The TV Series Chernobyl: A Masterpiece?

The TV series Chernobyl has been the subject of acclaim by many people. Here, Shannon Bent returns and gives us her generally positive take on the series. However, she also considers the inaccuracies in the show and some of the negative impacts, including the vandalization of the Chernobyl area.

This follows Shannon’s articles on Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie (here) and Topography of Terror (here), the UK’s Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker (here), and the definition of a museum (here).

A 2013 photo of a ferris wheel in Pripyat, the town in which the Chernobyl power plant was. Source: Tiia Monto, available here.

We all love a good war film, or period drama TV show. History carries its own drama and intrigue that we can capitalize on and use for entertainment value. And yes, it is okay to say that you are interested in a movie about the darkest moments for the human race; arguably it is part of the human condition to have interest in ‘horrible’ subjects. And then big film companies have a fantastic ability to take these already amazing, impressive, unbelievable historical subjects and add even more drama, explosions and death to it. Sometimes to the point of impertinence. 

As a historian, historical accuracy is the most important thing in not only my work, but in my own time when enjoying TV, books and films. I enjoy action, drama, suspense. But all this cannot be at the expense of historical accuracy. There’s just no need for it! There are so many war films that take drama and action over the heroic stories of those that actually fought and it is a huge shame. 

Moving away from war

I’m going to move away from war for a moment. I know, shock. In my defense, when you have a degree in something, it tends to occupy your mind more than other subjects. But the first piece of popular culture (using a term harping back to my Sociology class) I want to speak about is the recent HBO series ‘Chernobyl’. I don’t wish to use the word ‘masterpiece’ more than once in this series of articles so let’s get it out of the way first off. This series was a masterpiece. I have never been more gripped, more hooked, more moved, by a piece of cinematography than I was by this mini-series. I was skeptical at first. While the writers, producers and cast list was enough to make anyone impressed, it was the topic that concerned me. We have a tendency to wait a few decades before we begin to encompass historical events like this into popular culture. That, or we begin fairly soon after the event so that it is fresh in everyone’s mind and people that were apart of it can be involved if they wish. The Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986, and not only that but during the most secretive period in the world’s history, the Cold War. (Okay, I lied. I said there was no war in this one. There is. Sorry.) This makes accurately commenting on the subject tricky to say the least. For a start, of course 1986 is within many people’s lifetimes. However, to be crude and obvious about it, not many people that were there have survived to be able to tell their story today. Furthermore, anything that happened within the Soviet Union was kept under tight lock and key, and even with the downfall of the regime in 1991 that supposedly made archives and records accessible to governments, journalists and historians, knowledge on everything that occurred is sketchy at best. Let alone knowledge on a subject as damming as this. 

So, I was skeptical. I was worried if it was going to be handled sympathetically, accurately, and without too much political correctness when it came to ‘pointing the finger’ so to speak. There were many things that could have gone horribly wrong. But we were all in for a positive shock.

The Bridge of Death

The series begins a mere few hours before the disaster occurs yet does a fantastic job at setting the scene in communist Ukraine. It presents Pripyat as the purpose-built town it was intended to be – all existing purely to house workers for the power plant. Filmed in previously communist Lithuania, the architecture is perfectly Soviet. The reactor room was reconstructed on the set with minute accuracy, but we have photos to help us with that. This means costumes etc. can be fairly accurate too. These things should be correct; however, like I say, photos and, lets be honest, logic, should lead to these things being accurate. It’s the smaller matters that may be an issue. 

