Chernobyl Liquidator

How the work began: plant staff and firefighters

The first to act were not outside units but the plant staff themselves, who worked in the reactor hall and the machine hall. Immediately after the explosion they shut down equipment, cleared debris and extinguished equipment fires. Around forty firefighters under Major Leonid Telyatnikov, police and station workers were the first liquidators, and six firefighters died within weeks of radiation burns and acute radiation sickness. The first-phase death toll was 30: one death at the moment of the explosion and one shortly after from multiple injuries, with the remaining 28 dying within three months from radiation burns and acute radiation sickness.

On scale, the WHO reported 240,000 recovery workers called upon in 1986 and 1987 alone, while special certificates recognizing people as liquidators were issued for 600,000. Recorded individual doses through 1990 ranged from under 10 mSv to more than one sievert, averaging about 120 mSv, with 85 per cent of recorded doses between 20 and 500 mSv; military dose records are thought to be biased toward high values. UNSCEAR states that most of the 530,000 registered recovery operation workers received 0.02 to 0.5 Gy between 1986 and 1990, that the cohort remains at potential risk of late consequences such as cancer, and that their health will be followed closely.

The tasks performed

By category the participants included operational plant personnel; firefighters who responded immediately to the reactor accident; civil defence troops who removed contaminated materials; Internal Troops and police providing security, access control and evacuation; military and civil medical and sanitation personnel; Air Force and civil aviation helicopter units; and civilian scientists and workers, among them transport workers, a team of coal miners, construction specialists and media professionals. The mobilized labour force included a 300-strong police brigade from Kyiv that buried contaminated soil; a large, mostly military labour force mobilized for decontamination before the sarcophagus was built; workers of Construction Directorate No. 605 (US-605), who built the 'Ukrytie' (Sarcophagus); Internal Troops guarding the zone; drivers; miners who pumped out contaminated water; and helicopter crews. Individuals include the civilian helicopter pilot Mykola Melnyk, who placed radiation sensors on the reactor; the photographers Igor Kostin and Volodymyr Shevchenko, credited with the most immediate and graphic pictures of the destroyed reactor; coal miners who built a large protective foundation to keep radioactive material out of the aquifer; and General Nikolai Tarakanov, who led the operation to remove highly radioactive elements from especially dangerous zones.

Phases and how people were mobilized

Liquidators are divided into three groups: 'early liquidators' present at the explosion or in the initial zero to one day before Pripyat's evacuation; the early phase participants from the evacuation of Pripyat to the completion of the sarcophagus in November 1986, among whom about 7 per cent of those who worked through 1986 received the high doses of 0.20 to 0.25 Gy; and late-phase liquidators who worked from the end of sarcophagus construction until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. During the Soviet period many liquidators were coerced by direct order to work for a set period, while thousands, mostly military officers and skilled professionals, volunteered or extended their service beyond the initial compulsory term. Status is defined by place and task rather than nationality, so the small number of foreigners, mostly from Western countries, who volunteered in international medicine- and science-related relief projects may also technically qualify depending on their exact location and tasks at the time.

Scale figures vary by registration system, ranging from several hundred thousand to nearly a million, with at least 300,000 to 350,000 likely directly involved. The All-Union Distribution Register (USSR, 1986-1989) gives 293,100; the Russian National Medical Dosimetric Registry gives 168,000 in Russia, plus 123,536 from Ukraine and 63,500 from Belarus, a total of about 355,000.

Naming and legal status

'Liquidator' competes with alternative names such as emergency worker, accident recovery worker, salvage personnel or decontamination participant. The word derives from the Russian verb meaning to eliminate the consequences of an accident, and although it soon became clear that the consequences could only be reduced rather than eliminated, the title was already in common use. The status is an official legal category in the former Soviet states: Belarusian law (Law No. 9-Z of 6 January 2009) lists 'participants in liquidation of the consequences of the Chernobyl NPP catastrophe' separately from the affected population, and the status is confirmed by a certificate (udostoverenie) granting benefit rights.

The state response generated a mass of privileges. UN Chernobyl Forum data show that Belarusian and Russian legislation provided more than seventy, and Ukrainian more than fifty, different privileges and benefits depending on degree of invalidity and contamination level; as many as 7 million recipients received social benefits, an unsustainable fiscal burden. Ukraine devoted 5 to 7 per cent of government spending annually, and Belarus 22.3 per cent of its national budget in 1991, declining to 6.1 per cent by 2002.

Aftermath: cuts in benefits and falsified exposure records

Soviet authorities often downplayed and concealed the dangers, and many liquidators were forced to sign fake documents underreporting the radiation they had been exposed to. Those records later blocked proper compensation or medical care, and declining health was attributed to personal lifestyle such as alcoholism or heart disease rather than radiation.

In the post-Soviet period the status and benefits themselves were cut back. Benefit cuts followed the first 'Chernobyl Way' march of around 30,000 people in 1988; the Belarusian state cut benefits for liquidators in 1995, and in Ukraine in 1997 the government deemed benefit payments illegitimate, stripping thousands of their benefits and forcing others to prove need, with courts' restoration decisions blocked in appeals. In Khabarovsk a number of military liquidators were denied compensation for loss of health on the grounds that they were not salaried workers but under military order; they appealed to the ECHR. Russia adopted ECHR rulings of 29 December 2004 and 21 March 2006 on aid or state housing, but an interim ECHR Resolution in 2009 (CM/ResDH(2009)43) indicated that Russia was failing to implement those policies.

Assessment and the dispute over deaths

The death toll is presented not as a settled single figure but as competing estimates. In 2006 Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union said 25,000 Russian liquidators were dead and 70,000 disabled, roughly the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead and 25,000 disabled in Belarus, a total of 60,000 dead and 165,000 disabled, or 10 and 27.5 per cent of 600,000. The WHO suggested that eventual radiation deaths could reach 4,000 among the highest exposed groups with 9,000 in total, while fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed as of mid-2005; survivor and environmental organisations gave figures of no fewer than 93,000.

Record and memory

Among individual examples, Toptunov stayed at the block until 8 a.m. despite severe physical deterioration from high ionising-radiation doses and helped organize water supply into the reactor core, and Anatoly Baranov switched turbogenerators 3 and 4 from hydrogen to nitrogen, preventing an explosion and fire in the machine hall. A few days after the explosion three volunteers descended into the bubble pool and emptied it so that nuclear material from the destroyed reactor would not reach the water, preventing a steam explosion; on 24 June 2019 the title of Hero of Ukraine was awarded to Ananenka Oleksiy, Bespalova Valery and Boris Baranov (posthumously). About forty firefighters took part in extinguishing the fire, all received large doses of radiation and many died of acute radiation syndrome and radiation burns, while some received the highest title, Hero of the Soviet Union: Viktor Kibenok and Volodymyr Pravyk posthumously, and Leonid Telyatnikov, who survived and continued in service. Survivors of the 633rd Fire Brigade of Ivano-Frankivsk, among the nearly 600,000 officially identified liquidators, describe doing work for which they were never trained; member Serhiy Melnyk arrived 12 weeks after the accident and served 48 days, and according to Oleynik the unit leader spent much of his time restoring benefits and restored liquidator status to 96 members.

Public memory persists as well. The National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv keeps a 'Remembrance Book' (Книга пам'яті), an open online database of liquidators with personal pages including 'radiation damage suffered', 'field of liquidation activity' and 'subsequent fate'; it began in 1997 and had over 5,000 entries as of February 2013, and monuments and plaques to liquidators stand in many cities of the former Soviet Union.