Notes

Introduction

1 “In all, 67 employees have been sacked or demoted, amongst them 20 specialists who were present in the control room above the no. 4 reactor during the experiment. … It appears that the trial proceedings will go beyond considerations of the operators’ culpability and focus on the responsibility of the specialists who designed the experiment and of the nuclear power station's management, supervisory staff and safety inspectors” (“Chernobyl Trial Set for July,” Financial Times Business Limited, FT Energy Newsletters—European Energy, June 26, 1987, 15). 27 of those 67 were also expelled from the Communist Party (John Greenwald and Ken Olsen, “Disasters Judgment at Chernobyl: Six Defendants Go on Trial for Causing a Nuclear Catastrophe,” Time 130, no. 3 (July 20, 1987): 44–45; “Chernobyl Trial Begins in Soviet [Union],” New York Times, late city final ed., July 8, 1987, section A, p. 5). All media sources cited in this chapter were retrieved from LexisNexis Academic.

2 Robert Paine, “‘Chernobyl Reaches Norway: The Accident, Science, and the Threat to Cultural Knowledge,” Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992): 261–280; Vasilii Borisovich Nesterenko, Masshtaby i posledstviia katastrofy na Chernobyl'skoi AES dlia Belorusi, Ukrainy i Rossii (Minsk: Pravo i ekonomika, 1996); Vasil’ Gigevich and Oleg Chernov, Stali vody gor’kimi: Khronika Chernobyl'skoi bedy (Minsk: Belorus’, 1991).

3 International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident, No. 75-INSAG-1, Safety Series (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1986).

4 The Party's Central Committee decree of July 14, 1986 was classified as top secret, but large parts of it were published on the front page of Pravda on July 20. For details, see chapter 5; see also “A Soviet Aide Says Chernobyl Officials Will Be Put on Trial” (New York Times, late city final ed., March 14, 1987, section 1, p. 6); Anna Christensen, “Trial to Be Held Soon in Chernobyl,” United Press International, March 13, 1987.

5 “Scapegoats of Chernobyl.”

6 David Marples points out that the Soviet authorities initially allowed Western journalists to report directly from the site of the accident, but subsequently opted for a stricter information control strategy (David R. Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (London: Macmillan, 1988)).

7 Nikolai V. Karpan, Chernobyl’: Mest’ mirnogo atoma (Kiev: Kantri Laif, 2005).

8 Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), especially 67–96.

9 As a reaction to what was perceived as Western propaganda, “The reporting on Chernobyl in the Soviet press has been matched, dispatch for dispatch, by articles on problems in Western nuclear stations and by attacks on the Western press for sensationalizing the accident in the early days when official Soviet information was scarce to nonexistent” (Bill Keller, “The 1986 Disaster at Chernobyl: A Year Later, Lessons Are Drawn; in Soviet [sic], Heroism and Candor Are Hailed, but Questions Linger,” New York Times, April 26, 1987, late city final ed., section 1, p. 1).

10 “Soviet radiation experts in white coats disclosed that radiation in the area was four times higher than normal, although they told reporters it was safe for humans” (Stephen Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up,” Toronto Star, July 12, 1987, Sunday 2nd ed., p. H3). See also Christopher Walker, “Design Row Opens Chernobyl Trial,” Times (London), July 8, 1987. Gorbachev reports a radiation level on the safest streets of Chernobyl as reaching 1 milliroentgen per hour (Boris Gorbachev, “Tainy Chernobyl'skogo suda,” Zerkalo nedeli 6, no. 491 (April 2004): 24–29).

11 Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941, Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 90.

12 On opening day the courtroom was packed with members of the press as well as about 150 relatives and coworkers of the victims and accused (Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up”); “Persons Guilty of Chernobyl Accident to Go on Trial Soon,” ITAR-TASS, March 13, 1987; “Briefing—Chernobyl,” ITAR-TASS, July 2, 1987; “Trial of Culprits of Chernobyl Accident,” Russian Information Agency ITAR-TASS, Moscow, July 15, 1987; Greenwald and Olsen, “Disasters Judgment at Chernobyl.” On the choice of location see RGANI, f. 89, op. 4, d. 22. Access to the town of Chernobyl was possible only with a special permit (“Chernobyl Trial Set for July”). And yet TASS called the trial “public” even after it was over, and the discrepancy between “public” and a complete lack of media coverage must have become apparent: “The public trial lasted for more than three weeks. Thirty-eight witnesses and thirteen victims of the disaster were interrogated, thus providing a true picture of why the accident at the atomic power plant had happened on the night of April 25–26, 1986” (“Trial in Chernobyl Ends,” ITAR-TASS, July 29, 1987).

13 According to the Guardian, only five foreign journalists, from Japanese television, BBC radio, and a French and American news agency, were to be admitted to the trial (Martin Walker, “Three Go on Trial after World's Worst Atomic Disaster,” Guardian (London), July 7, 1987). The BBC reported that the Soviet Foreign Ministry admitted ten foreign correspondents to the proceedings (“Foreign Ministry briefing: USA's ‘new demands’ on INF, Afghanistan, Chernobyl trial,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, July 7, 1987). See also “Briefing—Chernobyl” and Christopher Walker, “Anger at Chernobyl Trial Curb on Press,” Times (London), July 6, 1987. The London Times reported that twelve “specially selected reporters from Moscow were permitted to attend yesterday,” none from a Western newspaper (Walker, “Design Row”). See also “Chernobyl Trial Closed, Press Told,” Globe and Mail (Canada), July 9, 1987.

14 “Chernobyl Trial Begins.”

15 Patrick Cockburn, “Six Go on Trial in Chernobyl,” Financial Times (London), July 8, 1987. According to Aleksandr Kovalenko, the chief information officer for the Chernobyl rescue operation, there was “logic in holding the trial at the scene of the crime,” which led some to speculate that the move also served to avoid seeking responsibility among high-ranking officials in Moscow (Walker, “Anger”; “Scapegoats of Chernobyl”).

16 Just prior to the trial, speculation ran wild on who else would be tried. But neither Ivan Emelyianov, a deputy director of the Institute of Energy Technologies (NIKIET), who the Central Committee had dismissed from his post, nor any of the three deputy directors of the Chernobyl station, one of whom had fled the scene of the accident, were prosecuted (“Chernobyl Trial Set for July”; Richard Levine, Milt Freudenheim, and James F. Carity, “Fixing the Blame at Chernobyl,” New York Times, June 22, 1986, “The World” section).

17 John-Thor Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up for Trial of Officials,” Globe and Mail (Canada), July 7, 1987.

18 “V Politbiuro TsK KPSS,” Pravda, July 20, 1986, 1, 3; Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up.”

19 “Chernobyl Trial Set for July”; Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up.”

20 Fomin had broken his eyeglasses and slit his wrists with the shards; see Grigori Medvedev, The Truth about Chernobyl (New York: Basic Books, 1989), and Richard F. Mould, Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2000). According to Mould, “The trial was apparently postponed once because one of the accused, the chief engineer, Fomin, had not recovered sufficiently” (p. 300). See also Mary Dejevsky, “Chernobyl Chief Faces 10 Years in Labour Camp: Sentences Leave Question of Ministerial Responsibility Unexplained,” Times (London), July 30, 1987. The trial was now to begin July 7 (“Briefing—Chernobyl”).

21 Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up.”

22 “Western Reporters Barred from Trial,” United Press International, July 8, 1987; “Chernobyl Trial Closed, Press Told.” The prosecutor was Iurii Shadrin (starshii pomoshchnik general’nogo prokurora SSSR; see A. V. Illesh and A. E. Pral’nikov, eds., Reportazh iz Chernobylia: Zapiski ochevidtsev. Kommentarii. Razmyshleniia (Moscow: Mysl’, 1988), 147).

23 Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up.”

24 “Results of the Chernobyl Trial,” ITAR-TASS, July 31, 1987.

25 See above, note 4; also Walker, “Three Go on Trial.” The Central Committee's top-secret decree had found fault with the nuclear industry's organizational culture, the ministry's supervision of personnel performance, and discipline in all the organizations involved. The decree itself has been declassified in the meantime (Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986, RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 2).

26 The London Times summarized the pretrial common knowledge as follows: “An unauthorized experiment conducted while safety mechanisms were shut off ... shortcomings in the system of responsibility, design faults in the reactor and the risks in siting nuclear power stations close to populated areas” (“Scapegoats of Chernobyl”).

27 “Chernobyl Trial Closed, Press Told,” Globe and Mail (Canada).

28 Greenwald and Olsen, “Disasters Judgment at Chernobyl.” The indictment apparently mentioned that similar unauthorized experiments had been conducted at the same station in 1982 and 1985, leading to a near accident in 1985 (“Western Reporters Barred”; Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up”).

29 Ugolovnyi kodeks Ukrainskoi SSR, part 2, article 220 (in Illesh and Pral’nikov, Reportazh iz Chernobylia, 147). See also Walker, “Design Row”; “Western Reporters Barred”; Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up”; Milt Freudenheim, Katherine Roberts, and James F. Clarity, “The Trial Begins at Chernobyl,” New York Times, July 12, 1987, late city final ed., section 4, p. 2; Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up.” The maximum penalty for these charges was ten years in prison (“Western Reporters Barred”; Cockburn, “Six Go on Trial”; “Chernobyl Trial Closed, Press Told”). See also “Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years,” Financial Times Energy Newsletters—European Energy, August 7, 1987, 1.

30 The legal concept “explosion-prone plants (or facilities)” is contested.

31 Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up.”

32 Walker, “Design Row.” The trial confirmed rumors that the evacuation of Pripyat did not begin until thirty-six hours after the explosions. This evidence contradicted previous official statements about the evacuation and public health (“Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years”).

33 For example, as late as 2004 the journalist Boris Gorbachev dismissed attempts to exculpate the director or the chief engineers as a propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting scientists and reactor experts (Gorbachev, “Tainy Chernobyl'skogo suda”).

34 Walker, “Anger”; Dahlburg, “Chernobyl Gears Up”; Charles Mitchell, “Chernobyl Trial Closed to Public and Media,” United Press International, July 9, 1987; “Chernobyl Officials Are Sentenced to Labor Camp,” New York Times, July 30, 1987, late city final ed., section A, p. 5. Details on post-Chernobyl Soviet information management are also available in the declassified documents of RGANI, fond 89.

35 V. Vozniak and S. Troitskii, Chernobyl: Tak eto bylo (Moscow: Libris, 1993).

36 “The Soviet press is also expected to cover the prospective trial of officials being blamed for the Chernobyl accident, as it did the recent trial of captains held responsible for a ship collision in the Black Sea last August” (Keller, “The 1986 Disaster at Chernobyl”). Charles Mitchell reported that “diplomats have speculated the trial may have been closed because testimony might reveal the poor state of safety in the Soviet nuclear power industry and other accidents or near-accidents that have not been disclosed” (Mitchell, “Chernobyl Trial Closed to Public and Media”). See also Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up”; Dejevsky, “Chernobyl Chief Faces 10 Years in Labour Camp.” One source noted that “accounts of the trial itself, which began July 7, were sketchy” (“Chernobyl-Plant Officials Sentenced,” Facts on File World News Digest, July 31, 1987, section D3, 557). See also Patrick Cockburn, “Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Chiefs Given 10-Year Jail Sentences,” Financial Times (London), July 30, 1987, 40. The articles that did appear revealed details of the disaster for the first time (“Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years”).

37 See, for example, Handelman, “Chernobyl Facts Covered Up”; “Chernobyl Trial Begins.”

38 Freudenheim, Roberts, and Clarity, “The Trial Begins at Chernobyl”; “Trial of Culprits of Chernobyl Accident.”

39 “Western Reporters Barred.”

40 “Western Reporters Barred”; “Trial of Culprits of Chernobyl Accident”; “Chernobyl Trial Closed, Press Told.”

41 Karpan notes that the trial allowed some degree of controversy and a limited, but frank, discussion of factors other than human error as causes of the disaster (Karpan, Chernobyl’: Mest’ mirnogo atoma). In 2004, a group of lay archivists connected loosely to the former satellite town of the Chernobyl plant launched a website, http://pripyat.com. It was intended initially as an “unofficial site of the town of Pripyat,” a site that would commemorate the ghost town and enable its former inhabitants, now spread all over the world, to connect in cyberspace. The expressed goal of the site is to protect the town as a kind of contemporary history museum. In the process, the site's archive of personal photographs, memoirs, documents, and other materials has grown. Today, this unique site features a treasure trove of visual material, current media reports, a library of documents, and much more. It was on this website that I was first able to find notes from the trial proceedings: plant personnel had been taking turns attending and transcribing what went on behind closed doors. Obviously, these notes are a rather problematic, but nevertheless extraordinary source.

42 Karpan, Chernobyl’: Mest’ mirnogo atoma. Diatlov sent his research to international journals while he was in prison; some of it was published only posthumously (Anatolii S. Diatlov, Chernobyl’: Kak eto bylo (Moscow: Nauchtekhlitizdat, 2003); Anatoly Dyatlov [Anatolii S. Diatlov], “26 April 1986,” Nuclear Engineering International 41, no. 501 (April 1996): 18–22; Anatoly Dyatlov [Anatolii S. Diatlov], “Why INSAG Has Still Got It Wrong,” Nuclear Engineering International 40, no. 494 (September 1995): 17–21).

43 The RBMK is a graphite-moderated, water-cooled design. The acronym is Russian for “high-power channel/boiling-water reactor” (reaktor bol'shoi moshchnosti kanal’nyi/kipiashchii).

44 For a selection of news reports see, for example, “Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years”; “Ten Years in Stir for Chernobyl's Scapegoats,” Newsweek, August 10, 1987, 47; “Chernobyl Officials Are Sentenced to Labor Camp”; Dejevsky, “Chernobyl Chief Faces 10 Years in Labour Camp”; “Results of the Chernobyl Trial.” A brief Russian summary can be found in Illesh and Pral’nikov, Reportazh iz Chernobylia, 154.

45 Karpan lists these experts’ home institutions and reaches the conclusion that they were all affiliated, in one way or another, with the reactor designer's institute, and concludes that they may not have been completely impartial (Karpan, Chernobyl’: Mest’ mirnogo atoma).

46 Dostat’ was the word capturing this process: it literally means “to track down, to locate.” Soviet managers, from Beria to Briukhanov, obviously also knew when to enforce what kinds of punishment. The resulting arbitrariness in decision making made the system extremely vulnerable to what Vaughan calls the “normalization of deviance” (Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)).

47 Vozniak and Troitskii, Chernobyl: Tak eto bylo.

48 Chapter 2 goes into great detail about these two ministries. Throughout, I use Sredmash as the abbreviation for the Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Ministerstvo srednego mashinostroeniia) and Minenergo for the Ministry of Energy and Electrification (Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii). These are not the only abbreviations used by Russians, but since they are critically important institutions in this story, I am using labels that will help non-Russian readers to keep these two ministries apart.

49 “Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years.”

50 In addition to the five years, Rogozhkin received a two-year sentence, to run concurrently, for negligence and failure to execute his duties. As one Russian journalist put it in 2004, they were only guilty of following the orders of their superiors, and “de facto they were sentenced for their inadvertent participation in a technological mess” (Gorbachev, “Tainy Chernobyl'skogo suda”). Rogozhkin, Kovalenko, and Laushkin pleaded not guilty; Briukhanov, Fomin, and Diatlov, as mentioned above, accepted professional responsibility for the accident but denied criminal liability (“Chernobyl Officials Are Sentenced to Labor Camp”). See also “Trial in Chernobyl Ends”; “Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years”; “Chernobyl Director and Aides Get 10 Years Labor Camp,” Xinhua General Overseas News Service, July 29, 1987; Dejevsky, “Chernobyl Chief Faces 10 Years in Labour Camp.”

51 “Chernobyl Officials Are Sentenced to Labor Camp.”

52 “Ten Years in Stir for Chernobyl's Scapegoats.”

53 Cockburn, “Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Chiefs Given 10-Year Jail Sentences”; “Chernobyl Officials Are Sentenced to Labor Camp.” Briukhanov, Fomin, and Diatlov reacted to their sentencing very differently. Briukhanov accepted his sentence without objection, while Fomin apparently experienced severe shock. Diatlov continued to defend himself during his subsequent imprisonment. He wrote countless letters from prison, and with the tireless support of his wife, was pardoned by Gorbachev in the fall of 1990; he died in December 1995 (Diatlov, Chernobyl’: Kak eto bylo, 167).

54 “Results of the Chernobyl Trial.” The journalist Boris Gorbachev considered the three main defendants lucky in that they were not tried according to the all-Union law, where a conviction for violating technical safety regulations at a dangerous nuclear facility, and for losing control over this facility with grave consequences that included the loss of human life, would have allowed a death sentence (Gorbachev, “Tainy Chernobyl'skogo suda”).

55 “Results of the Chernobyl Trial.” This quote is provided in its original English version.

56 “In reports to his superiors, he [Briukhanov] underestimated these readings by twelve times” (“Chernobyl Officials Get 10 Years”). See also Cockburn, “Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Chiefs Given 10-Year Jail Sentences”; “Chernobyl-Plant Officials Sentenced.”

57 “Results of the Chernobyl Trial.”

58 “It is still not known whether the experiment was authorized at ministerial level or whether it was conducted at the instigation of the plant's management. The additional sentence on Bryukhanov for abuse of power suggests that he has been blamed” (Dejevsky, “Chernobyl Chief Faces 10 Years in Labour Camp”).

59 The press release ends with what can almost be read as a mission statement: “A reliable and safe operation of complex modern equipment can be ensured only given a high level of discipline, organization, competence and responsibility of the personnel” (“Results of the Chernobyl Trial”).

60 Briukhanov was released after serving five years of his sentence and granted interviews to international media on various anniversaries of the disaster. For example, see Maksym Asaulyak, “Viktor Bryukhanov: I Could Have Been Sentenced to Death,” Kyiv Weekly, April 28, 2011, http://kyivweekly.com.ua/pulse/theme/2011/04/28/164825.html; “Neponiatnyi Atom: Interv’iu s Viktorom Briukhanovym,” Profil’, April 24, 2006, http://www.profile.ru/obshchestvo/item/50192-items_18814; Anton Samarin, “Chernobyl nikogo i nichemy ne nauchil,” Odnako, 26 April 2010, http://www.odnako.org/almanac/material/chernobil-nikogo-i-nichemu-ne-nauchil-1/. Diatlov and Fomin were also released early, both for medical reasons. Diatlov died in 1995 of heart failure, four years after his release from prison, and after trying to publicize his version of the accident. Fomin spent part of his sentence in a neurological facility and was also released early. He worked at the Kalinin nuclear power plant until he retired. Both Kovalenko and Rogozhkin were released early and returned to work at Chernobyl. Former inspector Laushkin died of stomach cancer shortly after his release (Mould, Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe, 301). Kovalenko also died soon after his release.

61 On the international level, this strategy tends to emphasize that “this could never happen at any of our nuclear plants.”

62 This attitude comes through quite clearly in some of the interviews used for The Second Russian Revolution, a documentary produced by Brian Lapping Associates for BBC Television, the Discovery Channel, and NHK, especially episode 2, The Battle for Glasnost’.

63 Given the sheer complexity of the technical, political, historical, and economic issues surrounding this accident, but also the abundance of publications on the subject that rarely agree on the accident's causes, I find catchy titles such as those used by Richard Mould disturbing, despite the useful information the books contain: “Chernobyl: The Real Story,” and “Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe” (my emphases). (See Mould's Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe, cited earlier, and his Chernobyl: The Real Story (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988).)

64 As in English, operators in Russian can refer either to the technician in the control room of a nuclear reactor or to the utility running one or more nuclear power plants. I have used reactor operator and plant operator in instances where the terminology would otherwise have been ambiguous. For examples of plant operators mishandling the reactor, see Lev P. Feoktistov, “Uroki Chernobylia,” Priroda 9 (1986): 123–124; Anatolii P. Aleksandrov, “Izmeniat’, chto izmenit’ eshche vozmozhno. …,” Ogonek 35 (August 1990): 6–10.

65 John Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” Osiris 21 (2006): 161–181; John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 5–44.

66 Glenys A. Babcock, “The Role of Public Interest Groups in Democratization: Soviet Environmental Groups and Energy Policy-Making, 1985–1991,” doctoral dissertation, RAND Graduate School, 1997; Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

67 I first wrote this introduction before the dramatic events of March 2011 at the Fukushima-1 nuclear plant in Japan's Tohoku province. I have tried to capture some of the connections in the epilogue (see also Sonja D. Schmid, “Both Better and Worse Than Chernobyl,” London Review of Books Blog, March 17, 2011, http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/03/17/sonja-schmid/both-better-and-worse-than-chernobyl).

Chapter 1

1 Nikolai A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira: Zapiski konstruktora (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, IzdAt, 2002), 230. In a memorandum to Khrushchev from the Central Committee's Department of Machine Engineering (dokladnaia zapiska), titled “On the Universal Electrification of the USSR” (O sploshnoi elektrifikatsii SSSR), which was categorized as “secret” (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 149, l. 2–78), I. Novikov reported that in 1958 there were 41.8 million television sets and 48.5 million radios in the United States, while in the Soviet Union, there were only 2.7 million TV sets and 12.3 million radios (l. 13). The Central Committee and the Council of Ministers subsequently approved a “drastic increase of productivity of labor” in an attempt to create the “material and technical basis of communism” (l. 3).

2 There were some private niches in the agricultural sector that were legal in the Soviet Union; however, they are irrelevant to our topic (Alec Nove, The Soviet Economy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 61–65).

3 George T. Mazuzan and J. Samuel Walker, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946–1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

4 This is not to say that the state did not play an important role in nuclear industries around the world, including in liberal democracies—it most certainly did (e.g., Hecht, The Radiance of France; J. Samuel Walker, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1935–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1964); Margaret Gowing and Lorna Arnold, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–52, Volume 1: Policy Making (London: Macmillan, 1974); Margaret Gowing and Lorna Arnold, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–52, Volume 2: Policy Execution (London: Macmillan, 1974)).

5 Translated and quoted in Arnold Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 6. In 1939, Vernadskii became the director of the newly created Commission for Isotopes (ibid., 23, 117). One of my interviewees came to our conversation prepared with this very quote on a little piece of paper. He read the note to me, and emphasized its prophetic value (Interview #23).

6 An international discussion on siting policies can be found, for example, in International Atomic Energy Agency, ed. Siting of Reactors and Nuclear Research Centres: Proceedings of the Symposium on Criteria for Guidance in the Selection of Sites for the Construction of Reactor and Nuclear Research Centres, Bombay, 11–15 March 1963 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1963). See also Charles K. Dodd, Industrial Decision-Making and High-Risk Technology: Siting Nuclear Power Facilities in the USSR (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994).

7 For example, Chernobyl was part of the Kievenergo dispatch system (see chapter 5). At least two of the Ukrainian nuclear power plants were also designed to export electricity to East European CMEA countries: they partly financed their construction in exchange for free electricity delivery (Office of Technology Assessment, Technology & Soviet Energy Availability (Washington, DC: Congress of the U.S., Office of Technology Assessment, 1981)).

8 The planning for a nuclear power plant site sometimes included considerations about the imminent availability of workers once a nearby industrial facility was completed (e.g., RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, f. 2015, vol. 2: “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska k godovomu otchetu za 1958 god po kapital’nomu stroitel'stvu direktsii stroiashcheisia Leningradskoi GRES No. 16,” l. 38).

9 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). For the U.S. context see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Touchstone, 1986).

10 V. K. Ulasevich, ed., Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia: O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh (k 100-letiiu N. A. Dollezhalia), 2nd ed. (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); Boris A. Fain, Aktivnaia zona: Povest’ ob atomnom institute (Moscow: Skripto, 1998); Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira.

11 Paul R. Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture,” in Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order, 168–191 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union.

12 Kurchatov and Aleksandrov did not specify locations for these reactors, but a year later, four sites were under discussion: one near Moscow, one near Leningrad, and two in the region where the Beloiarsk plant was later built. According to Soviet scientists at the First United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in 1955 in Geneva, the plant near Moscow was originally to be built near Podolsk (Fermi 1957), but eventually the site near Voronezh replaced that earlier location. Archival documents suggest that as early as 1956, plans were made for the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 7, l. 23); in 1957, the deputy head of Glavatomenergo, Iu. Ponomarev signed detailed plans on major construction work and capital investments for the Novo-Voronezh site (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 1, l. 22). The plant intended for Leningrad was later handed over to Sredmash entirely. See Vladimir V. Goncharov, “Pervyi period razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, 16–70 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 32, 19).

13 A planning period of five years was the signature Soviet interval since 1929 (Nove, The Soviet Economy). With the exception of World War II, which cut short the third five-year plan, and Khrushchev's decision to abandon the sixth prematurely in favor of a new seven-year plan (1959–1965), the Soviet economy maintained this planning interval until its demise.

14 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 9, 34.

15 Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture”; Vladimir P. Vizgin, ed., Istoriia Sovetskogo Atomnogo Proekta: Dokumenty, Vospominaniia, Issledovaniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Ianus-K, 1998) and vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2002); Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb.

16 Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture,” 168–191, 174. In fact, Josephson argues that only “the Chernobyl disaster and the decline of the Soviet Union were to shake the foundations of Soviet nuclear culture” (Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic-Powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR,” Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 297–324 (quote on 322)). On nuclear power exhibitions at the Exhibition of the Achievements of the People's Economy (VDNKh) in Moscow, see Sonja D. Schmid, “Celebrating Tomorrow Today: The Peaceful Atom on Display in the Soviet Union,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 3 (2006): 331–365. On revolutionary and utopian dreams, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

17 Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture”; Josephson, “Atomic-Powered Communism.” For examples of how scientists popularized this vision see, for example, V. S. Emel’ianov, “Atomnaia nauka i tekhnika i stroitel'stvo kommunizma,” Atomnaia energiia 11, no. 4 (1961): 301–312; Andranik M. Petros’iants, Atomnaia energetika (Moscow: Nauka, 1976); Andranik M. Petros’iants, Iadernaia energetika: Nauka i tekhnicheskii progress, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1981); Andranik M. Petros’iants, Atomnaia nauka i tekhnika SSSR (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1987).

18 Sonja D. Schmid, “Shaping the Soviet Experience of the Atomic Age: Nuclear Topics in Ogonyok, 1945–1965,” in Dick van Lente, ed., The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945–1965, 19–52 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

19 In a 1969 letter to Nikolai K. Baibakov, then head of Gosplan, Pavlenko (the head of Gosplan's Department for Energy and Electrification) and two colleagues explained their problems with coordinating work on this scale by pointing out that as an emerging technology, nuclear power presented planners with a series of unknown factors: the equipment was sophisticated and required extraordinary quality control, there were only a few specialized factories, and the economics of nuclear power plants was still poorly understood (“Letter to comrade Baibakov, N. K.” from A. Pavlenko, K. Vinogradov, and A. Nekrasov, No. 22–9, of January 10, 1969 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3215, l. 1–3)). In their letter, Pavlenko and his colleagues asked comrade Baibakov to personally coordinate the development of a nuclear industry sector, or at the very least to assign one of his first deputies to the task. They also requested additional positions for their department, for newly created groups of specialists in other departments, and for the planning and supervision of the emerging nuclear power industry.

20 Interview #28.

21 Nove, The Soviet Economy, 18. See also Ian D. Thatcher, “Alec Nove: A Bibliographical Tribute,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 8 (1995): 1383–1410.

22 Recent work in STS has addressed the history of economics, and in particular the social construction of “the market” and its supposedly abstract principles and autonomous mechanics (e.g., Michel Callon, “What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?,” in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, 311–357 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, “Markets Made Flesh: Performativity, and a Problem in Science Studies, Augmented with Consideration of the FCC Auctions,” in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, 190–224 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Michel Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo, “Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange,” American Journal of Sociology 109 (2003): 107–145).

23 Alec Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990, 132. See also Alexei Kojevnikov, “The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science,” Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002): 239–276.

24 Martha Lampland, “The Technopolitical Lineage of State Planning in Hungary, 1930–1956,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, 155–184 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

25 Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 131.

26 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Loren R. Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Ed A. Hewett et al., “Soviet Economy,” Soviet Economy 1, no. 1 (1985): 5; Ed A. Hewett, Reforming the Soviet Economy: Equality versus Efficiency (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1988).

27 Marxists conceptualized history as unfolding in six consecutive stages: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and full communism. See Alexander Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R.: The 1960s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 25; Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution: The Overthrow of Tzarism and the Triumph of the Soviets, trans. Max Eastman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Macmillan, 1994).

28 See Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 31; Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 129.

29 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–23 (emphasis in original).

30 Bunce, Subversive Institutions; Nikolai L. Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Steven Lee Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

31 The chairman of the Council of Ministers was one of the roughly twenty members of the Politburo. The Politburo was called “Presidium of the Central Committee” from 1952 to 1966, then it reverted to its original name. The Presidium had more members than the Politburo (Nove, The Soviet Economy, 26).

32 In 1969, Nove wrote that “the Minister and the Deputy-Ministers must be seen essentially as senior business executives or civil servants, not as politicians in the western sense” (ibid., 70).

33 The management of Soviet enterprises was appointed by the state and typically consisted of the director, the chief engineer (who was also the deputy director), and the chief accountant, who together were in charge of operations and legally responsible for them. Enterprise performance was evaluated according to predetermined efficiency plans. If an enterprise managed to reduce its cost by maximizing output or minimizing input, a portion of such “overplan profit” went directly to the enterprise as an incentive (Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 12–15, 47; Nove, The Soviet Economy, 34).

34 Reports from nuclear power plants under construction often contained complaints about poor quality or delayed delivery of construction materials by subcontractors. For example, in their 1972 annual report, the management of the Armenian nuclear power plant complained that the factory assigned to produce reinforced concrete for the plant had delivered parts of extremely poor quality during the first half of the year. Management initiated a technical inspection by a research institute, which determined that the factory had delivered 200,000 rubles worth of brak, defective parts. If nothing else, this inspection prompted the factory to produce better concrete during the second half of 1972 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 5693, l. 25).Starting in the late 1960s, organizations emerged that mediated between individual enterprises and ministries, “associations” (ob”edineniia), and trusts (tresty). These organizations sometimes functioned like chief administrations, but outside the formal structure of a ministry (Nove, The Soviet Economy, 43–44, 68). See also David Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926–1934 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). The big regional construction trusts—for example, Tsentratomenergostroi, Iuzhatomenergostroi, Donbassatomenergomontazh, Spetsatomenergomontazh, and Mosspetsatomenergomontazh—were the most relevant to the nuclear industry (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15).

35 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3 (Narkom elektrostantsii i elektropromyshlennosti SSSR, Ministerstvo elektrostantsii SSSR (1939–1959)), l. 4.

36 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, l. 2–3.

37 This is from an early 1960s Soviet textbook (M. G. Kolodnyi and A. P. Stepanov, Planirovanie narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR (Kiev: Izd-vo Kievskogo universiteta, 1963), 217–219, quoted in Nove, The Soviet Economy, 91).

38 Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 135. This behavior was exacerbated by past experience, when attempts to amend unrealistic plans by writing to the responsible planning bodies had remained unsuccessful. In the 1972 report to Glavatomenergo, the management of the Armenian nuclear power plant wrote: “The failure to fulfill the plan for capital investments can basically be explained by erroneous planning. Glavatomenergo and the leading republican organizations did not pay attention to our frequent written requests regarding an amendment of the plan” (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 5693, l. 2, Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii, Glavatomenergo, Direktsiia stroiashcheisia Armianskoi AES, godovoi otchet za 1972 god).