I’ve just spent the last half an hour annoying my parents who are trying to read the newspaper by reading out lines from various articles I have found online about the accuracy of this series. There seemed to be a consistent item that was cited in these articles – ‘The Bridge of Death’. In the first episode, it is shown that many residents of the town went to stand on a bridge that directly faced the power plant to watch the fire, and this eerie blue glow that sat above it. The episode also depicts a type of ‘ash rain’ falling onto the skin of the onlookers, adults and children alike, presumably radioactive ash. At the end of the episode, in a manner that a lot of historical dramas like to adopt, the producers add in comments about what has been more accurate or extra information about scenes shown before. The comments at the end of this episode claim ‘of the people who watched from the railway bridge, it has been reported that none survived. It is now known as ‘The Bridge of Death’’. This has been highly disputed by just about everyone. A BBC article containing the comments from Mr Breus, an engineer at the power plant and eyewitness of the disaster just hours after it happened, says that many people would have slept through the night and would have only been aware of the explosion the following morning. I am inclined to agree. Depending on how loud the explosion was (and I know that sounds potentially stupid, it is an explosion. It’ll be damn loud. But what I mean is, taking into account proximity to the town, surrounding terrain etc., it may not have been loud enough to wake some people) many people may have continued to sleep unaware. The series practically implies that half the town took a picnic up to the bridge to go and watch. Also, I do not wish to insult the intelligence of the people of Pripyat by implying that an explosion or fire at a nuclear power plant is something to go and watch like one would a firework display. It is more likely that even if residents were aware, most would have done the smart thing of staying in their homes until morning and awaiting official information.

Google this concept and you will find forum after forum, website after website, thread after thread, about how there is no evidence of this being true. Keep in mind this is one of the most highly researched events in history, and I don’t just mean by historians. Every sector of science has taken this one under its wing; environmental scientists, human scientists, biologists, chemists, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists. You name it, they have studied it. Not to mention historians, journalists and writers collecting eyewitness accounts and numerous stories from just about every element of society in Pripyat. If there was a notable amount of people collecting on a bridge to watch the biggest nuclear disaster in history, someone would have noticed the pattern and commented on it. Perhaps this is a case of drama for drama’s sake. People are pretty annoyed about this point. It’s a fairly large misleading point, and furthermore to claim that everyone depicted died is even more misleading.

Chernobyl Tourism

There are various other historical inaccuracies that people have pointed out, and a few accounts of drama for drama’s sake. Overall though, the consensus is that the series was done sympathetically, mostly accurately and with fantastic self-awareness of the enormity of what they were commenting on. Even I, who believe that historical inaccuracy is the worst thing people could grace TV and cinema with, can overlook these elements in favor of overall understanding better the hell that these people went through in dealing with this disaster. But more to the point, very much more to the point than my last 1,000 words have been, far worse and sinister things have come out of this series than just a few historical inaccuracies or dramatization of the facts.

I will forever maintain that the human race is its own greatest vice. We are an incredible species; we develop and research and discover. We advance at the speed of light to make our lives better. Yet we are still infinitely stupid. Within a month of the series airing on its various platforms, visitors to the exclusion zone rocketed in numbers. I guess to be expected, to an extent. If you draw attention to any historical site or event in popular culture, you are, by definition, making it popular. This is very much the point of this series; making history popular and how we react to it. I will also admit my guilt in jumping onto this bandwagon. Many times I have seen a site on TV or read about it in a book or article and insisted on going to see visit it. After all, standing in the place in which history has occurred brings it to life, as I have said before. However, I must say, not many of these places I have been eager to visit contain the most radioactive areas of land on the planet. I considered it, once, when I was looking for interesting trip destinations. While it was cheap to visit (it has considerably risen in price now as I’m sure you can imagine), it was a fleeting consideration and it was short-lived. 

However, unfortunately, many people aren’t flocking to the site to pay their respect to history, to the people that lost their lives because of the tragedy. No, instead they are going there to take selfies and graffiti the buildings. And it is not just the visitors that are capitalizing on ‘dark tourism’. Online and at the site there are gift shops selling souvenirs such as t-shirts with the radioactive symbols on, ‘radioactive glow’ mugs and key rings, fridge magnets and hats. But perhaps more disturbingly than all of this, the official souvenir vendors at the checkpoint entering the exclusion zone are selling bottled ‘radioactive air’ and ‘Chernobyl ice cream’, supposedly made from the contaminated milk of local cows. The amount of times I have used inverted commas in this article to do with this topic is disturbing to me. These elements of gifts and souvenirs are fairly alarming when you consider that they are supposed to be a thing which would give the user radiation poisoning. Apart from being totally stupid, it is the most appalling, unethical, amoral thing I have ever read in my life. 

