Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Viktor Brukhanov is the Director of Chernobyl from its earliest inception on through to the explosion and its aftermath. In 1970 at the age of 34, Brukhanov leads construction on the plant where he will serve as director. An electrical engineer, Brukhanov has little experience with nuclear power.

By the Spring of 1986, Brukhanov successfully oversees the construction of four giant nuclear reactors as well as an entire city surrounding the plant. On the eve of the disaster, as construction is set to begin on two more reactor units, Brukhanov expects promotion to a position at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow. By 2:00 am on the morning of the explosion, when the director arrives at the nightmarish scene, he thinks to himself, “I’m going to prison” (97).

Despite fission materials and graphite littering the ground and alarmingly high levels of radiation, Brukhanov refuses to issue an evacuation order or even acknowledge the severity of the disaster. Around dawn, Brukhanov instructs his staff to draft a written report. The single typed page lists radiation levels of 2.3 roentgen an hour without mentioning this is the highest possible measurement on the device used to establish this figure.

For his negligence before and after the reactor explosion, the Party kicks Brukhanov out and arrests him for breach of safety. During the trial, Brukhanov accepts responsibility for the explosion but denies having read the false radiation readings before signing off on them. Brukhanov receives 10 years in prison and serves five of them before release for good behavior.

Alexander Yuvchenko is a 24-year-old senior mechanical engineer in the Chernobyl plant’s reactor department. He lives in Pripyat with his wife Natalia and their two-year-old son, Kirill. Though not in the Control Room when the explosion began, he is on duty in Unit Four on the night of the accident. Described as “lean and athletic” (47), Yuvchenko is among the first to learn the true extent of the damage caused by the explosion.

By the next morning, Yuvchenko is among ninety individuals admitted to the hospital with symptoms of radiation sickness. When Natalia tracks him down, he looks healthy aside from what looks like a severe sunburn across his shoulder and arm. Before Natalia can return the next day, Yuvchenko moves to Hospital Number Six is Moscow along with many other patients exposed to high amounts of radiation.

After a period of latency that lasts around two weeks, Yuvchenko’s radiation burns begin to blacken and peel the skin away on his arm and shoulder, and the radiation eats into his tissue nearly to the bone. As 30 plant workers and firefighters die around him at Hospital Number Six, Yuvchenko suffers excruciating pain and fears for his own life. Following months spent on death’s doorstep, Yuvchenko’s bone marrow begins to function properly again, perplexing his doctors. Nevertheless, he still suffers enormous amounts of pain from the open wounds on his shoulder where doctors removed necrotized tissue.

Despite recurring health problems, Alexander Yuvchenko is eventually able to return to work and live a fulfilling life with his wife Natalia and their son Kirill. In 2008, he develops a massive inoperable tumor and falls into a coma, dying eight hours later at the age of 47.

Between 1985 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev serves as the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union’s head of state, the last to serve in this role before the USSR’s dissolution. Early on in his career as General Secretary, Gorbachev becomes known for advocating glasnost, the concept of openness and transparency. Higginbotham argues that despite the use of glasnost as a political slogan, in practice Gorbachev and the Politburo tended toward secrecy in regard to the Chernobyl incident, sharing information only when it becomes virtually impossible to keep it hidden.

Higginbotham also argues that the Chernobyl incident helped accelerate Gorbachev’s ambitious yet ultimately ill-fated economic reforms known as perestroika. Fifteen years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s removal from office, the former General Secretary credited the Chernobyl meltdown with the collapse of the Soviet Union, even more so than his failed economic reforms. 

Leonid Toptunov is a 32 year old who two months prior to the accident received promotion to the position of senior reactor control engineer, the most demanding position at the plant. Under normal circumstances, a reactor control engineer with only two months experience on the job would not work the control board during such a precarious test. But managing the test falls to Toptunov after the dispatcher in Kiev insists Unit Four wait until midnight to perform the test.

When lowering the power as part of the test, Toptunov makes a serious error that causes core reactivity to enter a freefall. Although Toptunov makes an honest mistake that nevertheless contributes to the core explosion, countless other factors play a role in the catastrophe. Despite dismissal by Dyatlov following the explosion, Toptunov stays behind to participate in a futile but heroic effort to try to flood the reactor. After two hours of working ankle-deep in highly radioactive water showering from the ceiling, Toptunov finally manages to open one of the cooling valves. His efforts are in vain, however, as the water flows uselessly out of shattered pipes.

Toptunov is among the patients transported to Moscow’s Hospital Six after suffering acute radiation syndrome. On the night of May 14, Toptunov suffocates to death after his radiation-damaged lungs fail him.

In the lead-up to the Chernobyl trial, the prosecutor makes clear that had Toptunov survived he would be criminally liable for the explosion alongside the rest of the defendants. It isn’t until 2008 that Toptunov finally receives recognition for the heroism he displayed in the immediate wake of the explosion and inducted into the Ukrainian Order of Courage, Third Class.

Anatoly Dyatlov is the Chernobyl plant’s prickly and demanding deputy chief engineer for operations at the time of the accident. His questionable decision-making during the turbine test is a major factor in causing the runaway chain reaction and eventual explosion. In addition to advising Toptunov to lower the power needlessly—which leads to the sequence in which Toptunov’s error causes reactivity to bottom out—Dyatlov insists that the operators continue to conduct the test, despite the fact that the conditions of the now-poisoned reactor necessitate a full shutdown. A less stubborn man might have listened to his workers’ very reasonable objections to these directives. But Dyatlov possesses an arrogance and disdain toward less senior plant workers that Higginbotham suggests is a product of the Soviet Union and its dictates regarding following orders without question.

Of the six defendants in the Chernobyl trial, only Dyatlov is confrontational. In his defiant testimony, Dyatlov absolves Toptunov and Akimov of guilt, instead laying blame on the designers and bureaucrats who failed to inform plant operators of the RBMK reactor’s design flaws. Along with Brukhanov and Fomin, Dyatlov receives a 10-year prison sentence. In 1990, Dyatlov receives a pardon due to declining health and dies five years later of bone marrow cancer at the age of 64.