VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL
VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
TRANSLATION AND PREFACE BY KEITH GESSEN
First published in Russian as Tchernobylskaia Molitva by Editions Ostojie, 1997
Copyright © 1997 by Svetlana Alexievich
Translation © 2005 by Keith Gessen
First edition, 2005
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 1-56478-401-0
Partially funded by grants from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
Dalkey Archive Press is a nonprofit organization located at Milner Library
(Illinois State University) and distributed in the UK by
Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd. (London).
www.centerforbookculture.org
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in Canada.
CONTENTS
Translator’s Preface
Historical Note
Prologue: A Solitary Human Voice
PART ONE: THE LAND OF THE DEAD
On Why We Remember
About What Can Be Talked about with the Living and the Dead
About a Whole Life Written down on Doors
By Those Who Returned
About What Radiation Looks Like
About a Song without Words
About a Homeland
About How a Person Is Only Clever and Refined in Evil
Soldiers’ Chorus
PART TWO: THE LAND OF THE LIVING
About Old Prophecies
About a Moonlit Landscape
About a Man Whose Tooth Was Hurting When He Saw Christ Fall
About a Single Bullet
About How We Can’t Live without Chekhov and Tolstoy
About War Movies
A Scream
About a New Nation
About Writing Chernobyl
About Lies and Truths
People’s Chorus
PART THREE: AMAZED BY SADNESS
About What We Didn’t Know: Death Can Be So Beautiful
About the Shovel and the Atom
About Taking Measurements
About How the Frightening Things in Life Happen Quietly and Naturally
About Answers
About Memories
About Loving Physics
About Expensive Salami
About Freedom and the Dream of an Ordinary Death
About the Shadow of Death
About a Damaged Child
About Political Strategy
By a Defender of the Soviet Government
About Instructions
About the Limitless Power One Person Can Have over Another
About Why We Love Chernobyl
Children’s Chorus
A Solitary Human Voice
In Place of an Epilogue
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
On September 11, 2001, after the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center, emergency triage stations were set up throughout New York City. Doctors and nurses rushed to their hospitals for extra shifts, and many individuals came to donate blood. These were touching acts of generosity and solidarity. The shocking thing about them was that the blood and triage stations turned out to be unnecessary. There were few survivors of the collapse of the two towers.
The effects of the explosion and nuclear fire at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986 were the exact opposite. The initial blast killed just one plant worker, Valeriy Khodomchuk, and in the next few weeks fewer than thirty workers and firemen died from acute radiation poisoning. But tens of thousands received extremely high doses of radiation—it was an accident that produced, in a way, more survivors than victims—and this book is about them.
Much of the material collected here is obscene. In the very first interview, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of a fireman whose brigade was the first to arrive at the reactor, talks about the total degeneration of her husband’s very skin in the week before his death, describing a process so unnatural we should never have had to witness it. “Any little knot [in his bedding], that was already a wound on him,” she says. “I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn’t accidentally cut him.”
Some of the interviews are macabre. Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovskiy, head of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fisherman, recalls his meeting with the regional Party bosses a few months after the explosion. They explained that the Zone of Exclusion, as the Soviets termed the land within thirty kilometers of the Chernobyl power plant, evacuated of humans, was still filled with household pets. But the dogs and cats had absorbed heavy doses of radiation in their fur, and were liable, presumably, to wander out of the Zone. The hunters had to go in and shoot them all. Several other accounts, particularly those about the “deactivation” of the physical landscape in the Zone—the digging up of earth and trees and houses and their (haphazard) burial as nuclear waste—also have this quasi-Gogolian sense: they are ordinary human activities gone terribly berserk.
But in the end it’s the very quotidian ordinariness of these testimonies that makes them such a unique human document. “I know you’re curious,” says Arkady Filin, impressed into Chernobyl service as a “liquidator,” or clean-up crew member. “People who weren’t there are always curious. But it was still a world of people. The men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls.” Or, in the words of one of the hunters: “If you ran over a turtle with your jeep, the shell held up. It didn’t crack. Of course we only did this when we were drunk.” Even the most desperate cases are still very much part of this “world of people,” with its people problems and people worries. “When I die,” Valentina Timofeevna Panasevich’s husband, also a “liquidator,” tells her as he succumbs to cancer several years after his stint at Chernobyl, “sell the car and the spare tire. And don’t marry Tolik.” Tolik is his brother. Valentina does not marry him.
Svetlana Alexievich collected these interviews in 1996—a time when anti-Communism still had some currency as a political idea in the post-Soviet space. And it’s certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding area, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. “If I’d known he’d get sick I’d have closed all the doors,” one of the Chernobyl war widows tells Alexievich about her husband, who went to Chernobyl as a liquidator. “I’d have stood in the doorway. I’d have locked the doors with all the locks we had.” But no one knew.
And yet, as these testimonies also make all too clear, it wasn’t as if the Soviets simply let Chernobyl burn. This is the remarkable thing. On the one hand, total incompetence, indifference, and out-and-out lies. On the other, a genuinely frantic effort to deal with the consequences. In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. They dropped bags of sand onto the reactor fire from the open doors of helicopters (analysts now think this did more harm than good). When the fire stopped, they climbed onto the roof and cleared the radioactive debris. The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn’t break down until weeks or months later, at which point they’d die horribly. In 1986 the Soviets threw untrained and unprotected men at the reactor just as in 1941 they’d thrown untrained, unarmed men at the Wehrmacht, hoping the Germans would at least have to stop long enough to shoot them. But as the curator of the Chernobyl Museum correctly explains, had this effort not been made, the catastrophe might have been a lot worse.