Very Good Books About Very Bad Things: Svetlana Alexievich’s "Voices From Chernobyl"

Voices From Chernobyl: An Oral History of the Unthinkable

Do you remember Chernobyl?

I do, but barely. I feel like I’m supposed to say that the memory of the world’s worst nuclear accident is seared into me, but that wouldn’t be true. I was fifteen years old when news of the incident broke, and Chernobyl—wherever that was—sounded scary, but also reassuringly distant.

It was, and it wasn’t. Though I’d grown up in terror of nuclear war—everyone in Washington, D.C. knew we’d be toast half an hour after the start of hostilities—I was confident that little if any radiation would reach me, personally.

I was right, and also wrong. Radiation poisoning works in strange ways, and it can take decades for its effects to become known. This fact is interlaced throughout Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl, an oral history that gives voice to ordinary people put into extraordinary situations. Written only eleven years after the accident, the sense of dread—that the worst may be yet to come—is palpable.

But as wincingly as the book explores the effects of radiation on the human body, it’s what it does to our psyches that has the most lasting effect. Reading the book from a post-COVID perspective adds an uncomfortably raw dimension. I see now that Chernobyl was about trust, and what happens when it vanishes.

As officials in Moscow and Kiev obfuscated and lied, those in the region immediately affected by the accident—some 39,000 square miles, or roughly the entire state of Virginia—were left to their own devices. Here’s a small excerpt, spoken by an environmental inspector tasked with approving shipments into and out of the Exclusion Zone:

I feel worst of all for the people in the villages—they were innocent, like children, and they suffered. [They] couldn’t understand what had happened, they wanted to believe scientists, or any educated person, like they would a priest. But they were told: “Everything’s fine. There’s nothing to fear. Just wash your hands before eating.” 

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.

I had no idea. Writing from the information-saturated environment of today, it’s difficult to impart just how distant the Soviet Union felt in 1986. And if as a proud Washingtonian I took a skeptical perspective on Ronald Reagan and his hollow triumphalism, I knew we weren’t like them, the Soviets. They seemed more like a different species than followers of a different ideology, and I was certain that if tragedy ever struck, we’d care for our people better than they ever would.

What did I know? The years since Chernobyl have provided plenty of indications as to how well our government handles mass tragedy (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job!”). Today, with over 1,100,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, Voices from Chernobyl is especially poignant. For as little faith as I professed then, I see now how much I was hanging on to, and how much of it has slipped away since.