Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe

My problems with Richard F. Mould's Chernobyl Record start with the words "definitive history" in the title. The book is decidedly not a history of events that resulted in the catastrophe. It is rather a mixture of chronicle, traveler's journal, summaries of some aspects of nuclear civilization, and a great deal of statistics. The tone of the narrative varies from emotional eyewitness account to overly dry technical description. Along with authoritative, official information, there are bits with less-than-evident significance, such as pictures of the author's Soviet visa or a camel in the Kazakh steppe. While the comparison of the Chernobyl explosion to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Tokaimura seems to be too laconic, the comparisons to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic explosions and to nuclear weapons test sites seems out of place.

The 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe was indeed a multidimensional phenomenon, and it may still be too soon to attempt a "definitive" history. But what is striking is that Mould has not even tried to address the very basic historical question: whether Chernobyl was just one of quite a few (even though the worst) accidents of the nuclear era, or whether the Soviet regime was mainly responsible for this misfortune. The question is much easier to ask than to answer, but no history should overlook it.

The book's most interesting chapter for a historian (and the longest) is the concluding one, "The Legasov Testament." It is an English translation of reflections on the Chernobyl accident by academician Valery Legasov, a nuclear scientist, and one of the principal Soviet officials in the field of atomic energy at the time; he was the head of the Soviet delegation at the first international postaccident meeting. The document was published in the central Soviet newspaper Pravda 20 May 1988, two years after Chernobyl and a few weeks after Valery Legasov had committed suicide at age 51.

Mould presents the Legasov text as "a valuable historical account." That may be true, but only within the real historical context of the Soviet Union's responsibility to its people in the management of science. So Legasov's account could—or maybe should—be a starting, rather than a concluding, point in a history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, if what is being built is a "definitive" history.

According to Mould, Legasov's career was ruined "in large part because [he] began to speak out about the problems—instead of keeping quiet and voicing only the Communist Party line." Actually the cause and effect might be quite the other way around: Legasov began to speak after his extremely successful career had stumbled dramatically over Chernobyl in the time of the Communist perestroika. This possibility is supported by Russian sources: The style of the wording of Legasov's "testament" in the original Russian looks more like that of a high-ranking apparatchik rather than of a scientist. It is especially clear in its full version—a transcript of a five-tape recording of Legasov's oral account that is now circulating in Russian on the Internet (http://litportal.org.ru/catalog/a-rusl). Another source is Vladimir Gubarev, the science editor of Pravda, who urged Legasov to write his thoughts on Chernobyl and who published a heavily abridged version.

David Holloway masterfully demonstrated the penetrability of the Soviet "enigma" in his definitive history of the Soviet atomic bomb, Stalin and the Bomb (Yale U. Press, 1994). The field of peaceful nuclear energy in the USSR has much weaker classification restrictions than the field of nuclear weaponry, but it is unlikely that anyone could probe its real context by relying on translators, as Mould did.

The principal issue in question is personal professional responsibility. True, Soviet society was corroded by decades of totalitarian rule. And the Soviet nuclear establishment was a part of the whole story. But the general issue of professional responsibility has quite personal dimensions. In the same society and in the same nuclear establishment, another academician with a no-less impressive career than Legasov exercised his professional responsibility more than once: Andrei Sakharov, while considering himself entirely loyal to the essential purposes of the Soviet system, personally and officially voiced his professional understanding of the problem of nuclear testing in 1958, of the nuclear moratorium in 1961, and anti ballistic-missile defense issue in 1967. And it was his feeling of personal professional responsibility that led him to break the Soviet rules and to go public in 1968—each time in order to prevent a calamity.

Musing over Chernobyl, Legasov came to the conclusion that it was "impossible to find a single culprit." Sakharov would have to have named himself a culprit, had he not taken responsibility on himself. The issue of scientists' responsibility in Chernobyl is still waiting for a definitive history.