Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an OGONEK interview by Vanda Beletskaya with Academician Anatoliy Petrovich Aleksandrov, former president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Aleksandrov blames the Chernobyl accident on an ill-considered experiment prepared by Donenergo that violated operating instructions. He also describes earlier nuclear plant defects, Legasov's suicide, and his dealings with Beria and Kapitsa. He argues for continued atomic power engineering and a law on nuclear power.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 6 of 16 well. I do not recall who at that time gave a report on this at the Academy of Sciences, but I precisely recall that then Yuriy Ovchinnikov (a vice president at that time) spoke very benevolently and praised the work. Wait, you are the one who wrote at that time in OGONEK that the work was very talented and promising. 91. But the events developed as follows. The research on 'blue blood'' was submitted for the State Prize. I participated in the preliminary discussion and felt that there was not complete agreement concerning the collective which had been submitted for the prize. And at that time, perhaps, foolishly, at an operations meeting for half an hour I related before the presidium that the work was being proposed for the prize, but there were difficulties with regard to the collective and it was necessary to elaborate the matter. And suddenly to my complete surprise Ovchinnikov got terribly excited, jumped up, and began to say in raised tones that the research had not been completed, while Genrikh Ivanitskiy was misrepresenting, was misleading everyone, and was all but giving false information about the results of the clinical testing of the preparation. 92. Such behavior of Yuriy Ovchinnikov was completely incomprehensible to me. Some people at that time conjectured that Yuriy Anatolyevich himself wanted to be in the collective of authors. But this is not so. Ovchinnikov from the very start of the nomination for the prize was not among the authors of the work, he himself did not want to be included. At one time precisely Ovchinnikov signed the document concerning the fact that Ivanitskiy, the director of the institute at which the work was performed, should be the supervisor of the research. 93. I asked Academician Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bayev, he was closer than I to this matter, he is a biologist. He replied: "'I do not understand myself why Yuriy Anatolyevich get wound up. This happens with him, perhaps, it will pass. Let us wait." 94. A very little time passed, and suddenly Ovchinnikov gave me a little note about the fact that fluorocarbons had been studied in Japan and America and their use there in the clinic had not been halted, since they have a bad effect on patients. Therefore, we must also halt the tests. I read the signature: Kryuchkov. Yes, the same one, from the KGB, as now. 95. I as president of the Academy commissioned then Chief Scientific Secretary Georgiy Konstantinovich Skryabin to set up a commission made up of scientists. He agreed with me that the KGB is not an authority in science. Why should we halt the research, if they are opposed? I recall that I advised enlisting on the commission Academician Ivan Lyudvigovich Knunyants, a most prominent specialist
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.