Reading up on what these tours off, how these tour companies bring bus after bus of people in, making their guests spend longer at these souvenir stands than at the actual site, and then allow these visitors to pick things up, climb into buildings, vandalize the area and litter the now reclaimed wildlife-filled forest is utterly disgusting. Both parties are to blame here. Yes, the people should know better; have some basic humility. But these tour companies shouldn’t be allowing such vile behavior in such a dangerous place. Ultimately, the bottom line is that while living history is amazing, and the concept of standing in the very place that history happened is very important to many including me, this should not be happening. Who is to blame is to be debated, of course, and is hotly contested. To me, everyone is. Everyone from the tour companies to the people behaving badly on the tours are all throwing their hat into this ring of destruction and in some manner competing to see who is worse.

The importance of the media in popularizing history

The question is, seeing as this has all stemmed from the HBO series as the popularity of the site rose along with the viewing figures of the show, how much is the entertainment industry to blame? And I’m referring to more general concepts too, not just Chernobyl; World War battlefield sites and movies, areas of natural beauty that appear in the media, these are all places that have been affected by the emergence of media popularity through TV and film. 

Ultimately, I feel the question is should we have to miss out on educational and entertainment opportunities of TV and movies so that idiots don’t know where to go to defile and destroy an area of great importance to humanity.?

This seems harsh maybe. But if you’ve read anything else I’ve written you may know by now I pull no punches in these articles. I’m fed up with people thinking that their stupid actions should take priority over the preservation of a place in which people lost their lives to try and save others. Not many things can make my blood boil like this topic does. I was beside myself with anger when I began reading the articles I have mentioned and quoted in this piece. I do not believe we should stop creating fantastic pieces such as the series Chernobyl just in case someone decides that they want to graffiti a radioactive building or somebody decides to capitalize on a very real deadly concept of radioactive material and uses it to sell some kind of ‘quirky’ and ‘individual’ gift. However, I feel ultimately this is the price we pay if we wish to encompass sites such as Chernobyl into popular culture. It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, how historically accurate you make your show, you always run a risk of being misconstrued or misinterpreted or simply people missing the point that this area is a) dangerous, b) should be protected, and c) is sacred to the people that once lived there and witnessed this disaster. Even if you can beautifully articulate this point in your work, as I feel Chernobyldid, capitalism will continue to roam free in the area and people will continue to not understand why taking smiling selfies in a reactor room where people lost their lives is in poor taste, to put it mildly. 

Creating series like this are so important for everyone, and I cannot express how vital it is for everyone to understand this topic, no matter how little of it they understand. And if we remove the tour guides, the souvenir shops and the memorabilia, the Chernobylseries has achieved its main goal: one thing is for sure, the disaster of Chernobyl on the April, 26 1986 will never be forgotten. 

What do you think of the article? Let us know below.

References

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/shortcuts/2019/jun/04/chernobyl-welcomes-the-tourists-a-messy-and-morally-queasy-experience

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/dark-tourism-chernobyl/index.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48580177

https://works.bepress.com/philip_stone/31/

Why did the USSR Collapse? Chernobyl, Gorbachev and Glasnost

The death of the last “Old Bolshevik” General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Chernenko, in March of 1985 gave way to the rise of the young, liberal, and ultimately final General Secretary of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. But just over one year after Gorbachev became General Secretary the Chernobyl nuclear explosion took place. Here, Brenden Woldman argues that it was this explosion that was the most important element that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Chernobyl. Last Day of Pripyat by Alexey Akindinov. Source: Alex Akindinov, available here.

Mikhail Gorbachev, newly crowned leader of the USSR in 1985, was a product of the communist system and a firm believer in Soviet ideology. Nevertheless, Gorbachev understood that the USSR was at a crossroads and liberal reforms were necessary for the survival of the Soviet empire.

Gorbachev thought that the enactment of glasnost (openness and a new era of honesty between the government and the people) and perestroika (restructuring of the Soviet economic and political system) would spark a golden age of Soviet ingenuity and would reignite the USSR as a super power. However, the USSR was not ripe for the backlash that would come with glasnost’s emphasis on openness. The reason for Gorbachev to double-down on glasnost was the failed cover-up that came from the Chernobyl disaster. Within a year of Gorbachev’s ascension to power, one of the greatest man-made environmental disasters the world had ever seen placed the Soviet Union in the global spotlight and showed the hypocrisy of the Soviet Union’s new “reformer”.

