The KremlinTimeline 1: The Chernobyl Disaster 1986

GENERAL OVERVIEW:

Chernobyl disaster,  accident in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear powerstation in the Soviet Union, the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power generation. The Chernobyl power station was situated at the settlement of Pryp’yat, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the city of Chernobyl

(Ukrainian: Chornobyl) and 65 miles (104 km) north of Kiev, Ukraine. The station consisted of four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power; it had come online in 1977–83.The disaster occurred on April 25–26, 1986, when technicians at reactorUnit 4 attempted a poorly designed experiment. Workers shut down the reactor’s power-regulating system and its emergency safety systems, and they withdrew most of the control rods from its core while allowing the reactor to continue running at 7 percent power. These mistakes were compounded by others, and at 1:23 AM on April 26 the chain reaction in the core went out of control. Several explosions triggered a large fireball and blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. This and the ensuing fire in the graphite reactor core released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, where it was carried great distances by air currents. A partial meltdown of the core also occurred.On April 27 the 30,000 inhabitants of Pryp’yat began to be evacuated. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish monitoring stations reported abnormally high levels of wind-transported radioactivity and pressed for an explanation. The Soviet government admitted there had been an accident at Chernobyl, thus setting off an international outcry over the dangers posed by the radioactive emissions. By May 4 both the heat and the radioactivity leaking from the reactor core were

being contained, albeit at great risk to workers. Radioactive debris was buried at some 800 temporary sites, and later in the year the highly radioactive reactor core was enclosed in a concrete-and-steel sarcophagus (which was later deemed structurally unsound).Some sources state that two people were killed in the initial explosions, whereas others report that the figure was closer to 50. Dozens more contracted serious radiation sickness; some of these people later died. Between 50 and 185 million curies of radionuclides (radioactive forms of chemical elements) escaped into the atmosphere—several times more radioactivity than that created by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. This radioactivity was spread by the wind over Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and soon reached as far west as Franceand Italy. Millions of acres of forest and farmland were contaminated, and, although many thousands of people were evacuated, hundreds of thousands more remained in contaminated areas. In addition, in subsequent years many livestock were born deformed, and among humans several thousand radiation-induced illnesses and cancer deaths were expected in the long term. The Chernobyl disaster sparked criticismof unsafe procedures and design flaws in Soviet reactors, and it heightened resistance to the building of more such plants. Chernobyl Unit 2 was shut down after a 1991 fire, and Unit 1 remained

on-line until 1996. Chernobyl Unit 3 continued to operate until 2000, when the nuclear power station was officially decommissioned.Following the disaster, the Soviet Union created a circle-shaped exclusion zone with a radius of about 18.6 miles (30 km) centred on the nuclear power plant. The exclusion zone covered an area about 1,017 square miles (2,634 square km) around the plant. However, it was later expanded to 1,600 square miles (4,143 square km) to include heavily radiated areas outside the initial zone. Although no people actually live in the exclusion zone, scientists, scavengers, and others may file for permits that allow them to enter for limited amounts of time. 1

TIMELINE 2: The Fall of the Soviet Union 1989-1991

1 https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Kremlin,_Moscow

GENERAL OVERVIEW:

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.

The divide between the extreme wealth of the Politburo and the poverty of Soviet citizens created a backlash from younger people who refused to adopt Communist Party ideology as their parents had.

The USSR also faced foreign attacks on the Soviet economy. In the 1980s, the United States under President Ronald Reagan isolated the Soviet economy from the rest of the world and helped drive oil prices to their lowest levels in decades. When the Soviet Union’s oil and gas revenue dropped dramatically, the USSR began to lose its hold on Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.

Political revolution in Poland in 1989 sparked other, mostly peaceful revolutions across Eastern European states and led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. By the end of 1989, the USSR had come apart at the seams.

An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate

by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.

On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991.2

WHY DID THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSE?

THE POLITICAL FACTOR

When Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on March 11, 1985, his primary domestic goals were to jump-start the moribund Soviet economy and to streamline the cumbersome government bureaucracy. When his initial attempts at reform failed to yield significant results, he instituted the policies of glasnost(“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). The former was intended to foster dialogue, while the latter introduced quasi free market policies to government-run industries. Rather than sparking a renaissance in Communist thought, glasnost opened the floodgates to criticism of the entire Soviet apparatus. The state lost control of both the media and the public sphere, and democratic reform movements gained

2 https://www.history.com/topics/russia/history-of-the-soviet-union

steam throughout the Soviet bloc. Perestroika exhibited the worst of the capitalist and communist systems: price controls were lifted in some markets, but existing bureaucratic structures were left in place, meaning that Communist officials were able to push back against those policies that did not benefit them personally. In the end, Gorbachev’s reforms and his abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine hastened the demise of the Soviet empire. By the end of 1989 Hungary had dismantled its border fence with Austria, Solidarity had swept into power in Poland, the Baltic states were taking concrete steps toward independence, and the Berlin Wall had been toppled. The Iron Curtain had fallen, and the Soviet Union would not long outlast it.

THE ECONOMIC FACTOR

By some measures, the Soviet economy was the world’s second largest in 1990, but shortages of consumer goods were routine and hoarding was commonplace. It was estimated that the Soviet black market economy was the equivalent of more than 10 percent of the country’s official GDP. Economic stagnation had hobbled the country for years, and the perestroika reforms only served to exacerbate the problem. Wage hikes were supported by printing money, fueling an inflationary spiral. Mismanagement of fiscal policy made the country vulnerable to external factors, and a sharp drop in the price of oil sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin. Throughout

the 1970s and ’80s, the Soviet Union ranked as one of the world’s top producers of energy resources such as oil and natural gas, and exports of those commodities played a vital role in shoring up the world’s largest command economy. When oil plunged from $120 a barrel in 1980 to $24 a barrel in March 1986, this vital lifeline to external capital dried up. The price of oil temporarily spiked in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but by that point the collapse of the Soviet Union was well under way.

