Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“We have a drink and they start cursing the kolkhoz chairman. ‘We’re not going, period. We lived through the war, now it’s radiation.’ Even if we have to bury ourselves, we’re not going!”

An elderly villager who returned home after the evacuation recalls how she and her neighbors reacted dismissively to news of the impending evacuation. Members of this generation were less fearful of radiation than younger people were, because this invisible, abstract threat seemed trivial compared to the tangible horrors they experienced or witnessed during World War II.

“What’s it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? What color is it? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it’s black. But if it’s colorless, then it’s like God. God is everywhere, but you can’t see Him.”

This remark from Anna Badaeva, a returned villager, illustrates how the rural population lacked the scientific education to understand radiation. The only way she can make sense of an invisible force of such potency is to invoke the supernatural.

“We met these crazed dogs and cats on the road. They acted strange: they didn’t recognize us as people, they ran away. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with them until they told us to start shooting at them.”

This soldier was assigned to one of the most emotionally traumatizing categories of liquidation work: exterminating domestic animals left behind in evacuated villages. Even for the toughest combat veterans, shooting unwitting dogs who approached them expecting kindness felt like a violation of the natural order of things.

“[O]n one side of the road there were soldiers, keeping people out, and on the other side cows were grazing, the harvesters were buzzing, the grain was being shipped. The old women would come and cry: ‘Boys, let us in. it’s our land. Our houses.’ […] Your mind would turn over. The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there’d be a soldier who had to make sure that when she was done milking, she’d pour the milk out on the ground.”

This liquidator was tasked with preventing residents from returning to evacuated villages, a job complicated by the uneducated villagers’ inability to comprehend the invisible threat of radiation. They wondered how everything could be poisoned if it looked normal on the surface. The Chernobyl disaster disrupted the age-old relationship between peasants and their land in a way that military conflict, however brutal, did not, and the appearance of normalcy only made this disruption seem more surreal.

“Don’t write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed—and they really were wonders, but first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they’d put out a new ‘Action Update’: ‘men are working courageously and selflessly,’ ‘we will survive and triumph.’ They gave me a medal and one thousand rubles.”

This liquidator cynically rejects the notion of heroic self-sacrifice as central to the Soviet character, arguing that during the war as well as the Chernobyl disaster, epic levels of sacrifice were necessary only because of poor leadership. Instead of providing protective gear and useful information to safeguard the liquidators’ health, the government offered only tired propaganda slogans, meaningless medals, and paltry bonuses.

“They made us sign a non-disclosure form. […] We lugged buckets of graphite from the reactor. That’s ten thousand roentgen. We shoveled it with ordinary shovels, changing our masks up to thirty times a shift. […] Our unit got back, they didn’t even give us a change of clothes. We walked around in the same pants, same boots, as we had at the reactor. Right up until they demobilized us.”

This “biorobot” was 22 years old when he was sent to clear the reactor roof. The signing of the nondisclosure form illustrates the government’s efforts to cover up the extent of the disaster, while the comment about clothes illustrates leaders’ lack of concern for workers’ safety. The speaker understands that the protection offered by masks was negated by the radioactive dust in their clothes.

“I’ve wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren’t writing much about it—they write about the war, or the camps. […] If we’d beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we’d understood Chernobyl. But we don’t know how to capture any meaning from it. We’re not capable of it. We can’t place it in our human experience or our human time-frame.”

Like so many of Svetlana Alexievich’s subjects, university instructor Y. A. Brovkin feels that, because this nuclear disaster was without precedent in human history, making sense of it is impossible. The 20,000-year half-lives of some radioactive isotopes mean that some areas will remain uninhabitable forever—and unlike enemy forces during a war, radioactive contamination can never be definitively defeated.

“Our political officer read notices in the paper about our ‘high political consciousness and meticulous organization,’ about the fact that just four days after the catastrophe the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month they put up another one. I tried to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace that flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice? But the thing is, if they’d given me the flag then, and told me to climb up there, I would have. Why? I can’t say.”

For liquidator Arkady Filin, Party officials’ discourse of heroism rang false when liquidators were compelled to risk their lives on the reactor roof not just for the urgent task of removing highly radioactive debris but also for propaganda purposes. Filin is disillusioned with the Soviet celebration of self-sacrificial heroism, but he acknowledges the potency of that discourse by stating that he too would have complied with such orders.

“To be honest it was just a deep hole in the ground, even though you’re supposed to dig it in such a way that you can’t reach any ground water, and you’re supposed to insulate it with cellophane. You’re supposed to find an elevated area. But of course these instructions were violated everywhere. There wasn’t any cellophane, and we didn’t spend a lot of time looking for the right spot.”

