Alex Ritson

We were exposed to quite a lot because when we got back to Moscow, we went to our appropriate embassies.

We didn't obviously trust anything the Soviets or Russians were telling us.

So we went to experts at the American embassy and the British embassy.

The American embassy was the main one.

They told us to burn our clothes basically because we were completely contaminated.

When did the full picture of the damage done happen?

by this disaster.

When did that finally come out?

That took quite a while.

It didn't come out in Moscow where we were.

It came out in the West.

And it came out after the collapse of the Soviet Union, really.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the leader at the time, he'd been in power for a year.

He was the reformist Soviet leader who wanted to turn the Soviet Union into a modern democracy and didn't manage.

the country collapsed, and he said when it was collapsing that he thought the Chernobyl accident was one of the principal reasons for the quick downfall of the Soviet Union.

Charles Bremner, talking to Caroline Wyatt.

And that's all from us for now.

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