Here’s what it’s like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been. At the medical center where they brought my brothers, I stood banging my head against a corner of a crash cart. When one of the nurses saw me, I said, “There; that’s better. That kills the thoughts before they grow.”
Hullabaloo
I am Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky, chief engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, and my younger brother, Mikhail Vasilyevich, was a senior turbine engineer serving reactor unit No. 4 at the Chernobyl power station, on duty the night of 26 April 1986. Our half-brother Petya and his friend were that same night outside the reactor’s cooling tower on the Pripyat river, fishing, downwind. So you can see that our family was right in the thick of what followed. We were not—how shall we put it?—very lucky that way. But then, like their country, the Prushinskys have always been first to protest that no one should waste any pity on them. Because the Prushinskys have always made their own luck.
The All-Prushinsky Zero Meter Diving Team
My father owns one photo of Mikhail, Petya, and myself together. It was taken by our mother. She was no photographer. The three of us are arranged by height on our dock over the river. We seem to be smelling something unpleasant. It’s from the summer our father was determined to teach us proper diving form. He’d followed the Olympics from Mexico City on our radio, and the exploits of the East German Fischer had filled him with ambition for his boys. But our dock had been too low, and so he’d called it the Zero Meter Diving Platform. The bottom where we dove was marshy and shallow and frightened us. “What are you frightened of?” he said to us. “I’m not frightened. Boris, are you frightened?” “I’m not frightened,” I told him, though my brothers knew I was. I was ten and imagined myself his ally. Petya was five. Mikhail was seven. Both are weeping in the photo, their hands on their thighs.
Sometimes at night when our mother was still alive our father would walk the ridge above us, to see the moon on the river, he said. He would shout off into the darkness: he was Victor Grigoryevich Prushinsky, director of the Physico-Energy Institute. While she was alive, that was the way our mother—Mikhail’s and my mother—introduced him. Petya’s mother didn’t introduce him to anyone. Officially, Petya was our full brother, but at home our father called him Half-life. He said it was a physicist’s joke.
“Give your brother your potatoes,” he would order Petya. And poor little Petya would shovel his remaining potatoes onto Mikhail’s plate. During their fights, Mikhail would say to him things like, “Your hair seems different than ours. Don’t you think?”
So there was a murderousness to our play. We went on rampages around the dacha, chopping at each other with sticks and clearing swaths in the lilacs and wildflowers in mock battles. And our father would thrash us. He used an ash switch. Four strokes for me, then three for Mikhail, and I was expected to apply the fourth. Then three for Petya, and Mikhail was expected to apply the fourth. Our faces were terrible to behold. We always applied the final stroke as though we wanted to outdo the first three.
When calm, he quoted to us Strugatsky’s dictum that reason was the ability to use the powers of the surrounding world without ruining that world. Striped with welts and lying on our bellies on our beds, we tinted his formulation with our own colorations of fury and misery. Twenty-five years later, that same formulation would appear in my report to the nuclear power secretary of the Central Committee concerning the catastrophic events at the power station at Chernobyl.
Loss
Our mother died of the flu when I was 11. Petya lost his only protector and grew more disheveled and strange and full of difference. Mikhail for a full year carried himself as though he’d been petrified by a loud noise. Later we joked that she’d concocted the flu to get away, and that she was off on a beach in the Black Sea. But every night we peeped at one another across the dark floor between our beds, vacant and alone.
In the mornings I took to cupping Mikhail’s fist with my palms when he was thumb-sucking, as though I were praying. It brought us nose to nose and made me shudder with an enraged tenderness. Petya sucked his thumb as well, interested.
That Warm Night in April
What is there to say about the power station, or the river on which it sits? The Pripyat just a few kilometers downstream drains into the Dnieper, having snaked through land as level as a soccer pitch with a current the color of tea from the peat bogs nearby. In the deeper parts, it’s cold year round. For long stretches it dips and loops around stands of young pines.
Mikhail was pleased with the area when he settled there. He was a young tyro, the coming thing, at 28 a senior turbine engineer. There were three secondary schools, a young people’s club, festive covered markets, a two-screen cinema, and a Children’s World department store. Plenty of good walking trails and fishing. Petya followed him. Petya usually followed him from assignment to assignment, getting odd jobs, getting drunk, getting thrown in jail, getting bailed out of trouble by his brother. Or half-brother.
