Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Nadezhda Burakova (a doctor) and her husband decided to return to their village after the evacuation because elsewhere they were feared and treated like “lepers.” She explains, “Here, we’re all Chernobylites. We’re not afraid of one another” (198). Comparing their fate unfavorably with that of the war generation, she argues that winning the war “gave them a very strong life-energy […]. They weren’t afraid of anything, they wanted to live, learn, have kids. Whereas us? We’re afraid of everything. We’re afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don’t exist yet” (199). In other words, this “war” will continue to affect future generations in unknown ways given the persistence of radiation. Chernobyl has changed Russia’s “national character,” she laments, instilling widespread “doom,” which sharply contrasts with the collective triumphalism of the postwar years.

This is the only monologue by a Communist functionary: Vladimir Ivanov, who was First Secretary (the top official) of the Stavgorod Regional Party Committee at the time. Ivanov seeks to exonerate himself and his colleagues for participating in the cover-up. They were only following orders and would have been expelled from the Party if they hadn’t, he explains. Furthermore, superior officials themselves didn’t comprehend the disaster’s severity because they “didn’t understand that there really is such a thing as physics” (201); their career success was a product of ideological conformity rather than practical expertise. More fundamentally, he acknowledges, “We were all part of that system. […] We believed in the high ideals, in victory! We’ll defeat Chernobyl!” (201). In other words, he and people like him still believed in the legitimacy and competency of the Soviet regime.

This anonymous speaker laments the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he considered a “great empire” that other nations feared or envied. In its place, he claims, democracy has provided ordinary people with nothing but a sharply increased cost of living and foreign aid of a demeaning character: “They send us Snickers and some old margarine, old jeans, like we’re savages who just climbed out of the trees” (205). He accuses Gorbachev of collaborating with the CIA, and speculates that “the CIA and the democrats […] are the ones who blew up Chernobyl” (205). His comments reflect the sort of conspiracy theory that Soviet propagandists have peddled for decades.

Irina Kiseleva, a journalist, recalls that at first she didn’t believe neighbors who had heard reports of the accident on Western radio or from relatives in Minsk: “I was absolutely certain that if anything serious happened, they’d tell us. They have all kinds of special equipment—special warning signals, bomb shelters—they’ll warn us. We were sure of it! […] We were very trusting” (207). As soon as she started visiting villages in the Zone, however, she was shocked by the obvious cover-up: “The dosimeter is shaking, it’s gone to its limit, but the kolkhoz [collective farm] offices have signs up from the regional radiologists saying that it is all right to eat salad […]. What do those radiologists say now?” (208). Villagers told her that officials had tried to convince them to stay and that “[e]ven when they evacuated a village, they still brought people back in to do the farming, harvest the potatoes” (208). She saved copies of various “top-secret instructions” (209), including one on how to handle contaminated chickens at a processing plant:

If there are a certain number of curies, you need to boil it in salt, pour the water down the toilet, and use the meat for pate or salami. If there’s more curies than that, then you put it into bone flour, for livestock feed. That’s how they fulfilled the plans for meat. They were sold cheaply from the contaminated areas—into clean areas. […] This was criminal! Criminal! (209).

In 1986, Vasily Nesterenko was the director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy. Like his colleague Borisovich (See: Part 3, Chapter 7), his first memories are of the oppressive weight of government surveillance. On the first day, when he tried to place phone calls on a government line, he realized that Soviet officials were already blocking communications, because as soon as one started talking about the accident, the line went dead, indicating that they were listening. In the circumspect Soviet manner, he refrains from explicitly accusing the KGB: “I hope it’s clear who’s listening—the appropriate agency. The government within the government” (210). Leaders focused on shutting out “Western voices” instead of listening to scientists, he says: “They needed to talk about physics, about the laws of physics, but instead they talked about enemies” (213).

These officials weren’t criminals, however, Vasily concludes—they were simply behaving as the Soviet system had conditioned them to behave, which meant conformance. Had officials truly cared about citizens’ well-being, he says, they could have taken protective measures without causing panic, like by introducing iodine into the freshwater reservoirs and adding it to milk, but they didn’t because “people feared their superiors more than they feared the atom. Everyone was waiting for the order, for a call, but no one did anything himself” (214).

