DEATH IN THE AIR
Chilling unseen pictures show Chernobyl bustling with life in days AFTER blast – as Russian invasion sparks new fears
YOUNG mums push prams through the park, kids kick a football in their school playground and a bride and groom emerge from a registry office, smiling as they climb into a wedding car.
But these idyllic scenes hide a sinister secret - they were filmed in the city of Chernobyl, hours AFTER the nuclear explosion in the nearby power plant, which led to an estimated 200,000 deaths in 1986.
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The previously unseen film - unearthed in Sky’s Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes - shows the locals going about their day in the pretty city dubbed “heaven” by one resident, blissfully unaware that it’s soon to become hell.
The documentary, which airs on Monday, is pieced together with archive material never shown outside the former Soviet Union, including harrowing footage of workers and firefighters dying from radiation sickness, with blackened skin, sores and weeping wounds.
As Russia began its assault on Ukraine last week, Putin's troops captured the infamous nuclear exclusion zone, sparking safety concerns.
Levels of gamma radiation spiked after military equipment rolling through the area unsettled contaminated dust, Ukraine said in a chilling warning.
Lyudmilla Ignatenko was five months pregnant when she watched the explosion at the nuclear plant from the balcony of the flat. Her husband, Vasya - a firefighter and one of the first responders on the scene - died an agonising death three weeks later.
“We had great plans for the future and then…,” Lyudmilla tells the documentary.
“I was pregnant. They admitted me to hospital. I gave birth to a girl. Before he died Vasya and I gave her a name, Natasha. After five hours, she died.
“I was told she had protected me, she saved my life. All the radiation that I was inhaling, she absorbed it.”
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Director James Jones embarked on a quest to uncover lost footage of Chernobyl after stumbling on the clip of the Ukrainian city's residents enjoying a sunny Saturday morning - oblivious to the deadly radiation all around them.
“Someone had been filming in the town, with young mums pushing their children in buggies and kids playing in the sand,” he says.
“There are white flashes on the film caused by high levels of radiation, but the residents were just going about their day, totally oblivious to it.
“It had me thinking what else was filmed? And then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, searching online, random Facebook groups and wherever people post stuff, and every week it felt like I was finding something new.”
Through contacts in Ukraine, James uncovered reels and reels of old footage, including 5,000 young men roped in as “liquidators”, sent to their death in a futile attempt to clean up the exposed radioactive material from the roof of the plant.
'Heaven' in vibrant young city
Lyudmilla moved to the city of Chernobyl, in 1972, as part of an influx of young workers drafted in to help with the construction and running of the newly-commissioned nuclear power plant.
“I felt like I was in heaven,” she says. “I’d never seen such a beautiful and vibrant town before. Everything was nice, beautiful, green. Such a beautiful town, on the bank of the river.”
The city - which had an average age of 26 and a higher birth rate than anywhere else in the USSR - were assured the plant was was “the best and safest in the world.”
In one propaganda film, a white-coated scientist says: “Sometimes people ask, ‘Could a nuclear power plant explode?’ Well, I can responsibly declare that this is completely out of the question. It’s impossible to even imagine such a thing.”
Incredibly, the Soviets were so convinced they refused to build the protective shell other power stations, including those in the US, installed to prevent radiation leaks.
Young people were encouraged to move to the city from all over the Soviet Union and a huge maternity hospital was built to facilitate the “birth of future nuclear energy builders”.
Lyudmilla met Vasya in the city and said it was “love at first sight.” She found out she was pregnant shortly after they married.
“We really wanted a child,” she says. “We couldn’t even imagine the possibility of any threat, even though Vasya worked as a firefighter. It felt safe.”
Night shift forced to work through 'nuclear plague'
All that changed in the early hours of April 26, when an explosion in one of the four nuclear reactors and subsequent fires sent radioactive material blasting into the air and spreading for miles around.
“My balcony overlooked the garden and I could see the road. I saw three fire engines and I saw Vasya running,” says Lyudmilla.
“When I turned my head to the power plant I saw fire and smoke, in the shape of a mushroom cloud.”
Firefighters were not told of any radiation danger and night shift workers at the plant were told to keep working.
Engineer Oleksey Breus says he and other workers were picked up as usual the following morning and bussed to the smouldering plant, adding they were “scared of entering the zone of this nuclear plague”.
He shook hands with a night shift worker who was “white as a sheet”, having already already received lethal doses of radiation, and another's skin was red raw from exposure.
