Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

by Svetlana Alexievich

You can’t take your belongings! All right, I won’t take all my belongings, I’ll take just one belonging. Just one! I need to take my door off the apartment and take it with me. I can’t leave the door. I’ll cover the entrance with some boards. Our door—it’s our talisman, it’s a family relic. My father lay on this door. I don’t know whose tradition this is, it’s not like that everywhere, but my mother told me that the deceased must be placed to lie on the door of his home. He lies there until they bring the coffin. I sat by my father all night, he lay on this door. The house was open. All night. And this door has little etch-marks on it. That’s me growing up. It’s marked there: first grade, second grade. Seventh. Before the army. And next to that: how my son grew. And my daughter. My whole life is written down on this door. How am I supposed to leave it?

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 the chickens had black cockscombs, not red ones, because of the radiation. 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.”

“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.”

The radio wasn’t saying anything, and the papers weren’t either, but the bees knew. They came out on the third day. Now, wasps—we had wasps, we had a wasps’ nest above our porch, no one touched it, and then that morning they weren’t there anymore—not dead, not alive. They came back six years later. Radiation: it scares people and it scares animals. And birds. And the trees are scared, too, but they’re quiet. They won’t say anything. It’s one big catastrophe, for everyone. But the Colorado beetles are out and about, just as they always were, eating our potatoes, they scarf it down to the leaf, they’re used to poison. Just like us.

The war—that’s the only thing I can talk about. 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.

thinker says, I don’t remember his name, but in effect he says: “Evil is not an actual substance. It is the absence of good, in the way that darkness is simply the absence of light.”

I clipped an article from the newspaper. It’s about the operator Leonid Toptunov, he was the one on duty that night at the station and he pressed the red accident button a few minutes before the explosion. It didn’t work. They took him to the hospital in Moscow. The doctors said, “In order to fix him, we’d need a whole other body.” There was one tiny little non-radioactive spot on him, on his back. They buried him at the Mytinskaya Cemetery, like they did the others. They insulated the coffin with foil. And then they poured half a meter of concrete on it, with a lead cover. His father came. He’s standing there, crying. People walk by: “That was your bastard son who blew it up!”

When I got in the car, I remembered for some reason the American astronauts who’d flown to the moon, and one of them later became a priest, and the other apparently went crazy. I read that they thought they’d seen cities, some kind of human remnants there. I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they’re safer than samovars.

A group of scientists flew in on a helicopter. In special rubber suits, tall boots, protective goggles. Like they were going to the moon. This old woman comes up to one of them and says, “Who are you?” “I’m a scientist.” “Oh, a scientist. Look how he’s dressed up! Look at that mask! And what about us?” And she goes after him with a stick. I’ve thought a few times that someday they’re going to start hunting the scientists the way they used to hunt the doctors and drown them in the Middle Ages.

“Chernobyl,” he’d say, “happened so that philosophers could be made.”

We didn’t kill the turtles. If you ran over a turtle with your jeep, the shell held up. It didn’t crack. Of course we only did this when we were drunk.

He didn’t mention the dead girl, didn’t feel sorry for her for a second. He just wanted to see it and remember it. So he could draw it later on. And I started remembering how he used to ask me what color the fire at the station was, and whether I’d seen cats and dogs that had been shot, were they lying on the street? Were people crying? Did I see how they died? After that . . . I couldn’t be with him anymore. I couldn’t answer him. [After a pause.] I don’t know if I’d want to meet with you again. I think you look at me the same way he did. Just observing me and remembering. Like there’s an experiment going on. I can’t rid myself of that feeling. I’ll never rid myself of it. Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I’d never heard those words before.

something’s not right. And then it hits me: I don’t smell anything. The garden is blooming, but there’s no smell! I learned later on that sometimes the body reacts to high doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs. At the time I thought of my mother, who’s seventy-four and can’t smell, and I figured this had happened to me too. I asked the others, there were three of us: “How do the apple trees smell?” “They don’t smell like anything.” Something was happening to us. The lilacs didn’t smell—lilacs! And I got this sense that everything around me was fake.

In Khoyniki, there was a “plaque of achievement” in the center of town. The best people in the region had their names on it. But it was the alcoholic cab driver who went into the radioactive zone to pick up the kids from kindergarten, not any of the people on the plaque. Everyone became what he really was.

I met this one man, he was saying that this is because we place a low value on human life. That it’s an Asiatic fatalism. A person who sacrifices himself doesn’t feel himself to be a unique individual. He experiences a longing for his role in life.

At the meetings of government commissions, every day it was very simply said: “We’ll need to put down two to three lives for this. And for this, one life.” Simply, and every day.

Now they’re dying. But if they hadn’t done this? I consider them heroes, not victims, of a war, which supposedly never happened. They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war. The Chernobyl monuments look like war monuments.

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: “You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl.” He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn’t believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. “She should at least have fingers,” I thought. “She’s a girl.”

“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.

The little girls in the hospitals play with their dolls. They close their eyes and the dolls die. “Why do the dolls die?” “Because they’re our children, and our children won’t live. They’ll be born and then die.”

We ran into an old lady. “Children, tell me, can I drink milk from my cow?” We look down at the ground, we have our orders—collect data, but don’t interact with the locals. Finally the driver speaks up. “Grandma, how old are you?” “Oh, more than eighty. Maybe more than that, my documents got burned during the war.” “Then drink all you want.”

A while ago in the papers it said that in Belarus alone, in 1993 there were 200,000 abortions. Because of Chernobyl.

“The kids draw Chernobyl. The trees in the pictures grow upside-down. The water in the rivers is red or yellow. They’ll draw it and then cry.”

There’s a moment in Ales Adamovich’s book, when he’s talking to Andrei Sakharov about the atom bomb. “Do you know,” says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, “how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?”

The tractor is plowing. I ask the Party worker who’s with us: “Does the tractor driver at least wear a gas mask?” “No, they don’t wear them.” “What, you didn’t get them?” “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.” “How can you do that?” “Easy for you to say, Professor. If you lose your job, you’ll find another one. Where am I going to go?”

And the May Day parade? No one forced us to go—no one forced me to go there. We all had a choice and we failed to make it. I don’t remember a more crowded, cheerful May Day parade. Everyone was worried, they wanted to become part of the herd—to be with others.

“We’ll die, and then we’ll become science,” Andrei used to say. “We’ll die and everyone will forget us,” Katya said. “When I die, don’t bury me at the cemetery, I’m afraid of the cemetery, there are only dead people and crows there,” said Oksana. “Bury me in the field.”

Another time the nurse from the nearby clinic comes, she just stands in the hallway and refuses to come in. “Oh, I can’t!” she says. And I can? I can do anything. What can I think of? How can I save him? He’s yelling, he’s in pain, all day he’s yelling. Finally I found a way: I filled a syringe with vodka and put that in him. He’d turn off, forget the pain. I didn’t think of it myself, some other women told me, they’d been through the same thing.

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

He wrote down in his notebook: “When I die, burn the remains. I don’t want you to be afraid.” There’d been rumors that even after dying the men from Chernobyl are radioactive. I read that the graves of the Chernobyl firefighters who died in the Moscow hospitals and were buried near Moscow at Mitino are still considered radioactive, people walk around them and don’t bury their relatives nearby. Even the dead fear these dead.