Vasily tried to compel ministry bureaucrats to take action, but they refused to meet with him. The Institute’s radiation-measuring equipment was confiscated, and he started getting threatening phone calls at home. He was warned (presumably by the KGB) that he could be committed to a psychiatric hospital—a common punishment for Soviet dissidents—or be a casualty in a car “accident.” He adds, “They could drag me into court for anti-Soviet propaganda. Or for a box of nails missing from the Institute’s inventory” (216). In other words, decades after Stalin’s death, the state could still target Soviet citizens for political “crimes” or on obviously trumped-up charges, which is ultimately what happened to him: “[T]hey dragged me into court. And they got what they wanted. I had a heart attack” (216). His comments suggest that he felt defeated by the state (216).

At the time of the disaster, Natalya Roslova, an engineer and self-described member of the “local intelligentsia,” was already cynical enough to mistrust government propaganda. Although she and her friends were initially unconcerned about radiation, the official denials made them suspicious: “You turned on the television, they were saying, ‘Don’t listen to the provocations of the West!’ and that’s when you knew for sure” (218). However, she recalls, with apparent shame, that she nevertheless voluntarily attended the May Day parade. A group of East Germans working at her factory immediately demanded protective measures and, when their request was denied, promptly left the country. Instead of following their lead, Natalya and her colleagues mocked the Germans as hysterical cowards and not “real men” like the Russian liquidators “up on that melting roof with their bare hands, in their canvas gloves (we’d already seen this on television)” (219).

She now sees this selfless Soviet heroism as “a form of barbarism, the absence of fear for oneself. We always say ‘we,’ and never ‘I’” (219). After Chernobyl, the omnipresent fear of illness and death, and the awareness of the government’s betrayal, has made her more focused on self-protection: “We’re beginning to learn to say ‘I’” (219). At the same time, she confesses, “we love Chernobyl” (219) because it gave meaning to their lives and their suffering and brought international attention: “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” (219). Natalya now heads the local Women’s Committee for the Children of Chernobyl.

This chapter features excerpts from 17 boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 16. The older ones share childish memories of the accident and evacuation. A girl and her brother, then ages six and eight, began confessing their “sins” after their grandmother told them to start praying because the explosion was “God’s punishment”; these sins involved a broken jar of jam and a ripped dress, misdeeds that are achingly innocent in comparison to the official actions that caused the disaster and the government’s response to it. One child simply recalls the possessions left behind in their buried village: “My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike” (223). Others remember noticing changes in the natural world:

The sparrows disappeared from our town in the first year after the accident. They were lying around everywhere—in the yards, on the asphalt. They’d be raked up and taken away in the containers with the leaves […] The May bugs also disappeared, and they haven’t come back (222).

One boy recalls how his schoolmates were jealous when he bragged about his father, who had just returned from serving as a liquidator; he then adds, tersely, “A year later he got sick. […] My mom and I are alone now” (224). The speaker in the final excerpt recalls, “I used to write poems. I was in love with a girl” (224), adding matter-of-factly, “In seventh grade I found out about death” (224). Several of his friends subsequently died; one died by suicide. With heartbreaking poignancy, he says, “The whole sky is alive for me now when I look at it, because they’re all there” (225).

Here Alexievich recycles the prologue title for the monologue of Valentina Panasevich, another widow of a liquidator. Like the prologue, it’s a moving account of her husband’s slow and gruesome death and their deeply loving relationship. She wonders why they felt no fear when he was sent to Chernobyl in October. After he became ill, she hustled to procure gifts for the medical staff, a common practice in a society plagued by low wages and chronic shortages. Her husband was the last of his team to die, after a yearlong ordeal of bodily decay: “Something black grew on him. His chin went somewhere, his neck disappeared, his tongue fell out. His veins popped, he began to bleed. From his neck, his cheeks, his ears” (233). Toward the end, she used a syringe to inject vodka in a last-ditch effort to relieve his excruciating pain. A pair of orderlies from the morgue told her, “The way the Chernobylites die is the most frightening of all” (236).