alt Hacker NewsThe story depresses me a little. One of the greatest engineering marvels in history, destroyed by stereotypical Russian negligence, incompetence and corruption and more then 100 lives lost in the process. The Soviets for all their many sins were at least capable of building incredible things, the protections on the nuclear reactor held up, for example, preventing a massive environmental catastrophe.
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It's stereotypical now but I remember at the time this was taken as a kind of confirmation that russia had been coasting on and also neglecting a lot of the soviet-era infrastructure. It's hard to reflect back now but in 2000 the soviet collapse was recent memory and the role and effectiveness of its successor was an open question, internationally.
I do remember that in the 90s the "russia understanders" were split into two camps: now that russia is free of the shackles of communism it will step into its destiny as supreme global superpower vs the soviet system was actually quite effective at large scale mundane infrastructure & logistics in a way the russian federation isn't.
By 2000 the weight of evidence was already fairly strong for the second view but this disaster, and especially their response to it, really settled the matter. This is how I remember feeling about it all anyway.
The soviet-era protections on a certain infamous RBMK reactor didn't hold up quite so well.