Welcome to Journey Through Time. I'm Sarah Churchill.

And I'm David Olishogger.

And this is our final episode in the story we've been telling about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

Yeah, the worst nuclear disaster in history that spread a plume of radioactivity across Europe

that's linked to an unknown and unknowable number of deaths. And we've talked about the

consequences of the disaster for the people of the Soviet Union, especially people of Ukraine,

where the Chernobyl plant was built. But in this episode we want to talk about the

legacies of the disaster, but also the consequences for the nation that had created Chernobyl,

the Soviet Union, a nation that obviously does no longer exist. In 2006, on the 20th anniversary

of the Chernobyl disaster this year is the 40th anniversary. Mikhail Gorbachev wrote

this. He said, the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my

launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the main cause of the Soviet Union's collapse five years later.

Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning

point. There was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.

He was right. The years after Chernobyl were the twilight years of the Soviet Union.

And that's because the effect of the disaster did not end neatly. The Soviet Union entered

what was to be its final years with the sort of criticality, a political criticality of Chernobyl

sort of building up within the system. Let's start at the end of 1988. By then, the Soviet Union had

built a sarcophagus to enclose the remains, the radioactive remains of reactor for at the Chernobyl plant, a building rushed into existence that was only to last 20 to 30 years. That name of sarcophagus spoke of a kind of permanent resting place for this nuclear poison,

but it was already beginning to decay and show structural weaknesses. This is because if you

force people to build buildings at incredible speed, they will do so by cutting incredible corners.

The sarcophagus in some ways was a metaphor for the Soviet Union. It was an unwieldly construction

...