A great - and chilling - read is Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_from_Chernobyl). It had a very strong impact when read in original Russian.
Couple vignettes from my memories of this disaster.
My physicist grandfather lived in Gomel during this time and when this happened during all the May holidays, he barricaded his entire family in his apartment for a month, sealing all the cracks around the windows
My parents skipped sending us from Moscow to Grodno, Belarus for the usual summer holidays because of the direction of the plume (NE) which I remember not liking one little bit. They and grandparents also forbade collection of any morel mushrooms which we used to pick in the forests all the time. I think the mushrooms also became considerably fewer in years past.
The translation into english is pretty decent but a bit rough in places, which is understandable. Russian and english are quite different.
"I am ashamed to even remember how the well-known “Warrior with privileges” at the Supreme Council of the USSR mocked this old man, a participant in the Patriotic War,[WW2] Hero of the Soviet Union. Was it only she, mocked only him?"
and this:
"All these notorious activities with trying on gas masks and regarding the poorly drawn posters turned out to be unnecessary."
... stand out to me for various reasons.
This is history told by a participant first hand from a particular place and point in time with a local point of view but with some of the original shackles removed. It is a bit retrospective though.
I find this paragraph in particular to be very powerful:
"The time had come to reward the heroes. There were many of them in Chernobyl, as in every war. Helicopter pilots, chemists, firefighters, nuclear scientists, workers, scientists. I do not know what will become of our orders and medals, whether it will be honorable or shameful to bear the title of Hero of Socialist Labor tomorrow and whether the authorities will replace it with the title of Hero of Capitalist Labor. And with the Order of the October Revolution, everything is clear: It will become the Order of the August or December Counter-Revolution, or even the Devil’s October. I am sure that someday such awards will not be a sign of honor and heroism, but a symbol of betrayal and shame."
Chernobyl is one of the main reasons the USSR collapsed.
Communist parties, as always, cover up disasters to maintain "stability" (ie. credibility as the only governing party.)
The Chernobyl coverup became public, discrediting the party as incompetent at governing.
(At the moment the CCP is attempting to coverup a flood that entered a subway system and a major vehicle tunnel, possibly drowning 1,000 people. Witnesses are being warned to maintain the "local image.")
"Cars trapped in tunnel amid floods in China; Family washed away by mudslides | China in Focus"
You obviously know close to nothing about real USSR. There were HUGE amount of very different (and quite known to citizens) disasters before Chernobyl and Chernobyl by itself added almost nothing to what people already knew about their country and regime. Moreover handling of Chernobyl consequences was a much better than handling of other disasters of the past. So you point about Chernobyl being at least somewhat visible reason in USSR collapse is totally invalid. It may have played some role, but no bigger than minuscule comparing to other reasons.
Much better source than Lenin's Tomb are available. Journalists tend to focus on simplifying, story like explanations, whereas reality is much more complex, even more interesting than the "stories" they tell.
Chernobyl was a mere foot note in the Biographies of Gorbachev.
In fact, ethno national flareups in Nagorno-Karabakh, and rise of anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine and Baltics is perhaps the most critical factors that lead to the collapse of the USSR.
Even on a chronological basis, it would be attribute to Chernobyl. USSR collapsed in 1991 December. Even a month before it collapsed, it wasn't imagined or expected that it would simply collapse that way.
> Even a month before it collapsed, it wasn't imagined ...
Oh I imagined, starting with the fall of Berlin Wall a lot citizens hoped for it collapse but no one really could be so certain. Why do people always need to single out just one cause?
I know a lot about both Chernobyl and the real USSR, and while Chernobyl obviously didn't lead to the collapse directly, it absolutely played the key role in destroying people's trust.
>There were HUGE amount of very different (and quite known to citizens) disasters before Chernobyl
Like what? Three most known disasters of the late Union were Chernobyl, Spitak earthquake, and Ufa train disaster, and the latter only became known because of Chernobyl which opened the valve on the freedom of the press a bit. All three clearly showed three things:
- that government was completely unprepared to natural and man-made disasters, so that the Army had to be involved (MChS was created in Russia after the breakup precisely in response to that, other republics did the same, largely)
- that the party didn't have the interest of people in mind, and was concerned with covering their own asses up first. People responded in the same way - just listen to 'Я вынес из Зоны' by Sergey Uryvin, it's a nice illustration of the atmosphere during liquidation.
- that Glasnost didn't work very well in practice
>Moreover handling of Chernobyl consequences was a much better than handling of other disasters of the past.
Only because it happened in a populated area, was not restricted to military, and was practically impossible to downplay or deny due to that. They still tried, demonstrating that Glasnost was only a declaration with little substance.
Chornobyl was very different from any previous disaster or mass murdering. For many decades, USSR propaganda pictured nuclear as the solution for all future problems. «Nuclear energy + intelligent robots = communism». And then you have nuclear disaster and no robots.
