Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-9

Part 2, Chapters 1-5

Part 2, Chapters 6-11

Part 3, Chapters 1-9

Part 3, Chapters 10-18

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 1, Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “The Land of the Dead”

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “About What Radiation Looks Like”

Anna Badaeva, another elderly returnee, recalls her lack of concern on the night of the explosion: “It’s on fire—so it’s on fire. A fire is temporary, no one was scared of it then. They didn’t know about the atom” (51). Although her village is less than 20 miles from the plant, she and her neighbors viewed this proximity as strictly a good thing, because it brought better provisions to their rural backwater location: “[T]hey had everything, like in Moscow” (51). Moreover, they were entirely unaware of its dangers; even now, Anna seems to not fully understand the nature of radioactive exposure: “They scare us and scare us with the radiation, but our lives have gotten better since the radiation came” because the village store now has “three kinds of salami” and even oranges (51). She even suggests that the disaster was a fabrication. However, moments later she notes that “all the men are dead. […] And all our women are empty, their female parts are ruined in one in three of them, they say” (52).

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “About a Song Without Words”

In this very brief monologue, elderly returnee Mariya Volchok implores the interviewer to help find her former neighbor, a woman with disabilities who is mute, so that the villagers can “go there and bring her back. So that she won’t die of sorrow” (54).

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “About a Homeland”

This chapter presents three monologues by refugees from the Tajikistani Civil War, which killed tens of thousands and displaced 10-20% of that country’s population in 1992-97. Like the elderly locals in the preceding monologues, three women share traumatic wartime memories, but in this case the memories are painfully fresh. As recent arrivals in Chernobyl, they have no memories of the disaster and little fear of radiation, which to them seems insignificant compared to the violence humans inflict upon each other in wartime. Lena M. relates a deep sense of dislocation: Not only was she forced to leave her home in Tajikistan, but her homeland itself disappeared with the dissolution of the USSR.

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “About How a Person is Only Clever and Refined in Evil”

Nikolai describes himself as a sort of vagabond, for whom living in the isolation of Chernobyl represents both freedom and repentance from unnamed sins. He muses philosophically on the meaning of life and death and the nature of evil—and seems to suggest that the scientific rationalism underpinning nuclear power is to blame for the disaster. He laments, “But neither the scientist, nor the engineer, nor the soldier will admit to it. Only in evil is a man clever and refined” (66), praising, by contrast, the simplicity and honesty of prayer.

Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “Soldiers’ Chorus”

This long chapter weaves together excerpts from 17 veterans of the post-disaster response, including four civilian liquidators, three police officers, and various military personnel: three privates, two drivers, two helicopter pilots, a Geiger operator, the commander of a guard regiment, and a captain. The book lists the speakers’ names at the beginning of the chapter but presents the excerpts without attribution.

One speaker describes the surreal juxtaposition of the military presence on agricultural life that, initially, carried on as usual: “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” (71). The appearance of normalcy—and the beauty of the countryside—made it hard to comprehend the disaster’s scale. Another speaker recalls how, when he was deployed, he was excited to “do something heroic” (67) and shared a sense of trans-ethnic camaraderie with the other soldiers: “We had guys from all over the Soviet Union. Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Armenians […] It was scary but also fun, for some reason” (68). These “biorobots” were sent to clean the reactor roof and surrounding area with only gauze surgical masks for protection but, he says, were “proud” of being able to achieve what robots could not. Other speakers emphasize that their superiors provided no information or meaningful protection. One recalls, “They gave us some gas masks, but no one used them. They showed us dosimeters a couple of times, but they never actually handed them to us” (74). Another recalls being told by his sergeant, “It’s fine. Just wash your hands before you eat” (79). It’s impossible to know which leaders were deliberately misleading the men and which were simply ignorant, but several speakers recall being asked to sign nondisclosure agreements and warned not to tell others about their experiences.

Multiple speakers reflect on how the Soviet legacy of collective suffering and Communist indoctrination prepared them for unquestioning self-sacrifice: “You have to serve the motherland! Serving—that’s a big deal,” says one (75). Another notes, “They made the call, and I went. I had to! I was a member of the Party. Communists, march!” (77) A veteran of the Afghanistan war says that—unlike at Chernobyl—“death was a normal thing” in the war: “It was easier there. They just shot you” (83). A sudden death in combat is easier to comprehend than the insidious violence of radiation, the effects of which may take years to manifest.

Part 1, Chapters 5-9 Analysis

This section expands on the theme of residents’ ignorance about the risks of nuclear energy production, their struggle to comprehend the nature of radioactive contamination, and the ways in which they compare it to wartime. In Chapter 5, Anna Badaeva describes the wartime experience:

[D]uring the war we gathered stinging-nettle and goose-foot. We got fat from hunger, but we didn’t die. There were berries in the forest, and mushrooms. But now that’s all gone. I always thought that what was boiling in your pot would never change, but it’s not like that (53).

Whereas people starved during the war because they had no food, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, food is everywhere—growing from trees, in the forest, on the fields—but has all been contaminated by invisible forces. Nothing in residents’ prior experience prepared them for this reality, which highlights one of the book’s primary themes: The World-Changing Nature of Nuclear Disaster. Chapter 6 reinforces the importance of home and community for displaced villagers and illustrates that even people who have suffered greatly are capable of great compassion.

Chapter 7 introduces a different take on the Chernobyl-war comparison, from the perspective of people who moved to the Exclusion Zone because they had nowhere else to go, after fleeing the violence of an ongoing war in Tajikistan. They came to Chernobyl because, as one unnamed woman explains, “[N]o one’s going to chase us out of here. [...] I’m not scared here. I can’t be afraid of the earth, the water. I’m afraid of people” (60). The intangible threat of radiation is insignificant compared to “the man with the gun” (60). In addition, this chapter addresses the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was celebrated as liberation from Moscow’s imperialism by ethnonationalists in Ukraine and the Baltic republics but was traumatic for those citizens, like Lena, who embraced being “Soviet” as a unifying identity that transcended ethnicity. Lena asks rhetorically, “What am I? My mother’s Ukrainian, my father’s Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? […] On our passports, my kids and mine, it says ‘Russian,’ but we’re not Russian. We’re Soviet!” (63). Mourning the loss of that identity, she nostalgically appreciates that a statue of Lenin still stands in Chernobyl. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove statues of Lenin and other communist leaders from public squares in 2015, after the “Maidan Revolution” that ousted Ukraine’s corrupt, pro-Moscow president; however, a contaminated statue of Lenin remains in Chernobyl, preserved like a time capsule of corruption along with everything else in the Exclusion Zone.

If the Chernobyl disaster was like a war, then the combatants in that war were the liquidators—military and civilian—who put their bodies on the line to contain the damage. Some were sent to clean up nuclear waste as “biorobots,” a term that reflects how the government considered citizens as disposable as machines. Chapter 9, “Soldiers’ Chorus,” introduces the theme of Collectivism Versus Individualism, as multiple speakers reflect on how Soviet culture valorized self-sacrificing heroism on behalf of the collective good. One veteran comments on how, in times of crisis, Russians reveal their greatness, many becoming “heroes.” He sardonically notes, however, that unlike their European counterparts, they’ll never have properly paved roads or “manicured lawns.” In other words, while the Soviets lag far behind Western Europe in material standards of living, they’ve demonstrated a far greater capacity to set aside self-interest in defense of their country. Anther speaker is more overtly cynical: “They didn’t need to send all those people there to get radiation. What for? They needed specialists, not a lot of human material” (84). His comment implies that fewer bodies could have accomplished the enormously labor-intensive containment effort had officials been more competent and more concerned about individual well-being.