Oleksey later found his skin was bronzed, like he had caught a tan, and tests found his right arm was polluted from the handshake.
“We had to run all over the unit, looking for injured,” he says. “The conditions were absolutely horrifying. There was fire, smoke, pieces of construction hanging down.
“Radiation levels were so high that the devices we had were not powerful enough.”
Schools open and families on days out after blast
Hours later, the city of Chernobyl woke up to a “normal” Saturday and the Soviet authorities, determined to play down the danger of contamination, did nothing to warn them.
“Everyone was outside, taking walks with baby carriages, children. Schools and kindergartens were open,” says Lyudmilla.
“Nobody was warned by anyone. The only thing that happened was that the streets were being cleaned in some places with a foamy substance and that’s it. Everything else was so calm.’”
It was 36 hours before officials knocked on doors, telling residents to gather in parks and playgrounds for evacuation but, after waiting for buses for hours, they went home.
In fact, they should have been told to stay inside and shut doors and windows instead of waiting in the open air - where there was 10 times more radiation than indoors.
Even when the 2,200 buses arrived to take locals away the following day, they were told they would be returning in three days.
As fires raged on, President Gorbachev ordered officials not to report them, meaning people in nearby cities went on living life as normal while being exposed to radiation about 50 times above normal.
Helicopters were drafted in to drop sand on the plant - which damaged the site and released yet more radiation into the atmosphere.
“The explosion at Chernobyl caused a toxic nuclear mess the likes of which the world had never seen before,” says Oleksey. “An eruption of thick nuclear material had poured out over 1000 sq km.”
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Weeping sores and flesh falling off bone
In the days that followed the disaster, all the firefighters who had tackled the blast were sent to hospital - including Vasya.
Lyudmilla - who lied to doctors about her pregnancy after being warned hospital visits could stop her having children - watched as he deteriorated, losing his hair and developing painful sores.
“Radiation wounds don't look like normal wounds, they are completely different,” she says.
“His voice got weaker. He had wounds in his mouth, he started getting them everywhere.”
Harrowing footage shows Vasya with weeping sores, his skin and flesh peeling away to expose bone.
Even as he lay dying, Lyudmilla and the other firefighters’ wives were taken to see Gorbachev who “told us they were heroes of our country, and that all of them would be buried in Moscow” before making them sign non-disclosure agreements.
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Soldiers sent to death for 800 Roubles
On May 14, Gorbachev claimed only seven people had died adding: “Thanks to effective measures taken, the worst is behind us. The more serious consequences have been averted.”
But the secret clean-up operation was still going on. Shocking footage on the documentary shows troops - known as “liquidators” - drafted in to remove 200 tons of deadly debris from the roof in gas masks with lead sheets tied on to uniforms as rudimentary shields.
“The order had been given - it was suicidal,” says one surviving liquidator, Nikolai Kaplin.
“Nobody knew anything and they were literally going into hell.
“We didn’t have proper protection. The contact time is a few seconds but these molecules and atoms accumulate in the body.
“Sooner or later all our bodies showed signs. We all went through it - vomiting, coughing, extreme exhaustion. On the fifth day I started vomiting and choking.
“We were just cannon fodder.”
The liquidators were hailed as heroes and awarded 800 rubles (equivalent of £14,000) - but 80 per cent would die in the next few years.
Local hospitals also saw a huge increase in birth abnormalities, with newborns suffering adrenal cancer and thyroid cancer, the birth of so-called ‘sirens’ - babies with the whole lower part of their body fused like a fish tail - and even a two-headed baby.
Despite hospitals packed with adults and children suffering from the horrific effects of the fallout - including leukaemia - the Soviet government banned doctors from linking any illness to radiation sickness, even claiming the symptoms were psychological and caused by “radiophobia”, the fear of radiation.
One eminent scientist is seen proclaiming: “The accident at the Chernobyl power plant had no impact on the health of the population.”
Seeking scapegoats, the government put on a “show trial”, prosecuting several workers from the plant for a fictional breach of safety measures.
It was not until 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the authorities admitted a design fault had caused the disaster, which exposed 8.4million people to radiation.
It is estimated that 200,000 people died as a result of the accident. The official Soviet death toll remains at 31.
Now abandoned, Chernobyl is still inside a nuclear exclusion zone and, today, it's back in the news after invading Russian troops regained the territory.
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But for Lyudmilla and other former residents, it will be remembered as a place where unimaginable horror became a reality.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes airs on Sky Documentaries at 9pm tonight
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