'Tis a blog title

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-1886)

It was requested that I do a post on Valery Legasov - his early life, his family, etc. (@creation-vs-destruction) and, well, who am I to argue against talking about my favorite person ever? 

He is a tricky historical figure, only recently brought to people’s attention. In 2006, twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, many documents became declassified. It was revealed that the Soviets at the time thought a second explosion would have killed instantly killed millions of people and rendered about half of Europe uninhabitable. Scientists today generally agree that this theory was exaggerated and it would not have been as drastic as they predicted, but at the time, they were sitting on the knowledge that the entire population of Kiev were going to be killed in a massive shock-wave unless they did something. This spurred a large increase in interest in the Chernobyl disaster. It made people go… uhh, okay, so we almost lost half of Europe in 1986, how exactly is it we are just learning about this now? This information led to an increase in documentaries: The Battle of Chernobyl (2006) being the most comprehensive, but also Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl (2006) and Chernobyl: Valery Legasov’s Battle (2008). It was at this time that interest in Valery Legasov began increasing.

Now with HBO’s Chernobyl released this spring, interest in Chernobyl and Legasov has increased exponentially. But still even right now, he is hard to find information on. If you visit his Wikipedia page, it’s very scant - there isn’t much to see, and what there is to see is often unsourced and contradictory. Well-intending articles on popular entertainment news sites are accidentally stating inaccurate info on him. I’ve been fascinated with him for years and have soaked in a lot of information about him from various sources, but I’ve found interviews from the people who knew him tend to offer the most information.

I am going to try my best to dump everything I know about him in this post, with one exception: I’m not going to go into the finer details about his suicide because they are unsettling and, in my mind, an invasion of his family’s privacy. The one mercy HBO gives us is the character Valery Legasov is a loner without a family who lived a reclusive life, but the real Legasov’s suicide was extremely traumatic to those who were close to him, and no more words are needed than that. It’s not how he should be remembered.

Since this has been requested @elenatria, @oikid, @creation-vs-destruction and I’ve already procrastinated enough. It was requested a while ago that I do a post on the real Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin, because they really were not as bad as HBO’s Chernobyl depicted them. Again, giving the same disclaimer as I did in the Bryukhanov post, I’m not going to comment on whether HBO did the right thing in how they depicted them or not (I suppose people can battle that out in the notes if you want). Instead, I’m just going to compare them. Again, I’m not as familiar with these men as I am with Valery Legasov because they have never caught my attention in my time studying Chernobyl, but this is what I have on them. I’m going to do Anatoly Dyatlov now and Nikolai Fomin last because people are more interested in Dyatlov, so here we go.

HBO Anatoly Dyatlov is probably the meanest character in the series. He is also probably the most hated character on HBO’s Chernobyl. The HBO Dyatlov was, well, very resistant in accepting that the reactor had exploded.

Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that the core had exploded, HBO Dyatlov could not accept it, in some cases, even months later. Some of his best lines from the show include:

He’s delusional. Get him out of here.

You didn’t see graphite. You didn’t. You DID-NANNTTT! BECAUSE IT’S NOT THERE.

What’s radiation? It’s reading 3.6 roentgens, but that’s as high as the meter - 3.6, not great, not terrible.

How do I even know it exploded?

So he’s a pretty much despised character and has been memed more than any other character on the show.

Anatoly Dyatlov (Get Ready to Cry at the End)

Dyatlov was born to a poor family in Siberia. At the tender age of 14, Dyatlov ran away from home and never went back, which suggests an unhappy home life as a child. He became an electrician and landed a job installing nuclear reactors aboard nuclear submarines for the Soviet Navy. These nuclear reactors found on submarines were small VVER reactors, nothing compared to the powerful RBMK-1000s found at Chernobyl. Still, he installed 40 VVER reactors before landing his job at Chernobyl in 1973.

