Moscow is a place of rescue and bereavement in the book’s Chernobyl testimonies: families travel there to reach critically ill firefighters, only to find that access, information, and even the handling of the dead are controlled by institutions. In a separate account, the city is where a physicist learns of the accident and tries to alert officials. These stories make Moscow less a single, fully described urban setting than a junction between private emergencies and the state’s response to catastrophe.

The journey to the hospital

One wife recalls that, during the night, buses were gathering for a possible evacuation while fire trucks filled the opposite side of the street. The radio announced that residents might be taken away for three to five days. Her husband, a firefighter who had been at the reactor, had already been flown to Moscow on a special plane. She traveled to her parents’ village, where she and her family finished planting the garden, and then, pregnant and feeling ill, set out for Moscow with her father. He withdrew all the money her parents had. The journey itself largely disappeared from her memory; the urgent aim of reaching her husband remained.

On arriving, she and her father asked the first police officer they saw where the Chernobyl firefighters had been taken. The officer directed them to Hospital No. 6, at the Shchukinskaya stop. Their surprise was significant: people had warned them that the hospital’s location was a top secret. The directions proved more accessible than the rumors suggested, but the hospital itself was a radiology institution with controlled entry. She paid the woman at the door and was allowed in, then had to plead with others before reaching the head radiologist, Angelina Vasilyevna Guskova. When Guskova asked whether she had children, the visitor understood that her pregnancy could prevent her from seeing her husband and tried to conceal it.

Hospital care and bodily change

The hospital’s rules and conditions shaped the wife’s experience as sharply as the illness did. On her first day in the dormitory, staff measured her belongings with a dosimeter and took away her clothes, bag, purse, shoes, and undergarments because they were contaminated. She was left with her money and given an oversized hospital robe and slippers. She wore them to visit her husband, who was startled by her appearance. Even in these circumstances, she tried to make him soup: she boiled water in a glass jar and added tiny pieces of chicken. Other people provided a pot and a cutting board, and people brought her vegetables because she could not go to the market in her robe. By then, however, he could not swallow the food or even drink.

Her recollection of his deterioration is not a smooth medical account but a succession of changes she could barely take in. Each day, she says, she met a different person. Burns and lesions appeared in his mouth, on his tongue and cheeks; his appearance changed through layers of injury and shifts in color. The speed of the decline left little time to think or grieve. She later described the hospital as a place for people with severe radiation poisoning and recalled the stark measure attached to it: in fourteen days, a person dies. Her family reached Moscow on May 9, bringing her belongings and money. Her husband had wanted her to see the city’s Victory Day fireworks; instead, she sat with him in the hospital as he struggled to orient himself between day and night.

Death and a restricted burial

The account of the final days is broken into flashes. After spending the night with her husband, the wife briefly returned to the dormitory; while she was away, she was told that he was calling for her. She hurried back from the cemetery, where two of his friends, Viktor Kibenok and Vladimir Pravik, had been buried, and learned that her husband had died fifteen minutes earlier. She had been away for only a few hours. She shouted up at the sky, then ran back to see him once more before he was taken from the hospital.

At the morgue, his family saw the difficulty of preparing a body devastated by radiation: formal clothes had to be cut, his swollen feet would not fit into shoes, and he was ultimately buried barefoot. His body was placed in a thick transparent plastic bag, then in a wooden coffin, which was itself enclosed in another bag and placed inside a zinc coffin. Only his service cap did not fit. The Extraordinary Commission told the relatives that the bodies were too radioactive to be returned to their families and would be buried in a Moscow cemetery in sealed zinc caskets beneath cement tiles. If relatives objected, officials said the dead were now heroes of the State and no longer belonged to their families.

The funeral procession made that assertion visible. The family and military personnel rode in a hearse, but the group was kept waiting and driven around Moscow for two or three hours. They were told that entry to the cemetery was being withheld because foreign correspondents were there. When they were finally allowed in, soldiers surrounded the mourners and escorted the coffin. The burial was hurried; the wife was not allowed to embrace the coffin before it was covered with earth. The family was put on a bus, and tickets home were bought for the following day. A plainclothes watcher accompanied them and would not let them leave the dormitory to buy food. Even the towels and sheets were counted and packed into a polyethylene bag as they departed. The family had paid for fourteen nights in the dormitory, a duration that echoed the hospital’s grim measure of survival.

Moscow as a point of communication and memory

A different testimony places Moscow in the first hours of the disaster as a point from which news might be carried outward. A physicist says he was in the city on business on April 26, 1986, when he learned of the accident. He tried repeatedly to reach Nikolai Slyunkov in Minsk, calling from Moscow with information he considered urgent. In this account, the city is not the site of the reactor or the speaker’s work there; it is where he first received the news and attempted to make it heard.

Across these accounts, Moscow holds sharply different meanings without resolving them. It offers the hospital to which a family can travel, and a place where relatives can gather around a dying man. It is also where officials impose restrictions on the body, the funeral, and the family’s movements. For the physicist, meanwhile, it is the starting point for an attempted warning. The city’s significance lies in these overlapping functions: refuge and separation, medical care and secrecy, personal grief and official procedure.