THE MILITARY FACTOR

It is a widely held belief that Soviet defense spending accelerated dramatically in response to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and proposals such as the Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, the Soviet military budget had been trending upward since at least the early 1970s, but Western analysts were left with best guesses in regard to hard numbers. Outside estimates of Soviet military spending ranged between 10 and 20 percent of GDP, and, even within the Soviet Union itself, it was difficult to produce an exact accounting because the military budget involved a variety of government ministries, each with its own competing interests. What can be said definitively, however, is that military spending was consistently agnostic of overall economic trends: even when the

Soviet economy lagged, the military remained well-funded. In addition, the military took priority when it came to research and development talent. Technological innovators and would-be entrepreneurs who could have helped support Gorbachev’s partial transition to a market economy were instead funneled into defense industries.

AFGHANISTAN

In addition to budgetary matters, the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan(1979–89) was a key military factor in the breakup of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet army, lionized for its role in World War II and a vital tool in the repression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring, had waded into a quagmire in a region known as the Graveyard of Empires. As many as a million Soviet troops participated in the 10-year occupation, and approximately 15,000 were killed and thousands more were wounded. More than a million Afghans—mostly civilians—were killed, and at least 4 million were externally displaced by the fighting. The army that had bested Hitler and crushed dissent during the Cold War found itself frustrated by mujahideen armed with American surface-to-air missiles. As long as the government controlled the press, dissent about the war in Afghanistan remained muted, but glasnost opened the door to the vocalization of widespread war weariness. The army, perhaps the single most powerful opponent of

Gorbachev’s reform efforts, found itself back-footed by the stalemate in Afghanistan, and it lost whatever leverage it might have had in checking the advance of perestroika. In the Soviet republics, the Afgantsy (veterans of the Afghan conflict) agitated against what they perceived to be Moscow’s war. Many soldiers from the Central Asian republics felt closer ethnic and religious ties to Afghans than they did to Russians, and protests were widespread. In the European republics, the cleavage with Moscow was even more dramatic. Antiwar demonstrations broke out in Ukraine, while opposition forces in the Baltic republics viewed the war in Afghanistan through the lens of the Russian occupation of their own countries. This fueled the secessionist movements that proceeded, largely unchecked, to declarations of independence by all three Baltic states in 1990.

THE SOCIAL FACTOR

On January 31, 1990, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Moscow. The image of the Golden Arches in Pushkin Square seemed like a triumph of Western capitalism, and customers lined up around the block for their first taste of a Big Mac. But such a display was not uncommon in the final years of the Soviet Union; Muscovites queued just as long for morning editions of liberal newspapers. Glasnost had, indeed, ushered in a flurry of new concepts, ideas, and experiences, and Soviet citizens were eager to explore them—whether that involved devouring essays about

democratization from leading political philosophers or dipping a toe into a market economy via Western-style fast food. In 1984 Eduard Shevardnadze had told Gorbachev, “Everything is rotten. It has to be changed.” The feeling was not an uncommon one. The Soviet public was disgusted with the widespread corruption endemic to the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s goal with glasnost and perestroika was nothing less than a transformation of the Soviet spirit, a new compact between the Soviet regime and its people. Gorbachev’s chief adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, described the challenge facing them: “The main issue today is not only economy. This is only the material side of the process. The heart of the matter is in the political system…and its relation to man.” In the end, the tension between the newly empowered citizenry and a Soviet state with ruined credibility proved too much to overcome, and a last gasp coup attempt by Communist hardliners shattered the Soviet Union.

THE NUCLEAR FACTOR

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States teetered on the edge of mutual nuclear destruction. What few had considered, however, was that the Soviet Union would be brought down by an incident involving a civilian nuclear plant. Gorbachev had been in power for just over a year when, on April 26, 1986, the Unit 4 reactor at the Chernobyl power station in Pryp’yat (now in Ukraine) exploded. The explosion and subsequent

fires released more than 400 times the amount of radioactive fallout as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The official response to the disaster would be a test of Gorbachev’s doctrine of openness, and, in that regard, glasnost would be found fatally wanting. Communist Party officials acted quickly to suppress information about the severity of the disaster, going as far as to order that May Day parades and celebrations in the affected area should proceed as planned despite the known risk of radiation exposure. Western reports about the dangerously high levels of wind-transported radioactivity were dismissed as gossip, while apparatchiks quietly collected Geiger counters from science classrooms. Workers were finally able to bring the radiation leak under control on May 4, but Gorbachev did not issue an official statement to the public until May 14, 18 days after the disaster. He characterized the incident at Chernobyl as a “misfortune” and pilloried Western media coverage as a “highly immoral campaign” of “malicious lies.” Over time, Communist Party propaganda was increasingly at odds with the daily experiences of those in the contamination zone who were dealing with the physical effects of radiation poisoning. Whatever trust remained in the Soviet system had been shattered. Decades later, Gorbachev marked the anniversary of the disaster by stating, “even more than my launch of perestroika, [Chernobyl] was

perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.” 3

3 https://www.britannica.com/story/why-did-the-soviet-union-collapse