Post Cold War Lesson from Chernobyl
Recently completing the book: Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (2019, Simon and Schuster)—a fascinating, thorough account of the…
Recently completing the book: Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (2019, Simon and Schuster)—a fascinating, thorough account of the Chernobyl accident from the design of the unit to today, I discovered, in a sense, my own ignorance. Not only a veteran (Navy), I am a baby-boomer who came of age in the 1970’s. This means that I am of the generation that learned the cold war American perspective of what it meant to live in the Soviet Union.
If you are not from that time, you might not understand that the Eastern European governments which were part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), including the Russians, Ukrainians and others behind “the Iron Curtain” were our enemies. Therefore, we learned that citizens were an oppressed people living under an evil government. This made us think of every Soviet government official as a heartless goon. This may have been closer to truth during the Stalin era, but we are talking when much of the Stalin oppression was being dismantled to some degree after his death in 1953. In 1986, the Soviet Union was on the cusp of its demise collapsing under its own weight coincidentally during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev. He promoted his policy of glasnost and the continuing policy of perestroika both of which called for more openness and less central control of the Soviet nations.
In the 1970’s, Phil Donahue used to bring Vladimir Posner onto his program regularly. Posner’s role was to be a face of the Soviet people so that we would know they were not in fact evil aliens from the other side of the world.
Still we laughed at the Wendy’s commercial mocking our cold war enemies with a Soviet fashion show. The model walked the runway in a drab denim dress and kerchief for day wear and just added a flashlight for evening wear and a beach ball for swim wear.
It took a lot of convincing for all of us to learn that those lost behind the Iron Curtain were just like us, but living under various forms of one of many Communist governments, with differing degrees of harshness or not.
I remember when word of a nuclear accident at Chernobyl started to get out, the Soviets released video of many residents near the local town in the midst of festivities and even dancing, all to allay rumors that such an accident happened. This was classic Communist propaganda. A famous comedian here in the United States joked the footage did not show that soldiers were off camera with guns loaded screaming “Keep dancing”.
So, in fact, this was our image of the Soviet Union during the cold war. Meanwhile, what actually happened at Chernobyl was a gargantuan effort to save the surrounding town and fellow citizens from the lethal danger of nuclear fallout, at their own personal risk. There were no local residents dancing and no soldiers threatened citizens by the barrel of a rifle. Instead, workers and government officials were doing everything they could from putting out the fire in unit four to wading through radioactive water turning water valves to curtail the continued nuclear reaction, save the town and the people in it from certain and horrible death. Their primary concern was protecting the people while preventing a panic as they eventually discovered the need to evacuate the area. I do not think the Americans would be that much different, if for no other reason that the issues were the same, protect the people, do not start a panic. Of course, in our freer society, the media would reveal any secret plans, something the Ukrainian media could not do.
Workers and military leaders worked desperately to find a way to stop the nuclear reaction, which was well into what then Hollywood, less than a decade previously, coined as China Syndrome — a nonstop reaction that could, in theory, continue uncontrollably to burn through the Earth until it reached China. (Obviously, the Americans coined the phrase, from a Ukrainian perspective this would be more accurately called the American Syndrome.) Doctors did all they could to treat the victims — workers who heroically tried to contain the accident and to stop the nuclear fallout from poisoning the local residents, the nation and beyond. They risked sickness and death as nuclear radiation passed through their bodies, affecting every cell in the pathway with, for some, intensely lethal doses of radiation. A few never even made it to the local hospital. One is buried in the entombed lost reactor.
This reflects a real tragic element of the Cold War. The Soviets were afraid of appearing incompetent with their star nuclear program literally exploding before their eyes, so the government tried to keep the world’s worst nuclear accident a secret, while clandestinely working feverishly to protect their own citizens.
The Soviets alone did all they could to protect their people. It is a normal human behavior that we learned was endemic to the Soviet Republics contrary to what we learned in our formative years.
Adam Higginbotham wrote that the world community eventually became aware of the accident when the Soviets could not hide the truth much longer as radioactive clouds were spreading over Scandinavia. The first sign of trouble outside of the USSR, he writes, was that Finnish and other government officials could not explain why radiation monitors were suddenly going off for no apparent reason.
The Apollo 13 drama in 1969 brought Americans and the world community together to bring the three astronauts safely back to Earth. The movie of the same name portrays Gene Krantz, who was commander in Mission Control, calling that rescue effort NASA’s finest hour, which I understand he actually said.
Midnight in Chernobyl reflects the Soviets’ greatest post-war tragedy, but Eastern Europe’s, especially the Ukraine’s, finest moment. So many came together to do all they could for their comrades so that their lives would be saved. The story shows us what I said at the beginning, much of what we learned during the 1960’s and 70’s was American cold war perspective about who the Soviet people really were. But the book reflects that in fact, they were just like us with a different form of government albeit centralized and less open to the outside world.
Photo: AwOiSoAk KaOsIoWa [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]