“Russians deliberately build such stations on the territory of Ukraine, knowing that in the event of an accident, it is mainly Ukrainians who will suffer.”
Speaking about the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant tragedy, it is worth recalling not only how the Soviet authorities tried to hide the accident until the very end, but also how Soviet bodies tried to find those responsible not only among foreign agents, but also among the pro-Ukrainian population, and tried to discredit the Ukrainian diaspora abroad — continuing their long-standing practice of accusing Ukrainians of bourgeois, criminal, and aggressive nationalism, the reality of which in fact was a struggle against the occupying power of the Soviet Union in Ukraine.
■ KGB Colonel Volodymyr Podeliakin recalled in 1987 that the main task of his department was “to clarify and investigate the causes of the accident, to identify persons involved in it. Was there intent in their actions and the ‘hand’ of the enemy? And this task (version) remained the main one for us for the entire period of the investigation”.
Radiation leaks had occurred earlier at various stations of the USSR, but explosions had never happened. The KGB officers reasoned as follows: the newest and most modern Unit 4, put into operation only two years earlier, could not have exploded by itself.
Therefore, someone must have planted explosives or set it on fire.
■ At the time of the accident, the KGB had 82 recruited agents and 113 trusted persons at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but the search for CIA agents — mainly referring to them — did not yield results.
From this point of view, the high activity of Ukrainian organizations in the United States seemed suspicious, as they sought permission to deliver humanitarian aid to the victims. The USSR did not give consent. In Soviet leadership offices, it was considered an axiom that the Ukrainian diaspora was controlled by the CIA.
■ Already on April 30, a rally took place in New York in front of the USSR mission to the UN. Its participants, American Ukrainians, demanded truthful information about the scale and consequences of the accident and permission to immediately deliver aid to the victims.
On the same day, a similar rally took place near the UN Secretariat building. The concealment of the scale of the tragedy by the Kremlin was called there a “policy of genocide by Moscow against the Ukrainian people”.
In Soviet media, controlled by censorship, these events were not reported. In KGB documents, the demonstrators were contemptuously referred to as “Ukrainian nationalists.”
Ukrainian newspapers in America called for collecting donations for the victims. In Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches, memorial services were held for the victims of the nuclear disaster.
■ The President of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in exile, Mykola Levytskyi, and the Deputy Head of the Government of the UPR, Ivan Samiilenko, sent a telegram to the President of the United States Ronald Reagan.
“Dear Mr. President,” it said, “the consequences of the nuclear disaster in Chornobyl, Ukraine, are stubbornly kept secret by Moscow. The victims of this catastrophe and the entire Ukrainian people, as is known, are deprived of the right and means to tell the world the truth.”
And further, thanking the government of the United States for the desire to help the victims, the leaders of the UPR asked “to take further measures for immediate necessary assistance both to already known and potential victims of this catastrophe” and to seek the creation of an international commission to determine the consequences of the accident at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
With similar requests, Mykola Levytskyi and Ivan Samiilenko also appealed to the Secretary-General of the UN Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.
■ The activity of Ukrainian organizations in America yielded results. Already on May 1, the U.S. Congress reviewed the submitted materials and adopted Resolution No. 440.
Congressmen reproached the governments of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR for concealing the fact of the accident and not warning other countries about the possible danger.
The reproach to Kyiv was hardly appropriate, since the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant was directly subordinated to Moscow. Moreover, the government of the republic did not have the authority to make statements on the international stage.
Resolution No. 440 demanded to provide honest information about the scale of the accident and the safety measures taken, to allow foreign Ukrainians direct telephone communication with affected relatives, and also to involve international experts to help overcome the consequences.
The head of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, Stepan Mukha, in an informational report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine explained the appearance of the resolution by “provocations of Ukrainian nationalists,” and even two weeks later, on May 7, just in case, neutrally called the accident a “situation at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.”
■ The version of a terrorist act as the cause of the accident was considered the main one for a long time.
For example, on May 7, the newspaper “Radyanska Ukraina” in the article “On the events at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant” reported about “nonsense around the Chornobyl accident,” meaning “false fabrications” spread throughout the world by so-called “reactionary centers of foreign OUN—Ukrainian nationalists”.
Possible accomplices of the “OUN leaders” were sought among their supporters in Ukraine.
Thus, a KGB agent rushes to Fastiv, a district center of Kyiv region, where 58-year-old Mykola Hlukhenkyi lives, a “former participant of the criminal Ukrainian nationalist underground.” And then visits the village of Vepryk near Fastiv, where 63-year-old Volodymyr Kosovskyi lives, also a “former one.” The purpose of the visits: to find out whether overseas “leaders” had established contact with these two.
But no, both spoke about the victims with pain and sympathy.
■ Instead, a worker of the Lutsk municipal machinery plant, Ivan Shevchuk, “previously convicted for participation in the nationalist underground,” did not realize that he was speaking to a state security representative.
“Russians,” he said openly, “deliberately build such stations on the territory of Ukraine, knowing that in the event of an accident, it is mainly Ukrainians who will suffer.”
The KGB, it seems, for a long time could not believe that two explosions and a fire at the nuclear plant were not sabotage by foreign intelligence services.
Two residents of the Ivankiv district in Kyiv region, “previously convicted for criminal Ukrainian nationalist activity,” living near the Chornobyl plant, were checked even three years after the accident, in 1989.
■ On June 2, the aforementioned head of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, Stepan Mukha, sent a memorandum to the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi titled “On the operational situation in connection with the accident at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.”
“In the first days after the accident,” the document marked “Secret” states, “foreign OUN actively spread fabrications about its nature and scale, ‘mass casualties’ and catastrophic consequences for the entire population of Ukraine and neighboring countries”.
