At 1:23 am on 26 April 1986, the No. 4 reactor of the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near
Pripyat in
northern Ukraine exploded, opening and exposing the uranium core. A few hours later, the
Politburo of the Soviet Union became informed of the disaster. Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev and the
Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Ryzhkov decided then to form a commission headed by Shcherbina. Shcherbina was at this point the
Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and a fairly low-level member of the government. As head of the commission, he was given the task of both investigating the cause of the disaster and remedying the situation. As Shcherbina was in Siberia at this time, he only arrived in Chernobyl late on the night of 26 April, almost a full day after the explosions. By the time he arrived, two other groups of experts had already been flown to Chernobyl. According to
The Washington Post, Shcherbina had initially rejected appeals for an immediate evacuation of the area from civil defence workers, citing "panic is even worse than radiation." He and other officials who arrived in Chernobyl were described as "absolutely incompetent" by Grigori Medvedev, former chief engineer at the No. 1 reactor in Chernobyl and author of
The Truth About Chernobyl. On 6 May, Shcherbina gave the first Soviet news conference on the disaster where he admitted that people living near the nuclear plant had been exposed to its radiation for 36 hours before evacuation, although he didn't state the levels they were exposed to. He also said that local officials had underestimated the size of the accident. This followed widespread foreign criticism of the USSR for its handling of Chernobyl. Although Shcherbina and other officials read out prepared scripts, portions of the conference, such as the possibility of cancer development following radiation exposure, were omitted when shown on
Soviet television. In contrast to what he later said to the Politburo on 3 July 1986, Shcherbina said that Chernobyl met all Soviet and international standards. In June 1986, he submitted the commission's report to the Central Committee's Strategic Group containing the commission's findings in non-technical terms. In a Politburo session on 3 July 1986 chaired by Gorbachev, Shcherbina presented the findings from the commission's investigation where he blamed both the staff of Chernobyl, but also the design of
RBMK reactors. Excerpts of the session later published by the head of the
Federal Archival Agency of Russia Rudolph Pikhoia disclosed Shcherbina's full presentation to the Politburo. At the session, Shcherbina reported the main findings of the commission's report. He began by laying the blame on the nuclear plant's leadership — the
Ministry of Energy and Electrification and the government company
SoyuzAtomEnergo — for creating a culture of carelessness and failing to learn from previous accidents. He then described the events that led to the disaster, including design flaws present in RBMK reactors where Shcherbina also reported that the commission found that the
Ministry of Medium Machine Building,
Kurchatov Institute, and the RBMK reactor designers held some responsibility for the disaster. He described RBMK reactors as being "incompatible with modern safety requirements.” Two days later on 5 July, the USSR's official press agency
TASS reported that the government had replaced Shcherbina with Deputy Prime Minister
Vladimir Gusev as head of the Chernobyl commission amid rumours of Shcherbina's declining health and hospitalisation from
radiation exposure. In September 1986, Shcherbina was present at the Soviet signing of two treaties from the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in response to the Chernobyl disaster — the
Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident and the
Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency. At the signing, he declared that the USSR "will comply with both conventions.'' == 1988 Armenian earthquake ==