Thirty years ago, on May 14, 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev broke his 18-day silence on the Chornobyl nuclear accident. In his 25-minute speech broadcast on Soviet television, Mr. Gorbachev reported than nine persons had died as a result of the disaster and that 299 were hospitalized with radiation sickness of varying severities.
“I don’t honestly believe” the official Soviet figures of “two, or three or six dead,” said an unidentified U.S. State Department official, who spoke with The Ukrainian Weekly on condition of anonymity. I “would add a couple of zeroes to those figures.” As time goes on, he said, more information will become available about the nuclear accident that began on April 26, 1986, nearly 60 miles from Kyiv.
“The most serious consequences of the accident have been averted,” Mr. Gorbachev added. “Of course, the end is not yet. It is not the time to rest. Extensive and long work still lies ahead. The level of radiation in the station’s zone and on the territory in the immediate vicinity still remains dangerous for human health.”
The Soviets revealed that 92,000 persons had been evacuated from the Chornobyl area, with news reports of heroic efforts by workers to extinguish the fire at the plant, the evacuation of area residents and the entombment of the still-smoldering reactor.
Dr. Robert Gale, an American specialist on bone marrow transplants who had been treating accident victims in Moscow, said that there would be more casualties in the weeks to come, noting that seven out of 35 patients under his care had died as a result of radiation exposure.
Soviet reprisals fell on A. Sicharenko, an engineer and local party official from Prypiat, and another party official, A. Shapoval, who Pravda reported had ignored their duties during the evacuation of employees and residents. Mr. Shapoval was stripped of his Communist Party membership, while Mr. Sicharenko was given a “severe reprimand.” A third official, A. Gubsky, secretary of the local construction organization, was given an unspecified punishment for failing “to give a timely, principled assessment of what had occurred.”
The Weekly’s editorial of May 18, 1986, commented: “…We fear the Soviets are conducting a cover-up much like the one that hid the awesome Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 from the world’s view. We fear – though we sincerely hope such fears prove groundless – that the casualties of the Chornobyl disaster are much higher than the Kremlin admits. We fear the dead are buried and that a shroud of silence has been draped over Ukraine. …Western journalists … are being shown only what the Kremlin wants them to see: the Potemkin villages of 1986. We believe that the health of countless residents of Ukraine has been jeopardized by Soviet attempts to manifest normalcy.”
After 18 days of silence, the editorial noted, Mr. Gorbachev “acknowledges that nine are dead and 299 hospitalized, and then proceeds to use the situation for Soviet propaganda: to call for a nuclear test ban, to suggest that the International Atomic Energy Agency [the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency] be strengthened, and to condemn the Western media for sensationalizing the Chornobyl accident.”
Source: “Gorbachev speaks on Chornobyl accident; sources still question casualty figures,” The Ukrainian Weekly, May 18, 1986.