Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Y. A. Brovkin, an instructor at Gomel State University, recalls driving home from a business trip on a moonlit night and being moved by the appearance of farm fields where the contaminated topsoil had been removed and replaced with white dolomite sand: “It was like not-earth” (89), he says, reflecting how the disaster seemed to have altered physical reality. Musing about why so little has been written about the disaster in comparison to World War II and Stalinism, he argues that this is because of the Chernobyl disaster’s fundamental incomprehensibility: “We don’t know how to capture any meaning from it. […] We can’t place it in our human experience or our human time-frame” (90). Wars eventually end, and they have winners and losers, but “victory” over radioactive fallout is impossible.

Arkady Filin recounts the abrupt manner in which he and others were conscripted as liquidators:

They came suddenly, gave me a notice, and said, There’s a car waiting downstairs. It was like 1937. They came at night to take you out of your warm bed. Then that stopped working: people’s wives would refuse to answer the door, or they’d lie, say their husbands were away […]. So they started grabbing people at work, on the street, during a lunch break at the factory cafeteria. It was just like 1937 (90).

He’s comparing it to the peak year of Stalin’s Great Purge, when anyone could be arrested at any time for any or no reason. The decontamination work itself felt surreal: “We buried houses, wells, trees. We buried the earth. […] We buried the forest” (92). He says he couldn’t sleep at night, suggesting that the unnaturalness of burying earth under earth was deeply disturbing. Residents “didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage” (92). Meanwhile, a dosimeter reading would reveal that a stove with lard cooking on it was “not a stove, it’s a little nuclear reactor” (92).

V. I. Verzhikovskiy (the chairman of a local sportsmen’s association) and hunters Andrei and Vladimir were tasked with exterminating pet dogs and cats left behind in evacuated villages. They spent two months in the Zone with no protective gear, witnessing surreal scenes of abandonment. They dumped truckloads of animal corpses in a makeshift “cemetery” that was supposed to be lined to prevent groundwater contamination but in fact was “just a deep hole in the ground” (102).

Katya P. was a child living in Pripyat at the time of the disaster. On the day of the explosion, she and the other kids “raced to the station on our bikes, and those who didn’t have bikes were jealous. No one yelled at us not to go” (105). Everything seemed normal until people began showing visible signs of radiation poisoning. Katya compares herself and fellow Chernobylites to the ostracized survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, known in Japan as Hibakusha, who can’t marry anyone except other survivors. She has a fiancé, but his mother worries about Katya’s reproductive health, telling her, “My dear, for some people it’s a sin to give birth” (108). Young survivors like Katya carry the burden of the increased probability of birth defects in their children in addition to the trauma of evacuation and resettlement. Like Brovkin in Chapter 2, she notes that while books and movies about the war are plentiful, none are available to help her make sense of Chernobyl.