The HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” told the world, in graphic detail, what really happened in the worst nuclear catastrophe humankind has ever faced; Estonian World brings you a first-hand account by an Estonian Chernobyl veteran who was forced by the Soviet authorities into the disaster zone to help with the clean-up efforts.*
“Chernobyl”, the critically acclaimed miniseries produced by the American network Home Box Office and Britain’s Sky, has been seen around the world. For the first time, a dramatisation of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe brought the truth about what happened on 26 April 1986 in Ukraine to hundreds of thousands of people. The show emphasised the dishonest nature of the Soviet Union and asked an important question – what is the cost of lies?
On 26 April 1986, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, located near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine, exploded during a safety test. Although radiation quickly spread across the region, reaching Western Europe and Scandinavia, the Soviet authorities did not disclose what had happened and continued lying to their own citizens and to the world about the extent of the radiation – and about the fact that other Chernobyl-type nuclear power plants carried the same potential risk of exploding.
Army reservists deployed without being told where they were going
Estonians were fortunate to live close to Finland, and many learned what had happened from Finnish radio and television news. Once information from Western sources had spread across the Soviet Union – especially in the affected areas – the Soviet authorities were finally forced to admit what had happened.
But the story did not end there. The clean-up efforts in Pripyat and elsewhere in Ukraine and Belarus required the work of 800,000 people – and those people had to come from somewhere. The Soviet authorities therefore used army reservists, among others, to help with the clean-up operation – sending them to Ukraine without, at least initially, telling them where they were being deployed.
Estonian Väino Liimann was one of those reservists. A 37-year-old senior lieutenant in the Soviet Army, he was sent to the disaster area in 1988 – two years after the catastrophe.
“I worked at Tallinn University of Technology at the time. I was summoned to the war commissariat – as the Soviet Army’s recruitment office was then called – some eight to ten times, and each time I was ordered to return in seven to ten days,” Liimann recalls.
“The final order to appear was for a Sunday. That day, they put us on a bus and took us to Riga – the capital of Latvia – where we were given uniforms. Only there did we learn that we were being sent to Ukraine to clean up the consequences of the disaster.”
Replacing roofs, cutting away topsoil and replacing fences
The Estonian reservists were stationed in the village of Aliaksandraŭka, Belarus, near the Ukrainian border. “The village where we worked, Poliske, was on the edge of the closed zone – within an 80-kilometre perimeter of the nuclear plant,” Liimann says. “Our job was to clean up Poliske because it was inhabited. On the first day, for example, we were assigned to clean a children’s playground. We also replaced the roofs of buildings and cut away ground surface where radiation levels were higher than normal. We also replaced fences.”
“But despite replacing all items with higher-than-normal radiation levels, the residents were still evacuated two years later because the reactor was still leaking constantly, and the village’s radiation levels rose back to their pre-clean-up level. Our efforts were therefore only a temporary remedy.”
As Liimann was an officer, he went to measure radiation at the playground after it had been washed. Using the DP5 dosimeter employed by the Soviet Army, he measured tree leaves on the ground around the playground, as well as the sand. These showed radiation levels of 30 milliroentgens or more, while the playground, after washing, measured 12–15 milliroentgens.
“In Aliaksandraŭka, where we stayed, the radiation level was 16–18 milliroentgens an hour. That means the average hourly background radiation level was 22 times as high as a dental X-ray – and we lived at that level for six months in a row,” he notes.
Liimann recalls that, as an everyday effect of the high radiation, he was constantly tired and spent all his free time sleeping. “Everyone also coughed. It was not so noticeable in the open air, but when we went to the cinema or the sauna, it was pretty awful to hear. And it was peculiar to taste copper all the time. These are the things you sense and feel in a highly irradiated area; radiation has no smell or colour.”
Working for pennies
“Nature was lusher because radiation helps plants grow,” he also remembers. “But you had to avoid eating berries, apples or mushrooms. I measured the radiation level of mushrooms; it was three times higher than normal.”
Liimann was also occasionally taken into the closed zone. “A couple of times, we went to the city of Chernobyl and to some other towns as well, because the roofs, topsoil and fences we had removed were taken to nuclear repositories and burial grounds, and officers sometimes had a duty to accompany the driver,” he recalls.
The soldiers taking part in the clean-up efforts were not even paid a proper salary. “We received the regular army wages – a private got 3.80 roubles a month, while officers received about 20 roubles or so,” Liimann says.
For comparison, the average salary in the Soviet Union in 1985 – and salaries did not change that much – was around 190 roubles; the minimum pension was 50 roubles. From 1961 to 1991, the official parity of the rouble to the US dollar was USD1=SUR0.9, although that does not really mean much, as the cost of living was completely different in the US and the Soviet Union. But a monthly public transport ticket cost three roubles in Tallinn in the 1980s, which puts a private’s monthly wage of SUR3.80 into perspective.
Looking for the birds
The soldiers with whom Liimann served were from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Kaliningrad oblast – a Russian region located between the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Poland. All the men were aged 25–40. “There were three officers from Estonia and, under my command, about 60 reservists from the Baltic countries, including about ten from Estonia,” he recalls, adding that the reservists’ military speciality was either chemist or driver-chemist.
“How many of these men are still alive? I have no idea. I would guess about 10 per cent.”
How did spending six months in a radiation zone affect the men’s health? “They told us it could affect chronic diseases, but I did not have any back then. Now I have rheumatoid arthritis. Psychologically? I cannot say it affected me. When we went there, I was a little afraid and looked around to see whether there were birds in the sky – and there were, which calmed me down a little. We were ordered to wear respirators, but we only wore them when dismantling something, so that we would not inhale radioactive dust. The summer was hot, and wearing a respirator all the time was difficult.”
By the time Liimann was sent to the disaster zone, he was already fairly knowledgeable about what had happened. “We first heard about it on Finnish radio and, on 9 May 1986, after rainfall, I took a dosimeter and measured the radiation level in the car park of Tallinn University of Technology. The highest level of radiation was probably nine microroentgens an hour – Estonia’s natural level is six. So, when I went to the affected area two years later, I had already read the official Soviet report on the catastrophe and was informed about what had happened. But I had no idea how the radiation had spread there.”
Up to 200,000 people lost their lives
The total number of casualties from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster remains disputed. The United Nations has estimated that around 4,000 people died; Greenpeace, however, has claimed that up to 200,000 people lost their lives. During the accident, steam-blast effects caused two deaths within the facility – one immediately after the explosion, and the other compounded by a lethal dose of ionising radiation.
Over the following days and weeks, 134 servicemen were hospitalised with acute radiation syndrome, of whom 28 firefighters and employees died within months. In addition, approximately 14 radiation-induced cancer deaths among this group of 134 hospitalised survivors followed within the next ten years.
Among the wider population, an excess of 15 childhood thyroid cancer deaths had been documented by 2011. Further research is required to determine definitively the elevated relative risk of cancer among the surviving employees, those initially hospitalised with acute radiation syndrome, and the wider population.
The official Soviet death toll from the disaster was 31. This figure has remained unchanged since 1987.
This article was originally published on 26 April 2019 and lightly amended on 26 April 2026.
