Declassified KGB documents on Chernobyl (27 photos)

As you know, the KGB archives were declassified not long ago. This is an unprecedented event for the so-called. "CIS countries" and a very good step in understanding what Soviet power was like. Many documents in the archive concern the Chernobyl station and the liquidation of the consequences of the 1986 accident.

Many guesses, previously expressed only in the form of assumptions, were confirmed - for example, that the station was built with many serious violations of technical regulations, that the true consequences of the accident were specially classified by the authorities (which also prevented normal work to eliminate the consequences), that the commission on The LPA did not have accurate information about the condition of the reactor remains, and that the liquidation work was carried out largely thoughtlessly and illiterately...

The first document is a memo to the First Secretary of the Kyiv Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine V.M. Tsybulko. about violation of technical standards during the construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The subject of the note directly concerns technical violations in the construction of the station and also talks about the theft of materials from the construction site - a common problem of many Soviet construction projects.

The second document is about the same thing - about serious shortcomings in the construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, deviations from technical standards and violations of technological processes during construction.

Document number three is a very voluminous memo addressed to the head of the USSR KGB department for Kyiv and the Kyiv region. Already in the first paragraph of the text, serious violations in the construction of the station are mentioned, which in the future could lead to accidents.

The second page talks about errors in the covering of the turbine hall - perhaps as a result of this, its roof was pierced by debris from the reactor core during the 1986 accident. Much has been said there about the poor waterproofing of power units.

The last pages talk about numerous safety violations and numerous injuries received by construction workers during the construction of a nuclear power plant.

Memo to the head of the USSR KGB for Kyiv and the Kyiv region Banduristy IM.Z. about the emergency situation at the 3rd and 4th power units of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 1984, two years before the April disaster.

Memo on the insufficient reliability of the RBMK-1000 reactors used at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 1984.

July 1986, list of information about the Chernobyl accident that is subject to classification. This is confirmation that the true levels of radiation on the roofs of the Fourth Block and the turbine hall were hidden even from the technical specialists who prepared the robots for decontamination of the station roofs, as a result of which the robots “burned out” from radiation.

August 1986, memo on the ineffective use of labor of liquidators in the ChEZ

A voluminous and very interesting memorandum, which talks about the repeated underestimation of the actual victims of the Chernobyl accident, about the erroneous determination of the condition of the destroyed reactor (“the commission determined it to be “nuclear hazardous,” but now there is no information about the condition”).