Soviet Newspaper Blasts Chernobyl Heads

MOSCOW--In an article linking the Chernobyl disaster with a history of Soviet bureaucratic bungling, a leading Russian newspaper yesterday criticized the choice of an often-flooded riverbank as the site for the nuclear power plant.

Officials didn't prepare for the possibility of an accident, said Ukrainian writer Boris Oleinik in the weekly newspaper Literary Gazette.

As a result, firemen and police didn't have the protective clothing and equipment they needed when an April 26 explosion tore open the plant's No. 4 reactor, he said.

Oleinik traced the negligence which he blamed for the Chernobyl disaster to a long history of bureaucratic ineptitude in the country as a whole.

For decades, he said, incompetents were kept on at the Chernobyl plant and even promoted for political reasons.

Discipline has been lax, signs of major problems have gone unheeded, and industrial managers have artificially inflated output targets and promised to finish projects ahead of time just to please political leaders, Oleinik said.

Without mentioning Nikita S. Khrushchev by name, the author indirectly criticized the late premier, who was ousted in disgrace in 1964.

Oleinik recalled the Khrushchev years when officials made overambitious agricultural targets, especially in growing corn, a pet project of Khrushchev, and then ignored the fact that targets were not met.

"Taking into account that among these beautiful talkers were dense hypocrites and adventurists like the much-talked about swine herd of the 1960s, there appeared a certain skepticism toward pretty words among part of our youth," Oleinik said.

The remark clearly was aimed at Khrushchev, who came from peasant stock and is closely identified in the Soviet Union with the 1960s and with the corn-growing program.

Window dressing industrial targets and unrealistic output schedules are especially dangerous with atomic energy, Oleinik wrote. "It makes reality of the apocalypse."

The article was the latest in a series of searching pieces about the accident in the northern Ukraine, which killed at least 31 people, contaminated vast tracts of land and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Press coverage has generally followed a tone set by the ruling Politburo, which blamed criminal negligence by local and national officials, not any design flaw in the reactor, for the explosion.

"There are many reasons for contemplation," Oleinik wrote. "But above all, many people have started to doubt the correctness of the site which was selected for the plant."

The Chernobyl station was started in the mid-1970s about 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on the banks of the Pripyat River.

Oleinik noted that the Pripyat is the largest tributary of the Dnieper River, which in turn is the region's major waterway and the source of much of Kiev's drinking water.

"It (the Pripyat) has low banks, which is important during the four-month spring flooding when water inundates significant areas," Oleinik said.

"Today, when so much effort is expended and so much of the people's money spent to protect water resources, this question [of the plant site] crops up again, and poses not only a lesson but a warning for the future," he said.

Soviet officials have said the Chernobyl disaster prompted a review of nuclear plant locations, which often are close to large population centers.

One large plant was built on Leningrad's outskirts, and smaller cities have grown up around other plants, like Chernobyl.

Oleinik said officials ignored warnings of problems at Chernobyl, including an article printed in March by the Ukrainian literary newspaper.