Seven people were killed and several injured by the blast of a nuclear-powered rocket engine near Nyonoksa, in Russia’s far north, on August 8. Radiation levels in the surrounding region spiked immediately after the accident. 

Doctors were unknowingly exposed to patients contaminated with radiation after the nuclear-powered engine exploded during a rocket test. Victims of the accident were taken to an ordinary reception ward in a hospital in the north-western city of Arkhangelsk. Wearing only masks for protection, doctors later tried to scrub down contaminated equipment after finally learning that there had been a radiation leak. 

President Putin sought to play down the incident, saying that it posed no threat. Four radioactivity monitoring stations in Russia – part of an international network – fell silent shortly after it happened. Inevitably, secrecy surrounding the radioactive incident has led to comparisons with the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in 1986.

The nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl under the then Soviet Union led to thousands of deaths. But it remains notorious all these years later for the toxic cloud of lies that surrounded the way it was handled by the authorities and as an example of what happens when the state systematically deceives its citizens.

What is so instructive about the way President Putin’s Russia handled this latest – though much smaller – nuclear incident is that the techniques of desinformatsiya (disinformation) used at Chernobyl 33 years ago have been inherited and refined by the modern Russian state.

A few days after the Chernobyl disaster, the Washington Post received a sensational leak from an unknown source. It was a letter supposedly from the US Information Agency (USIA) to a Republican Senator, advising him to exaggerate the number of casualties from the explosion at the nuclear plant in Ukraine.

According to the leaked letter, the US was attempting “to make the Chernobyl disaster into an effective propaganda campaign” by falsely asserting the incident had already claimed up to 3,000 victims. It was presented as a shocking attempt to embarrass the Soviet Union, mislead the public and make political mileage out of a terrible human tragedy.

The letter was a KGB forgery. This was a calculated attempt by Moscow to plant fake news and make western anxiety over the nuclear disaster appear artificially inflated as part of a cynical Cold War ploy on the part of America. 

The Washington Post spotted the ruse (from the bogus signature on the USIA letterhead) and killed the story before it could run. 

The forged letter was just one element of the vast cloud of falsehood, half-truths and censorship that spread from the Soviet Union in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. 

The gripping HBO Sky television series, Chernobyl, which I have just finished watching, follows the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe, reflecting the best and worst of human nature. But its official theme is inescapable and shocking. Its central storyline is the official degradation of truth and what happens when the state deliberately and systematically deceives its citizens. 

To the Russian government, it matters not whether the world believes this version, merely that it foments uncertainty

Soviet Russia responded to the horror of Chernobyl by trying to contain the story inside a concrete casing of lies.

Chernobyl helped to destroy the Soviet Union. But the techniques of disinformation it practised have been inherited and refined by Putin’s Russia, whose fake news, and false allegations of fake news, have poisoned modern politics. 

On the 30th anniversary of Chernobyl in 2016, President Putin declared that the accident should serve as “a harsh lesson to humanity”. 

Yet the Russian state continues to practice many of the techniques that the accident exposed, including impeding the free flow of information to its people (as happened earlier this month in Noyonoska), and the manipulation of the media at home and abroad.

The KGB’s Andropov Institute, from which Putin graduated the year before Chernobyl, was the espionage school where spies were taught the dark arts of so-called “active measures” (aktivniye meropriyatiya) including forgery, disinformation, interfering in foreign elections, spreading false rumours and political warfare. 

FSB, the successor to the KGB, still employs the same disruptive misinformation methods. 

The Russian response to Chernobyl, the television series, bears some disquieting parallels with the Soviet response to Chernobyl, the catastrophe. 

Russian tabloid columnists and state television news channels have condemned the series as propaganda that exaggerates Soviet state negligence. 

They called for a more “patriotic” re-telling of the story, emphasising the (undoubted) bravery of rescue workers. 

A headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia’s most popular daily, read: “Chernobyl did not show the most important part – our victory.” 

Russia’s pro-government NTV network is preparing to air its own drama of the disaster, in which a group of KGB counterintelligence officers track down a CIA agent sent to gather information who had infiltrated the nuclear plant. 

It is not a theory which is supported by historians. It is yet another myth forged by the KGB to obscure the truth. 

To the Russian government, it matters not whether the world believes this version, merely that it foments uncertainty, for that is the purpose and power of desinformatsiya.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union when Chernobyl exploded, later admitted that the Chernobyl disaster was “the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union”. 

But at the same time, he reinforced the KGB-promoted myth that the horrified western reaction to it was merely “a poisoned cloud of anti-Sovietism”.

The KGB approach was brutally simple. Every criticism of the Soviet Union, every setback, should be dismissed as western propaganda intended to blacken the regime in the eyes of the world. 

In today’s digital age with an army of bot-nets churning out rumour and confusion – including obedient media such as Sputnik and RT (Russia Today) – Moscow has ever greater opportunities to shape and distort not only the narrative of the present, but also the past.

Valery Legasov, the hero of Chernobyl, the television series, played by Jared Harris, says: “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there”. 

The truth of Chernobyl, the calamity, was fought over in the Cold War. It has re-emerged as a battleground in the new one. 

But the lie is still there.