Second paragraph of third chapter:

In Prypiat, the person with the greatest stake in the success of the conference was Vasyl Kyzyma, the fifty-four-year-old head of the construction directorate that was charged with building the power plant. As far as power and prestige went in the city of Prypiat, Kyzyma outshone Briukhanov [Viktor Bryukhanov]. Whereas the latter lived in an apartment building, though a prestigious one, Kyzyma and his family occupied one of four cottages built in a city that was supposed to have no cottages at all. When the Ukrainian party boss, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, visited the site of the power plant in the mid-1970s, he was so impressed with the young director of construction that he ordered his aides to ensure Kyzyma’s election to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet. That would not only raise Kyzyma’s salary but also boost his prestige and independence from local party and state officials. In 1984 Kyzyma was given the highest Soviet award—Hero of Socialist Labor. Briukhanov, despite being elected a delegate to the party congress in Moscow, was still waiting for that kind of recognition.²
² Vladimir Vosloshko, “Gorod, pogibshii v 16 let,” Souz Cgernobyl’; January 24, 2002, www.souzchernobyl.org/?section=38cid=148.

This is a tremendous chronicle of the nuclear accident of 26 April 1986 (my nineteenth birthday), looking at the sets of choices made both at leadership level in the Soviet Union and at management level in the Chernobyl reactor itself, and at the role played by the catastrophe in the subsequent fall of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The accident itself could certainly have been prevented on the day had the engineers realised the actual state of the nuclear reactor before running tests on it; but the reactor was badly designed in the first place, and the accident it had not happened at Chernobyl Number 4, it would have happened somewhere else.

Plokhy tells the story through the engineers and officials who were closest to the action, and it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for the men, and one or two women, who suddenly found themselves dealing with the unthinkable.

One thing that particularly struck me was that the engineers in the control room simply did not know what had happened after the first explosion. The two trainees, Aleksandr Kudryavtsev and Viktor Proskuryakov, were sent to try and lower the control rods by hand cranks into the reactor core, but of course it had exploded so they came back with nothing but fatal doses of radiation. (I have been telling the interns in my office that we won’t be asking them to do that, but they do not seem completely reassured.)

What looked like industrial rubble lying around the reactor was actually highly radioactive debris, that the fire fighters and other rescue workers pushed past or moved aside with no protection at all. It is astonishing that only a few dozen people are known to have died from the direct effects of radiation exposure on the day, though of course the public health impact continues to the present. Checking the record, I find that the two women who are known to have been direct victims were both police guards in their fifties who stayed on watch all night as the reactor burned.

The political effect of the accident was immense. The tensions between the Soviet central authorities, responsible for the reactor, and the Ukrainian republic’s government, responsible for the clearing up, escalated and never recovered; Chernobyl was a crucial step in the disintegration of the USSR. But even before that, the removal of the electricity generated by the whole complex from the Soviet grid was a critical blow for the struggling industry of the entire Union; and more important, the failure of the Soviet state to take the most basic steps to ensure the survival and health of its own people killed off its legitimacy, as brutally chronicled by Svetlana Alexievich.

It is grim history, but very much worth reading. You can get Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/ Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.

I got this soon after the war started, almost three years ago now, but have only just got around to reading it. It’s an important explanation of the story of Ukraine, starting from Kievan Rus and going through the various semi-autonomous realms of the Middle Ages, through the centuries of Russian rule, and then independence up to 2014.

Some interesting nuggets: the daughters of the eleventh century Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise, and his Swedish wife, married the kings of Hungary, Norway and France, and one of his sons married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. I see that there is also a theory that another daughter married an English Saxon prince and was the mother of Edgar Ætheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland, though Plokhii doesn’t mention it.

It was by no means historically inevitable that Ukraine would spend much of its history under Russian rule. Connections northwestward, to Poland, Lithuania and what’s now Belarus, were always strong, and there were always links with Constantinople and to a lesser extent Vienna as well. The Cossack states of the early modern period and the national revivals of the nineteenth century demonstrate that Ukraine is not just something invented in the twentieth century.

Speaking of which, the twentieth century history of Ukraine is pretty awful, and also pretty closely linked to Russia. After losing the 1917-1921 war of independence, Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, and was economically very important with its concentrations of both agriculture and industry. Khrushchev made his political career there; Brezhnev was born there; Konstantin Chernenko, who briefly ruled the USSR near the end, was born to a Ukrainian exile family.

But Stalin executed almost all of the senior political and intellectual leadership, and then the Holodomor, the great famine, killed millions more. Stepan Bandera, the far right political figure who Russians love to hate, was never in fact very successful, but the Soviets had good reason to worry about Ukraine’s loyalty (and assassinated the exiled Bandera in Munich in 1959 by spraying him with cyanide).

And when both Ukraine’s Communist leadership, and the Ukrainian people when consulted at the ballot box, refused the offers of a new relationship made by Moscow in 1990-91, the result was the disintegration of the USSR as a whole. In the 1991 independence referendum, there was more than a 50% vote in favour in both Crimea and Sevastopol, and more than 80% in Donetsk and Luhansk; those were the four least pro-independence oblasts.

I said many years ago that all European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and this is particularly so in the case of Ukraine. But that doesn’t make Ukraine a fictional concept, or Ukrainian a fictional language, or Ukrainians a fictional people, as the tankies would have you believe. Ukraine deserves external support to maintain and restore its integrity as a state, and this book is a good introduction to its history. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on those piles respectively are Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, and Ithaca, by Claire North.