Editor-in-chief of the information website Desk Russie, journalist and historian Galia Ackerman is the author of several books on Russia and the former Soviet Union. She recently published Le KGB à Tchernobyl. Une plongée inédite dans les archives ukrainiennes (“The KGB at Chernobyl: An Unprecedented Dive into the Ukrainian Archives”).
Why do we still not have a reliable assessment of what was one of the greatest disasters in the history of civilian nuclear power?
It is impossible to establish a reliable assessment, primarily because the authorities stopped counting at 31 immediate victims: the firefighters and power plant workers who died in the month following the accident. Everything else was kept quiet, as proven by the KGB documents I have seen.
All information relating to the accident – the explosion, its causes, the state of the plant, the number of people exposed to radiation, the contamination levels of soil, water and air, and so on – was classified as top secret, according to an internal KGB operational document. The secret services systematically lied to the public and spread false information, especially internationally, about contamination levels, which they reported as 50 to 100 times lower than they actually were.
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