Even though the disintegration of block four at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl happened a long time ago, the question of how this disaster could have developed is only insufficiently answered. Common interpretations with their emphasis on constructional and operative as well as regulative mistakes are not wrong, but describe instead only the symptoms and not the causes of the accident. The Technocratic-Culture-Analysis points out that the causes are rather to be found in the socialisation and the societal-cultural peculiarity of the relevant actors. It is shown that the key problem was the strife for legitimacy by the Communist Party in the shaping of the Soviet society – not only in the 1980s, but instead since the USSR was founded. Furthermore, key actors behaved from a safety point of view in many instances detrimental. This behaviour was crucial to the development of the disaster and cannot be solemnly explained by pointing out constructional and operative flaws. In this sense, the study at hand contributes to a more thorough understanding of the motives these key actors had in order to understand important features of the Soviet nuclear industry.