As the book’s title says, this is an oral history. The book is broken up into sections in which the author interviews individuals involved with the clean-up (or their families), former/current residents of the evacuated areas, and others that were affected by the events. I picked this one up after reading that the writers/creators behind HBO’s Chernobyl had used it as a reference during the show’s development. The miniseries is dramatic and a good watch, but it inevitably understates the scale of what happened in April 1986. “Accumulation” is the word that comes to mind for me as I think about the different accounts that are recorded in this book, whether we’re talking about radiation, loss of home and suffering, or despair. In reading the accounts, you get a sense of the absurdity of living under conditions where it’s too late to help what’s happened. In a distant sense, it feels similar to what some of the very early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were like (at least in the range of experiences I’ve had).
Especially in the later chapters, there’s a fair amount of reflection on features of eastern European culture that I don’t feel qualified to parse. Some of the subjects seem to allude to a continuity or permanence of toil and suffering for the people who’ve inhabited what we know as Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, but I worry my understanding is superficial. There are some interesting moments in the book that grapple with the fall and loss of the Soviet Union. Something I wasn’t aware of was that a number of refugees from civil wars during the end of the USSR ended up resettling inside the Zone. In one chapter, the subject notes that they aren’t Russian, but they were formerly Soviet. The feelings of displacement, loss of the country one grew up in, and ambivalence about the country that followed it were interesting. In several accounts, there was a sense of mourning for the loss of a higher, shared, or common purpose. Anger at the authorities for betraying the nominal principles of their society in their handling of the disaster.
The accounts from Chernobyl’s liquidators and their family members were harrowing. If you watched the HBO miniseries, you’re presented with some gruesome pictures of what radiation can do to the body. All I can say is that this is another area in which television understates the horror of what happened. At the time, there was a myth that alcohol could help prevent or reduce the impact of radiation exposure. Based on what the subjects describe, it makes sense why the crews cleaning up the region were constantly looking for alcohol; their experiences sound horrible.
There’s something tragically poetic in many of the recountings. Here are some quotes that I highlighted.
The future is destroying me, not the past. [p.27]
My grandfather kept bees, five nests of them. They didn’t come out for two days, not a single one. They just stayed in their nests. They were waiting. … The radio wasn’t saying anything, and the papers weren’t either, but the bees knew. [p.52]
We’re all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says “Russian,” but we’re not Russian. We’re Soviet! But that country— where I was born— no longer exists. [p.63]
Don’t write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed— and they really were wonders. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. [p.76]
They didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say, “Boys, what is this— is it the end of the world?” [p.92]
Our neighbors put down a new floor that year from the local forest, and then they measured it, its background radiation was a hundred times over the limit. No one took that floor apart, they just kept living there, figuring everything would turn out fine, somehow, without their help, without their participation. … The unthinkable happened, but people lived as they’d lived. [p.122]
At the end of our time there we all got the same thing written on our medical cards: they multiplied the average radiation by the number of days we were there. And they got that initial average from our tents, not from where we worked. [p.164]
They believed in their physics, they were of the generation that belived in it. But the era of physics ended at Chernobyl. Your generation already sees the world differently. I recently read a passage in Konstantin Leontiev in which he writes that the results of man’s physical-chemical experiments will lead a higher power to intervene in our earthly affairs. But for a person raised under Stalin, we couldn’t imagine the possibility of some supernatural power. I only read the Bible afterwards. [p.183]
Our family tried to not economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping that it would be made of good meat. Then we found out that it was the expensive salami they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it. We turned out to be defenseless. [p.185]
We had philosophical debates— about how we’re the prisoners of materialism, and that limits us to the objects of this world, but Chernobyl is a portal to infinity. … We heard rumors that the flame at Chernobyl was unearthly, it wasn’t even a flame, it was a light, a shining. Not blue, but more like the sky. And not smoke, either. The scientists had been gods, now they were fallen angels, demons even. The secrets of nature were hidden from them, and still are. [p.195]
That great empire crumbled and fell apart. First, Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When it fell apart, we found ourselves all alone. I’m afraid to say it, but we love Chernobyl. It’s become the meaning of our lives. The meaning of our suffering. Like a war. The world found out about our existence after Chernobyl. It was our window to Europe. We’re its victims, but also its priests. I’m afraid to say it, but there it is. [p.219]
These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. [p.240]