Historians later came to credit the Chernobyl disaster as a catalyst in forcing the decaying Soviet government to be more transparent - an openness called glasnost, which paved the way to reform and the subsequent Soviet collapse. We realized the entire drama only later,” he said. “I can’t agree that we were trying to conduct a sly policy and hide something. “We spent the first days trying to get the picture,” Gorbachev told the Associated Press in 2006. Then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not comment publicly for three weeks, and has consistently denied there was any cover-up, insisting authorities in Moscow did not know what was happening. The Kremlin did not acknowledge the nuclear accident until two days after the explosion when scientists in Sweden raised the alarm about a sharp spike in radiation levels apparently coming from the Soviet Union. According to official post-Soviet data about 60 percent of the fallout landed in Belarus. Radioactive plumes drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. Another program “Anatomy of a Protest” portrayed anti-government agitators in former Soviet states as “Western puppets” and CIA agents and used edited wiretaps apparently leaked to the producers by the Russian FSB intelligence service.Įstimates of deaths as a result of radiation released by the explosion of Reactor 4 vary from 4,000 in an initial United Nations study to up to 200,000 reported by Greenpeace. In August 2014, it broadcast a documentary describing critics of Russia's policies in Ukraine as “traitors” and “fascists” and skewed footage of a concert. The hero of the drama is a Russian counterintelligence agent dispatched to track him down.Ī central square in the deserted town of Pripyat, some 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant Ukraine.
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Marketing literature for the NTV series details a plot revolving around a CIA agent infiltrated into Pripyat and tasked with gathering intelligence on the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, near Pripyat.Īccording to media reports, Russia’s culture ministry is helping to fund the NTV show with a $460,000 grant. It is being produced in Belarus and raises the idea that foreign-inspired conspiracy may have had a hand in the explosion of reactor No.
NTV, which is owned by the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom, intends to provide patriotism with its own series.
#Russian reactor meltdown heroes tv#
Writing in the Moscow Times, Ilya Shepelin, a broadcaster with Dozhd, an independent media outlet, says the slurs are partly rooted in “jealous resentment” and “says more about the critics than it does about the series.” He added: “The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down.”īut other independent observers argue the major offense of the HBO mini-series from the Kremlin’s perspective was its lack of Russian patriotism. The Moscow weekly Argumenty i Fakty dismissed the show as “a caricature and not the truth.” Stanislav Natanzon, an anchor at Russia-24, one of the country’s main news channels, joked, “The only things missing are the bears and accordions!” But Kremlin partisans, pro-government commentators and newspapers have torn into the HBO mini-series, claiming it tarnishes the image of Russia as a great nuclear power. It was trumpeted as the Soviet ‘national’ reactor, unique to the USSR and far larger than those in the United States.Cast of HBO's Chernobyl miniseries pose for group photo at Tribeca Film Festival in New York.Ĭritics and audiences have placed the show at the top of IMDb’s list of highest-rated television series, ahead even of Game of Thrones, and the mini-series has been praised by historians for its authenticity.
A gigantic cylinder of graphite blocks housing tonnes of uranium fuel pellets cooled by water, the RBMK was based on the same principles as those built at Mayak to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, scaled up to titanic proportions and modified to generate electricity. Pressed for time, and hobbled by backward Soviet tooling and manufacturing that made the mass production of western-style reactors impossible, the model adopted was the RBMK ( Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalnyy High Power Channel-type Reactor).
In a bid to catch up, Soviet leaders launched an accelerated programme of power-plant construction. By the late 1960s, the pace of development in the USSR’s civilian nuclear industry had fallen behind those in the west. The roots of the disaster can be traced back to the choice of reactor type selected for Chernobyl.
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