39 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, l. 4. These plans determined exact deadlines for the completion of a given task (usually in terms of kvartaly, quarter years), the money to be spent on a given aspect of the task (e.g., industrial construction work, construction of apartment buildings, provision of healthcare, and sotskul'tbyt or social and cultural infrastructure), the enterprises responsible for providing supplies, and much more (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, l. 5).

40 Nove, The Soviet Economy, 90–91.

41 Ibid., 42.

42 Ibid., 229. Among the nonpriority sectors that encountered shortages were consumer goods. The refusal to meet consumer satisfaction was justified by Marxist-Leninist theory: on the way to communism, society was expected to experience a period of hardship, where needs could not yet be fully met. In exchange for these sacrifices, the state guaranteed citizens secure employment (often with low expectations in terms of work ethic) and low prices for rents and necessities (Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 136; Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 33). What was “necessary,” as opposed to indicative of “bourgeois decadence,” was up to the Party, which portrayed citizens as “truly free” only when they desired what was “historically necessary” (Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 31–32).

43 Many of the economists originally serving on Gosplan were former Mensheviks (the defeated opposition to the Bolsheviks), but when they opposed what they perceived as unrealistic targets of the first five-year plan (1929–1933), they were removed (Nove, The Soviet Economy, 71–74).

44 Ibid., 77. In 1932, Gosplan was put in charge of long- and short-term planning, of resource allocation, and of the development of new techniques. Gosplan allocated resources for large investment programs, including the civilian nuclear power industry. Gosplan even absorbed the Central Statistical Office, following the elimination of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenkha) (Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 133). In 1948–1949, Stalin changed the State Planning Commission to State Planning Committee and relieved it of the tasks of material resource allocation, statistics, and new technologies. These tasks were instead assigned to individual State Committees directly subordinated to the Council of Ministers (Gossnab, Gosstatistika, Gostekhnika). (The collection of documents relating to Gostekhnika from 1948 to 1951 are at RGAE, f. 9480, op. 1.) After Stalin's death in 1953, the pre-1948 status was largely restored; only statistics remained a separate body under the Council of Ministers. In 1955, the State Economic Commission (Gosekonomkomissiia) was created to relieve Gosplan of short-term planning, but it was abolished two years later. The introduction of new technologies was also singled out under the revived Gostekhnika. (The new Gostekhnika's tasks were identical to those the organization had in 1948 to 1951, except for standards and patents, which were assigned to two separate State Committees (RGAE, f. 9480, preface to op. 2).) Gostekhnika was again reorganized in 1957 (as the State Scientific-Technical Committee, GNTK SSSR). The only change in tasks was an emphasis on international scientific contacts. This organization lasted until April 1961 (RGAE, f. 9480, preface to op. 3). After that, it became the State Committee for the Coordination of Science and Technology, until October 1965, when it was transformed into the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT, under the Council of Ministers; RGAE, f. 9480, preface to op. 7). Apart from facilitating, coordinating, and supervising research on innovative technologies and their implementation, the GKNT was also in charge of popularizing scientific information, of exhibiting the latest achievements, and of other forms of public dissemination of scientific knowledge (see also RGAE, f. 9480, preface to op. 9, vol. 1). From 1960 to 1962, Gosplan was put in charge of short-term planning (up to five years), while long-term planning was assigned to a new agency, the Scientific-Economic Council (Nauchno-ekonomicheskii sovet, Gosekonomsovet)—again in an effort to emphasize long-term economic plans. See also RGAE, f. 4372, op. 57, d. 468, l. 57–63, 64, and 117–119.

45 Nove, The Soviet Economy, 73. Due to the chronic uncertainties of supplies and interministerial competition for them, each ministry strove to set up its own supply base and make sure its own factories produced the needed components. On the power of individual ministries, especially Sredmash, see Maria N. Vasilieva, “L’évolution des systèmes de prise de décisions dans le nucléaire soviétique (Russe),” Histoire, Économie et Société 20, no. 2 (April-June 2001): 257–275; Maria N. Vasilieva, Soleils rouges: L’ambition nucléaire soviétique [Essai sur l’évolution des systèmes de prise de décision dans le nucléaire soviétique (Russe)] (Paris: Institut d’Histoire de l’Industrie et Éditions Rive Droite, 1999); Vitalii P. Nasonov, E. P. Slavskii: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAT, 1998); Igor’ A. Beliaev and German G. Malkin, eds., E. P. Slavskii: 100 let so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: IzdAt, 1999).

46 Delayed delivery of supplies from subcontractors or their poor quality were some of the most common reasons cited in the annual reports of nuclear power plants for the underfulfillment of the plan. Delays caused by others were considered legitimate reasons for not meeting plan targets, and they had no consequences for the plant's management. The factories accused of delayed delivery of supplies or of faulty manufacturing usually had another subcontractor they could blame for the problems. Once that excuse was exhausted, an enterprise could fall back on the common excuse that they themselves had received plans with significant delays—for example, the plan for the current year had not arrived at the factory until March or April.

47 Minenergo conducted annual inspections of power plants and transmission lines (examples of reports are RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 802, d. 4222, and d. 5378). Nuclear power plants received a certificate of technical readiness (pasport tekhnicheskoi gotovnosti) after a successful inspection (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 5378, l. 155–156).

48 Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 133.

49 For an insightful critique of the concept of “economic reform,” see Ed A. Hewett, Soviet Central Planning: Probing the Limits of the Traditional Model (Washington, DC: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1984).

50 Nove, The Soviet Economy, 66.

51 Western analysts predicted that “it would be difficult but not quite impossible to arrive at a ‘technically’ balanced plan, that is, one where the needed inputs match the intended output, but quite impossible to see how one could approach an economic optimum” (Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 133, emphases in original).

52 Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 24.

53 Ibid., 37. By contrast, Kotkin has argued that the Soviet Union was essentially stable until the 1980s (Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)).

54 For a rich biography on Khrushchev, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003).

55 There were two notable exceptions: the Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Sredmash), which he left undisturbed, and the Ministry of the Electric Power Industry (later Minenergo), which was renamed but survived the reforms intact (Nove, The Soviet Economy, 76). The Ministry of the Electric Power Industry was liquidated in late 1958/early 1959 and replaced by a Ministry of the Construction of Power Plants. As a consequence, a large number of organizations tried to assert claims to individual enterprises that had been associated with the disassembled ministry (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 58, d. 461, l. 1–90). See also Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (London: Longman, 2003).

56 Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 81–82.

57 Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 67–69.

58 Jeremy Smith and Melanie Ilic, eds., Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (New York: Routledge, 2011).

59 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 23.

60 Ibid., 9, 23, 36–37.

61 Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 145.

62 Letter from Igor V. Kurchatov to the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, and chairman of Gosplan, Iosif I. Kuzmin, dated March 2, 1959 (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 47–48).

63 Ibid., 24, 49, 59.

64 Ibid., 9, 49–51. Goncharov provides two of Kurchatov's letters as appendixes to his article: one is from June 21, 1958, and addressed to Leonid Brezhnev, then a member of the Central Committee's Presidium (Letter to comrade L. I. Brezhnev from I. V. Kurchatov, June 21, 1958, No. G/590ss (also in RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 107, rolik 7213, l. 64–66)); the other dates from April 1959 and was sent to Kosygin, as well as to two high Party officials (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 65–70). In 1964, nuclear power plants were expected to become competitive with other power plants by 1970 (Statement on “The Soviet Fuel-Energy Balance,” letter from I. Poliakov dated March 21, 1964, forwarded to P. F. Lomako and V. E. Dymshits (Gosplan) on March 31, 1964 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 65, d. 771, l. 22–47)). In the copy preserved at RGAE in the Gosplan document collection, the relevant passage is underlined by hand with a big question mark added in the left margin.

65 Criteria for more specific site selections were manifold, as discussed earlier. See also Dodd, Industrial Decision-Making and High-Risk Technology.

66 See, for example, the letter from A. Nekrasov to G. Pervukhin (Gosplan), April 20, 1967, suggesting it was unnecessary to build a separate Latvian nuclear power plant, given the planned Leningrad nuclear plant (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 1736, l. 53–54); another letter is from the chairman of the Belorus Council of Ministers, T. Kisilev, to the Ukrainian Council of Ministers (March 12, 1968, No. 0212–255), requesting a nuclear power plant in the Belorus SSR (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 2495, l. 81–82). Ia. Finogenov (deputy minister of power and electrification) explained to Pervukhin (Gosplan) on April 19, 1968 (No. F-3814), that Minenergo intended to start construction of a Belorus nuclear power plant in 1971–1975 (l. 83). Finally, Pervukhin wrote back to the Belorus Council of Ministers on June 21, 1968 (No. N.22–352), reporting that Minenergo had been given the responsibility of identifying suitable sites for the construction of new nuclear power plants, including one in the Belorus SSR. He indicated that after this work was completed, a decision about further plans would be made (l. 84–85).

67 An interesting case of adjustment occurred in 1966, when after the first quarter of the year, actual electricity use remained way below expectations. So the plan needed to be adjusted down to reflect this situation, as well as to avoid financial problems and a destabilizing effect on the economy (Letter No. ES-217 from P. S. Neporozhnii to the Council of Ministers, April 28, 1966; RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 908, l. 208–210). Despite doubts by the Ministry of Finance (l. 212), Gosplan approved the suggested modifications (l. 213). Again in 1969, Neporozhnii reported problems with anticipated electricity use: this time, he stated that the ministries and departments (that operated within “limits”) had not used the anticipated amount of electricity, while “unlimited” consumers, like households or agriculture, had been underrated in that year's plan. As a solution, he in effect suggested that the actual use of electricity up to the preset “limits” should be more strictly enforced, and requested that the Council of Ministers and Gosplan review this issue (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3214, l. 80–84). The practice of “limits” for industry was not new; see letter from A. Salmin (secretary of the Cheliabinsk Party committee) No. 97s, dated August 29, 1956 (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 41, l. 38).

68 The Ordzhonikidze factory in Podolsk had failed to set up a required test stand. See RGAE, f. 4372, op. 64, d. 576, l. 238–239 (“Tov. Kosyginu A. N., O polozhenii na stroitel'stve Novo-Voronezhskoi atomnoi elektrostantsii,” by F. Maiboroda and A. Cherepnev, January 11, 1962), and 240–252 (“O polozhenii na stroitel'stve Novo-Voronezhskoi atomnoi elektrostantsii,” by G. V. Ermakov (Chief Engineer of the Ministry of the Construction of Power Plants), A. V. Nikolaev (State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy), V. V. Goncharov and S. A. Skvortsov (Institute of Atomic Energy), A. A. Khokhlachev (Ordzhonikidze factory, Podolsk), M. I. Ivanov (Project Manager TEP), N. A. Rogovin (Head of the construction of the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant), and I. F. Chepak (Director of the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant)).

69 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 64, d. 576, l. 253.

70 On March 27, 1962, Gosplan submitted a revised delivery schedule of equipment for the Novo-Voronezh and Beloiarsk nuclear power plants (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 64, d. 576, l. 254).

71 Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 72–73, 87.

72 Although originally, Khrushchev and Bulganin had split Malenkov's combined role as general secretary and premier, Khrushchev later combined these two roles in his own person (Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 71). In the 1970s, long before Kosygin's retreat from politics in October 1980 (he died in December 1980), Brezhnev took on both of these roles (Viktor Andriianov, Kosygin: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003)).

73 Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 44, 67; T. I. Fetistov, ed., Prem’er izvestnyi i neizvestnyi: Vospominaniia o A. N. Kosygine (Moscow: Respublika, 1997); Andriianov, Kosygin: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei; Aleksei N. Kosygin, Ob uluchshenii upravleniia promyshlennost’iu, sovershenstvovanii planirovaniia i usilenii ekonomicheskogo stimulirovaniia promyshlennogo proizvodstva. Doklad na plenume TsK KPSS, 27 sentiabria 1965 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1965).

74 Kosygin had headed various ministries under Stalin but fell from Stalin's favor in 1952, when he was removed from the Politburo. Under Khrushchev, he served as chairman of Gosplan, and later as deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. After Khrushchev's ouster, Kosygin headed the government as chairman of the Council of Ministers, while Brezhnev became First Secretary of the Party (Andriianov, Kosygin: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei; Fetistov, Prem’er izvestnyi i neizvestnyi).

75 Kosygin, Ob uluchshenii upravleniia promyshlennost’iu; see also Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 44, 67; Andriianov, Kosygin; Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). Kosygin's reforms were arguably inspired by Evsei Liberman's new methods of economic planning that he saw based on the principles of a “new democratic centralism.” See Michael Kaser, “Kosygin, Liberman, and the Pace of Soviet Industrial Reform,” The World Today 21, no. 9 (1965): 375–388; Vladimir G. Tremla, “The Politics of ‘Libermanism,’” Soviet Studies 19, no. 4 (1968): 567–572; Robert Stuart, “Evsei Grigor’evich Liberman,” in George W. Simmonds, ed., Soviet Leaders, 193–199 (New York: Crowell, 1967); Myron Sharpe, ed., Planning, Profit, and Incentives in the USSR, Volume 1: The Liberman Discussion—a New Phase in Soviet Economic Thought (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1966).

76 In contrast to the pre-Khrushchev pattern, central planners and regional administrators were now supposed to engage in a shared effort to enhance economic efficiency. Also, under Kosygin's reforms enterprise directors were strengthened vis-à-vis trade unions and the Party. The role of the trade unions was stabilized as management watchdogs, supervising the introduction of innovative technologies and the correct functioning of bureaucratic procedures (Balinky et al., Planning and the Market in the U.S.S.R., 79–86).

77 Nove, The Soviet Economy, 84, 221.

78 Other important aspects of this reform process included the reinstating of Gosplan as the sole planning agency.

79 Only the State Committee for Construction (Gosstroi) and the State Committee for Scientific Research (which was renamed as the “State Committee for Science and Technology”) survived these reforms by being placed directly under the patronage of the Council of Ministers (ibid., 82–84).

80 Interview #21. Kosygin actively supported the RBMK design proposed by Sredmash (Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia, 33–35, 41–53). Slavskii's medals include the Hero of Socialist Labor (three times), ten Orders of Lenin, Order of the October Revolution, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor, Order of the Patriotic War (first degree), a Medal “For Labor Valor,” five anniversary medals, the Lenin prize, and the State Prize (three times) (Nasonov, E. P. Slavskii, 226). His ministry had a reputation—that because of the classified nature of the evidence cannot be verified—for always having money and being able to pay its bills, so industry competed for Sredmash contracts (Interview #3).

81 Nove, The Soviet Economy, 78; Hewett, Soviet Central Planning. Just before the State Committee for Energy and Electrification became a ministry again, on September 8, 1965, Neporozhnii urged Kosygin in a letter (No. ES-725) “to examine one more time and to decide favorably” the question of allocating factories to his committee that had previously been assets of the Ministry of Power Plants (RGAE, f. 4372, f. 66, d. 231, l. 86–87; RGAE, f. 4372, op. 58, d. 461, l. 1–90). Thus, while enterprises in a socialist society did not engage in direct competition (a crucial ingredient of market economies), there was competition for control over enterprises on the level of ministries.

82 In his letter to the Council of Ministers of October 19, 1965 (No. ES-26), quoting order No. 755 of October 12, 1965, Neporozhnii refers to an earlier letter (dated October 9, 1965, No. ES-9) that had supposedly contained a detailed list of enterprises (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 231, l. 98).

83 For example, RGAE, f. 4372, op. 65, d. 769.

84 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 65, d. 771, l. 151–152 and 191–192.

85 Ibid., l. 195.

86 Letter No. ES-82 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 907, l. 57–65).

87 Ibid.

88 Letter No. ES-579 of August 17, 1967 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 1723, l. 145–149). For a broader argument on these interinstitutional struggles for power see Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

89 This line of argument continued in 1968 in the context of nuclear power plants: costs continued to rise for reactors, main circulation pumps, steam turbines, computers, and specialized stainless steel equipment (Letter from Neporozhnii to the Council of Ministers, July 9, 1968, No. ES-489 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 2496, l. 188–189)).

90 Neporozhnii wrote to the Central Committee on August 25, 1962, complaining about delays in the delivery of materials and equipment for the Beloiarsk and Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plants, and objecting to the poor quality of the equipment supplied (Letter from P. S. Neporozhnii to the Central Committee, No. 2996-Is (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 257, l. 64)).

91 Letter to V. M. Riabikov, November 22, 1968, No. 22–693 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 2501, l. 72–74).

92 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3209, l. 116–118.

93 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3209, l. 119.

94 Letter No. 22–680 to Baibakov from M. Pervukhin, A. Pavlenko, and A. Sapozhnikov, July 16, 1976, addressed the need to import stainless steel pipes for power engineering in addition to the domestically produced ones (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6047, l. 116–118). These stainless steel pipes were among the most sought-after parts in the nuclear power industry, but Soviet industry in the early 1970s couldn't manufacture more than a fraction of the quantities needed. The rest had to be imported, until more national factories could start production (Letter No. 22–741 to V. Isaev from A. M. Nekrasov (Department of Energy and Electrification), August 3, 1973 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6047, l. 154)). Sredmash apparently had accepted orders for enriched nuclear fuel to be delivered to France and Italy between 1973 and 1977. The Department of Energy and Electrification requested that Gosplan dedicate part of this income to importing special stainless steel pipes for nuclear power plants in 1974 and 1975, and in addition that it ask these countries for the material in advance (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6047, l. 117–118).

95 Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, 125–154 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

96 Letter from the Ministry of Energy and Electrification to the Council of Ministers, March 31, 1969, No. ES-230 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3210, l. 37).

97 Letter from P. Neporozhnii to A. Kosygin, July 4, 1969, No. ES-553 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3210, l. 79–84).

98 Iurii I. Koriakin, Okrestnosti iadernoi energetiki Rossii: Novye vyzovy (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002), 49.

99 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 9.

100 Viktor I. Riabko, “Stroiteli energozhilstroia—Chernobyl'skoi AES,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 325–331 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 325–327).

101 See, for example, RGASPI, f. 1, op. 65, d. 536–537. This production-line vision was never actually accomplished, because nuclear power plant construction chronically lagged behind schedule and managers had to work out unforeseen problems, adjust to manufacturing delays, and so on.

102 An unconfirmed story I heard from one interviewee reinforces the salience of this process: during the initial operation of Leningrad's reactor number 1, the sudden failure of the cooling system threatened the reactor's safe operation, but operators were able switch over to the already-completed cooling system of unit 2 (Interview #18).

103 In 1971, RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 4387, l. 102.

104 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3210, l. 81–82.

105 “According to comrade E. P. Slavskii's conclusion, this program will be supplied with nuclear fuel, but it will necessitate the expansion of existing production capacities” (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3210, l. 83).

106 This phrase is shorthand for referring to interministerial and interdepartmental collaborations (“sovmestno s osnovnymi zainteresovannymi ministerstvami”) (Letter to comrade N. K. Baibakov, signed by M. Pervukhin, A. Nekrasov, and K. Vinogradov, August 25, 1969, No. 22–544 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3215, l. 38–40)).

107 Letter No. ES-544 to the Council of Ministers, June 10, 1971 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 4701, l. 94).

108 Letter from V. Ia. Isaev, July 15, 1971 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 4701, l. 97).

109 Letter No. ES-156 to V. E. Dymshits, March 7, 1972 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 5416, l. 22–23).

110 Letter No. 583-P from V. Isaev (Gosplan) and F. Manoilo (Construction Bank of the USSR), March 31, 1972 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 5416, l. 126).

111 Letter to A. M. Lalaiants (deputy chairman of Gosplan) from A. Pavlenko, September 5, 1973 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6259, l. 4–5). Imports of stainless steel pipes with no welded seams were anticipated to be as high as 40 percent until 1978 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6259, l. 12).

112 In other regions of the Soviet Union, where natural resources were nearby and easy to develop, nuclear power was not the top choice. But in the European part, nuclear power looked comparatively cheap.

113 Letter No. 50–356 to the chairman of Gosplan, N. K. Baibakov, from G. Krasnikovskii (head of the state expert commission), September 26, 1973 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6259, l. 8). The commission's full report, dated September 20, 1973, is attached to this document (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6259, l. 9–16), with the signatures of fourteen members (not including the chairman) on l. 14.

114 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6259, l. 12. At that point, a second production line was not scheduled for completion until the early 1980s.

115 Gas deliveries to Eastern Europe had started in 1974; in contrast to oil deliveries that had started earlier, gas prices were not subsidized (Office of Technology Assessment, Technology & Soviet Energy Availability).

116 GKNT Report to the Council of Ministers, No. 356-p, signed by V. Kirillin, N. Baibakov, and P. Neporozhnii, December 31, 1974 (RGAE, f. 9480, op. 9, d. 2403, l. 34–38).

117 The difference between peak and base demands was 26 million kW in 1970–1971, and the capacity to cover peak demand was 30 million kW. For 1975 the difference was anticipated to rise to 47 million kW (Letter from A. Nekrasov to N. K. Baibakov, “On measures to cover peak demands in electrical power systems,” December 22, 1970 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3976, l. 161–163); see also the letter from M. Pervukhin and A. Pavlenko to N. Baibakov, December 29, 1970, “regarding the question of locating energy production and covering peak demands in electrical power systems of the European part of the USSR” (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3976, l. 173–175)).

118 This report was approved by Gosplan and was intended for discussion in the session on May 26, 1975, at 10:00 a.m. (RGAE, f. 9480, op. 9, d. 2403, l. 71b; the actual report is on l. 72–88).

119 RGAE, f. 9480, op. 9, d. 2403, l. 72–73.

120 Ibid., l. 74.

121 “Electrification is the backbone of the construction of an economy of a communist society; it plays an important role in all branches of the national economy in the realization of modern technological progress” (from the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in A. S. Pavlenko and A. M. Nekrasov, eds., Energetika SSSR v 1971–1975 godakh (Moscow: Energiia, 1972), 7).

122 Josephson, “Atomic-Powered Communism.”

123 Nove makes the argument that as early as in the late 1960s, palpable political influence on economic decisions decreased (Nove, The Soviet Economy, 160). As Bunce puts it, there “was an implicit deal struck in the 1960s between the regime and the society, wherein publics agreed to comply with the regime and tolerate declining opportunities for social mobility in exchange for a well-developed social security net, price stability, steady if unspectacular improvements in the standard of living, increased access to consumer goods, and a relatively depoliticized environment” (Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 33; see also Nove, The Soviet Economy, 17).

124 Political science scholars have emphasized this active role of the state (e.g., Theda Skocpol and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labour (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origin of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)). For analyses of the relationship between science, technology, and the state see, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Yaron Ezrahi, “Technology and the Illusion of the Escape from Politics,” in Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard M. Segal, eds., Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, 29–37 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994); Scott, Seeing Like a State; Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Brian Wynne, eds., Risk, Environment and Modernity: Toward a New Ecology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004).

125 The rhetoric of international cooperation, subtly present since the first Geneva Conference in 1955, also changed registers over time. This language evolved from vague declarations of “nuclear assistance” and ambivalent promises of technology transfer, into slowly emerging cooperative agreements with partners in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (for references see Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization?”).

Chapter 2

1 Many global nuclear histories start with the atomic bomb and end with nuclear power programs, as if the latter were “trickle-down” effects of harnessing nuclear energy for the bomb. In the discussion that follows, I reverse this order, in part to honor chronology and in part to demonstrate how nonmilitary bureaucracies came to govern nuclear power.

2 On the idea of “social technologies” see, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

3 Cf. Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1986), 278.

4 Weber defined bureaucracy as “a form of organization that emphasizes precision, speed, clarity, regularity, reliability, and efficiency achieved through the creation of a fixed division of tasks, hierarchical supervision, and detailed rules and regulations” (ibid., 24–25). See also Richard Swedberg, ed., Essays in Economic Sociology: Max Weber (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster, 1968); Sam Whimster, ed., The Essential Weber: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2004); Robert K. Merton, Ailsa P. Gray, Barbara Hockey, and Hanan C. Selvin, eds., Reader in Bureaucracy (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952).

5 Thomas Hughes identifies the part of a large technological system that lags behind the rest as “reverse salient”—that is, a part that can impair the functioning of the entire system (Thomas P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 51–82 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) (especially 73–74)).

6 Langdon Winner has argued that a technology like nuclear power suggests certain forms of politics, institutional structures, and practices surrounding it (Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)). Contrary to Winner's argument, the history of the Soviet nuclear industry shows that nuclear power can be and in fact is administered quite differently in different national contexts, and depending on the institutional culture.

7 Secondary sources include Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York: Freeman, 1999); Arkadii K. Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’ atomnaia promyshlennost’ v SSSR (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1995); Arkadii K. Kruglov, Shtab Atomproma (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1998); Vladimir M. Kuznetsov, Rossiiskaia atomnaia energetika vchera, segodnia, zavtra: Vzgliad nezavisimogo eksperta (Moscow: Natsional’nyi Institut Pressy, 2000); David R. Marples, “The Post-Soviet Nuclear Power Program,” Post-Soviet Geography 34, no. 3 (1993): 172–184; Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia maloi atomnoi energetiki, vol. 5 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004).

8 Martha Lampland, “The Technopolitical Lineage of State Planning in Hungary, 1930–1956,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, 155–184 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27–61.

9 On March 15, 1956, a government decree set the goal of constructing nuclear power plants with a combined power output of 2175 MW within the next five years, and assigned 775 MW to Sredmash, and 1400 MW to the ministry of power plants (Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001), 218). This division of labor appears in archival references as well, albeit less explicitly. In 1971, for example, Gosplan anticipated an increase in power capacities of 154.3–164.3 million kW, of which 146.5–156.5 would be produced at power plants managed by Minenergo (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 4387, l. 114–115).

10 These included the ministries of petrochemical engineering (Minneftemash), of the instrumentation industry (Minpriborprom), of ferrous and nonferrous metals (Minchermet and Mintsvetmet), and of the chemical industry (Minkhimprom) (see “Letter to comrade Baibakov, N. K.” from A. Pavlenko, K. Vinogradov, and A. Nekrasov, No. 22–9, of January 10, 1969 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3215, l. 1–3)). In the mid-1950s, Sredmash was responsible for designing and building reactors, Minenergo for managing the overall plant construction and assembly, and the Ministry of Heavy Machine Building (Mintiazhmash) for manufacturing parts for the two ministries (Vladimir V. Goncharov, “Pervyi period razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 16–70 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 33)).

11 On “crisis,” see Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986): 273–286; Nikolai L. Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

12 A good summary of how top-tier cadres were recruited in the Soviet era occurs in Nikolai I. Ryzhkov's preface to a volume on Vitalii F. Konovalov, minister of nuclear energy from 1989 to 1991: “The vast majority [of promoted cadres] consisted of professionally trained, talented organizers. And all good things in the country were accomplished with their active and positive participation. ... Back then, loyalty to the Homeland, to the people, formed the basis [of personnel management]” (V. V. Chernyshev, ed., Vitalii Fedorovich Konovalov: Stranitsy zhizni. Tvortsy iadernogo veka (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003), 3).

13 Historian of technology Paul Josephson sharply criticizes these early Soviet attempts to mass-produce equipment for the nuclear industry. According to him, this “premature standardization” was the main reason the Soviet nuclear power industry failed in terms of safety and economic efficiency (Josephson, Red Atom). But who determines when a standard is set “prematurely”?

14 Even the reactor designs that the Soviets labeled “standardized” (seriinyi proekt) continued to be modified and improved.

15 Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry,” Osiris 23 (2008): 82–111 (especially 83).

16 GOELRO is the acronym for the state commission appointed to create the plan, Gosudarstvennaia komissiia po elektrifikatsii Rossii. (See Iurii I. Koriakin, Okrestnosti iadernoi energetiki Rossii: Novye vyzovy (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); Petr S. Neporozhnii, Energetika strany glazami ministra: Dnevniki 1935–1985 gg. (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 2000); Dimitrii G. Zhimerin, ed., Sovremennye problemy energetiki (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1984); Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); see also RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, p. 1 (Narkom elektrostantsii i elektropromyshlennosti SSSR, Ministerstvo elektrostantsii SSSR, 1939–1959).)

17 Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 169–170. In fact, some critics argue that the revolution actually hampered an already-ongoing process of electrification and that the GOELRO plan was too often fetishized (Koriakin, Okrestnosti).

18 Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 189.

19 Petr S. Neporozhnii and Vladimir Iu. Steklov, eds., 50 let Leninskogo plana GOELRO [1920–1970]: Sbornik materialov (Moscow: Energiia, 1970); Vladimir Iu. Steklov, V. I. Lenin i elektrifikatsiia, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1982); Energetika narodnogo khoziaistva v plane GOELRO (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1966).

20 Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 190.

21 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 10.

22 The construction efforts initially relied heavily on prison labor, until the Council of Ministers shut down the GULag system in 1960 (see, e.g., Memorial, http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/r1/r1-4.htm). Memorial links the official end of the GULag system to order No. 020 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), dated January 25, 1960, which followed decree No. 44–16 of January 13, 1960, by the Council of Ministers. See also http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/the-gulag/. Koriakin dates the end of the prison labor system earlier, around 1956, which reflects the transfer of labor camps supporting the construction of military projects in 1955 from the central GULag administration to industrial and “special” construction administrations (Glavpromstroi and Glavspetsstroi) (Koriakin, Okrestnosti, 31). In 1939, the “People's Commissariat of Power Plants and the Electrical Industry” was created as an offspring of the People's Commissariat of Machine Building. Its subsequent reorganizations were in part due to the involvement of the Secret Police (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, NKVD) in the construction of power plants until 1956.

23 Arnold Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 23.

24 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 75.

25 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, especially 76–79; Thomas B. Cochran, Robert S. Norris, and Oleg A. Bukharin, Making the Russian Bomb: From Stalin to Yeltsin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

26 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 116.

27 Beria's Special Committee came into existence following a top-secret decree on August 20, 1945 (Postanovlenie gosudarstvennogo komiteta oborony No. 9887, ss/op (“top secret/special folder”—the highest level of security)); its members were Georgii Malenkov, one of the Central Committee secretaries; Nikolai Voznesenskii, head of Gosplan; three industrial managers (Vannikov, Zaveniagin, and Pervukhin); the scientists Kurchatov and Kapitsa; and General Makhnev from the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) (Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 135). On Beria, see Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

28 Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 117; Knight, Beria; Peter DeLeon, Development and Diffusion of the Nuclear Power Reactor: A Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1979), 74–75; Kruglov, Shtab atomproma.

29 Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 323; Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 218. Beria was arrested on June 26, 1953, and executed after his trial in December 1953. Kramish asserts that this arrest marked “a general lessening of tensions within the Soviet atomic energy program” (Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 177). The new Ministry of Medium Machine Building was created on the basis of the First Chief Administration (PGU), and the Third Chief Administration, an organization involved with rockets, aircraft, missiles, and missile defense (Pavel L. Podvig, “Protivoraketnaia oborona kak faktor strategicheskikh vzaimootnoshenii SSSR/Rossii i SShA v 1945–2003 gg.,” doctoral dissertation, Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, 2004; David Holloway, “Physics, the State, and Civil Society in the Soviet Union,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30, no. 1 (1999): 173–193).

