![]() ![]() Chernobyl helped to transform the slow-burn of Soviet environmental protests into an explosive form of eco-nationalism On the brink of glasnost, Chernobyl helped prise open the vice of Soviet censorship, forcing the regime to publicly confront its failings and their dreadful consequences for the country. The public clamour for detailed information about the threat to health quickly proved unstoppable. With both radiation readings and the demand for information in western Europe rising and Ukrainian hospitals admitting hundreds of patients suffering from radiation sickness, the Kremlin finally broke its silence almost three days after the accident. Crowds lined the streets to cheer the achievements of Soviet socialism while their leaders, who knew of the explosion only 80 miles away, looked down on families oblivious to the danger. Woefully misjudging the scale of the disaster, the Kremlin insisted that the Ukrainian authorities go ahead with the organisation of the May Day parade in central Kiev just as radiation levels in the city were spiking. It had deep roots in the party’s reckless obsession with production targets and in the pliant nuclear industry’s alarming record of cutting corners to cut costs.Ī helicopter ‘bomb run’ on the damaged reactor in May 1986. The turbine test that went catastrophically wrong was not, he argues, a freak occurrence but a disaster waiting to happen. In this compelling history of the disaster and its aftermath, Serhii Plokhy presents Chernobyl as a terrifying emblem of the terminal decline of the Soviet system. There, Lenin and co still gaze down triumphantly on the desolation. When, in 2015, the Ukrainian parliament ordered the removal of all Communist party statues from the country’s streets and squares, Prypiat and the 18-mile radius exclusion zone around Chernobyl became a “time capsule” and a “communist preserve”. It has remained uninhabited since the Soviet authorities belatedly ordered the evacuation of its population 36 hours after the plant first began spewing lethal radiation into the atmosphere. The adjacent city of Prypiat, which grew up around Chernobyl, is a latter-day Pompeii. ![]() Tourists are promised safety, comfort and the ghoulish thrill of visiting the site where, at 1.23am on 26 April 1986, an explosion at the nuclear plant’s reactor No 4 created the largest peacetime nuclear disaster in history. These days, European travel agencies offer trips to Chernobyl for as little as €500.
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