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Chernobyl by Iurii, Macmillan, pp 168, Pounds sterling 25 hbk, Pounds
sterling 6.99 pbk

THERE are few people as well qualified as Iurii Shcherbak to write a
book on the Chernobyl accident. Shcherbak is a noted Ukrainian author who
is also a medical doctor, and trained as a epidemiologist. A few days after
the explosion in Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in
April 1986, Shcherbak went to the vacated town of Pripyat, ‘because,’ as
he once told me, ‘one seldom gets an empty town to study, and it was a unique
subject for epidemiology’. But it was the writer, not the epidemiologist,
who found the most interesting material in that bedroom town for the power
plant, and so for many months after the explosion Shcherbak spent his time
interviewing the people who had been involved in or affected by it. Chernobyl
is the result.

Although Shcherbak’s book is subtitled ‘A Documentary Story’, it is
not deeply concerned with the accident itself. The author devotes only a
few pages to describe what went on inside the plant in those early-morning
hours of 26 April, when the experiment in using residual kinetic energy
to generate emergency power went so tragically, and stupidly, wrong. What
most of Shcherbak’s many interview subjects do for us is to tell us of the
ways in which they, and those around them, reacted to the accident after
it happened – with frequent panic, with almost universal incredulous shock,
with hasty and massive mobilisation of resources and improvised damage-control
measures and, very often, with great heroism.

One of Shcherbak’s most useful witnesses (as she was my own, in researching
my novel of the same title) was the young woman named Luba Kovalevska. Before
the accident, Kovalevska worked on the staff of the local newspaper Tribune
of Energy, though she was beginning to feel that her position was at risk.
Just a month earlier she had published, in Literaturna Ukraina, the periodical
of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, an article entitled ‘Not a Private Affair’.
In it, she documented some of the shortcomings at the proposed new fifth
reactor at Chernobyl – shoddy materials, inadequate supervision and poor
morale.

For a time after the article appeared, Kovalevska’s life became almost
a burden to her. ‘I was accused of everything under the sun,’ she told Shcherbak,
‘that I was incompetent, half-educated (the expressions they used were,
it’s true, milder, but that’s what they amounted to.’) She was summoned
before the local Party organisation for an interview. There was a good chance,
she felt, that her Party membership would have been revoked – if Reactor
No. 4 had not blown up first.

Kovalevska is scathing about managers who house themselves in hotels
and use their position for material advantages. They are responsible for
slack workers: ‘People wonder: ‘What’s the point of living the life of a
fool, when next door people are living well, just as they like. They exhort
us to honest work and enthusiasm, while all the while they themselves acquire
Czech lavatory pans from the hotels. They leave their own ones there and
take the Czech ones.’ ‘

On the night before the accident, Kovalevska had been working late,
finishing a long narrative poem on the Italian violinist, Paganini. She
took a sleeping pill. She heard nothing of the distant explosions, saw none
of the ‘shooting star’ flashes other witnesses described. When she woke,
her mother asked her if there had been a thunderstorm in the night, and
so, Kovalevska says, ‘I went out and looked – all the roads were flooded
with water and there was some white solution, everything was white, foaming,
all the roadsides. And I know how it is when there is an accident, some
accidental spill. I began somehow to feel uneasy. I walked on. I looked:
policemen here and there, never had I seen so many policemen in the town
before. They were not doing anything, just standing around near strategic
²ú³Ü¾±±ô»å¾±²Ô²µ²õ.’

But no one spoke of the accident; no authority acknowledged it had happened;
children went out to play, and there was no warning that it would be better
to keep them inside. The first definite information Kovalevska had that
an accident had truly occurred was when she went to look at the powerplant,
only a kilometre or two away, and then she saw the pillar of fire. But that
it contained deadly radionuclides no one said; it was more than 24 hours
before the town of Pripyat was evacuated.

The Pripyat doctor, V. P. Bilokin, was the first to arrive at the Chernobyl
plant after the explosion. The emergency message had said simply that there
had been a ‘fire’. As Bilokin came in he was challenged by a guard: ‘ ‘Where
are you going?’ ‘To the fire.’ ‘Why haven’t you any special clothing on?’
‘But how was I to know that special clothing was necessary?’ I had no information.
I was wearing my doctor’s smock, it was an April evening, a warm night,
I didn’t have a cap, nothing. We drove in.’

When casualties began to report feelings of weakness and nausea and
when, belatedly, a dosimeter crew arrived, Bilokin realised his own danger.
But there was little to do. He had no mask, nor were there any available.
He phoned for gauze to put over his face, but there was not even gauze to
be had. Bilokin himself wound up as a radiation casualty, though he recovered.

When the accident was finally acknowledged at the highest levels, the
Soviet state mobilised immense forces to control the fire and deal with
the casualties. But that did not happen at once. Glasnost had not arrived
in that part of the Soviet Ukraine; Kovalevska says flatly: ‘The newspapers
were writing lies.’ Even those who knew the truth refused to act on it.
Another witness, A. Perkovska, went to the Pripyat town authorities to demand
that the children, at least, be kept off the streets. She was refused: ‘This
is not your affair. The decision will be taken by Moscow.’

One of Shcherbak’s most interesting interviews is with the American
doctor, Robert Gale. Gale gets kinder treatment from Shcherbak than he did
in, say, the play Sarcophagus (where playwright V. S. Gubarev makes him
a publicity-seeking American millionaire). But when California comes to
Kiev, there must inevitably be a certain number of raised eyebrows on both
sides. Shcherbak’s description of Gale suggests some of the reasons: ‘He
is elegant, too. He invariably wears a dark-blue blazer with gold-like buttons,
a dark-red tie, and grey trousers. And his bare heels at first look somehow
very ridiculous and moving: he wears shoes without heel-pieces.’ (We would
call them ‘sandals’, of course. Gale did make it a point to wear sandals
in the Soviet Union.) Unfortunately, there are flaws in this book not of
the author’s making. There is no index. The translation is stilted and,
typographically, the book is curiously amateurish. It is hard to tell whether
it is the author or one of his subjects speaking. Shcherbak deserves to
have been better served in these respects. But this is only the first half
of the work he has planned on Chernobyl and its consequences; with any luck,
when the second part is ready the whole thing will become available in a
better format.

Frederik Pohl is an SF writer and is based in Palatine, Illnois.