30 The Soviet nuclear weapons project no doubt benefited from espionage, but it still involved tremendous ingenuity, coordination, and expenditures domestically, as Holloway has convincingly documented in Stalin and the Bomb. See also Vladimir P. Vizgin, ed., Istoriia Sovetskogo atomnogo proekta: Dokumenty, vospominaniia, issledovaniia., vol. 1 (Moscow: Ianus-K, 1998); Vladimir P. Vizgin, ed., Istoriia Sovetskogo atomnogo proekta: Dokumenty, vospominaniia, issledovaniia, vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2002).

31 Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960); Boris A. Fain, Aktivnaia zona: Povest’ ob atomnom institute (Moscow: Skripto, 1998); Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Atomnyi avral (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 2001).

32 Cf. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; V. K. Ulasevich, ed., Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia: O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh (K 100-letiiu N. A. Dollezhalia), 2nd ed. (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh: Prodolzhenie traditsii (K 50-letiiu NIKIET im. N. A. Dollezhalia) (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); Lev D. Riabev, ed., Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy, 1938–1945, vol. 1, chast’ 2 (Moscow: Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 2002); Lev. D. Riabev, ed. Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy, 1945–1954, vol. 2, kn. 1 (Sarov: Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 1999); Lev D. Riabev, ed. Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy, 1945–1954, vol. 2, kn. 2 (Sarov: Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 2000); Lev D. Riabev, ed. Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy, 1945–1954, vol. 2, kn. 3 (Sarov: Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 2002); Lev D. Riabev, ed. Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, vol. 2, kn. 4 (Moscow and Sarov: Nauka and Fizmatlit, Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, 2003); Lev D. Riabev, ed. Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy: Atomnaia bomba, 1945–1954, vol. 2, kn. 5 (Moscow and Sarov: Nauka and Fizmatlit, Federal’noe agentstvo po atomnoi energii, 2005). As we will see throughout this book, the two programs cannot be clearly separated from an organizational viewpoint (see also DeLeon, Development and Diffusion of the Nuclear Power Reactor, 101).

33 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Raisa V. Kuznetsova, ed., Kurchatov v zhizni: Pis'ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia (iz lichnogo arkhiva) (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2002); Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1. For example, Kurchatov gave a passionate speech about the peaceful future of nuclear energy at the twentieth congress of the CPSU in 1956 (Igor’ V. Kurchatov, “Rech’ tovarishcha I. V. Kurchatova,” Pravda 53, no. 22 (February 1956): 7); on June 21, 1958, he wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev about delays on the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant construction site (Letter No. G-590 ss; RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 107, rolik 7213, l. 64–66) (reproduced in Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 65–66); in the spring of 1959, he wrote to the secretaries of the Party's Central Committee, F. R. Kozlov (April 16) and A. I. Kirichenko (April 6), as well as to the Council of Ministers (Aleksei Kosygin, April 24), again promoting the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant (ibid., 67–70).

34 This is the first official reference to peaceful applications of nuclear energy. See, for example, Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Vvedenie k 1-mu vypusku,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001), 5; Vladimir G. Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika: Otsenki proshlogo, realii nastoiashchego, ozhidaniia budushchego (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004), 8.

35 Lev A. Kochetkov, “K istorii sozdaniia Obninskoi AES,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 96–101 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Lev A. Kochetkov, ed., Ot Pervoi v mire AES k atomnoi energetike XXI veka. Sbornik tezisov, dokladov i soobshchenii (Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference, Obninsk, June 28–July 2, 1999) (Obninsk: Iadernoe obshchestvo Rossii, 1999).

36 Interview #12.

37 The pressurized water and liquid metal reactors eventually proved more suitable for naval propulsion (Maria Nicolaevna Vasilieva, Soleils rouges: L’ambition nucléaire soviétique [Essai sur l’évolution des systèmes de prise de décision dans le nucléaire soviétique (Russe)] (Paris: Institut d’Histoire de l’Industrie et Éditions Rive Droite, 1999); Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom: O iadernykh reaktorakh). Also see Interviews #4, #5, and #7.

38 “People's Commissariat” was the label Soviet political leaders preferred for what eventually became “ministries” after Stalin's death. The “People's Commissariat for Power Plants and the Power Industry” was created on January 24, 1939 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, t. 1, l. 5, Moscow). See also “Elektroenergetika: Nekotorye vazhneishie sobytiia,” prepared by Vanguard Ltd. as part of the project Elektromysl’ in March and April 2001, which contains a summary of the history of this industry from the nineteenth century to the early 1990s (http://www.sapov.ru/consul/reports/electro/el-sense_06.htm).

39 In its post-1962 form, it came to life through order No. 985 from the Communist Party's Central Committee and the Council of Ministers dated September 21, 1962, “On the organization of a union-republican ministry of power and electrification” (Ob organizatsii soiuzno-republikanskogo Ministerstva energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR) (mentioned in RGAE, f. 4372, f. 66, d. 231). The Russian word energetika encompasses both the engineering, and the industrial, operational, and commercial aspects of the power industry. For the sake of consistency, I have translated energetika as “energy.”

40 Schattenberg was able to locate an unedited manuscript of Lavrenenko's memoirs (RGAE, f. 9592, op. 1, d. 404) (Susanne Schattenberg, Stalins Ingenieure: Lebenswelten Zwischen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002)).

41 “Glavnoe upravlenie po kapital’nomu stroitel'stvu atomnykh elektrostantsii (Glavatomenergo). Godovoi finansovyi plan Glavka po kapital’nomu stroitel'stvu i izmeneniia k nemu na 1957 god. Plan finansirovaniia kapital’nogo stroitel'stva po Glavatomenergo na 1957, i svedeniia ob ego izmeneniia” (RGAE, f. 9599, op.1, d. 2). The official document of acceptance (Akt priemki) is in RGAE, f. 9599, op.1, d. 10, l. 17–32. Teploelektroproekt's Leningrad branch (LOTEP) was in charge of constructing the Beloiarsk plant. See also the minutes of the technical meeting in Glavatomenergo on February 19, 1959 (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 15, l. 6–7, “On the question of confirming a container wagon for the Beloiarsk GRES (state regional power station)” and “On the question of designing and manufacturing a container-wagon for the transport of fuel assemblies [for] V-1 at the Novo-Voronezh GRES”).

42 The original plans had been for a conventional power plant at the Beloiarsk site, according to Glavatomenergo's annual capital investment report for 1957 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, d. 1881, l. 2). When the Novo-Voronezh and Beloiarsk plants started operation in 1964, they were still perceived as experimental stations, not as powerful industrial power plants (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 233, l. 245–250). Even in late March 1965, neither plant was considered an industrial energy production facility (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 233, l. 245–250; Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 217; Neporozhnii, Energetika strany glazami ministra).

43 The Ministry of Power Plants and their project managing organization Teploelektroproekt (with its suborganization LOTEP in Leningrad) in May 1957 were still designing and planning the VVER plant near Leningrad, on the assumption that they would be able to use plans developed for the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant, since the basic equipment was expected to be analogous at the Leningrad site (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 8, l. 20).

44 In the early 1960s, as a consequence of Khrushchev's reforms, the ministry was called the State Production Committee for Power and Electrification (Gosudarstvennyi proizvodstvennyi komitet po energetike i elektrifikatsii SSSR), with Neporozhnii as its chairman. The committee was responsible for supervising the construction of huge hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, as well as fossil fuel plants and high-voltage power supply lines (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 65, d. 765, l. 79–88).

45 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 217; Neporozhnii, Energetika strany glazami ministra. See also “Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR, Glavnoe proizvodstvenno-tekhnicheskoe upravlenie po stroitel'stvu, Vsesoiuznyi institut po proektirovaniiu organizatsii energeticheskogo stroitel'stva ‘Orgenergostroi’: Organizatsiia opytnogo stroitel'stva Zaporozhskoi, Krymskoi i Chigirinskoi AES metodom nepreryvnogo dolgovremennogo potoka: Rukovoditel’ raboty professor F. V. Sapozhnikov,” Moscow, 1981 (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 65, d. 536, str. 1–34). Neporozhnii reportedly opposed the graphite-water reactor (RBMK) and its promoters, primarily on economic grounds (Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3, 217–218; Viktor P. Tatarnikov, “Atomnaia elektroenergetika (s VVER i drugimi reaktorami),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossi. Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 303–399 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (especially 340–342); see also Interviews #8 and #25).

46 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, t. 1, l. 8.

47 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 65, d. 769, l. 60–63.

48 Draft plan for the development of the nuclear power industry in 1966–1970, generated by A. Pavlenko (from Gosplan's Department of Energy and Electrification), sent to N. Baibakov, July 8, 1967 (Otdel energetiki i elektrifikatsii: Proekt plana razvitiia energetiki na 1966–1970 gg., razrabotannyi otdelom (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 1737, l. 1–11)).

49 Aleksandr Emel’ianenkov, Ostrova Sredmasha (Moscow: Rossiiskaia gazeta & Izd. Parad, 2005); Vladimir Gubarev, Agoniia Sredmasha: Ot Chernobylia do Chubaisa (Moscow: Akademkniga, 2006); Alexander Yemelyanenkov, The Sredmash Archipelago (Moscow: IPPNW-Russia, 2000); Fain, Aktivnaia zona.

50 Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Nakanune avrala (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 2000); see also Vitalii P. Nasonov, B. L. Vannikov: Memuary, vospominaniia, stat’i (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1997).

51 As chairman of Gostekhnika, Malyshev exercised technical control on a higher level, but he died on February 20, 1957, of leukemia (Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 178). On the history of Gostekhnika and its later incarnations, see Stephen Fortescue, Science Policy in the Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 1990). For Zaveniagin's tenure at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex from 1933 to 1936, see M. Ia. Vazhnov and I. S. Aristov, eds., A. P. Zaveniagin: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: PoliMediia, 2002); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

52 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 218. Kramish notes that Zaveniagin's death “marked the beginning of several organizational crises within the Soviet atomic energy program” (Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 178).

53 Pervukhin was sent to the GDR as ambassador, to return only in the late 1960s, when he took on a position as a member of Gosplan's board (also see Interview #7).

54 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 218. On Slavskii, see also Igor’ A. Beliaev and German G. Malkin, eds., E. P. Slavskii: 100 let so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: IzdAT, 1999); Vitalii P. Nasonov, E. P. Slavskii: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAT, 1998).

55 Sredmash was apparently able to keep the high level of government support alive, which in turn reinforced its reputation as powerful “state within the state” (Fain, Aktivnaia zona).

56 DeLeon, Development and Diffusion of the Nuclear Power Reactor, 98.

57 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 217.

58 While part of Sredmash, Glavatom directly answered to the Council of Ministers. Kramish dates the creation of this agency to April 18, 1956 (Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 178), while Sidorenko gives the earlier date of March 20, 1956 (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 218).

59 Josephson, Red Atom.

60 Emelyianov had been chairman of the Committee on Standards during the Second World War (Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 179); this previous qualification could have backed up, if not inspired, the drive toward standardization of nuclear reactors, plant details, and construction processes.

61 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 218. Sidorenko describes this as “detachment” from Sredmash, but the exact administrative subordination of ministries, glavki (Chief Administrations), and committees was shuffled frequently, without substantially altering their functions. Glavatom shared its fate with other State Committees. See also RGAE, f. 4372–62–571, l. 220–222.

62 Andranik M. Petros’iants, Dorogi zhizni, kotorye vybirali nas (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1993); Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 220.

63 No wonder international observers kept puzzling over its exact institutional scope. As one asked, “Did it encompass both peaceful and military nuclear applications, R&D, regulation, and safety standards?” (DeLeon, Development and Diffusion of the Nuclear Power Reactor, 75). One of the nine Administrations was in charge of nuclear power plants; its director was Nikolai Nikolaev, a power engineer who had led operations of one of the plutonium production reactors at Chelyabinsk-40, and later became director of the Obninsk nuclear power plant (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 218).

64 This agency's mandate and its level of autonomy fluctuated between ministerial and Union-wide for decades, and its designation reflects that; its name changed back to Chief Administration in 1965 and to State Committee in 1978. In everyday operations, the difference between State Committee and Chief Administration may not have mattered, and authors certainly conflate the two frequently.

65 Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 181.

66 The IAE was one of the scientific research institutes that reported to the GU-16, which I discuss later in this chapter.

67 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 355–363. Holloway's account also refutes DeLeon's earlier conclusion that “the complete domination by the Soviet state of its nuclear research during the early stages makes it difficult to imagine that Russian nuclear scientists could have voiced an independent policy about nuclear energy research beyond describing the theoretical knowledge and technical applications” (DeLeon, Development and Diffusion of the Nuclear Power Reactor, 93). Also see Igor’ V. Kurchatov, “Nekotorye voprosy razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR,” Pravda 141, no. 20 (May 1956): 2; “Nekotorye voprosy razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR (Doklad, sdelannyi I. V. Kurchatovym v Kharuelle (Angliia) v aprele 1956g.),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 71–82 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001).

68 Grabovskii, Nakanune avrala; Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Atomnyi avral (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 2001); Vizgin, Istoriia Sovetskogo atomnogo proekta, vols. 1 and 2. Kurchatov even “saved” Soviet genetics by providing an umbrella institute for them (see also Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)). Vizgin has described the nuclear physics community as a small cell of “civil society” in the Soviet Union (see also Holloway, “Physics, the State, and Civil Society”).

69 “Ia schastliv, chto rodilsia v Rossii i posviatil svoiu zhizn’ atomnoi nauke velikoi Strany Sovetov” (Kurchatov, “Rech’,” 7).

70 Iurii N. Rudenko and Vladimir A. Semenov, eds., Avtomatizatsiia dispetcherskogo upravleniia v elektroenergetike (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo MEI, 2000).

71 Sonja D. Schmid, “Envisioning a Technological State: Reactor Design Choices and Political Legitimacy in the Soviet Union and Russia,” doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 2005; Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry.”

72 This question continued to be debated even after the creation of Soiuzatomenergo, the All-Union operating organization set up in 1978 (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 223).

73 On the tension between the opposing views of nuclear materials and facilities as trivial or special, see also Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

74 This transfer did not come as a surprise: it was anticipated by the ministries and committees involved. On April 30, 1964, Neporozhnii, chairman of the State Committee for Power and Electrification, wrote to the chairman of Gosplan (P. F. Lomako at that point) about the development of the power industry during the eighth five-year plan (No. N-4958, a reaction to order No. 1082 of the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee from October 19, 1963, “On the order and schedule of creating a draft of the five-year plan of developing the Soviet economy for 1966–1970” (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 65, d. 769, l. 55–98)).

75 In addition, the Ministry of Heavy Machine Building (Mintiazhmash) would manufacture heat-exchange equipment, steam turbines, steam conductors, and transportation equipment for all types of reactors; the Ministry of the Defense Industry (Minoboronprom) would manufacture circulation pumps and specialized optical devices; and the Ministry of the Electrotechnical Industry (Minelektrotekhprom) would produce all electrical equipment, as well as the control and safety systems for all reactor types. Additional ministries were responsible for even more specialized items.

76 In July 1967, the Department for Energy and Electrification in Gosplan credited nuclear power plants as an increasingly important source of energy, with an estimated 10 percent of electricity to be generated at these plants by 1975 (Draft plan for the development of the power industry in 1966–1970, generated by A. Pavlenko, sent to N. Baibakov, July 8, 1967 (Otdel energetiki i elektrifikatsii. Proekt plana razvitiia energetiki na 1966–1970 gg., razrabotannyi otdelom; RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 1737, l. 1–11)).

77 For example, the construction bureau OKB Gidropress, originally a classified Sredmash enterprise, was transferred to the authority of the Ordzhonikidze Machine Building Factory of Podolsk, a factory working for a civilian ministry (the Ministry of Heavy, Power, and Transport Engineering), in 1966 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 911, l. 20).

78 For example, in 1978 it would start operating a state-of-the-art training center for VVER control room operators at the Novo-Voronezh plant, replacing earlier temporary training simulators (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 222). Much later, a similar center for RBMK operators was established at Smolensk.

79 In 1978, the former director of the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant, Fedor Ovchinnikov, was appointed deputy minister of nuclear power, and from 1982 to 1986, Gennadii Shasharin filled the position. Shasharin had worked as chief engineer at the Beloiarsk plant, supervised construction of the Loviisa plant in Finland, and later served in the Central Committee's Department of Mechanical Engineering (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 221). According to one interviewee, the team at the Beloiarsk plant (where the first two reactors were a graphite-water design) had been recruited mostly from Minenergo cadres, while most of the cadres for the Novo-Voronezh (the first VVER) and the Leningrad (the first RBMK) plants came from Sredmash (Interview #25).

80 Sidorenko writes that Glavatomenergo was “created” in 1966, but since this organization had existed before, it could only have been recreated, reorganized, or updated to the new organizational management structures. Georgii Ermakov served as chief engineer under Grigoriants. In late 1969, Leonid Voronin replaced Ermakov, and he remained in this position until May 1978, when Glavatomenergo was liquidated. The chief engineer was the highest scientific-technical position, and it was the highest management position involving the least amount of administrative work (see Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978)).

81 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 219. I have been unable to locate the decree, but the majority of Soviet nuclear power plants trace their existence back to decree No. 800–252, issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers in September 1966.

82 Vsesoiuznoe promyshlennoe ob”edinenie “Soiuzatomenergo” (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 221). Order No. 190 Minenergo USSR, June 2, 1978, implementing decree No. 1044r of the Council of Ministers from May 23, 1978 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 16, t. 2, foreword p. 1).

83 Vladimir Nevskii was appointed director of the new organization. Nevskii came to Soiuzatomenergo from the Beloiarsk nuclear power plant, where he had served as director. Iurii Markov became his first deputy (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 221). Markov was transferred from Sredmash's GU-16, and returned to Sredmash in 1982. In 1982, Nevskii died and Gennadii Veretennikov stepped in as director of Soiuzatomenergo. Like several other top Minenergo managers, he was released from this position after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 222).

84 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 222. To facilitate nuclear power development in CMEA countries, two joint enterprises had been established in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Interatominstrument was set up to oversee the manufacture of high-technology equipment for nuclear power plants (Office of Technology Assessment, Technology & Soviet Energy Availability (Washington, DC: Congress of the U.S., Office of Technology Assessment, 1981), 295). Interatomenergo was established to coordinate supplies, to supervise the start-up of plants, and to train nuclear power managers (Vladimir Sobell, The Red Market: Industrial Co-Operation and Specialisation in Comecon (Aldershot: Gower, 1984), 155; Office of Technology Assessment, Technology and Soviet Energy Availability, 295).

85 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 219.

86 NIKIET provided this quality control to plants where RBMKs were assembled. Apparently, there were significant differences in how well this service worked, depending on which ministry managed a given plant (Fain, Aktivnaia zona, 114–123).

87 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 219–220.

88 December 1958 report from Lavrenenko (Glavatomenergo) to the Central Committee (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 107, rolik 7213, l. 80–88). See also the correspondence between the secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee (Obkom KPSS), comrade Rodionov, the Central Committee's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Ministry of Power Plants in November 1957, about the initial plans of the Ministry of Power Plants to build a nuclear power plant with VVERs (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 69, rolik 7205, l. 39–48).

89 In March 1958, Lavrenenko (Glavatomenergo) reported to the Central Committee on construction work at the Leningrad nuclear power plant (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 107, rolik 7213, l. 43–51).

90 December 1958 report from Lavrenenko (Glavatomenergo) to the Central Committee (RGANI, f. 5, op. 40, d. 107, rolik 7213, l. 80–88).

91 Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 34.

92 The site changed to Sosnovyi Bor (Interview #8 and personal communication). Aleksandrov and his deputy Savelii Feinberg from the Institute of Atomic Energy served as scientific directors, NII-8 (Dollezhal's institute, the later NIKIET) as the chief design engineer, and the Leningrad enterprise GSPI-11 (the later NIPIET) as the general project manager, with the participation of a series of other factories (Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 42). Apparently, Minenergo or some of its enterprises were still involved in the process until the start-up of the first unit in 1973: as late as January 1974, Pervukhin from Gosplan stated in a letter to the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Veniamin Dymshits, that Minenergo had turned over all responsibilities for the Leningrad nuclear power plant to Sredmash (l. 51 in letter No. PP-17277 to V. E. Dymshits from M. Pervukhin, January 11, 1974 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6042, l. 50–57)).

93 Leonid A. Belianin, ed. Leningradskaia AES: Gody, sobytiia, liudi (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1998). Additionally, the plant “survived” all subsequent reorganizations of the nuclear power industry as an independent entity under the aegis of Sredmash. When Sredmash was liquidated in 1989, and even when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the Leningrad plant's directors managed to keep some of its special status within the new administrative framework for the civilian nuclear sector and under the new nuclear authorities. The plant blocked Rosenergoatom, the newly created operating agency that was to coordinate the overall technological policy, to generalize operating experience, and to provide and develop the scientific, technological, and production support for nuclear power plant operation, from taking over the Leningrad plant's agendas (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 234). Sidorenko credits the direction of Anatolii Eperin with efforts to modernize and upgrade their reactor units, which resulted in performance parameters that surpassed those of other RBMK-equipped nuclear plants administered by Rosenergoatom (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 235). For the past and continuing problems of the Leningrad nuclear power plant, see Judith Perera, The Nuclear Industry in the Former Soviet Union: Transition from Crisis to Opportunity, 2 vols. (London: Financial Times Energy Publishing, 1997).

94 All of these reactors were prototypes of new designs: the first RBMK-1000 at Leningrad, the first RBMK-1500 at Ignalina, and the first fast neutron reactor at Shevchenko.

95 Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii and Departament po atomnoi energetike, eds., Shestnadtsatoe glavnoe: Istoriia i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, 2003). When Petrosyiants was appointed First Deputy Minister of Sredmash in 1967, the Chief Administration (GU IAE) was split into two Chief Administrations, GU-16 and GU-17. GU-17 was in charge of instruments for the nuclear industry (Glavatompribor) (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 220).

96 Among its powerful leaders were Nikolai Nikolaev (GU-16's first director) and Nikolai Ermakov. Little information is available on Ermakov, other than that he graduated from Moscow's Power Engineering Institute (MEI) and worked for Sredmash and later Minatom as a reactor specialist. Between the fall of 1986 and 2000, he served as head of GU-16, which by then had been reorganized from a Chief Administration into a Department. Other leaders include Boris Baturov (1968–1969), Aleksandr Meshkov (10/1969–3/1979, when he became deputy minister, and later first deputy minister), Evgenii Kulov (4/1979–3/1982, when he was appointed deputy minister), and Evgenii Kulikov (4/1982–6/1986) (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 220).

97 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 220–221.

98 Kapitsa's outspoken conflict with Beria, and Stalin's surprising tolerance of it, has been the subject of many historical analyses (Alexei B. Kojevnikov, “Piotr Kapitza and Stalin's Government: A Study in Moral Choice,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 22, no. 1 (1991): 131–164; Alexei B. Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (London: Imperial College Press, 2004); Loren R. Graham, Moscow Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)). Although Kapitsa lost his position as director, Stalin and Beria knew only too well that they needed Kapitsa's team of outstanding scientists for the success of the weapons program (see, e.g., Boris Gorobetz, “V treugol’nike Kapitsa-Beria-Stalin,” Mirovaia energiia/World Energy, 2008, http://www.worldenergy.ru/doc_20_53_2819.html).

99 Movies were made about the first launch of the icebreaker Lenin, featuring Aleksandrov at the reactor control panel. Some are available in the motion picture collection of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, MD (e.g., The Atomic Flagship, Record #326.036, and Atomic Icebreaker, Record #326.063). Submarine propulsion was a classified subject and therefore not discussed in public sources; in recent years, however, more information on the Soviet nuclear navy has been forthcoming—for example, in Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom; Ulasevich, O iadernykh reaktorakh; Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Pervaia Sovetskaia atomnaia podvodnaia lodka K-3 (Moscow: Samizdat, 2005); and Vasilieva, Soleils Rouges. Together with Kurchatov, Aleksandrov is credited with the development of the Soviet pressurized water reactor (Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, 182).

100 His secret projects started during the Second World War (A. P. Aleksandrov, ed., Vospominaniia ob Igore Vasil’eviche Kurchatove (Moscow: Nauka, 1988); P. A. Aleksandrov, Akademik Anatolii Petrovich Aleksandrov, priamaia rech’, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 2002); Nikolai S. Khlopkin, ed., A. P. Aleksandrov: Dokumenty i vospominaniia. K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003)). Aleksandrov's personal record in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences was released in 2003 (ARAN, f. 1916).

101 Decree No. 684–200, issued by the Council of Ministers on September 16, 1971, established the MVTS, the Mezhvedomstvennyi Tekhnicheskii Sovet po atomnym elektrostantsiiam pri Ministerstve srednego mashinostroeniia SSSR (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 237).

102 Among these ministries were Sredmash, Minenergo, the Ministry of Heavy Machine Building (Mintiazhmash), the Ministry of Power Engineering (Minenergomash), the Ministry of Chemical Machine Building (Minkhimmash), the Ministry of Electrotechnical Industry (Minelektrotekhprom), and the Ministry of Health (Minzdrav). Research organizations included, for example, IAE, FEI, NIIAR, VNII for Inorganic Materials, TsNII “Prometei,” VTI im. F. E. Dzerzhinskogo, TsKTEI im. Polzunova, TsNIITMASh, and the Institute of Biophysics. Construction bureaus included, among others, OKB Mashinostroeniia, OKB Gidropress, and NIKIET. Industrial organizations included the Institute Teploelektroproekt, Atomenergoproekt, the Izhora works, the Podol'skii mashinostroitel’nyi zavod, the Khar’kovskii turbinnyi zavod, as well as others.

103 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 250. See also Interviews #8 and #21. At the apex of his power, Aleksandrov sometimes took the liberty of advising his colleagues in the MVTS—for example, minister Neporozhnii—on what to present when to which board (see for example ARAN, f. 1916, op. 1, d. 212, dated “not earlier than March 1981”: Zamechaniia k proektu doklada Ministra energetiki i elektrifikatsii Neporozhnego P. S. O merakh po uluchsheniiu tekhniko-ekonomicheskikh pokazatelei, povysheniiu effektivnosti i snizheniiu stoimosti stroitel'stva atomnykh elektrostantsii.”).

104 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 240–246. According to one interviewee, open discussion was possible in this assembly, although Aleksandrov tightly controlled the actual decision-making process (Interview #7).

105 Interview #4.

106 Sredmash's Scientific-Technical Council had begun reviewing the first version of the “General regulations to ensure the safety of nuclear power plants during design, construction, and operation” (Obshchie polozheniia obespecheniia bezopasnosti atomnykh elektrostantsii pri proektirovanii, stroitel'stve i ekspluatatsii, OKB-73) on February 20, 1971 (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 238).

107 This discussion had been referred to as the “V-230/V-213 problem”: the V-230 design did not feature a steel containment structure but the V-213 did.

108 One important actor, who I do not discuss in detail, was Veniamin Dymshits, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1962 until his retirement in 1985, and chair of the State Committee for Supplies (Gossnab) from 1965 to 1976. In these positions, Dymshits coordinated the allocation of resources to enterprises, and oversaw the country's energy policy. He played an important role, though often behind the scenes, in the development of the Soviet nuclear industry (see, e.g., M. P. Alekseev, “Ob organizatsii nadzora za bezopasnost’iu v atomnoi energetike,” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 38–50 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 43–44); Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Kak eto bylo,” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 51–61 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 55); Alec Nove, The Soviet Economy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969) (especially 84, 221)).

109 Grigorii Medvedev, “Chernobyl'skaia Tetrad’,” Novyi Mir 6 (1989): 3–108 (especially 36).

110 From 1989 until 1991, Kopchinskii directed the Department of Nuclear Energy in the Council of Ministers’ Bureau of the Fuel and Energy Complex—yet another duplicate administrative unit, which provided some nuclear expertise directly to the Council of Ministers (see Georgii A. Kopchinskii and Nikolai A. Shteinberg, Chernobyl: Kak eto bylo. Preduprezhdenie (Moscow: Litterra, 2011)).

111 Vladimir V. Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy Politburo TsK KPSS na Chernobyl'skoi AES,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 263–282 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 264).

112 The tasks of Gosplan's Department of Energy and Electrification were updated on October 15, 1969 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 2900, l. 72–77).

113 Letter No. 22–828, “On the construction of nuclear power plants,” to V. Isaev (chairman of Gosplan), from A. Nekrasov (Department of Energy and Electrification), August 28, 1974 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 6648, l. 108–109).

114 This thirty-page draft document of “Temporary occupational health and safety requirements for the design of nuclear power plants” (“Vremennye sanitarnye trebovaniia k proektirovaniiu atomnykh elektrostantsii: Proekt”; RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 9, l. 42–72) was apparently sent to Pozdniakov, a representative of the Chief Administration for the Use of Atomic Energy (under the Council of Ministers) by Glavatomenergo's chief engineer Ermakov (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 9, l. 78) and commented on by Teploelektroproekt (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 9, l. 73–77; RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 9, l. 73–77), together with a three-page letter written with knowledge of this commentary from Glavatomenergo (RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 9, l. 79–81; RGAE, f. 9599, op. 1, d. 9, l. 79–81).

115 Letter No. ES-579, September 28, 1966 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 910, l. 280–282).

116 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union and in Russia,” Nuclear Engineering and Design 173 (1997): 3–20 (especially 7).

117 Department of Physical and Technical Problems of Power Engineering, Soviet Academy of Sciences (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 4704, l. 164–165). Harmonization with international nuclear regulation was further accelerated by the Soviet-led construction of the Finnish nuclear plant at Loviisa, where the Finnish government held Soviet contractors accountable to Western safety standards (Sidorenko, “Kak eto bylo,” 52–53).

118 N. I. Kozlov et al., Pravila iadernoi bezopasnosti atomnykh elektrostantsii PBIa-04–74, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Atomizdat 1977); Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Problemy bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 194–216 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 196); Sidorenko, “Kak eto bylo,” 53. The original document, OPB-71, was restricted to internal use (see, e.g., A. M. Bukrinskii, “Neizvestnye stranitsy iz istorii sozdaniia Gosatomnadzora Rossii,” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 102–110 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 103)).

119 Alekseev, “Ob organizatsii nadzora,” 38.

120 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska Sidorenko V. A. v komitet partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 44–47 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (especially 46). See also Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 5–28 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (especially 11); Sidorenko, “Kak eto bylo,” 54.

121 Bukrinskii, “Neizvestnye stranitsy iz istorii sozdaniia Gosatomnadzora Rossii,” 105.

122 This new committee, which initially received 185 approved positions (and had great difficulty filling them), merged Gosgortekhnadzor's nuclear safety division with two nuclear safety divisions formerly under Sredmash. According to Alekseev, deputy chairman of Gosatomenergonadzor from 1983 to 1987, decree No. 653–207, “On the creation of an All-Union Soviet State Committee for Oversight of the safe conduct of work in the nuclear power industry,” was the direct outcome of a Central Committee meeting on the country's future energy policy, especially nuclear energy, which involved a number of high-ranking political functionaries (Alekseev, “Ob organizatsii nadzora,” 43–44, 46).

123 V. M. Malyshev, “Istoriia stanovleniia gosudarstvennogo nadzora za bezopasnost’iu atomnoi energetiki SSSR (1983–1991 gg.),” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 26–37 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 26).

124 Ibid., 27.

125 O. M. Kovalevich, “Ob obrazovanii Gosatomenergonadzora SSSR,” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 69–78 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 70).

