Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
by Svetlana Alexievich
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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to show more suffering and courage in our time.". show lessTags
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Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, interviewed hundreds of people affected by the Chernobyl explosion. There are the pregnant wives of the firefighters who were sent onto the roof of the reactor and died of radiation poisoning within weeks, or of the soldiers who survived for a year or two, whose children were born dead, or damaged; scientists who tried to tell the truth; refugees from Chechnya so desperate that they moved into the contaminated zone; old people who moved back home to their farms; young women for whom giving birth is a sin; young men and women who will spend their lives alone because noone will marry a survivor of Chernobyl. People went to watch the burning reactor. Their children played outside show more in earth that will be contaminated with radioactive isotopes for thousands of years. 20% of the land in Belarus is contaminated. Radioactive milk, meat, fruit and vegetables were sold at markets outside the contaminated zone and people bought them because they were cheaper.
This book was agonising to read, but too important to avoid. show less
This book was agonising to read, but too important to avoid. show less
This one took me a while to get through, I think in part because it is not a novel, but rather a series of monologues. Spoken by individuals who lived the Chernobyl disaster zone at the time of the accident, as well as people who moved to the area after the incident, it was a chilling tale that felt like science fiction. I learned a lot - for example, I learned that refugees are moving to Chernobyl because it's practically abandoned and no one will kick them out. I learned more about what the effects of living in a radioactive zone. One eerie thing about this book is that in some ways I felt like I was reading about life during quarantine - we are not in an active war, but everything feels dangerous and people are still dying. There is show more a fear of going out and living life, but at the same time, life must be lived and sometimes we forget about what's going on in the larger scheme of things, and just have our own interactions with our community as if nothing ever happened.
It was the final line of the book that really gave me chills, though. The author was speaking about how many nuclear bombs and reactors exists around the world, and how technically this book is about history, but, she notes, "I felt like I was recording the future." show less
It was the final line of the book that really gave me chills, though. The author was speaking about how many nuclear bombs and reactors exists around the world, and how technically this book is about history, but, she notes, "I felt like I was recording the future." show less
Uno de los libros más tristes que he leído. Cada historia tiene una forma distinta de ser desgarradora y terrible. Los coros y coros de gente le dibujan al lector con sus experiencias personales el fin de una era y de una potencia mundial. Chernóbil queda como un símbolo de nuestro afán de modernidad rebelándose en nuestra contra y evidenciándonos como seres fallidos. Buena prosa, simple y directa, muy comunicativa. Algunos dicen no estar de acuerdo con las ideas políticas de la autora, y es muy válido, pero no por eso hay que despreciar su trabajo literario y periodístico. Así como pasó con Solzhenitzin, no siempre es bueno tener razón antes de tiempo, y aún no ha transcurrido el tiempo suficiente para saber si pasará lo show more mismo con Alexeievich. Por mientras, lo mejor es leer su obra y discutirla. show less
The first interview is with the widow of one of the firemen who were sent in on the first day. He'd been shoveling radioactive sludge dressed in only jeans and a t-shirt, his skin turned grey over an afternoon, he literally fell apart within days. She caught cancer from sitting at his bedside as he died.
The second interview is with a psychologist who lived through World War II in the Ukraine and still can't find anything that compares to working in the Zone.
The third is with one of the old women who moved back a few years later, lives illegally in her little cottage out in the woods. What else is she supposed to do? The radiation can't be that bad if you can't see it.
The fourth is with a father trying to explain how it feels to bury his show more daughter, dead from a disease that, officially, cannot exist.
And so on and so on and so on.
