How the state concealed the truth about the Chernobyl disaster
The first report of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident appeared 36 hours after the explosion in the Pripyat radio broadcast network. The central media only responded 79 hours later: a Vremya newscaster read out the TASS report on the disaster.
By this time, Sweden had already registered a sharp increase in radiation levels, and the Minister of Energy called an emergency press conference, at which he confirmed that the source of the contamination was not within the country, but east of Finland.
On April 29-30, the all-Union and Ukrainian republican leadership debated whether to hold a May Day demonstration: attending the demonstration was the duty of every Soviet citizen. Gorbachev believed that canceling the demonstration would cause panic and threatened to dismiss Volodymyr Shcherbitsky, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Central Committee, if the mass celebration was disrupted.
The demonstration eventually took place. Around 120 people participated. The first stage of the 39th International Bicycle Peace Race took place on May 6. At that time, background radiation levels in Kyiv reached 550–1200 microroentgens per hour.
Nikolai Ryzhkov, at that time the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, head of the operational group of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the liquidation of the accident, later recalled"There wasn't complete panic in Ukraine, but it was among the leadership. I'm not talking about the top echelon. They didn't flee. But the middle ones, yes."
Everyone who could evacuated their children from Kyiv. However, doing so could result in the loss of party membership and employment, as such an act was considered "spreading panic."
In the KGB report to Shcherbitsky dated May 16 said: “Under the influence of the anti-Soviet campaign raised abroad around the accident, the number of tourists from capitalist countries visiting Kiev sharply decreased (120-150 people versus 900-1000 in May 1985 daily), in addition, classes were interrupted and foreign students, interns, and foreign specialists left.”
Only on May 4-5 was the information blockade gradually lifted. But the information coming from above was extremely contradictory.
Deputy Minister of Health of the Ukrainian SSR Anatoly Kasyanenko assured citizens, that "in the city of Kyiv there are no preconditions for taking any special measures" and was surprised by "the desire of some women to terminate their pregnancies" or at least leave Kyiv during this time. According to him, there was also no reason "to refuse to eat raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries." At the same time, other officials advised against both "gifts of the forest" and forest walks.
Head of the Republican Ministry of Health Anatoly Romanenko advised Kyivians were told to spend more time outdoors, then to close their windows tighter, adding after every other sentence: "Trust me as a minister!" Zhvanetsky later played on this in one of his sketches: "I don't trust you as a minister!" And, as is usually the case, the lack of reliable information was compensated for by a wide variety of rumors: about radioactive rain, about mutant animals, about a new city being secretly built in the middle of the bare Kazakh steppe, where everyone would be resettled for the winter... And about how there was no radiation, it was just that the state, for some reason, once again needed to drive people off their land.