About book Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster (2006)
Sadness. Depression. Despair. Anguish. Heart-breaking, gut-wrenching. Downtrodden. The limitless list of disparaging adjectives is mind-numbing in reading this otherwise brilliant piece by Belorussian journalist Svetlana Aleksievich. Up until last year, Chernobyl was the worst accident at a nuclear power plant in the brief, albeit controversial history of atomic energy. The interviews collected for this book are from widows of plant workers, liquidators (fire fighters at the power plant), scientists, photographers and regular people who were uprooted from their once "peaceful" Soviet villages across The Ukraine, Belarus and others. You've never met these people. You know nothing about them. Yet, from the onset of the book, the more you learn about them and their loved ones, you begin to feel some sort of personal connection; you want to sympathize with them. The first story is from the widow of a first-responder/liquidator to the plant. Her graphic, detailed account of her husband's final days is among the saddest of stories I've ever read. The step-by-step process of death by acute radiation poisoning... the skin turning black before peeling off, swelling of the tongue, the inability to digest food, etc. Though against the advice of friends and doctors, she stood by him until he died a painful, debilitating death. While my summary of this account is brief and dull at best, I assure you that there are few places in literature where you will find such stories of dedication and commitment to a partner; sickness and in health, til death do they part. Radioactive material does unfathomable things to the human body when exposed. For a partner to follow her significant other until his dying moments, with flesh dripping from the body, the inability to speak, swallow, or even be at half mental capacity is one of the more emotional and inspiring stories of love I've ever read about. The only thing this man could do at the end of his life was to love his wife. This... was just one of several stories from the people who were there; who will carry Chernobyl with them, almost literally wearing it with them on their shoulders for the rest of their now shortened lives. They refer to themselves as "Chernobylites" or "Children of Chernobyl."Many of these people compared it to war. After reading this, it really was like a war for them. Military take over of villages, forcing people from their homes and unable to take anything with them. Writers love creating stories about this stuff all the time, but Chernobyl's aftermath, seemingly a never-ending nightmare, is all as real as can be. It's an intriguing book for sure, one of the few that I simply refused to put down late at night or to meet someone for an outing. But what may prove more discouraging and frightening beyond the actual explosion in reactor number four at Chernobyl is the subsequent response by the Soviet Union. This was in 1986, so for those of you keeping score at home, tensions were still high in the Cold War and the Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. In concluding my brief history lesson, I will premise my next point in saying that the events that unfolded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant truly epitomize what the Soviet Union stood for and how they operated. Once word spread to Moscow of the accident, it was downplayed... heavily by the Kremlin. I won't analyze the lethal dosage of radiation, the unit of measurements or any other ridiculous numbers that drew scrutiny from Moscow, but from the very beginning, their only concern was not to instill a panic across the Soviet states. The infamous ghost town of Pripyat, literally right next door to Chernobyl, housed upwards of 35,000+ to provide shelter for the power plant employees and their families. Sadly, the innocent denizens of Pripyat weren't informed of the severity of the situation until two days after the explosion. By that point, Pripyat was already the most radioactive place outside of the reactor; the slow evacuation process certainly didn't help matters, especially for survival down the road. After Pripyat was evacuated, many of the remaining towns that would be affected by radiation would not be alerted of the dire situation until AFTER the May Day festivities across the Soviet Union. The 300,000+* liquidators that were forced to the plant did so usually without protective suits and gas masks, which, let's be honest... what amounts to a surgical face covering really only delays the inevitable. Several liquidators died right there on the roof of the reactor from working too long. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. No one told them about the obscenely high levels of radiation spewing out into the atmosphere. But as the days went on, they knew. People everywhere began to figure out just how bad this was. The misconceptions, the cover-ups and lies... these ridiculous antics by the Soviet Union teetered on blatant genocide. Before and even shortly after Chernobyl, the Soviet Union had their comrades wrapped around its collective finger; Communists would believe anything that came out of the Kremlin, everything from Stalin, Khrushchev and ole Gorby himself regurgitating lies to the Soviet people about Chernobyl. After several days, the fire was finally extinguished in the reactor. What followed was an atrocious propagandizing campaign to remind people that "The situation is under control" and "everything is fine and back to normal." It may have been a week, two weeks, a month. But the real damage hadn't even been done across the region. According to the USSR, it was the west spreading lies and propaganda to scare the Soviets about how bad the accident was; nothing but scare tactics and everyone should ignore the "western threats." Obviously, we had nothing to do with it. And yet, we were involved anyway. Many will attribute Chernobyl as the beginning of the end of the Cold War and Communism as we know it in Soviet Russia. All of our nuclear stockpile pointed towards one another for four decades amounted to nothing but 40 years of fear and anxiety. Ironically, one of the very plants that contributed weapons grade radioactive material for the Soviet nuclear inventory was responsible for killing its own people... and is STILL killing in June of 2012, 26 years later. More to that point, (your brief chemistry lesson for the day) the radioactive plutonium, uranium, strontium and cesium emitted from Chernobyl have half-lives ranging from several thousand to close to a BILLION years before completely decomposing. In other words, no one will ever inhabit a town like Pripyat, Ukraine or anywhere in southeast Belarus again. The Chernoybl disaster is a subject that I have quickly become enamored and somewhat infatuated with recently. I've known about the general events that occurred; human error allowed a catastrophic explosion in the reactor to spread millions of curies of radioactive material across Europe. It killed several initially and rendered the land uninhabitable forever. Unfortunately, after reading this book, my brief synopsis only scratches the surface. We have passed 26 years since the accident. Some people volunteered, some were forced against their will to be a faithful Communist, LOYAL to the Motherland and do their part. It was a death sentence. The numbers are highly debatable to this day, but it is believed that as of 2004, 985,000 people have died or will die as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. That was eight years ago. Furthermore, some believe that as many as SEVEN generations of children will continue to be irradiated from Chernobyl. Perhaps the saddest, disheartening fact about Chernobyl is that it is almost inevitable that well over a million people will have died because of it. Though it was hard to put down, it was quite hard to press on at times with the emotional content. I've read some sad books in my time. I've read "The Diary of Anne Frank" and even "Night" by Elie Wiesel. I, too have even read my fair share of Shakespeare. If someone were to ask me "What's the saddest thing you've ever read/heard?" I would tell them "Voiced From Chernobyl." It is not my intent to belittle the Holocaust, but with Chernobyl, there's truly no way of knowing when people stop dying because of it. Chernobyl has no part in our American history, but no one can take away the significance of the event in the history of the world. It might be the most historically significant event that you just haven't heard of yet.
Voices from Chernobyl was written in 1996, ten years after the reactor meltdown. It is an oral history of the disaster; that is, it’s presented as a series of ‘monologues’ by people who were involved in some way, with titles like ‘Monologue about War Movies’, ‘Monologue about the Shovel and the Atom’, ‘Monologue about Expensive Salami’. I’m actually a bit curious about exactly how they were collected; they are presented as verbatim transcripts, although I’m sure they’ve been tidied up somewhat. What you don’t get is any idea of what questions or prompting came from the interviewer. It’s quite an effective device, keeping the journalist out of the spotlight and letting the voices speak for themselves, but I assume there’s an element of artifice to it. I don’t think it detracted from the book, I’m just curious about the process.The result is, anyway, an extraordinary book. The stories come from all kinds of perspectives: local farmers, soldiers, scientists, officials, construction workers, wives, children. And the material is fascinating: people’s accounts of being evacuated, of working on the reactor site, of nursing dying relatives. There are people who refused to leave, and people who came back because it was home, and people who, having fled conflicts elsewhere, moved to the area because there were houses lying empty. And overlying it all is the extraordinarily inept and chaotic government response, which included, for example, failing to distribute iodine or breathing masks because they thought doing so might cause panic.And as well as the material being so interesting, it has a very literary quality; bleak and fatalistic, but laced with dark humour and absurdity, sometimes earthy, sometimes poetic. That poetry comes both from the real poignancy of the human situations and the surreal quality of many things that happened: the soldiers sent into the Zone to kill all the cats and dogs; the people whose job it was to dig up soil and bury it in pits; the fact that they were told that drinking vodka would help fight radiation poisoning, so everyone seems to have been rolling around in an alcoholic haze.It really is a fabulous book. Here’s a little excerpt, from a man who has moved to live in the evacuated zone:It’s easy to find books here. Now, an empty clay pitcher, or a spoon or fork, that you won’t find, but books are all over. The other day I found a volume of Pushkin. “And the thought of death is sweet to my soul.” I remember that. Yes: “The thought of death.” I am here alone. I think about death. I’ve come to like thinking. And silence helps you to prepare yourself. Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is. But I’m here alone. Yesterday I chased a wolf and a she-wolf out of the school, they were living there.Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul.And I’ll say this: birds, and trees, and ants, they’re closer to me now than they were. I think about them, too. Man is frightening. And strange. But I don’t want to kill anyone here. I fish here, I have a rod. Yes. But I don’t shoot animals. And I don’t set traps. You don’t feel like killing anyone here.And here’s a bit by someone else, who moved back:Sometimes I turn on the radio. They scare us and scare us with the radiation. But our lives have gotten better since the radiation came. I swear! Look around: they brought oranges, three kinds of salami, whatever you want. And to the village! My grandchildren have been all over the world. The littlest just came back from France, that’s where Napoleon attacked from once—”Grandma, I saw a pineapple!” My nephew, her brother, they took him to Berlin for the doctors. That’s where Hitler started from on his tanks. It’s a new world. Everything’s different. Is that the radiation’s fault, or what?Voices from Chernobyl is my book from Belarus for the Read The World challenge. If you’re thinking ‘hang on, Belarus, that doesn’t sound right’, well, you’re right, the plant itself is in Ukraine, but it’s just by the border with Belarus and so Belarus was one of the worst affected places.A quick namecheck for the translator, Keith Gessen, who I’m sure deserves a lot of credit for how well the book reads in English; and just to reiterate, I think this is a really good book and I strongly recommend it.
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This is definitely the best non-fiction book I have ever read, and one of the best books in general. I think for westerners this can be a glimpse in to the hopeless and horrible reality of Chernobyl. Parts of this book are so emotionally heavy that they are almost impossible to read, other parts are impossible to read without outright weeping. It is sometimes horrible to think that this is all real, and people are living this reality every day. I think people have a lot to learn from the Belorussians interviewed in this work, and I would reccommend this book to everyone.On an emotional and psychological level the only thing I can compare this book to is chronicles about the Holocaust, because in a way it tries to accomplish the same type of objective. There is a haunting quality about this that is more terrifying. When one reads about genocide, the evil, the perpetrators are usually obvious, but here the horror lies in the laws of Physics, and it is hard to pin point the culprit, the guilty party. Alexievich writes that she believes she is telling the stories of the future. That is a terrifying statement, and I hope that no one would ever have to live through what many in Belarus are living through today.
—J.
Ok, long review ahead! English version of the book: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear DisasterMy year of birth is forever the Chernobyl year (and in addition to that I share a bday with Hitler…), and Chernobyl has always been a thing I've heard about. Sweden got some of the radiation fallout:...which was probably fortunate, since otherwise who knows how long it would have taken for the world to know about the accident? (On the alert: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en...)But, and I find this really surprising, there aren't many documentaries (on TV) about it or books visible. Like you'd think there'd be, because this is a huge event in modern European history. Yet I get the impression people are a bit "meh" about it and go there on extreme tourism tours. Why is that? Do people even know how many died as a result of it? (Well, seems no one does, because they covered stuff up like mad.) When I lived in Kyiv for three months, I was told not to buy berries from women on the street, because people went to the Chernobyl area to pick them. Reading this book, I feel you should pretty much not buy ANYTHING in Belarus/Northern UA because people more or less took everything there was in Pripjat and surrounding villages to sell it. Including building materials intended for isolating radiation damaged earth and other things. (Did you know that they buried the forest and the soil? And that they were supposed to not dig too deep to avoid hitting the ground water, but people were incompetent and/or drunk so they hit it anyway?)Also, the thing about how Kyiv, possibly my number 1 favorite city, could just as well have taken the majority of the fallout and probably died? Scary. Instead Belarus got 80% of it, which isn't very nice, either.Like the other book by Svetlana Alexievich, Wojna nie ma w sobie nic z kobiety, which I've read and loved, this is a collection of "monologues" from people somehow related to the topic of the book. I found the format a little bit less of a success for this particular event, but still, it's a very good read, and it's very authentic. The author hasn't cleaned up the language of the interviewee. If he calls her a whore, that's what it says in the book. If radioactivity doesn't already freak you out, you should probably read it. At least the first chapter, so you'll know what