The USSR's Last Battle.

I keep a medal in my desk at home. I didn’t earn it; it is only an eBay purchase, but it has a lot of philosophical value for me. It is constructed of brass with enameled areas and a cloth ribbon on the hanger. The central detail shows the Greek symbols for alpha, beta, and gamma radiation over a drop of blood, and the Cyrillic script around the central device reads “uchastnik likvidatsyi posledstviy avarii” or roughly “participant in the liquidation of accident consequences.” (Apologies to those readers whose Russian is certainly better than mine!) As any watcher of Cold War spy movies will now, in Soviet parlance to ‘liquidate’ something meant to eliminate, mitigate, or clean up the consequences of something, whether it was a spy or an enormous environmental disaster. 

The story behind this medal is one not commonly known in the United States.

The specific term ‘liquidators’ (ликвида́торы or ‘likvidátory’ in Russian) was coined in 1986 to refer to the Soviet soldiers, scientists and others who responded to the Chernobyl disaster—the April 26, 1986 explosion at Reactor 4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine that blew a 1,200 ton reactor cover into the air and spread radioactive fallout, from dust to basketball size chunks of the reactor core, across the surrounding countryside. The first clue the world outside the USSR had that something had happened was when radiation alarms started going off....in Sweden.  I remember being very upset when the news of the Chernobyl explosion broke, because the news broadcast interrupted the Transformers cartoon I was watching – I was seven years old at the time and my priorities were in line with my age.

The Soviet Union being what it was, most large civil projects, from construction programs to disaster response efforts, were run more or less along the lines of military campaigns, for reasons of authoritarian pragmatism (there wasn't really another means to get anything done), Soviet ideology and the heroic nature of collective work, and institutional culture, since most of the Soviet leadership were old men who had come of age during the Great Patriotic War, and who tended to see everything through the prism of a national war effort.  The head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which managed most of the USSR's nuclear program, was Efim Slavsky, a nearly 90 year old veteran of the 1917 October Revolution who had fought in Bolshevik cavalry during the Civil War. By 1986, having run the ministry since 1957, Slavsky was nearly senile but still held his position thanks to these impeccable credentials. 

 As the Chernobyl disaster progressed, the military element of the response became more pronounced, as the Soviet leadership spoke in wartime terms, of “mobilizing” and “sending troops to the front” —Mikhail Gorbachev himself usually referred to the Chernobyl cleanup as a “frontline action.” At one point, workers hoisted a red flag on top of the reactor building as a symbol of ‘victory’ after finishing a particularly difficult phase of the work. In light of the militarized character and massive resources devoted to the operation, one BBC documentary on the topic subsequently dubbed the Chernobyl cleanup “the Soviet Union’s last battle.”

A view into the interior of the exploded reactor - potentially deadly even to fly over in a helicopter.

Like any battle, the Chernobyl cleanup had its heroes and its casualties. The first responders to the disaster were mostly plant personnel and the local fire department from the town of Pripyat.  In the first hours after the explosion, these men worked desperately to keep a bad thing from becoming even worse.  Three plant technicians swam underwater through a reservoir of radioactive water to close valves in the plant’s cooling system, draining a water storage tank located beneath the reactor, since the reactor was melting through the concrete slab it sat on; had the molten reactor contents reached the water, the resulting steam explosion could have blasted the reactor core completely out of the reactor building and scattered it like radioactive shrapnel for tens of miles. The Pripyat firefighters, meanwhile, arrived with fire hoses and Geiger counters to pour water on the fire, working in an area that still has radiation levels of over 2,000 rems. 100 rems over a short period of time will cause acute radiation sickness (ARS) and 400-500 rems in a short period of time is often a fatal dose. Many of these men collapsed or became ill later that day and were hospitalized with radiation sickness, and most died within weeks. Some had to be buried in lead-lined coffins.

