The Forgotten Heroes of Chernobyl. Udo Fehring

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СКАЧАТЬ turned the transmitter button until the used English voice can be heard again.

      Wadim and Anna had both learned English at school and at that moment it was paying off.

      Unfortunately, at the time, the British and Western authorities were still not aware of the causes and effects of the nuclear accident. They only learned that this accident was now classified as a Super-Worst-Case-Scenario, so called as the largest to be assumed accident.

      Wadim reflected the news of the evacuation Pripyat again and suddenly he shook his head.

      "What's going on?" Anna asked.

      "I just imagined what it means to evacuate a city like Pripyat. Nearly 50,000 people live there. If all are evacuated at once, you need 1,000 buses. That's horrifying!"

      Anna now understood that the situation there was more than serious. And Pripyat was only about 50 km away.

      Wadim and Anna were also curious about how the Russian authorities would deal with the upcoming celebrations on May 1, which was a high public holiday in socialist countries with public parades, in which normally joyful children's groups participated.

      Would they have the courage to cancel all parades in the affected area? Or would they, that would Wadim and Anna expected, suppress all the bad news about Chernobyl and act as if nothing had happened.

      Wadim and Anna had hoped that with the formula of "Glasnost" praised under President Gorbatschov, which means openness and transparency, something would have changed with regard to negative reports as in this case. But obviously this was just eyewash. Wadim knew that the people under another president were the same and their thinking would not change so quickly. In particular, condemnation of guilt was still a so-called "no-go" in socialism. It was therefore doubtful that the whole truth of the nuclear accident had reached Gorbatschov.

      Wadim's and Anna's decision was clear. They would not go to the parade and Marusha would not join the parade as well. They wanted to limit their open-air activities to a minimum in the next few days, if that was possible. At least until there was clarity that there was no danger to the Kiev population any more. And this message had to be confirmed by foreign authorities.

      The next day Anna asked for a short talk with the kindergarten leader when she left her daughter in kindergarten. Because Anna wanted that Marusha should not play outside until further notice. The kindergarten leader showed understanding, because several parents had already expressed this wish before.

      "You can be assured. We won’t let the children play outside the kindergarten. We ourselves are not comfortable being out in the fresh air, well-aware that the radiation levels may be extremely high."

      Anna was at least comfortable with that.

      Unfortunately, in addition to the short news from the Russian news broadcaster, there was still no news in other media. A short message from a few lines about the nuclear accident had "just" made it to the third page in Pravda, the largest newspaper in the Soviet Union.

      In the evening, the Soviet Minister of Health gave a brief instruction to the Chernobyl population: Everyone should keep windows and doors closed, regularly take iodine tablets in the prescribed dose and, when entering their own apartment, put off their shoes on a wet mat in front of the door.

      Wadim and Anna shook their heads once more. As if someone believed that it was possible to control the radiation and the impact of such by such lapidary measures and "lock out" the radiation outside their own four walls.

      The celebrities for May, 1st in Kiev was not canceled as expected. To demonstrate how harmless the Soviet authorities continued to assess the situation, even a Politburo member and his whole family was sent to Kiev. According to the motto: If we send "our people" there, the situation could not be so bad.

      Looking backward, the "non-refusal" of this grand parade and other celebrations should prove to be one of the biggest mistakes the authorities have made in connection with the disaster.

      Finally, on May 2, there was news on Soviet television. In addition to the already evacuated city of Pripyat, all inhabitants were evacuated within a radius of 30 km from Chernobyl, which corresponded to another 130,000 people.

      But what appalled Wadim and Anna even more was the finding of the weather experts who reported that the wind direction had changed from south-east to north, which meant that Kiev would soon see increased levels of radiation through the radioactive cloud.

      Wadim and Anna were seriously considering migrating the city. Unfortunately, these plans unfortunately had to be "buried" again quickly. All train and flight tickets to get out of the city were sold out for the next few weeks. Unfortunately, they neither did not own a car, which meant that they were more or less "trapped" in Kiev.

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