Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Arkady Bogdankevich, a rural medical attendant, more or less refuses to engage in the interview, chastising Alexievich for coming to ask questions without offering any material assistance. He shows her the medical cards of several young patients with extremely high radiation levels in their thyroids but says, “I refuse to trade on their tragedy. To philosophize” (119). He doesn’t want these young patients reduced to experimental subjects and objects of morbid curiosity.

Nina Konstantinovna and Nikolai Zharkov are schoolteachers. Nina talks about how children nowadays seem different than those she taught before the disaster, both psychologically and physically. She recalls trying to explain to students’ mothers that they should launder the children’s clothing every day, but the mothers are overworked and struggling to make ends meet to that point that they lack the capacity to worry about radiation. She recalls how, despite the contamination, villagers continued eating produce from their gardens, planting crops, and cutting wood from the forest—and how students were sent to the fields to harvest beets and potatoes in the fall: “Chernobyl isn’t as bad as leaving potatoes in the field” (122).

Nikolai talks about how the Soviet system prepared citizens for military conflict but not for this type of disaster: “[W]e all had a military upbringing. We were oriented toward blocking and liquidating a nuclear attack. We needed to be ready for chemical, biological, and atomic warfare. But not to draw radionuclides out of our organisms” (123). The invisible violence of radiation can’t be compared to the immediacy of death during wartime, he says, sharing grim childhood memories of the Siege of Leningrad. Nevertheless, while living with radiation is less traumatic than mass starvation, it’s also less comprehensible:

That you might not have bread or salt, and that you might get to the point where you’ll eat anything, you’ll boil a leather belt so that you can feed on the smell—that I could understand. But this I can’t. Everything’s poisoned? Then how can we live? (124).

Nikolai also talks about how the disaster created a new identity for its survivors: “The world has been split in two: there’s us, the Chernobylites, and then there’s you, the others. […] No one here points out that they’re Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites” (126).

Anatoly Shimanskiy, a journalist who reported from the Zone, talks about how incomprehensible this disaster was, especially given the time-scale of radioactive contamination: “Fifty, one hundred, two hundred [years]. But beyond that? Beyond that my consciousness couldn’t go. I couldn’t even understand anymore: what is time? Where am I?” (127). He shares excerpts from his field notebook, including notes that officials reverted to “Stalin’s old vocabulary” and sought to blame Western “spies and provocateurs,” while “no one talks about iodine protection” (128); in other words, even during an unprecedented catastrophe, Soviet leaders elevated ideology over pragmatism. Residents evaded the military blockade by sneaking through the forests and swamps at night to return to their villages, much as they did under German occupation during the war. Former companion animals became feral: “The first wolf-dogs have appeared. […] And the feral cats have already formed packs and attack humans. They want to have revenge on us” (131). These changes represent nature punishing humanity—and a breakdown in the distinction between reality and unreality. The lack of official information gave rise to fantastic rumors: that thousands of villagers were buried in mass graves, “like during the Leningrad Blockade” (132), that the entire local population was to be deported to Siberia, that the explosion was caused by an earthquake, that the military knew about it beforehand, and that fish were being born without heads or tails—and human infants were being born with yellow fluid instead of blood.

Sergei Sobolev, a rocket-fuel engineer and an officer of the Shield of Chernobyl Association, says that everyone “wants to philosophize” about Chernobyl, and yet the disaster is “beyond any philosophical description” (133-34). He talks about the thousands of liquidators whose lives or health were sacrificed in the containment effort, receiving the paltry award of “a certificate and […] 100 rubles” (135). He links this fact to the Soviet ethos of selfless service and military discipline: “In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice, we have no equals. […] Yes, we are raised to be soldiers. That’s how we were taught. We’re always being mobilized, always ready to do the impossible” (137). Although Chernobyl is described as an accident, he considers it a war. He recalls accompanying an English journalist to visit sites where contaminated forest was buried and how stunned the Englishman was by the carelessness of the work: “He was expecting some fantastically engineered structures, but these were ordinary ditches” (141). The journalist wants to visit the largest “graveyard” shown in an aerial photograph from that period, but Sergei soon realizes “that graveyard no longer exists” because it “was taken apart long ago and carried off to the market, for spare parts for the kolkhoz and people’s farms. Everything’s been stolen and moved out” (141). The journalist is shocked that such lawlessness could prevail under such dangerous circumstances, but Sergei is nonchalant because this type of theft and petty corruption had long been routine in Soviet society as a response to low wages and chronic shortages of consumer goods.

This chapter presents unattributed excerpts from 16 individuals, including three wives of liquidators, five doctors, a journalist, a hydro-meteorologist, a mother, and three resettled residents and two current residents of villages in the Zone. A schoolteacher recalls that when the school director ordered the teachers outside to dig up topsoil, they all complied without question, except for “two young teachers” who “are from the new generation. These are already different people” (144). In other words, people who grew up with no memory of the war and Stalinism lack the self-sacrificial instinct. One speaker recalls being haunted by the smell of rotten meat after burying trainloads of dead livestock, and wondering, “Can it be that this is what an atomic war smells like?” (146). He adds, “The war I remembered smelled of smoke” (146), illustrating the strangeness of this disaster compared to ordinary warfare. In addition, he recalls exiting a helicopter in the Zone to find “boys playing in the sand, like nothing had happened. One has a rock in his mouth, another a tree branch. They’re not wearing pants, they’re naked” (147). The children were obviously exposing themselves to dangerous levels of radiation, but the liquidators didn’t do anything about it: “[W]e have orders, not to panic the population” (147).

Another speaker recalls how in the beginning, television news commentators insisted that there was no danger, showing staged dosimeter readings and claiming that Western sources were spreading disinformation to induce panic. A doctor recalls how some residents speculated that the explosion was an act of terrorism, but she considered it more likely a consequence of characteristic Soviet incompetence and shoddy workmanship. She notes that Party officials who addressed residents in the aftermath lacked any relevant expertise and instead spoke of “the heroism of the Soviet people” (149). A liquidator’s widow regrets failing to defend her husband from the radioactive exposure that eventually killed him: “If I’d known he’d get sick I’d have closed all the doors, I’d have stood in the doorway. I’d have locked the doors with all the locks we had” (152), she says; she didn’t realize then how dangerous the work would be. In the final excerpt, a woman describes a New Year’s Eve celebration featuring homemade provisions—vodka, “smoked goods, lard, meat, pickles” (153)—and notes that they had no alternative to consuming radioactive food: “[W]here else are we going to get anything? The village stores are empty, and if something appears in them, we can’t buy it on our salaries and our pensions” (153).