The Real Anatoly Dyatlov

Since this has been requested @elenatria, @oikid, @creation-vs-destruction and I’ve already procrastinated enough. It was requested a while ago that I do a post on the real Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin, because they really were not as bad as HBO’s Chernobyl depicted them. Again, giving the same disclaimer as I did in the Bryukhanov post, I’m not going to comment on whether HBO did the right thing in how they depicted them or not (I suppose people can battle that out in the notes if you want). Instead, I’m just going to compare them. Again, I’m not as familiar with these men as I am with Valery Legasov because they have never caught my attention in my time studying Chernobyl, but this is what I have on them. I’m going to do Anatoly Dyatlov now and Nikolai Fomin last because people are more interested in Dyatlov, so here we go.

HBO Anatoly Dyatlov is probably the meanest character in the series. He is also probably the most hated character on HBO’s Chernobyl. The HBO Dyatlov was, well, very resistant in accepting that the reactor had exploded.

Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that the core had exploded, HBO Dyatlov could not accept it, in some cases, even months later. Some of his best lines from the show include:

He’s delusional. Get him out of here.

You didn’t see graphite. You didn’t. You DID-NANNTTT! BECAUSE IT’S NOT THERE.

What’s radiation? It’s reading 3.6 roentgens, but that’s as high as the meter - 3.6, not great, not terrible.

It’s reading 3.6 roentgens, but that’s as high as the meter - How do I even know it exploded?

So he’s a pretty much despised character and has been memed more than any other character on the show.

Anatoly Dyatlov (Get Ready to Cry at the End)

Dyatlov was born to a poor family in Siberia. At the tender age of 14, Dyatlov ran away from home and never went back, which suggests an unhappy home life as a child. He became an electrician and landed a job installing nuclear reactors aboard nuclear submarines for the Soviet Navy. These nuclear reactors found on submarines were small VVER reactors, nothing compared to the powerful RBMK-1000s found at Chernobyl. Still, he installed 40 VVER reactors before landing his job at Chernobyl in 1973.

During his time in the Navy, Dyatlov was involved in another nuclear accident. Dyatlov was exposed to 100 rem, which was enough to seriously threaten his health, but he survived. He was married with two sons at the time of this accident. One of his sons developed leukemia and died shortly after. This may have been a coincidence, or it may have been because Dyatlov carried radiation home with him from the accident. It was not uncommon for people who absorbed a large amount of radiation to take that radiation with them and make their young children sick. Liquidators who gave their sons their hats to wear for fun, for example, later realized they had made a grave mistake when their son developed brain cancer. And others who were exposed to large amounts of radiation, such as Valery Legasov, found out that all of their belongings, even what they had at home, were radioactive. So while it may have been a coincidence, many believe that Dyatlov’s son died due to his father’s contamination that he unwittingly brought home. The loss of one of his sons was devastating to Dyatlov.

Dyatlov was a workaholic and suffered from insomnia and so-called “dark thoughts.” Upon his arrival at Chernobyl, Dyatov immersed himself in the academia surrounding RBMK reactors. He read everything he could about them, along with all of the scientific fields that surrounded the nuclear industry. He was a stickler for detail. Whether people liked him or not, Dyatlov was considered an expert on RBMK reactors because he examined every millimeter of the reactors. He used to inspect the reactors to make sure they were functioning properly, that there was no leaks or cracks. He worked ten hour shifts 6 or 7 days a week. And he didn’t drive or take a bus from his Pripyat apartment to Chernobyl. He walked the 1.9 miles every day, to and back again, because it helped keep his dark thoughts at bay, and he liked to jog as well.

Was he really as mean as the show depicted him? Yes and no. Dyatlov was not exactly known for being nice or popular. However, he was not as heartless as HBO depicted him, nor was he as close-minded.

Dyatlov did not seem to ever make the transition from a military workplace to a civilian workplace. He expected absolute obedience from his subordinates. An order was an order, no questions asked. To question him was a sign of disrespect in his mind. He was full of logical fallacies. He believed in what he had read about RBMK reactors more than he believed in what was right in front of him. And he believed that if he said something to an inferior, he was always right. I don’t believe that this was a conscious decision he made, but it was how his mind was organized. He was a product of the Soviet military. He was extremely stubborn and believed that when he said something, what he said was fact.

