Inga Legasova, 1 september 2021.

On September 1, on Knowledge Day, my father, Academician Valery Alekseyevich Legasov, was born. He was born in 1936, so today, on the first day of September 2021, he could’ve been 85 years old, and our whole family would celebrate his anniversary in the evening after a day of work.

We did celebrate his anniversary in the family. Only without him and without my mom, God bless them both. We remembered Dad’s qualities such as truthfulness, honesty, decency, incorruptibility, devotion to his family and country, loyalty to the ideals he considered valuable…

And for some reason today I am reminded of the five-part series “Chernobyl”, unfortunately, not made by our Russian filmmakers, but by American ones. The whole world watched it with bated breath. And despite the fact that in this series my father was shown as a hero, which he really was, but for me that world famous series left a very unpleasant aftertaste in my heart and soul.

Why?

Because the whole plot of the show was at odds with the honesty under which my father lived his life. And yet it was the commitment to truth that was stated as the leitmotif of all five episodes.

“My Duty to Tell About It” was the title of my father’s article about the events at Chernobyl, published in 1988 in the Pravda newspaper.

Perhaps now it is my duty to tell how truth and untruth have been mixed in the TV series “Chernobyl” for the sole purpose of making as much money as possible from the tragic story, kicking in passing the Soviet Union, on whose territory in 1986 this “disaster of planetary scale”, as Father called it, took place.

There is a method of confusing the viewer - by showing some really true footage and stories, generously dilute them with false footage and stories. It is scary because the uninitiated believe both true and false thoughts, pictures and stories. And it is the false stories that are given the main role of proclaimers of truth.

It is these false stories that get stuck in the minds of viewers and shape their attitudes toward what happened. I think it is important to talk about this, because the people who witnessed those events 35 years ago are passing away, and there will soon be no one to challenge the filmed and shown material that is far from a documentary.

To begin with, the whole “Chernobyl” series begins with lies. My father is shown as a lonely, unhappy man living in a filthy apartment. So, perhaps, the creators of the series imagined the life of a renowned Soviet scientist engaged in strategic scientific problems.

However, in fact, my father was happily married, lived in a large house allocated to him by the state with a loving wife, loving children, with his beloved grandchildren, and even with his beloved dog. The house was joyful, often crowded, cheerful, and very friendly.

Instead of real academician Legasov, a very energetic, active and determined man, he is shown as a reflective, weak-willed and fearful person. It is enough to compare the last documentary shots of the series, in which my father is seen, with the image made by the authors of “Chernobyl” to clearly understand that “Professor Legasov” in the film and the real Academician Legasov in real life are two big differences, as they say in Odessa.

My father was also not a developer of RBMK reactors, as he was mentioned in the show for some reason, without thinking hard. Apparently, they forgot to google that the glory of creating these reactors belongs to Academician Dollezhal.

And Academician Legasov, or as he was lovingly called by his colleagues due to his young age, “Academician Valera” was quite a famous physicochemist in scientific circles and was a serious specialist in rectification purification and chemistry of heavy metal hexafluorides, in studies of corrosion resistance of various materials in hexafluoride environment; my father became a discoverer in a new field of chemistry - chemistry of noble gas compounds and obtained in his lab tens of new unique substances that had wide practical use.

He investigated xenon-organic compounds and application of plasma for the synthesis of new compounds, used the original techniques for the synthesis of chemical compounds under nonequilibrium conditions, proposed and widely implemented the plasma-chemical method for the synthesis of higher fluorides of heavy metals with the use of “inert” fluoragents (carbon tetrafluoride, sulfur hexafluoride), based on the explosive conductor phenomenon; my father developed the new direction related to the production and use of high-intensity fluxes of electroweak and electropositive gases.

Academician Legasov proposed, developed and mastered new highly effective methods of noble gas synthesis (radiation, photochemical, plasma-chemical) and technologies of their production. My father introduced spark plasmatron, UV- and HF-generators of atomic fluorine. He found catalysts for the thermal dissociation of fluorine and studied in detail the photochemistry of liquefied fluorine. The catalytic process developed by my father to produce atomic fluorine made the technology for the synthesis of thermodynamically unstable, but very important krypton difluoride and other unstable compounds much safer and more productive.

