The general who sent men onto the Chernobyl roof when the robots died
'How is this possible?' I still cannot stop asking myself. 'Did we come from the Stone Age, to collect sheets of lead and cut makeshift protection for vital organs?'
A Soviet civil defence general and doctor of technical sciences. Four months after the Chernobyl explosion, when every remote-controlled robot had failed, the government commission handed him the most dangerous decontamination zone. He ordered lead sheeting stripped from the walls of government offices and improvised into protective gear, then ran 3,828 soldiers through the roofs of reactor 3 in 40–90-second shifts; they cleared 200 tonnes of highly radioactive debris by hand. He developed radiation sickness, wrote two books about the operation, and was nominated for Hero of the Soviet Union, only to be struck from the list after a conflict with the chief of staff of the Kiev Military District.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1953Graduated Kharkov Military Technical School
- 1963Graduated Kharkov Automobile and Highway Institute, mechanical engineering
- 1967–72Instructor at Moscow Military School of Civil Defence; adjuncture at Kuibyshev Engineering Academy
- 1972–86Senior specialist, Military Technical Committee; First Deputy Chief, All-Union Civil Defence Research Institute; Deputy Chief of Civil Defence Staff, RSFSR
- 1986Commander, removal of highly radioactive debris from Chernobyl danger zones
- 1988Commander, rescue operations after the Spitak earthquake
- 1990s–Published memoirs; member of Union of Russian Writers; Sholokhov Literary Prize
Related historical events
Organiser of the Chernobyl disabled veterans' movement
Tarakanov contracted radiation sickness at Chernobyl and was registered as a second-group invalid. Many of the soldiers who carried out the decontamination he directed fell ill in the same way, and after the Soviet collapse they faced medical, housing and pension problems as individuals. Tarakanov devoted his later capacity to turning those problems from individual compensation claims into the organised demands of a collective.
He headed the international public organisation 'Centre for Social Protection of Chernobyl Invalids'; the Moscow branch of the same movement counted more than three thousand members, including several hundred widows of liquidators, and kept a library on the accident and a card index of Chernobyl invalids in Moscow and the regions. It also organised annual 26 April commemorations and international motor rallies. When the Russian government and the Moscow city authorities began stripping back benefits from the mid-2000s, item by item - free cars, priority housing, state-funded treatment, utility discounts - he made the rollback a public issue. In 2016 he protested the city's attempt to take back the office the organisation had used rent-free for nearly twenty years, and ahead of the thirtieth anniversary that year he said publicly that Putin had not kept his word.
This work overlapped with his role in the 2000 presidential campaign, when he became a trusted campaign representative for Putin and toured the difficult 'red belt' regions. He stated publicly that he had asked the future head of state not to forget the Chernobyl veterans and that Putin guaranteed him help; he later described that promise as unfulfilled. Living with the after-effects of radiation sickness, he went on publishing memoirs and documentary collections from the 1990s onwards, as a member of the Union of Russian Writers and a winner of the Sholokhov literary prize. Memory work and rights advocacy became the same undertaking.