If anyone was not meeting up to Dyatlov’s expectations, he wrote their names down and reprimanded them. He yelled, he cursed, he called inexperienced workers that failed to live up to his expectations “fucking goldfish” a lot. But this was just another day at work to him. And even though workers might have skirted to avoid him in the hallways from time to time, they all believed he was an expert in the field. No one questioned his expertise.

At the time of the accident, Dyatlov was entering his second day of no sleep. He was exhausted and in a bad mood. He yelled at and threatened Akimov and Toptunov to go through with the test and perform it at a much lower level than the safety regulations said were acceptable, most likely because he falsely believed the reactor was safer operating at 200 megawatts instead of 700. And the ironic thing is, Dyatlov was not an engineer. No matter how much he read about RBMK reactors, he couldn’t press the buttons to operate one. That was Akimov’s job. Dyatlov could no more take the controls and do the test himself than a passenger could take over for the pilot and fly the airplane. But he refused to listen to Akimov or Toptunov.

Dyatlov’s demeanor completely changed when the accident happened. He was confused. He fell back onto the literature he read and decided they needed to make sure the reactor was cooled to avoid the meltdown, but the damage had already been done and was not un-doable. He had never read that an RBMK reactor core could explode, so he didn’t believe it. He told Akimov and Toptunov to go home. They began to obey, but then returned to their posts out of a sense of responsibility. Dyatlov told them again to go home (they didn’t). Dyatlov went to the bunker to meet Bryukhanov. He was throwing up and weak.

This is the point in which HBO Dyatlov is no longer accurate.

When asked what had happened, Dyatlov threw up his hands and said, “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it!”

Dyatlov was sent to the hospital by Bryukhanov. The firefighters, Akimov, Toptunov, and others would join him later. And then he went from the Pripyat hospital to Hospital Number 6 in Moscow. During his time in Hospital Number 6, Dyatlov met with Akimov, Toptunov, and other operators from the plant while they were still in the latency period. While Akimov and Toptunov were still well enough, they all talked about what had happened. Dyatlov was no longer insistent that he knew the answers. He wanted to find out what happened. “I am open to any suggestion, lads,” Dyatlov implored them. “Don’t be afraid to come out with even the most far-fetched ideas.”

Dyatlov never blamed Akimov or Toptunov for what had happened.

Dyatlov watched almost everyone in the control room with him wither away and die, and yet he survived.

Dyatlov took Legasov’s conclusions on the design flaws and ran with it. He wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency, lashing out that they had not disclosed the full truth about the extent of the design flaws in Vienna and that the RBMK reactors should never have been in operation at all, and that the design flaws were the reason why his colleagues were dead.

At the trial, Dyatlov was angry and spoke out several times. He demanded people tell the truth about the design flaws that Legasov reported. He was combative. One of the experts who testified snapped at him, “What is this, a physics exam? I’ll ask you to answer the question!” He did say he was not in the control room when the crucial decisions were made, but he also said that Akimov and Toptunov, now dead, were not in any way responsible for the accident. But the court would not consider the design flaws in their decision. It was a show trial, the verdict was already passed down. When one unnamed scientist said that the men in the control room could not have known about the fault of the design and the positive void coefficient danger, the prosecutor immediately dismissed him from the stand. (In HBO, this unnamed scientist was Valery Legasov. We don’t know his name or his fate.)

Dyatlov died of bone marrow cancer in 1995 at the age of 64.

So, yes, he was one to shout at his subordinates, he was certainly “mean” at work, he was deeply flawed in his logic, but he was not the monster who called Akimov and Toptunov’s “incompetent morons” after they had died. He was upset and bothered by their deaths; he considered them innocent. So much so that he did this:

Dyatlov wrote a letter to Leonid Toptunov’s mother, saying, “I fully sympathize with you and grieve with you. There is nothing more unbearable than losing one’s child.”