WASHINGTON – A roundtable discussion commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster was held at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (USUF) on April 26. The panelists were Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S.; Mykola Riabchuk, a prominent Ukrainian writer and literary critic; and Nadia McConnell, USUF president.
Ms. McConnell recalled the Soviet information blackout about the catastrophe and how only a week after the explosion, while radiation continued to spew from the damaged reactor, the May Day parade in Kyiv went on as planned with thousands of people of all ages exposed to Chornobyl’s radioactive cloud.
She said that, for her, the biggest lessons from the Chornobyl disaster pertain not to the issue of nuclear safety (which, certainly, is important) but to how a totalitarian state deals with a catastrophe versus the response of an open society. She drew a stark comparison between the Soviet cover-up of the nuclear accident at Chornobyl and the quick and comprehensive Japanese and international response to the Fukushima power plant crisis.
Ms. McConnell stressed that the Soviet “playbook” of concealing and denying the Chornobyl catastrophe and the scope of its destruction and human casualties is the same tactic employed by the Kremlin today regarding Russia’s engagement in a hybrid war against Ukraine:
“I don’t think that we in the West have learned any lessons about Chornobyl because again when anybody talks about Chornobyl… nobody really talks about the cover-up, the understanding of the cover-up. The fact that this is a consistent playbook by the Kremlin and we see it today with the war – denial… We don’t really discuss the real tragedy of Chornobyl.”
Ms. McConnell also noted that pledging conferences that have been convened to assist the victims of Chornobyl as well as the victims of Russia’s war against Ukraine have never met their goals.
For Ambassador Chaly, the Chornobyl disaster had a deep personal dimension. His father was a Chornobyl “liquidator”– the designation given to thousands who were involved in the rescue, containment and clean-up operations surrounding the nuclear power plant – and was also involved in establishing a museum devoted to Chornobyl.
Ambassador Chaly said that Chornobyl is a symbol of the old Soviet style of governance and is an important reminder of the failed Soviet culture of security lapses and suppression of news and information, as a well as a general lack of respect for human life.
According to Mr. Chaly, Ukraine’s experience with this nuclear tragedy has made it a constructive contributor to nuclear non-proliferation efforts, including giving up its nuclear arsenal and cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Ominously, there are concerns that Russia may deploy nuclear weapons on the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukraine still relies on nuclear power for generating a large portion of its electricity, and it needs additional international support for completing the Chornobyl containment structure and dealing with other aspects of the aftermath of the disaster, explained Ambassador Chaly.
In his presentation, Mr. Riabchuk reminded the audience that liquidators were being sent to quell the disaster without any gear to protect them from lethal doses of radiation. They were being sent to their deaths, as the Soviet system did not care about human lives.
The Chornobyl disaster had huge political ramifications for the closed Soviet system, said Mr. Riabchuk. “This silencing of the disaster largely contributed to the opening of the Soviet system, because people both within the elite and within society, people who favored this opening, they had an additional argument, to say ‘see what happens in a closed society.’ A closed society is dangerous for its own citizens, for its own people. So I think it was a very important argument within the reformist camp to push forward this idea of opening, of glasnost.” Glasnost became a topic in the aftermath of the disaster, Mr. Riabchuk added. In Ukraine “it disclosed the very cynicism of the imperial center, how harmful this dominance of Moscow was.”
Mr. Riabchuk, who resided in Kyiv at the time, recalled how he learned about the Chornobyl catastrophe from his father, who was living in Lviv. His father heard about the Polish government’s rapid response to Chornobyl on Polish radio, and more and more Ukrainians soon came to learn about the seriousness with which neighboring countries were trying to mitigate the impact of Chornobyl’s radiation. This showed that the Polish government, unlike the Ukrainian government, cared about its people, noted Mr. Riabchuk, while the Ukrainian government – “they were just puppets of Moscow.”
And whatever nationality you were, those living in Ukraine all suffered from the policies of Moscow – all were in the same boat and this consolidated people. “I think the real drive for independence was initiated by this event,” commented Mr. Riabchuk. He went on to say that it also contributed to the emergence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the environmental movement, and that many other important changes in people’s mentality occurred afterwards.
He concluded his presentation by underscoring that people realized the system and imperial rule were a disaster for all and something should be changed. “I think it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union,” stated Mr. Riabchuk.