Why did the Chernobyl accident happen, and what was its impact on Ukraine?
The worst nuclear accident in history took place on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, located about 70 miles north of Kyiv. The faulty design of Soviet nuclear reactors, in combination with human error, caused a powerful steam explosion in the station's Reactor No.
4. The reactor did not explode in a chain reaction like a nuclear bomb would, but its heavy lid was blown off, releasing into the atmosphere an enormous amount of radioactive contamination—90 times that emitted during the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.The Soviet authorities delayed the announcement of the catastrophe to their own citizens until the radioactive fallout reached Northern Europe and caused an international scandal. Soviet engineers managed to encase the damaged reactor in a concrete sarcophagus, but for the disaffected population in Ukraine and elsewhere, Chernobyl (or Chornobyl, according to Ukrainian spelling) was the proverbial last straw. The catastrophe happened just as the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announced his new policy of glasnost, supposedly promoting greater official transparency and accountability. The official handling of the accident was decidedly “old-style,” however, and now the people could speak more freely about the regime's criminal negligence.
Widespread popular discontent after Chernobyl forced Gorbachev to give society more of a voice. Ecological concerns following the Chernobyl disaster gave rise to the first Ukrainian mass civic organization independent from the state, the ecological association Green World (1987). It was followed in 1989 by the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society and a mass popular front in support of democratic reforms, Rukh (Movement). Gradually, a modern political sphere came into being, although no political parties other than the ruling Communist Party could be registered until 1990.
The assertion of popular sovereignty during the Soviet Union's last years took the form of vesting political power in the 15 union republics, including Ukraine, where a growing number of citizens held the federal center responsible for both the Soviet legacy of Stalinist terror and Chernobyl, a new and potent symbol of everything that was wrong with Soviet communism.Thirty-one people, most of them responding firefighters, died of radiation sickness immediately after the Chernobyl disaster. Tens of thousands were exposed to high radiation levels during the hectic cleanup effort. Over 200,000 people in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus had to be permanently resettled away from the contaminated exclusion zone. Long-term health and ecological
The Making of Modern Ukraine 55 effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe are difficult to estimate, in part because the Ukrainian state had neither the resources nor the political will to prioritize post-Chernobyl rehabilitation programs in the decades immediately following the accident. Even urgent maintenance work on the concrete-and-steel sarcophagus was funded by the West.