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Kiev in the Wind: The May Day Parade and the Lie That Condemned a City
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Five days after Reactor Four exploded, Soviet authorities forced 500,000 Kiev residents to march through a radioactive plume — and told them nothing. This is the story of the cover-up that shaped every decision made in the weeks that followed Chernobyl.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On May first, nineteen eighty-six, five days after Reactor Four exploded at Chernobyl, Soviet authorities ordered citizens of Kyiv to march through the streets in celebration. It was International Workers' Day.
At one twenty-three in the morning on April twenty-sixth, nineteen eighty-six, Reactor Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. Not one explosion.
The men who arrived first thought it was an ordinary industrial fire. That's the key point.
Pripyat was a city of thirty thousand people. It sat less than three kilometers from the reactor.
While Pripyat was being emptied, the graphite core of Reactor Four was still burning. The fire burned from April twenty-sixth until May the fourth.
Here's where the political dimension of this disaster becomes impossible to separate from the human one. Gorbachev learned the full extent of what had happened at Chernobyl eighteen days after Western governments had detected it through their own atmospheric monitoring.
Gorbachev had launched glasnost, his transparency policy, in nineteen eighty-five. The idea was that the Soviet Union could reform and strengthen itself through more open information.
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