During his time in the Navy, Dyatlov was involved in another nuclear accident. Dyatlov was exposed to 100 rem, which was enough to kill him, but he survived. He was married with two sons at the time of this accident. One of his sons developed leukemia and died shortly after. This may have been a coincidence, or it may have been because Dyatlov carried radiation home with him from the accident. It was not uncommon for people who absorbed a large amount of radiation to take that radiation with them and make their young children sick. Liquidators who gave their sons their hats to wear for fun, for example, later realized they had made a grave mistake when their son developed brain cancer. And others who were exposed to large amounts of radiation, such as Valery Legasov, found out that all of their belongings, even what they had at home, were radioactive. So while it may have been a coincidence, many believe that Dyatlov’s son died due to his father’s contamination that he unwittingly brought home. The loss of one of his sons was devastating to Dyatlov.

Dyatlov was a workaholic and suffered from insomnia and so-called “dark thoughts.” Upon his arrival at Chernobyl, Dyatov immersed himself in the academia surrounding RBMK reactors. He read everything he could about them, along with all of the scientific fields that surrounded the nuclear industry. He was a stickler for detail. Whether people liked him or not, Dyatlov was considered an expert on RBMK reactors because he examined every millimeter of the reactors. He used to inspect the reactors to make sure they were functioning properly, that there was no leaks or cracks. He worked ten hour shifts 6 or 7 days a week. And he didn’t drive or take a bus from his Pripyat apartment to Chernobyl. He walked the 1.9 miles every day, to and back again, because it helped keep his dark thoughts at bay, and he liked to jog as well.

Was he really as mean as the show depicted him? Yes and no. Dyatlov was not exactly known for being nice or popular. However, he was not as heartless as HBO depicted him, nor was he as close-minded.

Dyatlov did not seem to ever make the transition from a military workplace to a civilian workplace. He expected absolute obedience from his subordinates. An order was an order, no questions asked. To question him was a sign of disrespect in his mind. He was full of logical fallacies. He believed in what he had read about RBMK reactors more than he believed in what was right in front of him. And he believed that if he said something to an inferior, he was always right. I don’t believe that this was a conscious decision he made, but it was how his mind was organized. He was a product of the Soviet military. He was extremely stubborn and believed that when he said something, what he said was fact.

If anyone was not meeting up to Dyatlov’s expectations, he wrote their names down and reprimanded them. He yelled, he cursed, he called inexperienced workers that failed to live up to his expectations “fucking goldfish” a lot. But this was just another day at work to him. And even though workers might have skirted to avoid him in the hallways from time to time, they all believed he was an expert in the field. No one questioned his expertise.

At the time of the accident, Dyatlov was entering his second day of no sleep. He was exhausted and in a bad mood. He yelled at and threatened Akimov and Toptunov to go through with the test and perform it at a much lower level than the safety regulations said were acceptable, most likely because he falsely believed the reactor was safer operating at 200 megawatts instead of 700. And the ironic thing is, Dyatlov was not an engineer. No matter how much he read about RBMK reactors, he couldn’t press the buttons to operate one. That was Akimov’s job. Dyatlov could no more take the controls and do the test himself than a passenger could take over for the pilot and fly the airplane. But he refused to listen to Akimov or Toptunov.

Dyatlov’s demeanor completely changed when the accident happened. He was confused. He fell back onto the literature he read and decided they needed to make sure the reactor was cooled to avoid the meltdown, but the damage had already been done and was not un-doable. He had never read that an RBMK reactor core could explode, so he didn’t believe it. He told Akimov and Toptunov to go home. They began to obey, but then returned to their posts out of a sense of responsibility. Dyatlov told them again to go home (they didn’t). Dyatlov went to the bunker to meet Bryukhanov. He was throwing up and weak.

This is the point in which HBO Dyatlov is no longer accurate.

When asked what had happened, Dyatlov threw up his hands and said, “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it!”

