Soviets Admit Chernobyl Secrecy Fallout

The Soviet media for the first time acknowledged Sunday that a delay in releasing information about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster led to widespread public anxiety in the Soviet Union.

Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Party, said the experience should prove to be a lesson for the future.

The Soviet Union waited almost three full days to admit that an accident had occurred April 26 at Chernobyl, and it provided only terse government bulletins for a week after that.

This secretiveness was widely criticized in Europe and the United States, as well as by international organizations concerned with public health and the safety of atomic energy.

The Pravda article was the closest that the Soviet authorities have come to admitting that belated, skimpy information about Chernobyl may have been a mistake.

Pravda published a front-page report from Kiev, 60 miles south of Chernobyl, by correspondent Boris Oleynik that focused on the initial lack of information.

“In the first days, shifts in people’s moods came from uncertainty that was sometimes promoted by belated information on the real state of affairs at the site of the accident,” he wrote.

“This will be a lesson, not only for us,” he added. “It is necessary to trust people--all the more, Soviet people, who in these days once again demonstrated to the whole world standards of calm courage.”

Western diplomats have said that the policy of silence, in stark contrast to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s support for greater openness in public affairs, severely damaged the Kremlin’s prestige.

But Moscow has counterattacked by accusing Western governments and media of whipping up anti-Soviet hysteria with exaggerated reports of casualties and radiation levels stemming from Chernobyl.

Death, Injury Toll

So far, 13 people are reported to have died, while almost 300 are said to have been hospitalized with serious radiation sickness.

The article from Kiev said there were “whirlpools of hysterical, selfish individuals” at train stations when thousands of people, mainly women and children, were leaving the Ukrainian capital.

But it insisted that there was no general panic during the exodus.

The general calm in the city, the Pravda correspondent said, indicated that people could have been trusted with more detailed information about the disaster, the worst in the history of civilian nuclear power.

Meantime, the official news agency Tass accused West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl of impudence for asking the Soviet Union to pay compensation because of the Chernobyl accident.

In a speech in Munich, Kohl criticized Gorbachev’s failure to raise the compensation issue in his speech on Soviet television last Wednesday.

West Germany plans to compensate farmers who were prohibited from selling their products after a cloud of radiation from Chernobyl drifted over much of Europe.

The Agriculture Ministry has said the program will cost about $90 million, and a ministry official said West Germany will take its case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague if Moscow refuses to pay.

In rejecting Kohl’s call for compensation, Tass referred to the devastation the Soviet Union suffered in World War II.

“They in Bonn have apparently forgotten their irredeemable debt to the Soviet people for the grief, murder, destruction and sufferings caused by German Nazism to the Soviet Union, to every Soviet family,” Tass said.