touring the Chernobyl area on a motorbike

Helped ease the housing shortage???

Helped ease the housing shortage???

For people who didn't checked, the context is even more funny:
"marauders in radiation poluted area are not just a regular marauders, they don't steal stuff for themselves. There were cases of radiactive tv sets and other stuff being sold on city second hand markets and then police shot 7 or 8 of them and it helped"
So, I guess "public safety" would be the justification for these killings.

this IS a rather large area of land, left uninhabited for very obvious reasons. it also does suggest some interesting things -- about conservation generally, humanity's place in nature, etc.

(This was a Pizza Hut. Now it's all covered with daisies. You got it. You got it.)

some of them are very 'Silent Hill'

wish I had a permanent link, but it's a javascript window. http://www.slate.com/

I love the idea of wild horses living in old stalinist flats. However those pictures at Slate are just horrendous and heartbreaking.

http://todayspictures.slate.com/inmotion/essay_chernobyl

Has anyone visited Pripyat recently? I'm thinking of going next month if i can arrange a tour.

Has anyone visited Pripyat recently? I'm thinking of going next month if i can arrange a tour.

I keep meaning to do this but never get around to it. Has anyone been?

I can't believe I've never seen this thread. I was obsessed with that woman's site when I first found it. I've not been but I would love to go. You really should and then come back and post pics and tell us all about it so we can live vicariously through you please.

I'll see what i can do!

I visited on Saturday. There seems to be some question about how long tours to the exclusion zone are going to be run for due to safety concerns (the rather prosaic threat posed by crumbling buildings rather than radiation) and I felt that, Ukraine being a country I have a great love for and Chernobyl being such a huge part of its history, it’s somewhere I should get to while I still had the chance.

The tour operators showed the excellent documentary The Battle Of Chernobyl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18o_X696dYw) on the two hour drive from Kyiv, helping to set an appropriate tone. Pripyat isn’t just a spooky ghost town, it’s somewhere tens of thousands of people were fatally poisoned and half a million more pitched in, at great cost to their own health, to prevent a horrific disaster becoming an unimaginable one.

28 firemen were first on the scene - all were dead within weeks. 600 airmen were used to drop bags of sand and boric acid on the reactor – all died of radiation poisoning not long afterwards. From the 10,000 Tula miners who tunnelled into the cooling tanks to prevent another explosion to the ‘bio-robots’ – reservist soldiers who were drafted in to clean uranium rods from the roof of the reactor when the actual robots found the radiation levels impossible - the heroism and sacrifice was absolutely extraordinary. That sacrifice probably prevented a second catastrophe that would have vapourised everything as far as Minsk and rendered Europe uninhabitable in perpetuity. The gravity of the historical and human context means visiting should be undertaken with some respect afforded to other sites of great modern tragedy in Europe. Quite how anyone could be crass enough to greenlight the Chernobyl Diaries is literally beyond me.

http://i.imgur.com/bfxbpI6.jpg?1

There are about 3000 people working in the town of Chernobyl, roughly 18km from the reactor, at any one time. Some, like our official guide, live there in two week shifts but most commute in from Slavutich, a town outside the zone. Most of the work is either focused on scientific monitoring or the construction of a new €1bn sarcophagus for Reactor no.4. The old one is cracking and still contains enough nuclear waste to poison 100m adults. The funding is coming from the EU, as a trade-off for Ukraine closing the other reactors which, remarkably, were still active until the 2000s. Around 150 people live in the zone permanently – illegal but tolerated by the authorities. All are elderly and either couldn’t hack city life or wanted to see out the rest of their life in their old family homes. The number was as high as 800 a few years ago.

On the way through town, we’re given a primer on the region’s history and told that Chernobyl was a majority Jewish town until WW2 and is still one of the most important sites for pilgrimage in Eastern Europe. We’re also told, in uncompromising terms, about the mutual distrust between zone workers and the Orthodox American and Israeli pilgrims who visit ever year – each accusing the other of disrespecting their respective suffering.

