Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

by Svetlana Alexievich

I don’t say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come back from. And I can’t tell anyone.

I’m not afraid of death anymore. Of death itself. But I don’t know how I’m going to die. My friend died. He got huge, fat, like a barrel. And my neighbor—he was also there, he worked a crane. He got black, like coal, and shrunk, so that he was wearing kids’ clothes. I don’t know how I’m going to die. I do know this: you don’t last long with my diagnosis. But I’d like to feel it when it happens. Like if I got a bullet in the head. I was in Afghanistan, too. It was easier there. They just shot you. 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!” We’re lonely. We’re strangers here. They even bury us separately, not like they do other people. It’s like we’re aliens from outer space. I’d have been better off dying in Afghanistan. Honest, I get thoughts like that. In Afghanistan death was a normal thing. You could understand it there.

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.

The first time we came, the dogs were running around near their houses, guarding them. Waiting for the people to come back. They were happy to see us, they ran toward our voices. We shot them in the houses, and the barns, in the yards. We’d drag them out onto the street and load them onto the dump truck. It wasn’t very nice. They couldn’t understand: why are we killing them? They were easy to kill. They were household pets. They didn’t fear guns or people. They ran toward our voices.

So it was like this. The smells—I couldn’t understand where this smell was coming from in the village. Six kilometers from the reactor. The village of Masaly. It was like roentgen central. It smelled of iodine. Some kind of sourness. You had to shoot them point blank. This bitch is on the floor with her pups, she jumps right at me. I shoot her quick. The puppies lick their paws, fawning, playing around. I had to shoot them point blank. One dog—he was a little black poodle. I still feel sorry for him. We loaded a whole dump truck with them, even filled the top. We drive them over to our “cemetery.” To be honest it was just a deep hole in the ground, even though you’re supposed to dig it in such a way that you can’t reach any ground water, and you’re supposed to insulate it with cellophane. You’re supposed to find an elevated area. But of course those instructions were violated everywhere. There wasn’t any cellophane, and we didn’t spend a lot of time looking for the right spot. If they weren’t dead, if they were just wounded, they’d start howling, crying. We’re dumping them from the dump truck into the hole, and this one little poodle is trying to climb back out. No one has any bullets left. There’s nothing to finish him with. Not a single bullet. We pushed him back into the hole and just buried him like that. I still feel sorry for him.

I’ll tell you, every person dies just like an animal. I saw this many times in Afghanistan. I, myself, I was wounded there in the stomach, and I was lying in the sun. The heat was unbearable. I was thirsty! “Well,” I thought, “I’m going to die here, like a dog.” I’ll tell you, the blood flows the same way, just like theirs does, and the pain is the same.

We’re often silent. We don’t yell and we don’t complain. We’re patient, as always. Because we don’t have the words yet. We’re afraid to talk about it. We don’t know how. It’s not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there’s us, the Chernobylites, and then there’s you, the others. Have you noticed?

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.

A person who sacrifices himself doesn’t feel himself to be a unique individual. He experiences a longing for his role in life. Earlier he was a person without a text, a statistic. He had no theme, he served as the background. And now suddenly he’s the main protagonist. It’s a longing for meaning.

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. This

I had a conversation once with a young priest. We were standing at the grave of Sergeant-Major Sasha Goncharov. He’d worked on the roof of the reactor. It’s snowing and the wind is blowing. Terrible weather. The minister is reading the mourning prayer without a hat on his head. “It’s like you didn’t feel the weather,” I said to him afterward. “It’s true,” he said. “In moments like that I feel all-powerful. No church rite gives me so much energy as the mourning prayer.” I remember that—the words of a man who was always near death.

Not long ago my brother visited me from the Far East. “You’re all like black boxes here,” he said. He meant the black boxes that record information on airplanes. We think that we’re living, talking, walking, eating. Loving one another. But we’re just recording information!

He came back. We went to visit his parents. He was spackling a wall with his father when he fell down. We called an ambulance, took him to the hospital—he’d received a fatal dose of leukocytes. He returned with one thought in his mind: “I’m dying.” He became quiet. I tried to convince him it wasn’t true. I begged him. He wouldn’t believe me. Then I gave him a daughter, so he’d believe me. I’d wake up in the morning, look at him: how am I going to make it by myself? You shouldn’t think a lot about death. I chased the thoughts away. If I’d known he’d get sick I’d have closed all the doors, I’d have stood in the doorway. I’d have

locked the doors with all the locks we had.

Now I sing in the church choir. I read the Bible. I go to church—it’s the only place they talk about eternal life. They comfort a person. You won’t hear those words anywhere else, and you so want to hear them.

Chernobyl happened, and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren’t used to it, that everyone has his separate life. Until then no one needed this life. But now you had to think: what are you eating, what are you feeding your kids? What’s dangerous, what isn’t? Should you move to another place, or should you stay? Everyone had to make her own decisions. And we were used to living—how? As an entire village, as a collective—a factory, a kolkhoz. We were Soviet people, we were collectivized.

It’s such beautiful land out there. The old forests are still there, ancient forests. The winding little streams, the color of tea and clear as day. Green grass. People calling to each other through the forest. For them it was so natural, like waking up in the morning and walking out into your garden. And you’re standing there knowing that it’s all been poisoned. 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.” 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.]

I believe that the three-dimensional world has become crowded for mankind. 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 explosion of a large number of nuclear warheads will result in enormous fires. The atmosphere will be saturated with smoke. Sunlight won’t be able to reach the earth, and this will ignite a chain reaction—from cold to colder to colder still. This man-made version of the end of the world has been taught since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. But atom bombs won’t disappear even after they destroy the last warhead. There will still be the knowledge of atom bombs.

For us, city dwellers, the home is a machine for living in. For them it’s an entire world, the cosmos.

Not long ago I was so happy. Why? I’ve forgotten. It feels like another life now. I don’t even understand, I don’t know how I’ve been able to begin living again. Wanting to live. But here I am. I laugh, I talk. I was so heartbroken, I was paralyzed. I wanted to talk with someone, but not anyone human. I’d go to a church, it’s so quiet there, like in the hills. So quiet, you can forget your life there. But then I’d wake up in the morning, my hand would feel around—where is he? It’s his pillow, his smell. There’s a tiny bird running around on the windowsill making the little bell ring, and it’s waking me up, I’ve never heard that sound before, that voice. Where is he?

And I proposed to him myself, I asked him: “Marry me. I love you so much!” I fell in love up to my ears. He was such a great-looking guy. I was flying through the air. I asked him myself: “Marry me.” [Smiles.] Another time I’ll think about it and find ways of cheering myself up—like, maybe death isn’t the end, and he’s only changed somehow and lives in another world. I work in a library, I read a lot of books, I meet many people. I want to talk about death, to understand it. I’m looking for consolation. I read in the papers, in books, I go to the theater if it’s about death. It’s physically painful for me to be without him—I can’t be alone.

Now I forget that face—the face I had then, with him. I don’t see that face anymore in the mirror.

But if anyone touched me now, I think, I’d cry and cry. Who took him away from me? By what right?