The person steering Chernobyl Unit Four to its scheduled shutdown on the night of April 26th, 1986, was not Anatoly Dyatlov, as considered by many, but the Shift Supervisor Aleksandr Akimov. It was he who made many of the difficult decisions that night, all of which culminated in the explosion and race to prevent a worse accident from occurring, ultimately costing his life.

But who was Akimov, really? Was he the easily swayed man depicted in the HBO TV miniseries, the complete opposite, or somewhere in between? I’ll let you be the judge of this.

The background art in the thumbnail of this video is the "Shipwreck of The Chernobyl Titanic" by Alexey Breus, who was present in the Control Room the morning after the explosion.