Highlights from: Voices from Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievich

The HBO series ’ Chernobyl’ was what got me hooked on this topic. The series was great, but I felt the need to know more about Chernobyl.

This book is a series of interviews taken by Svetlana Alexievich, a Nobel prize winning Belarusian journalist. Most of the highlights here are excerpts from different interviews with the survivors.

This book opened to me a whole new perspective of Chernobyl and sadly, what mankind has done.

Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population.

"The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it."

"Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth."

"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."

"We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore. I had just come home from Afghanistan. I wanted to live a little, to get married. I wanted to get married right away. And suddenly here’s this announcement with a red banner, “Special Call-Up,” come to this address within the hour. Right away my mother started crying. She thought I was being called up again for the war. Where are we going?"

"After Chernobyl you can eat anything you want, but you have to bury your own shit in lead."

"I’m not afraid of death anymore. Of death itself. But I don’t know how I’m going to die. My friend died. He got huge, fat, like a barrel. And my neighbor—he was also there, he worked a crane. He got black, like coal, and shrunk, so that he was wearing kids’ clothes. I don’t know how I’m going to die. I do know this: you don’t last long with my diagnosis. But I’d like to feel it when it happens. Like if I got a bullet in the head. I was in Afghanistan, too. It was easier there. They just shot you."

Leonid Toptunov, he was the one on duty that night at the station and he pressed the red accident button a few minutes before the explosion. It didn’t work. They took him to the hospital in Moscow. The doctors said, “In order to fix him, we’d need a whole other body.” There was one tiny little non-radioactive spot on him, on his back. They buried him at the Mytinskaya Cemetery, like they did the others. They insulated the coffin with foil. And then they poured half a meter of concrete on it, with a lead cover. His father came. He’s standing there, crying. People walk by: “That was your bastard son who blew it up!”

"From above I saw a ruined building, a field of debris—and then an enormous number of little human shapes. There was a crane there, from East Germany, but it wasn’t working—it made it to the reactor and then died. The robots died. Our robots, designed by Academic Lukachev for the exploration of Mars. And the Japanese robots—all their wiring was destroyed by the radiation, apparently. But there were soldiers in their rubber suits, their rubber gloves, running around . . ."

"I suddenly started wondering about what’s better—to remember or to forget? I asked my friends. Some have forgotten, others don’t want to remember, because we can’t change anything anyway, we can’t even leave here. Here’s what I remember. In the first days after the accident, all the books at the library about radiation, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even about X-rays, disappeared."

"Then we discovered a sign, which all of us followed: as long as there were sparrows and pigeons in town, humans could live there, too. I was in a taxi one time, the driver couldn’t understand why the birds were all crashing into his window, like they were blind. They’d gone crazy, or like they were committing suicide."

"Every day they brought the paper. I’d just read the headlines: “Chernobyl—A Place of Achievement.” “The Reactor Has Been Defeated!” “Life Goes On.” We had political officers, they’d hold political discussions with us. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming."

"Want to hear a joke? This prisoner escapes from jail, and runs to the thirty-kilometer zone at Chernobyl. They catch him, bring him to the dosimeters. He’s “glowing” so much, they can’t possibly put him back in prison, can’t take him to the hospital, can’t put him around people. Why aren’t you laughing?" [Laughs.]

"Chernobyl is with us every day. A young pregnant woman died suddenly, without any diagnosis, the pathologist didn’t give a diagnosis. A little girl hanged herself, she was in fifth grade. Just . . . for no reason. A little girl. There’s one diagnosis for everything—Chernobyl. No matter what happens, everyone says: Chernobyl."

"In my opinion — we’re the raw materials for a scientific experiment, for an international laboratory. There are ten million Belarussians, and two million of us live on poisoned land. It’s a huge devil’s laboratory. Write down the data, experiment all you want."

"The world has been split in two: there’s us, the Chernobylites, and then there’s you, the others."

"Yesterday my father turned eighty. The whole family gathered around the table. I looked at him and thought about how much his life had seen: the Gulag, Auschwitz, Chernobyl. One generation saw it all."

"I’m afraid of staying on this land. They gave me a dosimeter, but what am I supposed to do with it? I do my laundry, it’s nice and white, but the dosimeter goes off. I make some food, bake a pie—it goes off. I make the bed—it goes off. What do I need it for?"

"We didn’t understand then that the peaceful atom could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of physics."

"Our son was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class. The other kids were afraid of him, they called him “Shiny.” His childhood had ended so early."

"After Chernobyl—there was an exhibit of children’s drawings, one of them had a stork walking through a field, and then under it, “No one told the stork.”"

"You have no idea how much of what was sent into the Zone as aid came out of it as contraband: coffee, canned beef, ham, oranges. It was taken out in crates, in vans. Because no one had those products anywhere."

"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 . . ."

"We had good jokes, too. Here’s one: An American robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then—breaks down. The Russian robot is up there two hours! Then a command comes in over the loudspeaker: “Private Ivanov! In two hours you’re welcome to come down and have a cigarette break.” Ha-ha!"

"That warm April rain. Seven years now I’ve thought about that rain. The raindrops rolled up like quicksilver. They say that radiation is colorless, but the puddles that day were green and bright yellow."

"We already had thousands of tons of cesium, iodine, lead, circonium, cadmium, berillium, borium, an unknown amount of plutonium (the uranium-graphite reactors of the Chernobyl variety also produced weapons-grade plutonium, for nuclear bombs)—450 types of radionuclides in all. It was the equivalent of 350 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima."

"It was a country of authority, not people. The State always came first, and the value of a human life was zero. Because they might have found ways—without any announcements, without any panic. They could simply have introduced iodine into the freshwater reservoirs, or added it to the milk. The city had 700 kilograms of iodine concentrate for that very purpose—but it just stayed where it was. People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom."

"I have information indicating that the bosses were taking iodine. When my colleagues at the Institute gave them checkups, their thyroids were clean. Without iodine that’s impossible. And they quietly got their kids out of there, too, just in case. And when they went into the area themselves they had gas masks and special robes—the very things everyone else lacked."

"Everything is different for us: we aren’t born the same, we don’t die the same. If you ask me, How do people die after Chernobyl? The person I loved more than anything, loved him so much that I couldn’t possibly have loved him more if I’d given birth to him myself—turned—before my eyes—into a monster. They’d taken out his lymph nodes, so they were gone and his circulation was disrupted, and then his nose kind of shifted, it grew three times bigger, and his eyes became different—they sort of drifted away, in different directions, there was a different light in them now, and I saw expressions in them I hadn’t seen, as if he was no longer himself but there was still someone in there looking out."