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Orenburg steppes, he seized the towns of Ali-
Atka, Chimkent, and Tashkent from the Khan of
Kokand. In 1865 he was appointed military gov-
ernor of Turkestan, but he was dismissed the fol-
lowing year for exceeding his authority. As editor
with Rostislav Fadeev of the reactionary journal
Russian World
(1875-78), he opposed the Czar's
military reforms and advocated Pan-Slav imperi-
alist views. His support of Slavs in their liberation
struggles from Turkish rule led him to accept the
command of the Serbian army in 1876. When
the
RUSSO
-
TURKISH WAR
broke out the following
year, he was refused permission to rejoin the
Russian army. His fortunes improved again after
1881 with the new and more conservative czar,
ALEXANDER III
. In 1882 he was promoted to lieu-
tenant general and appointed governor-general
of Turkestan. In 1884 he became a member of
the War Council.
events that contributed to the development of
Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (openness). The
exact toll of the accident remains unclear, but
scientists estimate that the people of the Cher-
nobyl area were exposed to 100 times the
radioactivity of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima
in 1945. More than 600,000 people involved in
the cleanup are known to have died or have
fallen sick since 1986. In Belarus, which suffered
the brunt of the exposure, babies were still being
born without arms or eyes 10 years after the dis-
aster. Other estimates note that over 15 million
people were victimized by the accident. In 1991,
reactor Number 2 was shut down, but five years
later, despite the obvious symbolism of Cher-
nobyl, the Ukrainian government announced
plans to reopen the Number 2 reactor.
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich
(1828-1889)
writer
Best known to posterity for his political novel,
What Is to Be Done?,
Chernyshevsky was a jour-
nalist and a prominent intellectual leader in the
1850s and 1860s, known for his radical views.
Chernyshevsky, the son of a priest, was born in
the Volga River town of Saratov. After initial
studies at the Saratov Seminary, he rejected his
father's career to pursue studies in philology at
St. Petersburg University. There his thinking
began to take shape under the influence of the
leading critic of the 1840s, Vissarion
BELINSKY
,
who impressed on his followers the importance
of social engagement in literature and criticism.
After a brief attempt at teaching in Saratov,
Chernyshevsky returned to St. Petersburg and
joined the editorial staff of the progressive jour-
nal
The Contemporary
(
Sovremennik
) in 1853.
Writing during the reformist decade that fol-
lowed the death of
NICHOLAS I
and Russia's defeat
in the
CRIMEAN WAR
, Chernyshevsky gained a
reputation for well-crafted, increasingly blunt
critiques of liberalism, advocating instead greater
concern for Russia's peasantry, at a time when
the Russian government was planning the aboli-
Chernobyl
Home to the Chernobyl Power Plant near Kiev
in Ukraine, Chernobyl was the site of the most
severe nuclear accident to date, the conse-
quences of which are still being felt in the
region. On April 26, 1986, plant operators dras-
tically reduced the power in reactor Number 4,
one of the plant's four graphite reactors, by
almost one-half as part of a controlled experi-
ment to evaluate the response to a sudden loss of
electrical power. The reactor overheated causing
a meltdown of the core, and two explosions
blew off the top of the reactor, releasing roughly
seven tons of radioactive fuel out of the building.
For more than 10 days, clouds of radioactive
material were released into the atmosphere,
blowing northward over Belarus and toward
Scandinavia. About 70 percent of the radiation
fell on neighboring Belarus. The disaster came
early in the tenure of Mikhail
GORBACHEV
as
Soviet ruler, and the Soviet government's initial
response was one of secrecy. But after other
nations called for a fuller disclosure, the govern-
ment admitted to the magnitude of the accident.
The Chernobyl accident is seen as one of the
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