Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

Summary

A minute-by-minute account of the April 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl power station in Soviet Ukraine, drawing on recently declassified KGB documents, Communist Party records, and interviews with survivors to reconstruct what happened in the reactor and in the corridors of power in Moscow. Plokhy argues that Chernobyl was not simply a technical accident but a systemic failure shaped by Soviet institutional culture — the secrecy, the suppression of bad news, and the political pressure that made honest safety reporting impossible. Published before the HBO dramatisation brought the story to a global audience, the book is the most authoritative historical account of the disaster and its political consequences.