Remembering Chernobyl: Wet Rugs, Stonewalling Officials
and a Run on Vodka
The huge volume of recollections, photographs and documentaries dedicated to the anniversary of Chernobyl speaks to the extraordinary force that catastrophe still has 20 years later. That's not surprising: commemorations of great disasters are a way to pay tribute to the victims and the heroes, to learn to live with nightmares and fears. They are occasions to try to understand why such things happen, to ensure they won't happen again, to ask what our reactions revealed about us. The greatest catastrophes take on a personality, a name: Bhopal, Oklahoma City, 9/11, the tsunami. These names and others have entered the language as symbols of apocalyptic tragedies.
Each disaster has its own unique attributes. Chernobyl, for me, stands for a fear that many have described in recent days, a fear of an evil that cannot be seen or fathomed. I was a reporter in Moscow at the time and lived through the anxiety and questions that gripped us all in the hours, days, weeks and even months after we got the first word of the disaster, one paragraph from Tass that still ranks as one of the great understatements of all time: "An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged."
That's all. Unlike most of the natural or manmade threats we confront, this one had no face, no presence, no visible menace. There was no black thundercloud firing bolts of lightning, no powerful wind bending trees to the ground, no huge building disappearing into a vast cloud of dust. There was only the knowledge that a great, invisible, mysterious killer had been loosed on the world.
The actual fire at Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine had been put out long before we even learned that it had happened. And it was one of the finest springs in memory in Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia, whose beauty belied the fear that the air, the ground and the leaves could be burning and altering our very genes.
My recollection of my first visit to Kiev, about five weeks after the accident, was of a wondrously clear sky and chestnut trees thick with blooms — and of wet streets continuously washed by water trucks, of playgrounds without children, of empty streets at 9 p.m. when the main evening TV news show began, or when the wind suddenly shifted and blew from the direction of Chernobyl. Orange signs on main routes pointed to "Chernobyl" to guide the convoys of trucks bearing equipment to the reactor. Wet carpets were laid out in hotels and public buildings for people to clean their soles, and I found myself obsessively washing my hands and my hair to clear away what people came to call "the dust."
Word went out that vodka and wine could help, and people drank all they could get their hands on. Geiger counters appeared everywhere — the police ran them over tires at checkpoints outside Kiev; technicians in white coats ran them over cucumbers at the farmers' market. When I returned to Moscow, my wife made me take off my shoes and clothes in the entrance hall, before I got near the children. She secretly threw the clothes away. Though the washing may have been useful, all these measures seem, in retrospect, to have been more of an effort to give the invisible, pervasive enemy a form, so we could believe we were doing something against it.
Everyone was hungry for information, but for a long time there was pitifully little. The accident occurred in the second year of Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership, before his new policy of openness had fully taken hold. The Kremlin reacted initially with its usual snarling secrecy, saying as little as possible and blaming the West for raising a "hullabaloo around the accident." Whatever scraps that could be gleaned spread instantly, and everyone soon became an expert on dosimeters, permissible exposure, gamma rays.
We know a lot more today about Chernobyl and about nuclear power. We know why the reactor blew, and we know how to make nuclear plants that are far safer. But we still don't know the full toll of Chernobyl, nor what to do with that deadly ruin and its cracked concrete "sarcophagus," nor what harm it may still be causing. "Chernobyl" remains what it became 20 years ago, the name of a horror that doesn't show itself .