The first of the abandoned villages we visit, Kopachi, was considered too dangerous to leave standing due to its wooden architecture so it was knocked down and buried. The only surviving building is the brick nursery. After days of prevarication, during which many of the 130,000 people living in the Chernobyl region received fatal or life-threatening doses of radiation, the entire population was moved out with two hours’ notice, leaving anything they couldn’t physically carry behind them on the understanding that they would be gone for a week or two at most.

http://i.imgur.com/K0AeuEK.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/qFrRpp3.jpg?1" class="noborder">
http://i.imgur.com/yYBtkyt.jpg?1

It’ll be about a thousand years until it’s safe for anyone under the age of 18 to be allowed back.

And here’s the guilty party in the makeshift concrete straightjacket it took 90,000 people six months to create:

http://i.imgur.com/70bYSDV.jpg?1

The new sarcophagus will look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/vHiTHDz.jpg?1

It’s still too dangerous to work directly on the reactor so it’s being built on rails and will be slid into place when finished. Should be ok for about 250 years.

The heart of Chernobyl, its company town Pripyat (pop: 43,000), was just three km away from the reactor. When it exploded local people reported seeing a column of multi-coloured fire stretching a kilometre into the sky and that it was one of the most beautiful things they’d ever seen.

http://i.imgur.com/43D3aGA.jpg?1

Pripyat is huge and entirely deserted. This was the supermarket, with signs for canned vegetables and fruit still in place.

http://i.imgur.com/BkksW9L.jpg?1

The fairground was a fortnight away from opening when the reactor went up.

http://i.imgur.com/3itWTxy.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/a4bX3AL.jpg?1" class="noborder">

The most famous building in the city is the school, though, its floor littered with thousands of tiny, child-sized gas masks.

Despite the disrepair, it still feels like a school – signs telling students to be ‘bold and agile’ and a woodworking classroom that still, remarkably, smelled like every woodworking classroom in the history of the world 28 years after it was last used.

The music room has seen better days, however.

On the way out of the school, we were met by this beautiful creature, a glossy-coated fox with no fear of humans. You got the sense it would have eaten out of our hands, had we had anything worth offering. Rather unromantically, the guide mentioned that you can often pet foxes when they’re in the first stage of rabies as they’re as friendly and docile as domestic dogs, but I’d prefer to believe that they’ve just adapted to an environment where people pose no threat.

Although they were too far away to photograph well, we also saw a team of glorious Mongolian horses dashing through the fields of long grass. A couple of dozen were introduced as an experiment, essentially to see whether or not they’d die or have colts with deformities, but there are hundreds now and they’re going strong. The whole of the Belarussian section of the exclusion zone, as far as I can tell, is kept as a nature reserve and, given that the land will never be lived in again by people, it’s likely the Ukrainian side will follow it back to the wild over time.

The last stop on the trip was a visit to an apartment block, reemphasising that Pripyat was a thriving home to tens of thousands, not just a place for work and study. Each little flat had pretty wallpaper and furniture still standing.

A copy of Kotsiubysnky’s Fata Morgana that will never be finished:

What happened at Chernobyl was terrifying but what could have happened was so many times worse, it did make me question whether nuclear fuel can ever be considered a viable option in the long term. Yes there were design flaws and yes there was human error but the consequences of anything similar happening again, however improbable that may be, are difficult to conceive. There are probably a dozen things that could kill us first but, either way, walking around Pripyat, with its mixture of buildings declining to rubble and relics of everyday domestic life, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, one way or another, this is a glimpse of what the whole world will look like one day. As a memento mori / reminder of the transience of human existence, it’s a humbling experience.

Some of the pictures didn't link correctly so:

http://i.imgur.com/iU3dmWX.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/uEZjwU3.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/BBiEtc8.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/fax4D3y.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/fejSn5r.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/istBWX9.jpg?1

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http://i.imgur.com/GO8F4M4.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/a4bX3AL.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/qFrRpp3.jpg?1

excellent

currently on a wikipedia trawl through chernobyl related stuff

When it exploded local people reported seeing a column of multi-coloured fire stretching a kilometre into the sky and that it was one of the most beautiful things they’d ever seen.

No pictures survived? I imagine the radiation probably fogged all the film within a pretty big radius

these are taken on top of the reactor and survived, although you can see the ionizing artifacts

http://www.jonmwang.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bio-robots-chernobyl.jpg

As far as i know, there are no surviving pictures from the first few hours of the fire. If the radiation didn't get to the film, the KGB probably did.There was a huge effort on the part of the reactor controllers to hide as much evidence as they could from the authorities and, in turn, for the authorities to hide the evidence from the world. If you believe Gorbachev, the news that the reactor had exploded didn't reach him until after Sweden reported the fallout hitting Stockholm two days later. He knew that there had been an accident but claims that the extent was, somehow, hushed up locally.

