PAP's first dispatches on the disaster appeared two days after the explosion, on April 28, relaying Soviet TASS (Russian state-owned news agency) bulletins under the heading "Communiqué of the USSR Council of Ministers". The words "catastrophe" and "explosion" never appeared; the event was described only as an "accident". Two people were reported dead.
TASS told readers that the situation at the plant and in nearby towns had been "stabilized". To reinforce this, PAP cited Swedish and Finnish radiation measurements taken the same day — two days after the blast — as evidence that levels remained within normal limits. One dispatch noted that Swedish workplace safety rules permitted workers to operate without protection at radiation levels 250 times natural background, and that such doses were found in Swedish nuclear plant offices.
On Poland itself, PAP acknowledged that a radioactive cloud was moving over the country's northeastern provinces at high altitude, and that elevated iodine concentrations had been detected in the air.
Readers were advised not to consume milk from cows fed fresh grass, and iodine tablets were distributed once to children in the affected regions.
Government spokesman Jerzy Urban, at a press conference for foreign correspondents on April 29, said he could not give precise contamination levels but insisted that "nowhere did radioactivity approach a threshold posing a risk to human health".
A week after the disaster, PAP was still relaying TASS denunciations of Western media reports as "slanderous fabrications" — including Western governments' decisions to evacuate their nationals from the Soviet Union. "Reasonable people around the world understand that an accident occurred that could have happened anywhere", TASS said, as quoted by PAP.
In subsequent days, Chernobyl dispatches grew fewer. The message was consistent: the situation was improving, and the plant would soon resume operations.
The Chernobyl distaster
The explosion at Chernobyl's fourth reactor on April 26, 1986 — caused by a flawed safety test that sent power surging to dozens of times the reactor's rated capacity — triggered a hydrogen blast that tore apart the reactor core and hurled burning radioactive debris across the site.
Thirty-one people died in the immediate aftermath; around 1,000 others received high radiation doses.
Some 300,000 people were eventually evacuated from a 100-120 km radius around the plant, and the nearby city of Pripyat — home to most plant workers and their families — was not evacuated until more than 24 hours after the explosion.
The Soviet government's delayed, chaotic response — including allowing a May Day parade to proceed in Kyiv while radiation levels in the city were multiple times above safe limits — badly damaged Moscow's credibility.
The disaster is estimated to have affected around 600,000 people worldwide, with some 4,000 deaths attributed to radiation-induced cancers.
The destroyed reactor has been covered since 2019 by a vast steel containment structure — the largest movable construction in the world — built at a cost of EUR 1.5 billion.
(jh)
Source: PAP