“Why doesn’t he ever follow you?” Mikhail asked me the night Petya showed up on his doorstep yet again. Mikhail didn’t often call. It was a bad connection that sounded like wasps in the telephone line. Petya was already asleep in the dining room. He’d walked the last 20 versts after having hitched a ride on a cement truck.
They found him a little apartment in town and a job on the construction site for the spent fuel depository. As for a residence permit: for that, Mikhail told me on the phone, they’d rely on their big-shot brother.
I was ready to help out. We both treated Petya as though he had to be taught to swallow. “Let me do that,” we’d tell him, before he’d even commenced what he was going to attempt. Whatever went wrong in our lives, we’d think they still weren’t as fucked up as Petya’s.
Mikhail’s shift came on duty at midnight, an hour and 25 minutes before the explosion. Most of the shift members did not survive until morning.
Petya, I was told later, was fishing that night with another layabout, a friend. They’d chosen a little sandbar near the feeder channel across from the turbine hall, where the water released from the heat exchangers into the cooling pond was 20 degrees warmer. In spring it filled with hatchlings. There was no moon and it was balmy for April, and starry above the black shapes of the cooling towers.
Earthenware Pots
As Chief Engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, I was a mongrel: half technocrat, half bureaucrat. We knew there were problems in both design and operating procedures, but what industry didn’t have problems? Our method was to get rid of them by keeping silent. Nepotism ruled the day. “Fat lot of good it’s done me,” Mikhail often joked. If you tried to bring a claim against someone for incompetence or negligence, his allies hectored you, all indignation on his behalf. Everyone ended up shouting, no one got to the bottom of the problem, and you became a saboteur: someone seeking to undermine the achievement of the quotas.
People said I owed my position to my father, and Mikhail owed his position to me. (“More than they know,” he said grimly, when I told him that.) At various Congresses, I ran my concerns by my father. In response he gave me that look Mikhail called the Dick Shriveler. “Why’s your dick big around him in the first place?” Petya once asked when he’d overheard us.
We all lived under the doctrine of ubiquitous success. Negative information was reserved for the most senior leaders, with censored versions available for those lower down. Nothing instructive about precautions or emergency procedures could be organized, since such initiatives undermined the official position concerning the complete safety of the nuclear industry. For thirty years, accidents went unreported, so the lessons derived from these accidents remained with those who’d experienced them. It was as if no accidents had occurred.
So who gave a shit if the Ministry of Energy was riddled through with incompetents or filled with the finest theorists? Whenever we came across a particular idiocy, in terms of staffing, we quoted to one another the old saying: “It doesn’t take gods to bake earthenware pots.” The year before, the chief engineer during the start-up procedures at Balakovo had fucked up, and 14 men had been boiled alive. The bodies had been retrieved and laid before him in a row.
I’d resisted his hiring. That, for me, constituted enough to quiet my conscience. And when Mikhail submitted an official protest about sanctioned shortcuts in one of his unit’s training procedures, I forwarded his paperwork on with a separate note of support.
Pastorale
The town slept. The countryside slept. The Chief Engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, in his enviable Moscow apartment, slept. It was a clear night in April, one of the most beautiful of the year. Meadows rippled like silvery lakes in the starlight. Pripyat was sleeping, Ukraine was sleeping, the country was sleeping. The Chief Engineer’s brother, Mikhail, was awake, hunting sugar for his coffee. His half brother, Petya, was awake, soaking his feet and baiting a hook. In the number 4 reactor the staff, Mikhail included, was running a test to see how long the turbines would keep spinning and producing power in the event of an electrical failure at the plant. It was a dangerous test, but it had been done before. To do it, they had to disable some of the critical control systems, including the automatic shutdown mechanisms.
They shut down the emergency core cooling system. Their thinking apparently had been to prevent cold water from entering the hot reactor after the test and causing a heat shock. But who knows what was going through their minds? Only men with no understanding of what went on inside a reactor could have done such a thing. And once they’d done that, all their standard operating procedures took them even more quickly down the road to disaster.
The test as idea was half standard operating procedure, half seat-of-the-pants initiative. Testimony, perhaps, to the poignancy of their longing to make things safer.
Did Mikhail know better? Even he probably knew better. His main responsibility was the turbines, but even so. Did he suspect his colleagues’ imbecility? One night as a boy after a beating he hauled himself off his bed and pissed into our father’s boots, already wet from the river. He’d never suspect, Mikhail told us. Mikhail lived a large portion of his life in that state of mind in which you take a risk and deny the risk at the same time, out of rage. No one in his control room knew nearly enough, and whose fault was that? “Akimov has your sense of humor,” he told me once about his boss. It didn’t sound like good news for Akimov’s crew.