Memorial to the Pripyat firefighters

As the scope of the disaster cleanup expanded, the Soviet government called in tens of thousands of men-- recent military draftees, army reservists, and thousands of specialists from many fields, including firefighters, oilfield drilling crews, heavy construction workers, hundreds of engineers and scientists, medical personnel, helicopter crews from the Afghanistan war, coal miners, police and even janitors.  Most of these people not only had no experience or training in radiation matters or even in disaster response work, and the vast majority did not even know what they had been brought in to do.  Working conditions were harsh and most of the safety equipment was improvised on the spot, with lead aprons and trucks hastily plated over with hand-beaten lead panels.

The scale of the crisis was unbelievable- by one estimate it cost 18 billion rubles, when the value of a ruble was nominally equivalent to a dollar-- and the atmosphere was one of desperate improvisation. The immense steel and concrete sarcophagus that encloses the reactor was designed and built in less than six months, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. The entire population of an area of nearly a thousand square miles—120,000 people—had to be evacuated in a matter of days, although this vital measure was deliberately delayed for nearly a week in order to avoid disrupting the politically important May Day celebrations.  The entire Red Forest, a four square mile area which earned its nickname from the color the trees had turned after being struck by fallout, was clear cut in order to bury the trees in massive concrete-lined pits, and to allow dust suppressants to be applied to the soil. Whole villages were demolished and the debris buried in concrete-lined pits.

Relays of army helicopters airdropped bags of lead, sand, and boric acid into the shattered reactor building to bury the burning core and extinguish the fire, the pilots accumulating dangerous doses of radiation with every flight. One civilian helicopter pilot, Mykola Melnyk, received the two highest awards of the USSR – the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union-- for daring precision flying to install radiation sensors on the reactor, flying for hours at a time through the radioactive cloud leaking from the ruptured reactor.  Mr. Melnyk passed away in 2013.

Massive geoengineering projects were launched, including construction of underground slurry walls around the plant to limit the migration of contaminated groundwater, and a crew of coal miners spent months tunnelimg out space for a massive cooling system –sadly never actually needed-- beneath the exploded reactor itself, in order to prevent the molten reactor mass from melting its way through the building's foundation and the underlying soil, where it could potentially reach the water table and trigger a steam explosion—the “China Syndrome’ in US slang.  

The Sarcophagus under construction

The most dangerous part of the work, the shoveling of radioactive debris from the roof of the power plant building back into the reactor crater to allow construction of the sarcophagus, was done by army reservists in improvised protective clothing, working in relays for shifts less than a minute long, on what was still accounted a virtual suicide mission. A previous attempt to use bomb disposal robots to remove the debris had failed when the radiation levels destroyed the robots’ electronics, and the gallows humor of the Soviet military gave their human replacements the morbid nickname of “bio-robots.” Sadly, the reason the bomb disposal robots failed was that the Soviet government's representatives had tried to conceal the severity of the disaster and had given the German robot manufacturer a bogus estimate of the radiation the robots would have to endure, with the result that the robots were brought into an environment they were not designed to operate in, and promptly failed.

“Bio-Robots” at work on the roof of the reactor building. The distortion in the image is due to radiation affecting the photographic negative, a typical thing for photographs in 'hot' areas during the 'liquidation.'

In all, an estimated 600,000 men and women served as liquidators at one point or another, mostly in the summer and fall of 1986, and about a quarter million of them were exposed to their theoretical lifetime safe limit of radiation—or far more. Tens of thousands have already died, and tens of thousands more are disabled by health problems. In recognition of their services, liquidators were awarded the status of military veterans and were granted government benefits such as medical care, though these vary according to how badly the individual was exposed for and for how long, and these allotments may be more or less forthcoming at times, especially given that most of the disaster area and many of the former liquidators are now Ukrainian, and part of the exclusion area is now in Belarus, and the strained or outright hostile state of affairs between the three countries can lead to disruptions in the process.

The “Sarcophagus” today, slowly rusting away.

Next year, 2016, will be the 30^th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster; I don't know what kind of memorial services are planned, but it damn well deserves something- particularly hope that it never happens again. 

And yes, I already checked-- the medal isn't radioactive.

Also-- I once had a professor of Russian History named John Windhausen.  That man could teach you everything you needed to know about the crazy world of the USSR. Ваше здоровье, doc!