Izvestia Details Pattern of Lies in Chernobyl Cover-Up : Disaster: Paper says documents reveal Soviets told nation one thing and West another, neither version true.

In the weeks following the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station six years ago, the Soviet leadership told lie upon lie to cover up the scope of the disaster and hide the danger it posed to the country’s population, according to secret Communist Party documents published Friday by the newspaper Izvestia.

In a pattern of cynical and calculated deceit, the Soviet government and the Communist Party effectively denied medical care to tens of thousands of people caught in the showers of radioactive particles released from Chernobyl, secret minutes from meetings of the party’s ruling Politburo showed.

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people were put at risk through the shipment of materials, including food, from the contaminated regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia on orders from party and government officials concerned about “lost production,” according to the documents.

And in a cover-up that continues, authorities here told their own nation one thing and the West another about the accident and its aftermath, knowing that neither version was true, the Izvestia article charged.

They have withheld information from international nuclear safety specialists, provided incomplete data to foreign doctors who came to treat victims and arranged phony tours for journalists, environmentalists and aid donors to show the region returning to normal.

“People who took part in those (Politburo) meetings knew all the truth about Chernobyl, but chose to misinform and deceive the country and the world,” Alla Yaroshinskaya wrote in her biting analysis of declassified Chernobyl documents.

“They invented different categories of truth: one for the East, another for the West, yet another for the International Atomic Energy Agency and quite another for us who in their view were not entitled to know anything at all.”

Former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was present at some of the meetings, the article indicated. Current Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin was not a Politburo member at that time and was not present.

Among Izvestia’s findings:

* The amount of radiation considered safe was increased tenfold by the government two weeks after the accident with Politburo approval, to reduce the number of people who would have to be examined, treated and perhaps hospitalized.

A similar decision on what constitutes dangerous levels of radioactivity was made to limit the number of people who would have to be resettled away from the contaminated area to 166,000 rather than 1.5 million who would have had to be moved under a previous standard that most environmental scientists regard as minimal.

* Milk and meat from the contaminated area were deliberately mixed with those from other regions and distributed around the country so they could be sold. Regulations on acceptable radiation levels again were changed with Politburo approval.

An estimated 47,500 tons of “dirty” meat and 2 million tons of milk with radioactive levels higher than had been allowed for human consumption were shipped from the region from 1986 through 1989 and mixed with clean meat and milk for sale under this directive, according to government officials quoted by Izvestia.

* The workers at the Chernobyl plant, forced to move out of their highly contaminated township next to the plant, were resettled in an new town, Slavutich, that government and party officials knew to be contaminated as well with radioactive Cesium-137 isotopes.

* From the outset, the number of victims reported to the Politburo was far higher than the 32 dead and 209 victims of radiation sickness disclosed publicly, and the secret Politburo minutes show that thousands of people were being hospitalized, many hundreds of them children, at a time when Soviet leaders were minimizing the extent of the crisis.

Yuri Spizhenko, the Ukrainian health minister, estimated this week that 6,000 to 8,000 people have died in his country alone as a result of Chernobyl. While some were residents of the area, most were soldiers, firemen and construction workers who fought to put out the fire at Chernobyl and received high doses of radiation there.

While charges of a cover-up had come earlier from Ukrainian investigators, with the Politburo minutes Yaroshinskaya documents a pattern of decisions that not only hid the truth but actually spread the danger and thwarted a full response.

Times researcher Sergei Loiko contributed to this story.