126 A. V. Ageev, “Vospominaniia,” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 89–101 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 93–94). Ageev also notes that the centralized, “total” oversight was lost in this process. Instead, “we understood that with the transition to regulatory principles we had to ... transition to periodic, selective inspections” (ibid., 94). Also see Kovalevich, “Ob obrazovanii Gosatomenergonadzora SSSR,” 69; Bukrinskii, “Neizvestnye stranitsy iz istorii sozdaniia Gosatomnadzora Rossii,” 129.

127 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 228–229. This division was realized to different degrees in Western countries (France, Canada, Britain, and the United States). See, for example, Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Pollak, The Atom Besieged: Extraparliamentary Dissent in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); Ferdinand Henry Kim Krenz, Deep Waters: The Ottawa River and Canada's Nuclear Adventure (Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2004); Rebecca S. Lowen, “Entering the Atomic Power Race: Science, Industry, and Government,” Political Science Quarterly 102, no. 3 (1987): 459–479; J. Samuel Walker, A Short History of Nuclear Regulation, 1946–1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1993). There was some state involvement in all these nuclear programs, but private industry took on an independent role and not always a very supportive one (see Lowen, “Entering the Atomic Power Race: Science, Industry, and Government”).

128 Sidorenko, “Problemy bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” 196.

129 It is important to note, however, that 1966 marks only the official date of this transfer. Preparations for Minenergo to take over the operation of nuclear plants had been going on since the mid-1950s, both in terms of preparing personnel and in terms of siting and significant construction activity.

130 The Beloiarsk nuclear plant, where two prototypical reactors operated, as well as all sites operating new VVERs, were not subject to Sredmash's direct oversight. As we will see in chapter 4, proliferation concerns may have played a role in determining which reactor stayed under Sredmash's aegis, but there was no consistent rationale behind which reactor types or generations needed “extra” attention and which ones didn't.

131 For example, Interviews #3, #4, #8, #27. This assessment echoes some of the discussion surrounding “Normal Accidents” and “High Reliability Organizations” (Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Todd R. LaPorte and Paula M. Consolini, “Working in Practice but Not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of ‘High-Reliability Organizations,’” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 1, no. 1 (1991): 19–48; Karlene H. Roberts, “Some Characteristics of One Type of High Reliability Organization,” Organization Science 1, no. 2 (1990): 160–176; Karl E. Weick, “Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability,” California Management Review 29, no. 2 (1987): 112–127).

132 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union and in Russia,” 7.

133 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 224–225.

134 The concept of “safety culture” gained currency after the Chernobyl accident. The notion encompasses the design and operation of a plant, and also its management (Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 11).

135 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 225.

136 Dubovskii's quote is from Vladimir Anisinov, “AES: Stepen’ riska (beseda s B. G. Dubovskim),” Smena 10 (1994): 55–61, on 58. The second quote (“Za kazhdim operatorom soldat s avtomatom ne postavish’”) is from Interview #27.

137 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 225.

138 Most prominently, economic efficiency clashed with safety considerations (Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom; Fain, Aktivnaia zona, 108–130). Unfortunately, this kind of specific information does not appear in accessible managerial documents (but was likely discussed at the meetings of the MVTS, for example). Diane Vaughan talks about these competing imperatives guiding the American space program. The dilemma between tight schedules and how-safe-is-safe-enough can probably be considered a fundamental problem in engineering in general (Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)).

139 In a way, the Soviet nuclear power industry was therefore an “experiment” that used society as a “laboratory” for identifying acceptable risk (W. Krohn and J. Weyer, “Society as a Laboratory: The Social Risks of Experimental Research,” Science & Public Policy 21, no. 3 (1994): 173–183).

140 Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin; Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision. See also Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Thomas F. Gieryn and Anne E. Figert, “Ingredients for a Theory of Science in Society: O-Rings, Ice Water, C-Clamp, Richard Feynman, and the Press,” in Susan E. Cozzens and Thomas F. Gieryn, eds., Theories of Science in Society, 67-97 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Sheila Jasanoff, ed., Learning from Disaster: Risk Management after Bhopal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Asa Boholm, “The Cultural Nature of Risk: Can There Be an Anthropology of Uncertainty?,” Ethnos 68, no. 2 (2003): 159–178; Brian Wynne, Rationality and Ritual: Participation and Exclusion in Nuclear Decision-Making (New York: Earthscan, 2011).

141 In Balzer's words, they were “leaders with special traits—political acumen, blue-collar credentials, and superb networks” (Harley D. Balzer, “Engineers: The Rise and Decline of a Social Myth,” in Loren R. Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order, 141–167 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) (quote on 153)).

142 Nove, The Soviet Economy.

143 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditio Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

144 Gosplan, Upravlenie delami (Administrative Department), “Doklad o general’noi scheme energeticheskikh system SSSR na period do 1980 goda,” 1971 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 4387, l. 124). Also see Interview #25.

145 Their public representation stressed the peacefulness of nuclear power (in contrast to the American aggressors), and its contribution to the general electrification of the country (which was marketed as the basis for the developing national economy). See Sonja D. Schmid, “Shaping the Soviet Experience of the Atomic Age: Nuclear Topics in Ogonyok, 1945–1965,” in Dick van Lente, ed., The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945–1965, 19–52 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Paul R. Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors and Soviet Culture,” in Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order, 168–191 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic-Powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR,” Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 297–324; K. Polushkin, “Atomnyi bogatyr’,” Nauka i zhizn’ 11 (1980): 44–52; V. S. Emel’ianov, “Atomnaia nauka i tekhnika i stroitel'stvo kommunizma,” Atomnaia energiia 11, no. 4 (1961): 301–312; Neporozhnii, Energetika strany glazami ministra.

Chapter 3

1 The power plants not transferred to Minenergo were all prototypes of new designs: the first RBMK-1000 at Leningrad (start-up in 1973), the first RBMK-1500 at Ignalina (Lithuania, start-up in 1983), and the first fast breeder reactor at Shevchenko (Kazakhstan, start-up in 1973). I was not able to see the actual document authorizing the transfer.

2 The vast literature on “human factors,” informed primarily by psychology, tries to capture and formalize the elements of this tacit expertise, and to find ways to convey that which cannot be formalized in sophisticated types of peer-to-peer training. See, for example, Jyuji Misumi, Bernhard Wilpert, and Rainer Miller, Nuclear Safety: A Human Factors Perspective (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999); Kim J. Vicente, The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology (New York: Routledge, 2004).

3 Nikolai Krementsov has characterized this emphasis on institutional structures, rather than on individual biographies, as a consequence of the Second World War, which profoundly affected “the structural and functional dynamics of the Stalinist science system” (Nikolai L. Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 288–289; see also Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)). At the core of these changes was the emergence of interest groups within the Soviet scientific community (and, by extension, within the technical intelligentsia) that knew how to work the system and that knew how to use shifts in political authority and industrial policy to their advantage. These changes were retained throughout, and reinforced by, the Cold War.

4 See the following works by Thomas P. Hughes: Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989); Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).

5 International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident, No. 75-INSAG-1, Safety Series (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1986).

6 Several of my interviewees proudly emphasized that Soviet nuclear specialists in general were highly qualified, and that the percentage of nuclear industry cadres with higher education degrees was higher in the Soviet Union than in the United States (e.g., Interviews #1 and #16; see also Sonja D. Schmid, “When Safe Enough Is Not Good Enough: Organizing Safety at Chernobyl,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 67, no. 2 l (2011): 19–29).

7 Examples include K. E. Baskin, L. P. Drach, and A. I. Glushchenko, Eshche mozhno spasti! Edinaia elektroenergeticheskaia sistema—bazis ekonomiki Rossii: Uroki Chernobylia. Opasnost’ iadernogo terrorizma (Moscow: Fizmatlit, 2006); Anatolii S. Diatlov, Chernobyl’: Kak eto bylo (Moscow: Nauchtekhlitizdat, 2003). For documentation of cynicism in the Soviet Youth League (Komsomol), see Steven Lee Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). The moral problem of taking part in the industry that developed nuclear weapons was countered by the necessity of creating a “shield” for the fatherland and of ensuring nuclear parity.

8 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

9 For example, Raisa V. Kuznetsova, ed., Kurchatov v zhizni: Pis'ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia (iz lichnogo arkhiva) (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2002); Nikolai A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira: Zapiski konstruktora (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, IzdAt, 2002); Boris A. Fain, Aktivnaia zona: Povest’ ob atomnom institute (Moscow: Skripto, 1998); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia: O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh (k 100-letiiu N. A. Dollezhalia), 2nd ed. (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh: Prodolzhenie traditsii (k 50-letiiu NIKIET im. N. A. Dollzhalia (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); Vitalii P. Nasonov, E. P. Slavskii: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAT, 1998); Igor’ A. Beliaev and German G. Malkin, eds., E. P. Slavskii: 100 let so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: IzdAt, 1999); A. P. Aleksandrov, ed., Vospominaniia ob Igore Vasil’eviche Kurchatove (Moscow: Nauka, 1988); P. A. Aleksandrov, Akademik Anatolii Petrovich Aleksandrov, priamaia rech’, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 2002); Nikolai S. Khlopkin, Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); Nikolai S. Khlopkin, ed., A. P. Aleksandrov: Dokumenty i vospominaniia: K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003).

10 Harley D. Balzer, ed., Russia's Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1996); Harley D. Balzer, “Engineers: The Rise and Decline of a Social Myth,” in Loren R. Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order, 141–167 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) (especially 141); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Engineers became one of the most influential political groups in the Soviet Union (Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 73). In the 1960s, physicists were another group with an extremely positive self-image, who enjoyed correspondingly high social prestige (Petr Wail’ and Aleksandr Genis, 60-e: Mir Sovetskogo cheloveka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996)). In an interview with A. I. Mikoian, Victor Perlo notes “the extremely rapid rise in the number and quality of trained scientific-technical personnel, and the lead which the USSR has established over all other countries in the extent of scientific-engineering education” (Victor Perlo, How the Soviet Economy Works: An Interview with A. I. Mikoyan, First Deputy Minister of the U.S.S.R. (New York: International Publishers, 1961), 28).

11 Arkadii K. Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’ atomnaia promyshlennost’ v SSSR (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1995); Shtab atomproma (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1998).

12 Dollezhal was drawn into the atomic bomb project by Kurchatov in 1946 (Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 183). In 1952, Dollezhal's construction bureau was expanded to form a new institute, NII-8 (later NIKIET), with him as the director.

13 One major influence was the NKVD, which stands for Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del, “People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs.”

14 Jokes about radiation's preservative effects abounded among my Sredmash interviewees, mostly men, who without exception were well above the average age of their compatriots.

15 Sredmash employees who led “regular” lives typically lived in big cities, where they followed the standard model of commuting between separate places for work and residence. Life in closed Soviet cities, by contrast, merged professional and residential life in a way similar to what Janowitz describes for U.S. army bases (Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 175–176; see also Sharon K. Weiner, Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)).

16 Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility, 183–184; Michael David-Fox, “What Is Cultural Revolution?,” Russian Review 58 (April 1999): 181–201.

17 Balzer, “Engineers,” 141.

18 Graham, Short History, 164; see also Viktor A. Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, atomnykh stantsiiakh, uchiteliakh, kollegakh i o sebe (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003).

19 Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, especially 232–256.

20 Among those who received training at the Obninsk plant were military nuclear submarine crews. When the framework of this training was first discussed late in 1954, the director of the Obninsk plant, Nikolai Nikolaev, suggested a one-year placement for mastering the operation of a nuclear reactor. The military officers settled for a three-month training program, after which the officers had to pass an exam that would certify them to operate a nuclear reactor on their own (Fain, Aktivnaia zona, 39–40).

21 Interview #5.

22 Interview #7.

23 On the vicious cycle of ineffectiveness in the system of raspredelenie see Solnick, Stealing the State, 125–174.

24 By the time the first industrial-scale nuclear power plants were started up in 1964, the first generation of nuclear engineers had been trained successfully (Aleksandr N. Semenov and A. B. Chubais, eds., Elektroenergetika. Stroiteli Rossii: XX vek (Moscow: Master, 2003), 760–768). Also see Interviews #3 and #9. And yet as late as 1968, there were still not enough engineers who also had expertise in industrial planning. The first graduates of such training programs were not expected until 1972 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 64, l. 89).

25 For an elaboration of “honor” as the basis of the belief system in the U.S. Army, see Janowitz, The Professional Soldier, 215. Janowitz also notes that political ideology (in the sense of strong political alliances) was common only in higher tiers.

26 For a succinct explanation of the system of nomenklatura see Krementsov, Stalinist Science. Initially “devised for the personnel of party organs and agencies, the system was expanded in the early 1930s into the scientific community” (Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 40). See also Interview #25.

27 Alec Nove, The Soviet Economy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 108–109.

28 The record in the weapons program and Sredmash is mixed: while some specialists were “deselected” based on political criteria, at other times ideological loyalty could take a backseat if the technical expertise in question was critical enough (Paul R. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, California Studies in the History of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Karl Hall, “The Schooling of Lev Landau: The European Context of Postrevolutionary Soviet Theoretical Physics,” Osiris 23 (2008): 230–259; Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 1972); Loren R. Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)).

29 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23.

30 The nomenklatura system kicked into high gear, for example, when Minenergo's operating organization, Soiuzatomenergo, nominated Vladimir Bronnikov as chief engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The Ukrainian Party committee blocked Bronnikov's promotion “for their own reasons” (po svoim kriteriiam) (Gennadii A. Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” in Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 75–132 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995)). See also chapter 5.

31 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 217–253 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 219).

32 One often used example is learning how to ride a bicycle, but tacit knowledge has also proven highly relevant in scientific experiments: the replication of a particular research experiment may depend not only on the correct setup and procedure, but on the tacit skills of one of the lab workers (Harry Collins, “What Is Tacit Knowledge?,” in Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, 107–119 (New York: Routledge, 2001); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, [1966] 1983); Jeremy Howells, “Tacit Knowledge, Innovation, and Technology Transfer,” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 8, no. 2 (1996): 91–106; Alice Lam, “Tacit Knowledge, Organizational Learning and Societal Institutions: An Integrated Framework,” Organization Studies 21, no. 3 (2000): 487–513; Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2010); Joy Parr, “A Working Knowledge of the Insensible? Radiation Protection in Nuclear Generating Stations, 1962–1992,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 820–851; Harry Collins and Robert Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 2 (2002): 235–296; Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)).

33 At least since Chernobyl, the international nuclear community has recognized the training of nuclear cadres as a major issue, and also that an aging workforce poses serious problems in terms of knowledge transfer (e.g., C. R. Clark et al., “Achieving Excellence in Human Performance in the Nuclear Industry through Leadership, Education, and Training (IAEA-CN-114/F-8),” in IAEA, ed., Fifty Years of Nuclear Power—the Next Fifty Years, Proceedings of an international conference held in Moscow and Obninsk, June 27–July 2, 2004, Conference Material IAEA-CN-114 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2004); see also the IAEA's emphasis on “safety culture” and the development of related training modules).

34 “Godovoi otchet Glavatomenergo po kapvlozheniiam za 1957 god,” RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, d. 1881, l. 11.

35 The final, fifth edition, appeared in 1994, months after the author passed away. Margulova had tried to revise the textbook in light of the Chernobyl experience (Tereza Khristoforovna Margulova, Atomnye elektricheskie stantsii, 5th ed. (Moscow: IzdAT, 1994)).

36 “Godovoi otchet Glavatomenergo po kapvlozheniiam za 1957 god,” RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, d. 1881, l. 12.

37 As of January 1, 1958, there were ninety-four students enrolled (“Godovoi otchet Glavatomenergo,” 1957 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, d. 1881)).

38 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, d. 1881, l. 12.

39 Interview #9. However, one interviewee recalled that what such a “praktikum” often meant was that the student would be led into the main control room, and then told to sit down and not touch anything (Interview #25).

40 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, d. 1881, l. 13. This corresponds to what other nuclear specialists have described: they went through several positions, getting to know the nuts and bolts of a given reactor, and gradually worked their way up the professional hierarchy (Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Vtoroi Ivan: Sovershenno sekretno (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1998); Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike).

41 Interviews #3 and #9.

42 Sredmash specialists and recently discharged navy personnel from nuclear submarines brought experience with reactor operation and maintenance, whereas Minenergo specialists contributed the experience of operating complex industrial facilities (Interview #7). The Soviet nuclear navy's influence in the nuclear industry came up rarely in written sources or interviews; while there clearly was some connection, the Soviet Navy's ties to the nuclear industry were not nearly as significant as those in the United States.

43 Interview #7.

44 Tereza Margulova was instrumental in developing curricula and setting up nuclear power engineering departments at established technical universities all over the country—for example, at the Urals Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk (today Ural Federal University), at the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute (today Tomsk National Research Polytechnic University), and in Obninsk (a branch of MEI).

45 This mutual distrust between ministries or people's commissariats has a long tradition; see, for example, Balzer, “Engineers,” 152.

46 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Vvedenie k 1-mu vypusku,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 5–15 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 6); Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union and in Russia,” Nuclear Engineering and Design 173 (1997): 3–20 (especially 5).

47 Full-scale, sophisticated simulators for the Soviet nuclear navy (Voenno-morskoi flot) were designed and built as early as 1967, according to S. D. Malkin, one of the country's leading developers of reactor simulators. By contrast, the authorities did not acknowledge the need for similarly sophisticated and expensive simulators for nuclear power reactors until Chernobyl (S. D. Malkin, “O polnomasshtabnom trenazhere dlia Leningradskoi AES,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3, 147–155 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003)). Apparently there were smaller-scale simulators that started operating in the late 1970s at the Novo-Voronezh plant (for VVERs), and just before Chernobyl for RBMKs (Interview #7).A Central Scientific Research Institute (TsNII) had been set up at the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant that was specifically involved with starting up VVERs. Glavatomenergo acknowledged this institute's contribution to the training of operating personnel, assistance with the launch preparation, and the actual start-up (order No. 12 issued by Glavatomenergo on July 23, 1973 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 6792, l. 23–24): five employees of the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant were presented with financial awards (100–250 rubles)). Similarly, although apparently less formally, staff at the Beloiarsk nuclear plant helped train operating personnel for RBMKs (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 7918, l. 9), until much later, especially after Chernobyl, when RBMK operators received training at the Smolensk nuclear plant.

48 For a fascinating account of such a “collegial model of workplace relations” see Joy Parr, “A Working Knowledge of the Insensible?” Perin's Shouldering Risks provides an anthropology of the U.S. nuclear power industry, and stresses the importance of protocols encouraging “doubt, discovery, and interpretation” rather than “command and control” for work in nuclear power plants (Constance Perin, Shouldering Risks: The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)).

49 This was not unusual in the Soviet economy as a whole: as Nove put it, “There exists an informal network of personal links and contacts, which plays an essential role in overcoming a variety of obstacles” (Nove, The Soviet Economy, 227).

50 This stands in stark contrast to the findings of studies on risk taking in contemporary organizations, where shirking attribution and liability sometimes produces a spiraling avoidance of any kind of risk, which in turn produces risk of risk avoidance (see, e.g., Henry Rothstein, Michael Huber, and George Gaskell, “A Theory of Risk Colonization: The Spiralling Regulatory Logics of Societal and Institutional Risk,” Economy and Society 35, no. 1 (2006): 91–112).

51 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Symposium on the Education and Training of Engineers in the Nuclear Industry: A Symposium Arranged by the Nuclear Energy and the Education and Training Groups, 5th December 1968, London (London: Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 1969); John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 5–44.

52 Perepiska s Gosplanom SSSR o perspektivnom i tekushchem planirovanii v energetike, 3.I.1968–27.XII.1968 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 64, l. 78).

53 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 64, l. 80.

54 RGAE, f. 9480, op. 9, d. 2403, l. 74.

55 Letter from Petr S. Neporozhnii to deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, M. T. Efremov, July 16, 1970, No. ES-671 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 3924, l. 12).

56 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 6803, l. 26–27. Sites under Sredmash's tutelage seem to have suffered less from these limitations; the ministry clearly had more discretionary funds on hand.

57 Discrimination, both positive and negative, toward certain groups was common, openly as well as covertly. On the Soviet system of higher education see, for example, Harley D. Balzer, Russian Higher Education (Washington, DC: National Council for Soviet and East European Research, 1993); Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Michael David-Fox and György Péteri, eds., Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2000); Boris N. Onykiy and Eduard F. Kryuchkov, “Nuclear Education in Russia: Status, Peculiarities, Problems and Perspectives,” International Journal of Nuclear Knowledge Management 1, no. 4 (2005): 308–316; Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

58 See Sonja D. Schmid, “Shaping the Soviet Experience of the Atomic Age: Nuclear Topics in Ogonyok, 1945–1965,” in Dick van Lente, ed., The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945–1965, 19–52 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

59 This corresponds to Nikolai Krementsov's argument that ideology played a subordinate role in concrete science-policy decision making even in the 1930s and the 1940s (Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 288–289). All of my interviewees were reluctant to relate their career choices and their interest in nuclear power to what they perceived as “political” ideas, as most popular-scientific literature on the subject might make us believe. This reaction may have been an artifact of my asking directly for this connection, and therefore an example of what Gilbert and Mulkay have called “discursive repertoires,” and more specifically, the “empirical repertoire” (G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)). This device, according to Gilbert and Mulkay, is used to organize rational reconstructions of a scientist's own (correct) position, while the “contingent repertoire” is used to account for error—in my case, this would most likely be a belief that nuclear power would bring about communism. More or less utopian visions about the communist future were part of the official discourse, and without doubt attractive and seemingly within reach for a great number of Soviet citizens (Andranik M. Petros’iants, Atomnaia energetika (Moscow: Nauka, 1976); Andranik M. Petros’iants, Iadernaia energetika: Nauka i tekhnicheskii progress, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1981); Andranik M. Petros’iants, Atomnaia nauka i tekhnika SSSR (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1987); V. S. Emel’ianov, “Atomnaia nauka i tekhnika i stroitel'stvo kommunizma,” Atomnaia energiia 11, no. 4 (1961): 301–312; P. T. Astashenkov, Atomnaia promyshlennost’ (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo literatury v oblasti atomnoi nauki i tekhniki, 1962); Andrei P. Ermakov and Anatolii G. Syrmai, Atomnaia energiia i transport (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963); I. D. Morokhov et al., Atomnoi energetike XX let (Moscow: Atomizdat, 1974)). The fact that relatively unrestricted research and experimenting could be justified with reference to its usefulness for the state was not lost on promoters of the civilian nuclear industry (Sonja Schmid, “Envisioning a Technological State: Reactor Design Choices and Political Legitimacy in the Soviet Union and Russia,” doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 2005; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 287–288).

60 Several recent Russian publications celebrate this older generation of designers as heroic spirits, who altruistically devoted their lives and talents to their fatherland. See note 9 in this chapter.

61 In The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, Loren Graham has famously written about the exceedingly narrow training of Soviet engineers, as opposed to the generalists of the pre-Soviet generation. But many young technical specialists joined the nuclear industry with very specialized training and broadened their skills as the industry, and the tasks for its workforce, developed and professionalized (Sean F. Johnston, The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineers and the Shaping of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)).

62 Balzer, “Engineers,” 159. See also Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

63 Solnick, Stealing the State, 218–219.

64 Ibid., 58–59.

65 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178.

66 “The scientific rather than the technical intelligentsia has been the more vocal force in dissident activity” (Balzer, “Engineers,” 167). See also Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?,” in Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia, 1–18 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Albert Parry, “Science and Technology versus Communism,” Russian Review 25, no. 3 (1966): 227–241; James H. Billington, “The Renaissance of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Foreign Affairs 35 (1957): 525–530.

67 See, for example, the famous article by Dollezhal and Koriakin (Nikolai A. Dollezhal’ and Iurii F. Koriakin, “Iadernaia elektroenergetika: Dostizheniia i problemy,” Kommunist 14 (1979): 19–28): intended as a proposal to further increase the economic efficiency of the nuclear industry by suggesting remotely located “nuclear energy complexes,” it was perceived as a criticism of current practice. See also Interview #22.Loren Graham showed that the centrally planned economy that took shape in the 1920s was extraordinarily compatible with the technocratic tendencies of the time (Graham, Short History, 159–160).

68 One of my interviewees told me that he had “fallen in love” with nuclear power early in his career (Interview #11).

69 Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry,” Osiris 23 (2008): 82–111; also Interviews #3 and #9.

70 Very few managed to separate the “political” from the “rational” as Andrei Sakharov did. His boundary drawing allowed him to criticize the Soviet “political” regime (the lack of intellectual freedom) while remaining faithful to its “rational” values (modernization, progress, scientific rationality).

71 In particular Interview #16.

72 “In political terms, the intelligentsia leadership [of the late 1920s and early 1930s] came from the Academy of Sciences and the high-salaried specialists and consultants associated with the government commissariats; and for these men the issue of intellectual freedom was secondary to the issue of political influence and specialist input in government policy-making” (Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility, 84–85). According to Loren Graham, engineers stood by the implicit agreement struck with the party in the late 1920s, that they “would not raise basic political questions, but instead carry out the party's orders” in exchange for promotions in industry, agriculture, and the military (Graham, Short History, 164). See also Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 33.

73 Yuri Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life (New York: Morrow, 1991); Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Knopf, 1990).

74 The Interdepartmental Technical Council on Nuclear Power Plants (MVTS) is a good example: the most powerful decision-making body for the Soviet Union's nuclear energy policy, it was intended to serve as a forum for open expert discussion. (On the creation of this council in 1971, and its demolition after the Chernobyl disaster, see Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 237.) Another example involves publication patterns, in which instead of publishing controversial replies to a provocative argument, follow-up articles were published that provided the “correct interpretation” of the original thesis (see, e.g., Dollezhal’ and Koriakin, “Iadernaia elektroenergetika”). On censorship and self-control in the Soviet mass media, see, for instance, Gayle D. Hollander, Soviet Political Indoctrination: Developments in Mass Media and Propaganda since Stalin (New York: Praeger, 1972), and Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

75 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 5. For a more detailed discussion of the Russian and Soviet technical intelligentsia see Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 6–7, 15.

76 When the system failed, when responsibility was to be assigned, the first charge was usually “wrecking” or “sabotage,” and when this proved unfounded, “personnel error” (Bailes, Technology and Society).

77 Johnston argues that these three countries, the first to devote significant resources to nuclear research and development, “created templates that influenced the creation of subsequent national programmes” (Johnston, The Neutron's Children, 12).

78 Johnston, The Neutron's Children, 2.

79 Ibid., 6.

80 Ibid., 10.

81 Ibid., 13.

82 Ibid., 14. Johnston counters the idea that “the Soviet context simultaneously vaunted and eviscerated engineering identities, allying them to socialist progress and centralized governance” (ibid., 13). See also Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities.”

83 These concepts are fundamentally actors’ categories that involve a variety of associations; it is therefore important to note that as analytical categories, I use them only to refer to the institutional affiliations of these specialists.

84 Interview with the minister of Atomic Energy, Aleksandr Iu. Rumiantsev, on Ekho Moskvy, May 29, 2003, 16:08–16:30, emphasis added, www.echo.msk.ru/interview/22335. (Topics: Minatom's international programs; cooperation with Iran on nuclear power technology; shutdown of Russian plutonium-producing reactors. Moderators: Matvei Ganapol'skii and Aleksei Venediktov.)

85 This tension is not limited to cadres for the nuclear power industry; it is characteristic of all applications of nuclear energy and fuels nonproliferation debates to this day.

86 Discussions of the “human factor” were not new in Soviet industry. Fitzpatrick has identified the idea of operators being “cogs in a machine” as part of a long-standing institutional conflict between the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and the Supreme Council of the People's Economy (Vesenkha) that culminated in 1928, when Narkompros argued that “workers were simply conditioned (trenirovany) to become efficient cogs in the industrial machine” and concluded: “Certainly the Soviet Union must adopt modern industrial methods, including the conveyer belt and the assembly line. But this did not mean that workers could be treated as automata” (Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility, 127).

87 Grabovskii, Vtoroi Ivan. Grabovskii was not able to use archival material, and therefore labeled his story fictional. However, the story is clearly autobiographical. He had been one of the young operators.

88 Theodore Porter, “Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 633–652; Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

89 Interview #4 and personal communication.

90 I chose these translations to make the division of tasks, and the scope of the respective assignments, as clear as possible.

91 The Institute of Atomic Energy was scientific director of nuclear reactors—that is, not just nuclear power plant reactors but also reactors for submarines, icebreakers, space vehicles, and so on (Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike). See also Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 5–28 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002). On Aleksandrov's role in the development of Soviet power reactor designs, see Arnold Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959); Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 42.

92 Kramish, Atomic Energy, 182; Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 42.

93 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 237.

94 Interview #3.

95 Khlopkin, Stranitsy zhizni.

96 For a description of this process by Nikolai Vladimirovich Zhukov, head of NIKIET's avtorskii nadzor, see, for example, Fain, Aktivnaia zona, 114–120..

97 Apparently, this happened at the Kursk nuclear power plant: NIKIET's inspectors blocked work from proceeding, and their objections were found valid by the scientific director (Fain, Aktivnaia zona, 114–117).

98 On NIKIET (Nauchno-issledovatel'skii i konstruktorskii institut energotekhniki) and Dollezhal, see Nikolai A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira; Ulasevich, O iadernykh reaktorakh; Sozdano pod rukovodstvom; Fain, Aktivnaia zona.

99 V. P. Denisov and Iu. G. Dragunov, Reaktornye ustanovki VVER dlia atomnykh elektrostantsii (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002). The largest factory for manufacturing VVER reactor vessels, Atommash in Volgodonsk, was designed to produce several reactor vessels per year, essentially guaranteeing the conveyer-belt-like production of pressurized water reactors. However, construction proceeded slowly (Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York: Freeman, 1999), 97–108). Once the Soviets started exporting VVERs to CMEA countries in the 1960s, engineering cooperation began to develop, especially with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, 125–154 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)).

100 Interview #7. These organizations were typically regional branches of Minenergo's own construction trust, Teploelektroproekt (TEP).

101 For example, so-called science cities included Obninsk, Dubna, and Melekess (Dimitrovgrad), to mention but a few (e.g., Judith Perera, The Nuclear Industry in the Former Soviet Union: Transition from Crisis to Opportunity, vol. 2 (London: Financial Times Energy Publishing, 1997), 21–22).

102 Gidropress had also been producing parts for the RBMK and had repeatedly reported problems with the RBMK equipment (Viktor P. Tatarnikov, “Atomnaia elektroenergetika (s VVER i drugimi reaktorami),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 303–399 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom; Ulasevich, O iadernykh reaktorakh; Fain, Aktivnaia zona; Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira; Iurii I. Koriakin, Okrestnosti iadernoi energetiki Rossii: Novye vyzovy (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); Evgenii O. Adamov, ed., Belaia kniga iadernoi energetiki (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2001)).

103 For a rather skeptical view of shifting personnel, see Balzer, “Engineers,” 198–201.

104 Notable exceptions were, as previously mentioned, the Leningrad, Ignalina, and Shevchenko nuclear power plants.

105 Minister Petr Neporozhnii maintained friendships with the long-term chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, and with the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) functionary in charge of the country's energy complex, Veniamin Dymshits (Petr S. Neporozhnii, Energetika strany glazami ministra: Dnevniki 1935–1985 gg. (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 2000)).

