Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

by Svetlana Alexievich

There’s something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don’t really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don’t behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren’t heroes.

What does our propaganda consist of? Our ideology? You’re offered a chance to die so that you can gain meaning, and be raised up. They’ll give you a role! That’s the high value of death, because death is eternal.

I feel worst of all for the people in the villages—they were innocent, like children, and they suffered. Farmers didn’t invent Chernobyl, they had their own relations with nature, trusting relations, not predatory ones, just like they had one hundred years ago, and one thousand years ago. And 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.” I understood, not right away, but after a few years, that we all took part in that crime, in that conspiracy. [She is silent.]