Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Larisa Z. relates how her four-year-old daughter was born with severe birth defects—she had only one kidney and no anus or vagina—yet survived four surgeries. Larisa complains that the doctors only recently acknowledged that her daughter’s condition was caused by radiation exposure. She adds that her village was initially supposed to be evacuated, but “then they crossed it off their lists—the government didn’t have enough money” (86).

Y. A. Brovkin, an instructor at Gomel State University, recalls driving home from a business trip on a moonlit night and being moved by the appearance of farm fields where the contaminated topsoil had been removed and replaced with white dolomite sand: “It was like not-earth” (89), he says, reflecting how the disaster seemed to have altered physical reality. Musing about why so little has been written about the disaster in comparison to World War II and Stalinism, he argues that this is because of the Chernobyl disaster’s fundamental incomprehensibility: “We don’t know how to capture any meaning from it. […] We can’t place it in our human experience or our human time-frame” (90). Wars eventually end, and they have winners and losers, but “victory” over radioactive fallout is impossible.