# Quote — John Sweeney, Murder in the Gulag

> What was supposed to be a safety test at the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 was the sickest of jokes. The RMBK reactor was the Soviet solution to big oil prices. But it had a series of horrible design flaws. It couldn't tell its operators what was really happening in its guts. Operators could turn a valve by moving a helm-sized wheel and not know whether this would make things more or less dangerous. And the designers' safety test could could lead to a disastrous chain reaction which boiled the nuclear kettles. That had happened eleven years before in 1975 in Soviet Leningrad, now St Petersburg, when Putin was just starting his career inside the KGB in his home city. The secretive Soviet state covered up the huge leak of radiation. The exposed population were not told of the danger. The accident was not reported in the media. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building blamed the accident on poor construction, not terrible design. The commission investigating the incident made several recommendations. None were implemented. No one complained because no one knew. Welcome to the Soviet Union.

- Author: [John Sweeney](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-sweeney.md)
- Book: [Murder in the Gulag](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-sweeney/murder-in-the-gulag.md)
- Page: 19
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Sweeney_(journalist)#Murder_in_the_Gulag_(2024)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-sweeney/murder-in-the-gulag/what-was-supposed

## More from this book

> His first downfall came in late 2004 when Putin sacked him. Kasyanov was considered to have been a good prime minister, but in the late nineties he was first nicknamed 'Misha Two Per Cent', a reference to the two per cent stake he allegedly took from government deals. Kasyanov says Putin himself brought up the nickname during their last meeting in December 2004: 'Remember that name if you ever decide to go over to the opposition', was Putin's threat. His second downfall was the sex tape during which the couple, as every political couple does the world over, slagged off their allies, Navalny included. Kasyanov carried on for a bit, a bird with a broken wing, but his career in Russian politics was dead.
>
> That left only one man standing: Navalny.

p. 149 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-sweeney/murder-in-the-gulag/his-first-downfall.md)

> The whole point of Putin sending Navalny to Yamal was to break his spirit and within a month of arrival, he was cracking jokes about keeping warm in minus 32 degrees C inside the carcass of a hot, fried elephant. Once again, one is left thinking how much Putin must have hated him.

p. 267 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-sweeney/murder-in-the-gulag/the-whole-point.md)

> Roughly a year before [his assassination], I had interviewed Nemtsov about Putin's grotesquely corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi, asking him about the $5 billion road-rail link resort from the coast to the mountain ski resort. Nemtsov replied that: 'It would have been cheaper to have lined this road with Louis Vuitton handbags'. Before meeting Nemtsov, I had spent time with the comically stupid Putinist mayor of Sochi. He had knocked back my question about how gay Olympians would be treated in a city where the Kremlin's homophobic laws held sway by proclaiming: 'There are no gays in Sochi'. When I told Nemtsov about this, he laughed and laughed and laughed for so long we had to trim it down in the edit. He had a beautiful sense of the ridiculous and when I heard he had been shot, I burst into tears.

p. 146 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-sweeney/murder-in-the-gulag/roughly-a-year.md)