Among many stories of the Chernobyl disaster, this one is perhaps the most mythologized – the story of three engineers – Alexei Ananenko, Boris Baranov and Valery Bespalov. They ventured into the depths beneath Reactor 4 to open the valves and drain the steam bubbler pool. With help from the media, they were nicknamed "divers," and a dramatic representation of this version can be seen, for example, in the famous HBO "Chernobyl" miniseries. We, however, decided to take a different approach, reach those people, and find the truth. What followed evolved from fact-checking into a massive investigation based on room layouts and hall plans, combined with old documents aiming to reconstruct their route.
All this gives a completely different level of understanding of what that operation was and how exactly it was carried out. This is the story of three heroes.
00:00 Into the darkness
00:40 The hardest May
02:48 A not so easy task
03:45 Ananenko, Bespalov, Baranov
05:42 Reconstructing the route
10:30 The descent
11:45 After the operation
13:07 What studies in the pool revealed
13:57 Legacy
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