3.5 Stara The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster .

On April 26 1986 the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occured in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quaters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl Presents personal accounts of the tragedy.

I remember here in Ireland in 2002 Iodine tablets designed to counteract radioactive iodine were issued across Ireland amid fears of a terrorist attack on the Sellafield site, which is just 180 kilometres from the Irish coast. The 2002 batch – 14.2million tablets at a cost of €630,000 – expired in 2005 but I do remeber this was a direct fear for Irish people after what happened in Chernobyl.

The book is very interesting and an important account of real and ordinary people and their suffering. It will be thirty years since the accident and yet the suffering will continue for lifetimes to come.

I did however find about half way through the book that the voices tended to blend into one and I found myself a little distracted. We dont get to know any of the voices very well but I can understand the authors reasons for this as its and oral history which is more about expressing the anger fear and love of the time than makeing a connection with the owners of the voices.

There is an organisation here in Ireland which is doing amazing work by flying children from Belarus and placing them in Irish homes for a few weeks each summer. They attend summer camps and enjoy life as Irish children do and its a wondful way to give children from this area a break and to experience a different culture

An interesting and important book. ( )

Reading ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is an extraordinary experience, surprisingly different to [b:War's Unwomanly Face|4025275|War's Unwomanly Face|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1338204032s/4025275.jpg|15615499]. Svetlana Alexievich employs the same technique: a mosaic of voices, recounting memories in their own words. Actually, I think that’s part of its power: to produce such a stark contrast with events that took place forty years before. Reading [b:War's Unwomanly Face|4025275|War's Unwomanly Face|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1338204032s/4025275.jpg|15615499] is extremely upsetting, because it tells of such horrors. The experiences of the women in the Red Army traumatised and scarred them, yet there is an unequivocal meaning behind them. These women fought the Nazis and eventually beat them. While the human cost of victory on the Eastern Front is beyond imagination, there is no question that fighting the Nazis was the right thing to do. That the war was a grotesque waste, that the Soviet authorities needlessly threw away lives as if they were endless, that the women later questioned certain things that they’d done: none of this changes the fact that the Red Army was right to fight the Nazis. This moral certainty runs through the book, with the frequent implication that only by suffering through hells could the war be won. Somewhat perversely, the reader finds themself wondering if the Red Army’s utter disregard for individual lives was necessary. The war turned against the Nazis on the Eastern Front, thanks to the Red Army - could any Western European army have done the same? An over-simplistic question, but a haunting one.

That point in history shows what the Soviet system could achieve with its overwhelming emphasis on collectivity and disregard for individual lives. Conversely, ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ demonstrates how that same system, that same mentality, enabled catastrophe four decades later. Indeed, a great many interviewees contrast the war with Chernobyl. They had been prepared for nuclear war, yet none those drills were of the slightest help when actual disaster came. The nature of this disaster exposed the fractures in the Soviet system and helped to usher in its end. The testimonies in this book add up to a devastating indictment. While the government scrambled to ignore and cover up what was happening, local residents and clean-up workers were receiving lethal doses of radiation. This went on for months, even years.

‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is no systematic history, it’s a series of personal reflections. From those who saw the reactor glow in sky, whose husbands shovelled detritus off its roof, who still refuse to leave the exclusion zone, who detected the radiation from their universities and tried to raise the alarm, who organised the response, who were born after the disaster and are dying of leukemia. From this clamour of voices, a story of utter state failure to protect its population emerges. There was no excuse.

Yet there are other reasons to be terrified of the Chernobyl disaster. It could have been handled so much better and so many lives could have been saved, but it could also have been so much worse. I hadn’t previously realised that many people died so that the melted reactor fuel could be prevented from reaching groundwater. Had that happened, the resulting explosion could have rendered much of Russia and Europe uninhabitable. The sacrifice of those who knowingly poisoned themselves to save millions should not be forgotten. Conversely, what was the point of the sacrifice of those who spent six months shovelling contaminated soil, without protective gear, in areas that should have been abandoned from the start?

While I found myself considering the whole situation with the comfortable benefit of hindsight, the book itself gives you the immediacy of personal accounts. The cleanup workers knew things weren’t right and were worried, despite having only slight inklings of what they were being exposed to. The interviewees recount their responses: fatalism given their lack of choice, faith in the system, optimism that the hazard pay was worth it, heavy drinking. It seems like a cliche that vodka was considered protective against radiation exposure, but apparently alcohol can legitimately help.

