The answer is, none. Or, to be more exact, none that was reported.
One can begin to understand the reluctance to acknowledge industrial, especially nuclear, accidents.
After all, as is universally known, Soviet science and technology were by far the most advanced in the world.
Hence any reports of disasters could only have been concocted by the capitalist scum plotting to besmirch the reputation of the mother of all progress.
This goes ten-fold for any mishaps in the area of weapon production. Soviet nuclear weapons and means of their delivery were as safe for the Soviet Union as they were deadly for its enemies.
Anyone spreading rumours to the contrary had to be a hireling of world capitalism. Consequently he had to be imprisoned if inside Russia, or ignored if outside. If facts are a stubborn thing, said Comrade Stalin, so much the worse for facts.
Alas, facts persisted both in their stubbornness and their frequency. Thus the Mayak nuclear-bomb factory near Cheliabinsk had 34 accidents between 1953 and 2008. The worst of them, in 1957, released 100 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste, contaminating an area the size of Western Europe.
None of the disasters was officially reported. All were emphatically denied when ‘vicious and unfounded’ rumours began to circulate.
Note, however, that the Mayak accidents began on Stalin’s watch and continued well into Putin’s, with the same veracity of reporting throughout. This proves the point I often make: post-perestroika Russia is but a continuation of the Soviet Union by other means.
Who is in charge at any particular point makes no difference whatsoever. Thus Mikhail Gorbachev, universally elevated to secular sainthood for replacing a communist state with a kleptofascist one, lied with customary Soviet ease about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Had the westward winds not made Geiger counters go haywire in Scandinavia and Scotland, the catastrophe would have been hushed up like so many others.
Such, for example, as the one in 1960, when a Soviet ICBM R-16 exploded at Baikonur test range, killing many high-ranking officers, including Marshal Nedelin, commander of the Soviet strategic rocket forces.
Official announcement? I remember it well: Marshal Nedelin died ‘a sudden and unexpected death’. Sudden yes, but hardly unexpected considering the Soviet safety record.
As I suggested, though one can’t condone such industrial-scale lying, one can understand it. No socialist projects, be it at their mildest (e.g. the NHS) or most extreme (e.g. the USSR), are about reality.
They are all about make-believe, hot air enveloped in a tissue of lies. A word of truth would pierce the bubble, exploding the whole shebang.
But the beauty of Soviet lies was that they went way beyond what’s to be normally expected from any old socialism. Specifically, they extended not only to man-made disasters but also to acts of God (who, as any good socialist knows, doesn’t exist).
God, who everyone knew didn’t exist, had to keep smiling at the USSR.
Thus Soviet citizens were spared the information of the 1948 earthquake in Turkmenistan. Registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, it levelled the city of Ashgabat and its environs, killing 176,000 people.
The same goes for the calamitous 1966 Tashkent earthquake, the peat fires around Moscow at the same time, when black smoke descended on the city killing thousands of asthmatics, and countless other calamities.
Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Putin, didn’t just practise deceit, the hushing up of truth. They’ve always told active lies with a fluency putting to shame even our own experts Tony Blair and Dave Cameron.
Thus Soviets tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 only to pre-empt an impending aggression by Nato forces, that is a capitalist USA and an unreconstructed Nazi West Germany.
The Soviet Union never installed missiles in Cuba, all its dissidents were in the employ of the CIA, no Soviet citizens ever wished to emigrate, only American millionaires could ever afford medical care, Western unemployed starved to death in their thousands, lynching was the favourite pastime in the American South…
Now that the organisation directly responsible for cooking up and spreading such lies is in charge, one shouldn’t be unduly surprised at the cynical ease with which KGB Col. Putin is lying about the horrific murder of 298 innocent people in the skies over eastern Ukraine.
Russia’s mainstream media, wholly controlled by Putin’s gang, are laying the blame on the ‘Nazis’, ‘fascists’ and ‘Banderites’, the only terms used to describe the independent Ukraine and her legitimate government.
One is amazed that the Banderites aren’t also taking the rap for shooting down the Korean airliner in 1983 or, come to that, all those disasters I mentioned earlier, including the Ashgabat earthquake.
The radio intercepts published two days ago leave no room for doubt: Flight MH17 was shot down by a BUK-M missile launched from the territory controlled by the bandits Putin is using as his proxies.
Moreover, the intercepts published this morning prove that the BUK-M system was operated not by a ‘separatist’ crew but by a Russian one. In a conversation with GRU colonel Petrovsky, the ‘separatist’ commander on the ground reports the safe arrival from Russia of the BUK-M launcher complete with its crew.
Later the same commander first rejoices at shooting down the plane, then swears when he found out which plane he hit. (All parties to the exchanges swear after every other word, as most Russians do.)
Two members of the BUK-M crew, both spotters, were later arrested at the Ukrainian border, trying to get away from the murder site. They were carrying Russian passports and papers identifying them as soldiers in the Russian armed forces. The spotters have been charged with terrorism, a charge that can be justifiably levelled at Putin and his whole gang.
That the crew shot down the airliner by mistake, having incompetently taken it for an Antonov transport plane, is irrelevant. At best, it’s a mitigating, not exculpating circumstance.
Actually, considering the safety record of Antonov aircraft, it’s surprising the Russians would bother to fire on it in the first place. All they had to do was wait until it gained altitude and then come down of its own accord – naturally to a thunderous silence in the Russian press.