106 International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident (INSAG-1).

107 Anthropologist Constance Perin has pointed out for the U.S. context that there is a persistent ambivalence between rule following and situated expert judgment: “Safety may depend on the exercise of individual and/or collective judgment. Nevertheless, the dominant risk-handling strategy remains strict adherence to rules and procedures. The industry frames this dilemma as one of a choice between the proceduralization of global, algorithmic knowledge and the localism of professional experience and knowledge, or between routinization and latitude for ‘disciplined improvisation’” (Constance Perin, “Operating as Experimenting: Synthesizing Engineering and Scientific Values in Nuclear Power Production,” Science, Technology & Human Values 23, no. 1 (1998): 98–128 (quote on 105); see also Perin, Shouldering Risks).

108 In the archival documents, I found a maximum of 29 percent of the salary consisting of rewards, and according to one interviewee, at times this percentage rose to 60 percent. Administrators criticized a 29 percent bonus (premiia) as too low (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 7267, l. 73–74; Interview #17, and personal communication).

109 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 224–225; Perera, The Nuclear Industry in the Former Soviet Union. Without exception, the atomshchiki I interviewed also professed that they were only too aware of the risks involved.

110 Evidence includes, for example, the chapters in Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’? (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995).

111 The first report on the results of such a state inspection conducted at power plants and power lines that I was able to locate was from 1971. See “Gosudarstvennaia inspektsiia po ekspluatatsii elektrostantsii i setei: Svodnye otchety inspektsii po avariiam za 1971g.” (State inspection of the operation of power plants and grids: Summary inspection reports on accidents during 1971) (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 4222).

112 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 5378.

113 Accidents involving problems with the nuclear reactor itself were reported to Sredmash; these reports are not accessible at this point.

114 RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 64, l. 85. In other words, Minenergo saw nuclear plant personnel as “special” and as in need of “special training.”

115 Commemorative Seminar at the World's First Nuclear Power Plant, May 16, 2003, Obninsk; also Interview #21.

116 Glavatomenergo, rukovodstvo, RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 802.

117 Glavatomenergo, Ekspluatatsionno-proizvodstvennyi otdel. Protokoly tekhnicheskikh soveshchanii po tekhnicheskim voprosam za 1968 g., “Protokol po voprosu kontrolia energovydeleniia rabochikh kanalov Beloiarskoi AES,” March 18, 1968 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 821, l. 8).

118 “Protokol po voprosu kontrolia energovydeleniia rabochikh kanalov Beloiarskoi AES,” March 18, 1968 (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 821, l. 9).

119 “Protokol opredeleniia maksimal’noi pogreshnosti pri raschete potoka teplovykh neitronov v rezul'tate vygoraniia sterzhnei RR reaktora I bloka na Beloiarskoi atomnoi eektrostantsii,” signed by the chief engineer of the Beloiarsk nuclear power plant, Gennadii A. Shasharin (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 802; RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 821, l. 33–38).

120 This episode is also characteristic of the technological optimism of both designers and operators: their behavior reflected a deep confidence that mistakes were lessons to be learned on the way to perfection. See, for example, Susanne Schattenberg, Stalins Ingenieure: Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002).

121 Letter No. ES-881, September 16, 1971, to the Council of Ministers (“O sroke vvoda v deistvie III energobloka Novovoronezhskoi AES,” signed by P. Falaleev (Minenergo)) (RGAE, f. 7964, op. 15, d. 3924, l. 56).

122 Karl E. Weick, “Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability,” California Management Review 29, no. 2 (1987): 112–127.

123 Vladimir Anisinov, “AES: Stepen’ riska (beseda s B. G. Dubovskim),” Smena 10 (1994): 55–61; Nadezhda Nadezhdina, “Zalozhniki reaktora,” Trud 3 (April 1996): n.p.

124 Another strategy was to transfer trusted individuals to key positions in the nuclear industry, when Sredmash felt there was not enough in-house expertise.

125 Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities.”

126 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Vvodnye zamechaniia k urokam Chernobyl'skoi avarii,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 4–16 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002). See also J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

127 Several Minenergo employees I interviewed claimed that Sredmash had concealed the potentially catastrophic scale of accidents at nuclear power plants (e.g., Interviews #7 and #11).

128 This report, INSAG-1 (International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident), was published in September, immediately after the meeting, and was based on working documents prepared by the USSR State Committee on the Utilization of Atomic Energy for the IAEA Meeting of Experts, Vienna, August 25–29, 1986, and on additional material presented by the Soviet experts during the meeting. The Chernobyl trial a year later confirmed this verdict one more time (see introduction; also Boris Gorbachev, “Tainy Chernobyl'skogo suda,” Zerkalo nedeli 6, no. 491 (April 2004): 24–29; A. V. Illesh and A. E. Pral’nikov, eds., Reportazh iz Chernobylia: Zapiski ochevidtsev. Kommentarii. Razmyshleniia (Moscow: Mysl’, 1988); Nikolai V. Karpan, Chernobyl’: Mest’ mirnogo atoma (Kiev: Kantri Laif, 2005); V. Vozniak and S. Troitskii, Chernobyl: Tak eto bylo (Moscow: Libris, 1993)).

129 On the functionality of ignorance see M. Michael, “Ignoring Science: Discourses of Ignorance in the Public Understanding of Science,” in Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, eds., Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, 107–125 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

130 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 226. See also Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 7; Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 10–11.

131 Alexander Shlyakhter and Richard Wilson, “Chernobyl: The Inevitable Results of Secrecy,” Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992): 251–259; Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power”; Kruglov, Shtab atomproma; Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’. But this assessment is still problematic because it does not take into account that nuclear power plants went from total secrecy to quite comprehensive civilian control and back, in tight interconnection with organizational responsibilities, overall economic reforms, and the adoption of specific technical choices. See Schmid, “Envisioning a Technological State.”

132 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 223.

133 See Holloway's argument about the nuclear physicists’ freedom amid the Stalinist terror (Holloway, “Physics, the State, and Civil Society”). See also Asif A. Siddiqi, “Within the First Circle: Science and Engineering in the Gulag,” paper presented at the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Washington, DC, November 16–19, 2006; Michael A. Dennis, “Secrecy and Science Revisited: From Politics to Historical Practice and Back,” in Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist, eds., The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine, 172–184 (London: Routledge, 2006).

Chapter 4

1 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Vvedenie k 1-mu vypusku,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 5–15 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 5); Lev A. Kochetkov, ed., Ot Pervoi v mire AES k atomnoi energetike XXI veka: Sbornik tezisov, dokladov i soobshchenii (Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference, June 28–July 2, 1999, Obninsk) (Obninsk: Iadernoe obshchestvo Rossii, 1999).

2 Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 5; Vladimir G. Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika: Otsenki proshlogo, realii nastoiashchego, ozhidaniia budushchego (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004), 8, 12; Kochetkov, Ot pervoi v mire.

3 V. P. Denisov, “Evoliutsiia vodo-vodianykh energeticheskikh reaktorov dlia AES,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 218–302 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002).

4 Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 5; Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 8.

5 I owe this observation to Jonathan Coopersmith. At Rosenergoatom annual conference in June 2004, Aleksandr Rumiantsev, then Russian minister of Atomic Energy, deplored the diversity of reactor designs developed in the USSR (see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi kontsern po proizvodstvu elektricheskoi i teplovoi energii na atomnykh stantiiakh (Rosenergoatom), ed. 50 let atomnoi energetike, Proceedings of the Fourth International Scientific and Technical conference on Nuclear Power Safety, Efficiency and Economics held in Moscow, June 16–17 (Moscow: Mashmir, 2004). By contrast, he praised the early standardization in France. Other countries’ nuclear power programs may not actually be as straightforward and clear (cf., e.g., Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998)), and, conversely, the Soviet program might look fairly “logical” to an outsider in retrospect.

6 Peter DeLeon, Development and Diffusion of the Nuclear Power Reactor: A Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1979), 99.

7 Vladimir V. Goncharov, “Pervyi period razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 16–70 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Igor’ V. Kurchatov, “Rech’ tovarishcha I. V. Kurchatova (Akademiia Nauk SSSR),” Pravda 53, no. 22 (February 1956): 7.

8 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union and in Russia,” Nuclear Engineering and Design 173 (1997): 3–20 (especially 5); Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 6.

9 Interview #4.

10 Had Kurchatov's group failed, instead of receiving prestigious awards, they would have been shot or imprisoned (David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 215).

11 “Stabilization,” “closure,” and the preceding chaos or “interpretative flexibility” are stages in the “Social Construction of Technology” program that Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, Thomas Hughes, and others developed in the 1980s (Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)). I use “stabilization” here because “closure” has since been shown to be a thoroughly leaky process (Paul Rosen, “The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes: Technology and Postmodernity in the Cycle Industry,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 479–513) that is hardly ever permanent, and rarely even approaches the definition of “stable state characterized by consensus” (Thomas J. Misa, “Controversy and Closure in Technological Change: Constructing ‘Steel,’” in W. E. Bijker and J. Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, 109–139 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) (especially 109)).

12 In 1956, Kurchatov accompanied Nikita Khrushchev to Britain, where he gave two talks at the leading nuclear research center at Harwell.

13 Many nuclear research centers, design institutes, and construction bureaus were secret “iashchiki,” identified only by their post office box numbers.

14 Postanovlenie SNK SSSR No. 3117–937ss; see www.ippe.ru/ist/date.php.

15 Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York: Freeman, 1999); Alexei Kojevnikov, “Piotr Kapitza and Stalin's Government: A Study in Moral Choice,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 22, no. 1 (1991): 131–164.

16 An excellent, detailed biography can be found at a local Obninsk site: http://iobninsk.ru/aleksandr-ilyich-leypunskiy/; see also the short biographical note provided by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the History of Science and Technology, http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/repress/kharkov/leipunsky.htm.

17 A year later, in 1950, Leipunskii started his own program to develop fast neutron reactors.

18 Kochetkov, Ot pervoi v mire, 15; Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 5; Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 12.

19 Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 5.

20 Kurchatov and Zaveniagin also justified the choice of the graphite-moderated, water-cooled design as follows: “The installation AM (with water coolant) has the advantage that experience with regular boilers could be applied more directly than with the other designs …; the relative simplicity of the installation makes its construction easier and cheaper” (quoted in Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 13).

21 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Arkadii K. Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’ atomnaia promyshlennost’ v SSSR (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1995); DeLeon, Development and Diffusion, 59; Helen Knorre, “Frontiers of Technology: U.S.S.R.,” Nuclear Engineering 9, no. 100 (1964): 317–318.

22 Natural uranium contains mostly uranium 238 and only traces of uranium 235. Through complex, time-consuming, and costly processes, the percentage of uranium 235 can be increased (this is called “enrichment”); the result is called “enriched uranium,” and the percentage of enrichment refers to the portion of uranium 235. The availability of enriched uranium allowed the use of light water as a coolant. Uranium separation and enrichment are tightly controlled technologies; facilities are very complex and expensive, and for some time, only the United States and the USSR could manufacture enriched uranium. The United States initially refused to supply even its allies (France, Britain) with enriched uranium, and so these countries at first had little choice other than to develop reactors operating on natural uranium. Only after their own separation plants provided them with the ability to enrich uranium did they gradually (and at great cost) switch to reactors operating on enriched uranium (DeLeon, Development and Diffusion, 57–60).

23 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 17.

24 Most prominently, Kurchatov spoke at the twentieth Party congress (Kurchatov, “Rech’ tovarishcha I. V. Kurchatova”). Feinberg's book, Theory of Nuclear Reactors, seems to have been a standard textbook for nuclear physics students (S. M. Feinberg, S. B. Shikhov, and B. V. Troianskii, Teoriia iadernykh reaktorov, 2 vols. (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1983)).

25 SM stands for sverkh-moshchnyi, “high power,” but also—according to informal evidence—for Savelii Moiseevich, Feinberg's first name and father's name (Viktor A. Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, atomnykh stantsiiakh, uchiteliakh, kollegakh i o sebe (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); Boris A. Fain, Aktivnaia zona: Povest’ ob atomnom institute (Moscow: Skripto, 1998); Nikolai A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira: zapiski konstruktora (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, IzdAt, 2002).

26 On March 15, 1956, the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a decree that, among other things, officially ordered the construction of the Beloiarsk nuclear power plant (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 33–34).

27 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 6. Usually, steam produced in nuclear reactors is more saturated than in conventional power plants, and thus less efficient with conventional turbines. In the ensuing decades, efforts were made to facilitate the production of turbines specifically engineered for nuclear power plants, with a reduced rotation speed.

28 Interview #8.

29 Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 17.

30 Brian Wynne, “Unruly Technology,” Social Studies of Science 18, no. 1 (1988): 147–167; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems.

31 L. A. Alekhin and G. V. Kiselev, “Istoriia sozdaniia pervogo v SSSR i v mire dvukhtselevogo uran-grafitovogo reaktora EI-2 dlia odnovremennogo proizvodstva oruzheinogo plutoniia i elektroenergii,” Istoriia nauki i tekhniki 12 (2003): 2–35.

32 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 60.

33 Named after the Moscow scientist Bilibin, who in the 1930s conjectured that the far north was rich in gold, the plant owes its existence to the Soviet government, which decreed on January 12, 1966, that a nuclear plant would be the most suitable energy provider for this remote region: it would provide heat and electricity and require minimal maintenance. The plant was declared an All-Union shock-work construction site in 1967. The first two Bilibino 12 MW reactors went operational in 1974, the third in 1975, and the fourth on December 28, 1976; they remain in operation today.

34 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 31; Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 6.

35 In 1994, FEI started cooperating with NIKIET on the technical design for a second series of reactors at the Bilibino site.

36 In 1964, at the Third United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, Andranik Petrosyiants reported dissent regarding the immediate future prospects of breeder reactors. Petrosyiants reported that Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union proposed a fast transition to breeder reactors, while Canada and the United States considered them a relatively distant option. The argument did not seem to center on financial or safety issues; breeders were simply considered the logical, “rational” next step (Andranik M. Petros’iants, “Tret’ia mezhdunarodnaia Zhenevskaia konferentsiia atomnikov,” Atomnaia Energiia 17, no. 5 (1964): 323–328). Breeder development took very different paths—it was abandoned in France and Germany, mostly because of safety concerns, energetically pursued in Japan, and hesitantly pursued in the USSR.

37 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 28; Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 15–16.

38 The 1959 reactor at Obninsk was an experimental breeder reactor with 5 MW thermal capacity and sodium coolant. It was the prototype of the first Soviet commercial breeder reactor, which was built on the Caspian Sea (in what today is Kazakhstan) with the purpose of desalinating water and producing electricity for a new city, Shevchenko. Today, the nuclear power plant is referred to as the Mangistau nuclear complex and the city is called Aqtau, which means “white mountain” in Kazakh. The Shevchenko reactor (BN-350) had a capacity of 350 MW. It started operation in 1973, but due to operational difficulties, it never consistently operated at full power. The experimental fast neutron reactor BOR-60 (with 12 MW capacity) was considered the prototype for a breeder reactor designed for power generation, even though it was launched in the territory of a then classified research institute (Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 16). The BN-600 reactor went operational at the Beloiarsk site in 1980, and in 2010 it received a license extension until 2020. A larger reactor based on the same design, the BN-800, has been under construction at the Beloiarsk site since 1984. The Russian government continued to include the BN-800 in its target programs, in part because fast reactors are seen by some as a way to deal with the problem of spent nuclear fuel (http://www.belnpp.rosenergoatom.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosenergoatom/belnpp/about/prospects).

39 See, for example, Josephson, Red Atom.

40 Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 8; Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 3; Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 17.

41 The exact location was not revealed at the time, but it is now known that this reactor was built in the territory of the Siberian Chemical Combine (Combine 816, or Tomsk-7, later renamed Seversk), about 12 kilometers northwest of the city of Tomsk (Alekhin and Kiselev, “Istoriia sozdaniia”; see also Global Security's site on the Tomsk-7/Seversk Siberian Chemical Combine (Combine 816), at http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/tomsk-7_nuc.htm).

42 Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Vtoroi Ivan: Sovershenno sekretno (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1998).

43 Its initial power output was 100 MWe, which was increased to 600 in subsequent years (Sidorenko, “Vvedenie”).

44 Interview #5.

45 Michele Stenehjem Gerber, On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

46 The last dual-use reactor in Zheleznogorsk was shut down only in 2010, because the nearby towns relied on them for heat and hot water (Stephen Bunnell, “Russian Plutonium-Producing Reactors Closed,” Arms Control Today July/August (2008), http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2008_07-08/RussianPlutonium; Frank N. von Hippel and Matthew Bunn, “Saga of the Siberian Plutonium-Production Reactors,” Journal of the Federation of American Scientists 53, no. 6 (2000), http://www.fas.org/faspir/v53n6.htm).

47 The abbreviation “ADE” most likely stands for “atomic dual-use power reactor” (atomnyi reaktor dvukhtselevoi energeticheskii). Dual-use reactors were built at Tomsk-7 (today Seversk), Cheliabinsk-40 (today Ozersk), and Krasnoiarsk (today Zheleznogorsk). ADE-3 was started up in 1961, and construction of ADE-4 and ADE-5 began in 1963 and 1965, respectively. The decision to build these dual-use reactors was made in 1957, even before the “Second Ivan” had started up.

48 Letter to A. N. Kosygin, chairman of the SM, “On the construction of a complex of heat-supply facilities in the city of Tomsk” (RGAE f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3973, l. 170–172).

49 Information on the construction of a complex of heat-supply facilities in the city of Tomsk (“Spravka o stroitel'stve kompleksa sooruzhenii po teplosnabzheniiu goroda Tomska”), November 2, 1970 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3973, l. 173–174); letter from Gosplan's N. Baibakov to the Tomsk regional party committee (E. K. Ligachev), January 14, 1971 (RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3973, l. 175).

50 The planning of a nuclear power plant site sometimes included considerations about the imminent availability of workers once a nearby industrial facility was completed (e.g., RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3, f. 2015, vol. 2: “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska k godovomu otchetu za 1958 god po kapital’nomu stroitel'stvu direktsii stroiashcheisia Leningradskoi GRES No. 16,” l. 38).

51 “Atomnuiu energiiu—na sluzhbu mirnomu stroitel'stvu: Beseda korrespondenta ‘Izvestii’ s nachal’nikom Glavnogo upravleniia po ispol’zovaniiu atomnoi energii pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR E. P. Slavskim,” Izvestiia, no. 23 (May 1956): 2–3.

52 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 21–22; “Atomnuiu energiiu—na sluzhbu mirnomu stroitel'stvu.”

53 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 54; Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 8.

54 This “TETs-3” was planned to be sited in Khovrino, with two VVER reactors and a total power output of 400 MW (Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energiia,17).

55 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 22–23.

56 Ibid., 59; see also some of the letters Kurchatov wrote, which are included as appendixes to Goncharov's chapter (Letters to Leonid I. Brezhnev, June 21, 1958; to secretary of the Party's Central Committee Frol R. Kozlov, April 16, 1959; to secretary of the Party's Central Committee A. I. Kirichenko, April 6, 1959; to the chairman of the Council of Ministers Aleksei N. Kosygin, April 24, 1959) (ibid., 65–70)).

57 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 6.

58 Ibid., 9; Viktor P. Tatarnikov, “Atomnaia elektroenergetika (s VVER i drugimi reaktorami),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 303–399 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Interview #11.

59 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 9.

60 In 1956, an intergovernment agreement was signed between the USSR and the GDR, and in 1957 construction work on the first East German nuclear power plant at Rheinsberg, with a capacity of 70 MW, began. It was commissioned in 1966. From 1971 to 1975, six VVER-440 units went critical in the Soviet Union (at Novo-Voronezh, Kola, and the Armenian nuclear power plant), and from 1974 to 1982, ten such reactors were commissioned in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR under CMEA agreements (Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 8–10).

61 Maria Nicolaevna Vasilieva, Soleils rouges: L’ambition nucléaire soviétique [Essai sur l’évolution des systèmes de prise de décision dans le nucléaire soviétique (Russe)] (Paris: Institut d’Histoire de l’Industrie et Éditions Rive Droite, 1999); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia: O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh (k 100-letiiu N. A. Dollezhalia) (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh: Prodolzhenie traditsii (k 50-letiiu NIKIET im. N. A. Dollzhalia (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002).

62 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 8; DeLeon, Development and Diffusion, 113. In addition to the pressurized water reactors, Soviet engineers also built prototype submarine reactors cooled with liquid metal. Only one of them was produced for a series of submarines in the late 1970s: seven Alfa class submarines were equipped with liquid metal cooled reactors, but the design did not catch on. See Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 54; “Atomnuiu energiiu—na sluzhbu mirnomu stroitel'stvu.”

63 See George T. Mazuzan and J. Samuel Walker, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946–1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1–31.

64 Propulsion reactors use uranium with a much higher fuel enrichment (20 to 90 percent) than power reactors, which usually operate with a maximum enrichment of 3 to 4 percent.

65 Goncharov lists the following scientists as involved in the development of these reactors: A. P. Aleksandrov, S. M. Feinberg, I. I. Afrikantov, N. S. Khlopkin, and G. A. Gladkov (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 61). The Russian icebreaker fleet currently encompasses six icebreakers (Rossiia, Taimyr, Sovetskii Soiuz, Vaygach, Yamal, and 50 let Pobedy), a container ship (Sevmorput), and two service ships (Imandra and Lotta), as well as a special tanker for liquid radioactive waste (Serebrianka) and a vessel for personnel cleanup and dose measurement (Rosta-1) (“Nuclear Icebreakers,” http://www.rosatom.ru/en/about/activities/nuclear_icebreakers). In 1964, Germany produced a nuclear freighter (Otto Hahn), and Japan was working on its first nuclear ship. The United States had launched the NS Savannah around the same time as the Lenin. Soviet analysts concluded that the NS Savannah failed due to “a lack of trust from trade companies and passengers” (Petros’iants, “Tret’ia mezhdunarodnaia Zhenevskaia konferentsiia atomnikov,” 327; see also David Kuechle, The Story of the Savannah: An Episode in Maritime Labor-Management Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)).

66 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 12. When Western nuclear experts assessed the safety of Eastern European VVERs in the 1990s, they concluded that the horizontal steam generators made these reactors more forgiving than Western pressurized water reactors with vertical steam generators (http://insp.pnnl.gov/-profiles-reactors-vver230.htm; see also Thomas R. Wellock, “The Children of Chernobyl: Engineers and the Campaign for Safety in Soviet-Designed Reactors in Central and Eastern Europe,” History and Technology 29, no. 1 (2013): 3–32).

67 Convenience thus contrasted with quality: parts assembled on site could not be guaranteed to meet the same consistent quality standards that factory-manufactured parts for nuclear reactors did (Interview #8).

68 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 8–10; Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 55.

69 Neutron shielding can be achieved by creating a thick protective layer of water and steel between the core and the vessel, but this “increases the non-productive part of the vessel” (Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 10). Engineers therefore created types of special nickel-plated steel that would retain their strength despite irradiation for the reactor's lifetime (then projected at twenty to forty years).

70 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 55.

71 The Atommash factory—under construction and behind schedule for most of this story—was intentionally built on a large river system, so these limitations could eventually be overcome by loading nuclear equipment on barges and shipping it to its ultimate destination.

72 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 8; DeLeon, Development and Diffusion, 113.

73 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 9. At least the first VVER-440 units (of the 440/230 variety) had isolation valves that allowed “plant operators to take one or more of the six coolant loops out of service for repair while continuing to operate the plant” (http://insp.pnnl.gov/-profiles-reactors-vver230.htm).

74 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 9.

75 The earlier design version of the VVER-440 is also referred to as “Model 230” or “V-230,” whereas the later one, which contains several modernized design features (including a containment structure), is referred to as “Model 213” or “V-213.” After 1991, and a lengthy process of safety evaluation, the V-230 reactors in Eastern Europe were shut down for good (Wellock, “Children of Chernobyl”).

76 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 17.

77 AST/ATETs reactors were essentially versions of the VVER; they were equipped with so-called inherent and passive safety features, including natural circulation, low power densities in the core, slow-proceeding normal and accident processes, great reserves of coolant in the primary circuit, and passive emergency heat-removal systems, to name but a few (Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 16–17).

78 Several of my interviewees were very disgruntled by the fact that a very successful politician, Boris Nemtsov, started his political career “riding the green wave”—that is, by opposing the Gorky nuclear heating plant. Nemtsov followed Sergei Kirienko (one of Boris Yeltsin's luckless premiers) from Gorky to Moscow, where he eventually became leader of the Soiuz pravykh sil party (“Union of Right Forces”). The Gorky plant (at least temporarily) housed a vodka production facility. This halt in the construction of new nuclear power plants after Chernobyl is usually attributed to “public pressure,” but the concurrent economic decline should not be neglected (Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Glenys A. Babcock, “The Role of Public Interest Groups in Democratization: Soviet Environmental Groups and Energy Policy-Making, 1985–1991,” doctoral dissertation, RAND Graduate School, 1997; Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sonja D. Schmid, “Transformation Discourse: Nuclear Risk as a Strategic Tool in Late Soviet Politics of Expertise,” Science, Technology & Human Values 29, no. 3 (2004): 353–376; Jeremy J. Richardson, ed., Pressure Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David R. Marples, “The Post-Soviet Nuclear Power Program,” Post-Soviet Geography 34, no. 3 (1993): 172–184; Donna Bahry and Brian D. Silver, “Soviet Citizen Participation on the Eve of Democratization,” American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (1990): 821–847; James H. Oliver, “Citizen Demand and the Soviet Political System,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 2 (1969): 465–475; Jerry F. Hough, “Political Participation in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 28, no. 1 (1976): 3–20).

79 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 17–18. These designs would also allow a reduction in the operating personnel by a factor of 2.5–3, a measure not so much aimed at cost-cutting as at reducing the potential for human error (ibid., 18).

80 Around the same time, the staff at the Beloiarsk nuclear power plant, then the only industrial-scale graphite-water reactor in operation, received a design draft for review: it was a graphite-water reactor different from the one they were managing (Interviews #3 and #9). The Beloiarsk specialists were asked to evaluate, it turned out, an early version of the RBMK: a graphite-water design that would soon be adopted as the second standardized reactor for mass implementation in the Soviet territory. After several weeks of studying these blueprints, the experts at Beloiarsk concluded that this design retained the negative features of early power reactors, and in their final report recommended that the design needed significant improvements. As one of my interviewees predicted, I was not able to locate this report in an archive.

81 Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 42. According to veterans of the Leningrad nuclear power plant, these goals of physical and thermal efficiency, along with reliability and safety, were guiding principles in the design process (Leonid A. Belianin, ed., Leningradskaia AES: Gody, sobytiia, liudi (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1998)). This stood in marked contrast to production reactors, where the primary goal was to maximize the output of weapons-grade plutonium.

82 The State Specialized Design Institute (GSPI-11) was appointed chief project manager, the Kharkov Turbine Factory was selected as chief engineer of the nonnuclear part of the plant, and several factories were tasked with manufacturing equipment (Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 41–42).

83 These reactors had an electrical power of 1000 MW, and a thermal power of 3200 MW (ibid., 33). On November 11, 1966, the minister of Medium Machine Building, Efim Slavskii, issued an order that held the following individuals personally responsible for the design of the first two blocks of the Leningrad nuclear power plant: A. P. Aleksandrov as scientific director, S. M. Feinberg as his deputy, N. A. Dollezhal as the chief design engineer, Iu. M. Bulkin as his deputy, and A. A. Bochvar as the chief designer of the fuel assemblies. Additionally, NII-8 was put in charge of addressing the comments of the experts and of updating and improving the design (ibid., 48).

84 Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 34, 42. One difference between the Beloiarsk reactor and the RBMK design was that the fuel elements at Obninsk, as well as at the Beloiarsk reactors and Bilibino, were ring-shaped and steel-clad, while the RBMK's fuel elements are pellet-shaped and zirconium-clad.

85 The government decree (Postanovlenie Soveta Ministrov No. 500–252, September 29, 1966) that identified the RBMK as the reactor type to be implemented at Leningrad, and several other locations, was issued several months before Dollezhal's institute was appointed chief design engineer. On the Internet, including Rosatom's official website, there seems to be some confusion about the date of this government decree (September or November) and so far I have not been able to verify the date; however, several authoritative sources use the September date (V. P. Vasilevskii et al., “Razrabotka proekta i sozdanie pervogo energobloka s reaktorom RBMK-1000,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3, 61–101 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003) (especially 63); A. N. Kuz'min, “Sorok let s RBMK,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3, 156–170 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003) (especially 157); Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom; Ulasevich, O iadernykh reaktorakh).

86 The original fuel enrichment was 1.8 percent, which was subsequently recognized as a design flaw, facilitating a very high positive steam coefficient of reactivity. In the late 1970s the designers increased the enrichment to 2 percent; at the Lithuanian RBMKs, the enrichment was further raised to 2.4 percent, then to 2.6 percent, and later to 2.8 percent (Interview #16).

87 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13.

88 Ibid., 13.

89 World Nuclear Association, “RBMK Reactors,” http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Appendices/RBMK-Reactors.

90 The remotely controlled refueling machine, essentially a tall crane that moves atop the reactor's upper biological shield, is brought in position over the desired channel, seals the head, and (after equalizing the pressure and feeding water into the channel) draws up the spent fuel assembly. It then automatically inserts a fresh fuel assembly, seals the channel, and transports the spent fuel to a pool for cooling. The Russian acronym for this machine is PRM, Pogruzochno-razgruzochnaia mashina (Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13).

91 Variations in the fuel cycles can be used to increase or decrease the amount of plutonium, or electricity, produced. The longer the fuel rods are left in the reactor core (i.e., the better the fuel is burned up), the more electricity can be generated; the less time they are left in the core, the more plutonium is produced (Interview #4).

92 At an international conference in Moscow in June 2004 (Rosenergoatom, VNIIAES), a physicist from the Kurchatov Institute who talked about fuel burn-up in RBMKs mentioned that “now that we don't need to produce extra plutonium anymore, this doesn't matter” (quoted from memory), indicating that there had been some options as to how to utilize the fuel in order to get (or not) a maximum of plutonium out of it. So the RBMKs could be used to produce additional plutonium (a fact noticed by Western observers and analysts), just in case the Siberian installations broke down or were incapacitated for other reasons. But RBMKs were not intended as primary plutonium producers—for that purpose the Soviets had their military reactors in Siberia (also Interview #11).

93 Despite the fact that Western sources have claimed that RBMKs were used for plutonium production, I haven't found evidence to support these claims. The plutonium production capacity of military and dual-use reactors in Siberia was so great that the use of the RBMK—a design optimized for power generation—for weapons-grade plutonium production seems unlikely, at least under normal circumstances.

94 DeLeon, Development and Diffusion, 112.

95 Ibid., 113, and Interview #22.

96 The “void coefficient,” also called “steam (or bubble) coefficient of reactivity,” was one of the physical causes for the reactor accident in Chernobyl (www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/s/steam-bubble-coefficient.htm). I return to this design feature in more detail in chapter 5.

97 Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 51. The physical launch in Russian is fizicheskii pusk, or fizpusk.

98 This period of work, leading up to the launch of the reactor, is called pusko-naladochnye raboty (start-up and adjustment work) (Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 50).

99 This is referred to as energeticheskii pusk.

100 The “Den’ energetika” is still celebrated in Russia on December 22 (the day of the “atomshchik” is September 28).

101 This mode of operation (opytno-promyshlennaia operatsiia (Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 51)) is distinct from the actual industrial operation.

102 Ibid., 51.

103 Ibid., 52.

104 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13.

105 Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 56. The zirconium-niobium alloy used in the cladding provided more economical use of neutrons in the chain reaction, and more easily managed coolant temperatures (Sidorenko 1997, 11–12).

