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.
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