There is a family story that my grandfather finds hilarious. On the 9th of May 1981, he came with his wife and daughter (my mother) to the opening of the Motherland Statue in Kyiv, because he had been one of the engineers who worked on the project. He and his wife had tickets for the celebration, while my mom, still a child, did not. Due to her age and connection to her grandfather, it seemed unlikely that any problem might occur; but it proved to be otherwise. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, was an honorary guest at the event, and his security was the biggest priority. When the guards saw a young girl, who—the horror!—didn’t have a pass, they bravely refused her entry and returned to their job with a feeling of fulfilled duty. “Your mom scared Brezhnev himself!” grandfather would tell me again and again, grinning at the story.
The reason why my grandfather finds this story so hilarious comes from the experience he had living in the Soviet Union. The system of that country was built with the intention of making a person feel inferior to the glory of the Communist world. The Soviet governmental buildings were ridiculously huge, grey, and gloomy; the monuments were numerous and threatening; and the people were hard-working and hard-living. They were little ants working for the grandeur of the USSR, who could easily have their heads bitten off and be thrown out of the anthill for the smallest error of thought. Like the statue in the nightmare of King Nebuchadnezzar, the communist colossus stood on its bronze legs of socialist ideas, with a rusty body made of prisons and gulags, and arms covered in gore, wiping the bloodied mouth of the proud head. And yet when a brave dissident would raise his voice and speak against the system, that statue would suddenly shake in fear and try to get that person off!
In 1933, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones reported to the whole world about the man-made famine, called Holodomor, that killed millions of Ukrainians. Organized for the purpose of genocide, it was swept under the Soviet rug, but fortunately that rug had holes. The Soviet machine was shaken. In September 1965, during the Kyiv premiere of Serhiy Paradzhanov’s film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors a Ukrainian dissident named Vasyl Stus, together with Ivan Dzyuba, Vyacheslav Chornovol, and Yuriy Badz, called on party leaders and the people of Kyiv to condemn the arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. He was repressed, and his writing was banned, but the Soviet machine shook again. On 1 December 1978, a criminal case on the charge of violent resistance was opened against Vasyl Ovsienko, another dissident, who worked as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. It was alleged that he had torn two buttons from a policeman’s coat. Needless to say, no buttons were harmed by Ovsienko, but because of his work, and that of other dissidents, the USSR was shaking in fear.
What does it matter if three-quarters of the world perish, as long as the remaining one-quarter is Communist?
Vladimir Lenin
By persecuting Christians, dissidents of various ethnic backgrounds, and other enemies of the Soviet ideology, the disciples of Lenin were working hard on the declared three-quarters of the world. However, one of their most catastrophic blunders in Ukraine came from something that caused outrage far beyond the iron curtain of the USSR—something that gave one of the final blows to the feet of the statue.
At the end of April 1986, my father, who was 17 at that time, worked as a laboratory assistant at the physics department of the medical institute. He studied the radiation background and explored the work of Geiger counters. Suddenly, all their Geiger counters began to show very high background radiation compared to previous values. It was clear that something was wrong, but the state media were silent.
This is the story of how tens of millions of Ukrainians and other neighboring nations became hostages of the USSR’s deception about the nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. While the government was trying to find a way to save face in the eyes of world leaders, people started to put two and two together, seeing the harrowing signs of trouble. Birds fell from the sky, cows refused to drink from the contaminated rivers, bees wouldn’t leave their hives for weeks, and the worms went so deep under the ground that the fishermen were not able to gather them.
The initial reaction of the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was to conceal the truth until it was ‘safe’ for the image of the party. The danger that people were facing was the last concern of the party leaders—it was a sacrifice that they were willing to make. Instead, they cared about the success in the Cold War and the infallible image of the USSR. That’s why, in one of the first messages of the KGB administration in the city of Kyiv and the region, it was said: “In order to prevent the leakage of information, the spread of false and panic rumors, the control of outgoing correspondence is organized, the access of subscribers to international communication lines is limited.” In other words, the facts about the explosion were concealed, and journalists were silenced.
However, they had to give some information. So on April 28th at 9:00 p.m., on the Vremya TV program (the news program of the Soviet Union), the host announced that an accident had damaged one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, that victims were being helped, and that a government commission had been created. The illusion of safety was successfully crafted. The next day, to make sure that only the State’s information would be spread, Leonid Bykhov, the head of the Committee for State Security of the Ukrainian SSR, issued an order “to strengthen the work of city-district authorities at enterprises and institutions to stop the spread of provocative and panic rumors, and to apply the most decisive measures against their instigators.” As a result, district police departments were obliged to report to the duty officer of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR about the number of identified “talkers.”
In those days, the churches were full because people didn’t know who to turn to. What the scientists were explaining was completely incomprehensible. And they themselves, it seems, were confused then, and already did not trust the military, politicians, and local officials at all. People had nowhere to turn, and they turned to God. I think they understood by feeling that we faced some completely new reality, and no one can help with this.
Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian author of Chernobyl Prayer
Eventually, neither the KGB’s efforts nor the negotiations of USSR officials could stop the winds that drove the nuclear emissions through Belarus and Lithuania to Sweden, Finland, and beyond. To put the disaster in perspective: as a result of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 100 times more radiation was released than from the effect of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The silence of the USSR leaders was creating the conditions of an international scandal.
