I recently returned from a trip to Switzerland. While admiring the holiday lights, I was reading a book wildly incongruous with the beautiful scenery: a gripping account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Immediately after the tragedy, Belarusian journalist (now Nobel laureate) Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of witnesses. n+1 editor Keith Gessen translated this work as Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster in 2005. Though its topic makes for an unlikely book club choice, Voices—the primary source material for a recent Emmy Award-winning HBO series—raises compelling questions about trauma and accountability.
Alexievich’s previous works tackled the Nazi occupation of Belarus and the Soviet-Afghan War, but Chernobyl seems a particularly hard sell. Abandoned ghost towns, cancer-stricken firefighters, genetically mutated infants: such devastation can numb the reader quickly. In his translator’s note, Gessen warns of the “obscene” horror that lies in wait, but also marvels at how the everyday collides with the unspeakable. I was struck by how the interviews (which read more like dramatic monologues) fulfill two key roles. On one hand, they portray the personal consequences of the tragedy in empathetic, poetic language. Yet they also grapple with the political backdrop: How was Soviet ideology complicit in this horrific accident?
The interviewees form a demanding Greek chorus: widowed wives, sick liquidators (the clean-up crew for the reactor and surrounding countryside), re-settlers who refused to evacuate. Among the cacophony, one story captures the loss in quietly eerie terms: the account of Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the young wife of a firefighter. They are “newlyweds” expecting their first child when he is sent to the explosion in shirtsleeves. She spends her family’s savings to follow him to a radiology hospital in Moscow. Concealing her pregnancy to gain admittance, she arrives to watch him disintegrate from radiation sickness. As his hair and skin fall off, she cannot stop visiting him. After his death, her baby dies four hours after birth, compelling her to ask, “Why are these things together—love and death…Who’s going to explain this to me?” This elegiac prologue exemplifies one of the book’s great strengths: the strong wives of liquidators who struggle with the all-encompassing destruction of radiation. They confront the vagaries of science and Soviet pretension, contending with their husbands’ suffering and the measly compensation of a few thousand rubles or a medal.
Voices from Chernobyl sucked me into its dark vortex with these deeply personal musings, but historical questions remain: Why did officials conceal the disaster’s effects under a haze of deceptive, reassuring propaganda? To answer, Alexievich turns to the intelligentsia—scientists, politicians, and scholars who offer a battery of explanations. An environmental inspector observes that “everyone found a justification for themselves,” while a historian points to a fatalist Soviet mindset. A former Communist bigwig insists his superiors didn’t understand that “the world is built on physics, not on the ideas of Marx”: “I’m a product of my time. I’m not a criminal.” Vasily Nesterenko, a physicist turned heroic whistleblower, sums up this position succinctly. “People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom.” In an era when globalization and the decline of the nation-state have become common buzzwords, we would do well to remember how powerful a political collective consciousness can be.
These lingering ideas about blame and responsibility have been a recent talking point due to the miniseries about the disaster, which casts scientists in the role of confrontational heroes. In a New Yorker article, Masha Gessen (translator Keith Gessen’s sister) notes how this formula ignores the apathy and resignation that defined Soviet life. After reading, I’m not sure she gives enough credit to scientists like Nesterenko, who never stopped sounding the alarm despite death threats and imprisonment. Don’t let the terrifying topic scare you away—this book is a tough but rewarding read, and will stay with you long after the last page.
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Keith Gessen (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005)
Photo Credit: Amort1939, Pripyat, Chernobyl, via Pixabay.