Voices From Chernobyl is one of the harshest reportage books I've read. Aleksievich doesn't try for objectivity, for a whole picture, for a rational explanation of the hows and whys and the why nots of what happened on 26 April 1986 outside Pripyat, Ukraine, and the aftermath. The coverups, the reassurances, the suicidal heroism, the disintegration of the USSR along with the people who had to keep on living on radioactive ground. Chernobyl is too big, she argues; its a trauma of mythical proportions, one whose full effect we don't even know yet (certainly not in 1997), it cannot be understood with mere numbers anymore than the Holocaust or the plague can, you need stories. So the book consists of only that; interviews, with Aleksievich's own questions removed, leaving only a chorus of disembodied voices identified only by their first name and a title. Some have enough distance to it to offer their ideas of how it could happen (blame communism, blame decadence, blame deep-rooted Russian fatalism, blame alcohol, blame...), while others cannot look away from their own memories. What it all means to them.
The soldiers who dove, voluntarily, into the cooling tank to vent it manually. Dead now, of course.
The people sent in with orders to find entire cities clean. Who measured lethal radiation in breast milk and could do nothing about it.
The flag they raised over the reactor when the sanitation was supposedly finished, to celebrate the Soviet state's victory.The radiation annihilated it within days. So they raised another one.
A joke: both the Japanese and the US donated experimental remote-controlled robots to be used in the cleanup. The Japanese robot lasted an hour before the radiation fried it. The US robot lasted three hours. The Soviet robot worked for 8 hours, then its commanding officer said "Good work, Private Ivanov, you may take a break." The soldiers were told vodka was good for flushing the radiation out of your system.
The teacher who thought she would be safe by only buying the most expensive food, surely that would be OK... until she found out that the officials had raised the prices on food from contaminated areas to make sure people ate less of that.
The official who realised, to his horror, that the pits they dug to bury the tools and machines they used at the accident site were empty; everything sold on the black market, spread all around the Union, with no way to tell a highly radioactive tractor from a normal one.
The mother, fighting desperately for the life of a daughter born without a lower body; forget walking, she can't even take a dump.
And so on and so on and so on.
It's not the book you should read to get an overview of what happened. It doesn't have any answers, any conclusions, its subjectis too big to do anything but start to outline the questions surrounding a trauma that, argues Aleksievich, hasn't been dealt with yet. 25 years on, 15 years after being written, it's probably in dire need of a sequel. But it is an absolutely bone-chilling documentary. show less
The second interview is with a psychologist who lived through World War II in the Ukraine and still can't find anything that compares to working in the Zone.
The third is with one of the old women who moved back a few years later, lives illegally in her little cottage out in the woods. What else is she supposed to do? The radiation can't be that bad if you can't see it.
The fourth is with a father trying to explain how it feels to bury his show more daughter, dead from a disease that, officially, cannot exist.
And so on and so on and so on.
Voices From Chernobyl is one of the harshest reportage books I've read. Aleksievich doesn't try for objectivity, for a whole picture, for a rational explanation of the hows and whys and the why nots of what happened on 26 April 1986 outside Pripyat, Ukraine, and the aftermath. The coverups, the reassurances, the suicidal heroism, the disintegration of the USSR along with the people who had to keep on living on radioactive ground. Chernobyl is too big, she argues; its a trauma of mythical proportions, one whose full effect we don't even know yet (certainly not in 1997), it cannot be understood with mere numbers anymore than the Holocaust or the plague can, you need stories. So the book consists of only that; interviews, with Aleksievich's own questions removed, leaving only a chorus of disembodied voices identified only by their first name and a title. Some have enough distance to it to offer their ideas of how it could happen (blame communism, blame decadence, blame deep-rooted Russian fatalism, blame alcohol, blame...), while others cannot look away from their own memories. What it all means to them.
The soldiers who dove, voluntarily, into the cooling tank to vent it manually. Dead now, of course.
The people sent in with orders to find entire cities clean. Who measured lethal radiation in breast milk and could do nothing about it.
The flag they raised over the reactor when the sanitation was supposedly finished, to celebrate the Soviet state's victory.The radiation annihilated it within days. So they raised another one.
A joke: both the Japanese and the US donated experimental remote-controlled robots to be used in the cleanup. The Japanese robot lasted an hour before the radiation fried it. The US robot lasted three hours. The Soviet robot worked for 8 hours, then its commanding officer said "Good work, Private Ivanov, you may take a break." The soldiers were told vodka was good for flushing the radiation out of your system.
