Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

The Russian Empire ceased to exist in 1917, when the autocratic tsar abdicated in the face of a soldiers’ mutiny. Power was seized by the Bolsheviks, a minor Marxist party led by exiled revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established in 1922. At the time, Russia was overwhelmingly agrarian and poor, lagging far behind the West in industrial and urban development. Karl Marx had theorized that a worldwide socialist revolution would be launched by radicalized urban factory workers, and most European socialists considered Russia unripe for revolution since it lacked such a proletariat. Bolshevik leaders decided instead to implement the revolution through top-down coercion, deploying a new secret police force to crack down on political dissent as the Communist Party remade the economy and government institutions.

Lenin died in 1924 and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who launched a program of forced agricultural collectivization to pay for rapid development of heavy industry; grain was confiscated at gunpoint from peasants, millions of whom were executed or deported to Siberian prison camps (the “gulag”). The state assumed ownership of all means of production and coordinated all economic activity according to five-year plans, with party propaganda constantly exhorting workers to “overfulfill the plan” and root out “bourgeois saboteurs.” These policies generated rapid economic growth but also contributed to a famine that killed millions from 1930 to 1933. The favoring of heavy industry, combined with the inefficiencies of the “command economy,” resulted in low standards of living and chronic shortages of basic consumer goods that persisted throughout Soviet history.

The mushrooming administrative bureaucracy was controlled by the hierarchical Communist Party apparatus, in which officials—appointed by superiors rather than elected—maintained their positions and privileges through patronage networks; success depended more on loyalty than on expertise. Cultural and social life was tightly controlled through propaganda, censorship, disinformation, and ubiquitous Party oversight and secret-police surveillance. At the apex of the party-state, the increasingly paranoid Stalin consolidated power and fostered a personality cult. During the “Great Purge” of 1936 to 1938, he deployed the ever-more-dominant secret police, first to eliminate potential challengers within the Party and army leadership, many of whom were tortured and executed as “enemies of the people” following bogus “show trials,” and subsequently to terrorize society at large. Intellectuals, clergy, allegedly prosperous peasants, ethnic minorities, and randomly targeted civilians were swept up in mass arrests, tortured, and executed or deported to the camps. Citizens were encouraged to denounce their neighbors, colleagues, and even family members. Prisoners were conscripted to dig canals, mine gold, and fell forests. Accurate casualties are impossible to determine, but scholarly estimates range from one to three million deaths from execution or in detention, as well as five to eight million deaths from famine.

Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, leading to some of the bloodiest battles of World War II. The Axis armies blockaded the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) for nearly 900 days, causing more than a million civilian deaths from starvation and disease. The Red Army halted the German offensive at the Battle of Moscow, launching a successful counteroffensive that culminated in Germany’s surrender in May 1945. More than 20 million Soviet citizens died in the war—more than any other nation, and about a third of the war’s total deaths—and millions more died in German prisoner-of-war and concentration camps. The Soviets’ extraordinary national sacrifice and victory over fascism in the “Great Patriotic War” generated tremendous national pride and remained a core theme of government propaganda throughout the Soviet era and in post-Soviet Russia.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the new Party leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the excesses of Stalinist terror and brought the secret police (KGB) back under Party control. However, intolerance of dissent, slavish deference to the Party apparatus, and constant surveillance remained hallmarks of Soviet rule. Leaders maintained the Stalinist culture of imposing unrealistic production quotas and deadlines on farm and plant managers, while avoiding responsibility for failure remained the chief priority of their bullied subordinates; work quality suffered greatly as a result. Economic growth stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s, and people became increasingly dissatisfied with low wages, chronic shortages, bureaucratic sclerosis, and the enormous disparity between the lifestyles of Party elites and ordinary citizens. Mikhail Gorbachev became Party leader in 1986, ushering in political and economic reforms that were, in part, catalyzed by the Chernobyl disaster and public condemnation of the regime’s response to it, and that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.