 The Blast

All was quiet on the morning of April 28, 1986 when Swedish monitoring stations showed an unnaturally sparked heightening of radioactive activity near northern Kiev at the Chernobyl nuclear electricity-generating plant.[1] The Soviet Union did little to confirm reports of the accident or the danger of it. Pravda, the official newspaper of the CPSU, did not report the accident until two weeks after it had occurred and Gorbachev himself did not publically acknowledge the disaster until May 14, nearly three weeks after the initial incident.[2] The reason for this silence was the attempted cover-up of the Chernobyl disaster by Gorbachev and the CPSU, even though the radioactive cloud released was ten times more hazardous than that of the radiation discharged by the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima.[3] However, those two weeks in which the Soviet Union tried to cover-up the severity of the accident showed the fragility and unwillingness of the USSR to implement the so-called media “openness” that was to come with Gorbachev’s glasnost.

The problems with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were well documented before the accident. Government reports dating back to the initial building of the power plant in 1979 showed the brittleness of the structure with a KGB memorandum stating that the Chernobyl plant, “could lead to mishaps and accidents”.[4] The poor quality of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was not shocking to those who had inspected the quality of the structures around the USSR. An accident involving one of the power plants was not a surprising revelation due to their poor quality. Nevertheless, in the early morning of April 26 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant erupted, causing the CPSU to begin plans for a cover-up.

The Failed Cover-Up

After the extinguishing of the fires and the securing of the scene, in depth urgent reports about the nature of the incident were sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[5] When questioning began on the severity of Chernobyl from Europe and the west, the CPSU began to intensify their cover-up plan by sending statements to ambassadors of the Soviet Union throughout the globe. These statements explain that a minor accident had occurred at Chernobyl and that the level of contamination may have exceeded norms, but “not to such a degree that it requires special measures to protect the population” and that the USSR did not need foreign aid as “no foreign nationals in the Soviet Union (particularly specialists or tourists) have made application to relevant Soviet organizations in connection with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident”.[6]

However, readings from radioactive stations across Western Europe showed that the Chernobyl accident was far more severe than initially expected, as journalists, foreign and domestic, reported on the severity of the calamity after the USSR allowed press to come to the scene. As one Pravda journalist reported, the low quality standards, lack of safety equipment, lack of evacuation of public citizens, and the overall “silence of the leaders of the republic” proved the unwillingness of the CPSU to report on the severity of the Chernobyl calamity.[7] It became clear that Gorbachev and the CPSU attempted to downplay the disaster which occurred at Chernobyl. The result was not only an environmental disaster but a political one as well, as the Soviet citizenry doubted the claim that Gorbachev was to be a new and honest General Secretary.

For Gorbachev, the calamity at Chernobyl came from two fronts. The first was the physical, environmental destruction that had occurred and the cleanup that was going to take years and require a lot of money. Yet the second hurt Gorbachev the most, as the attempted cover-up hurt Gorbachev’s reputation as a reformer and the legitimacy of glasnost. It also did not help that this reinforced the view among some of the Soviet citizenry of the poor infrastructure within the USSR in comparison to the west, which sparked the fall of the “Soviet façade”.[8] The embarrassment that came from Chernobyl left Gorbachev more decisive in implementing glasnost rhetoric, but it was too late for many as Soviet citizens began questioning the validity of glasnost.[9]

Life After Chernobyl

Chernobyl was the perfect storm of all the problems that were to come with Gorbachev’s reforms. However, the Chernobyl accident occurred in 1986, five years before the Soviet collapse. In short, there were more trickle down effects to come from glasnost and perestroika. However, the Soviet government was uneasy about granting complete open expression for the first time in the USSR’s history. Yet the embarrassment that followed the Chernobyl accident led Gorbachev to become more decisive and hardheaded with his implementation of glasnost and perestroika.[10]

Open expression became a staple of glasnost. Individuals connected to media began showing the gritty, more realistic portrayal of Soviet life instead of the utopian society depicted in propaganda. Crime, child abuse, suicide, prostitution, homelessness, declining health standards, poverty, and corruption were detailed extensively.[11] TV exposé’s like the news program Fifth Wheel filmed and broadcast the luxurious homes of the party elite in comparison to the impoverished living conditions of the working-class.[12] Soviet history was rewritten to show for the first time that Stalin was a mass murderer who killed millions of innocents and former General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev lived an extravagant, corrupt, and materialistic life. Glasnost opened up a variety of new problems that angered and humiliated many of the Soviet citizenry. The dissolving of the “Soviet façade” intensified.