The teacher who thought she would be safe by only buying the most expensive food, surely that would be OK... until she found out that the officials had raised the prices on food from contaminated areas to make sure people ate less of that.
The official who realised, to his horror, that the pits they dug to bury the tools and machines they used at the accident site were empty; everything sold on the black market, spread all around the Union, with no way to tell a highly radioactive tractor from a normal one.
The mother, fighting desperately for the life of a daughter born without a lower body; forget walking, she can't even take a dump.
And so on and so on and so on.
It's not the book you should read to get an overview of what happened. It doesn't have any answers, any conclusions, its subjectis too big to do anything but start to outline the questions surrounding a trauma that, argues Aleksievich, hasn't been dealt with yet. 25 years on, 15 years after being written, it's probably in dire need of a sequel. But it is an absolutely bone-chilling documentary. show less
So, one evening on Twitter I was chatting with some friends about female Nobel laureates for literature and I decided to put my money where my mouth was and read some – other than those I’d already read, Lessing and, er, Jelinek… And so I bought myself copies of Herta Müller’s The Appointment (see here) and Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer. I knew nothing about either writer, other than the fact they had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Chernobyl Prayer is… probably going to be one of my top five reads of the year come December. Yes, it is that good. Read it now. Alexievich has made a career out of publishing the stories told to her by people regarding certain events, and in Chernobyl Prayers she interviewed lots show more of people in Belarus and Ukraine about the nuclear reactor meltdown in that town, and used their accounts to build a narrative of events and the effects of the accident. I remember Chernobyl being on the news and, like most people in Western Europe, I never really understood the damage wrought by the disaster. It was severely downplayed by governments and the media throughout the world – but nowhere quite as extensively as it was in the USSR, especially in the areas most affected by Chernobyl. Chernobyl Prayers is not only eye-witness accounts of the disaster and its immediate aftermath, but every account editorialises on the incident, on the USSR and Russian character, and so provides a rich and deep portrait. I’ve heard it said Alexievich “embellishes” the testimonies she collects, but I was under the impression going in that Chernobyl Prayers was on the borderline between fact and fiction, and that’s an area I enjoy exploring in literature. So I consider that a value-add, not a criticism. I’ve since added Alexievich’s next book, Second-Hand Time, to my wishlist. show less
Chernobyl 25 de abril 1986 1:23 am
Una Planta nuclear con fines de abastecer de energía
4 reactores
exploto uno
Los primeros, los bomberos
murieron en 14 días, se caían a pedazos.
Numero de muertos totales, indeterminado, hoy día siguen muriendo personas a causa de esto, deformaciones genéticas, cáncer, tierras de cultivo, agua, animales, todo contaminado, la contaminación durará al menos otros miles de años.
Para el día siguiente de la explosión se reportaron niveles altos de radiación en:
Polonia, Alemania, Austria y Rumanía
Para el 30 de Abril en
Suiza e Italia
para el 1 y 2 de mayo en
Francia, Bélgica, Países Bajos, Gran Bretaña y Grecia
Para el 3 de Mayo
Israel, Kuwait, Turquía y Japón
el 5 en la India y China el 6 en Estados show more Unidos
El mundo se lleno de niveles altos de radiación en menos de una semana, no, no se van, no, no se quita, al menos no en un corto tiempo
En plena guerra fría, no hubo bombas nucleares que tanto temíamos, hubo un accidente nuclear que hizo el trabajo solo.
Muchas personas tuvieron que evacuar, los hicieron irse a otro lado, muchos murieron, otros siguen vivos y enfermos, otros, ahí siguen viviendo
¿que hay de esa gente que vivió todo esto, que tuvo que dejar todo, de un día para otro?
citas:
"Cuando entro a la ciudad de Chernobyl, no se si estoy viendo el pasado o el futuro"
"Tampoco salia el queso, nos pasábamos un mes sin nata ni queso. La leche no se cortaba, sino que se hacia polvo, un polvo blanco. De la radiación"
Hubo quien regreso, a ese lugar desolado, pero es ahí donde viven porque ahí tienen su casa, hay riesgos si, pero de algo deberán morir, dicen
Están los refugiados de Kazajistan que prefieren la radiación a las balas, la primera no se ve....