Regarding the else you have just written about... It's just so minuscule comparing to the real issues USSR and it's citizens had that I don't even know what to say about it. Just read some trustworthy books or even wikipedia about economics situation in late USSR and forget all you've just said. You literally don't give a shit about some fancy robots and nuclear disasters in some distant places when you have close to nothing to eat and nothing to put on.
Huh? Mayak was a top secret military facility in a fairly remote area. Its incidents and disasters were only unclassified after the breakup, and weren't known to the population. Chernobyl, on the other hand, was impossible to hide.
I recommend reading Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. It is an elaborate attempt to figure out the reasons behind the collapse. According to the author Chernobyl played a major role.
I don't agree with him and the reason is simple. "Major role" implies that if it had not happened then USSR might would not have collapsed, or it's fate had delayed significantly. But the thing is - even if there were no Chernobyl at all, USSR must have collapsed anyway due to a multitude of enormous internal issues. May be just a little later, but it's absolutely not a question if it would collapsed or not. Therefore Chernobyl just can't have a major role in that.
I don't mean to derail the conversation, but "Marxism" is a body of political and economic thought. Authoritarians who call themselves communists are... a different thing, simply.
Otherwise there wouldn't be a word in left-wing circles to describe the maniacs who apologise for those regimes like the USSR or China (the word is 'Tankies')
America is following the same path. Massive censorship on all social platforms about vaccine damage, and only positive information about the vaccine in the mass media.
I think this vaccination will be similar to chernobyl when looking back. People will be wondering why everyone went along with it.
Very interesting but I don't know if I'd hire this person: "How did you handle the meltdown situation in your production infrastructure?"
"We did everything that needed to be done, nothing wrong, all taken care of, dropped no ball at all, amazing job, all heroes. If there was anything, it was just other teams".
Did anybody find it weird that a series that ended with a rousing affirmation of the value of truth was full of so much gratuitous falsehood?
I was just reading the article and a name popped up: "Mikhail Ivanovich Shchadov", who looked pretty flash in the series, so I looked the real guy up, and one commenter had this to say:
"Mikhail Ivanovich Shchadov, the coal industry minister, is portrayed as a young, weak and fop man who allegedly has nothing to do with coal mining and is far apart from the working class. In real life Shchadov was a strong, rigorous and togated minister who had worked in the coal industry since the age of 15. He was a former miner and mechanic in Siberia."
Literally every time I've looked up something from that series, this has happened. And I've looked up a lot of stuff, because a lot of it didn't seem realistic.
I get trying to make a story dramatic, but when the whole thrust of the movie is about the price of lies, what are we supposed to think? Genuinely baffled.
> Did anybody find it weird that a series that ended with a rousing affirmation of the value of truth was full of so much gratuitous falsehood?
That rousing affirmation of the truth being in a courtroom scene that never happened - quite so, though "weird" doesn't quite cover it. On the subject of the individuals portrayed, I thought its depiction of Anatoly Dyatlov particularly slanderous.
Valery Legasov : Yes, 3.6 roentgen, which, by the way, is not the equivalent of one chest X-ray, but rather 400 chest X-rays. That number has been bothering me for a different reason, though. It's also the maximum reading on low-limit dosimeters. They gave us the number they had. I think the true number is much, much higher. If I'm right, this fireman was holding the equivalent of 4 million chest X-rays in his hand.
“I was oppressed and resented by the overt cynicism of the Western “civilized” society. Not only did they not provide material support, but they did not even express sympathy. At that time they treated us like lepers. And only individual organizations, specialists and entrepreneurs offered their help.”
Being a party boss, he skips the part where the USSR chose not to inform its European neighbours about the catastrophe. They knew when the radiation traveled to Eastern and Northern Europe with the wind. After that European governments started with frantic measures to protect their citizens and ecology.
Obviously, USSR citizens didn't know about it at all. But rumours persisted. I remember my mother listening to Turkish radio from a Black sea resort for the news on Chernobyl.
... after that, at least some of European governments started with not informing their population about the catastrophe and lying frantically about the lack of risks, with full support from the TV stations.
At least in France, where the tradition to infantilise the citizens was apparently as strong back then as it is today.
Apart from the fact that the USSR hid the disaster to save their ugly face and them being communists hellbent on conquering everything, the Western civilization don't owe them a thing. It's really the other way around - the USSR should compensate Western civilizations who suffered from USSR complete and total inadequacy. But USSR being piss poor and miserable, they hardly have anything of value.
Couple vignettes from my memories of this disaster.
My physicist grandfather lived in Gomel during this time and when this happened during all the May holidays, he barricaded his entire family in his apartment for a month, sealing all the cracks around the windows
My parents skipped sending us from Moscow to Grodno, Belarus for the usual summer holidays because of the direction of the plume (NE) which I remember not liking one little bit. They and grandparents also forbade collection of any morel mushrooms which we used to pick in the forests all the time. I think the mushrooms also became considerably fewer in years past.