Legasov was the first to carry out the catalytic synthesis of xenon hexafluoride, studied the thermodynamics and kinetics of formation of noble gas compounds, studied the thermodynamics of xenon-fluorine system and proposed an original method to determine the basic kinetic constants of gas-phase chemical reactions in non-isothermal conditions. He determined the kinetic constants of chemical processes of formation and decomposition of di-, tetra- and hexafluorides of xenon, and using experimental data and mathematical methods he found with his colleagues the optimum conditions for the synthesis of individual xenon fluorides.

Due to the works of Legasov’s laboratory the plasma-chemical methods of generation and application of intense flows of atomic fluorine for the synthesis of endothermic fluorides and oxidants used in various technologies, as well as the interaction of these flows with solid noble gas matrices at cryogenic temperatures were developed and the coefficients of use of atomic fluorine were determined by various methods.

The kinetics of oxidation of xenon, oxygen, nitrogen trifluoride by fluorine on the surface of strong Lewis acids, limited by the charge transfer from donor to acceptor, has been studied by him for the first time in science. The catalytic effect of fluorine-ion acceptors on the fluorination reactions of inorganic and organic compounds with xenon difluoride in non-aqueous solvents has been revealed. For the first time in the world the kinetics and mechanism of xenon difluoride hydrolysis were studied.

He had studied the interaction of xenon and krypton fluorides with all elements of the periodic system, oxides, salts, reactions of complexation, fluorination, substitution and addition, redox, which was of fundamental importance for the chemistry of noble gases.

The research conducted by my father and his colleagues laid the scientific foundation and helped to develop methods for quantitative capture of radioactive isotopes of noble gases, which is necessary for solving ecological problems of nuclear power engineering and radiochemical production throughout the world.

For all these numerous works my father was repeatedly awarded state prizes of the USSR.

That is why I remember watching with great amazement those frames of the above-mentioned series “Chernobyl” in which the actor who played Shcherbina (a clever man and an excellent talented organizer) yelled at “Professor Legasov” and threatened to throw him out of the helicopter. In fact, when he met Legasov in the first government commission at the Vnukovo airport near Moscow, Shcherbina immediately realized that he can fully rely on my father, and he treated him with deep respect and trust. Of course, no convoy (as shown in the TV series) was sent to my father or anyone else. No one arrested him, locked him up anywhere. This crap, presented as truth, has nothing to do with reality.

And the governmental commission did not fly from Moscow to Kiev by helicopter, of course. How long did they have to fly? The authors of the show did not compare the speed of the helicopter and the distance from Moscow to Kiev.

What strange idea has arisen in the scriptwriters’ brains, inflamed with a desire to earn some money on the Chernobyl story - to show some long party meetings, meetings, conversations under portraits and busts of Lenin on the theme of what to do? ?!?!

There was nothing like that in reality - the accident happened at night from 25th to 26th of April 1986. In the morning of April 26, the first governmental commission was formed urgently by the Soviet government, which included Shcherbina as the head of the commission.

Legasov as a scientific expert, Minister of Energy of the USSR Mayorets, Deputy Minister of Health of the USSR Vorobyov, Deputy Chairman of Gosatomenergonadzor of the USSR Sidorenko, Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR Soroka, head of one of the KGB units Shcherbak, Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers Nikolayev, Chairman of the Kiev Regional Executive Committee Plyushch.

At 2 p.m. on April 26 the commission flew to Kiev, from where it was quickly transported by car to the accident site in the city of Pripyat. And in the evening of April 26 my father asked them to let him by helicopter fly around the explosion zone several times, which he did, having caught a fatal dose of radiation.

In addition, that same evening he drove several times to the fourth destroyed power unit in an armored personnel carrier provided by the military, because he needed to understand for himself whether the reactor was working or not. It was fundamentally important to understand this in order to make the right decisions quickly.