No es un libro que cuenta la historia del accidente, es un libro que habla de las personas, lo que vivieron, lo que viven, lo que sienten ante una tragedia en la que no había antecedentes de nada, "¿que son los átomos a todo esto?"
Se burlan de ellos mismos: ¿cuanto es 7 mas 7? no se preguntarle a alguien de Chernobyl
Un tragedia sin precedentes, Una tragedia que puede volver a pasar, una tragedia que nos toca a todos, pero que todo el mundo se calla, porque si, pasan documentales, pero ¿las personas de a pie? ¿esas que todo lo perdieron? ¿los perros, los gatos que dejaron atrás? ¿los animales que se sacrificaron a punta de pistola? En aras de ¿que? ya estaban contaminados,
Ver personas contar como hicieron lo que tenían que hacer, es decir, limpiar la contaminación, limpiar el reactor para poderlo amurallar, matar los animales contaminados, quitar la radiación de la tierra y enterrarla, pero esas personas, dieron la vida para que nosotros podamos tener la nuestra, verdaderos héroes olvidados, por el mundo, por su gobierno, por su país, por un tiempo les dieron apoyo medico, hoy en muchos casos, ya no tienen eso.
Niños que siguen naciendo enfermos, pero que no son considerados parte de esta desgracia, porque políticamente prefieren cerrar los ojos, mientras toda esa gente sigue viviendo la desgracia de un accidente nuclear.
Extraordinario libro, estremecedor, esclarecedor, un monologo de varios actores principales. show less
Una Planta nuclear con fines de abastecer de energía
4 reactores
exploto uno
Los primeros, los bomberos
murieron en 14 días, se caían a pedazos.
Numero de muertos totales, indeterminado, hoy día siguen muriendo personas a causa de esto, deformaciones genéticas, cáncer, tierras de cultivo, agua, animales, todo contaminado, la contaminación durará al menos otros miles de años.
Para el día siguiente de la explosión se reportaron niveles altos de radiación en:
Polonia, Alemania, Austria y Rumanía
Para el 30 de Abril en
Suiza e Italia
para el 1 y 2 de mayo en
Francia, Bélgica, Países Bajos, Gran Bretaña y Grecia
Para el 3 de Mayo
Israel, Kuwait, Turquía y Japón
el 5 en la India y China el 6 en Estados show more Unidos
El mundo se lleno de niveles altos de radiación en menos de una semana, no, no se van, no, no se quita, al menos no en un corto tiempo
En plena guerra fría, no hubo bombas nucleares que tanto temíamos, hubo un accidente nuclear que hizo el trabajo solo.
Muchas personas tuvieron que evacuar, los hicieron irse a otro lado, muchos murieron, otros siguen vivos y enfermos, otros, ahí siguen viviendo
¿que hay de esa gente que vivió todo esto, que tuvo que dejar todo, de un día para otro?
citas:
"Cuando entro a la ciudad de Chernobyl, no se si estoy viendo el pasado o el futuro"
"Tampoco salia el queso, nos pasábamos un mes sin nata ni queso. La leche no se cortaba, sino que se hacia polvo, un polvo blanco. De la radiación"
Hubo quien regreso, a ese lugar desolado, pero es ahí donde viven porque ahí tienen su casa, hay riesgos si, pero de algo deberán morir, dicen
Están los refugiados de Kazajistan que prefieren la radiación a las balas, la primera no se ve....
No es un libro que cuenta la historia del accidente, es un libro que habla de las personas, lo que vivieron, lo que viven, lo que sienten ante una tragedia en la que no había antecedentes de nada, "¿que son los átomos a todo esto?"
