“MY MOTHERLAND is the Soviet Union,” reads a sentence written in cursive script in one of the exercise books scattered on the floor of an abandoned school in Pripyat, a Soviet ghost town next to the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which blew up on April 26th 1986. The town, built in the 1970s for the plant’s workers, was evacuated on the afternoon of April 27th 1986, some 36 hours after the worst nuclear-power disaster in history.
Today Pripyat is being reclaimed by nature and tourists. What were once streets have become forest paths; concrete blocks of flats decorated with Soviet slogans and symbols are barely visible through the trees. Some 200 pensioners eventually returned to villages in the area, but Pripyat itself remains dead, a Soviet Pompeii. Tourists and journalists stroll through silent alleys dotted with rusting propaganda stands, taking photographs of scattered gas masks, clothes, toys and textbooks in abandoned schoolrooms. Some may have been positioned there deliberately by tour organisers.
Chernobyl is also a monument to the extinction of Soviet civilisation. As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, reflected years later, the meltdown, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.” It was a catalyst for glasnost, the opening-up of the Soviet media, which exposed the flaws of the Soviet system and set off the chain reaction that led to its ultimate destruction.
Mr Gorbachev had been in power just over a year, attempting to grant the struggling Soviet system a new lease on life. The disaster was a bad omen. At 1.23am on April 26th the system suffered a power surge. The resulting explosion released 400 times as much radioactive material as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It also blew the lid from the Soviet tradition of lies.
The ensuing cover-up was more deplorable than the errors that led to the explosion. Soviet officials did not report the accident. The first information came from sensors in Sweden, which detected a rise in radioactivity. While firefighters from Kiev were heroically trying to put out the blaze, receiving deadly doses of radiation in the process, children in Pripyat played football on the streets and couples celebrated weddings outdoors. Families walked onto a bridge to look at the fire, unaware that they were exposing themselves to the worst of the radioactive cloud. Throughout the day local officials kept silent. The decision to evacuate Pripyat's residents was made in the evening of the April 26th and overnight 1,100 buses were brought in. The following day, residents were given two hours to pack their essentials. The rest of the country was kept in the dark.
Finally, on April 28th, the government made a 15-second statement on the evening news: “There has been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.” It noted that “assistance has been provided” to those affected and that “an investigative commission has been set up”. On May 1st, while local Communist Party bosses were evacuating their own families, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people attended a May Day parade in Kiev, where radiation levels were several-fold higher than normal. Many came with children in short-sleeved shirts.
Instead of providing information, the Soviet propaganda was busy battling the foreign media. Moscow News, a propaganda sheet published in a dozen languages, ran an article headlined “A Poisoned Cloud of Anti-Sovietism”. It denounced “a premeditated and well-orchestrated campaign” aiming to “cover up criminal acts of militarism by the USA and NATO against peace and security.”
In the eyes of his two most important constituencies—the Soviet intelligentsia and the West—Mr Gorbachev’s pledge of openness had failed its first important test. In fact, as a transcript of an emergency Politburo meeting shows, Gorbachev himself was furious over his limited access to information: “Everything was kept secret from the Central Committee. The whole system was penetrated by the spirit of boot-licking, persecution of dissidents, clannishness, window-dressing and nepotism. We will put an end to all this.”
Mr Gorbachev believed that to renew the Soviet system, he had to open up the channels of information. Within weeks glasnost began in earnest. Vitaly Korotich, a poet from Kiev who had condemned the Chernobyl cover-up, was appointed editor of Ogonyok, an illustrated weekly with a circulation of 1.5m copies. Along with the revamped Moscow News, it became a mouthpiece of Mr Gorbachev’s programme of perestroika, or restructuring. These publications, and others that followed suit, undermined one of the main pillars of the Soviet system: its ability to lie. Five years after the explosion at Chernobyl, that inability to conceal the truth would bring down the whole rotten construction.