#asker: rodka

[teeth--thief]

Photos of Lyonyd (Leonid?…) Toptunov? I wouldn’t mind rambling on him, also.

- Rodka

I deliberately saved this ask for last (sort of). As a treat for myself and as a threat for everyone else ♡ And for @ur-favorite-basil-enthusiast since he was also interested in seeing The Collection.

I'll have to split this into a few parts - dreaful, I know! - because I can only add 10 pictures to one post while on mobile =( I'll keep reblogging with additional pictures till I run out of things to share. Subscribe for more insane content in the future and don't forget to click that bell icon to...

Part 1

He had manifested to me in a dream when I first started researching Chernobyl, have I ever mentioned that? Well, he has. Which was truly an anomaly because I almost never have any dreams at all... but about that some other time, perhaps.

I am going to put the pictures of him under the cut so nobody gets jumpscared by my Collection of Five Billion White Guy Pictures. And I'll also include some relevant information! Or as relevant as I can make it, at least.

Just to be clear (and safe): I found all of these out in the wild, on da internet. I am, however, pretty sure that at least the collage of his pics from uni times is from @/toptunovleonid on Instagram. So, just to be very clear: all credit for at least that goes to her.

Semi-chronologically, his pictures go like this:

Ignoring that one picture that is barely visible and out of frame in a few pictures of the photo album it's in, because he looks about 10 there and I feel slightly weird about sharing it specifically.

We're in... Tallinn, middle school number 11!

Second boy from the left in the second picture is him. That is he. He who was 15 then. And a 16 year old Lyonya in the left picture, of course.

From this time, one of his classmates remembers him as follows: At school he was quiet, unnoticeable, very shy. I remember he was always hanging out with younger kids. He was chubby. They'd now say he was a "nerd". Alright, we get it, he was a sweet child... Teen? Both? Or was he like this all his life? Either way, please stop before I die from all that sugar...

He's (10th grade) the guy leading the little girl (1st grade). His shapeless hair has charmed me. What's his hair routine and will it work on my curls? Mhm, didn't think so. And first in the second row from the bottom in the small pictures, in case you can't recognise his face yet.

As a bonus - his school certificate from the school in Tallinn he attended until graduating in 1977:

The grades were from 2 (you didn't pass with that one, so that's an F) to 5 (an A, I suppose?). So as you can see, he certainly studied well. What a nerd (affectionately).

Uni territory now! Moscow calling 📞 or, rather, Obninsk and the MEPhI

If you weren't born in any of the USSR countries during The Soviet Times, it'll come as a surprise to you but the students had mandatory... field... work... classes...? if you can call them that. They had them digging potatoes and what not. Nothing screams socialist spirit like making uni students do free labour in the field, I guess?

Pictures with his uni girlfriend, how cuuute! (And Sasha Korol hanging from the roof in the background... for reasons unknown)

Lyonya pretending to drive a combine harvester. And next to him, obviously, Sasha Korol. When I first saw this picture, I thought he was on some kind of a scaffolding but alas - it's one of those old beasts, like our Bizon. But that's not a Bizon because those had roofs. Nobody here cares for USSR combines talk - not even me - let's move on.

Not too sure when these two are from but they look uni enough to me - probably from the very beginning and sometime closer to the end, judging by his stache doing significantly better...

Mandatory military service because a REAL MAN in the USSR needed to know how to shoot a gun, obviously. Even when that meant military service interrupted your uni for a short while. I say that as if no other countries before or after had mandatory army time... don't question it, I'm doing a bit.

Lyonya is second in top row in the picture on the left and third from the left in the top row in the other pic. Korol is there, too, he's fourth from the left in the top row in the first picture and second from the right in the bottom row in the other picture.

[teeth--thief]

I’ve likely flooded your inbox by now. Tell me about Medvedev?

-R, (Rodka).

Hi hi hello Rodka! Hell yeah, let's get into that mf-- man. I mean man.

He's the author of The Truth about Chernobyl aka Chernobyl Notebook and No Breathing Room (it takes a masochist to read that, which I am not. It's in the Drive regardless, just in case someone out there is). The general consensus goes that he was more or less a mouthpiece for the government, spreading their narrative further. The book, being one of the first ones about the disaster, was meant to ensure that the general public blames all the convenient people, overlooking the ones that truly mattered and were to blame in this story.

In the preface of very own his book, one S. Zalygin (I don't know who you are and do not care to find out) describes him as such:

The author is a nuclear power specialist who worked for a time at the Chernobyl AES and knows it well, just as he is personally acquainted with all the principal participants in the events. By virtue of his official position, he has attended many of the crucial conferences concerning nuclear power plant construction.

