Marat Filippovich Kokhanov

Marat Filippovich Kokhanov’s account presents a scientist trying to make dangerous knowledge count in a system that could block its transmission. Identified as a former chief engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, he recounts calling Belarusian party leadership with an urgent warning: the radioactive cloud was moving toward Belarus, and people and animals near the station needed to be evacuated. His testimony follows that warning into obstruction, official denial, and an effort to preserve evidence after access to decision-makers narrowed.

Identity and Institutional Position

The book introduces Kokhanov as a former chief engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. In recounting his attempt to reach Nikolai Slyunkov, he identifies himself as the Institute’s director, a professor, and a corresponding member of the Academy. These credentials matter within the episode: he is not an outside observer trying to attract attention, but a senior scientific figure who insists that his professional standing gives weight to what he knows.

That standing does not guarantee access. Kokhanov says he tried to reach Slyunkov, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus’s Central Committee, by government telephone line. The calls did not connect; when he began discussing the accident, the line went dead. He understood this as evidence that the conversation was being monitored and blocked. Even the official channel, and even the call of an Academy member to the republic’s senior party official, could not secure an unimpeded passage for information.

Warning and Official Response

After roughly two hours, Kokhanov managed to reach Slyunkov. He explained that his calculations, informed by conversations with people in Moscow, indicated that the radioactive cloud was moving toward Belarus. He urged immediate iodine prophylaxis for the population and evacuation of people near the station, adding that no person or animal should remain within one hundred kilometers of it. The warning was concrete and practical: it specified a direction of danger, a protective measure, and the scale of exclusion he believed necessary.

Slyunkov replied that reports had already reached him and that the fire had been put out. When Kokhanov later met him, he again argued that people needed to be saved and pointed out that evacuation was already under way in Ukraine. Slyunkov challenged the Institute’s personnel for moving through town with dosimeters and alarming residents. He invoked assurances from Moscow, including Professor Ilyin, chairman of the Soviet Radiological Protection Board, and cited the government commission at the station and the military equipment sent there. In Kokhanov’s account, the response displaced the question of what radiation could do with the appearance of administrative control: officials had consulted, a commission was present, and the army had been deployed, so the danger could be treated as contained.

Kokhanov countered with the scale and composition of the contamination as he understood it: thousands of tons of radioactive substances, about 450 types of radionuclides, and an estimated release equivalent to 350 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. He stresses that the situation called for discussion of physics and its laws, while official attention turned instead to enemies and the search for blame. His comparison exposes the disparity between measurable material consequences and a political vocabulary that could redirect scrutiny away from decisions and responsibility.

Evidence, Privilege, and Pressure

The confrontation deepened Kokhanov’s suspicion that danger was not being managed equally. He said he had information that senior officials were taking iodine and that their children had been quietly moved out of the area. He also reported that officials entering the zone had gas masks and protective clothing unavailable to ordinary people, and described a specially monitored herd and protected agricultural resources near Minsk. These are claims he presents as evidence of unequal protection; in his telling, their significance lies not only in privilege itself but in the contrast between private precautions and public reassurance.

After officials stopped receiving him, Kokhanov turned to written reports. He sent maps and figures through the chain of command, compiling four folders of 250 pages each. He made two copies of the material, keeping one at the Institute and hiding the other at home with his wife. The precaution reflected his expectation that records might not remain safe: on returning from a trip, he found that the folders in his office had disappeared. The missing files did not end his efforts. He continued writing and speaking out, insisting that people had to be evacuated, while the Institute continued making trips to the affected area and produced what he describes as the first map of contaminated regions, with the entire south marked red.

The pressure reached beyond administrative exclusion. Kokhanov says the Institute’s radiation-measuring equipment was confiscated without explanation, and that threatening calls came to his home, warning him to stop frightening people. He also describes intimidation directed at scientists in the Institute. The sequence—from blocked calls, to ignored warnings, to missing reports, confiscated instruments, and threats—shows how control over evidence and the people producing it became part of the crisis. The instruments could measure radiation, but their removal could also limit who was able to make the danger publicly legible.

Narrative Role and Significance

Kokhanov’s testimony is organized around a conflict between scientific judgment and political authority, but it does not reduce that conflict to a simple opposition between knowledge and ignorance. His account emphasizes how official routines and party discipline could prevent available knowledge from changing action. He portrays Slyunkov not as a lone villain but as part of a system in which officials avoided sticking their necks out and preferred to keep everyone satisfied. In that account, obedience and caution within the hierarchy helped convert a warning into an inconvenience rather than a basis for immediate protection.

The testimony also gives institutional details the force of a human record: a line that goes dead, a two-hour effort to reach an official, four folders of reports, an office emptied of its files, a map with the south in red, and scientific instruments taken away. These particulars trace both the attempted movement of information and the obstacles placed in its path. Kokhanov’s significance in the book rests on that double record: he describes what he tried to communicate about the physical danger, and how the structures around him restricted the communication, documentation, and measurement needed to respond to it.