I recommend the documentaries on YouTube, there are some images of the plant from a few days after, but the documentaries have detailed re-enactments. Sad, but this was how I learned about how a nuclear power plant works.

amazing story and photos, sv

yeah, thank you for sharing sv!

Brilliant reportage and pictures SV.

I am right in thinking that if this disaster had occurred in a nuclear reactor in say England or France rather than the Soviet Union it would have been more catastrophic because the firemen and soldiers would be more likely to down tools rather than embark on a suicide mission? I recall reading that they plied the first responders with vodka and told them it would protect them from the radiation. I need to read a good Chernobyl book because I never realised how potentially even more catastrophic it could have been.

that's an interesting thought

although a disaster of that severity like that is hypothethically much less likely in a western country, there would be severe difficulties in getting enough people to take those risks, by comparison in fukushima there were only fifty people who willingly exposed themselves to high levels of radiation, to get many thousands of people to do that is something else altogether

and if they needed specific skills like the miners to dig underneath the reactor....even if there are enough miners left in this country one doubts how many of them would be prepared to do that

apart from soldiers nobody else could be compelled to work in those conditions and more people were involved in the chernobyl cleanup than are currently in the uk military

so either paying huge amounts of money to people with the right skills or emergency legislation mandating people to work are the only options

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50

I meant to say Am I right? obv

have you read any good chernobyl books nakch?

no i have only read internet stuff about it but the wikipedia page is good and links to other pages where necessary

the most horrifying part is the possibility (as i understand it) that the 'corium' mixture of superheated radioactive isotopes, molten concrete, ash etc would have hit the coolant water in a confined space and created a boiling liquid explosion of such power that it could have acted like the charge in a primitive nuclear weapon and created a fission explosion with the material in the other three reactors

Alexander Akimov, the unit shift chief, and Leonid Toptunov, a technician, falsely believed the water flow to the reactor was blocked by a closed valve, and so they fought their way to where they believed they could pump water back into the reactor and spent hours, submerged to the waist in radioactive water. Both would die a torturous death from radiation poisoning.Later, in hospital, Akimov tried to stand and the skin fell off his leg like a sock.

That is so horrific, fucking hell.

some other stuff on the internet disputes the claim of the soviet physicist that it could have created a nuclear explosion and it would just have been a large conventional explosion that would have spread over a wider area than the first one, although that still would have been fairly catastrophic

Great pictures SV.

I went myself, not long after this thread was initially started. Very interesting to see how it looks lately.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32488483?ocid=socialflow_twitter

"Chernobyl fox makes five-decker sandwich"

it's just carrying them away to hoard in one load, but the bbc is clickbait trash nowadays

The smoldering graphite, fuel and other material above, at more than 1200 °C, started to burn through the reactor floor and mixed with molten concrete from the reactor lining, creating corium, a radioactive semi-liquid material comparable to lava. If this mixture had melted through the floor into the pool of water, it was feared it could have created a serious steam explosion that would have ejected more radioactive material from the reactor. It became necessary to drain the pool.

The bubbler pool could be drained by opening its sluice gates. However, the valves controlling it were underwater, located in a flooded corridor in the basement. So volunteers in wetsuits and respirators (for protection against radioactive aerosols) and equipped with dosimeters, entered the knee-deep radioactive water and managed to open the valves. These were the engineers Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov (who knew where the valves were), accompanied by the shift supervisor Boris Baranov. Upon succeeding and emerging from the water, according to many English language news articles, books and the prominent BBC docudrama Surviving Disaster – Chernobyl Nuclear, the three knew it was a suicide-mission and began suffering from radiation sickness and died soon after. Some sources also incorrectly claimed that they died there in the plant. However, research by Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of the 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, determined that the frequently recounted story is a gross exaggeration. Alexei Ananenko continues to work in the nuclear energy industry, and rebuffs the growth of the Chernobyl media sensationalism surrounding him. While Valeri Bezpalov was found to still be alive by Leatherbarrow, the 65-year-old Baranov had lived until 2005 and had died of heart failure.