pain is. And the last one, to get a peak at sadness-induced madness. (Both are terribly sad stories of women whose men died in gruesome ways of radiation.) Also take a look at the chapter named "The Children's Choir", with snippets of conversation from children who all know that they are going to die.Now, a couple of things reoccur in these stories, and I think those kinds of things are interesting to note.t1) The ignorance of the population. No one was really taught anything. No one understood the dangers of having a nuclear power plant as your neighbor. No one could fathom the idea that even though your apples look perfectly fine, they may still kill you. And, there's basic ignorance, but then, when this thing happens the authorities remove books and information on radioactivity from the library. People trying to warn the population were threatened with getting their Party Membership retracted and told to stop helping Western powers sow panic…t2) Corruption. Always with the corruption. Villages were evacuated depending on how high the radiation level in them were. But what does it matter when you can bribe the person recording said radiation levels if you, because you don't understand what radiation is, do not want to leave?t3) The animals. Many, many mention all the animals they had to kill (= all of them). And they mention it with remorse and regret. Surprisingly many Belarusians seem to view nature (plants etc.) as a living being as well. t4) The Soviet Man. If you want to know more about how Soviet people thought, the books of Alexievich are excellent sources. If you come from an individualist society, understanding why people in hundreds sacrifice themselves (wouldn't say thousands, because many of the "volunteers" weren't actually there of their own free will…) for the State, so as to not tarnish the name of Soviet Greatness, can be difficult.t5) Alcohol. Alcohol apparently helps against radiation damage, so the workers were told do drink. And they drank everything, all kinds of fluids containing alcohol. t6) The plans for food production still had to be fulfilled, and higher up "middle managers" were too afraid not to fulfill their original orders to not continue harvesting in heavily contaminated areas. If people stopped buying the produce marked with names from contaminated areas, they just removed the label.. And you know how in Fukushima, they had old people volunteer to do the clean up? The suicide squads? In the Soviet Union, they insisted on using the young.Some more Fukushima-Chernobyl comparisons: maximum level of radiation discovered was 4 times higher in Chernobyl compared to Fukushima, near the reactor, and the amount of radiation released was 5,7 times greater in Chernobyl.This next part is not very relevant for the Chernobyl topic, so I'll put it behind a spoiler to reduce length of the review. It's not a spoiler, though.(view spoiler)[There are quite a lot of disturbing stories in this book, as one would expect there to be. Not all of them are related to Chernobyl per se; some are told by the people Alexievich interviews, explaining why they moved to the Chernobyl area after the event. Because the rest of us are sitting here going, "what? MOVE there? Why would you do that?" But yes, people from war ridden areas actually moved to Chernobyl to find peace. (And slow death, but the peace was/is apparently worth it.) So, one of the stories we get to enjoy is that of how a man, as a child, watches a pregnant woman kill herself by hitting herself in the head with a brick. Just think about that for a while. t1) How on earth do you manage that? The first blow, fine, but then?t2) Was there seriously no other way? The woman was down by the river/creek. Was drowning seriously a worse alternative?This woman is obviously not the focus of the book, she's a memory that fits in three sentences, but I can't get that story out of my head. Not to worry though, I haven't spoiled the entire thing for you, there are TONS of equally disturbing stories left for you to discover. From the same man, we get to know what apparently happened to women in general when left to do too much hard work (when their husbands were at war). Wanna know what it is? Read the book. (hide spoiler)]
—Rebecka
Undoubtedly, this was one the most, if not the most powerfull text written in Russian language for the last few decades. It's a doc book. Svetlana Aleksievich gave voice to dozens of ordinary people who suffered from Chernobyl disaster. They are telling their stories without author interferense, she only gives them opportunity to speak....How soldier was chasing radicative cat around trying to kill it and little girl, owner of the cat was running behind the soldier, screaming: "Run away, little cat, run away"......How head of the city brought his little granddaughter to 1st May demonstration, so people would think everything is allright, there's no radication and later that girl died from leukaemia......How local girls organized several free brothel near the station for liquidators, knowing that they will have to die and liquidators will have to die too...And hundreds of others. Aleksievich was exiled from Belorussia where she lived. Authorities don't want the truth.Now she hides somewhere in Europe.This is only one of five such books by her: others are about Afgan War, Chechen war, Women stories at war... I will read and review them later, the actual books are already on my shelf, but this reading is too strong to swallow all at once.
—Pavel