Soviet essayist Alexander Tsipko summed up the feelings that many citizens felt during the era. True, glasnost created more opportunities for freedom of speech and of the press, but the revelations that came with glasnost on Soviet history completely demoralized the Soviet populace. Tsipko wrote the following to define the shocking feeling that many Soviet citizens had from glasnost’s “therapy by truth”:

No people in the history of mankind was ever enslaved by myths as our people was in the 20th century… We thought that building communism in the USSR was the greatest deed of our people, but we were purposefully engaging in self-destruction…We thought that our national industry, organized like one big factory…was the ultimate achievement of human wisdom, but it all turned out to be an economic absurdity which enslaved the economic and spiritual energies of…Russia.[13]

This powerful sentiment mirrored the feelings to the majority of Soviet citizenry. The heartbreak felt by Tsipko echoed throughout the Soviet Union, as it seemed that everything that Soviet citizens had learned and believed in were all lies fabricated by the CPSU. The feeling of confusion and loss of the Soviet ideology was quickly replaced by open protest and rage against the system that many Soviets had spent their entire lives trusting. Consequently, glasnost allowed open expression of anti-communist and anti-Soviet views that ultimately gained momentum as organized social movements led to public protest against the CPSU.[14] Between the Chernobyl meltdown and the collapse of the USSR was five years of brutal honesty that destroyed many Soviet citizens’ belief in the Soviet system. What sparked this doubt toward the system and the intensification of glasnost was Chernobyl.  

Gorbachev in Retrospect

In a 2006 interview Gorbachev saw Chernobyl as the real reason the Soviet Union collapsed. Chernobyl showed the hypocrisy of glasnost, the CPSU’s unwillingness to be honest with the Soviet people, the economic and environmental devastation on the USSR, and the embarrassment of admitting a cover-up. Combined, they proved to the Soviet people that Gorbachev was not the reformer he claimed to be. Gorbachev states, “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later”.[15] Chernobyl was a moment that represented all the problems and hypocrisies that were to come with Gorbachev’s reforms. Yet this loosening of media relations led to more complications than the Soviet Union could swallow, as the policy of glasnost became more of a problem than a solution. Without the intensification of glasnost the Soviet Union could have survived longer than its collapse in 1991. However, if it was not for the Chernobyl meltdown and its failed cover-up, Gorbachev would not have felt obligated to intensify his policy of glasnost.

Why do you think the Soviet Union collapsed? Let us know below…

 

[1] Diane Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman, Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, 499.

[2] Ibid. 499.

[3] Ibid. 499.

[4] Yuri Andropov. “KGB memorandum from Andropov to the Central Committee, February 21, 1979, on construction flaws at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant”, in Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, 501.

[5] The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “Urgent report on the Chernobyl accident from the first deputy minister of energy and electrification, April 26, 1986” in Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, 501.

[6] The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “Resolution of the Central Committee, April 29, 1986, on additional measures to be taken concerning the damage caused by the Chernobyl accident” & “Central Committee resolution of April 30, 1986, concerning progress in repairing damage caused by the Chernobyl accident” in Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, 505-508.

[7] Vladimir Gubarev. “Report by Pravda journalist Gubarev on his observations at the site, May 22, 1986” in Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, 509-511.

[8] Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, 421.

[9] Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change, 99.

[10] Ibid. 99.

[11] Ibid. 100.

[12] Ibid. 100.

[13] Alexander Tsipko. “Novy Mir 4”, in Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?: Understanding Historical Change, 105.

[14] Ibid 105.

[15] Green Road Journal Writing Staff, "Gorbachev; Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Was Real Cause Of The Collapse of Soviet Union, But It Took 20 Years For The Truth To Come Out, Just Like TMI And Fukushima, Denial Plus Cover Up Is The Norm," A Green Road Journal, April 15, 2016, , accessed October 24, 2016, http://www.agreenroadjournal.com/2012/12/gorbachev-chernobyl-nuclear-accident.html.