Soviet Hiroshima

Nuclear tests at the Totsky training ground through eyewitnesses

Apocalypse rehearsal. On September 14, 1954, at a Totsky training ground during military exercises, an atomic bomb with a capacity of 40 kilotons in TNT equivalent was blown up. She almost twice superior in its destructive force each of those bombs that the Americans in August 1945 dropped into Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The essay on this Orenburg journalist Vyacheslav Moiseev publishes the next, 138th issue of the Magazine "Continent". The New Times reprints fragments of essay - amazing evidence of eyewitnesses of nuclear tests

“Tu-4” with a bomb, which the creators called the female name “Tatyana”, rose from the airfield of the Research Institute of the Air Force in Akhtubinsk, the Astrakhan region. Ten minutes before the explosion, the “Atomic Alarm” signal was given, according to which everyone was supposed to go into shelters, and the crews of tanks, self -propelled guns and armored personnel carriers to take places in their cars and lift up hatches. At nine o’clock thirty -three minutes local time sounded: "Reset!" A moment before that, on board the bomber, the attack aurmanbardir, Captain L. Kokorin pressed the reset button. Tatyana separated from Tupolev at an altitude of 8 thousand meters. After 45 seconds, when the bomb was 350 meters from the ground, an explosion occurred.

Recalls G.S. Yakimenko:

I was at the observation post, in the shelter. And when the explosion struck, lay in a gas mask at the bottom of the trench. The earth smelled, trembled. Between the flash and the explosive wave was gone for 12-15 seconds. They seemed to me eternity. Then he felt as if someone was tightly pressing me with a soft pillow to the ground. Having risen, he saw an atomic mushroom shot down in the sky on a half -kilometer ...

If you believe the colonel crooked (whose book is the Apology of the Totsky Explosion), when flying up the Tu-4 aircraft with a bomb to the target, Marshal Zhukov commander Marshal Zhukov, was at the observation point in the Mountain Mountain (10.5 km southeast of the epicenter) and went to an open wooden observation deck, preferring it to the trenches and concrete Bunker. embrasures. Following him, all the Soviet military leaders and foreign guests headed. After the explosion of the atomic bomb, the powerful explosive wave reached this observation post, having rotted the hats from Zhukov himself and from Marshals Konev and Rokossovsky, sweeping the stool prepared for the leaders of the exercises and invited. Marshals, as eyewitnesses claim, did not even take an eyebrow, only the adjutants rushed to catch up with their caps.

On the morning of September 14, Lieutenant V.Ya. Benzinov was in a dugout near the epicenter. This is what he says:

At 9.00 we heard a weak sound - an imitation of the explosion. And at 9.33 the earth swayed under us. We sat in the dugout on the box. The colonel says to me: "What are you, Benzinov, are you downloading a box?" I barely managed to answer: “I do not download anything, comrade Colonel,” - like right there, like a blow on the ground, reinforced by a million times ... We rolled a twenty -pound stone on the roof of our dugout (eight ceilings!). It was blown away, like a fluff, we never found it ...

N.B. Kurapov described the explosion, perhaps more meticulous than the rest:

After the explosion - a terrible buzz. The earth swayed in one, then in the other direction in a matter of fraction of a second. Then the strong pressure of the air was felt. The explosive wave passed, and it became two seconds to breathe heavily - it is clear that the airless space was formed. The eardrum first crushed inside, and then from the inside. My neighbor and I lay behind the wattle fence, with our feet to the epicenter, as we were told. The ears are whistling, ringing with a rattle. It was such a pressure that when the eardrums rose in place, they made a ringing in low colors like a bell. We climbed onto the roof, although we warned us that it was impossible. The mushroom was - the leg is black and the hat is red. As from the pipe on a frosty day, everything mixed in it: puffs of smoke, dust, fragments ...

M.K. Scheveleva, along with fellow villagers, evacuated to stone sarma, 20 kilometers west of his native Elshanka, also remembered the explosion well:

The light was really brighter than the sun, but in my childhood memory there was a comparison with lightning and a strong thunderstorm. Grandmother fell to her knees in front of the icon and prayed eagerly - tears flowed with a stream. Adults immediately ran to the rule of the collective farm: what is it? And what about the village?! I also carried me there. Again crying, groans, noise. The father later spoke, allocated a group of people and directed to find out what was with our village. It all burned ...