Dyatlov was sent to the hospital by Bryukhanov. The firefighters, Akimov, Toptunov, and others would join him later. And then he went from the Pripyat hospital to Hospital Number 6 in Moscow. During his time in Hospital Number 6, Dyatlov met with Akimov, Toptunov, and other operators from the plant while they were still in the latency period. While Akimov and Toptunov were still well enough, they all talked about what had happened. Dyatlov was no longer insistent that he knew the answers. He wanted to find out what happened. “I am open to any suggestion, lads,” Dyatlov implored them. “Don’t be afraid to come out with even the most far-fetched ideas.”

Dyatlov never blamed Akimov or Toptunov for what had happened.

Dyatlov watched almost everyone in the control room with him wither away and die, and yet he survived.

Dyatlov took Legasov’s conclusions on the design flaws and ran with it. He wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency, lashing out that they had not disclosed the full truth about the extent of the design flaws in Vienna and that the RBMK reactors should never have been in operation at all, and that the design flaws were the reason why his colleagues were dead.

At the trial, Dyatlov was angry and spoke out several times. He demanded people tell the truth about the design flaws that Legasov reported. He was combative. One of the experts who testified snapped at him, “What is this, a physics exam? I’ll ask you to answer the question!” He did say he was not in the control room when the crucial decisions were made, but he also said that Akimov and Toptunov, now dead, were not in any way responsible for the accident. But the court would not consider the design flaws in their decision. It was a show trial, the verdict was already passed down. When one unnamed scientist said that the men in the control room could not have known about the fault of the design and the positive void coefficient danger, the prosecutor immediately dismissed him from the stand. (In HBO, this unnamed scientist was Valery Legasov. We don’t know his name or his fate.)

Dyatlov died of bone marrow cancer in 1995 at the age of 64.

So, yes, he was one to shout at his subordinates, he was certainly “mean” at work, he was deeply flawed in his logic, but he was not the monster who called Akimov and Toptunov’s “incompetent morons” after they had died. He was upset and bothered by their deaths; he considered them innocent. So much so that he did this:

Okay, people have requested @elenatria @oikid I do a post on the real Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin, because they really were not as bad as HBO’s Chernobyl depicted them. I’m not going to comment on whether HBO did the right thing in how they depicted them or not (I suppose people can battle that out in the notes). Instead, I’m just going to compare them. I’m not as familiar with these men as I am with Valery Legasov because they have never caught my attention in my time studying Chernobyl, but this is what I have on them. I’m going to start with Bryukhanov because he represents the most startling difference between reality and HBO’s portrayal of him.

Viktor Bryukhanov

HBO Victor Bryukhanov was not the biggest jerk on the show, but still a jerk who did everything he could to cover up the disaster and bully those who said something terrible had happened. His portrayal on the show is meme material, whether you find Chernobyl memes disgraceful or funny.

The real Bryukhanov was not such a bad man. Out of him, Fomin, and Dyatlov, he in my opinion was the least guilty for the Chernobyl disaster.

The real Viktor Bryukhanov was given an impossible and unrealistic mission by the Soviet Union. In the HBO series, we see Bryukhanov as the man in charge of the nuclear power station. We don’t know how long he’s been in charge or how he got there. We just know he’s the Big Man there in Pripyat. The real Bryukhanov was the creator of not only the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, but also the entire city of Pripyat. 

At the age of only 34, Bryukhanov was given a task: build the largest, most prestigious nuclear power plants in the world and a city to house the plant workers from scratch. The land that what would become Pripyat and the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (AKA Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) was literally an empty field surrounded by a forest when Bryukhanov was put in charge. It was a monumental task. (The one nod we have to this in the series is when the old man asks everyone the name of this power plant - it’s real name. And everyone is stumped, except Bryukhanov because of course Bryukhanov would know - he literally was the engineer who built Chernobyl NPP and Pripyat from an empty field.)

