In his apartment in Kyiv, businessman Vladimir Konochera recalls the difficult days of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, with references to the current pandemic. He experienced the terrifying accident as a KGB employee and describes how the leadership of the then Soviet Union tried to "smother" the event, but also the adventure of his health, due to the radiation he was exposed to.
"The current pandemic, with this insidious and unknown virus, takes me back in time, when we were captured by another "virus", nuclear, that entered our homes, our cars, our mouths, our ears and it was not easy to you are spared, unless you were confined to the house or went far away. At that time, I could neither sit in the house, nor leave, because of my work, to the state security agencies," he says.
"An even bigger "accident" and than the one at the factory was the silence of the country's leadership at the time, which hid for about three weeks the truth about the explosion, resulting in thousands of people being fatally infected or suffering from serious diseases, from the radiation, such as me," he adds. "Today, with the coronavirus, we have constant information, but back then, even I who could have known the truth because of my work in the state security agencies, I didn't know exactly what was going on," he says.
Three days after the accident and amid the general ignorance of the first crucial days about what had happened, Conocera was ordered by his service to accompany some scientists and politicians to Chernobyl to investigate the situation, and four months later he was transferred to the special department set up there by the KGB. "The international interest was great, many foreign scientists came to the zone to study the accident and I accompanied them for "their safety", in fact to monitor them on behalf of the service", he mentions and describes:
"I found the city of Pripyat, where according to official statistics, before the accident, about 50 thousand inhabitants lived, terrifyingly empty, completely deserted/ The evacuation of its inhabitants began the day after the accident, on April 27, at 2 pm. None of the residents then could have imagined that, leaving their apartment "for three days", as they had been told, they would never return. About 1,500 buses arrived from Kyiv to Pripyat. Two diesel trains were sent to the railway station and those who had cars left on their own.”
In the midst of general ignorance and with some rumors that "something terrible happened in Chernobyl" had begun to circulate among the population, on May 6, 1986, in Kyiv, only a hundred kilometers from Chernobyl, it was done with all solemnity and the participation of tens of thousands of unsuspecting people, the May Day parade. "They were young people, mostly, with red flags, banners and placards and they were carefree, shouting slogans like 'Peace, Work, May!' etc. The invisible radioactive cloud was "suffocating" the atmosphere but people didn't know or understand anything. But the leadership knew but kept silent", Conocera recounts.
"According to the schedule, the parade was supposed to start exactly at 10 am, but the Ukrainian party leadership was late taking seats on the official platform. Most of the chairs were empty. The world below was happy in their ignorance, but because of the absence of leadership, they began to wonder what was going on and whisper that 'something terrible happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,'" says the KGB man, quoting a backstory starring Mikhail Gorbachev, around the conduct of the "radioactive parade".
"The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Vladimir Serbitsky, asked Moscow for permission to cancel the parade, but received strict orders from Gorbachev not to create panic. He even spoke to him threateningly:"If you don't do the May Day parade, say goodbye to the party!", he describes. "If Serbitsky then had the courage to take the initiative to cancel May Day in Kyiv, he would have become a national hero, but in those years no one could do such a thing," he says.
Almost three weeks after the accident and while Europe was up in arms, on May 14, Gorbachev addressed the Soviet people on television, saying that "thanks to the effective measures taken, today we can say that the worst is over, the most serious consequences averted." The tragic thing was, says Vladimir Konochera, that Mikhail Sergeevich said then, that nothing bad happened in the world and even accused the NATO countries and the USA of using the Chernobyl issue to "discredit the Soviet Union" and "to weaken the impact of Soviet proposals to stop nuclear testing.
Meanwhile, in Kyiv, on May 6, an International Cycling Race was to begin and, as Conocera reports, at the last minute athletes from Western countries canceled their participation and only athletes from the socialist bloc came, with whom the bike race was held normally. Rumors that something was up were getting louder. "The foreign athletes were informed of the events and did not come. The world would not have learned about the tragedy if the radiation cloud had not crossed the borders of the USSR."
In such an atmosphere, the absence of official information and the intensity of rumors about the Chernobyl plant, the KGB "employee" removed his family from Kyiv. "Seeing some of my high-ranking colleagues in the service suddenly send their families away, I made the decision and I also sent my wife and our son to Sochi, on the Black Sea," he says.
However, he had already been exposed to the radioactive cloud for good, and the first symptoms would appear on the day of the May Day holiday, in the central square, where he was on duty at the parade ground. "Suddenly I felt a weakness, my head was spinning. My mouth was dry, my throat hurt. We later learned that in those days, the radiation in the city exceeded the limits by 500 times. Because many hours from the day of the accident and afterwards, due to work, I was outside, I had received a large dose of radioactivity. All my lymph nodes were swollen," he says and continues:
“I got sick and my illness was directly related to my exposure to radiation, which weakened my immune system. A wound in the abdomen, led me to the operating room. I underwent five operations. A total of 15 hours almost dying on the operating table. I could not recover, due to contamination with radioactivity. The doctors, turning a blind eye, did not speak openly about the obvious connection between my illness and my stay in the zone of radiation contamination. The statistics remained hidden and prohibited from publication for a decade after the disaster.”
When asked if, after the nuclear accident, he visited Chernobyl, even once, he responded:"Never... I don't even want to go." "I know," he continues, "that more than a thousand people live in the Chernobyl dead zone today. Those who for some reason decided to stay there or some who returned. Still around three thousand people serve the exclusion zone in shifts".
And he completes by closing the narrative:"As strange as it sounds, today there is also tourism there! Several Kyiv tourist agencies offer tours to Chernobyl for lovers of alternative tourism. In 2018, about 70,000 tourists from all over the world visited Chernobyl, while in 2019, about 110,000 people arrived as tourists in the "dead zone", but this year no one knows the number of tourists yet, due to the pandemic we are experiencing." However, he and his family prefer to spend their holidays in Halkidiki every year.
Red wine against radioactivity
"We were protagonists in the movie about the end of the world," another witness to the shocking events of April 26, Marina Gromova, who also lives in Kyiv, told us. "Today's quarantine, due to the coronavirus pandemic, reminds me of the situation we experienced after the Chernobyl accident. And then and today no one knew who and when would get sick and where the infection would come from.
"On April 26, 1986, I was in Kyiv, but on May Day, when I was unofficially informed about the explosion, I flew to Adler (a.k.a. a resort on the Black Sea), where I took my two-year-old daughter to my parents, who they lived there. I returned to Kyiv, my debt was calling me! At that time I was the chairman of the Komsomol of the Kyiv History Museum. I thought I should be in the front line. My mother was crying, she wouldn't let me go, but I persisted!"
Marina Gromova still remembers the empty streets of Kyiv, an empty museum, with museum employees mopping the floors. "We were washing the building to remove the radioactivity. We felt that if we don't do it, the end of the world will come... I remember long queues in the shops, selling red wine. We drank the wine like water, because we were told that it helps to deal with radioactivity. I remember the streets of Kiev being constantly washed with pressurized water from tankers. Streets that shone with cleanliness, with flowering chestnut trees, but without cars and people. Apartment buildings with permanently closed windows, covered with wet cloths, were supposed to protect more from radiation. I remember information and news in newspapers, radio and television that no one believed, because they were telling lies, only lies!", concludes Marina Gromova.
APE-ME