106 Gennadii A. Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” in Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 75–132 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 126–127). Nuclear safety expert Viktor Sidorenko distinguished seven different “modes” or “modifications” of the RBMK that somewhat overlap with Shasharin's “generations.” Sidorenko divides up the first generation RBMKs into two, and the second generation into four modes (Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13–15).

107 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 14.

108 The first edition of safety regulations for nuclear power plant design went into effect in 1968 (ibid., 7). The first edition of the “General Regulations for Nuclear Power Plant Safety” was approved in 1971 (ibid., 9).

109 “Accident localization system” essentially means measures to contain an accident and to prevent the release of radioactive materials.

110 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13.

111 MKR is short for metallurgicheskii kol'tsevoi reaktor (“metallurgical ring reactor”) (Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, Strategiia razvitiia atomnoi energetiki Rossii v pervoi polovine XXI veka (Moscow: FGUP “TsNIIatominform,” 2001); Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 15). This reactor was supposed to replace some of the first-generation RBMKs—for example, at the Leningrad nuclear power plant. However, by 2006, not a single graphite-water design was part of the country's nuclear energy strategy (Natsional’nyi issledovatel'skii tsentr “Kurchatovskii institut,” O strategii iadernoi energetiki Rossii do 2050 goda (Moscow: NITs “Kurchatovskii institut,” 2012)).

112 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 217–253 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 227); Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13.

113 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13. For the decision to develop the RBMK, see Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 41–53.

114 Josephson, Red Atom, 25. Aleksandrov had succeeded the IFP's previous director, Petr Kapitsa, who was reinstated after Stalin's death. Peter Holquist has suggested translating sharik as “balloon,” referring to the helium used in this design. I am not sure whether Aleksandrov's proposal already featured spherical fuel elements (as later designs did; cf. Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 30), but if it did, sharik may also have referred to the spherical shape of the fuel elements. Helium is an excellent coolant and can produce heat and steam very efficiently.

115 The first series of fuel elements for the “EG” reactor (energeticheskii-gazovyi), produced by the All-Union Scientific and Technical Institute for Aviation Materials (VIAM), had already been produced and was being tested in research reactors (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 30; Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 65).

116 Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 8–9; Vasilieva, Soleils rouges.

117 This reactor, the ABTU-Ts (VGR-50), was never constructed either, and in June 1987 (after Chernobyl!), another decree ordered the construction of the VG-400 instead of the VGR-50 (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 30). As far as I could determine, the VG-400, which was supposed to produce electrical power and energy for applications in the chemical and metallurgical industry, was never built (cf. also Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 4). The main ideologue behind this design, Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi, in the early 2000s promoted the related idea of a “hydrogen economy,” where nuclear power plants produce electricity during the day, and hydrogen fuel cells during the night, when demand for electricity is low (Rosenergoatom's Fourth International Scientific and Technical Conference, “Nuclear Power Safety, Efficiency, and Economics,” held June 16–17, 2004, in Moscow). Gabrielle Hecht has described the development and demise of the gas-graphite design in France (Hecht, The Radiance of France, especially 271–323), and Maria Vasilieva investigated why the Soviets did not adopt gas-cooled designs like the British and French in the first place (Vasilieva, Soleils rouges).

118 Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’.

119 B. L. Ioffe and O. V. Shvedov, “Heavy Water Reactors and Nuclear Power Plants in the USSR and Russia: Past, Present, and Future,” Atomic Energy 86, no. 4 (1999): 295–304. In October 1945, the Technical Council of the Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb charged Abram Alikhanov with leading the newly established Laboratory No. 3 of the Academy of Sciences. Alikhanov led efforts to construct a reactor using heavy water as a moderator (Abram I. Ioirysh et al., Gosudarstvennyi nadzor za obespecheniem bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki: pravovye problemy (Moskva: Nauka, 1991); Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’). The same institute also spearheaded efforts to construct a homogeneous reactor (cf. Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 17). The 500 kW reactor had been engineered by the construction bureau OKB Gidropress in the city of Podolsk. In 1957, it was reconstructed and its output raised five times to reach 2500 kW (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 29).

120 Ioffe and Shvedov, “Heavy Water Reactors.”

121 The construction of the fuel rods proved particularly challenging: these consisted of metallic uranium in a cladding made of a magnesium and beryllium alloy and designed to withstand temperatures of up to 500°C (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 29–30).

122 Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 66; Andranik M. Petros’iants, Dorogi zhizni, kotorye vybirali nas (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1993). Goncharov suggests that several heavy-water reactors were planned for military sites in the Soviet Union, but they were abandoned after the mishaps with the operation of the Czechoslovakian reactor, which also revealed design and construction flaws (Goncharov, “Pervyi period,” 33, 58). Canada, by contrast, developed its national nuclear power program based on a heavy-water design, the CANDU. According to a nuclear physicist I interviewed, the Canadians also encountered severe problems with their fuel rods and received assistance from the Soviets with the technology the latter had mastered by then. He recalled that “the Canadians said ‘Thank you,’ and that was it” (Interview #23).

123 I use “momentum” or “technological momentum” in Thomas Hughes's sense, as “a mass of technical and organizational components” that technological systems acquire over a prolonged period of growth and consolidation. At some point, these technological systems “possess direction, or goals; and they display a rate of growth suggesting velocity” (Thomas P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 51–82 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) (quotes on 76)).

124 These numbers include all units that started up by the end of 1986. They include the unique Bilibino (four 12 MW units) and Beloiarsk reactors (100, 200, and 600 MW, respectively), and the breeder reactor at Shevchenko (350 MW). I did not include military dual-use reactors in this count.

125 The restarted civilian nuclear program included four designs: in addition to the AMB, under construction at Beloiarsk, and the VVER, under construction at Novo-Voronezh, these were a gas-graphite design and a heavy-water reactor with an organic coolant (see chapter one). According to Sidorenko, the heavy-water design was later replaced with light-water reactors, and the gas-graphite design with an emphasis on breeders, which were seen as a solution to the problem of fuel availability—at least until fusion would become operational (Sidorenko, “Vvedenie,” 9).

126 Interview #4; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb.

127 Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 53. A version of it was also provided in an interview (Interview #16). My English translation.

128 Tatarnikov, “Atomnaia elektroenergetika.”

129 Interviews #3 and #9. See also Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom; Leonid A. Belianin, ed., Leningradskaia AES: Gody, sobytiia, liudi (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1998); Nikolai A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira: Zapiski konstruktora (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, IzdAt, 2002). This production bottleneck would be cleared once the Volga-Don Atommash factory was completed, which was intended to release several reactor vessels for VVERs each year. But this factory was not to be completed until the early 1980s, and then only partially (Josephson, Red Atom, 97–108; Marsha Freeman, “Atommash: Assembly Line Nuclear Plants,” Executive Intelligence Review 6, no. 28 (1979): 20–21; V. A. Il’ichev and A. A. Prigoryan, “Structure Settlements at the Atommash Plant as a Result of Prolonged Soil Wetting,” Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering 25, no. 4 (1988): 150–157).

130 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13. See also Ulasevich, Sozdano pod rukovodstvom, 41–53.

131 In 1975, the Institute of Atomic Energy issued an expert summary titled “Nuclear Power: Fundamental Problems and Perspectives of its Development.” In this report, the choice of the RBMK in addition to the VVER was justified in terms of the relief it would bring to the machine-building industry, and also in terms of the potential to build reactors with very high power outputs (Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika, 21–23).

132 Interview #8.

133 Presumably, the RBMK could also be assembled using fewer skilled workers than the VVER; however, this argument was never made publicly.

134 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power.”

135 With the curious exception of the heavy-water reactor at Bohunice (in what today is Slovakia), the only design approved for export was the VVER (for details see Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, 125–154 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)).

136 Lev A. Kochetkov, “K istorii pervoi ocheredi Beloiarskoi AES,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atmnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 117–133 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001).

137 The siting of the VVER vessel factory Atommash does, in fact, suggest that barging the heavy, oversized vessels was being planned. But this factory failed, and the argument was dropped from official history.

138 Among the specialists who spent a formative period of their careers at the young Beloiarsk station were Gennadii Veretennikov, Boris Prushinski, and Artem Grigoryiants.

139 DeLeon, Development and Diffusion, 56; Reactors of the World (New York: Simmons-Boardman, 1958); U.S. Energy Research and Development Administra­tion, Division of Reactor Research and Development, Soviet Power Reactors 1974. Report of the United States of America Nuclear Power Reactor Delegation Visit to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, September 19–October 1, 1974 (ERDA-2, UC-79). (Washington, DC: U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, 1975).

140 Andranik M. Petros’iants, “Tret’ia mezhdunarodnaia Zhenevskaia konferentsiia atomnikov,” Atomnaia energiia 17, no. 5 (1964): 323–328.

141 In 1970, Sidorenko reported to an audience of almost 200 on a trip to the United States (Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR. Vsesoiuznyi teplotekhnicheskii nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut im. F. E. Dzerzhinskogo. NTS. Protokol i stenogramma zasedaniia NTS instituta ot 16.II.1970 po voprosu “Atomanaia energiia SShA.” Dokladchiki: V. V. Stekol’nikov, V. A. Sidorenko (RGANTD, f. R-277, op. 2–6, d. 1117). See also Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 5–28 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Tatarnikov, “Atomnaia elektroenergetika.” But see Mazuzan and Walker for a counterargument to the likely profitability of this reactor: they report that the United States initially considered its economic prospects worse than those of other designs (George T. Mazuzan and J. Samuel Walker, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946–1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1–31).

142 Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power,” 13. For a depiction in this spirit see, for example, K. Polushkin, “Atomnyi bogatyr’ [Atomic Giant],” Nauka i zhizn’ 11 (1980): 44–52; Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira; Belianin, Leningradskaia AES.

143 See Hecht, The Radiance of France, 3–4.

144 Ibid., 1998.

145 Sonja D. Schmid, “Transformation Discourse: Nuclear Risk as a Strategic Tool in Late Soviet Politics of Expertise,” Science, Technology & Human Values 29, no. 3 (2004): 353–376.

146 Alekhin and Kiselev, “Istoriia sozdaniia.”

Chapter 5

1 This procedure has often been referred to as an “experiment,” implying an inadmissible process at a civilian installation. However, tests are conducted at any industrial installation, nuclear or nonnuclear; they're part of the normal operation of a plant. For this reason I'll use the term test rather than experiment.

2 Gennadii A. Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” in Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 75–132 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 110).

3 The test also included measurements of the turbogenerator's vibrations, a problem caused by manufacturing defects that dated back to the start-up of unit 4 (Razim I. Davletbaev, “Posledniaia smena,” in Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 366–383 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 368)).

4 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 111.

5 Davletbaev, “Posledniaia smena,” 381.

6 Lenina S. Kaibysheva, “Posle Chernobylia,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 384–396 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 385); Constance Perin, “Operating as Experimenting: Synthesizing Engineering and Scientific Values in Nuclear Power Production,” Science, Technology & Human Values 23, no. 1 (1998): 98–128.

7 Davletbaev, “Posledniaia smena,” 369. A prominent science journalist I interviewed suggested that the accident happened because of soccer: the Kiev regional transmission system operator needed more electricity than anticipated because the soccer team Dinamo Kiev was playing, and everyone was watching TV (Interview #24). However, according to Robert Edelman, Dinamo Kiev actually played Spartak Moscow in Kiev two nights later, on April 27, in an open stadium, and won 2–1 (personal communication, October 2007).

8 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 111.

9 Xenon 135 is an element that comes into being when iodine 135 decays—a routine process in nuclear reactors. Xenon 135 is an extremely good neutron absorber and its half-life is 9.2 hours (Anatolii S. Diatlov, Chernobyl’: Kak eto bylo (Moscow: Nauchtekhlitizdat, 2003), 22). When the reactivity of a reactor is decreased (such as in the shutdown test described here), the reactor cannot be restarted until the xenon 135 that forms in the core has decayed. The maximum xenon 135 concentration is reached after about 12 hours. Several of my interviewees referred to this period of roughly 24 hours as ksenovaia iama, literally “xenon pit.” The United States encountered this phenomenon at its Hanford reactors; in the Soviet Union, it was well known at military reactors, but apparently this knowledge was not transferred to civilian graphite-water reactor operators (European Nuclear Society, www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/x/xenon-poisoning.htm).

10 I followed the very clear description in Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 116–117, and the timeline, based on INSAG-7, at http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety-of-Plants/Appendices/Chernobyl-Accident—Appendix-1–Sequence-of-Events. For more technical specifics on the RBMK see chapter 4.

11 After shutdown, even with the control rods completely inserted and no nuclear chain reaction occurring, however, the reactor continues to emit residual (decay) heat and needs to be continuously cooled. Without cooling, the decay of fission products in the reactor produces additional heat, which can drive the core's temperature up even with all control rods inserted.

12 The exact positioning of the control rods varies depending, among other things, on the fuel burn-up in the core. Since the RBMK can be refueled online (see chapter 4), refueling, or regrouping of fuel assemblies that are burned up to different degrees, occurs on a daily basis to optimize power output (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 115–116).

13 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 115.

14 Ibid.; International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, ed., Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident, No. 75-INSAG-1, Safety Series (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1986). Anatolii Diatlov, deputy chief engineer on duty at unit 4 that night, describes the situation as calm and routine right up until that time (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 29–61). The RBMK's scram button is sometimes referred to as AZ-5 or EPS-5.

15 As described earlier, the operators had pulled out the control rods in an effort to raise the reactor's power level, while the reactor was already entering the phase of “xenon poisoning.” After 1986, the operating instructions were changed to require a minimum of forty control rods permanently inserted into the core (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 125–126).

16 Minenergo's experts kept puzzling over where this additional reactivity came from—initially, they seriously considered the possibility of sabotage (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 93; Boris Ia. Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’—no eto sluchilos’ (pervye dni posle katastrofy),” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 308–324 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 316)).

17 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 93. The question of whether the explosion was thermal or nuclear is still contested.

18 This exponential rise in power is the same process that takes place in an atomic bomb, except that a weapon is built to exploit this process, whereas a power reactor is designed to avoid it under any circumstances (Interview #23).

19 The warning system that in fact had been switched off was the reactor emergency cooling system (sistema avariinogo okhlazhdeniia reaktora, SAOR), which gets activated automatically during the maximum design accident (maksimal’naia proektnaia avariia, MPA). The instructions for the test required switching off this system. In addition, Shasharin argues that the operators were confident about switching it off because they knew that six RBMK units (the two older reactors at Leningrad, Kursk, and Chernobyl) did not have this system at all. Besides, even if the system had been in operation, it was notoriously slow and would not have been able to alter the course of events (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 112–113).

20 Davletbaev, “Posledniaia smena,” 371.

21 “Proizoshlo prakticheski mgnovennoe (vzryvnoe) narastanie moshchnosti” (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 93). See also Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 9.

22 Aleksandr A. Iadrikhinskii, Iadernaia avariia na 4-om bloke Chernobyl'skoi AES i iadernaia bezopasnost’ reaktorov RBMK (Kurchatov: [n.p.], 1989) (quote on 10). This report is available online (e.g., http://ilya-sirius.ucoz.com/load/1-1-0-1). Others have speculated that what sounded like a second explosion could have been the reactor's upper biological shield, a disk-shaped concrete structure weighing a thousand tons (two million pounds), crashing back down on the reactor shaft after the first explosion lifted it off its base (Interview #34 and personal communication).

23 It is still disputed just how much radioactive material was released into the atmosphere and how much of the core ended up underground, solidified as an “elephant's foot” (e.g., Boris E. Burakov et al., “The Behavior of Nuclear Fuel in the First Days of the Chernobyl Accident,” Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings 465 (1996): 1297–1308). Official reports on the percentage of nuclear fuel that reached the environment often quote figures in the range of 3–5 percent (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 108). Alternative accounts maintain that the original discharge was 25–30 percent, and that eventually the entire fuel mass was outside of the reactor (e.g., Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 109; Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 313). Iadrikhinskii writes that at least 80 percent of the nuclear fuel was ejected (Iadrikhinskii, Iadernaia avariia, 6).

24 During the first 48 hours, 203 people had to seek medical treatment; 129 were sent to Moscow (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 83–84).

25 See, for example, “Moscow News Disputes Official Chornobyl Toll,” Ukrainian Weekly 57, no. 47 (November 19, 1989): 1, 5.

26 Davletbaev, “Posledniaia smena,” 377.

27 These tablets are used to prevent the thyroid gland from taking up radioactive iodine, and apparently there would have been sufficient quantities available in the area (A. N. Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy na Chernobyl'skoi AES,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 7–74 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 18)). It is beyond the scope of this study to go into detail on the radiological, medical, or demographic consequences of the Chernobyl accident. The literature on the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident is extensive; see, for example, Vasilii B. Nesterenko, Masshtaby i posledstviia katastrofy na Chernobyl'skoi AES dlia Belorusi, Ukrainy i Rossii (Minsk: Pravo i ekonomika, 1996); Mezhdunarodnyi Chernobyl'skii Proekt, Mezhdunarodnyi Chernobyl'skii Proekt: Otsenka radiologicheskikh posledstvii i zashchitnykh mer (Moscow: IzdAT, 1991); International Atomic Energy Agency, The International Chernobyl Project: An Overview. Assessment of Radiological Consequences and Evaluation of Protective Measures (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991); International Atomic Energy Agency, The International Chernobyl Project: Technical Report—Assessment of Radiological Consequences and Evaluation of Protective Measures (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991); Rudol’f M. Aleksakhin et al., Problemy smiagcheniia posledstvii Chernobyl'skoi katastrofy: materialy mezhdunarodnogo seminara (Briansk: Rossiia, 1993); Zbigniew Jaworowski, “All Chernobyl's Victims: A Realistic Assessment of Chernobyl's Health Effects,” 21st Century Science and Technology 11, no. 1 (1998): 14–25; E. B. Burlakova, ed., Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe: Human Health (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy; Scientific Council on Radiobiology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1996); V. M. Zakharov and E. Yu. Krysanov, eds., Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe: Environmental Health (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy; Moscow Affiliate of the International “Biotest” Foundation, 1996); Alexey V. Yablokov et al., “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1181 (2009).

28 Lenina S. Kaibysheva, Posle Chernobylia, 2 vols. (Moscow: IzdAt, 1996–2001).

29 Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 321.

30 Vladimir V. Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy Politburo TsK KPSS na Chernobyl'skoi AES,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 263–282 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 267–269). At the time of Briukhanov's initial report to the Central Committee, the available information was still very vague (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 80). Briukhanov has often been criticized for having been overwhelmed by the situation after the accident, an assessment several eyewitnesses refute (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 97; Grigorii Medvedev, Chernobyl Notebook, JPRS-UEA-034–89 (Washington, DC: Joint Publications Research Service, October 23, 1989)). Shasharin, for example, attributes Briukhanov's reluctance to provide more than sketchy information to the common habit of not talking in excessive detail over a regular phone line, and also to a fear of being asked questions he couldn't yet answer. Prushinskii, Soiuzatomenergo's chief engineer and one of the first specialists to travel from Moscow to Chernobyl, is also sympathetic to Briukhanov. He suggests that Briukhanov didn't provide deliberate misinformation, but that he was struggling to believe what he saw with his own eyes, like many other experts when they first arrived on site. Also, Prushinskii implies that Briukhanov was deliberately trying to prevent a mass panic (Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 314). But see Clarke (Lee Clarke, “Panic: Myth or Reality?,” Contexts 1, no. 3 (2002): 21–26) on how the authorities’ fear of a mass panic might itself be something of a myth.

31 Council of Ministers, decree No. 830, April 26, 1986 (Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 13).

32 The members of Shcherbina's government commission were Evgenii I. Vorob’ev (first deputy minister of Health), Vasilii I. Drugov (deputy minister of Internal Affairs), Valerii A. Legasov (academician, first deputy director of the IAE), Aleksandr G. Meshkov (first deputy minister of Sredmash), Anatolii I. Maiorets (minister of Minenergo), Nikolai F. Nikolaev (deputy chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers), Ivan S. Pliush (chairman of the executive committee (ispolkom) of the regional Kiev Council of People's Delegates), Viktor A. Sidorenko (first deputy chairman of Gosatomenergonadzor), Nikolai P. Simochatov (chairman of the Central Committee of the Union of Power Plant Workers and Workers in the Electrotechnical Industry), Oleg V. Soroka (deputy procurator-general), and Fedor A. Shcherbak (head of the Sixth Administration of the KGB) (Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (especially 18)). See also Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 316.

33 Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 18–20.

34 Prushinskii reports that the second team arrived as early as May 2 (Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 323). He left Chernobyl on May 4, together with A. N. Semenov and M. S. Tsvirko (ibid., 323).

35 Kaibysheva, “Posle Chernobylia,” 391.

36 This group of experts for emergency situations under Soiuzatomenergo was called OPAS, gruppa okazaniia pomoshchi atomnym stantsiiam pri avariiakh (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 79–80; Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 309–311).

37 The formation of this group was suggested by Mikhail S. Gorbachev (Operativnaia gruppa Politburo TsK KPSS) (Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 23; Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 271).

38 Semenov, Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia. Among the Strategic Group's members were the chairman of the Russian FSSR's Council of Ministers V. I. Vorotnikov, the Central Committee's secretary E. K. Ligachev, the head of the KGB V. M. Chebrikov (all of whom were also members of the Politburo), another secretary of the Central Committee, V. I. Dolgikh, defense minister S. L. Sokolov, and the minister of internal affairs A. V. Vlasov (Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 271).

39 Fond 89 is available at RGANI and the Hoover Institution. Also, Semenov reproduced several archival documents in his article (Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 25–58); see also RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 20–22, 24. This collection of documents in Fond 89 is a small selection of the historical record and, more than anything, provides an idea of the actual quantity of documents that remain unavailable.

40 Shasharin argued that the possibility of a renewed chain reaction was eliminated in the early morning of April 27, but this conclusion was not yet shared by everyone. The question of whether the reactor could “start” again worried the agencies until May 5; they argued that the regrouping of the fuel could create a critical mass (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 86).

41 Ibid., 87.

42 Semenov lists 14,506 as the exact number of children registered in Pripyat at the time of the accident (Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 14).

43 Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’”; Medvedev, Chernobyl Notebook.

44 Vladimir Gubarev, Pravda's science editor, could barely control his outrage when he reported to the Central Committee on May 16 on his visit to Pripyat and what he had learned about the course of the evacuation (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 6, l. 1–5, k P 13/III from May 22, 1986, secret, No. 14757).

45 Estimates of the scale of the actual danger were ambivalent, and top authorities were reluctant to listen to experts who advocated immediate evacuation (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 89, 96; Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” Medvedev, Chernobyl Notebook).

46 See, for example, Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 14; Prushinskii, “Etogo ne mozhet byt’,” 317.

47 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 2–13).

48 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 91–92. It's not entirely clear what medical support these centers could provide, but given how high the radiation level was, and that there were no reliable instruments to measure it, people likely continued to get sick. The medical centers could at least provide temporary relief from symptoms and help decide whether the affected could resume work after a period of rest, or whether they would need to leave the “zone.”

49 Igor’ A. Beliaev, Beton marki “Sredmash”: Proshlo 15 let (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001), 65. These 30,000 people subsequently became known as the “liquidators.” This neologism is derived from Russian likvidatsiia for cleanup, or accident mitigation.

50 Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 53.

51 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 91–92.

52 Ibid., 96–97.

53 Ibid., 85–86.

54 Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 22.

55 Their poetic/profane motto was: Esli khochesh’ byt’ ottsom—zakryvai iaitsa svintsom (“If you want to be a father, cover your balls with lead”) (ibid.).

56 Kaibysheva, “Posle Chernobylia,” 392.

57 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 99, 106.

58 In other words, 75 percent of the releases occurred during the nine days following the explosion (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,”105).

59 Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 21.

60 Letter from B. Shcherbina to the Strategic Group of the Politburo, July 29, 1986 (reprinted in Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 45); Interview #27.

61 According to Viktor Briukhanov, in an interview he gave a newspaper in 2006, then Minenergo head Maiorets called for “repair work” at unit 4 to be completed by the November holidays—the celebration of the Great Socialist Revolution in 1917 (“Neponiatnyi atom: Interv’iu s Viktorom Briukhanovym,” Profil’, April 24, 2006, http://www.profile.ru/obshchestvo/item/50192-items_18814). By mid-May, Minenergo was ordered to bring reactors 1 and 2 back to normal operation (Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 272).

62 B. Korolev, “Radiatsiia i kapusta,” Ogonek 22 (May/June 1986): 7; Sonja D. Schmid, “Transformation Discourse: Nuclear Risk as a Strategic Tool in Late Soviet Politics of Expertise,” Science, Technology & Human Values 29, no. 3 (2004): 353–376.

63 Martin C. Mahoney et al., “Thyroid Cancer Incidence Trends in Belarus: Examining the Impact of Chernobyl,” International Journal of Epidemiology 33, no. 5 (2004): 1025–1033; Wilmar M. Wiersinga, “Differentiated Thyroid Carcinoma in Pediatric Age,” in G. E. Krassas, S. A. Rivkees, and W. Kiess, eds., Diseases of the Thyroid in Childhood and Adolescence, 210–224 (Basel: Karger, 2007); V. K. Ivanov et al., “Dynamics of Thyroid Cancer Incidence in Russia Following the Chernobyl Accident,” Journal of Radiological Protection 19 (1999): 305–318; V. K. Ivanov et al., “Cancer Risks in the Kaluga Oblast of the Russian Federation 10 Years after the Chernobyl Accident,” Radiation and Environmental Biophysics 36 (1997): 161–167; A. Prisyazhniuk et al., “The Time Trends of Cancer Incidence in the Most Contaminated Regions of the Ukraine before and after the Chernobyl Accident,” Radiation and Environmental Biophysics 34 (1995): 3–6; K. Baverstock et al., “Thyroid Cancer after Chernobyl,” Nature 359 (1992): 21–22; K. B. Moysich, R. J. Menezes, and A. M. Michalek, “Chernobyl-Related Ionizing Radiation Exposure and Cancer Risk: An Epidemiological Review,” Lancet Oncology 3 (2002): 269–279; Nuclear Energy Agency, Chernobyl: Assessment of Radiological and Health Impacts, 2002 update of Chernobyl: Ten Years On (Paris: Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD, 2002); Nuclear Energy Agency, Committee on Radiation Protection and Public Health, Chernobyl Ten Years On: Radiological and Health Impact—An Assessment (Paris: Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD, 1995).

64 Velikhov voiced concerns that if enough nuclear fuel pieces fell into the cement mix, once that mix hardened, it might explode like an atomic bomb (Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 41, 44).

65 Ibid., 44.

66 This was in stark contrast to Minenergo's resources (Kaibysheva, “Posle Chernobylia,” 394–395).

67 Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 55; Interview #30.

68 Semenov, “K 10-letiiu katastrofy,” 62; see also Beliaev, Beton.

69 David R. Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 174.

70 Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 272–273. This work eventually resulted in the construction of the town of Slavutich. The city maintains a website that contains copies of the original documents on the construction of the sarcophagus; see www.slavutichcity.net.

71 Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

72 Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 109.

73 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 105.

74 The first eight sections of the report are reproduced in Sidorenko's forth volume (Boris E. Shcherbina et al., “Doklad pravitel'stvennoi komissii po rassledovaniiu prichin avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES 26 aprelia 1986 g. (iiun’ 1986),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 17–47 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002)).

75 Meeting No. 119, June 12, 1986, “Results of the accident analysis on unit 4 at the Chernobyl NPP [nuclear power plant] on April 26, 1986”; and meeting No. 120, June 17, 1986, “Questions on determining reasons for the development of the accident on April 26, 1986, at the 4th unit of the Chernobyl NPP [nuclear power plant] and elaboration of measures to improve the safety of the RBMK type reactor” (Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001), 246). Diatlov argues that this version did not do justice to the design flaws in the reactor, but in fact, the report does give a description of the design details (Shcherbina et al., “Doklad pravitel'stvennoi komissii”; Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 159).

76 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 77.

77 Shasharin notes that when they died, they were still puzzling over why the explosion had occurred (ibid., 88).

78 Ibid., 93. The president of the Academy of Sciences, Aleksandrov, sent a damaged tape from the Chernobyl reactor number 4 to the KGB, with a request to recover whatever they could, using their special secret service techniques (Letter from Anatolii Aleksandrov to the first deputy minister of Interior Affairs, Iu. Churbanov, request to restore the lost recording on the samopistsa of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in connection with the accident at the plant, early May 1986 (ARAN, f. 1916, op. 1, d. 227)).

79 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 88–89.

80 Ibid., 76.

81 Ibid., 76. The deputy chief engineer of unit 4 at Chernobyl, Anatolii Diatlov, in his account of the accident noted that the report produced by Shasharin's group was the only one acknowledging that the reactor did not conform to the required safety norms (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 80).

82 This report did not, in fact, represent Minenergo's “official” position, but Shasharin made his point consistently (“Dopolnenie k aktu rassledovaniia prichin avarii na energobloke No. 4 Chernobyl'skoi AES, proisshedshei 26 aprelia 1986 g.,” Minenergo SSSR, Soizatomenergo inv. No. 4/611, 1986 (http://accidont.ru/refer.html).

83 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 78.

84 According to Shasharin, Mikhail Gorbachev had personally initiated the insertion of this additional information into the Politburo's final report, which acknowledged not only mistakes made by the personnel but also design flaws (ibid., 78).

85 This decree has been declassified in the meantime: Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 2).

86 “V Politbiuro TsK KPSS,” Pravda 20 July 1986, 1, 3.

87 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 4–5).

88 “Utverzhedenie rukovoditelei Minsredmasha i AN SSSR ob absoliutnoi bezopasnosti deistvuiushchikh reaktorov na AES priveli k nedootsenke vazhnosti sovremennoi vyrabotki mer na sluchai avariinykh situatsii” (Ibid., l. 6)).

89 Ibid., l. 9).

90 The idiom s zaneseniem v uchetnuiu kartochku (“entered on his record”) refers to a permanent entry in one's Party registration card, which in the Soviet system was analogous to a criminal record.

91 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 7–8).

92 Ibid., l. 7. Dollezhal—officially the chief designer of this reactor type—delegated responsibility to his deputy, who in fact had been the chief designer of the control rods (Nadezhda Nadezhdina, “Zalozhniki reaktora,” Trud 3 (April 1996): n.p.).

93 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 8).

94 However, this did not prompt Slavskii to abandon “his” Sredmash. According to leading “liquidators,” he came to the Chernobyl disaster site regularly, to boost morale among the exhausted builders of the sarcophagus (Interview #30). See also E. P. Slavskii, “Uvol’nenie (Semeinye istorii; vospominaet byvshii nachal’nik operativnogo shtaba Goskomiteta po inspol’zovaniiu atomnoi energii, chlen Pravitel'svennoi komissii Igor’ Arkad’evich Beliaev)” (http://www.famhist.ru/famhist/ap/001d4ba4.htm).

95 Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 275–276; see also Semenov, Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia. It's difficult to assess actual public impact, but almost three weeks after the accident, Gorbachev's public appearance may no longer have had the effect it might have had three days after the disaster.

96 Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 270. See also Kaibysheva, Posle Chernobylia, vols. 1 and 2.

97 Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 277; Diatlov, Chernobyl’; “Informatsiia ob avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES i ee posledstviiakh, podgotovlennaia dlia MAGATE,” Atomnaia energiia 61 (1986): 301–320. The official report is reprinted in Sidorenko's fourth volume (Gosudarstvennyi komitet po ispol’zovaniiu atomnoi energii SSSR, “Avariia na Chernobyl'skoi AES i ee posledstviia: Informatsiia, podgotovlennaia dlia soveshchaniia ekspertov MAGATE (25–29 avgusta 1986 g., Vena,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 49–84(Moscow: IzdAt, 2002)).