Sweden was one of the first countries to raise the alarm due to the high level of radiation in the air, demanding an explanation from the Soviet government. “Unfortunately, the time for preventive measures had passed,” observes Mikael Jensen, a retired scientist from the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority.
It was already too late. A radioactive cloud was already over Sweden and problems came with the first rain. The Northern territories of the country were the most affected from the city of Uppsala to the city of Sundsvall. This area was famous for hunting and fishing, served as a recreation area, and often attracted tourists. After the Chernobyl disaster, all this was destroyed in some areas. People stopped eating meat from hunted animals and fish.
Sweden raised the alarm a day after the explosion. The United States did so three days after. On the 29th of April 1986, experts from the CIA prepared a report on the event at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. On the same day, the administration of President Reagan offered help to the Soviet Union. On April 30, Ronald Reagan received a message from Mikhail Gorbachev, who assured him that the situation was under control.
May 1 was an important day for the strengthening of Soviet ideology: Labour Day. Despite the fact that the level of radiation in the air was still high, the officials organized a parade (my own family took part). “More than 120 thousand Kyivans and the guests of the capital took part in the festivities on Khreshchatyk,” reported Vechirnii Kyiv on May 2nd. The next morning, 911 patients with symptoms of radiation exposure were hospitalized. The next day, the number rose to 1,345, including 330 children. To cope with the demand, patients with this diagnosis began to be accepted outside Kyiv. In order to hide the scale of the tragedy, the authorities were ordered to conceal the real diagnosis: ”Based on the instructions of the Ministry of Health of the Ukrainian SSR, in the medical histories of patients with symptoms of radiation sickness, indicate the diagnosis of ‘vegetative vascular dystonia,’” says Reference 6 of the Department of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR for the city of Kyiv (from May 13th, 1986).
With radiation actively spreading, the truth about the explosion began to slip out. The USSR needed an authoritative scientific voice that could advocate for them on the international arena. One of the scientists they chose was Valery Legasov, a Soviet inorganic chemist and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. His first task was to contain the consequences of radiation (with a few successful efforts), and his second task was to present the USSR’s report in Vienna. As he so aptly put it,
I did not lie in Vienna, but I did not tell the full truth.
A special meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna took place in August 1986. Legasov presented a censored report, shortened by the Central Committee, on the way the USSR had dealt with the tragedy. The eloquence of his speech partly restored the image that the Soviets were slowly losing in the eyes of the world. It seemed to others that the USSR had managed to contain most of the nuclear waste, or at least found an effective strategy to do so.
However, as a scientist, Legasov was not satisfied with his shortened report. Some of the information he omitted included the context of the explosion: institutional and cultural problems of the USSR that led to the accident, a detailed description of the design flaws (sensitive for Soviets issue during the Cold War), the full extent of fallout, and recognition of the ineffective decisions they had made. In his memoir, The Legasov Testament, he reflected on his visit to the disaster area:
And when I visited the Chernobyl station after the accident and saw what was happening there, I myself drew a precise and unequivocal conclusion, that the Chernobyl disaster is an apotheosis, the pinnacle of all the mismanagement that has been carried out for decades in our country.
From the moment of this professional fiasco in Vienna, Legasov attempted to get the truth out—or, at least, to persuade the USSR’s authorities to take better care of its people. He was concerned that the country wasn’t coping well with the problem and was afraid of future technological catastrophes. However, Legasov’s efforts were in vain. The day after the second anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, having recorded the truth about the event on audio tape, Legasov hanged himself. It happened a day before he was to release the outcomes of the investigation into the causes of the disaster.
In 2022, the heir of the USSR, the Russian Federation, launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some of the Russian troops were sent from the north and ordered temporarily to settle in Chernobyl. They started to dig trenches in the highly contaminated Rudiy Lis (Red Forest) and established positions in the surrounding area. The nuclear dust that was resting for many years was disturbed again. While there, the soldiers looted the contaminated equipment, valued at more than 1.6bn Ukrainian hryvnia, and transported it to the Russian territory.
The Ukrainian Minister of Energy, Herman Galushchenko, said that
The ignorance of the Russian soldiers is just as extreme as the dosimeters that we used to check the radiation background in the locations of the invaders. They dug with their bare hands in soil contaminated with radiation, collected radioactive sand in bags for fortifications, and breathed this dust. After a month of such exposure, they had a maximum of a year left to live. More precisely, not life, but slow death from diseases.
A year after the occupation of Chernobyl, the information was leaked that some of those soldiers began to suffer the consequences of exposure to nuclear poison.
The tragic irony of those soldiers being sent into a notoriously dangerous area proves that the current Russian government is a worthy heir of the Soviet Union. The lives of people are worth nothing compared to the need for the façade of the state to show grandeur and power. However, in the same way that the dissidents of the past—writers, scientists, activists, priests, and others—were able to deconstruct the USSR’s narratives brick by brick, there are modern fighters who are doing the same by speaking out against the Russian regime and the war propaganda they spew.
As history insistently presses its lessons into the present, one may wonder, amidst the grandeur of deception, how many brave voices are needed to dismantle the illusion of unpunishable power. Just as my mother unknowingly challenged the authority of Brezhnev, so too do individuals today challenge the oppressive regimes that seek to silence them. From dissidents of the past to modern-day activists, the power of truth remains resilient against the towering monuments of falsehood. And while the statue may look grand and strong, it takes only a spoken truth to cause it slowly to collapse.