Worked for a time at Chernobyl AES is one way to put it. I mean... sure, he did. According to Steinberg at least, he even was the first Deputy Chief Engineer. For 6 months. In 1973. According to Dyatlov, Medvedev was in Chernobyl from 1972 until 1974 - whichever the case may be, that's either 5 or 3 years before the launch of the first unit. Now, time for a little conspiracy theory... Guess when Dyatlov, who was very well known for tolerating nothing but absolute professionalism and discipline, started working in Chernobyl? In 1973. And guess who the first author (if I'm not mistaken) to spread the narrative about Dyatlov basically being The Devil and so much more was? Medvedev. Listen, I'm not saying these two things are related... HOWEVER...

Nah, I'm kidding. If that was the case, A.S. Dyatlov would have mentioned so in How It Was, in which he does talk in length about Medvedev and his book, mainly in chapter 9. He is mean to him in the best, most professional way possible. Example being this bit:

“I arrived at the construction site of the nuclear power plant in the village of Pripyat directly from the Moscow clinic, where I was treated for radiation sickness. I still felt bad, but I could walk and decided that, working, I would get back to normal faster.”

I don’t know how he felt - bad or good, but according to the 6th hospital (A.K. Guskova and A.F. Shamardin), G. Medvedev did not have radiation sickness and the dose was minimal.

He really said I went to the idiot village (got the most important staff from the hospital in Moscow on record) and everybody there knew you (they said you were fine, you fucking liar).

I'm not too sure where I heard this (maybe from Kupnyi?), but the general opinion of the people in the nuclear field, people from ChNPP of Medvedev is that... well... they don't see him as a professional at all, really. He was deemed untrustworthy, a liar and first and foremost - someone lacking the technical knowledge he always presented himself as being in possession of.

Additionally, this is what Nikolai Steinberg - one of the people on the INSAG-7 commission, a ChNPP worker (a book of his is on the Drive, too, by the way) - had this to say about him in this incredibly long interview with not only him but quite a few other interesting people... like the one and only, Stolyarchuk: bless whoever clipped it so that I don't have to look for the right part in a 3 hour long video! (Yes, there are subtitles! And there's also part two) Safe to say - nobody in the professional field likes Medvedev :)

[teeth--thief]

Haha I have taken big trees on the city train before. For Christmas! Though I imagine a shark is easier and cuter to carry.

- R

Five minute artist’s rendition of what I must have looked like then

[teeth--thief]

I am watching the Lost Tapes documentary. No questions this time, though the door is unlocked to your thoughts. Simply to update you on my work. Reading of the INSAG-7* has gone well, I am solidly through Annex II. Midnight in Chernobyl is near completion. How It Was is on the docket to be read, as with Legasov’s tapes (though those have been skimmed briefly). What else? Locations in Chernobyl has been looked through. Interviews watched.

* Printing this has made me look crazy I imagine! Carrying a stack of inch-thick papers on the bus. Pah.

- Rodka

Fun fact: despite the claims that it contains new video evidence and all that jazz, it contains nothing new 💀 They just enhanced some already available footage.

Not only that, but I'm pretty sure (that is: if that's THE documentary I heard/read this about) they deliberately altered one clip to claim it was recorded on a different day than in reality because you can hear them say the date in the video! 😍😍 We love honest film makers that definitely never make shit up! Never ever!! The lies told by some documentaries about Chernobyl are almost as ugly as my friend's last situationship, truly.

Phew! I got a little bitter there for a second... What was I actually going to say... ah. If you haven't checked out 3828 already then I'd recommend doing so! And this amazing interview with Aleksandr Agulov! There's tons of really great stuff out there, although some is not translated...

Congrats! Great job on working through your reading list! Just a heads up: How It Was has no official translation. The one I have in the Drive leaves a lot, and I mean A LOT, to be desired but it's the only completed version I could find in English. This one, although apparently incomplete and only in this format, is much more readable, though. I'd love to give credit where credit is due but I have no idea whose file this is, sadly :(

If it makes you feel any better about looking weird on the bus then when I bought the 1 meter long shark plushie from IKEA a few years ago, I had to get across the whole city to go home and so I sat with this huge shark in my arms for probably an hour, on the very back of the bus... World’s most humbling experience for world's most anxious man (or rather then - teen).

[teeth--thief]

Two asks, back to back… What’re your thoughts on Prof. Legasov?

