So I have way too much to say about the portrayal of Anatoly Dyatlov (Mr Everything’s Fine *pukes on the table* from episode 1) and about the real Anatoly Dyatlov, strap in for a ride because I’m a huge weirdo who knows way too much about Chernobyl.



Anatoly Dyatlov seems like one of the most unfairly maligned characters in the drama that unfolded in April 1986.

He was indicted alongside Brukhanov and Fomin but unlike them refused to play the part of a disgraced repentant administrator who caused the accident with gross incompetence and various oversights. From the very beginning up until his death in 1995 he was adamant to the point of belligerence in defending his subordinates working at the plant at the time. Contrarily to the official state position he claimed that none of them - Toptunov and Akimov in particular, the guys at the control desk at the time of the accident - made mistakes or caused the explosion. Those two died weeks later in the hospital in Moscow, but instead of a pension and medals for courage their families received curt notices that the only reason they won’t be prosecuted for criminal negiligence was because they were dead.

It was Dyatlov who fought for their recognition. He spent years in a labor camp and dedicated the rest of his life to campaigning to clear their names, writing letters and articles, digging up documentation and blueprints and basically proving that the reactor flaws were well known to its designers at the Kurchatov Institute and intentionally kept secret. In his own words, the flaws of the reactor design were so severe that if the explosion hadn’t happened in Chernobyl it would have happened somewhere else.

While it’s probably true that Dyatlov was in denial about the amount of rads present in the plant immediately after the accident, portraying him as a bad guy is silly because he wasn’t actually in charge (he was Fomin’s deputy, and Brukhanov - as plant director - was a superior to both of them) and was very quickly put out of commission via acute radiation syndrome. Fomin and Brukhanov meanwhile never were in the control room or anywhere near the explosion and continued to cause damage via denial and minimizing long after Dyatlov was flown to the hospital in Moscow.



Sorry about the wall of text, again I’m a huge weirdo about Chernobyl but I feel very strongly about how Dyatlov was made into a scapegoat by the Soviet courts and maligned for a long time afterwards (as he writes in his book, everyone knows you can’t trust a zek). His book is titled Chernobyl: How it happened but only avaiable in russian and (I think) german.