The Totsky training ground (about 10 by 10 kilometers) is located in a densely populated area only forty kilometers from Buzuluk and thirty of Sorochinsk, surrounded by villages and villages. Why did you blow up here?

Here is what Fedor Illarionovich Kolesov said in October 1989, who in 1954 held the post of chairman of the Totsky district executive committee:

I am with the military, who prepared this, asked: "Why not in the sands to blow up, how few of the sand we have?" And they say: “We need to know how it will be here, there is the same bend of land as in Germany. And inhabited the same ... "

Here is the story of F.I. Kolesova:

They forbade the population to dig trenches, ordered to sit at home. Who did not obey, dug up, sat, and to whom the hunt was to look - looked ... Here on Pervomaiskaya Street, they died in five years, consider all the men, and many women. Guys - more, they went more often into the forest. Cattle grazed: Molokoto is necessary. No one knew and said that it was impossible ... It was noticeable that people were sick more, dying. The doctors came, looked, felt. They did not give any drugs.

The residents of the Elshanks were allowed to return to their homes when the village was still burning.

Recalls M.K. Scheveleva:

Parents with older daughters raked potatoes from the cellar, and I climbed into the ashes from the burning house very interesting for something very interesting. The ashes had not cooled yet, I burned my legs a lot. Mom rushed to me, in her arms she raced somewhere. It turned out - to the well. They held me by the pens, and the legs turned out to be in the water ... I still remember my mother’s heavy breath (it was slow -hearted - well, of course, two months later I gave birth to a sister, which we still call “atomic”) ...

From 1955 to 1960, the number of oncological patients in the region increased from 103.6 to 152.6 people per 100 thousand people. One and a half times!

G.V. Terkina, a resident of Sorochinsk:

What to say about ordinary people when the leaders of the district died! In the village of Pronykino, one after another, a year or two later, the chairman of the village council of Staroselsev, the chairman of the collective farm Lenin Novikov, the wife of the director of the Bobylev school, he himself died, and his brother, his father died in the village of Makhovka ... The wife of the district committee of the district committee of the civil defense of Dodonov, the head of the cultural department of Dodonov, the director of the Mehleskhoz Ryazanov ...

For 35 years, the conspiracy of silence around the Totsk exercises and their consequences lasted. Only in 1989 the first timid articles on this subject appeared in the central press.

A.M. Rusanov, in 1994, the head of the natural environmental protection department and nature management of the regional administration:

We worked for a long time with one institute in the suburbs ... Most of all we worked with the radiation department. And there was one major there, I know his last name, but I won’t call him. When we started research and contacted St. Petersburg scientists, he directed the course of our thoughts to the fact that our explosion was not plutonium, but uranium. And Plutonius studies were very expensive, and we did not want to spend those pennies that stood out in vain. Therefore, we asked: "Well, what was the explosion?" - "Uranus, of course, where could the plutonium bomb come from?!" But every year we added evidence that the charge was not uranium ... And it turned out only in 1995, in the last year, when we were given money from the state budget ... The half -life of Plutonium is two thousand four hundred years. We met with him later, and I asked him: “Listen, comrade, why didn’t you tell us the truth at that time?” The answer was like this, almost literally: “Do you see how many stars I have on the uniform? That's right, three. And if I then disheveled you about the bomb, you look, so I would go with one. ”

In No. 138 of the Continent, the reader will find the full text of the great work of Yuri Afanasyev “We ​​are not slaves?”, Which is devoted to the problem of the so -called “special path” of Russia. Vladimir Moshegov appears with a new fundamental analytical article addressed to the processes taking place in the life of the Russian Church: “The end of the era. From totalitarianism to fundamentalism. " The article by Alexander Mishulovich “On Prophets and Prophets” is devoted to the ideology of today's terrorists. The room also has a story from the archive of one of the best Russian prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century by Vladimir Cormer's “Tradition of a random family”, poems, reviews of journal Russian prose and criticism.