Chernobyl Disaster

26 April 1986

In an odd way, it was only after watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl that I fully appreciated just how great a catastrophe threatened mankind on that April day in 1986. Of course, back then, thirty-five years ago, it was also terrifying – at first confusing, and then alarming. At that point, we started calling relatives in Kiev to suggest that it might be a good idea for them to come to Moscow. They gamely insisted that everything was just fine. Soon, it became less fine. The situation became so frightening that both our Kiev relatives and our friends from Zhitomir asked if they could come stay with us in Moscow for a while, since something really horrific had happened.

Soon the country started hearing Soviet – and European – experts assuring us on television that nothing terrible had happened. But long experience had taught the Soviet people: if they say prices won’t be increased, you’d better run to the store and stock up; if they say that everything is fine, brace yourself for rough times ahead; and if they tell you there’s no danger – then you’re really in trouble! Meanwhile, the Western “voices,” which were still banned in 1986 – the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle – were all talking about a radioactive cloud heading for Europe. Rumors started spreading about some people going to Chernobyl voluntarily and others being forced. A grim new term came into usage to describe those working to remediate this disaster: “liquidators.”

But this was a point in time when life was changing so quickly and so many strange and unexpected events were taking place – both good and bad – that Chernobyl rather quickly receded into the background. Perestroika was moving full steam ahead, store shelves were growing increasingly bare, there were reports of a sort we were not accustomed to hearing about ethnic conflicts in various corners of the Soviet Union, and generally, we had enough to worry about without Chernobyl. The social and political eruptions rocking the country made it hard to focus on the actual explosion of the No. 4 reactor.

Like many Soviet people, we had a dacha with a vegetable garden, to ensure that the carrots and dill our children ate would be fresh. Now, whenever dark clouds began to gather overhead, the whole family would rush to cover up the rows of vegetables with tarps to protect against radioactive rain. It was all treated as a bit of a joke, a weird game: Hurry up! Rain! Radiation! The kids thought it was fun. There was a lot of dark humor going around back then (“When you leave Chernobyl, don’t forget to bring home some dust for your mother-in-law”). Very funny.

Eventually, the political and economic upheavals became so overwhelming we totally forgot about Chernobyl, although people were still hesitant to buy anything from Ukraine in the markets (today we know that it was actually Belarus, especially Gomel Oblast, that suffered the worst contamination, along with some parts of southern Russia). Soon, food shortages became so bad that people had no choice. Then, suddenly, Ukraine was a separate country.

After Svetlana Alexievich’s earth-shattering Voices from Chernobyl and the amazing miniseries Chernobyl, people suddenly started to realize just what a dark shadow the disaster had cast over our lives all those years – all the elderly people who had stayed in the thirty-kilometer exclusion zone because they had nowhere else to go; the young daredevils who made illegal excursions (and continue to do so to this day) to the zone to explore the historic site and bring home souvenirs; the liquidators, many of whom are no longer with us; and those living in the contaminated areas, the proud recipients of free train fare and higher pensions, but also a greater risk of cancer.

Today when I think about Chernobyl, I envision the grim sarcophagus erected over the No. 4 reactor, still humming with radioactivity, a sort of Tolkienian Mount Orodruin that will forever be with us. At times it seems to me that, although the radiation has been entombed, the reactor still emanates a different sort of contamination – one that continues to poison life in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

How many other hastily designed plants have been built since Chernobyl? The Winter Cherry, a shopping mall and entertainment center, was no power plant and far from Chernobyl, in the Siberian industrial town of Kemerovo, but it has a symbolic link to Chernobyl. The disaster that struck that complex had fewer victims, “just” sixty, of whom thirty-seven were children. They died in a fire because the alarm system had been turned off and the fire exits were blocked. Why adhere to safety regulations when it’s easier to just bribe your way out of compliance? One can’t help but think both disasters were symptoms of the same disease.

After Chernobyl, how many people came down with cancer and went untreated? And what about retired Admiral Vyacheslav Apanasenko, who shot himself because the hospital where he was being treated for the cancer that ravaged his body did not give him painkillers? He had no direct link to Chernobyl (though he did take part in US-Soviet strategic nuclear disarmament negotiations), but it strikes me that he and other patients whose desperate pleas for help go unanswered because doctors are afraid of going to prison if they prescribe painkillers are also tied to Chernobyl’s legacy.

A government that hides oncoming disasters from people, preferring to report that everything is just fine instead of making an effort to save and evacuate; subordinates more afraid of their bosses than of the potential for catastrophe; bosses who turn a blind eye to problems but then blame their subordinates for inevitable disasters – Heavens! How many times has this scenario played out in our country? More to the point, how many times will it play out in the future?

In 1986, Chernobyl looked like the embodiment of a decrepit Soviet system that was receding into the past, of a dismal, stagnant, ineffectual regime where nobody put in much effort and nothing worked, where inept bureaucrats approved flawed power plant designs and other inept bureaucrats told us how good we had it.

Now, thirty-five years later, where is that regime? Where are those bureaucrats? They’re still there, or at least their children and grandchildren are. The only difference is that now they’re not talking about the advantages of Marxism-Leninism, but of Russia’s superiority over the rest of the world. The most fortunate among them live in gilded palaces.

It appears that Chernobyl was just as much an embodiment of the new world as the old. The new world has inherited all the weak spots, complexes, and defects of what it has replaced: its bureaucracy, its rigid ideology, its disdain for freedom, and rejection of the idea that individual lives matter.

Reactor No. 4 has been entombed by a sarcophagus that already has had to be replaced due to cracking. The reactions taking place under the sarcophagus cannot be stopped. The question is: can the chain reaction eating away at our society be stopped? Or can we expect another Chernobyl, but this time one that is political, economic, and diplomatic?