Thanks,

- Rodka.

Hello once again Rodka!

Now that's a tricky question... Well, no, not really, not for most people, but for me it is.

I have a degree of respect for him - of course I do, he worked real hard and then suffered the consequences of it. I find that admirable. However... I can't help but feel a hint of... distaste? towards him. And I'm not of the opinion that you can't speak ill of the dead, I think you should speak about them exactly how you would if they were alive. If his only accomplishment was telling lies about the workers then I would certainly speak ill of the dead but that's neither the beginning nor the end of his career (although... I suppose it is kind of the end).

I'm sorry but I'm an operators and workers girlie (I'll stop being a girlie when they invent an equally fun word for men. A fun...guy. fungi?) through and through. If you talk badly about the staff, you're automatically not a good one to me. Of course, I do understand that that was necessary for the official narrative, it's not like you could say the reactor was flawless in the same breath as the fact that the operators did the best they could with the information they had - you can't contradict yourself like that if you're an official representative.

There are plenty of people interested in him specifically, even here on Tumblr! Don't let my opinion deter you from learning more about him and from liking him - I'm just... overprotective. I hold the workers near and dear to my heart.

There's plenty of both archival footage (even a compilation) as well as documentaries that include him - some longer, some shorter (such as this one). And I'm pretty sure there's some reading material, too.

As someone with an advertisement degree (or two - we'll find out in a week or so), I think he did great PR work. Charismatic, energetic, spoke quickly, with no pauses or fillers - an excellent spokesperson if I've ever seen one (so the exact opposite of me :D). In conclusion: it's gonna be a no from me for the whole Vienna thing but a yes for everything else.

[teeth--thief]

Ah, no worries for the late reply. I assumed it only meant a greater one. It’s lovely, thank you.

-R

No no, thank YOU for always asking the best questions and, in turn, making me feel useful ♡ I'm so glad you enjoyed the post.

Sometimes it's not even that the answer takes a long time to type out or to verify, it's just that I'm always worried that I'll remember something super relevant after posting it (as if adding something later in a reblog isn't an option...) and so I stash the draft for later posting "just in case" and come back to check up on it every day as if it'd evolve on its own under my absence. And sometimes it clearly does because I reread something and it makes no sense anymore. Like, what was past me trying to say? Who knows. We'll never find out.

Yes, I always talk type this much. No, I don't think it's curable.

[teeth--thief]

Hi. R again. It hasn’t been long, I know. And I could figure this out on my own (forgive my pride, but I must defend it in advance; I am an adequately intelligent man), but, what was the misunderstanding of the flaw? English may be poor. Apologies again. I understand the rods. Their design, the problem(s) they posed… the technical, chemical, science, physics… I see it. The sociology, less so. What information were they (and by they, I mean anyone and everyone) missing? Were they prevented from knowing, or were (some of) them unimaginative? You seem to focus on the empathetic and humane. Thank you, again. Many thanks.

-R

Heeeello once again my lovely lovely Rodka! I'm sorry that this ask has been marinating in my inbox longer than the other ones, I had to find a free moment to get into this.

If you'd like me to find more things on this, get some more quotes, back things up with sources... I can do that. But I think the general consensus would be the same.

We have to take quite a few things into account to get the full picture.

The designers of the RBMK seemed to have known about certain flaws but failed to share that information with the people operating their very own reactors (if I had to guess, so that the staff wouldn't be, rightfully so, wary of the reactor itself while operating it - the last thing any new operator would like to hear is oh by the way, that huge thing you're operating? Oh yeah, it can explode. Or meltdown can occur. Or both.). And yet, even they seem to have overlooked certain aspects, and only learned about them after bad things already happened - think, Leningrad in 1975 - with this one everyone just went: Well. That's a bummer... Anyway. We won't tell people much of anything. That's nobody's business (it was, in fact, everyone's business) - and Chernobyl in 1986. And probably some others.

Now, by all accounts, the operators did not possess any knowledge about the flaws. In the control room itself there were a few key people who, in theory, should (would) have known about the flaws - if anyone, other than the people real high up, knew. The most crucial ones being:

> Dyatlov, as a Deputy Chief Engineer, with years of experience under his belt, being the author of the test program they were running that night.

> The two SIURs (Senior Reactor Control Engineers) from the fourth (Tregub) and the fifth (Toptunov) shifts respectively. If there's someone in the plant who should know all about the core and the control rods, it's them, that was their job.