Se burlan de ellos mismos: ¿cuanto es 7 mas 7? no se preguntarle a alguien de Chernobyl
Un tragedia sin precedentes, Una tragedia que puede volver a pasar, una tragedia que nos toca a todos, pero que todo el mundo se calla, porque si, pasan documentales, pero ¿las personas de a pie? ¿esas que todo lo perdieron? ¿los perros, los gatos que dejaron atrás? ¿los animales que se sacrificaron a punta de pistola? En aras de ¿que? ya estaban contaminados,
Ver personas contar como hicieron lo que tenían que hacer, es decir, limpiar la contaminación, limpiar el reactor para poderlo amurallar, matar los animales contaminados, quitar la radiación de la tierra y enterrarla, pero esas personas, dieron la vida para que nosotros podamos tener la nuestra, verdaderos héroes olvidados, por el mundo, por su gobierno, por su país, por un tiempo les dieron apoyo medico, hoy en muchos casos, ya no tienen eso.
Niños que siguen naciendo enfermos, pero que no son considerados parte de esta desgracia, porque políticamente prefieren cerrar los ojos, mientras toda esa gente sigue viviendo la desgracia de un accidente nuclear.
Extraordinario libro, estremecedor, esclarecedor, un monologo de varios actores principales. show less
Reading ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is an extraordinary experience, surprisingly different to [b:War's Unwomanly Face|4025275|War's Unwomanly Face|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1338204032s/4025275.jpg|15615499]. Svetlana Alexievich employs the same technique: a mosaic of voices, recounting memories in their own words. Actually, I think that’s part of its power: to produce such a stark contrast with events that took place forty years before. Reading [b:War's Unwomanly Face|4025275|War's Unwomanly Face|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1338204032s/4025275.jpg|15615499] is extremely upsetting, because it tells of such horrors. The experiences of the women in the Red Army traumatised and scarred show more them, yet there is an unequivocal meaning behind them. These women fought the Nazis and eventually beat them. While the human cost of victory on the Eastern Front is beyond imagination, there is no question that fighting the Nazis was the right thing to do. That the war was a grotesque waste, that the Soviet authorities needlessly threw away lives as if they were endless, that the women later questioned certain things that they’d done: none of this changes the fact that the Red Army was right to fight the Nazis. This moral certainty runs through the book, with the frequent implication that only by suffering through hells could the war be won. Somewhat perversely, the reader finds themself wondering if the Red Army’s utter disregard for individual lives was necessary. The war turned against the Nazis on the Eastern Front, thanks to the Red Army - could any Western European army have done the same? An over-simplistic question, but a haunting one.
That point in history shows what the Soviet system could achieve with its overwhelming emphasis on collectivity and disregard for individual lives. Conversely, ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ demonstrates how that same system, that same mentality, enabled catastrophe four decades later. Indeed, a great many interviewees contrast the war with Chernobyl. They had been prepared for nuclear war, yet none those drills were of the slightest help when actual disaster came. The nature of this disaster exposed the fractures in the Soviet system and helped to usher in its end. The testimonies in this book add up to a devastating indictment. While the government scrambled to ignore and cover up what was happening, local residents and clean-up workers were receiving lethal doses of radiation. This went on for months, even years.
‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is no systematic history, it’s a series of personal reflections. From those who saw the reactor glow in sky, whose husbands shovelled detritus off its roof, who still refuse to leave the exclusion zone, who detected the radiation from their universities and tried to raise the alarm, who organised the response, who were born after the disaster and are dying of leukemia. From this clamour of voices, a story of utter state failure to protect its population emerges. There was no excuse.
Yet there are other reasons to be terrified of the Chernobyl disaster. It could have been handled so much better and so many lives could have been saved, but it could also have been so much worse. I hadn’t previously realised that many people died so that the melted reactor fuel could be prevented from reaching groundwater. Had that happened, the resulting explosion could have rendered much of Russia and Europe uninhabitable. The sacrifice of those who knowingly poisoned themselves to save millions should not be forgotten. Conversely, what was the point of the sacrifice of those who spent six months shovelling contaminated soil, without protective gear, in areas that should have been abandoned from the start?
