Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

by Svetlana Alexievich

During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%.

“You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself.” And I’m like someone who’s lost her mind: “But I love him! I love him!” He’s sleeping, and I’m whispering: “I love you!” Walking in the hospital courtyard, “I love you.” Carrying his sanitary tray, “I love you.”

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.

people shoot, but it’s God who delivers the bullet. Everyone has his own fate.

I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it.

When a person’s dying, you can’t cry. You’ll interrupt his dying,

I can see his eyes are dull. I didn’t cry. I asked for just one thing: ‘Say hello to our daughter and to my dear mother.’ I prayed that we’d go together. Some gods would have done it, but He didn’t let me die. I’m alive . . .”

And you couldn’t make cheese. We lived a month without cheese and cottage cheese. The milk didn’t go sour—it curdled into powder, white powder. Because of the radiation.”

“They asked the Armenian broadcaster: ‘Maybe there are Chernobyl apples?’ ‘Sure, but you have to bury the core really deep.’ ”

“Everything that’s written in the Bible comes to pass. It’s written there about our kolkhoz, too. And about Gorbachev. That there’ll be a big boss with a birthmark and that a great empire will crumble. And then the Day of Judgment will come. Everyone who lives in cities, they’ll die, and one person from the village will remain. This person will be happy to find a human footprint! Not the person himself, but just his footprints.”

“Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.”

“If you don’t play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’ ”

Lol

“Why did that Chernobyl break down? Some people say, It was the scientists’ fault. They grabbed God by the beard, and now he’s laughing. But we’re the ones who pay for it.”

Why did we come here? To Chernobyl? Because no one’s going to chase us out of here. No one will kick us off this land. It’s not anyone’s land now. God took it back. People left it.

Is there anything more frightening than people?

You fast for your flesh, and you pray for your soul.

I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind. It set me free.

We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.

We knew that vodka helped. It removed the stress. It’s no wonder they gave people those 100 grams of vodka during the war. And then it was just like home: a drunk traffic cop fines a drunk driver.

Don’t write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed—and they really were wonders. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn’t have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor.

And in those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.

There were already jokes. Guy comes home from work, says to his wife, “They told me that tomorrow I either go to Chernobyl or hand in my Party card.” “But you’re not in the Party.” “Right, so I’m wondering: how do I get a Party card by tomorrow morning?”

I got home, I’d go dancing. I’d meet a girl I liked and say, “Let’s get to know one another.” “What for? You’re a Chernobylite now. I’d be scared to have your kids.”

After Chernobyl you can eat anything you want, but you have to bury your own shit in lead.

I’ve wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren’t writing much about it—they write about the war, or the camps, but here they’re silent. Why? Do you think it’s an accident? If we’d beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we’d understood Chernobyl. But we don’t know how to capture any meaning from it. We’re not capable of it. We can’t place it in our human experience or our human time-frame. So what’s better, to remember or to forget?

Someone bought a fox-fur hat at the market, and he went bald.

Have you ever heard of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima? The ones who survived after the bomb? They can only marry each other. No one writes about it here, no one talks about it, but we exist. The Chernobyl Hibakusha.

Everyone became what he really was.

The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That’s what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.

Our neighbors put down a new floor that year from the local forest, and then they measured it, its background radiation was a hundred times over the limit. No one took that floor apart, they just kept living there, figuring everything would turn out fine, somehow, without their help, without their participation.

But my real child is the museum: the Chernobyl Museum. [He is silent.] Sometimes I think that we’ll have a funeral parlor here, not a museum. I serve on the funeral committee. This morning I haven’t even taken off my coat when a woman comes in, she’s crying, not even crying but yelling: “Take his medals and his certificates! Take all the benefits! Give me my husband!” She yelled a long time. And left his medals, his certificates. Well, they’ll be in the museum, on display. People can look at them. But her cry, no one heard her cry but me, and when I put these certificates on display I’ll remember it.

But we always lived in terror, we know how to live in terror, it’s our natural habitat. In this our people have no peers.

This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.

I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: “Your cheeks are red. You’re getting better.” “Mom, take me out of the hospital. I’m going to die here. Everyone here dies.” Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There’s a line for the bathroom—everyone like me is in that line.

“Do you know,” says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, “how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?”

Why is there such an interest in science fiction? Man is trying to tear himself away from the earth. He is trying to master different categories of time, different planets, not just this one. The apocalypse—nuclear winter—in Western literature this has already all been written, as if they were rehearsing it. They were preparing for the future.

The scientists had been gods, now they were fallen angels, demons even.

People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom.

I have information indicating that the bosses were taking iodine. When my colleagues at the Institute gave them checkups, their thyroids were clean. Without iodine that’s impossible. And they quietly got their kids out of there, too, just in case. And when they went into the area themselves they had gas masks and special robes—the very things everyone else lacked.

“Oh, we got plenty! We have enough to last until the year 2000. We just don’t give them out, otherwise there’d be a panic. Everyone would run off, they’d leave.”

that’s also a form of barbarism, the absence of fear for oneself.

The May bugs also disappeared, and they haven’t come back. Maybe they’ll come back in a hundred years or a thousand. That’s what our teacher says. I won’t see them.

He died alone. As everyone dies alone.

I stopped the clocks in the house when he died. It was seven in the morning.