In April of this year, the 31st anniversary of the devastating Chernobyl disaster was celebrated. Only according to official data, which occurred on April 26, 1986, the accident is regarded as the largest in the history of nuclear energy. During the first three months after the accident, 31 people died; From the effects of radiation, another 80 died, and 134 suffered radiation sickness. However, many researchers note that the exact number of "victims of Chernobyl" is unknown until now, and the consequences of the tragedy are evident today, writes Ksenia Kirillova for LB.
The way the USSR behaved towards its allies, also affected by the Chernobyl disaster, deserves a separate mention. Some of the information on this topic begins to be published, but so far, for the most part, only in English-language sources.
For example, the first data were published about how Moscow, trying to hide the scale of what happened in all possible ways, did not provide its injured allies with even basic information about what had happened.
As a result, being formally one of the countries of the Warsaw Pact, Romania took an unprecedented step in 1986, seeking help from the United States.
With his own intelligence, Bucharest learned that something went wrong in Chernobyl, within hours of the accident. However, there was no briefing on what happened from the Soviet side. On the third day, the Romanian Foreign Ministry sent official inquiries to Moscow about the essence of the problems that arose, but all of them either remained unanswered or were met with a total denial of the tragedy as such.
Therefore, the country's leadership began to solve the problem on its own.
According to published data, on April 30, 1986, Romanian Defense Minister General Vasile Mila announced the interception of Soviet military radio programs. They showed that the radioactive cloud Cesium-137 and Yoda-31, which arose as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, reached the territories of Finland, Sweden, Norway and northern Poland, and the Soviet authorities took measures to evacuate residents in the area of ??the nuclear facility.