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,.,. . ..-'. COVEl DESIGN IY MAliNA DIUKMAN
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DIITalaUTIO IN CA.,. ADA IT H. I. FINN AND COMPo\ NT, LTIJ,
PaiNT tO INT HI UNITlD STATIS Of' AMlaiCA
Svedana Alexievich was born in the Ukraine and studied jour
nalism at the University of Minsk. She has received numerous
awards for her writing, including a prize from the Swedish
PEN Institute for "courage and dignity as a writer."
Keith Gessen is coeditor of n + 1 magazine. He has written
about Russia for The Atlantic and The New York Review of
Books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL
VOICES FROM
CHERNOBYL
THOER AHLI STOOFAR N YU CLDEIASRA STER
SVETLANAAl EXIEVICH
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VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL. Copyrig©h 1t99 7, 2006 byS vetlAalneax ievich.
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CONTENTS
fa
Translator's Pre ce IX
Historical Notes
Prologue: A Solitary Human Voice 5
PART ONE: THE LAND OF THE DEAD
About What Can Be Talked About with the
Living and the Dead 25
About a Whole Life Wrinen Down on Doors 31
Soldiers' Chorus 33
About What Radiation Looks Like 51
About a Song Without Words 54
About a Homeland 55
About Repentance 64
By Those Who Returned 67
PART TWO: THE LAND OF THE LIVING
About Old Prophecies 81
About a Moonlit Landscape 84
viii CONTENTS
AbouatM anW hosTeo otWha sH uninWgh en
HeS awC hriFsatl l 86
AbouatS ingBluel let 92
AbouHto wW e Can'Lti vWei thoCuhte khaovn dT olstoy I 00
AbouWta rM ovies 105
A Scream 114
Abouat New Nation 115
AbouWtr itiCnhge rnobyl 123
AbouLti easn dT ruths 129
PeoplCeh'osr us 138
PART THREE: AMAZED BY SADNESS
AbouWth atW e DidnK'nto w:D eatCha nB eS oB eautiful15 1
Aboutth eS hovaenld t hAet om 154
AbouTta kinMge asurements 161
AbouHto wt heF righteTnhiinnggi sn L ifHea ppen
QuietalnydN aturally 163
AbouAtn swers 170
AbouMte mories 173
AbouLto vinPgh ysics 175
AbouEtx pensSiavlea mi 181
AbouFtr eedaonmd t heD reamo fa nO rdinaDreya th 183
Aboutth eS hadoowf D eath 189
AbouatD amageCdh ild 193
AbouPto litSitcraalt egy 195
Bya D efendoeftr h Se oviGeotv ernment 201
AbouItn structions 202
Aboutth eF acts 205
About WWhey L ovCeh ernobyl 213
Children's Chorus 216
A SolitHaurmya nV oice 221
In Place ofa n Epilogue 235
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
n September II, 200 I, after the first hijacked plane hit
0
the World Trade Center, emergency triage stations were
set up throughout New York City. Doctors and nurses
rushed to their hospitals for extra shifts, and many individuals
came to donate blood. These were touching acts of generosity
and solidarity. The shocking thing about them was that the
blood and triage stations turned out to be unnecessary. There
were few survivors of the collapse of the two towers.
The effects of the explosion and nuclear fire at the Chernobyl
power plant in I986 were the exact opposite. The initial blast
killed just one plant worker, Valeriy Khodomchuk, and in the
next few weeks fewer than thirty workers and firemen died
from acute radiation poisoning. But tens of thousands received
extremely high doses of radiation-it was an accident that pro
duced, in a way, more survivors than victims-and this book is
about them.
Much of the material collected here is obscene. In the very
first interview, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of a fireman
whose brigade was the first to arrive at the reactor, talks about
the total degeneration of her husband's very skin in the week
before his death, describing a process so unnatural we should
X TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
never have had £O witness it. ''Any little wrinkle [in his bedding],
that was already a wound on him," she says. "I clipped my nails
down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him."
Some of the interviews are macabre. Viktor Verzhikovskiy,
head of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and
Fishermen, recalls his meeting with the regional Party bosses
a few months after the explosion. They explained that the
Zone of Exclusion, as the Soviets termed the land within thirty
kilometers of the Chernobyl power plant, though evacuated of
humans, was still filled with household pets. But the dogs and
cats had absorbed heavy doses of radiation in their fur, and
were liable, presumably, to wander out of the Zone. The hunt
ers had £O go in and shoot them all. Several other accounts,
particularly those about the "deactivation" of the physical
landscape in the Zone-the digging up of earth and trees
and houses and their (haphazard) burial as nuclear waste-also
have this quasi-Gogolian feel to them: they are ordinary hu
man activities gone terribly berserk.
In the end it's the very quotidian ordinariness of these tes
timonies that makes them such a unique human document. "I
know you're curious," says Arkady Filin, impressed into
Chernobyl service as a "liquidator," or clean-up crew member.
"People who weren't there are always curious. But it was still a
world of people. The men drank vodka. They played cards,
tried to get girls." Or, in the words of one of the hunters: "If
you ran over a turtle with your jeep, the shell held up. It didn't
crack. Of course we only did this when we were drunk." Even
the most desperate cases are still very much part of this "world
of people," with its people problems and people worries.
"When I die," Valentina Panasevich's husband, also a "liqui
dator," tells her as he succumbs to cancer several years after his
stint at Chernobyl, "sell the car and the spare tire. And don't
