How true is the hit TV show Chernobyl?

• Chernobyl is the explosive HBO show that has taken the world by storm and scored a higher IMDb than Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad.
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• The five-part series follows an investigative commission appointed in the wake of the devastating nuclear accident on April 26, 1986.
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• The show has been lauded by many in the West as a harrowing and realistic account of those who battled to save the world from the toxic radiation emitting from the plant's Reactor Four.
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• Yet its historical accuracy has now been brought into question, with a furious Russia planning to make its own series portraying the nuclear disaster as the work of an American CIA operative.
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• Here, MailOnline unpick the fact from the fiction in the series, looking at the main characters and what really happened to them.

Valery Legasov: The Soviet chemist

What happened in the show...

The show's main character Legasov, played by Jared Harris, is a prominent Soviet inorganic chemist and a member of the bloc's Academy of Sciences.

The deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy was in the series a nuclear physicist and picked by the government to look into the Chernobyl crisis less than a day after it happened.

At first he appears to bend to the will of the establishment - headed by Boris Shcherbina - but quickly changes tact as the scale of the disaster becomes apparent. He calls for the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, which Shcherbina eventually sanctions.