Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

An artful storyteller, Plokhy (Lost Kingdom), director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, melds Kremlin politics, nuclear physics, and human frailty into this spellbinding account of the 1986 explosion and fire at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, which Soviet officials tried to deny and then attempted to downplay the extent of. Plokhy expertly guides readers through the Soviet military-industrial complex, exposing the rivalries and clashes among Communist Party bosses, government ministries, the KGB, and central planners whose “unrealistic demands” and “impossible deadlines” precipitated the disaster. The meltdown occurred during a holiday connected to Lenin’s birthday; Plokhy, with a Gogolian sense of irony, captures the air of celebration as radiation levels climb to hundreds of times above normal and the threat of a second explosion looms. Officials denied what was happening, the KGB cut telephone lines to keep news of the disaster from spreading, and the deaths of firefighters exposed to lethal doses of radiation in the months following the explosion were kept secret. Plokhy, who shares the opinion of many historians that Chernobyl’s meltdown was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, documents the catastrophe and its effects on reemerging Ukrainian and Russian nationalism in this probing and sensitive investigative history. (May)