For weeks after, Moscow-based state news agencies made no mention of the ongoing disaster. Nor did Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl's toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine's citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl's ground zero, thousands of people - including countless children - marched down Kyiv's main drag of Khreschatyk Street. They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
- From Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg
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