“But here’s what did happen. My grandfather kept bees, five nests of them. They didn’t come out for two days, not a single one. They just stayed in their nests. They were waiting. My grandfather didn’t know about the explosion, he was running all over the yard: what is this? What’s going on? Something’s happened to nature. And their system, as our neighbor told us, he’s a teacher, it’s better than ours, better tuned, because they heard it right away. The radio wasn’t saying anything, and the papers weren’t either, but the bees knew. They came out on the third day. Now, wasps – we had wasps, we had a wasps’ nest above our porch, no one touched it, and then that morning, they weren’t there anymore – not dead, not alive. They came back six years later. Radiation: it scares people and it scares animals. And birds. And the trees are scared, too, but they’re quiet. They won’t say anything. It’s one big catastrophe, for everyone. But the Colorado beetles are out and about, just as they always were, eating our potatoes, they scarf them down to the leaves, they’re used to poison. Just like us.”
– Anna Badaeva, Chernobyl resident.
This is just one excerpt from the absolutely harrowing Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
The book was so upsetting I could only take a couple pages at a time. Extremely important record of the event, told by those who lived there, those who were hired to clean up the mess (soldiers, firemen, cannon fodder really). It’s devastating.
I just finished reading this, too, and read Alexievich’s Zinky Boys shortly after the Nobel Prize announcement. I actually found that book far more horrifying than Voices from Chernobyl, which surprised me a bit. Maybe it was reading them in the order I did, or reading them so close together? I don’t really know.
This is really just to say that if you got into Voices from Chernobyl you should totally check out Zinky Boys. It blew me away. I’m glad to know her other books are going to be translated in the next couple years.
I will check out Zinky Boys – thanks – although I might have to take a break. I feel like I got radiation poisoning just from READING this book.
There’s a chapter in Michael Dodd’s wonderful book Down with Big Brother (about – of course – the crack-up of the Soviet Empire), and the Chernobyl chapter is chilling. Told from the inside, from the guys working in the reactor.
One of the anecdotes in Voices From Chernobyl really struck me:
One of the soldiers sent in to do the cleanup says that in the midst of the destruction – one of the main things he was aware of – suddenly – was how there were photos of “The Leader” everywhere. On every desk, on every wall, statues everywhere. Somehow it had not struck him before – even though the whole Soviet Union was like that.
There, at Chernobyl, the whole thing suddenly appeared to him in full – the falseness of it, the false worship, the emptiness of the ritual – and when he got back from the assignment he turned in his Communist Party card. He said that was it, for him. It was like Chernobyl busted him out of the cult.
Yeah, that stood out for me as well. Afghanistan seems to have had a similar impact, as that sort of myth-puncturing is everywhere in Zinky Boys. (I agree that a break between the two books is probably wise. A month was apparently insufficient, at least for me.)
As one who was alive for only the last decade of the Cold War, and whose lasting memory of the period before the breakup of the Soviet Union is epitomized by the TV commercials for Reagan-meets-Gorbachev commemorative plates, both of these books have been really enlightening. It’s not a period or subject area that I’ve ever explored, and I think it’s pretty great to be getting my first real exposure from “over there,” rather than from an American.
and thanks again for the other book recommendation.
I will be sure to check it out.
One of the things so unbearably powerful about Voices from Chernobyl is the total lack of editorial interjection. We get the unvarnished stuff.
Some people are like, “Fuck everyone who sent us here, fuck the government, fuck the world.” Some people still cry for the family members they lost. Other people talk about the cats in the street in Chernobyl, cats who had been abandoned.
One of the most upsetting ones was the woman (I think?) who said to Svetlana: “Could you please get a message out? There was a woman in our village … could you see if you could find her? I don’t know her last name but she looked like this. She cannot read or write. She is now alone among strangers. Please please find her.” The woman was mentally disabled and everyone in the village took turns taking care of her.
:)
I have tears in my eyes just typing that out.
I was steeped in the Cold War from the moment of my birth, although it was already on its way out. Or, not really, but the cracks had started getting wider. I’m old enough that the Miracle on Ice really did feel like a battle between the only two superpowers left on the planet. It was real.
It’s funny that Russians are now showing up as “bad guys” in films again, because of Putin, because I grew up with those images of Russians as villains. :)
I’m glad I witnessed that crack-up in real time. I remember sitting with my friends in college, watching people hack away at the Berlin wall, and we all held hands, in tears, amazed at what we were seeing.
An incredible thing.
A while back – maybe 10 years? – a Russian chick – or maybe she was Ukrainian – I’ll have to check – rode a motorcycle out to Chernobyl, and took photographs. It’s still deserted. The houses are in ruins, but in some cases, plates are still on the table – pots on the stove – left there in the haste to evacuate. Like Pompeii. The photos are to totally haunting. I’ll see if I can track it down.
and she wasn’t a journalist on assignment, if I recall correctly. She was just a girl with a motorcycle, a camera, and curiosity.
I knew I had linked to it!!
Here it is:
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/highres/highres.html
You can click around through the galleries. The woman was from Kiev – she now has some photo books out, apparently.
Hi Sheila
I haven’t read yet those 2 books, I think the Zinky Boys would be very interesting, but I’m reading War’s Unwomanly Face, the only one from Alexaievich’s books that already appeared in Chilean bookstores.
It’s like entering a strange world, the WWII not just seen but felt and lived by Soviet girls and women, as remembered when they’re old. They are not shy or reserved in other aspects of life, but that chapter had to be closed, nobody wanted to know (not even their mothers, nor husbands) about their experiences, for decades on. I bet it was a long way to find those women and get them to talk. One of them said: “when you have to obbey a dictator like Stalin who sent your own father to Siberia, you don’t hesitate. We went through the fields killing Germans with a song in our hearts.”
I only find it difficult to read so many short sentences, it’s tiring and I try to overcome the fact that I find it a bit “edited” in the sense that nobody talks like that, I hear mostly Svetlana’s voice. It’s also translated into heavyly Spanish from Spain, not the standard Spanish, which makes it odd. Why didn’t they translate it to English earlier and made my life easier?
// We went through the fields killing Germans with a song in our hearts.” //
Woah.
I need to read that one too. I can’t speak to the translation of this volume – although I would say that some of it does sound rather poetic – although maybe that is because the words are laid out so starkly, if you know what I mean. No “he said” “she said”, no context provided. Just the words and the emotion, everything else stripped away.
It’s brutal. I am making sure I don’t read this one in the hour before I go to sleep.