transport. Ivan invited me for dinner that night.
I was impressed by the high quality of the seven-story buildings in Ivan’s microrayon near the northern ring highway. But once more it was obvious that something strange had happened. I saw men on the sidewalks between the buildings, but few women and no children. The playground with brightly painted swings and slides stood silent and empty in the warm spring twilight.
Over some good Armenian brandy, Alexi and Ivan told me frankly what they knew of the “accident” at Chernobyl. In the ten days that had passed since the first alarm, my friends had used their contacts within the Kiev scientific community to learn the truth.
“It was a complete fuckup,” Ivan said bitterly, shaking his head. “They were behind schedule running some kind of a test for the ministry in Moscow.”
Alexi continued. “To speed up the results they wanted, the plant engineers actually disconnected the safety systems, then shut down most of the circulation pumps for the reactor coolant water.”
He stared bleakly out at the sunset on the rows of suburban high-rise apartments. “The reactor went wild… uncontrolled reaction. Nothing they could do would stop it.”
“And the fire?” I asked.
“The entire reactor exploded,” Ivan said flatly. “It blew the roof off the building. The fire was the graphite control blocks burning, and hydrogen from the chemical reaction between the fuel rods and the coolant water.”
We refilled our glasses, but this time did not bother with the typical toasts. Good engineers that they were, Ivan and Alexi fully grasped the relentless progression of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Once the tons of uranium fuel were deprived of coolant and exposed to the atmosphere, they explained, the zirconium fuel rods melted, and the fuel pellets themselves formed a molten slag that reacted with steam pockets in the reactor vessel and the burning graphite to churn and bubble for hours. There was little the heroic fire fighters could do to extinguish such a blaze.
“Every second during that period,” Alexi said, “extremely radioactive fragments were being carried upward on the smoke and steam.”
“Picture a volcano, Sasha,” Ivan added. “But instead of lava you have molten uranium, and instead of normal ash you have radioactive cinder.”
“Blyat,” I whispered.
Ivan laughed hollowly and pulled a large bottle of amber liquid from the china cabinet. “I hope you haven’t been drinking tap water. We ran a Geiger counter test. The stuff is definitely hot. So now we drink kagor communion wine. There’s a lot available here in the Ukraine.”
“It’s supposed to clear your thyroid of radioactivity,” Alexi said. He drank down a glass and poured more.
I then realized that they were both drunk, the kind of intoxication that came from steady drinking over a period of days.
Ivan filled his own glass. “When we die, we will have blessed thyroids.”
I drank a glass of sweet kagor with them in silence, watching the last light drain from the sky above the river, and the streetlamps blink on along the opposite bank.
Finally Ivan spoke in a different tone, cold anger, not fatalism. “You should know about the Party officials from Pripyat and the other towns around the Chernobyl plant,” he said, reciting a story he had obviously told before. “They evacuated their own families immediately, even before dawn on April twenty-seventh.”
“That was a Sunday morning,” Alexi continued. “Kids were out playing in all the villages. The Party got their own people out by plane and helicopter. But they didn’t begin the public evacuation until Tuesday, fifty hours after the explosion.”
Ivan sipped his wine. “And when they did evacuate the people, the buses crossed a bridge through a terrible fallout zone only two miles from the plant, much closer than the route the Party families had taken.”
I was weighing the implications of this when Ivan broke out laughing. “Well, Sanya,” he said, clapping my shoulder, “don’t look so shocked. The Party finally was able to prove that it was the Vanguard of the Proletariat.”
Jana and I finally met the next day. We climbed up to the medieval ramparts of the old city for the view down to the river beaches and of the sports complex on the island opposite the bluff.
I tried my best to convince Jana to leave Kiev, to come with me to Moscow. But she couldn’t understand the extent of the danger here.
“There’s no reason to panic, Sasha,” she said, taking my hand in the bright spring sunshine. “The authorities have measured no unusual radiation here in Kiev.”
“Why did they evacuate all the children, then?”
Jana looked untroubled. “That’s just a precaution. We have to be sure children do not drink milk from cattle in the danger zone, which profiteers might try to sell.”
Obviously Jana had fully accepted the official version of events, which, of course, did not mention the early evacuation of the Party families. There were young men sunbathing on the beach. A few were even splashing in the shallows. Like Jana, they did not seem concerned about the water flowing south from the Chernobyl Reservoir.
I persisted. “Jana, just come with me. I can get you a plane ticket.”
She smiled, pleased over my concern for her, but shook her head. “No. I called my father, and he called his colleagues here in Kiev. They assured him there was no need for panic, no reason for me to leave.”
I studied Jana’s young blue eyes. Her trust was complete. Nothing I could say would convince her to leave. Her father had reassured her.
Looking away at the river below, I tried to understand the mentality of a man like Colonel Baglai. He had certainly been an officer long enough to realize that no military colleague would dispute the official party line and warn him of true danger. And her father, a deputy division commander, also understood the invisible menace of radioactive fallout.
The night before, I had experienced some of this invisible hazard. I’d woken up before dawn, with a vicelike headache searing my temples and forehead. As I sat on the edge of the bed, I was suddenly seized by a bout of explosive nausea, and vomited all over the floor. (Later, my flight surgeon told me these were the unmistakable symptoms of light radiation poisoning.)
I said goodbye to Jana the next day at the airport bus terminal. She stood there smiling among the forlorn ranks of schoolchildren carrying their small satchels, as if they really were just going to camp. Jana was the only one smiling.
It was not until May 14 that Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev finally broke his silence and spoke about the Chernobyl accident on national television. I was in Moscow staying with friends, and anxiously watched Gorbachev’s message, hoping for reassurance about the situation in Kiev, or at least some facts about the accident.
But instead of the “timely and frank information” that Gorbachev had promised two years earlier would be the hallmark of his government’s “trust in the people” and respect for their intelligence, the General Secretary was tight-lipped and defensive, belligerent toward the nations of Western Europe and the United States, which had demanded an explanation for the dangerous radioactive fallout spreading across their territories. It had not been until the French released detailed satellite pictures, showing the roofless Chernobyl reactor number 4 building with the terrible molten glow of its burning core, that Gorbachev reluctantly acknowledged the true scale of the disaster. But he avoided any concrete details, and instead fell back on crude xenophobia to berate the foreigners who had criticized the actions of the Soviet government. Watching Gorbachev’s speech, I realized that glasnost might be just another device that the authorities in Moscow cleverly manipulated to maintain themselves in power. I decided to take my friend Valery’s advice and began listening to Radio Liberty late at night in the kitchen of my tiny apartment in the military housing complex at Tskhakaya.
My pessimism about the validity of glasnost, however, certainly was not a preoccupation that summer. The regiment’s assignment to conduct the air-combat evaluation of the MiG-29 kept us all much too busy to dwell on politics. Even though we were flying multiple sorties every day, and pushing the aircraft to the limits of its envelope, there were still certain safety standards that none of us dared breach. I knew that a number of MiG-29s had crashed during the OKB and factory-production test phase, but no operational fighter had crashed yet, and Colonel Torbov made it clear that he did not want the first accident in a line regiment to happen at Tskhakaya.
So we were forbidden from low-altitude maneuvers until the regiment had its own instructors officially qualified to teach us. These two officers were the deputy regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Anatoli
