Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Chemical engineer Ivan Zhykhov was sent from Kursk to Minsk shortly after the accident. He’d recently completed civil-defense training “where they gave us information from thirty years before” and “taught us how to fall down so that the wave of the explosion would miss us” (159), but that training included no information about radioactive contamination. His team had to dig up topsoil and dump it in “an ordinary pit”—a task he derides as “useless” and “work for madmen” because the not-yet-closed reactor was still emitting radiation (161). The officers, whom he says “weren’t terribly bright,” advised the men to “drink more vodka, it helps with the radiation” (159), and they enthusiastically heeded this advice, but when the vodka ran out, they resorted to “nithinol and other glass cleansers” (160). This is one of many descriptions of heavy drinking by liquidators and of how their superiors encouraged it, propagating the myth that vodka protects against radiation.

Marat Kokhanov was Chief Engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences in Minsk. His staff tested livestock and agricultural products from the Zone, recording extremely high radiation levels. Cans of condensed milk and powdered milk from a particular factory, for example, “wasn’t milk, it was a radioactive byproduct” (165). Meanwhile, the milk was still being sold in stores, but after consumers realized that it was contaminated, “there suddenly appeared cans of milk without labels. I don’t think it was because they ran out of paper,” he adds, implying that the factory (or the stores) removed the labels to avoid culpability. He says he initially believed Gorbachev’s televised reassurances that everything was under control and complied with orders not to alarm residents, even though his engineering expertise should have led him to different conclusions.

Zoya Bruk, an environmental inspector, was ordered to collect soil and water samples and measure radiation levels in industrial facilities, again without protective gear: “You’d be sitting in the front seat [of the car], and behind you there were samples just glowing,” she recalls (171). Factories and collective farms continued to operate normally, processing timber and harvesting crops, because planning officials hadn’t revised production plans. She was surprised when local Party officials angrily attacked a Belarusian writer for raising alarms during the initial cover-up, because she expected that “some sort of self-preservation mechanism would kick in” (168)—in other words, that the officials would be compelled to acknowledge reality because their own children’s and grandchildren’s lives were at stake. She says much of the food donated as aid to the Zone was instead sold on the black market, with the collusion of local shop managers and inspectors, because “no one had those products anywhere” (173)—another illustration of chronic shortages in the command economy.

Aleksandr Revalsky, a historian, declares that “Chernobyl is the catastrophe of the Russian mind-set. […] it wasn’t just the reactor that exploded, but an entire system of values” (175). He’s referring to the cultural and emotional legacies of Stalinist terror, as evidenced in his realization that “my entire childhood, the childhood of my street, […] all of it was shot through with the language of the camps” (175). In other words, Stalin’s purges affected such a wide swath of Russian society that prison-camp lingo was widely known among the general public. He believes that post-Soviet societies should undertake “the sort of total reconsideration of our entire history that the Germans and Japanese proved possible” (176) after World War II but wonders skeptically whether his compatriots have sufficient “intellectual courage” to carry it out.

Nina Kovaleva is the widow of a liquidator who spent several years in the Zone. Liquidators were called heroes and celebrated by pop stars and other cultural figures, she mournfully recalls, but this was merely an attempt to give meaning to the suffering caused by the disaster. The effort seems to have failed, in her case, because she ends by declaring, “I know just one thing: I’ll never be happy again” (179). Medals and concerts won’t bring back her beloved husband.

Valentin Borisevich was a laboratory director at the Institute for Nuclear Energy in Minsk, where scientists first detected radioactive fallout the morning after the explosion. They soon deduced that a disaster had occurred at Chernobyl, and he wanted to alert his wife but was afraid to call her because the Institute’s phone lines were all bugged by the KGB. On the half-hour bus ride back to town after work, nobody talked about the disaster, because “everyone had his Party card in his pocket” (182); that is, they feared being reported to Party officials whose disapproval could cost them their jobs and privileges, and potentially even their freedom. Recalling how Soviet nuclear physicists were lauded as “the best and brightest” (183) amid the postwar optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, Valentin observes that the “era of physics ended at Chernobyl” (183), indelibly tarnishing the reputation of his profession. This is true for him on a personal level as well: Although he loved physics and previously wouldn’t have considered another profession, he now he wants instead to write about the philosophy of science.

Lyudmila Polenkaya, a teacher, recalls the panic and confusion of the early days, when the government provided no information and people wondered what was safe to eat. Some avoided meat, but she decided to buy “the most expensive salami, hoping that it would be made of good meat” (186). However, she continues, “Then we found that it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people to buy it” (186). In other words, she was cynical enough to know that government officials wouldn’t prioritize consumer safety, but she erred in predicting their specific tactics. This made her feel “defenseless” because the government wasn’t just failing to protecting citizens but was actively deceiving them. In her intellectual friend-group, however, when a doctor urged everyone to leave immediately for the sake of their children, they stubbornly chose to believe the official line instead. The next day, the doctor left town, while the others attended the May Day demonstration in Kiev, with their children in tow.

Aleksandr Kudryagin was conscripted as a liquidator “straight from the factory, just in a T-shirt, they didn’t even let me go home” (188). During the first few days, he and the other workers feared sitting on the ground, he recalls, but after a few months in the Zone, everything became “normal.” They went swimming, played soccer, and ate local produce and fish. After five months of evacuating and decontaminating villages, his group “volunteered” for the most dangerous job of all: clearing the reactor roof. No one was supposed to spend more than 40-50 seconds at a time there, but it proved impossible to accomplish the task in less than a minimum of several “minutes.” They laughed cynically when newspapers mendaciously proclaimed the cleanness of the air near the reactor because they knew this level of exposure would harm them and likely kill them within five to ten years; nevertheless, they accepted their fate “quietly, without panic” (190). Aleksandr recalls that the papers never reported on how the liquidators made their own “protective gear,” illustrating how Soviet journalists were conditioned to avoid anything potentially critical of the government, such as its failure to provide protective gear.