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.
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.
Vasily’s cruel death
Sveltlana’s interview with Lyudmilla reveals an overwhelming level of sheer inhumanity forced upon the firemen and plant workers in reactor number 4:
P. 42
The last two days in the hospital….Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It’s impossible to talk about. It’s impossible to write about. And even to live through.
Lyudmilla was at the same time, unknowingly exposing their unborn child to deadly radiation levels. Almost seven months following Vasily’s death she gave birth:
P. 48
They showed her to me—a girl. “Natashenka,” I called out. Your father named you Natashenka. She looked healthy. Arms, legs. But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight roentgen. Congenital heart disease. Four hours later they told me she was dead.
Birth defects due to radiation poisoning
The following pages are filled with stories of Chernobyl revealing even more hardships As if could be possible. Svetlana describes speaking to another expecting mother in Pripyat living close to the nuclear power plant. She also gave birth months after the accident:
P. 134
When she was born, she wasn’t a baby, she was a little sack, sewed up everywhere, not a single opening, just the eyes. The medical card says: “Girl, born with multiple complex pathologies: aplasia of the anus, aplasia of the vagina, aplasia of the left kidney.
Above all, young families living within the Exclusion Zone had no money to pay for dozens of surgeries required to attempt to save their young infants:
P. 137
With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They would be interested.” So I write. [Tries not to cry.] I write that every half hour we have to squeeze out her urine manually, it comes out through artificial openings in the area of her vagina. Where else is there a child in the world who has to have her urine squeezed out of her every half hour? And how much longer can it go on? No one knows the effect of small doses of radiation on the organism of a child.
Liquidation of animals inside the Exclusion Zone
So this unimaginable cruelty even extended to all animals within the Exclusion Zone. As depicted in HBO’s Chernobyl episode 4: The Happiness of all Mankind, many Liquidators were ordered to kill both domestic and wild animals. Therefore soldiers, simply walking from village to village calling out dogs and cats only to shoot them dead and collect their bodies for mass burials:
P. 159
If they weren’t dead, if they were just wounded, they’d start howling, crying. We’re dumping them from the dump truck into the hole, and this one little poodle is trying to climb back out. No one has any bullets left. There’s nothing to finish him with. Not a single bullet. We pushed him back into the hole and just buried him like that. I still feel sorry for him.
Certainly it was a gamble to learn if one would be drafted as a ‘bio-robot’ forced to clear radioactive graphite from the roof the reactor. As ordered, no solider could stay on the roof for more than 90 seconds due to fatal levels of radiation. Similarly, the Soviets required 340,000 soldiers to decontaminate Chernobyl over an initial two year period.
In conclusion, Svetlana’s writing of Chernobyl is simply overwhelming.
Red Lion Lux | Voices from Chernobyl – International Trailer
TJ Neathery | “Voices of Chernobyl” Collage Documentary