What I Am Reading: "Chernobyl" by Serhii Plokhy

This is what happens when Game of Thrones starts back up: I get interested in other HBO shows advertised, such as their new Chernobyl miniseries. I’ve read a bit about Chernobyl in the past; I read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history, a few years ago. I liked that book, but this book, by Ukranian academic Serhii Plokhy, is a full historical overview.

I found the book through an article in the New York Review of Books, covering three nonfiction books on Chernobyl that have been published recently. This book seemed to offer the most systemic view of the incident; and indeed it describes the Chernobyl disaster as having been caused by “the interaction between major flaws in the Soviet political system and major flaws in the nuclear industry.”

Writing in 2018, Plohky had access to archives opened after Ukraine’s color revolution; in addition, he was a resident of an area relatively near Chernobyl at the time of the incident in 1986, and so had first-hand memories of the milieu. The book has several reactor diagrams, but one thing I could have used was a governmental organization chart, as it can be tough to tell who is the boss of whom between the Ukranian government, the “all-Union” government, and the respective Communist Parties of each entity. Amidst all the official incompetence, downplaying, and cover-up (Gorbachev especially does not come off well), some members of the leadership did act competently, though not always with recognition. Valery Legasov was the Soviet scientist who did a considerable amount of on-the-ground emergency work, and then proceeded to be completely transparent with the international community about the technological failures resulting from the Soviet reactor design. He was widely ostracized for this “betrayal,” and committed suicide within a couple of years. Operating in a different arena, Ukranian Prime Minister Oleksandr Liashko assessed immediately that an evacuation of Pripyat would be required, and had the busses ready to go once he finagled an official sign-off.

Most of the heroes, however, were the Ukranian reformists and environmental activists who pushed for more answers and more action by the Soviet government in the years after the disaster. Plokhy’s Ukranian identity especially moves to the foreground when he spends some time covering the literary reaction in his country, and the role that writers such as Ivan Drach and Alla Yaroshinskaya played in the independence movement (and also how the country’s nuclear program had been a source of cultural pride prior to the disaster). The uproar around Chernobyl at the time helped fuel the demand for glastnost, and the subsequent push for environmental justice helped fuel Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. The anti-nuclear activism took on a nationalist character, as the country’s nuclear plants were largely operated by Russians. Plokhy also briefly mentions how eco-nationalism played a role in other Soviet independence movements, especially in Lithuania. Interestingly, in both cases, independence led to a softening of anti-nuclear stances, as the new republics could no longer rely on the USSR for their energy needs. The book finishes with a modern perspective on an even keel, noting the creation of new reactors in unstable and non-free states, and calls for greater safety. I am a supporter of nuclear power even after a few books on Chernobyl, but this seems like a fair note to me.

All in all, a very interesting book; a good academic update on a subject that I have read about (and now even watched a dramatization of) before. Another tie-in I thought to mention briefly is Mike Davis’ essay on anti-nuclear weapons activism in the United States and USSR; this essay (despite any factual inaccuracies it may possess) really opened my eyes to how anti-nuclear activism, especially in opposing weapons testing, was not limited to middle-class hippies. It was often the province of indigenous populations whose land in both superpowers was used as testing grounds. I thought of it a few times in the course of reading this book, though it covers different ground.