Minutes after they began, the flow of coolant water dropped and the power began to increase. Akimov and his team moved to shut down the reactor. But they’d waited too long and the design of the control rods was such that, for the first part of the lowering, they actually caused an increase in reactivity.
South Seas
On the evening of 1 May 1986 in Clinic No. 6 in Moscow I made the acquaintance of two young people: another senior turbine engineer and an electrical engineer. They had beds on either side of Mikhail’s. The ward overflowed with customers. A trainee was collecting watches and wedding rings in plastic bags. Everyone was on some kind of drip but there weren’t enough bowls and bins, so people were vomiting onto the floor. The smell was stunning. Nurses with trays skidded around corners.
Mikhail was a dark brown: the color of mahogany. Even his gums. When he saw my face he grinned and croaked, “South Seas!” A doctor changing his intravenous line explained without looking up that they called it a nuclear tan.
I was there partially in an official capacity, to investigate what had happened at the last moments.
Mikhail said, “Are you weeping? The investigator is weeping!” But his comrades in the nearby beds were unsympathetic. He interrupted his story in order to throw up in a bin between the beds.
He’d been in the information processing complex, a room a few levels below the control room. Two shocks had concussed the entire building and the lights had flashed off. The building had seemed to tip into the air and part of the ceiling had collapsed. Steam in billows and jets had erupted from the floor. He’d heard someone shouting, “This is an emergency!” and had pitched himself out into the hall. There was a strobe effect from the short circuits. The air smelled of ozone and caused a tickling sensation in the throat. The walls immediately above him were gone and he could see a bright purple light crackling between the ends of a broken high-voltage cable. He could see fire, black ash falling in flakes, and red-hot blocks and fragments of something burning into the linoleum of the floor.
He worked his way up to the control room, where everyone was in a panic. Akimov was calling the heads of departments and sections, asking for help. You could see the realization of what he’d helped do hitting him. According to the panels, the control rods were stuck halfway down. Two trainees, kids just out of school, were standing around frightened, and he sent them off to lower the control rods by hand.
“The investigator is weeping!” my brother said triumphantly, again.
“This is a great tragedy,” I told him, as though chiding him. The other engineers gazed over from their beds.
“Oh, yes,” he said, as though someone had offered him tea. “Tragedy tragedy tragedy.”
When it became clear that he wasn’t going to go on, I asked him to tell me more. “We have no protection systems—nothing!” he remembered Perevozchenko saying. Their lungs felt scalded. Their bronchioles and alveoli were being flooded with radionuclides. Akimov had sent him to ascertain the amount of damage to the central hall. He’d made his way to the ventilation center, where he could see that the top of the building had been blown off. From somewhere behind him he could hear radioactive water pouring down the debris. Steel reinforcing beams corkscrewed in various directions. His eyes stung. It felt as though something was being boiled in his chest. There was an acid taste to the steam and a buzz of static on his skin. He learned later that the radiation field was so powerful it was ionizing the air.
“Take that down, investigator,” Mikhail said. He tried to drink a little water.
The Maximum Permissible Dose
At 1:23:58, the concentration of hydrogen in the explosive mixture reached the stage of detonation and the two explosions Mikhail had felt in the information processing complex destroyed the reactor and the reactor building of unit No. 4. A radioactive plume extended to an altitude of 36,000 feet. Fifty tons of nuclear fuel evaporated into it. Another 70 tons spewed out onto the reactor grounds, mixing with the structural debris. The radioactivity of the ejected fuel reached 20,000 roentgens per hour. The maximum permissible dose, according to our regulations for a nuclear power plant operator, is five roentgens per year.
Some Rich Asshole’s Just Lost His Job
Petya said the explosions made the ground shake and the water surface ripple in all directions. Pieces of concrete and steel started landing in the pond around them. They could hear the hissing as the pieces cooled. For a while they watched the cloud billow out and grow above the reactor. By then the fire was above the edge of the building. Through a crack in one of the containment walls they could see a dark blue light. “Some rich asshole’s just lost his job,” he remembered remarking to his friend. I assume he meant someone other than his eldest brother.
And by then they’d both begun to feel dreadful. Their eyes streamed tears as they reeled about, so sluggish and disoriented it took them an hour to travers
