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gothicgunslinger 's review for:
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
by Svetlana Alexiévich
I had read an excerpt of another of Svetlana Alexievich's books, Secondhand Time, for a Soviet history class, and I knew I wanted to read more from her. This book has actually been on my to-read list for several years, but when the HBO series on Chernobyl came out, I decided to bump this up to the top. I wanted to read it before giving the show a proper watch, so I could compare the dramatization with real accounts.
"Harrowing" does not even begin to describe this book. It might be the most difficult book I've ever read, and I just spent two years studying war, political violence, and genocide. Voices From Chernobyl presents, in stark terms, a collective grief so absolute that it's hard to grasp its scope.
Chernobyl has been a subject of curiosity to me for a long time. I had never even heard of it until I picked up a copy of National Geographic for a college project in April of 2006 – the 20th anniversary of the disaster. The magazine featured glossy photographs of the abandoned city Pripyat, and I was fascinated. Ever since, I've had an eye on Chernobyl. I read an overview of what happened, but I never fully understood it. I understand it now.
It's been 33 years since the disaster. What has been lost in the public discourse about Chernobyl is how it did not happen in a void. It is easy to think that what was lost was the reactor and the nearby city of Pripyat. Voices From Chernobyl explains how far beyond that it goes. Although the reactor is located in Ukraine, the majority of the fallout fell into nearby Belarus. It's estimated a full 20% of the country's land is contaminated with deadly amounts of radiation. This book highlights the disaster's far-reaching effects: villages haphazardly evacuated, cleanup attempts making the situation worse instead of better, citizens lied to about the dangers for political reasons, and how business had to run as usual. So much of the contaminated land was made up of kolkhozes – Soviet collective farms, where huge swaths of the region got their meat, dairy, and produce. The distribution of contaminated products, both officially and on the black market, makes the spread of contamination innumerable. The longterm effects are ghastly – the book has several interviews with families of the "liquidators," who spent months in the Exclusion Zone with the lackluster cleanup efforts, only to become very sick and die a few years later. Children born with deformities or not at all, or growing up sick with cancers. What is the casualty toll on a disaster of this scale? It is estimated the explosion was the force of 350 Hiroshimas. It is literally beyond anything humankind has seen before, and this incomprehension shows in the befuddlement of the interviewees. They are all struggling to understand something that has never had to be understood before.
There were times in this book when their befuddlement was almost frustrating. How could you not know about the danger? I asked silently. But the answer is simple: I was less than a year old when the disaster happened. I grew up in a world with Chernobyl. These people did not.
Who is to blame for Chernobyl? This was a common theme that came up in the book, along with the comparisons to a war. But it seems to be both everyone and no one. The disaster was an accident, and there were real dangers that the reactor could have exploded again, rendering large swaths of Europe uninhabitable. You read of human sacrifice on a scale we've never had to reckon with before, and some things absolutely had to be done. So Chernobyl certainly had to have some heroes. But there's nothing to be proud of here, just mourned. Burying earth in earth, leveling villages but still letting people back in to work the land and distribute the contaminated food – how many people have died because of mismanaged bureaucracy? How many people are still living with the effects because politicians ignored the hard truths brought to them by scientists?
These may be questions that can only be answered by historians in the far future. But in the meantime, this book provides an essential candle in that vast darkness.
"Harrowing" does not even begin to describe this book. It might be the most difficult book I've ever read, and I just spent two years studying war, political violence, and genocide. Voices From Chernobyl presents, in stark terms, a collective grief so absolute that it's hard to grasp its scope.
Chernobyl has been a subject of curiosity to me for a long time. I had never even heard of it until I picked up a copy of National Geographic for a college project in April of 2006 – the 20th anniversary of the disaster. The magazine featured glossy photographs of the abandoned city Pripyat, and I was fascinated. Ever since, I've had an eye on Chernobyl. I read an overview of what happened, but I never fully understood it. I understand it now.
It's been 33 years since the disaster. What has been lost in the public discourse about Chernobyl is how it did not happen in a void. It is easy to think that what was lost was the reactor and the nearby city of Pripyat. Voices From Chernobyl explains how far beyond that it goes. Although the reactor is located in Ukraine, the majority of the fallout fell into nearby Belarus. It's estimated a full 20% of the country's land is contaminated with deadly amounts of radiation. This book highlights the disaster's far-reaching effects: villages haphazardly evacuated, cleanup attempts making the situation worse instead of better, citizens lied to about the dangers for political reasons, and how business had to run as usual. So much of the contaminated land was made up of kolkhozes – Soviet collective farms, where huge swaths of the region got their meat, dairy, and produce. The distribution of contaminated products, both officially and on the black market, makes the spread of contamination innumerable. The longterm effects are ghastly – the book has several interviews with families of the "liquidators," who spent months in the Exclusion Zone with the lackluster cleanup efforts, only to become very sick and die a few years later. Children born with deformities or not at all, or growing up sick with cancers. What is the casualty toll on a disaster of this scale? It is estimated the explosion was the force of 350 Hiroshimas. It is literally beyond anything humankind has seen before, and this incomprehension shows in the befuddlement of the interviewees. They are all struggling to understand something that has never had to be understood before.
There were times in this book when their befuddlement was almost frustrating. How could you not know about the danger? I asked silently. But the answer is simple: I was less than a year old when the disaster happened. I grew up in a world with Chernobyl. These people did not.
Who is to blame for Chernobyl? This was a common theme that came up in the book, along with the comparisons to a war. But it seems to be both everyone and no one. The disaster was an accident, and there were real dangers that the reactor could have exploded again, rendering large swaths of Europe uninhabitable. You read of human sacrifice on a scale we've never had to reckon with before, and some things absolutely had to be done. So Chernobyl certainly had to have some heroes. But there's nothing to be proud of here, just mourned. Burying earth in earth, leveling villages but still letting people back in to work the land and distribute the contaminated food – how many people have died because of mismanaged bureaucracy? How many people are still living with the effects because politicians ignored the hard truths brought to them by scientists?
These may be questions that can only be answered by historians in the far future. But in the meantime, this book provides an essential candle in that vast darkness.