Eyewitnesses' unpublished explanatory statements written immediately after the accident
Anyone who has read this far will no doubt be familiar with Nikolai Steinberg's involvement in Chernobyl's aftermath. After spearheading the reinvestigation that led to the publication of INSAG-7, many private documents from the Soviet prosecutor's office wound up in boxes on his balcony, where they would remain for the next thirty years. Shortly before the 2022 invasion, former liquidator and Chernobyl Museum curator Sergei Babakov (земля ему пухом) produced scans of some of these documents. They have been translated below, with limited commentary. My thanks to V. Krasnov and I. Kondrateva for assistance with transcription.
These handwritten documents are noteworthy because they are addressed to the direct supervisors of the participants, dated April 26th. They likely represent the very first eyewitness statements ever recorded, before the investigation was taken over by outside experts and the prosecutor's office. In at least one instance we can see differences between the fresh recollections of an eyewitness and the way he would remember the story in years to come.
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