Now, not only is this task daunting enough as it is, but imagine you are being told to do this and you are given hardly any materials. The materials you do get are wrong, half-broken, or faulty. Every time he got materials and equipment from the USSR, he had to take it apart, fix any manufacturing errors, and put it back together the right way. And then from these shoddy pieces you are to build something immediately. And this something was something as complicated as a high-powered nuclear reactor. He was given no wages. There was no one to help him manage anything. Any time he had to go back to Kiev, he had to hitchhike to get there. He lived in a little cottage in the woods with his wife and two young children. To top it off, his bosses were telling him they wanted the power plant up and connected to the grid by December 1975. This deadline was impossible.

Can you imagine Bryukhanov and his construction workers getting turbines from the USSR and taking them apart screw by screw and then fixing the manufacturing errors and putting it back together the right way so it could turn properly when receiving steam from a fissioning nuclear core? And he had to do this FASTER, FASTER. I mean, wut? This was reality for him. (We see a moment in the HBO series when Bryukhanov says, “This is what they do - send us shit equipment and wonder why things go wrong.”) The roof of Reactor 4 was covered in highly flammable materials that should not have gone over a nuclear reactor. The Soviet Union had a safety regulation that said non-flammable materials should go onto the roof. But guess what - the Soviet Union didn’t have the supplies, so Bryukhanov was forced to use cheap flammable material instead because it was literally impossible to purchase the right materials in the entire USSR.

He learned how to take limited resources and meet unrealistic goals out of necessity. He did this by cutting corners everywhere, not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. He was easily pushed around. He objected to things, saying it was unsafe, but he was told, “Just do it.” And he did. He worked himself down to the bone, often going without food and without sleep, surviving only on coffee and nicotine.

The pressure was too much for Bryukhanov. In July 1972, he went to his boss with a letter of resignation. He did not want to be in charge of building the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

His boss took his letter of resignation, ripped it up in front of him, and told him to get back to work.

He. Had. To. Keep. Building. And from nothing.

The real Bryukhanov was a softie. He was soft-spoken. Said little. Mild-mannered. He didn’t yell at his subordinates. People described him as “a marshmallow.” At the time of the accident, Bryukhanov was trying to get 50,000 roses delivered to Pripyat to be on display on May 1st, as a way to represent every single resident in the city. He was known for liking roses and had them all over his garden. He actually sent a request to Moscow for 50,000 roses because they would make the city look pretty for the holiday.

The real Bryukhanov ran to view the wreckage himself around 2:00am the night of the accident. As he ran to view reactor 4, he kicked at some of the graphite that was on the ground, unaware of the radiation. He immediately knew (and would later tell his family this): I am going to prison.

The HBO Bryukhanov tried to cover up the accident, but the real Bryukhanov immediately cried to Moscow for help. He immediately got on the phone and said that the accident was of a very serious scale. He gave the number he was given and the number they had: 3.6 roentgens, although he knew it was higher. When he was later told the 200 roentgen dosimeter had maxed out as well, Bryukhanov did not want to hear about it. He struggled to come to terms with the seriousness of what had happened.  Bryukhanov told Moscow officials that Pripyat should be evacuated, and he was reprimanded for suggesting such a thing. But because he was a softie, he didn’t argue and decided to turn the entire matter over to the Chernobyl commission. In fact, he was relieved that it was out of his hands. He wanted Boris Shcherbina there, and quickly.

Still, when someone asked him how Unit 4 was doing, Bryukhanov replied, “There is no Unit 4 anymore. Have a look for yourself. The separators are visible from the street.” By saying this, this tipped off his boss, who then told his boss, Boris Shcherbina, that the reactor had been completely destroyed.

Chernobyl the animated series 

now it makes sense! they use patronymics in the script (the creators decided not to use them in the show because the western viewers would be confused) and legasov refers to shcherbina by name+patronymic in the helicopter scene. way less insolent than only using his name

more chernobyl script highlights under the cut. the cast keeps calling it a page-turner in the interviews, and i totally agree. 

1. You are responsible for your own media experience. 

2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.

3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.

4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.