Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (trans. by Keith Gessen)
I like reading oral histories as there really isn’t any better way to get an idea of things that really happened from the perspective of those who were there without the narrative being filtered by the author’s agenda. (There is the risk of selective inclusion in the collection of narratives, but I think that’s minimal.) That said, they are also some of the most difficult things to read as the emotion is very raw and unfiltered.
In 1986, there was an explosion in reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Belarus near the Ukraine border in which more than 100 times the radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was released contaminating more than 1/3 of Europe. In the immediate aftermath, the Soviet government mobilized thousands of troops and “volunteers” to try to throw a lid on events while at the same time denying there was anything wrong. Many of those interviewed were “liquidators” (those recruited to evacuate the areas and clean things up) and their spouses and other relatives.
The book was initially published in 1997, about 10 years after the event. This is the English translation released last year. My only real compliant, such as it is, is there is little or no context provided for the narratives. Some have a brief introduction (names and maybe ages or jobs) , but I would have appreciated just a little bit more, like where they lived or what role they were performing in life when the event occurred (say, “a 56-year-old shepherd from 10km to the south” or something like that). Still, that’s a minor complaint. It’s hard to tell for sure, but the translator may have translated this pretty literally as some of the sentence structure is awkward and difficult to make sense of. Then again, many of those interviewed were simple, uneducated farmers and it may be an accurate reflection of the conversation. These are narratives, not interviews, there is no text from the author/recorder apart from a brief epilogue. She does, however, note what’s happening to the speaker (as in [quiet for a long time]).
A difficult as it is, it’s a book that should be read. To learn more about the event itself, visit http://www.chernobyl.info
Update 2007-01-18: An urban exploration of Pripyat.
