Thirty-five years ago, on April 26, 1986, a terrible tragedy occurred - the reactor of one of the power units of a nuclear power plant near the town of Chernobyl in Kyiv region exploded. After the explosion and fire, a deadly radioactive cloud formed, covering the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and reaching the territories of many European countries and even the eastern part of the United States. The terrible consequences of the accident were the death of a huge number of people, millions of victims, thousands of square kilometers of contaminated territory. The final demographic, ecological and biological results of the accident have not been determined yet. That is, despite the enormous costs of dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl tragedy, humanity has not yet fully understood and realized its scale.
However, some conclusions were made.
It was a human-made disaster that proved dangerous for almost the entire population of the planet. People have been unable to ensure either the problemless work of the "peaceful atom" or to systematically resist it in the event of an emergency.
«According to incomplete data, 600,000 people took part in the elimination of the consequences. Many of them became ill due to radiation. Firefighters arrived "bare-handed", without any means of protection, such as special insulating gas masks, due to which radioactive substances got into the airways. It was they who stopped another potential catastrophe - a hydrogen explosion. The total activity of radioisotopes released into the air after the Chernobyl accident was 30-40 times higher than in Hiroshima. Almost 8.5 million people absorbed high doses of ionizing radiation»
Information materials to the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. April 14, 2020
The disaster was not an accidental "operator's mistake", as initially reported by the Soviet media at the behest of the party leadership and the KGB. Further investigations revealed the use of poor quality materials in the building, structural imperfections, violations of technology and numerous accidents during the operation of the NPP. That is, this catastrophe was inevitable. "The best Soviet car" was doomed.
The Chernobyl disaster revealed the true inhumane nature of the Soviet totalitarian system, its attitude, first of all, to its own citizens.
The government of the USSR, the party leadership carefully concealed the accident. No one organized the evacuation of the population of Kyiv and the region, on the contrary, people were urged to live as if nothing had happened and there was no reason to worry. Hospitals, schools and kindergartens continued to operate. To demonstrate the absence of dangerous radiation, the multi-million city did not even cancel the holiday demonstration. On May 1, thousands of people, including schoolchildren, were taken to Khreshchatyk.
In order to hide the true scale of the tragedy, the ruling elite forced the Ministry of Health of the Ukrainian SSR to falsify diagnoses of radiation injuries. Instead, cancer patients continued to be referred to sanatoriums in the Kyiv region, located near the epicenter of radiation.
Even the official announcement of the tragedy was made by the Soviet authorities only under pressure from the world community, as on April 27 anomalous increase in radiation began to be recorded in various countries around the world.
Not everything was hidden by party, Soviet functionaries and the "omnipotent" KGB. They were not forgiven for their deception. The Chernobyl disaster was another reason for the disappointment of the Soviet state and eventually the collapse of the USSR.