In the spring of 1986, many Americans were following events in the Soviet Union. The new man in the Kremlin was Mikhail Gorbachev, a young (by Soviet standards) leader who was eager to reform the Soviet system. Gorbachev also sought better relations with the West.
I was a senior in high school in 1986. I was interested in the Soviet Union, too. I was old enough to remember the final Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the downing of KAL 007. But now, a new world seemed to be in the making.
Then, on April 26, there was a major nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in an area of the Soviet Union then commonly known as “the Ukraine”.
The Kremlin tried to cover it up (of course). The Kremlin had covered up similar disasters in the past (including one at a biological weapons facility in a remote part of the USSR). But this was too big to conceal.
Chernobyl would be in the news for months—years—afterward. The problem still hasn’t gone away completely.
In retrospect, the Chernobyl disaster (which sprung from Soviet ineptitude) was the first sign that Western optimism about the USSR in the mid-1980s was misplaced.
Forty years have passed since then. The former Soviet lands are still the source of mostly bad news. Case-in-point: the war between Russia and Ukraine, now in its fifth year.
-ET