Tag: Soviet Union

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HBO’s Chernobyl

In 2019 HBO released Chernobyl, a five part mini series addressing the nuclear disaster, cover-up, and the immediate impact on citizens living in the adjacent town of Pripyat. Today the series is available on HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and Netflix.

Surprisingly this series gained widespread critical acclaim. Receiving 19 nominations, Chernobyl won Emmy awards for Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing. At the same time the series won Golden Globe awards for Best Miniseries or Television Film. In addition, actor Stellan Skarsgård won Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film. Likewise, Jared Harris won Best Actor at the British Academy Awards.

This is certainly a powerful series. This event, over 30 years ago has faded from our memory. Occurring prior to the internet, webpages, and social media Chernobyl has moved it to the background of history. Perhaps the best selling point for watching.

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Latest Read: Voices from Chernobyl

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich is a truly moving work. Svetlana most deservingly won the 2015 Nobel Prize and her work on the lives impacted by the Chernobyl accident is a deeply moving read.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

My previous reads, especially Chernobyl 01:23:40 and Midnight in Chernobyl acknowledge Svetlana’s powerful work.

I certainly wish one could read Voices from Chernobyl and not be affected by the horrors of the world’s worst nuclear accident. However her powerful writing makes this all but impossible.

This book’s storytelling also justifies her Nobel award. The interviews of innocent citizens certainly reminds me of reading The Pentagon Papers. The horrors so demoralizing I had to stop reading such horrific details of war for almost one month. That same impact begins especially within the opening chapters.

Svetlana begins the reader’s nightmare journey with Fireman Vasily Ignatenko and his wife Lyudmilla. The horrors of acute radiation poising above all, does not discriminate. Thus all those innocent firemen worked for over an hour trying to extinguish the exposed nuclear core fires.

Vasily is a proud, strikingly handsome young firefighter. His unit was the first to arrive at reactor number 4, and they all walked right into the exposed core without protective gear. With an exposed core radiation level at 30,000 roentgen per hour Vasily and his fellow firefighters unknowingly found themselves exposed to 5,600 years worth of radiation in just 48 seconds.

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Latest Read: Chernobyl 01:23:40

Chernobyl 01:23:40 The Incredible True Story of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster by Andrew Leatherbarrow. Sincere props to Andrew for self-publishing this well researched book. His trip to Chernobyl in 2016 provides rich insights.

Chernobyl 01:23:40:

While other Chernobyl books are certainly well written from an engineering view of the disaster, Andrew writes a story easy to digest.

He begins with a very strong Chapter: A Brief History of Nuclear Power. Tracing the work of Marie Curie who pioneered ground breaking research into radioactivity. Moreover, her family legacy has five Nobel Prizes. Yet, Marie and her family all died of radioactive poising.

Andrew addresses for the most part, the history of nuclear accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.

In chapter two Chernobyl, Andrew writes a historical view of Chernobyl’s construction from 1970. One of the striking issues was finding documentation of an earlier serious accident at reactor number 1:

It is not well known that there was a severe accident at Chernobyl before the disaster of 1986, which resulted in the partial core meltdown of Unit 1. The incident occurred on September 9th, 1982, and remained secret for several years afterwards.

p. 62

Yet, even after the 1986 tragedy, a third serious accident at reactor number 3 in 1990 would again reveal problems impacting the entire Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

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Latest Read: Midnight in Chernobyl

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham Adam writes for The New Yorker, Wired, The Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazines. Published in 2019 the book is named a New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. Adam won the 2020 William E. Colby Award  for military and intelligence writing. The book also was awarded the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fiction.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

Due to the overwhelming positive response to HBO’s mini series this is a must read to learn the facts versus the dramatic and creative license of television.

The series gained widespread critical acclaim and received 19 nominations and won Emmy awards for Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing.

At the same time the series won Golden Globe awards for Best Miniseries or Television Film and actor Stellan Skarsgård won Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

However Adam’s detailed account sheds truth to the horrors of Chernobyl. We are now learning a much greater internal understanding from a time when information was not freely available. Conversely, the Soviet nuclear power planning would bring the number of reactors at Chernobyl from four to eight.

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Latest read: The Gulag Archipelago

I am not sure why this title The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 came to my reading list…other than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as author. In college August 1914: The Red Wheel 1: A Narrative in Discrete Periods of Time was on my reading list. The story of his own family and Imperial Russia’s role in WWI.
The Gulag ArchipelegoWith the holiday break at MIAD almost over I found time to finish this work’s first volume and re-examine my interest in Soviet history. For the better part of the 1900s – all too often – it delt with this type of control by the communist party in Soviet Russia.

Solzhenitsyn’s writing is so powerful. Soviet oppression beginning after the 1917 revolution and extending into Stalin’s post WWII Russia is one of the most horrific periods of the 20th Century. The amount of suffering and the power of the Checka was overwhelming to read story after story. And reading how many ways the Soviets could torture people…made me think about the amount of suffering and torture that occurred in “break away” Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact nations in 1968. Czechoslovakia and Poland come to mind.

So is it actually possible to torture someone by forcing them to standup for four or five days? Solzhenitsyn clearly proves this was just one of so many terrible treatments people faced for not supporting the communists. His writing provides too many details of the number of vivid examples…all based upon his own stay in a Gulag and the interview with hundreds of fellow prisoners. Solzhenitsyn wrote this in volumes and multiple sections. This is only Volume I Section I “The Prison Industry, Perpetual Motion.” As much as the first section is horribly depressing, his writing in section two is even more compelling.

I must now also acknowledge that Volume II has been to difficult to read. The detail’s provided by Solzhenitsyn too intense, depressing and horrific. The details of torture by the Soviets… A Russian ship carrying prisoners that breaks down at sea, is offered assistance by a Japanese boat — only to be waived off. Dead prisoners were then pushed overboard. Many unknown deaths by systematic torture how all too well the horrors of the Soviet Gulags.