Book Review: Voices from Chernobyl

Photo Credit: Jessica Maynard

“I can still see the bright - crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. It was pretty. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies. They stood in the blast dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.”

It has taken me some time upon completion of the book to be ready to write this review. Stories from this text will stay with you long after the final page, the way the after effects of Chernobyl have stayed with the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus for decades after the incident. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich is an oral history of what occurred in the months and years after the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen. Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people whose lives have been forever changed due to this nuclear disaster and presented them in a monologue format that is both intimate and harrowing. ​

“We paid for the dormitory ourselves. For fourteen nights. It was a hospital for radiation poisoning. Fourteen nights. That’s how long it takes a person to die.”

Popularity of the topic of Chernobyl has risen due to the HBO mini-series which, as if the event was not terrifying enough in real-life, gives a dramatized version of the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 and the events that unfolded after the fatal explosion at the nuclear power plant. Before the mini-series, the nuclear disaster of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was already intriguing due to the fact that it has, since the minutes and hours after the incident, been shrouded in secrecy and lies. ​

“Before we went back we were warned that in the interests of the State, it would be better not to go around telling people what we’d seen. But aside from us, no one knows what happened there.”

The interviews with the survivors took place in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union and were published in 1996, a decade after the nuclear disaster. The emotions of each person, once normal people but now contaminated with radiation and the stigma of being Chernobylites, bleed off the page and reveal the fear, anger, sadness and grief caused by living under a socialist government during the nuclear age. The stories reveal a culture that did not allow anyone to refuse orders due to the Communist Party Card in their pocket and a Communist Party who told dangerous lies to their people in return. ​

“I was absolutely certain that if anything serious happened, they’d tell us. They have all kinds of special equipment - special warning signals, bomb shelters - they’ll warn us. We were sure of it.”

Among those who lent their voices for Voices from Chernobyl are a widow of a firefighter who was one of the first on the scene, widows of liquidators who were sent to clean up the disaster, liquidators who have lived long enough to tell the tale and scientists who tried to speak up about the truth but were threatened to remain silent. The author also spoke with evacuees of Pripyat and villages in the surrounding area, residents who snuck back in after the evacuation to live on the contaminated land, pilots and soldiers involved in the clean up, mothers who gave birth to children with deformities and a few passages by children who were old enough to remember the disaster. ​

“The other day my daughter said to me: ‘Mom, if I give birth to a damaged child, I’m still going to love him.’ Can you imagine that? She’s in the tenth grade, and she already has such thoughts.”

I highly recommend reading Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, a book which Craig Mazin (writer and producer of the HBO mini-series) admitted, “I drew historical fact and scientific information from many sources, but Ms. Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl was where I always turned to find beauty and sorrow.” Ms. Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for her book about Chernobyl as well as her other writings of her country’s tragedies throughout history. I will admit, it was not what I expected. It was better. This is not a timeline of events or a listing of facts. It is a window into a world within a world where the rest of us are too afraid to go through any other means than by the pages of this book. ​

“I know just one thing: I’ll never be happy again.”