Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

A widely shared sentiment in Voices from Chernobyl is the notion that the Chernobyl disaster fundamentally altered the world—both the physical world and individuals’ subjective experience of it—in unprecedented and incomprehensible ways. The elderly village peasants were well acquainted with pain and suffering, having survived Stalinist terror and world war, but knew nothing of radiation. Their lives were defined by agricultural labor and the relationship to land, and their rural isolation mostly insulated them from concern about external affairs. As liquidator Aleksandr Kudryagin puts it, “They don’t have anything to do with the tsar, with the government—with space ships and nuclear power plants, with meetings in the capital” (189). The disaster brought that outside world with its fantastical technology into their very homes, and the containment and decontamination measures—“bury[ing] earth in earth” (171)—transformed familiar pastoral landscapes into a surreal terrain of “not-earth.” Kudryagin notes, “They couldn’t believe that they were now living in a different world, the world of Chernobyl. They hadn’t gone anywhere. People died of shock” (189). The idea that mysterious and invisible forces had permanently poisoned the land and all its fruits was unfathomable. When liquidators confiscated milk and buried crops, Kudryagin recognizes, they were “annull[ing] their labor, the ancient meaning of their lives” (189).