Viktor Verzhikovskiy, the hunter, recalls how they buried the contaminated corpses of dogs and cats, clearly unconcerned that their work would ever be inspected. This illustrates the careless incompetence that had become the norm in most Soviet workplaces by the 1970s and 1980s, because the command economy offered few incentives to do more than the bare minimum necessary to please the bosses. The lack of cellophane is another example of the chronic shortages of consumer goods.

“We were preparing for war, for nuclear war, we built nuclear shelters. We wanted to hide from the atom as if we were hiding from shrapnel. But the atom is everywhere. In the bread, in the salt. We breathe radiation, we eat it. That you might not have bread or salt, and that you might get to the point where you’ll eat anything, you’ll boil a leather belt so that you can feed on the smell—that I could understand. But this I can’t. Everything’s poisoned? Then how can we live?”

A central theme of Soviet ideology was the idea that the country was encircled by capitalist enemies who wanted to destroy Communism. Before Chernobyl, Soviet citizens—like most people around the world—believed that the only nuclear threat came from weapons, not power plants. A military ethos pervaded the culture, but leaders had such faith in the safety of reactors that they failed to prepare society for the possibility of radioactive fallout. As labor-studies teacher Nikolai Zharkov observes, Soviet citizens knew what it was like to go hungry from lack of food but had no frame of reference for the land itself and all its fruits becoming toxic.

“Stalin’s old vocabulary has sprung up again: ‘agents of the Western secret services,’ ‘the cursed enemies of socialism,’ ‘an undermining of the indestructible union of the Soviet peoples.’ Everyone talks about the spies and provocateurs sent here, and no one talks about iodine protection. Any unofficial information is considered foreign ideology. […] But hasn’t the old notion of the enemy been destroyed? The enemy is invisible, and he’s everywhere. This is evil in a new guise.”

Since the early days of the Bolshevik regime, Communist leaders were preoccupied with routing out internal subversion and sought to blame foreign agents or “class enemies” for all failures. Government propaganda reproduced this discourse in the weeks and months after the Chernobyl accident, but journalist Anatoly Shimanskiy recognized that it no longer made sense when the “enemy” was radioactive fallout.

“That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn’t have them went to friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, ‘Look! Remember!’ […] They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.”

Pripyat evacuee Nadezhda Vygovskaya recalls watching the reactor fire blazing the night after the explosion. Because the authorities failed to promptly inform or evacuate them, residents had no idea they were witnessing a nuclear meltdown rather than an ordinary fire, and they needlessly exposed themselves and their children to high levels of radiation.

“At that time my notions of nuclear power stations were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we’d been taught that this was a magical factory that made ‘energy out of nothing,’ where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren’t prepared. […] Some people listened to what was being said in the West, they were the only ones talking about what pills to take and how to take them. But most often the reaction was: our enemies are celebrating, but we still have it better.”

Like most of her compatriots, environmental inspector Zoya Bruk had always believed government claims about the safety of nuclear plants, and official pronouncements after the explosion initially gave her no reason to think otherwise. Her more cynical compatriots believed the contrary information they heard on Western radio broadcasts, but most people initially dismissed this as Western propaganda, struggling to accept that their government could deceive them so egregiously.

“Chernobyl happened, and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren’t used to it, that everyone has his separate life. […] Everyone had to make her own decisions. And we were used to living—how? As an entire village, as a collective—a factory, a kolkhoz. We were Soviet people, we were collectivized. […] Then we changed. Everything changed.”

One ways that the Chernobyl disaster altered survivors’ consciousness was by undermining the collectivist ethos inculcated in Soviet citizens through both Communist ideology and the lived experience of collectivized farms and factories and, for many urbanites, even shared apartments. In the aftermath of the explosion, residents no longer trusted the authorities and, for the first time, had to decide on their own how to protect themselves.

“I’m afraid of the rain. That’s what Chernobyl is. I’m afraid of snow, of the forest.”

Historian Aleksandr Revalskiy concisely conveys the fundamental strangeness of a disaster that altered the natural world instantly and permanently yet invisibly. People are accustomed to fearing human enemies, but the idea that the very air and land are poisoned is terrifying in a new way.

“My first reaction was to call my wife, to warn her. But all our telephones at the Institute were bugged. Oh, that ancient fear, they’d been raising us on it for decades.”

The recollections of nuclear scientist Valentin Borisevich testify to the omnipresence of KGB surveillance and to the ways it had conditioned Soviet citizens to censor themselves. This fear was “ancient” because the autocratic Russian monarchy had used secret police to spy on and oppress its subjects long before the Bolsheviks and Stalin.