Throughout the book, interviewees try to find wider meaning in the personal and collective tragedies they experienced as a result of Chernobyl. The range of these meanings is a big part of what makes this book truly memorable. There isn’t a sense of voyeuristic observation, because those who Alexievich's interviewed look back, at themselves and events, and perform their own analysis. Who is to blame? Is it useful to blame individuals, or the political system? What does Chernobyl mean for Russian culture, for science, for humanity’s relationship with nature? What does it say about time, about love, about death? I can’t possibly summarise all the answers advanced, given their range. I can only supply a quote that will stay with me:

We were brought up with a particular kind of Soviet pragmatism. Man was almighty, the crown of creation. He had the right to do whatever he pleased with the world. Ivan Michurin’s phrase was much quoted: ‘We cannot wait for the favours of nature; our mission is to take them from here’. The attempt to inculcate in the people qualities and attributes they did not possess. The dream of global revolution was an aspiration to remake human beings and the world around us. Remake everything! Yes! There’s that renowned Bolshevik slogan: ‘With an iron fist we shall herd the human race into happiness’. The psychology of a rapist. The materialism of a caveman. Defying history, defying nature. And it’s still going on. One utopia collapses and another comes to take its place. Everyone has suddenly started talking about God. God and the market, in the same breath. Why didn’t they go looking for him in the Gulag, in the dungeons of the purges in 1937, at the Party meetings in 1948 which set out to ‘smash metropolitanism’, under Khrushchev when they were destroying churches? The present-day subtext of Russian God-seeking is evil and deceitful.

Before reading ‘Chernobyl Prayer’, I wondered whether it would help me to understand my parents’ opinion of nuclear power. In short, they are resolutely opposed to it. I sometimes find this frustrating, because to me it’s a necessary evil in the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Until we have more flexible electricity grids, baseload power is needed to supplement the more erratic supply from renewables. (An oversimplification, I know.) To me, nuclear power is preferable to burning fossil fuels. To my parents, nuclear power should never be used. Intellectually, I can understand that they grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, they were new parents; I was only a year old. How could this fail to shape their opinions? I grew to adulthood fearing climate change rather than radiation, so cannot fully understand their antipathy. I assumed that this book would give me a sense of that fear. To a point it did, but the overall effect was much more ambiguous.

‘Chernobyl Prayer’ is undoubtedly terrifying and at times the medical details are repulsive. I alternated reading it with gentler books and sitcom episodes, and am very glad I abandoned my initial plan to read it over Christmas. (As if reading Shute’s [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772] during the 2013 Christmas holidays wasn’t idiotic enough.) Yet it doesn’t reduce Chernobyl to a power station failure and thus condemn nuclear power. The disaster was a systemic failure, of politics, of society, even of culture or morality, seemingly continuing to this day. While no interviewee claims to have expected such an event before it occurred, many consider it a logical consequence of the Soviet system, of Russian national character, of humanity’s attempts to conquer the atom. I keep coming back to the word fracture to describe Chernobyl, as it changed the world in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. Perhaps it’s still too soon to understand what it means, as multiple interviewees suggest. Even if all current nuclear power plants were decommissioned, we cannot go back to a pre-nuclear age. As a species, we are already committed to nuclear power. Chernobyl released isotopes that will last hundreds of thousands of years and what we have already built must be maintained in order to avoid further disasters.

While ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ made the fear of nuclear power easier for me to comprehend, I also feel that to stop using it completely would amount to denial, given the imperative of climate change. Greenhouse gases are invisible and linger for tens of thousands of years too. Moreover, sea level rise in particular puts existing nuclear power stations at risk. Undoubtedly there are no easy choices and scientific assessment of risks must be supplemented by testimonies like this, which viscerally convey the nature and scale of disasters. ‘Chernobyl Prayer’ communicates the existential fear of your body being irreparably damaged by something that evolution has given you no means of sensing. To Chernobyl’s victims, radiation is an invisible and incomprehensible poison, damaging not only current but future generations. Alexievich has collected vitally important voices into an utterly compelling and unforgettable document. We must learn from Chernobyl so that it never happens again. ( )

A profound account of the experiences of people in Belarus to the accident and aftermath at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. This book is a really good example of how oral history can be used to capture stories that professional historians would miss. Read it. ( )

This is a difficult book to read. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop thinking about the stories these people told, their memories, their life and the horrible suffering after the disaster. “There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.” ( )

A harrowing collection of interviews - in the form of monologues - by people connected with the Chenobyl disaster, from the widows of those involved in the cleanup, to an official who participated in the cover-up, people who moved to the restricted area after the disaster to escape genocide elsewhere, one of the hunters tasked with killing animals within the zone, and those who were children at the time. They make clear the ignorance of radiation and thus the terrible danger of all concerned due to the culture of secrecy and cover up in the Soviet Union. This was compounded by the corruption at all levels which led to vast amounts of radioactive goods and food being taken out of the zone and sold for profit in areas that hadn't been evacuated.

The book doesn't set out to describe the chronological timeline of the disaster or the explanation of why it happened. But it forms a companion volume to 'Midnight at Chenobyl' which provides all those and which I read quite recently. The present volume is the personal stories in their own words and a grim tale it makes. A book that will definitely be worth another read, though for me it is surprisingly short given the wealth of material and the hundreds of interviews which we're told the author (really an editor) carried out. Therefore I'm awarding it 4 stars. ( )