Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in 2006 "The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl... was perhaps the true cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union" - what role did the disaster have in the Soviet collapse?

Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted covers the end of the Soviet Union really well; he suggests that it had a lot to do with economics. If the oil crisis hadn't happened in the late 1970s, the Soviet Union might have become fiscally insolvent, and now the debate would rage about how much credit to give Jimmy Carter for defeating communism. Jimmy Carter! Imagine! But, the oil crisis did happen, and the USSR was particularly well-positioned to take monetary advantage of it and continue limping along into the 1980s.

Chernobyl happened to a society reeling from economic pressure on the heels of an oil crash and a quagmire of an invasion in Afghanistan, while also feeling social pressure radiating from the eastern bloc inwards for more freedom – of speech, of the press, of choice in people’s own lives. It happened to a government with a relatively young leader – Mikhail Gorbachev, 55 years old in 1986 – who was trying to shrug off the Soviet gerontocracy and their secretive, old-Soviet types of attitudes which were choking the life from a system he believed in. Discord and discontent were rampant in the USSR by April 1986. The oil boom that had bolstered the Soviet economy for most of the 1970s and early 1980s had ground to a halt; seemingly overnight, the full coffers from the oil disappeared. Soviet emigres derided the USSR as a land of kleptocracy. The ability of Soviet citizens to view Western television and listen to Western radio served to break the insular hold the Soviet state had on its own citizens and served to show the stark contrasts between citizens of the societies.

By mid-August 1986, 117,500,000 rubles had been spent on new houses alone; another 223,250,000 was slated to be spent by October 1st. By mid-December, 12,000 new homes had been built, more than 4,000 of which were in Belarus. Only 102 of these were occupied by January 1987. This low number may have had something to do with the fact that builders often left things incomplete: doors and windows left unpainted, linoleum laid across piles of trash and debris, heating systems only warming homes to 50 degrees and, perhaps worst of all, no hot water. The host of this new, unused housing ran the USSR upwards of 320 million rubles, on top of the other, more expensive costs of the Chernobyl cleanup.

David Marples’ first book on the event, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union, focused on the background of the disaster and what was known about the Chernobyl event at the time of the book’s publication in 1987. His contention in this first book – one with which I agree wholeheartedly – is that due to the pressure to reform and the influence of glasnost’, the Soviet government released far more information, and were more open and honest in their discussions about Chernobyl than they otherwise would have been (or, in fact, actually had been in the past). By Marples’ second book on the subject, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster, he has changed his tune, however: Marples suggests that the initial response to the Chernobyl disaster demonstrates a particular absence of glasnost’, the idea that, faced with empirical evidence of something very wrong occurring, the both the central and local Soviet authorities would only admit something part of the way – yes, there was radiation, but it was only slowly rising, so how much of a danger could it be?

There is also something to be said for the idea that, taking Marples’ idea at face value, and that the official, local response did in fact represent a particular lack of glasnost’, there is still the larger governmental response which unfolds in the days, months, and years after the initial thirty-six hours; that on a smaller, local level, those in charge of the plant were falling into old habits of reporting self-serving information to higher without regard to the consequences, where the response changes and morphs into more of a forthright one once the central government – and the rest of the USSR, as well as portions of the world – gets involved.

In short, I guess, Chernobyl certainly worked economically and politically to hasten the decay of the Soviet Union. It stretched the finances of the USSR to the extreme, while concurrently working to erode much of the remaining citizen's confidence, due to oftentimes conflicting information being put out in the press about the Chernobyl accident -- information which itself tended to be contradicted by reporting from the Western press (which Soviet citizens had easier access to). The end of the USSR was nigh, and the Soviet Union almost didn't make it to the Chernobyl disaster. So, to me, it had a role, but it was a role which might have easily been filled by any other disaster coming at the same time and place; or it might have been filled by nothing but the passage of time and the (albeit slower) erosion of the USSR as a power.

Sourcing:

Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted Thane Gustafson, Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev Konstantin M. Simis, USSR--the Corrupt Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism David Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster