The radionuclides strewn across our earth will live for 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years. From the perspective of human life, they are eternal.
-Page 24
A feeling arose in all of us - whether voiced or unvoiced - that we had touched on the unknown. Chernobyl is a mystery that we have yet to unravel. An undeciphered sign. A mystery, perhaps, for the twenty-first century; a challenge for it. What has become clear is... other challenges lie ahead; challenges more fiendish and all-embracing, although still hidden from view. Yet, after Chernobyl, something had cracked open.
-page 25
Man had been caught off-guard, he was not ready. Ill-prepared as a species, our entire natural apparatus, attuned to seeing, hearing and touching, had malfunctioned. Our eyes, ears and fingers were no longer any help, they could serve no purpose, because radiation is invisible, with no smell or sound. It is incorporeal. All our lives we had been at war or preparing for war, we were so knowledgeable about it - and then suddenly this!
-Page 28
The Русский Мир's European Debut
On the night of 26 April, 1986, Europe learned all that they will ever need to know about what a "Russian World" would look like when reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. For more than a week after, "experts" in Moscow spent hours on television each night assuring the world that it was not physically possible for a water-cooled reactor to explode, only to melt down. One must wonder if this was of any reassurance to the firefighters who were already, at that point, dying from the lethal doses of radiation they were exposed to while responding to the "physically impossible" explosion.
But I digress. We all know about Chernobyl... don't we?
According to Svetlana Alexievich's book, apparently not.
Perfectly Timed
Chernobyl Prayer was published in 1996, ten years after the disaster. It is a collection of interviews that the author took over the course of the previous three years, compiled into a series of monologues. No, it's not a scientific study and that's the whole point. People with scientific credentials during the latter days of the USSR (and the decade immediately after its fall) were subject to political pressure. Their "conclusions" were almost invariably altered to suit the needs of their superiors, and after those superiors fell from power, the scientists had to stand by their conclusions to avoid admitting they'd altered their conclusions for the benefit of their former leaders, lest they find themselves next on the chopping block.
The mindset among Chernobyl survivors was "science destroyed my home; science killed my family. Why would I trust science?"
If you're thinking this sounds a lot like the aftermath of China's bungling experiment that led to the worldwide release of Covid-19, then you're beginning to understand why I picked the book up in the first place. And yes, there are plenty of places in my now-heavily-annotated copy of this book, mostly at passages related to information-control and State cover-ups, where the words "just like Covid" are written into the margin next to an underlined segment.
There was a discrepancy between the scale of [the response] and the death toll. If you take the Battle of Kursk, there were thousands of victims. That makes sense. But here, in the first days of the disaster, it was supposedly just seven firemen. Later, a few more people. And then the terms became too abstract for our minds: 'in a few generations', 'eternity', 'nothing.' Rumors began...
-Pages 123 & 124
But, as one editor at our editorial meeting said, 'Remember! We have no doctors, teachers, scientists or journalists. We all have one profession now: that of being a Soviet citizen.'
-Page 138
We are not allowed to write about that. The kinds and quantities of radionuclide in the fallout are also off limits... 'Don't forget we have enemies. Many enemies across the ocean.' And that's why only good things can happen in the USSR. Nothing bad, or beyond comprehension.
-Page 139
It was only after the May Day Celebrations were over [weeks after the explosion] that Gorbachev appeared and said there was nothing to worry about, comrades, everything was under control. There had been a fire, just an ordinary fire. Nothing that unusual. The people living there were getting on with their work.
And we believed him.
-Page 183
But what stood out to me most was not the similarities between Moscow's determination to cover up their manmade cataclysm at Chernobyl and Beijing's determination to cover up their manmade cataclysm at Wuhan. That wasn't new.
It wasn't even the repeated references to the way everyone, even the lowliest peasant, was so fully and undeniably cognizant of the cavalier way Moscow threw away Human lives like they were nothing more than cheaply spawned units in an Age of Empires II Death Match. That was nothing new either.
No. What stood out was the way the children seemed to all know exactly what was happening, no matter how hard their parents fought to shield them from it! It was the recurring thread of children becoming obsessed with death, as the Russosphere's already fatalistic culture intertwined with the seeming omnipresence of death in the aftermath of the meltdown.
My daughter had turned six. On the very day of the accident. When I put her to bed, she'd whisper in my ear, 'Daddy, I want to live, I'm only little.' I didn't think she'd understand anything. Whenever she saw a nurse in a white coat at the kindergarten or a cook at the canteen, she'd go crazy. 'I don't want to go to a hospital, I don't want to die!'... My daughter died from Chernobyl... She was seven years old when she died.
-Pages 46 & 47, emphasis mine
I've been living at the hospital with my son for two years now...
Little girls play with dolls in the hospital wards. The dolls can close their eyes, and that's how you know a doll is dead.
'Why do the dolls die?'
'Because they're our children, [mama]. And our children aren't going to live. They'll be born and just die.'
-Page 189
The picture the author paints of Moscow's role in the disaster (and the way they prioritized saving face over saving lives) is both damning and familiar. And of course, as it was written by a Belarusian, and was originally published in Belarusian, by a publisher in Belarus, we can dispense with the "Guuuuuuuuh, DaT's JuS wEsTuRn PwOpAgAnDuR, YUK-YUK!!!" right from the downbeat.
So Is It Worth Reading?
A Communist regime's corruption and incompetence results in a continent-spanning catastrophe, unleashing an invisible force that claims millions of lives and irrevocably alters the planet. Does this sound pertinent to current events?
Madmen in Moscow, on a Quixotic crusade against the West, leave the nations surrounding Russia in ruins and destroy countless homes and lives in their desperate search for technological parity with their enemies, leaving scars that will last for generations. Does this sound pertinent to current events?
In fact, let me quit being so subtle. Russian psychopaths blow up a nuclear power plant, spreading potentially lethal fallout all over Europe and Asia, and beyond. Does this sound pertinent to current events?
...In short, yes. I'd say this book is as relevant in 2023 as it was when it was written, if not more-so.
