Gorbachev, Kravchuk recall early days of Chornobyl disaster (05/12/96)

Gorbachev, Kravchuk recall early days of Chornobyl disaster

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - A decade after the devastating explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev continues to deny that the Soviet leadership intentionally concealed the scale of the accident, reported Interfax-Ukraine on April 26.

Mr. Gorbachev told a news conference in Moscow on the 10th anniversary of the Chornobyl accident that "we failed to do something only because we were unaware of what had happened. I believe we were simply unprepared," he added.

"In the beginning, when our top scientists and a government commission arrived there (Chornobyl), they all stayed silent because they did not know what to report - because they could not understand anything," he said.

"And only gradually we started to understand the scale of the event and the dangers," added the former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who is currently running for president of Russia in the June elections.

Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk gave the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) Ukrainian service an interview on April 26, recalling the events of April 26-May 1, 1986, in Kyiv.

Mr. Kravchuk, then the head of propaganda and agitation division of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, recalled that he came into work at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, April 26, and stopped in to see First Secretary Volodymyr Ivashko, who told him of the Chornobyl accident. But at that point he did not realize the scope of the accident, thinking it was just a fire at the reactor.

In the afternoon, Mr. Kravchuk took a car out to his dacha at Koncha-Zaspa to the south of Kyiv, but before he even got out of the car, his wife signaled that he was wanted back at the Central Committee headquarters.

"Returning to Kyiv, I got into a car with Mr. Ivashko and Andriy Serdiuk, who is currently the deputy minister of health, but at the time was a secretary at the CC dealing, I think, with issues of science, and we drove out to Chornobyl," he recalled.

Mr. Kravchuk recalled noticing the convoys of buses moving toward Chornobyl, but insists that he was still not aware of the full extent of the accident. Even after the decision was made (on the evening of April 26) to evacuate the residents of Prypiat, and this was done in the afternoon on the 27th, Mr. Kravchuk did not think they would leave their town forever.

"On April 30, I was at the meeting of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, where we were deciding about whether or not to hold May Day parades on May 1. Various thoughts were expressed, but a decision to hold the celebrations was reached. If not everybody knew everything on April 26, 27 and 28, on April 29 and 30, everybody knew what had happened. And, I think the decision on April 30 you can call 'criminal,'" said Mr. Kravchuk.

"I recall standing on the reviewing stand on May 1 and Ivashko turning to me and saying that I should let the television station know that there should be footage of people frolicking in the park, children singing. 'This is the directive of the Politburo, to convey that everything is calm and nothing terrible has happened, said Ivashko," Mr. Kravchuk told the BBC last week.

Although Mr. Kravchuk stated that he did not get to the television station to convey this information, indeed, the station showed exactly what Mr. Ivashko had hoped for.

"We were all at the reviewing stand, and we were all armed with dosimeters," recalled Mr. Kravchuk, adding that he noticed how the needles on the dosimeters started moving out of control. It was precisely that day, on May 1, that the wind direction shifted toward Kyiv from Chornobyl, he said.

The reasoning of the party bureaucrats to go on with the demonstration, said Mr. Kravchuk, was that mass panic would be created, causing havoc among more than 2.5 million city residents. He added that officials were also worried about another explosion at Chornobyl at the fourth reactor, where the temperatures were continually rising.

"I cannot say that in Moscow they knew everything that had occurred on April 26, but I am convinced that they knew a catastrophe - and not just an ordinary fire - had occurred. You needn't be a specialist to understand this. I think that the leadership in Moscow and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky had all the information," said Mr. Kravchuk, who is now a deputy in the Ukrainian Parliament.

However, Mr. Kravchuk added that he did not know the full extent of Chornobyl until he became the chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament in 1990.

"If we had been a normal state, with a normal ideology and normal policy, we would have told the world the truth about the accident right away. And, Ukraine and Belarus should have been declared ecological disaster zones through the United Nations. But back then, we carried the philosophy of a Soviet state and the party, which proclaimed that we were the best, the strongest, the grandest, that our people are the most patient and ideologically tempered, that we can conquer all," he said.

Only on May 14, 1986, did Soviet leader Gorbachev address the state about the "misfortune" of April 26 - and he accused the West of exaggerating its seriousness and "defaming" the Soviet Union.

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