Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Retired psychologist Pyotr S. shares traumatic childhood memories of World War II: “There were battles going on all around. The street was filled with dead people and horses” (26). He adds, “I thought the most horrible things had already happened” (26). However, the Chernobyl disaster taught him that, even in peacetime, he isn’t protected from such horror.

Zinaida Kovalenko is an elderly resident who returned to her village after the evacuation. She describes feeling lonely but seems content to live out her final years at home. Like many rural villagers, she had little understanding of radiation at the time:

[W]e thought: it’s a sort of a sickness, and whoever gets it dies right away. No, they said, it’s this thing that lies on the ground, and gets into the ground, but you can’t see it. […] But that’s not true! I saw it. This cesium was lying in my yard, until it got wet with rain (28).

Her last point illustrates that, although radiation itself is invisible and intangible, people living near the reactor saw plenty of tangible evidence of contamination.

Nikolai Kalugin, a middle-aged Pripyat resident, describes how on the night of the evacuation he wanted to bring the front door of his apartment with him as a “talisman” and “family relic.” He recalls his deceased father having been laid out on that door, in keeping with family tradition, and notes old height-markings from his childhood and that of his son and daughter. Then he abruptly transitions to the memory of taking his wife and six-year-old daughter to the hospital with radiation exposure: “Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room?” (36). His question evokes the unnaturalness of seeing so many young casualties. The hospital staff refused to share test results with him. He notes that when his daughter died, he laid her on that same door.

Here, Svetlana Alexievich offers brief excerpts from a group discussion, without individual attribution. The speakers—all elderly returnees—are Anna, Eva, and Vasily Artyushenko; Sofiya Moroz; Nadezhda and Aleksandr Nikolaneko; and Mikhail Lis. World War II memories are interspersed with memories of the accident and evacuation. One recalls, “Planes, helicopters—there was so much noise. The trucks with trailers. Soldiers. Well, I thought, the war’s begun. With the Chinese of the Americans” (37). Another says, “The police were yelling. They’d come in cars, and we’d run into the forest. Like we did from the Germans” (42). Some take comfort in the fact that they collectively survived both war and Stalinist terror: “Girls! Don’t cry. We were always on the front lines. […] We lived through Stalin, through the war!” (39) Others lament the extent of suffering their generation has endured: “We never did live well. Or in peace. We were always afraid. Just before the war they’d grab people. They came in black cars and took three of our men right off the fields, and they still haven’t returned” (49). These men were presumably targets of Stalin’s 1930s “dekulakization” campaign.