While I found myself considering the whole situation with the comfortable benefit of hindsight, the book itself gives you the immediacy of personal accounts. The cleanup workers knew things weren’t right and were worried, despite having only slight inklings of what they were being exposed to. The interviewees recount their responses: fatalism given their lack of choice, faith in the system, optimism that the hazard pay was worth it, heavy drinking. It seems like a cliche that vodka was considered protective against radiation exposure, but apparently alcohol can legitimately help.
Throughout the book, interviewees try to find wider meaning in the personal and collective tragedies they experienced as a result of Chernobyl. The range of these meanings is a big part of what makes this book truly memorable. There isn’t a sense of voyeuristic observation, because those who Alexievich's interviewed look back, at themselves and events, and perform their own analysis. Who is to blame? Is it useful to blame individuals, or the political system? What does Chernobyl mean for Russian culture, for science, for humanity’s relationship with nature? What does it say about time, about love, about death? I can’t possibly summarise all the answers advanced, given their range. I can only supply a quote that will stay with me:
Before reading ‘Chernobyl Prayer’, I wondered whether it would help me to understand my parents’ opinion of nuclear power. In short, they are resolutely opposed to it. I sometimes find this frustrating, because to me it’s a necessary evil in the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Until we have more flexible electricity grids, baseload power is needed to supplement the more erratic supply from renewables. (An oversimplification, I know.) To me, nuclear power is preferable to burning fossil fuels. To my parents, nuclear power should never be used. Intellectually, I can understand that they grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, they were new parents; I was only a year old. How could this fail to shape their opinions? I grew to adulthood fearing climate change rather than radiation, so cannot fully understand their antipathy. I assumed that this book would give me a sense of that fear. To a point it did, but the overall effect was much more ambiguous.
‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is undoubtedly terrifying and at times the medical details are repulsive. I alternated reading it with gentler books and sitcom episodes, and am very glad I abandoned my initial plan to read it over Christmas. (As if reading Shute’s [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772] during the 2013 Christmas holidays wasn’t idiotic enough.) Yet it doesn’t reduce Chernobyl to a power station failure and thus condemn nuclear power. The disaster was a systemic failure, of politics, of society, even of culture or morality, seemingly continuing to this day. While no interviewee claims to have expected such an event before it occurred, many consider it a logical consequence of the Soviet system, of Russian national character, of humanity’s attempts to conquer the atom. I keep coming back to the word fracture to describe Chernobyl, as it changed the world in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. Perhaps it’s still too soon to understand what it means, as multiple interviewees suggest. Even if all current nuclear power plants were decommissioned, we cannot go back to a pre-nuclear age. As a species, we are already committed to nuclear power. Chernobyl released isotopes that will last hundreds of thousands of years and what we have already built must be maintained in order to avoid further disasters.
While ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ made the fear of nuclear power easier for me to comprehend, I also feel that to stop using it completely would amount to denial, given the imperative of climate change. Greenhouse gases are invisible and linger for tens of thousands of years too. Moreover, sea level rise in particular puts existing nuclear power stations at risk. Undoubtedly there are no easy choices and scientific assessment of risks must be supplemented by testimonies like this, which viscerally convey the nature and scale of disasters. ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ communicates the existential fear of your body being irreparably damaged by something that evolution has given you no means of sensing. To Chernobyl’s victims, radiation is an invisible and incomprehensible poison, damaging not only current but future generations. Alexievich has collected vitally important voices into an utterly compelling and unforgettable document. We must learn from Chernobyl so that it never happens again. show less
That point in history shows what the Soviet system could achieve with its overwhelming emphasis on collectivity and disregard for individual lives. Conversely, ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ demonstrates how that same system, that same mentality, enabled catastrophe four decades later. Indeed, a great many interviewees contrast the war with Chernobyl. They had been prepared for nuclear war, yet none those drills were of the slightest help when actual disaster came. The nature of this disaster exposed the fractures in the Soviet system and helped to usher in its end. The testimonies in this book add up to a devastating indictment. While the government scrambled to ignore and cover up what was happening, local residents and clean-up workers were receiving lethal doses of radiation. This went on for months, even years.
‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is no systematic history, it’s a series of personal reflections. From those who saw the reactor glow in sky, whose husbands shovelled detritus off its roof, who still refuse to leave the exclusion zone, who detected the radiation from their universities and tried to raise the alarm, who organised the response, who were born after the disaster and are dying of leukemia. From this clamour of voices, a story of utter state failure to protect its population emerges. There was no excuse.
Yet there are other reasons to be terrified of the Chernobyl disaster. It could have been handled so much better and so many lives could have been saved, but it could also have been so much worse. I hadn’t previously realised that many people died so that the melted reactor fuel could be prevented from reaching groundwater. Had that happened, the resulting explosion could have rendered much of Russia and Europe uninhabitable. The sacrifice of those who knowingly poisoned themselves to save millions should not be forgotten. Conversely, what was the point of the sacrifice of those who spent six months shovelling contaminated soil, without protective gear, in areas that should have been abandoned from the start?
While I found myself considering the whole situation with the comfortable benefit of hindsight, the book itself gives you the immediacy of personal accounts. The cleanup workers knew things weren’t right and were worried, despite having only slight inklings of what they were being exposed to. The interviewees recount their responses: fatalism given their lack of choice, faith in the system, optimism that the hazard pay was worth it, heavy drinking. It seems like a cliche that vodka was considered protective against radiation exposure, but apparently alcohol can legitimately help.
Throughout the book, interviewees try to find wider meaning in the personal and collective tragedies they experienced as a result of Chernobyl. The range of these meanings is a big part of what makes this book truly memorable. There isn’t a sense of voyeuristic observation, because those who Alexievich's interviewed look back, at themselves and events, and perform their own analysis. Who is to blame? Is it useful to blame individuals, or the political system? What does Chernobyl mean for Russian culture, for science, for humanity’s relationship with nature? What does it say about time, about love, about death? I can’t possibly summarise all the answers advanced, given their range. I can only supply a quote that will stay with me:
We were brought up with a particular kind of Soviet pragmatism. Man was almighty, the crown of creation. He had the right to do whatever he pleased with the world. Ivan Michurin’s phrase was much quoted: ‘We cannot wait for the favours of nature; our mission is to take them from here’. The attempt to inculcate in the people qualities and attributes they did not possess. The dream of global revolution was an aspiration to remake human beings and the world around us. Remake everything! Yes! There’s that renowned Bolshevik slogan: ‘With an iron fist we shall herd the human race into happiness’. The psychology of a rapist. The materialism of a caveman. Defying history, defying nature. And it’s still going on. One utopia collapses and another comes to take its place. Everyone has suddenly started talking about God. God and the market, in the same breath. Why didn’t they go looking for him in the Gulag, in the dungeons of the purges in 1937, at the Party meetings in 1948 which set out to ‘smash metropolitanism’, under Khrushchev when they were destroying churches? The present-day subtext of Russian God-seeking is evil and deceitful.
Before reading ‘Chernobyl Prayer’, I wondered whether it would help me to understand my parents’ opinion of nuclear power. In short, they are resolutely opposed to it. I sometimes find this frustrating, because to me it’s a necessary evil in the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Until we have more flexible electricity grids, baseload power is needed to supplement the more erratic supply from renewables. (An oversimplification, I know.) To me, nuclear power is preferable to burning fossil fuels. To my parents, nuclear power should never be used. Intellectually, I can understand that they grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, they were new parents; I was only a year old. How could this fail to shape their opinions? I grew to adulthood fearing climate change rather than radiation, so cannot fully understand their antipathy. I assumed that this book would give me a sense of that fear. To a point it did, but the overall effect was much more ambiguous.
‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is undoubtedly terrifying and at times the medical details are repulsive. I alternated reading it with gentler books and sitcom episodes, and am very glad I abandoned my initial plan to read it over Christmas. (As if reading Shute’s [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772] during the 2013 Christmas holidays wasn’t idiotic enough.) Yet it doesn’t reduce Chernobyl to a power station failure and thus condemn nuclear power. The disaster was a systemic failure, of politics, of society, even of culture or morality, seemingly continuing to this day. While no interviewee claims to have expected such an event before it occurred, many consider it a logical consequence of the Soviet system, of Russian national character, of humanity’s attempts to conquer the atom. I keep coming back to the word fracture to describe Chernobyl, as it changed the world in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. Perhaps it’s still too soon to understand what it means, as multiple interviewees suggest. Even if all current nuclear power plants were decommissioned, we cannot go back to a pre-nuclear age. As a species, we are already committed to nuclear power. Chernobyl released isotopes that will last hundreds of thousands of years and what we have already built must be maintained in order to avoid further disasters.
While ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ made the fear of nuclear power easier for me to comprehend, I also feel that to stop using it completely would amount to denial, given the imperative of climate change. Greenhouse gases are invisible and linger for tens of thousands of years too. Moreover, sea level rise in particular puts existing nuclear power stations at risk. Undoubtedly there are no easy choices and scientific assessment of risks must be supplemented by testimonies like this, which viscerally convey the nature and scale of disasters. ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ communicates the existential fear of your body being irreparably damaged by something that evolution has given you no means of sensing. To Chernobyl’s victims, radiation is an invisible and incomprehensible poison, damaging not only current but future generations. Alexievich has collected vitally important voices into an utterly compelling and unforgettable document. We must learn from Chernobyl so that it never happens again. show less
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Author Information
30+ Works 8,313 Members
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Stanislav, Ukraine, Soviet Union on May 31, 1948. She became a journalist and wrote narratives from interviews with witnesses to events such as World War II, the Soviet-Afghan war, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Chernobyl disaster. Her books include Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War and War's show more Unwomanly Face. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 for Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- La supplication. Tchernobyl, chroniques du monde après l'apocalypse
- Original title
- Чернобыльская молитва
- Alternate titles
- Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future [UK title]; Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster [US title]
- Original publication date
- 1997
- Important places
- Chernobyl, Ukraine; Prypyat, Ukraine; Belarus; Kiev Oblast, Ukraine; Moscow, USSR; Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine (show all 7); Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Chernobyl, Ukraine
- Important events
- Chernobyl Disaster
- Epigraph
- We are air: we are not earth
Merab Mamardashvili - First words
- (Prologue) I don't know what I should talk about -about death or about love?
On 26 April 1986, at 01:23 hours and 58 seconds, a series of blasts brought down Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, near the Belarusian border. (some historical background)
I don't know what to tell you about. (A lone human voice)
From materials published in Belarusian newspapers in 2005
… Kiev travel agency offers tourist trips to Chernobyl (In place of an epilogue) - Quotations
- Don't write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed—and they really were wonders. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing your... (show all)self in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been, that there shouldn't have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they'd put out a new "Action Update": "men are working courageously and selflessly," "we will survive and triumph."
They gave me a medal and one thousand rubles. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)You see, he looks at life with the eyes of a child.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)In terms of aesthetics, it will be almost comparable with the Eiffel Tower. (some historical background)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)About how much I loved. (A lone human voice)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Visit the atomic Mecca. Affordable prices. (In place of an epilogue) - Original language
- Russian
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 363.1799094776
- Canonical LCC
- TD186.5.B35
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- General Nonfiction, History, Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 363.1799094776 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Public Safety - Police, Crime Investigation Public safety from hazards Hazardous materials Specific types of hazardous materials Radioactive materials, nuclear accidents Ukraine
- LCC
- TD186.5 .B35 — Technology Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering Environmental pollution
- BISAC
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- 6,155
- Reviews
- 98
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- 21