98 N. S. Babaev et al., “Problemy bezopasnosti na atomnykh elektrostantsiiakh,” Priroda 6 (1980): 30–43. Legasov committed suicide on the second anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. His suicide fed speculation about the truthfulness of his testimony at the IAEA conference in 1986, but cannot clearly be linked to the report or the accident. The transcript of five audiotapes, where Legasov talks “About the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” is online at lib.web-malina.com/getbook.php?bid=2755.

99 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 106.

100 “Informatsiia ob avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES.”

101 Letter from the Central Committee's Department of Heavy Industry and Energy to the Central Committee, February 26, 1987 (ss, No. St-42/18 gs) (RGANI, f. 89, op. 11, d. 137, l. 2).

102 April 13, 1987, Postanovlenie TsK KPSS ss P61/88, “O plane osnovnykh meropriiatii v sviazi s godovshchinoi avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES” (RGANI, f. 89, op. 12, d. 4, esp. l. 6, 10, 16–21). Some of these movies were Preduprezhdenie, Kolokol Chernobylia, Trudnye nedeli Chernobylia, Chernobyl—dva tsveta vremeni. On one of the most prominent exhibitions—in the Pavilion for Atomic Energy at the “Exhibition of the Achievements of the People's Economy” (VDNKh)—see Sonja D. Schmid, “Celebrating Tomorrow Today: The Peaceful Atom on Display in the Soviet Union,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 3 (2006): 331–365.

103 Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo,” 12; B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003); Soraya Boudia, “Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks,” History and Technology 23, no. 4 (2007): 389–406; L. Malone, “The Chernobyl Accident: A Case Study in International Law Regulating State Responsibility for Transboundary Nuclear Pollution,” Journal of Environmental Law 12 (1987): 203–241; Interview #22. The Ukrainian Security Service (Sluzhba bezpeki Ukraïni) has made a series of declassified documents relating to Chernobyl accessible on the web; see http://www.ssu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=49046&cat_id=53036.

104 The Soviet censorship agency, Glavlit (Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel'stv), ceased to exist in 1991 (see Arlen V. Blium, Zakat Glavlita: Kak razrushalas’ sistema Sovetskoi tsenzury: Dokumental’naia khronika 1985–1991 (Moscow: Terra, 1995); Arlen V. Blium, “Kak bylo razrusheno ‘Ministerstvo pravdy’: Sovetskaia tsenzura epokhi glasnosti i perestroiki (1985–1991),” Zvezda 6 (1996): 212–221; Gennadii V. Zhirkov, Istoriia tsenzury v Rossii XIX–XX vv.: Uchebnoe posobie (Moscow: Aspect Press, 2001)). Also see, for example, Glenys A. Babcock, “The Role of Public Interest Groups in Democratization: Soviet Environmental Groups and Energy Policy-Making, 1985–1991,” doctoral dissertation, RAND Graduate School, 1997; Schmid, “Transformation Discourse.”

105 The evidence includes references to these internal reports in the open press—for instance, in Diatlov, Chernobyl’.

106 Diatlov, Chernobyl’; Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and many popular publications too numerous to list here.

107 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

108 His writings were eventually published in English and Russian (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 1995).

109 As explained in more detail in chapter 4, a loss of cooling water in this graphite-water reactor still allows the chain reaction to proceed, since the moderator (graphite) is not affected. Soviet physicists knew about this design feature, and they attempted to lower the positive steam coefficient starting in the early 1970s, when they experienced problems at the Leningrad nuclear power plant (Interview #16). The entire RBMK project was kept under a layer of secrecy, in part because of the reactor's potential to switch to plutonium production (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 184).

110 See chapter four; Interviews #3 and #9.

111 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 123–124; see also Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 11; Polivanov, “Chernobyl'skaia katastrofa,” http://treeofknowledge.narod.ru/chernob.htm.

112 Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 51. One of my interviewees, a designer, dismissed that accident as insignificant: “Oh well, they fused a channel, so what?” (Nu i chto, kanal zazhgli, nichego!) (Interview #23).

113 Quoting a report by Aleksandr Iadrikhinskii from the Kursk nuclear power plant, Diatlov argues that skeptical voices were not heard at all (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 118–119). Ulasevich, however, lists some delays in implementing the RBMK due to a series of concerns and suggestions that had to be considered (V. K. Ulasevich, ed., Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia: O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh (k 100-letiiu N. A. Dollezhalia), 2nd ed. (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002), 41–42).

114 Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 51.

115 Ibid., 188.

116 Ibid., 105. Only in 1983–1984 did the oversight committee, Gosatomnadzor, become independent from Sredmash (B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003)).

117 Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 80–81, 184.

118 I was not able to obtain any of Volkov's reports. The direct quotes from Volkov's report are quoted by I. F. Polivanov, a nuclear safety specialist, physicist and engineer, and consultant, who published a summary of Volkov's critique in Russian (Polivanov, “Chernobyl'skaia katastrofa,” http://treeofknowledge.narod.ru/chernob.htm). According to Polivanov, Volkov even listed the names of those he considered culpable for the Chernobyl catastrophe: “Guilty for what has happened are: the scientific director (IAE), the chief design engineer (NIKIET), and also Minenergo, which began operating a reactor without any protection against acceleration even from delayed neutrons” (ibid.).

119 Report by Vladimir P. Volkov, cited in Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 83.

120 Iadrikhinskii, Iadernaia avariia. This report is now available online (e.g., http://ilya-sirius.ucoz.com/load/1-1-0-1).

121 Prikaz predsedatelia Gosatomenergonadzora No. 11, February 27, 1990, cited in Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 178. The delay between Volkov's letter to Gorbachev and the creation of the commission can be explained by the ongoing conflict between Party officials who wanted to save face vis-à-vis the international community and technical specialists who argued that Western specialists had already figured out for themselves what had happened at Chernobyl and might as well be told the plain truth (Viktor A. Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, atomnykh stantsiiakh, uchiteliakh, kollegakh i o sebe (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003), 249).

122 Prikaz predsedatelia Gosatomenergonadzora No. 11, February 27, 1990, cited in Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 178. See also Georgii A. Kopchinskii and Nikolai A. Shteinberg, Chernobyl: Kak eto bylo. Preduprezhdenie (Moscow: Litterra, 2011).

123 Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po nadzoru za bezopasnym vedeniem rabot v promyshlennosti i atomnoi energetike, “O prichinakh i obstoiatel'stvakh avarii na 4 bloke Chernobyl'skoi AES 26 aprelia 1986 g. Doklad komissii Gospromatomnadzora SSSR,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 333–409 (Moscow: IzdAt, [1991] 2002). See also Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 178–183.

124 Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 118; Polivanov, “Chernobylskaia katastrofa.” Sidorenko also reports that “suggestions from the IAE meant to increase safety were usually obstructed or slowed down [by NIKIET representatives], irrespective of decisions made by scientific-technical councils etc.” (Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska Sidorenko V. A. v komitet partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 44–47 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (quote on 46)). While Aleksandrov was quick to attribute responsibility for the accident to the RBMK's chief engineer, Nikolai Dollezhal, Diatlov claims that Aleksandrov had received the monetary benefit for inventing the RBMK (Anatolii P. Aleksandrov, “Izmeniat’, chto izmenit’ eshche vozmozhno …,” Ogonek 35 (August 1990): 6–10). Apparently, the application for the invention had been declined twice by the Soviet patent office. It justified the rejection by stating that this was not a new design, and that an increase in economic efficiency was not considered worth a patent. After that, Aleksandrov filed the patent for the RBMK through Sredmash as a “classified” invention (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 120; Igor’ B. Beliaev, “Po tomu li puti? Dialog-rassledovanie (beseda s Viktorom Aleksandrovichem Bobrovym),” Literaturnaia gazeta 20 (5242), no. 17 (May 1989): 13).

125 International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, The Chernobyl Accident—Updating of INSAG-1 (INSAG-7) (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1992), especially the appended report by Abagian et al.

126 Michael Gordin, Karl Hall, and Alexei Kojevnikov, eds., Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860–1960, Osiris, vol. 23 (special issue) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

127 As an employee of the FEI in Obninsk, Dubovskii inspected nuclear safety for the Institute of Atomic Energy (IAE) in Moscow; the IAE's safety inspector in turn assessed nuclear safety at Obninsk (Vladimir Anisinov, “AES: Stepen’ riska (beseda s B. G. Dubovskim),” Smena 10 (1994): 55–61 (especially 58–59)).

128 Ibid., 56; see also Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska,” 44.

129 Anisinov, “AES: Stepen’ riska.” See also Gordon, Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let; Polivanov, “Chernobyl'skaia katastrofa,” http://treeofknowledge.narod.ru/chernob.htm.

130 Nadezhdina, “Zalozhniki reaktora.”

131 This design flaw was not eliminated until 1992.

132 Anisinov, “AES: Stepen’ riska,” 57. On the polikritichnost’ (multiple criticality) of the RBMK's core see, for example, Beliaev, “Po tomu li puti?”; Nikolai V. Karpan, Chernobyl’: Mest’ mirnogo atoma (Kiev: Kantri Laif, 2005); Interview #27. One interviewee put it bluntly: in the RBMK, there was not one core, but multiple cores (Interview #9).

133 Interviews #6 and #12; Anisinov, “AES: Stepen’ riska,” 56. See also Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska,” 44; Nadezhdina, “Zalozhniki reaktora”; Boris G. Dubovskii, “O faktorakh neustoichivosti iadernykh reaktorov na primere reaktora RBMK” (Obninsk: [n.p.], 1989).

134 Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 120, citing an essay (referat) by B. G. Dubovskii. See also Polivanov, “Chernobyl'skaia katastrofa,” http://treeofknowledge.narod.ru/chernob.htm.

135 Letter from B. G. Dubovskii to M. S. Gorbachev, November 27, 1989, cited in Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 172–173.

136 In particular, the physicists noted an initially positive surge of reactivity in the reactor's emergency shutdown system.

137 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Vvodnye zamechaniia k urokam Chernobyl'skoi avarii,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 4–16 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (especially 8).

138 “Sluchilos’ to samoe” (Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, 249).

139 The fourth volume on the history of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union that Sidorenko edited contains his July 1986 testimony (ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska) to the Party's Accident Investigation Committee. In this short essay, Sidorenko admits to “moral guilt,” acknowledges shortcomings in the regulatory organization's recruitment policies, and agrees with the government commission's conclusion that he had often been too accommodating when cooperating with ministries and other agencies, which undermined overall discipline (Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska”).

140 Apparently, this was the situation at most of the military reactors (Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 264).

141 Interviews #23 and #28.

142 Interview #32.

143 Diatlov assumes that Dollezhal and Emelyianov had positions where they did not feel threatened, even when their actions (or lack thereof) contradicted the decisions of the MVTS (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 202).

144 Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 265–266.

145 This was the title of the June 13, 1983 MVTS session (”O nedostatkakh v rabote AES s RBMK-1000 I povyshenii nadezhnosti etikh AES.”) These concerns were also put forward in a letter from the Central Committee's Vladimir Dolgikh. A note from the deputy director of the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Central Committee, Arkadii Volskii, would be considered as well (MVTS session No. 88; Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 244). These questions were also discussed in several later sessions in 1983, on June 27 (No. 89, “Doklad komissii MVTS po resul'tatam rassmotreniia proektnykh materialov po osnovnym tekhnicheskim i komponovochnym resheniiam unifitsirovannykh proektov energobloka RBMK-1000 (poruchenie MVTS ot 21.03.81)”), July 18 (No. 95, “O tselesoobraznosti prodolzheniia stroitel'stva Kostromskoi AES s reaktorom RBMK-1500 na vybrannoi ploshchadke po usloviiam seismichnosti,” and No. 96, “O khode rabot po UVS RBMK-1000 2-i ocheredi Smolenskoi i 3-i ocheredi Kurskoi AES”), and December 19 (No. 97, “O khode vypolneniia resheniia MVTS ot 13.06.83 po voprosam povysheniia nadezhnosti raboty AES s reaktorami RBMK-1000”) (ibid., 244–245).

146 Mar’in, “O deiatel’nosti operativnoi gruppy,” 266–267. See also Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 202.

147 Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 238.

148 Ibid., 202.

149 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Kak eto bylo,” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 51–61 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003) (especially 60–61).

150 J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

151 Babcock, “The Role of Public Interest Groups”; Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Schmid, “Transformation Discourse.”

152 But even within the Russian Federation, construction of several reactor units was halted (see, e.g., the movie Vse atomnye elektrostantsii Rossii, “All Russian Nuclear Power Plants,” produced on CD-ROM by Rosenergoatom, Moscow, and released in 2003).

153 “Pri proektirovanii novykh AES schitat’ netselesoobraznym ispol’zovanie reaktorov etogo tipa” (“It is not advisable to consider reactors of this type for the planning of new nuclear power plants”) (Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 10)). Later, the MKR, a reactor type based on the RBMK design, became the cornerstone of the country's new “energy strategy,” for more or less the same reasons that the RBMK had been chosen for mass implementation in the late 1960s: the industrial capacities for graphite-water reactors were available; also, the personnel had accumulated construction and operating experience with graphite-water reactors and when the RBMKs were phased out, they would not have to be retrained on pressurized water reactors (see also chapter 4).

154 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 129.

155 “Ustanovit’, chto proekty i mesta raspolozheniia AES utverzhdaiutsia SM SSSR.” Responsibility for the truthful implementation of this decree was assigned to the secretary of the Central Committee, Dolgikh, and to several departments serving the Central Committee (Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 11)).

156 The death toll from this 1988 earthquake (6.9 on the Richter scale) was over 45,000; it also caused extensive damage in the area around the city of Spitak.

157 Lilly Torosyan, “Revisiting the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant,” Armenian Weekly, December 7, 2012, http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/12/07/revisiting-the-metsamor-nuclear-power-plant.

158 Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belorus also inherited other nuclear artifacts—the subject of other work (e.g., Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005)).

159 On December 30, 1991, the new independent Russian government passed a resolution approving the resumption of construction on the Balakovo, Bilibino, Kola, Smolensk, and South Urals nuclear power plants (Babcock, “The Role of Public Interest Groups,” 178).

160 S. D. Malkin, “O polnomasshtabnom trenazhere dlia Leningradskoi AES,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3, 147–155 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003). Accident simulations, as helpful as they no doubt can be, still can't provide nuclear plant staff with guidelines for how to handle “beyond design-basis accidents,” that is, accidents that the plant's designers had not anticipated.

161 Bronnikov had just been reassigned and had returned to Pripyat to pick up his family on the day of the accident. He volunteered to stay and left only after having received a hefty dose of radiation (Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 98).

162 The position of director of a plant (nuclear or conventional) involved a large number of administrative duties and public functions—for example, speeches at regional conventions and meetings, appearances at schools and factories, frequent trips to Moscow, and so on (Interview #25).

163 This story exemplifies the pitfalls of the nomenklatura system (see chapter 3), where candidates nominated for high-level industry positions had to be approved by the Communist Party.

164 Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” 98.

165 The United States had built this type of reactor for plutonium production, but abandoned the design for commercial reactors.

166 Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo,” 14. Some British analysts, in their assessment of the accident, interpreted the tilted biological shield as a “safety valve” and argued that, had the Chernobyl reactor had a containment structure, the consequences might have been even more severe (Don Arnott and Robert Green, “Unique Safety Valve for a Reactor Nuclear Explosion?,” paper presented at the national conference “The Legacy of Chernobyl—Lessons for the UK,” Council House, Bristol, March 11, 1992 (organized by the National Steering Committee of Nuclear Free Local Authorities)).

167 One of the compromises worked out with the newly empowered oversight committee was a general reduction of power levels in all operating RBMKs. According to Vadim Malyshev, who was appointed head of Gosatomenergonadzor in September 1986, a power level reduced to 70 percent improved the physics of RBMK-type reactors and made them operate in a more stable manner (V. M. Malyshev, “Istoriia stanovleniia gosudarstvennogo nadzora za bezopasnost’iu atomnoi energetiki SSSR (1983–1991 gg.),” in B. G. Gordon, ed., Gosatomnadzoru Rossii—20 let, 26–37 (Moscow: NTTs IaRB, 2003)).

168 Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’? (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed. Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); Aleksandrov, “Izmeniat’, chto izmenit’ eshche vozmozhno …”; I. A. Bashmakov and S. Ia. Chernavskii, eds., Zakliuchenie na rabotu: Kontseptsiia razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow: n.p., 1993); N. A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira: Zapiski konstruktora (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, IzdAt, 2002). Nikolai A. Dollezhal declared that in the mid-1960s, the RBMK's fuel had been enriched at 1.8 percent with uranium 235—that is, as low a percentage as possible, to keep costs down. For references to Aleksandrov's efforts to promote the RBMK with regard to its economic efficiency, see Beliaev, “Po tomu li puti?” See also a report by A. N. Dollezhal (NIKIET), “Iadernaia bezopasnost’ reaktora RBMK vtorykh ocheredei: Neitronno-fizicheskie parametry,” quoted in Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 44.

169 These additional absorber rods are referred to as “DP,” dopolnitel’nye poglotiteli (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 44; Interview #16). Some of these modifications, however, negatively affected the reactors’ economics and were later modified again (e.g., a uranium-erbium mix replaced the original fuel in some RBMKs (Interview # 16)). According to deputy chief engineer Anatolii S. Diatlov, the fuel enrichment at Chernobyl's unit 4 prior to the accident had been 2 percent, and there had been no additional absorber rods (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 44). Boris Dubovskii seems to assume the existence of these additional absorber rods in the lower part of the reactor (a design modification he had initiated in the mid-1970s), but charges that they were not connected to the emergency shutdown system (avariinaia zashchita, AZ) (Diatlov, Chernobyl’, 171, citing Dubovskii, “O faktorakh neustoichivosti”).

170 Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska,” 45; Postanovlenie TsK KPSS “O reszul'tatakh rassledovaniia prichin avarii na ChAES i merakh po likvidatsii ee posledstvii, osobenno bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” ss P 21/10, July 14, 1986 (RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, l. 2–13).

171 Outsourcing nuclear plants to regional electricity networks, a question debated since the beginning of the nuclear industry, was now moot.

172 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 217–253 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (especially 222).

173 Ibid., 227; also Interview #23. Despite the fact that Sredmash officially ceased to exist in 1989, the new ministry was a direct successor organization of Sredmash, and many nuclear experts still frequently referred to it as Sredmash.

174 V. V. Chernyshev, ed., Vitalii Fedorovich Konovalov: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003).

175 Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, 92–94.

176 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 230.

177 Ibid., 230. Sidorenko was involved in planning this corporation after 1991.

178 The idea of creating a corporation, this time under the label Atomprom, was revived only when Evgenii Adamov, former director of NIKIET, was appointed minister of atomic energy in 1998. The proposal was slightly modified, but the main goal remained the preservation of the nuclear industry's infrastructure, now in the interest of profitability and competitiveness (ibid., 236).

179 Several options for how to organize the nuclear energy complex were discussed. One alternative was to create an executive corporation for the nonmilitary sector, and combine this with a state committee for nuclear energy, which would regulate the entire nuclear industry and directly manage all military nuclear enterprises (ibid., 231–232).

180 Ibid., 235–236; Viktor N. Mikhailov, Ia—“iastreb” (Moscow: Kron-Press, 1993).

181 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 236. Two more deputy ministers, A. G. Meshkov, and E. A. Reshetnikov, served on this commission, together with the leaders of several other departments, administrations, commissions, and organizations.

182 A good, personal biography of Riabev can be found at “Ministry Sovetskoi epokhi,” http://www.minister.su/article/1263.html.

183 For example, “Strategiia razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v ramkakh dolgosrochnoi kompleksnoi gosudarstvennoi toplivno-energeticheskoi programmy Rossiiskoi Federatsii na period do 2010 goda, ‘Energeticheskaia strategiia Rossii’” (Strategy for the development of nuclear power in the framework of the long-term, complex state fuel and power program of the Russian Federation for the period until 2010, “Energy Policy of Russia”), passed by the Minatom Council in 1992 and endorsed by Minatom's Scientific-Technical Council in 1994; and “Programma razvitiia atomnoi energetiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii na 1998–2005 gody i na period do 2010 goda” (Program for nuclear power development in the Russian Federation for 1998–2005, and the period until 2010), passed by a government decree of the Russian Federation on June 21, 1998, No. 815 (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 236).

184 Decree issued by the president of the Russian Federation on September 7, 1992, “On the organization that operates nuclear power plants of the Russian Federation,” No. 1055 (ibid., 233). The driving force behind the organization of Rosenergoatom was Evgenii Ignatenko, who later became the organization's director. Erik Pozdyshev was elected president of Rosenergoatom, and the manager responsible for the operation of nuclear power plants was Boris Antonov.

185 These organizations included the scientific production association “Energiia” (which encompassed VNIIAES), the production association “Soiuzatomtekhenergo,” the production association “Atomenergoremont,” the repair companies “Balakovoturboatomenergoremont” and “Kurskturbatomenergoremont,” the factory “Atomremmash,” the production association “Atomenergozapchast’” (spare parts), and a factory for experimental and power engineering equipment (Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 234).

186 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 235.

187 Ibid., 235.

188 Ibid., 234.

189 Specifically, these were unit 6 at the Zaporozhye nuclear plant, unit 4 at the Rovno nuclear plant, and unit 2 at the Khmelnitskii nuclear plant. All Ukrainian plants now also received Ukrainian names: the Zaporizka, Rivenska, Khmelnitska, and Iuzhno-Ukrainska nuclear power plants.

190 This excludes the Chernobyl reactors. According to Ukraine's Energoatom, unit 6 at Zaporozhye was completed and commissioned in October 1995, making it the largest nuclear power plant (at 6 GW) in Europe.

191 http://energoatom.kiev.ua/en.

192 Ibid. Until 2005, Energoatom's website featured a statement on personnel policy that included features such as “enhancement of [the] personnel's self-esteem for involvement in nuclear-power engineering, awareness of the prestige associated with being a worker in this field of activity,” and “the creation of positive public opinion regarding the activity of nuclear-power engineering, its priority with regard to the provision of cheap, environmentally clean energy for the population and national economy of Ukraine.”

193 For SSE Chernobyl NPP, see http://www.chnpp.gov.ua/index.php?lang=en; also Interview #33.

194 In 1997, the European Union, the United States, and Ukraine set up a fund to finance a massive project to secure the Chernobyl site; its most visible component is the “New Safe Confinement,” a giant archlike steel structure that workers are assembling off site and then plan to slide over the old entombment on train tracks—essentially a “second sarcophagus.” Construction began in 2010 and as of this writing is scheduled to be completed by 2015 (http://www.ebrd.com/pages/sector/nuclearsafety/chernobyl-sip.shtml).

Chapter 6

1 Sonja D. Schmid, “Shaping the Soviet Experience of the Atomic Age: Nuclear Topics in Ogonyok, 1945–1965,” in Dick van Lente, ed., The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945–1965, 19–52 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Paul R. Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors and Soviet Culture,” in Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order, 168–191 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic-Powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR,” Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 297–324; K. Polushkin, “Atomnyi bogatyr’,” Nauka i zhizn’ 11 (1980): 44–52; V. S. Emel’ianov, “Atomnaia nauka i tekhnika i stroitel'stvo kommunizma,” Atomnaia energiia 11, no. 4 (1961): 301–312.

2 Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry,” Osiris 23 (2008): 82–111 (especially 83).

3 On the rhetoric of international cooperation, in the context of the United Nations Conferences on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy and of CMEA cooperation, see chapter 1.

4 One example for this claim of a logical development is Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union and in Russia,” Nuclear Engineering and Design 173 (1997): 3–20.

5 Cf. Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004); Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

6 “My vse mozhem i umeem” (Anatolii V. Kocherga, “Pervyi mesiats posle avarii,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 170–181 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 171)). I am grateful to Asif Siddiqi for suggesting this elegant translation.

7 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 5–28 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (especially 11).

8 Ibid., 10. “During the mitigation work after the [Chernobyl] accident it became clear that all the fundamental capabilities in terms of technologies, qualification of personnel, ... and other attributes necessary during this critical period, were found in Sredmash, whereas the ministry in charge of operating nuclear plants [Minenergo] held them only in very limited ways” (Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 217–253 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001) (quote on 227)).

9 “[Efim P. Slavskii and Nikolai A. Dollezhal] considered the demands for new safety rules superfluous and detrimental. The Ministry of Energy [Minenergo] opposed the diffusion and implementation of the RBMK within their field of activity, motivated by [the RBMK's] high cost and its difficult assembly and operation” (Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska Sidorenko V. A. v komitet partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 44–47 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002) (quote on 46)). Also see Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” 11.

10 Gennadii A. Shasharin, “Chernobyl'skaia tragediia,” in Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’?, 75–132 (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995) (especially 124).

11 Sonja D. Schmid, “Transformation Discourse: Nuclear Risk as a Strategic Tool in Late Soviet Politics of Expertise,” Science, Technology & Human Values 29, no. 3 (2004): 353–376.

12 “Gor’kii urok,” Atomnaia Energiia 6, no. 60 (1986): 370–371.

13 The nuclear establishment remained divided over the advantages or disadvantages of a strictly centralized, hierarchically organized management structure, versus a privatized operating agency modeled on the idea of a corporation. In some ways, the situation in the nuclear industry reflects the political status quo of the Russian Federation as a whole: while the state is allegedly no longer authoritarian, it is clearly not (yet) democratic, but definitely capitalist. To this day, there is no unequivocal solution to the dilemma of the Russian nuclear industry (see Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, “Russian Nuclear Industry Reforms: Consolidation and Expansion,” CNS Research Story, May 22, 2007, http://cns.miis.edu/stories/070522.htm).

14 James Scott has characterized this “high modernist” approach as “social engineering” (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)). See also Michel Callon, “Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis,” in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 83–103 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). On the proposed corporation “Atom,” see Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 230. Sidorenko was involved in planning this corporation after 1991. See also Arkadii K. Kruglov, Shtab atomproma (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1998).

15 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” 231.

16 Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

17 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

18 I would not go as far as Babcock, who argues that “the authoritarian rulers of the Soviet Union did act against their own and the state's best interests” (Glenys A. Babcock, “The Role of Public Interest Groups in Democratization: Soviet Environmental Groups and Energy Policy-Making, 1985–1991,” doctoral dissertation, RAND Graduate School, 1997, 15)—that “best interest” would have to be defined in the first place.

19 According to Rosatom's website, as of 2014, the company is the world leader in the number of nuclear reactors under construction simultaneously (currently nine in Russia and nineteen abroad); it is also among the major uranium producers and generates about 18 percent of Russia's total electricity. Furthermore, Rosatom controls 40 percent of the global uranium enrichment market, and 17 percent of the global nuclear fuel market (http://www.rosatom.ru/en/about).

20 “Akademik Lomonosov” is scheduled to start operation in 2016 (OKBM Afrikantov, FNPP “Academician Lomonosov,” http://www.okbm.nnov.ru/english/lomonosov).

21 See www.lnpp2.ru.

22 World Nuclear Association, Nuclear Power in Russia (updated Dec 2013), http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-O-S/Russia—Nuclear-Power.

23 As of November 13, 2013, the “Russian state nuclear enterprise Rosatom reported an increase of almost 31% in export orders in 2012. The corporation's long-term strategy aims to significantly increase foreign orders by 2030” (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Rosatom-sees-exports-jump-in-2012-1311134.html).

24 On MIFI's history, see, for example, http://mephi.ru/about/index.php?sphrase_id=314856.

Epilogue

1 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Learning Lessons from Fukushima: Red Cross Red Crescent Moves to Step Up Nuclear Preparedness, May 17, 2012, http://www.ifrc.org/en/news-and-media/press-releases/asia-pacific/japan/learning-lessons-from-fukushima-red-cross-red-crescent-moves-to-step-up-nuclear-preparedness.

2 This scale, known as INES, is a tool that experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency developed in 1989.

3 That's when the U.S. Army moved in. See Kyle Cleveland, “Mobilizing Nuclear Bias: The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis and the Politics of Uncertainty,” paper presented at the Inaugural Meeting of the STS Forum on the 2011 Fukushima/East Japan Disaster, University of California at Berkeley, May 11–14, 2013.

4 Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, Special Report on the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, INPO 11–005 (Atlanta: INPO, November 2011); Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, Special Report INPO 11–005 Addendum: Lessons Learned from the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (Atlanta: INPO, August 2012).

5 Questions remain why plant operators did not vent the containment earlier than they did, which may have averted further damage (Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, Special Report, INPO 11–005, November 2011). But Fukushima's unit 1 manager, Masao Yoshida, explicitly disobeyed orders from TEPCO to discontinue seawater cooling (“Disregard Tepco Order, Boss Told Plant Workers,” Japan Times, December 1, 2011).

6 For example, see “GE Engineers and American Government Officials Warned of Dangerous Nuclear Design,” Washington's Blog, December 11, 2013, http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/general-electric-knew-reactor-design-unsafe-isnt-ge-getting-heat-fukushima.html; Bill Dedman, “General Electric-Designed Reactors in Fukushima Have 23 Sisters in U.S.,” NBC News Investigations, http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/03/13/6256121-general-electric-designed-reactors-in-fukushima-have-23-sisters-in-us?lite.

7 Kohta Juraku, “‘Made in Japan’ Fukushima Nuclear Accident: A Critical Review for Accident Investigation Activities in Japan,” paper presented at the Inaugural Meeting of the STS Forum on the 2011 Fukushima/East Japan Disaster, University of California at Berkeley, May 11–14, 2013; National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), “Executive Summary of the Official Report of Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, 5 July 2012,” 2012, http://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/NAIIC_report_lo_res10.pdf.

8 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Recommendations for Enhancing Reactor Safety in the 21st Century: The Near-Term Task Force Review of Insights from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Accident (Washington, DC: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011); International Atomic Energy Agency, Mission Report: IAEA International Peer Review Mission on Mid- and Long-Term Roadmap towards the Decommissioning of TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Stations Units 1–4, Tokyo and Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, 15–22 April 2013 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2013).

9 European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group, “Peer Review Report: Stress Tests Performed on European Nuclear Power Plants,” 2012, http://www.ensreg.eu/EU-Stress-Tests.

10 Nikolai Spasskii, deputy chief of Russia's Rosatom, suggested that international law should force countries operating nuclear plants to abide by international safety standards (“EurActiv G8 Summit Urges Stringent Nuclear Safety Rules,” May 27, 2011, http://www.euractiv.com/energy/g8-summit-urges-stringent-nuclear-safety-rules-news-505185).

Methodological Appendix Notes

1 Among the parts of this vast collection (most opisi have several volumes) that I examined in detail are RGAE, f. 7964, op. 3 and op. 8 (on the years 1939–1959), op. 15 (1968–1974), and op. 16 (1976–1981).

2 ARAN, fond 1745, op. 1, Komissiia po atomnoi energii. I reviewed documents from 1964 to 1978.

3 ARAN, fond 1522, op. 1, Uchenyi sovet pri prezidiume AN SSSR, Nauchno-tekhnicheskii otdel uchenogo soveta: Otdel rabot po atomnoi energii AN SSSR. I reviewed documents from 1949 to 1963.