Things get... interesting with the second SIUR, as according to Sasha Korol, his close friend, in Midnight in Chernobyl:

(...) There were also health checks, and security screenings conducted by the KGB. After one of these safety exams, Toptunov sat down with Korol and told him about a strange phenomenon, described deep in the RBMK documentation, indicating that the reactor control rods may—under some circumstances—accelerate reactivity instead of slowing it down.

I'm not too sure whether to believe it at all, but, alright, supposing that's true, let's say that during one of the many "examinations in the station’s Department of Nuclear Safety" or the KGB checks, someone produced some documents for the future SIUR to read, something describing the control rod flaws. First of all: who would be in possession of such documents? The KGB most likely. Because if it was someone higher up from the station then... well, it'd be Dyatlov and he most certainly had not known.

And if that happened at all, it'd suggest that Toptunov either did not know how to apply this knowledge to operating the reactor or he was under the wrong impression regarding it - as in, maybe he believed, or was led to believe, it doesn't happen in XYZ situations, that it's an incredibly uncommon phenomenon, etc etc. But if Toptunov learned that from something or someone at some point, why hadn't seemingly anyone else? Tregub? Hadn't known. Dyatlov? Hadn't known. Any other operator? Had. Not. Known.

Hunter, how do you even know that?, you may ask. Well, simply because the "immediate" staff didn't know anything - they all met up while in the hospital, discussing and theorising about what might have caused the explosion. You'd think that if someone knew something like this could happen in some rare circumstances, they'd speak up about it then.

On the topic of the KGB being involved, actually... being a NPP worker was not a job you could have just... got. As far as I know, anything that was more complex than moping the floor (this is probably a great exaggeration but if your position was in control of anything then that would most definitely be the case) was possible only after passing more or less extensive background checks. The whole plant crawled with informants, according to the declassified KGB documents (if I remember correctly that that's where I got this info from). While power plants were not exactly the state secret, it's pretty much given that they wouldn't just employ anyone there. If you were to rely sensitive information such as that your perfect RBMK reactors aren't so perfect after all, I'd assume you could tell them that.

So, in conclusion: some things seemed to have been overlooked by the designers and scientist in charge (academician A.P. Aleksandrov, mainly - nobody touched him after, or before, the disaster because he was INCREDIBLY well connected and also approximately one billion years old and the Soviet Union sure did respect its seniors... but only if they were important enough) - either deliberately or simply because nobody bothered to entertain what would happen if [this, that or the other thing] - ignored certain aspects of safety for their own sake. That is: to make their design (and in turn, themselves) look good.

Remember: In Soviet Union there were no accidents because of faulty equipment. In Soviet Union accidents could only occur because of working personnel. (A.S. Dyatlov)

[teeth--thief]

Rodka here. Deleted my old account. Here's my new one. And /here/, is something much more interesting than all of that... This is my (admittedly slow) progress on my (hard/Google) drive project. I've been quite rigorous about it. Even scrapped together some code to speed up PDF making... lots of URL prediction and automated file downloading. Anyway, it's good, no? If anything particularly strikes your fancy, let me know; I'll send it over. In the meantime, I'm still organizing away... - R

HELL YEAH, THAT'S SO COOL!! Great job! How's the progress now? =D

Meanwhile, I haven't added a single thing to my Google Drive in a million years... shame on me for abandoning my You Wouldn't Download a Car style project...! That said, I just haven't seen anything to add to it in a while... :(

[teeth--thief]

Your Chernobyl art brings smiles. -R

Hey mate, you can't talk to me like this, you'll make me fall in love... :/

No but seriously, thank you so much 😭 You have no idea how much this means to me ♡♡!!

I also have a drawing of the Ferris Wheel and the Joker robot! I don't think I ever shared them here... probably because this blog did not exist back when I made them.

And, obviously, I'll be making more Chernobyl related art! The environmental ones will have to take a back seat for now, I'm way too busy and stressed (I have literally the most important exams of my life in two months) to be making these, unfortunately, but I think I can manage cranking out another portrait or two before the anniversary! I don't know who of, yet... (hopefully not of me because that's what I've been feeling like drawing lately, strangely enough? lmao) I'm open to suggestions, I'm planning on doing drawings of so so many people, I'll get to everyone eventually, but... a request for a certain person would bump them up on the list (there is no list). Maybe a firefigher for a change... we'll see.

And, of course, I still have that Chernobyl themed shirt... vest... thing I haven't shown yet. The sleeves aren't done yet because I don't know what to do with them... I had a great idea but I'm pretty sure it would fail miserably, so. It's nothing impressive, but it was made with insane amout of love.