74 The Economist February 6th 2021
Obituary Nikolai Antoshkin
F
ewpeopleknewtheywerethereuntilhesatjokinganddrink-
ing with his friends in the steam bath, and then they were vis-
ible: the long livid scars across his upper body, where surgeons
had cut into him to treat radiation sickness. And there were other
signs. If he nicked himself while shaving, the cut would bleed for a
very long time. And three times a day he had to swallow eight pills
to deal with this ache, or that tiredness, caused by the job he had
done at Chernobyl in the spring of 1986, when Reactor number 4 at
the nuclear power plant had exploded, and he had been sum-
moned to quench the fire. His doctor had told him, “Chernobyl
will never let go of you.” True enough.
He had suspected that from his very first view of the scene from
the air. His speciality was helicopter reconnaissance; he had flown
many missions in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, scout-
ing out the camps of the mujahideen and their shadowy move-
ments through the mountains. At Reactor number 4 there was
nothing shadowy. The graphite core had ignited when exposed
and was burning freely. This was a fire like the demon of hell, bil-
lowing smoke that filled his mouth with a taste of rusty iron until
he had to vomit. Death stared in his face, and terrified him. This
was not like Afghanistan, where your helicopter got shot at but
you landed, forgot about it, and went back up. This would make it-
self felt for a lifetime, and his children’s lifetimes.
The operation had begun in confusion. He got the first alert on
the afternoon of April 26th, a Saturday. It was cryptic, trying to
play down the damage. Officials seemed offended that the blast
had even happened; man had tamed the atom, after all. His own
overriding thought, as an air-force man, was that this needed air-
craft, and he was ready. But for some hours no orders came. The of-
ficials brought in ground fire crews instead, who were sickened at
once and whose hoses proved useless. He twitched with anxiety
until they called him in.By the time he had driven from Kyiv, where he commanded the
district air force, to Pripyat, the nearest town to the plant, it was
sunset, and the sky was full of flames. Plumes of smoke were ris-
ing 400-600 metres into the air. A light wind was blowing, taking
radiation here, there and everywhere. He had a dosimeter with
him; at the stadium, just outside town, the roentgen count shot up
alarmingly. But most striking to him was the sight of the people
leaving Pripyat, the children skipping and excited, and the long
lines of buses at the city limits waiting to take them away.
His orders, when he got them, were plain enough. It was up to
him to work out how to do it. This was now a total air operation,
his province, as it had been ever since his triumphant progress
through the Orenburg Higher Military Aviation School. At once he
sprang to the task, calling in 600 volunteer pilots from all over the
Soviet Union and commandeering 100 helicopters. He also or-
dered 10,000 brake parachutes, each to be loaded with sand, clay,
boron and lead and dropped to seal the inferno. Having set all that
in train he then went down to the Pripyat river, with a spade, to
help dig sand. He reckoned they might need 5,000 tonnes of it.
The task was both delicate and terrifying. The target aperture
was only 19 metres across; each pilot had to hover 200 metres
above the core, in thick smoke, while another man held by a har-
ness leaned out to drop the parachute. The air temperature was as
much as 200°C, scorching the fuselages of the craft. Amid all this
neither he, nor they, had adequate protection. In the air they wore
masks; on landing they changed their uniforms and took baths to
wash off the radioactive dirt. He remembered smearing on some
nasty cream from Leningrad. Yet they had been exposed not to
1,500 roentgens as he thought, already enough to kill a man, but
double that. Twenty-eight pilots died soon afterwards; 14 more
died later, from lingering cancers. He himself spent the next two
years in hospital, though he was to die, eventually, of coronavirus,
not the fire. They flew, and dumped sand, and dumped sand again:
4,000 sorties in all, until after two weeks the blaze was out and
concrete was poured in to seal the core.
It was all rather different from what he had imagined as a boy,
herding sheep in the southern Urals, as he paused to watch the
fighter aircraft roar overhead to the Orenburg base. The life of a pi-
lot seemed one of bold and glorious adventure, soaring above his
peasant world. Later he organised a troupe called the Russian
Knights to put on aerobatic displays, and called his force at Cher-
nobyl “the Liquidators”. Yet his highest award, Hero of the Soviet
Union, was earned not on the Soviet-Chinese border, where he
flew in skirmishes, or in Afghanistan, or for his long service as a
flight commander. His “selfless service to the Motherland” was es-
sentially an industrial operation against no enemy, except the in-
sidious beams that nobody could see.
This rankled. Everyone celebrated the heroes of the Great Patri-
otic War, like his father, who had fought on the eastern front. Ev-
eryone obviously revered the cosmonauts. For some reason,
though, it was not cool to have the same regard for those who dealt
with domestic terror or, like him, domestic horror. Some solace
lay in organising the Moscow Club of Heroes, and in simply pin-
ning the great gold Hero star to his suit lapel when he retired and
briefly, after 2014, sat in the Duma to make laws. He was proud,
too, to be consulted as an expert when other nuclear accidents oc-
curred. In 2011 he sighed over Fukushima, and how slow the Japa-
nese were. They should have called on the whole world to help.
At Chernobyl, though, they had called mostly on him. Ten years
later he drove past it again. It was now surrounded by a 20km ex-
clusion zone, with the plant itself enclosed in a concrete sarcoph-
agus. At the Pripyat stadium wild trees were thrusting through the
turf. In the abandoned outlying villages, thickets had taken over
the sagging houses. Wolves prowled there in winter. There was
talk of creating a nature reserve; he knew the mushrooms had al-
ways been good. The earth was healing itself. It was doing better,
perhaps, than he was. At war with the invisible
General Nikolai Timofeyevich Antoshkin, commander of the
“Liquidators” at Chernobyl, died on January 17th, aged 78