“[A] few people could kill us all. They weren’t maniacs, and they weren’t criminals. They were just ordinary workers at a nuclear power plant. When I understood that, I experienced a very strong shock. Chernobyl opened an abyss, something beyond Kolyma, Auschwitz, the Holocaust. A person with an ax and a bow, or a person with a grenade launcher and gas chambers, can’t kill everyone. But with an atom…”

Evacuated village teacher Lyudmila Polenkaya reflects on the unprecedented nature of the Chernobyl disaster, which introduced a wholly novel form of violence to a people already intimately acquainted with the violence of war and genocide. It was hard to accept that so many lives could be endangered unintentionally by a simple workplace accident rather than by the deliberate actions of hostile foes.

“Later on we got an order: whoever drinks can stay a second term. So does vodka help or not? Well, at least psychologically it does. We believed that as much as we believed anything.”

Aleksandr Kudryagin is one of many liquidators who comment on how heavily the workers drank—and were encouraged to drink by their superiors—as a mechanism for coping with weeks and months of profound physical and psychological stress. Vodka was widely believed to offer protection against radiation, and some bosses encouraged this belief. Kudryagin may have been skeptical of the claim but no more skeptical than he was of any other information provided during this period of confusion and official secrecy.

“People talk about the war, the war generation, they compare us to them. But those people were happy! They won the war! It gave them a very strong life-energy, as we say now, it gave them a really strong motivation to survive and keep going. 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. They don’t exist, and we’re already afraid. [...] Everyone’s depressed. It’s a feeling of doom.”

After the accident, Nadezhda Burakova fled to her sister’s home in Minsk with her young daughter, but the sister refused to let them in because she was breast-feeding and feared radiation exposure. Unlike the war, which ended in decisive victory and liberation from German occupation, the Chernobyl radiation will affect the health of survivors’ children in unknown ways and will persist for generations.

“If I’m a criminal, why is my granddaughter, my little child, also sick. My daughter had her that spring, she brought her to us in Slavgorod in diapers. […] My wife said: ‘They should go to our relatives. They need to get out of here.’ I was the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party. I said absolutely not. ‘What will people think if I take my daughter with her baby out of here? Their children have to stay.’ Those who tried to leave, to save their own skins, I’d call them into the regional committee. ‘Are you a Communist or not?’ It was a test for people. If I’m a criminal, then why was I killing my own grandchild?”

Vladimir Ivanov is defending himself against the (implied) criticism that he, as the Regional Party boss, shares responsibility for the unnecessary illness and deaths caused by the official cover-up and 36-hour delay in evacuating residents. He casts himself as a faithful Communist who was simply fulfilling his duty, and he denigrates others who acted out of self-interest rather than political commitment. However, he also claims ignorance about the disaster’s severity, suggesting that if he’d known at the time how dangerous it was, he would have acted to protect his daughter and infant granddaughter.

“Everyone forgets that before Chernobyl everyone called the atom the ‘peaceful worker,’ everyone was proud to live in the atomic age. I don’t remember any fear of the atom.”

Ivanov is referring to the message promoted by both the US and Soviet governments in the 1950s and 1960s that energy production was an entirely safe use of nuclear fission, in contrast to atomic weapons. The Chernobyl nuclear plant was built just 80 miles from heavily populated Kiev because its RBMK reactors were (erroneously) considered foolproof.

“They needed to talk about physics, about the laws of physics, but instead they talked about enemies, about looking for enemies. [W]hat was this? Some professor, a bunch of physicists, were going to tell the Central Committee what to do? No, they weren’t a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience. The principle of their lives, the one thing the Party machine had taught them, was never to stick their necks out. Better to keep everyone happy. […] And of course if you didn’t please your higher-ups, you didn’t get that promotion, that trip abroad, that dacha. If we were still a closed system, behind the Iron Curtain, people would still be living next to the station. They’d have covered it up! Remember—Kytrym, Semipalatinsk—we’re still Stalin’s country, you know.”

Vasily Nesterenko, former director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy, complains that Soviet officials ignored him when he tried to warn about the radioactive fallout, because they’d been conditioned to respect Party hierarchy above all else and because they were uninformed about the risks of nuclear energy. If not for glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he thinks the regime would have kept covering up the extent of the contamination and exposing residents to unacceptable risk. Semipalatinsk, in northeastern Kazakhstan, was the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear weapons testing ground, where 456 tests were conducted from 1949 to 1989. Residents of the area were kept in the dark, and hundreds suffered radiation poisoning. Vasily thinks officials would have done the same after Chernobyl because of the deeply ingrained habits of secrecy and deference to hierarchy.

“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. Maybe they’ll come back in a hundred years or a thousand. That’s what our teacher says.”

This speaker from the “Children’s Chorus” recalls how the effects of radioactive contamination initially manifested most plainly in wildlife species. The child’s matter-of-fact tone in describing the undoubtedly disturbing spectacle of dead birds littering the ground poignantly illustrates how Chernobyl robbed its youngest survivors of their innocence. And even authority figures like schoolteachers have no idea how long the consequences of contamination will persist.