence and almost never gave him the floor again. Her condition was deteriorating and she had difficulty with the sight of her dying husband.
In the fall of 1988, he lost the use of his eyes. Medicine had succeeded in prolonging his existence, but his senses were perishing. The cataract was accompanied by a rather significant hair loss, bleeding and endless stomach pains. His physical balance was increasingly precarious. He was forced to return to Moscow in this sordid hospital. Doctors predicted three weeks of life expectancy. He died two months later.
His death had been anticipated, even expected. He had been one of the first people sent to the site and had been exposed to much higher levels of radiation than the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who later worked on the site. My mother received a medal and decided to bury it in an old chest of drawers. A few years later she married a Viennese architect. For fear of malformation, she had chosen to have an abortion. My sister was never born and I remained the only child I dreamed of no longer being.
For some reason, I gradually lost contact with my mother. Our emotional bond had slowly evaporated. After the age of thirty, our encounters became rarer, more impersonal too, until they became non-existent. Her Austrian husband may have made efforts to accept and educate me, but I had little empathy for him. He was a deceitful being, a manipulator with a voice too confident and teeth too white to be honest. But he was wealthy and enjoyed resplendent social circles, I had no choice but to consent to his presence with my mother.
I began my life as an independent adult in self-sufficiency, sheltered from any family structure. My father-in-law had found me a job as a fairly well-paid advertiser. I remembered thanking him for a vigorous but insincere handshake. A few months later, I decided to resign and start a career as a journalist.