The official account of the accident, once it had been fixed in June 1986 and presented in Vienna in August, needed a court to complete it. This piece follows the people the entry leaves in the control room at 1:23:40 through the year after, to the trial of July 1987 and what became of the two men whose names are attached to the night.

The year before

On Sunday 15 June 1986, seven weeks after the explosion, Pravda announced that Viktor Bryukhanov, the plant’s director, and Nikolai Fomin, its chief engineer, had been dismissed “for not being able to organize leadership and discipline, for meekness and lack of administrative ability”. Neither had been in the building when the test ran; Fomin, by his own account at the trial, arrived at six in the morning, five hours after the explosion, and Bryukhanov about half an hour after it. The same Pravda article complained that some of the plant’s staff were “still on the run”, a shift supervisor and senior foremen among them, and that the two undamaged units were to be back in operation by October.

Anatoly Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer who had drawn up the test programme and stood ten metres from the panels when the button was pressed, had received a radiation dose of about 600 rem and burns over a third of his body. He was arrested in December 1986. Aleksandr Akimov, the unit shift supervisor, and Leonid Toptunov, the senior reactor control engineer, had died in a Moscow hospital on 11 and 14 May, the first of the operators to die, and were buried at the Mitino cemetery. Grigori Medvedev, who had worked at the plant in the 1970s and visited the hospital, wrote that Akimov kept repeating while he could still speak: “I did everything correctly. I do not understand why it happened that way.”

In early July 1987 the CIA’s daily intelligence summary, declassified in 2025, judged that the trial was likely to draw attention back to the Soviet handling of the accident rather than close the book on it, and that “the accused probably will receive stiff sentences, but the public is unlikely to accept they are the only ones to blame.”

Three weeks

The court sat from 7 July 1987 in the Palace of Culture of the town of Chernobyl, inside the evacuated zone; the town’s 16,000 people had gone and it was in use as a base for the clean-up. Technicians in white gowns checked those entering for contamination on their clothes. The presiding judge was Raimond Brize, a deputy chairman of the USSR Supreme Court, flanked by two lay assessors. Six men sat at a table under guard: Bryukhanov; Fomin; Dyatlov; Boris Rogozhkin, a shift chief; Aleksandr Kovalenko, who had charge of the reactor; and Yuri Laushkin, a senior engineer. The charge was under Article 220 of the criminal code of the Ukrainian republic, “a breach of safety regulations at explosion-prone plants”, which carried up to ten years. Bryukhanov faced a further charge of abuse of power, for sending workers and firemen into the most dangerous parts of the plant and for the information he had sent to Moscow in the first hours; by six in the morning, the judge said in his verdict, 108 people were in hospital and he was still misinforming the authorities.

The reading of the indictment took most of the first day. It said that near-accidents had been averted at the plant before, most notably in 1985; that staff had been badly trained and badly instructed; that the technical log was riddled with mistakes; and that the plant’s officials had given false information about radiation levels afterwards and let people work in dangerous conditions. The expert commission’s conclusion, as the weekly Moskovskie Novosti reported it, was that “numerous violations of the rules on the use of equipment during the period when an experiment was being carried out are the main causes which led directly to the Chernobyl AES accident”; that the experiment “was a continuation of a series of similar and unsuccessful research projects”; and that it had not been “prepared in any serious manner. People with low qualifications were entrusted with the task of carrying it out.”

All six pleaded not guilty to the main charge. Bryukhanov admitted the abuse of power. Fomin blamed the design of the reactor and disputed the government commission’s finding of human error. Dyatlov said that the experiment had been started on his orders and denied that the safety systems had been switched off, and then said, by the United Press account of the first day: “With so many deaths I can’t say I am completely innocent.” The three Western reporters admitted for the opening were sent back to Moscow the next morning; the foreign ministry’s spokesman defended the closure on the ground that the evidence was technical. The court heard 51 witnesses over three weeks, thirteen of them people with radiation sickness, and the evidence, as the agencies reported it from the closed sessions, ranged well beyond the night: 71 serious safety violations since the plant opened in 1977, 27 of them covered up; staff who played cards and dominoes and wrote letters on shift. The defendants, for their part, argued that the reactor’s design was to blame.

The verdict

On Wednesday 29 July Brize read a verdict that took ninety minutes. “There was an atmosphere of lack of control and of lack of responsibility at the station,” he said. Bryukhanov, Fomin and Dyatlov were sentenced to ten years in a labour camp, the maximum; Bryukhanov to a further five, to run concurrently, for abuse of power; Rogozhkin to five years, Kovalenko to three, Laushkin to two. The court found that Laushkin had given permission for an unauthorised experiment. The sentences were to be served under the ordinary rather than the strict regime, which allowed visitors, mail and a better diet. Sixty-seven party officials had already been punished, 27 of them expelled. The spokesman for the clean-up organisation told reporters that at least three more trials would follow, one on the design and construction of the plant, one on the evacuation, one on the security of the station. The journalists who covered the verdict noted that the defendants had argued structural defects and that a government commission had found gross human error, and left it there.

Dyatlov was released in October 1990 on health grounds, after nearly four years, and spent the years after writing that the design had been not a contributor and not a major factor but the sole cause. Legasov, who had presented the official account in Vienna and had recorded five tapes of his own since, killed himself in the spring of 1988; Pravda printed an abridged version of his reflections on 20 May, a few weeks later. The reactors had already been changed, within weeks of the accident, in the ways the designers had been asked to change them since 1976.

Sources

• United Press International, “Chernobyl director and chief engineer fired”, 16 June 1986; “Six officials of the Chernobyl nuclear power station went on trial”, 7 July 1987; “Western reporters barred from trial”, 8 July 1987; “Six officials from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were sentenced”, 29 July 1987; “Six Chernobyl defendants sentenced to labor camp”, 30 July 1987. upi.com, upi.com, upi.com, upi.com, upi.com
• TASS, “‘Trial of those guilty’ at Chernobyl continues”, 15 July 1987, quoting Moskovskiye Novosti, in JPRS-UPA-87-031, 23 September 1987. archive.org
• Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Daily, 4 July 1987, “USSR: Chernobyl’ Trial Could Backfire on Moscow”, approved for release 17 March 2025. archive.org
• Grigori Medvedev, “Chernobyl Notebook”, Novy Mir, June 1989, in the JPRS translation, for the deaths of Akimov and Toptunov and Akimov’s words. archive.org
• Anatoly Dyatlov, “How it was: an operator’s perspective”, Nuclear Engineering International, November 1991, with its author note on his dose, burns, imprisonment and release. neimagazine.com
• Gennady Gorelik, review of R. F. Mould, Chernobyl Record, Physics Today, August 2001, for Legasov’s suicide and the Pravda publication of 20 May 1988. aip.brightspotcdn.com