Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost.

THE RIGHT BOOKS / CHILTON WILLIAMSON JR.

TWO DAYS after the disastrous explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, TASS announced: "The accident at the Chernobyl power station is the first one in the Soviet Union. Similar accidents happened on several occasions in other countries. In the United States, 2,300 accidents, breakdowns, and other faults were registered in 1979 alone." (A Radio Moscow science correspondent shortly raised the figure to twenty thousand, and asserted that "hundreds of [these] rated as particularly serious.") "Don't [Westerners] know," demanded Georgi Arbatov, head of the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada, "about the dozens of accidents during the operations of [their own] military nuclear technologies, including the two cases involving U.S. submarines?"--his implication being that no similar incidents had occurred on the Soviet side. And on May 14, Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of glasnost, stated bluntly, "For the first time ever we encountered in reality such a sinister force as nuclear energy that has escaped control." Glasnost or no, that statement in particular was a boldfaced lie: for thirty years, Western intelligence has been speculating on the nature of a nuclear disaster that occurred near the city of Sverdlovsk in the Ural mountains in 1958, one of the innumerable incidents discussed by James E. Oberg in Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost (Random House, $19.95).

"The purpose of this book," Oberg avers, "is to restore a balance to an existing and clearly unbalanced body of literature, which ranges from official Soviet `success stories,' by the Soviets or sycophantic admirers, to the most rabid of the anti-Soviet `dirty linen' collections." The West stands to learn from an informed accounting of Soviet mistakes and misadventures, Oberg believes, and so, in clear, relaxed, occasionally inaccurate journalistic style (unfortunately marred by his publisher's excessively Random editing) he chronicles anthrax infections, nuclear explosions, commercial-plane crashes, rocket blow-ups, submarine sinkings, satellite plummetings, cosmonaut deaths, and mine disasters; the cumulative effect of which is almost to make one discount the threat of the Soviet equivalent of SDI until one recalls that, as the author reminds us, what we have here is only the corrective other half of the story. It all makes for extremely interesting and entertaining reading, by no means in the cynical sense those adjectives might suggest. In no instance does Oberg gloat over tragedy; indeed, he has dedicated his book to "Grigoriy Nelyubov, an unfortunate cosmonaut and official non-person, and other unremembered victims."

Russian secrecy, of course, is a centuries-old tradition, long antedating the present Marxist-Leninist regime. Onto this tradition, however, the Soviets have grafted their highly utilitarian and relativistic notion of truth, as applied to the theory of journalism by a one-time director of TASS who stated: "News should not be merely concerned with reporting such and such a fact or event. News or information must pursue a definite goal: it must serve and support the decisions related to fundamental duties facing our Soviet society . . ." Glasnost, Oberg argues, has in fact encouraged Russian newsmen to pursue more aggressively stories unappreciated by government functionaries; "it has already brought about some remarkable revelations in some limited areas." For example, the Chernobyl meltdown, he believes, "came to symbolize the eventual victory of openness over reflexive secrecy." On the other hand: "There has yet to be a Soviet disaster announced in progress, as true glasnost should require. . . . [The new] `openness' is broad, indeed, but not universal by any means, and it is shallow, very shallow."

Meanwhile, one fact to emerge very plainly from this book is that Soviet technology remains in many ways as crude as the propaganda with which the government covers over its deficiencies. Oberg has compiled a catalogue of oversight and ineptitude so gross as to suggest at times Stone Age men handling Space Age tools, and frequently compounded by a criminal willingness to risk human life for ideological pride. (Oberg's account of the catastrophic explosion, in 1960, of a Mars-bound space vehicle on the pad, in which scores of men were killed, points to the Challenger disaster 26 years later while at the same time dwarfing it; though Oberg considers this to have been one of those incidents that, if they had been made known to the West, could have prevented similar tragedies from occurring later on.) In certain cases, particularly those involving the Soviets' push to rival the United States in the development of nuclear weapons, the government saw not risk but certainty of human injury, and yet proceeded anyway with its "nuclear gulag," where political prisoners were put to work, without any protection whatever, in lethally radioactive environments; following their slow deaths by radiation poisoning, their bodies were dumped into mass graves, and they were replaced by busloads of fresh victims. This story, most extensively recounted by Avraham Shifrin (an emigre now living in Israel), without doubt accounts for the most horrific material in Uncovering Soviet Disasters.