Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Pripyat evacuee Nadezhda Vygovskaya recalls how everyone “spilled out onto their balconies” on the night of the explosion and notes her “great view” of the strangely glowing reactor fire from her ninth-floor apartment (155). She remembers thinking that the fire looked pretty because no one knew how deadly it was: “We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful” (156). After evacuating, she felt stigmatized as a Chernobylite, and her son was bullied at school. However, she says she was “saved” by the courage and toughness of her mother, who had “lost everything […] in the 1930s,” when “they took her cow, her horse, her houses” (157). This probably means that the mother was targeted as a kulak, or relatively prosperous peasant, during Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign. The mother was matter-of-fact about this latest dramatic upheaval in her long life, noting that they survived and merely need to “get through” it. Members of this generation had seen so much suffering that they were unfazed by even an unprecedented nuclear catastrophe.

Chemical engineer Ivan Zhykhov was sent from Kursk to Minsk shortly after the accident. He’d recently completed civil-defense training “where they gave us information from thirty years before” and “taught us how to fall down so that the wave of the explosion would miss us” (159), but that training included no information about radioactive contamination.