4 ARAN, fond 1916, Lichnyi fond A. P. Aleksandrova. Other collections of potential interest for nuclear energy are f. 447 (Institut fizicheskikh problem im. S. I. Vavilova AN SSSR); f. 495 (Tekhnicheskii sovet AN SSSR, 1935–); f. 532 (Fizicheskii institut im. P. N. Lebedeva AN SSSR); f. 1728 (Otdelenie iadernoi fiziki AN SSSR, 1963–); f. 1747 (Komissiia po iadernoi fizike pri prezidiume AN SSSR, 1967–); f. 1827 (Otdelenie fiziko-tekhnicheskikh problem energetiki AN SSSR, 1963–); f. 1989 (Nauchnyi sovet po toplivnym elementam).

5 RGSAPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 35, d. 564.

6 One such album from 1979, for example, included sections on the Rovno (l. 1–7), Chernobyl (l. 8–11), Smolensk (l. 12–13), Kalinin (l. 23–26), and Kursk nuclear power plants (l. 27–30), the Atommash factory (l. 31–34), and the Balakovo nuclear power plant (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 1, d. 647, Otdel rabochei molodezhi). A brochure “Atomnaia energetika Ukrainskoi SSR” was published in 1980 by Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifkatsii USSR, Kiev, Reklama 1980, and is preserved in the Komsomol archive (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 88, d. 332, l. 1–9).

7 For example, minutes of the 1978 All-Union Convention of the secretaries of the Komsomol committees of industrial enterprises and planning institutes that worked for Komsomol “shock-construction sites” (Protokol vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia sekretarei komitetov VLKSM promyshlennykh predpriiatii i proektnykh organizatsii, vypolniaiushchikh zakazy udarnykh komsomol'skikh stroek atomnoi energetiki, Kurskaia obl., p. Kurchatov 1978 g. RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1 op. 65, d. 258). See also Protokol No. 9 zasedaniia biuro TsK VLKSM, 29.XII.1970–19.I.1971 (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 67, d. 316s (rassekrecheno), which includes a decree from 1970 about the work done by the Komsomol organization at the Institute of Atomic Energy (l. 13–17); and Protokol No. 45 zasedaniia biuro TsK VLKSM, 12.V.1981 g. (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 88, d. 329s (rassekrecheno)).

8 For example, Materialy k protokolu No. 9 zasedaniia biuro TsK VLKSM (§§20–29, 1a–4a), nachato 29.XII.1970, okoncheno 19.I.1971 g. (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 67, d. 318); Materialy k protokolu No. 45 zasedaniia biuro TsK VLKSM §§1–22,” 12.V.1981 g. (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 88, d. 331); Materialy k protokolu N. 8 zasedaniia biuro TsK VLKSM, nachato 19.XI.1970, okoncheno 22.XII.1970 g. (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 67, delo 310s).

9 For instance, Stenogramma soveshchaniia, protokol zasedaniia shtaba TsK VLKSM po shefstvu nad “Atommashem,” dogovor i obrashchenie uchastnikov soveshchaniia k komsomol'tsam i molodezhi strany. G. Volgodonsk, Rostovskaia obl. 23.9.1978– (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 65, d. 261); Stenogramma zasedaniia Biuro TsK VLKSM po obsuzhdeniiu voprosa “O rabote komsomol'skoi organizatsii instituta atomnoi energii imeni I.V. Kurchatova” No. 8/8 zhd. 1. Nachato 22. XII 1970 (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 67, d. 311).

10 For example, Otchet shtaba TsK VLKSM Vsesoiuznoi udarnoi komsomol'skoi stroiki IV energobloka s reaktorom BN-800 Beloiarskoi AES im. I. V. Kurchatova Sverdlovskoi oblasti (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 65, d. 916).

11 For instance, Materialy i postanovleniia biuro VLKSM i kollegii Ministerstva energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR “O shefstve komsomol'skikh organizatsii Ukrainy pod sooruzheniem ob”ektov atomnoi energetiki” (1981) (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 65, d. 537); Materialy k postanovleniiu biuro TsK VKLSM i kollegii Ministerstva energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR “O shefstve komsomol'skikh organizatsii Ukrainy nad sooruzheniem ob”ektov atomnoi energetiki,” dekabr 1980–avgust 1981g. (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 65, d. 536); Protokol sektora obshchego otdela: Prilozhenie k postanovleniiu § 13 protokla No. 45 zasedaniia Biuro TsK VLKSM (materialy k otchetu TsK LKSM Ukrainy: Illustrativnyi material, gazety, metodicheskie rekomendatsii, broshiura), nachato, okoncheno 12 maia 1981 g. (RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 88, d. 332), which includes a promotional pamphlet on nuclear power in Ukraine from 1980.

12 I reviewed documents covering the period 1973–1981.

13 This collection is also available (at least in part) at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, which has published a detailed English language guide to the collection: “This finding aid describes the records of Fond 89, consisting of documents submitted to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation for the trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This unique collection of documents came into being as a result of President Yeltsin's decision on November 6, 1992, to outlaw the Communist Party. This decision was challenged in the Constitutional Court. For the trial, government prosecutors drew on a wide range of documents emanating from the highest organs of the Soviet Communist Party and State. Covering the period 1919–1992, the documents were selected to prove that the Communist Party showed a complete disregard for human rights and international law. They constitute the most revealing collection of documents of the Soviet Union to have emerged since its collapse” (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt767nf11z/entire_text/?query=fond%2089#hitNum7).

14 For example, RGANI, f. 89, op. 4, d. 22, pertains to the trial in the city of Chernobyl. On information policies regarding the accident, see RGANI, f. 89, op. 9, d. 24; RGANI, f. 89, op. 11, d. 137; RGANI, f. 89, op. 12, d. 4; RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 21; and RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 27. RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 26, and RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 58, relate to the energy supply situation in the country after the accident. See RGANI, f. 89, op. 46, d. 1, on Emelyianov's nomination for the “Atoms for Peace” award. RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 20; RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 22; and RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 24, are transcripts of the meetings of the Central Committee's Operativnaia gruppa set up after the Chernobyl accident. RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 6, is a letter from science journalist Vladimir Gubarev about the situation at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in May 1986. RGANI, f. 89, op. 53, d. 12, is a decree by the Central Committee on the Chernobyl accident.

15 For example, delo 69 (rolik 7250) on the construction of the Leningrad nuclear power plant and other nuclear power plants; delo 107 (rolik 7213) on various design proposals and Kurchatov's interventions; delo 147 on the construction of the Beloiarsk and Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plants; and delo 149 on the development of the nuclear power industry from 1960 to 1980.

16 Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR. Vsesoiuznyi ordena Trudovogo Krasnogo Znameni teplotekhnicheskii nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut im. F. E. Dzherzhinskogo (Ural'skii filial), g. Cheliabinsk. Op. 2–6: dela upravlencheskoi dokumetantsii postoiannogo khraneniia za 1956–1970 gody (RGANTD (Samara), f. R-184, op. 2–6, t. 1); and Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR, Soiuzglavenergo, Vsesoiuznyi ordena Trudovogo Krasnogo Znameni teplotekhnicheskii nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut im. F. E. Dzerzhinskogo (VTI im. F. E. Dzerzhinskogo), 1931–1970 (RGANTD (Samara), f. R-277, op. 2–6).

17 Ministerstvo energetiki i elektrifikatsii, Glavnoe upravlenie nauchno-issledovatel'skikh i proektnykh organizatsii, GlavNIIproekt, Gosudarstvennyi nauchno-issledovatel'skii energeticheskii institut im. G. M. Krzhizhanovskogo (ENIN). Dela postoiannogo khraneniia upravlencheskoi dokumentatsii za 1961–1980 gg. (RGANTD (Samara), f. R-249, op. 2–6).

18 Vsesoiuznyi gosudarstvennyi ordena Lenina proektnyi institut “Teploelektroproekt,” Glavnogo tekhnicheskogo upravleniia po stroitel'stvu i proektirovaniiu elektrostantsii, podstantsii i setei “Glavtekhstroiproekt” Ministerstva energetiki i elektrifikatsii SSSR, 1934–1935, 1938–1970 (RGANTD (Samara), f. R-272, op. 9–6), and Vsesoiuznyi gosudarstvennyi ordena Lenina i ordena Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii proektnyi institut “Teploelektroproekt,” Gor’kovskoe otdelenie (GOTEP), 1969–1975 (RGANTD (Samara), f. R-289, op. 1–6).

19 Ministerstvo energeticheskogo mashinostroeniia SSSR, Tekhnicheskoe upravlenie, Vsesoiuznyi nauchno-issledovatel'skii i proektno-konstruktorskii institut atomnogo energeticheskogo mashinostroeniia, Dela postoiannogo khraneniia 1944–1981 (RGANTD (Samara), R-268, op. 1–6).

20 “Atomenergoproekt,” short for State Scientific Research, Design, Construction, and Prospecting Institute (Gosudarstvennyi nauchno-issledovatel'skii, proektno-konstruktorskii i izyskatel'skii institute) was originally part of the Minenergo apparatus, but after Chernobyl had been repeatedly reassigned to various ministries (e.g., the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry, and the Ministry of Atomic Energy). By the time I was able to see this collection of documents, it belonged to Minatom (RGANTD (Samara), R-811, op. 1–6, 1986–1991 gg.).

21 This method of identifying research subjects through the personal networks of an initially small group of people is known as “snowball sampling.”

22 Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York: Freeman, 1999).

23 Maria N. Vasilieva, Soleils rouges: L’ambition nucléaire soviétique [Essai sur l’évolution des systèmes de prise de décision dans le nucléaire soviétique (Russe)], Histoire industrielle (Paris: Institut d’Histoire de l’Industrie et Éditions Rive Droite, 1999); Maria N. Vasilieva, “L’évolution des systèmes de prise de décisions dans le nucléaire soviétique (Russe),” Histoire, Économie et Société, no. 2 (April-June 2001): 257–275.

24 Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia RBMK, vol. 3 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia maloi atomnoi energetiki, vol. 5 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004).

25 A. P. Aleksandrov, ed., Vospominaniia ob Igore Vasil’eviche Kurchatove (Moscow: Nauka, 1988); P. A. Aleksandrov, Akademik Anatolii Petrovich Aleksandrov, Priamaia rech’, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 2002); Raisa V. Kuznetsova, ed., Kurchatov v zhizni: Pis'ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia (iz lichnogo arkhiva) (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2002); Vitalii P. Nasonov, E. P. Slavskii: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAT, 1998); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., Sozdano pod rukovodstvom N. A. Dollezhalia: O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh (k 100-letiiu N. A. Dollezhalia), 2nd ed. (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); V. K. Ulasevich, ed., O iadernykh reaktorakh i ikh tvortsakh: Prodolzhenie traditsii (k 50-letiiu NIKIET im. N.A. Dollzhalia (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002); Nikolai A. Dollezhal’, U istokov rukotvornogo mira: Zapiski konstruktora (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, IzdAt, 2002); Boris A. Fain, Aktivanaia zona: Povest’ ob atomnom institute (Moscow: Skripto, 1998); Iu. A. Kazanskii, ed., Iadernaia energetika: K 100-letiiu A. I. Leipunskogo, Izvestiia vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii (Obninsk: Ministerstvo obrazovaniia RF, 2003); Nikolai S. Khlopkin, Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); Leonid A. Belianin, ed., Leningradskaia AES: Gody, sobytiia, liudi (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1998).

26 Ivan I. Larin, Tiazheloe bremia podviga (Moscow: IzdAt, 1996); Vitalii P. Nasonov, B. L. Vannikov: Memuary, vospominaniia, stat’i (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1997); E. P. Velikhov et al., ed., Nauka i obshchestvo: Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta (40–50 gody), Trudy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma ISAP-06. Vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 1997); E. P. Velikhov et al., ed., Nauka i obshchestvo: Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta (40–50 gody), Trudy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma ISAP-06. Vol. 2 (Moscow: IzdAt, 1999); E. P. Velikhov et al., ed., Nauka i obshchestvo: Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta (40–50 gody), Trudy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma ISAP-06. Vol. 3 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003); P. Astashenkov, Kurchatov: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1967); Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii and Departament po atomnoi energetike, eds., Shestnadtsatoe glavnoe: Istoriia i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, 2003); M. Ia. Vazhnov and I. S. Aristov, eds., A. P. Zaveniagin: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: PoliMediia, 2002); Vladimir G. Asmolov et al., Atomnaia energetika: Otsenki proshlogo, realii nastoiashchego, ozhidaniia budushchego (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004); V. P. Denisov and Iu. G. Dragunov, Reaktornye ustanovki VVER dlia atomnykh elektrostantsii (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); V. M. Kulygin, Iu. N. Smirnov, and M. E. Khalizeva, eds., Golovin, Igor’ Nikolaevich: Stranitsy zhizni. Tvortsy iadernogo veka (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004); Vera N. Tiushevskaia, I. K. Kikoin: Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: IzdAt, 1995); E. A. Negin et al., Sovetskii atomnyi proekt: Konets atomnoi monopolii: Kak eto bylo ... (Sarov: RFIaTs-VNIIEF, 2003).

27 For example, Sidorenko's contribution to the volume dedicated to Anatolii P. Aleksandrov on the centennial of his birth is written in a distanced way that is very distinct from other contributions (Viktor A. Sidorenko, “A.P. Aleksandrov i atomnaia energetika,” in Nikolai S. Khlopkin, ed., A. P. Aleksandrov: Dokumenty i vospominaniia, k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia, 212–219 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003)). Boris Fain's Aktivnaia zona includes excerpts from personal accounts, conversations, and interviews with nuclear engineers at the design institute NIKIET that would otherwise be inaccessible (Fain, Aktivnaia zona).

28 V. V. Goncharov, “Pervyi period razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 16–70 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001).

29 Igor V. Kurchatov, “Nekotorye voprosy razvitiia atomnoi energetiki v SSSR. Doklad, sdelannyi I. V. Kurchatovym v Kharuelle (Angliia) v aprele 1956g.,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 71–82 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001).

30 Anatolii P. Aleksandrov, “Iadernaia energetika i ee rol’ v tekhnicheskom progresse (General’nyi adres, zachitannyi A. P. Aleksandrovym na konferentsii VI mirovogo energeticheskogo kongressa, Moskva 1968g.,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 83–95 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001).

31 Lev A. Kochetkov, “K istorii sozdaniia Obninskoi AES,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 96–101 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Lev A. Kochetkov, “K istorii pervoi ocheredi Beloiarskoi AES,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 117–133 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Lev A. Kochetkov and M. F. Troianov, “Reaktory na bystrykh neitronakh,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 164–187 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); A. Ia. Kramerov, “Kanal’nye vodookhlazhdaemye uran-grafitovye reaktory (UGR) tipa RBMK,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 154–163 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); R. G. Bogoiavlenskii, “Razrabotka gazookhlazhdaemykh iadernykh reaktorov,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 188–193 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 217–253 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Problemy bezopasnosti atomnoi energetiki,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii, vol. 1, 194–216 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001).

32 For example, Viktor P. Tatarnikov, “Atomnaia elektroenergetika (s VVER i drugimi reaktorami),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 303–399 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); V. S. Osmachkin, “Problemy nadezhnogo teploobmena v aktivnoi zone reaktora VVER 1-go bloka NVAES pri ego proektirovanii,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 113–125 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); A. N. Kamyshan, “Sobytiia i liudi (Vospominaniia uchastnika),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 145–193 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002).

33 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Nauchnoe rukovodstvo v atomnoi energetike,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Istoriia VVER, vol. 2, 5–28 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002).

34 Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki, vol. 3.

35 Among others, Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po nadzoru za bezopasnym vedeniem rabot v promyshlennosti i atomnoi energetike, “O prichinakh i obstoiatel'stvakh avarii na 4 bloke Chernobyl'skoi AES 26 aprelia 1986 g., Doklad Komissii Gospromatomnadzora SSSR,” in V. A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 333–409 (Moscow: IzdAt, [1991] 2002); Boris E. Shcherbina et al., “Doklad Pravitel'stvennoi Komissii po rassledovaniiu prichin avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES 26 aprelia 1986 g. (iiun’ 1986),” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 17–47 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002).

36 Viktor A. Sidorenko, “Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska Sidorenko V. A. v Komitet Partiinogo Kontrolia pri TsK KPSS,” in Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia atomnoi energetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii: Uroki avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES, vol. 4, 44–47 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002).

37 Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi energetiki, vol. 5.

38 Lev D. Riabev, ed., Atomnyi proekt SSSR: Dokumenty i materialy; see the bibliography for the various volumes.

39 O. V. Bazanova, ed., Istoriia atomnogo proekta, vols. 1–4 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” 1995); O. V. Bazanova, ed., Istoriia atomnogo proekta, vol. 5 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” 1996); O. V. Bazanova and G. Ia. Karmadonova, eds., Istoriia atomnogo proekta, vol. 14 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” 1998); G. Ia. Karmadonova, ed., Istoriia atomnogo proekta, vols. 6, 8–13 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” 1996–1998); G. Ia. Karmadonova and O. V. Bazanova, eds., Istoriia atomnogo proekta, vol. 7 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” 1996); Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” ed., Istoriia atomnogo proekta, vols. 15–16 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Nauchnyi Tsentr “Kurchatovskii Institut,” 1998).

40 Arkadii K. Kruglov, Kak sozdavalas’ atomnaia promyshlennost’ v SSSR (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1995); Arkadii K. Kruglov, Shtab atomproma (Moscow: TSNIIatominform, 1998).

41 Vladimir P. Vizgin, ed., Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta: Dokumenty, vospominaniia, issledovaniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Ianus-K, 1998); V. P. Vizgin, ed. Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta. Dokumenty, vospominaniia, issledovaniia, vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2002).

42 E. P. Velikhov et al., ed., Nauka i obshchestvo: Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta (40–50 gody). Trudy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma ISAP-06, vol. 1 (Moscow: IzdAt, 1997); E. P. Velikhov et al., ed., Nauka i obshchestvo: Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta (40–50 gody). Trudy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma ISAP-06, vol. 2 (Moscow: IzdAt, 1999); E. P. Velikhov et al., eds. Nauka i obshchestvo: Istoriia sovetskogo atomnogo proekta (40–50 gody). Trudy ISAP, vol. 3 (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003).

43 Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, Strategiia razvitiia atomnoi energetiki Rossii v pervoi polovine XXI veka (Moscow: FGUP “TsNIIatominform,” 2001); Natsional’nyi issledovatel'skii tsentr “Kurchatovskii institut,” O strategii iadernoi energetiki Rossii do 2050 g. (Moscow: Kurchatovskii institut, 2012).

44 These include memoirs of nuclear physicists (Oleg D. Kazachkovskii, Fizik na sluzhbe atoma (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 2002); Pavel A. Zhuravlev, Moi atomnyi vek: O vremeni, ob atomshchikakh i o sebe (Moscow: Khronos-press, 2003)), accounts by engineers (Viacheslav V. Girnis, Zapiski atomshchika (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 2000)), the memoirs of the former minister of Atomic Energy (Viktor N. Mikhailov, Ia—“iastreb” (Moscow: Kron-Press, 1993) and the former deputy minister of Atomic Energy (Viktor A. Sidorenko, Ob atomnoi energetike, atomnykh stantsiiakh, uchiteliakh, kollegakh i o sebe (Moscow: IzdAt, 2003)), as well as the diaries of the former minister of Energy and Electrification (Petr S. Neporozhnii, Energetika strany glazami ministra: Dnevniki 1935–1985 gg. (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 2000)).

45 See the following works by Mikhail P. Grabovskii: Vtoroi Ivan: Sovershenno sekretno (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1998); Puskovoi ob”ekt (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1999); Nakanune avrala (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 2000); Atomnyi avral (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 2001); Plutonievaia zona (Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 2002); Pervaia sovetskaia atomnaia podvodnaia lodka K-3 (Moscow: Samizdat, 2005). Other creative formats include collections of poetry and “folklore” from the nuclear energy community (A. I. Veretennikov, ed., Fol’klor na sluzhbe atoma: Sbornik pesen, stikhov, tostov, baek, sochinennykh atomshchikami na poligonakh (Moscow: TsNIIAtominform, 1996)).

46 For Vladimir S. Gubarev's books, see Iadernyi vek: Bomba (Moscow: IzdAt, 1995); Iadernyi vek: Chernobyl’ (Moscow: Nekos, 1996); XX vek: Ispovedi. Sud’ba nauki i uchenykh v Rossii (Moscow: Nauka/Interperiodika, 2000); Agoniia Sredmasha: Ot Chernobylia do Chubaisa (Moscow: Akademkniga, 2006).

47 The official report was published in large part in the journal Atomnaia energiia in 1986 (“Informatsiia ob avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES i ee posledstviiakh, podgotovlennaia dlia MAGATE,” Atomnaia Energiia 61 (1986): 301–320). See also International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, The Chernobyl Accident—Updating of INSAG-1 (INSAG-7) (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1992). The IAEA maintained a project called “The International Chernobyl Project” for several years, but it no longer has permanent status (International Atomic Energy Agency, The International Chernobyl Project: An Overview. Assessment of Radiological Consequences and Evaluation of Protective Measures (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991); International Atomic Energy Agency, The International Chernobyl Project: Technical Report. Assessment of Radiological Consequences and Evaluation of Protective Measures (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991); International Atomic Energy Agency, “Strengthening Radiation and Nuclear Safety Infrastructures in Countries of the Former USSR,” paper presented at the conference on “Strengthening Radiation and Nuclear Safety Infrastructures in Countries of the Former USSR,” Vienna, May 4–7, 1993; International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Power Reactors in the World (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1996); Mezhdunarodnyi Chernobyl'skii Proekt, “Mezhdunarodnyi Chernobyl'skii Proekt: Otsenka radiologicheskikh posledstvii i zashchitnykh mer” (Moscow: IzdAT, 1991)).

48 For example, Don Arnott and Robert Green, “Unique Safety Valve for a Reactor Nuclear Explosion?,” paper presented at the national conference “The Legacy of Chernobyl—Lessons for the UK,” Council House, Bristol, March 11, 1992 (organized by the National Steering Committee of Nuclear Free Local Authorities); Anatolii S. Diatlov, Chernobyl’: Kak eto bylo (Moscow: Nauchtekhlitizdat, 2003); Nikolai A. Shteinberg, “O prichinakh i obstoiatel'stvakh avarii na 4-m bloke Chernobyl'skoi AES 26 aprelia 1986 g. Doklad” (Moscow: Komissiia Gospromatomnadzora SSSR, 1991); A. A. Iadrikhinskii, Iadernaia avariia na 4-om bloke Chernobyl'skoi AES i iadernaia bezopasnost’ reaktorov RBMK (Kurchatov: [n.p.], 1989).

49 For example, E. B. Burlakova, ed., Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe: Human Health (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy; Scientific Council on Radiobiology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1996); Iu. A. Izrael’ et al., Chernobyl’: Radioaktivnoe zagriaznenie prirodnykh sred (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1990); Vladimir K. Savchenko, The Ecology of the Chernobyl Catastrophe: Scientific Outlines of an International Program of Collaborative Research, Volume 16: Man and the Biosphere, ed. J. N. R. Jeffers (Paris: UNESCO, 1995); V. M. Zakharov and E. Yu. Krysanov, eds., Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe: Environmental Health (Moscow: Center for Russian Environmental Policy; Moscow Affiliate of the International “Biotest” Foundation, 1996); with a focus on radioactive waste, see Vladimir M. Kuznetsov, Rossiiskaia atomnaia energetika vchera, segodnia, zavtra: Vzgliad nezavisimogo eksperta (Moscow: Natsional’nyi Institut Pressy, 2000).

50 For instance, Vasil’ Gigevich and Oleg Chernov, Stali vody gor’kimi: Khronika Chernobyl'skoi bedy (Minsk: Belorus’, 1991); N. A. Kartel, ed., Chernobyl Digest 1994–95, vol. 4 (Minsk: Center for Russian Environmental Policy et al., 1996); Vasilii B. Nesterenko, Masshtaby i posledstviia katastrofy na Chernobyl'skoi AES dlia Belorusi, Ukrainy i Rossii (Minsk: Pravo i ekonomika, 1996).

51 For example, V. G. Bar’iakhtar, ed., Chernobyl'skaia katastrofa (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1995); Liubov’ Kovalevskaia, Chernobyl’ “DSP”; Posledstviia Chernobylia, Chornobyl’, Ukraine, 1986 (Kiev: Abris, 1995); Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

52 Among the Russian sources, see for example, Grigorii Medvedev, “Chernobyl'skaia tetrad’,” Novyi Mir 6 (1989): 3–108; E. I. Ignatenko et al., eds., Chernobyl’: Sobytiia i uroki. Voprosy i otvety (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989); Nikolai D. Tarakanov, Chernobyl'skie zapiski, ili Razdum’ia o nravstvennosti (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1989); Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Grigorii Medvedev, The Truth about Chernobyl (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Rudol’f M. Aleksakhin et al. Problemy smiagcheniia posledstviii Chernobyl'skoi katastrofy: materialy mezhdunarodnogo seminara (Briansk: Rossiia, 1993); K 10-letiiu avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES. Sotsial’naia i psikhologicheskaia reabilitatsiia postradavshikh ot Chernobyl'skoi katastrofy: Opyt i perspektivy (Moscow: MChS Rossii, 1996); Iurii V. Sivintsev and V. A. Kachalov, eds., Chernobyl’: Piat’ trudnykh let. Sbornik materialov o rabotakh po likvidatsii posledstvii avarii na Chernobyl'skoi AES v 1986–1990 gg. (Moscow: IzdAT, 1992); Helen Knorre, “The Star Called Wormwood: The Cause and Effect of the Chernobyl Catastrophe,” Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992): 241–249; Aleksandr N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl’ desiat’ let spustia: Neizbezhnost’ ili sluchainost’? (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995); Igor’ A. Beliaev, Beton marki “Sredmash”: Proshlo 15 let (Moscow: IzdAt, 2001); Gubarev, Iadernyi vek: Chernobyl’; Lenina S. Kaibysheva, Posle Chernobylia, 2 vols. (Moscow: IzdAt, 1996–2001); A. A. Karasiuk and A. I. Sidorenko, Vokrug Chernobylia: Dialogi s uchenymi (Moscow: IzdAT, 1991); M. I. Kostenetskii and G. T. Gribinenko, Ekho Chernobylia v Zaporozh’e: Nauchno-populiarnyj ocherk (Zaporozh’e: MP Bereginia, 1992). International publications include Ed A. Hewett, “Introductory Comment on the Consequences of Chernobyl’,” Soviet Economy 2, no. 2 (1986): 95–96; Ed A. Hewett et al., “Panel on the Economic and Political Consequences of Chernobyl’,” Soviet Economy 2, no. 2 (1986): 97–130; Paul R. Josephson, “The Historical Roots of the Chernobyl Disaster,” Soviet Union/Union Soviétique 13, no. 3 (1986): 275–299; Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic Energy and ‘Atomic Culture’ in the USSR: The Ideological Roots of Economic and Safety Problems Facing the Nuclear Power Industry after Chernobyl,” in T. Anthony Jones, David Powell, and Walter Connor, eds., Soviet Social Problems, 55–77 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); Michael K. Lindell and Ronald W. Perry, “Effects of the Chernobyl Accident on Public Perceptions of Nuclear Plant Accident Risks,” Risk Analysis 10, no. 3 (1990): 393–399; David R. Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); David R. Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (London: Macmillan, 1988); Judith Thornton, “Soviet Electric Power after Chernobyl’: Economic Consequences and Options,” Soviet Economy 2, no. 2 (1986): 131–179. There has even been an attempt to compile bibliographical information on scientific literature on the accident (Evgenii F. Konoplia, I. V. Rolevich, and Institut radiobiologii (Akademiia nauk Belarusi), Chernobyl'skaia katastrofa: Bibliografiia nauchnoi literatury (Minsk: Pravo i ekonomika, 1996)).

53 Iurii Shcherbak, Chernobyl: A Documentary Story, trans. Ian Press (from the Ukrainian) and foreword by David R. Marples (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); Vladimir Gubarev, Sarcophagus: A Tragedy, trans. Michael Glenny, with a preface by Robert Gale (New York: Vintage Books, 1987).

54 The Legasov transcripts are online at lib.web-malina.com/getbook.php?bid=2755; the city of Slavutich maintains a very informative website at www.slavutichcity.net; and the declassified documents relating to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are at http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=49046&cat_id=5303. Also, books published in small numbers have been made available online—for example, Diatlov's testimony on the Chernobyl accident has appeared online at multiple sites, including rrc2.narod.ru.

55 For example, I. G. Belousov, “Bez vedomestvennogo patriotizma: K probleme bezopasnosti iadernoi energetiki,” Energiia: Ekonomika, tekhnika, ekologiia 9 (1989): 6–8. Also see the following works by Rem A. Belousov: Ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii: XX vek. Kniga I: Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow: IzdAt, 1999); Ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii: XX vek. Kniga II: Cherez revoliutsiiu k NEPu (Moscow: IzdAt, 2000); Ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii: XX vek. Kniga III: Tiazhelye gody rosta i obnovleniia (Moscow: IzdAt, 2002); Ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii: XX vek. Kniga IV: Ekonomika Rossii v usloviiakh “goriachei” i “kholodnoi” voin (Moscow: IzdAt, 2004). In addition, see Iurii I. Koriakin, Okrestnosti iadernoi energetiki Rossii: Novye vyzovy (Moscow: GUP NIKIET, 2002).

56 Dimitrii G. Zhimerin, ed., Sovremennye problemy energetiki (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1984); A. S. Pavlenko and A. M. Nekrasov, eds., Energetika SSSR v 1971–1975 godakh (Moscow: Energiia, 1972); A. M. Nekrasov and M. G. Pervukhin, eds., Energetika SSSR v 1976–1980 godakh (Moscow: Energiia, 1977); A. M. Nekrasov and A. A. Troitskii, eds., Energetika SSSR v 1981–1985 godakh (Moscow: Energoizdat, 1981); A. A. Troitskii, ed., Energetika SSSR v 1986–1990 godakh (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1987).

57 Viktor Andriianov, Kosygin: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003); Frank Church, Interview with Kosygin: Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971); T. I. Fetistov, ed., Prem’er izvestnyi i neizvestnyi: Vospominaniia o A. N. Kosygine (Moscow: Respublika, 1997); Aleksei N. Kosygin, Ob uluchshenii upravleniia promyshlennost’iu, sovershenstvovanii planirovaniia i usilenii ekonomicheskogo stimulirovaniia promyshlennogo proizvodstva. Doklad na Plenume TsK KPSS, 27 sentiabria 1965 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1965); Aleksei N. Kosygin, Rech’ na vneocherednom XXI s”ezde KPSS (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959); Aleksei N. Kosygin, O gosudarstevennom piatiletnem plane razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1971–1975 gody i o gosudarstvennom plane razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1972 god (Moscow: Politizdat, 1971).

58 Alla Iaroshinskaia, ed., Iadernaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Fond Iaroshinskoi, 1996).

59 V. G. Terent’ev, ed., Kto est’ kto v atomnoi energetike i promyshlennosti Rossii/Who Is Who in Nuclear Power Engineering and Industry of Russia (Obninsk: Titul, 1995).

60 B. P. Shevelin, ed., Put’ k priznaniiu (Ekaterinburg: UrO RAN, Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po atomnoi energii, and Sverdlovskii nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut khimicheskogo mashinostroeniia, 2002).