hadn't congratulated SV on his report (instead calling out a link he posted as trash, lol), so here: that's brilliant, SV

have been reading about this quite a bit recently

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1111093/midnight-in-chernobyl/9780593076835.html

not sure how much of this will be actually "untold" but it seems worth a read.

thanks for the rec, tracked it down. (lemme know if you want a ysi)

cheers for the offer LBI, already got this one on the kindle on my next to read list.

np!

voices from chernobyl which won a nobel prize a few years ago is very good. extremely sad book.

well Midnight In Chernobyl is definitely no voices from chernobyl. i'm surprised at what a shit writer he is - if he just stuck to what he knew it would be interesting but all the badly written scene-setting fan-fic about the chernobyl project manager's sniffing the flowers in his garden or the courtship of one of the young scientists and how his partner's eyes seemed to change colour with her mood. I've abandoned after 60 pages for now. ffs!

:(

Photographer Robyn Von Swank has a great account @vonswankcuriosities of interesting places she’s toured -in early March she started putting up highlights of her two trips to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The photos are so, so good.

Starts here with Baba Ganya
https://www.instagram.com/vonswankcuriosities/p/Bu8GG8TgX2C/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kx4rf4r39s7f

I fell asleep watching ep 1 of the HBO series (and was having nightmares), and what I saw was pretty gritty and horrifying. The radiation horror and bit where one of the workers looks right into the burning core was something. It's got the reliably good Jared Harris and the cast speak in their normal accents rather stupid cod-ukranian accents thankfully. Going to try this one again later

I've been waiting for an evening or weekend when I'm in a really solid mood to start. I hadn't heard Jared Harris is in it, which sounds great.

all the resident Geiger counters only measure up to 360: "360... that is reasonable reading and it could be much worse!"

can't remember the units of radiation, but you get the horrific picture.

Like mh I'm waiting to be in a mood for this, but it's high up on my list. Very glad to hear they're not doing that awful Ukranian accent thing!

might need some xanax and a g'n't to face this

the incident happened very close to my birthday so the yearly remembrances seem somehow more relevant when they pop up

some of the horror in this is seeing the dickhead boss from the control room looking at glowing lumps of graphite from the exploded reactor in the grounds of the station and being too deep in the soviet denial/scapegoat game to even mention it to his minions.

I'll hold back more comment until I watch the new HBO thing, but I sometimes ponder how incredibly fucked we would have been if all those people hadn't done the work to contain what they could once the situation became clear.

the good news is in Ararat Valley, Armenia, they still have the antiquated Metsamor nuclear plant, which is a similar model to Chernobyl but somehow still operational despite being old and fucked and in a seismic zone!

2nd ep of Chernobyl builds on the good work of the first. I think that claustrophobic radiation horror at the end of the ep will give me nightmares tonight. Emily Watson/Stellan Skarsgard/Jared Harris all bringing it. There is brilliant scene with Skarsgard bluffing the lower level apparatchiks with his new-found knowledge (5mins ago in the chopper) of the make-up of RBMK reactors. Best series these useless fuckers have done in years imo.

yeah i love this show after two episodes. the horror is realised very vividly.

"a yearly stipend of 400 roubles" for whichever fool walks into the jaws of death. Nightmare day at work today!

"come on lads this is for russia"

"fuck it so, i could use a few extra roubles, where do i sign?"

"For the rest of my life, you say?..."

first episode was great, this last one was brilliant

my only problem is that i keep forgetting the names of the characters and it's difficult to refer to them by description (the apparatchik who doesn't actually know what's going on? er...
the scientist guy with glasses? er...), but that's on me

it was quite amusing when apparatchik with fey croaky voice tries to bullshit Skarsgard character that it's the concrete that is burning. But yeah, fuck knows the names of any of this lot!

I've started the Serhii Plokhii Chernobyl book, it's much better than that Higginbotham travesty and he grew up in the Soviet Union + has a better feel for how the dysfunctional + belligerent interactions between different departments (+ add idiot bosses/unrealistic quotas/budgetary pressures to the mix) conspired towards the 2nd rateness of the reactors (bad design without safety containment to start with) and absolute inevitability of a catastrophe at some point.

Yeah I only know the characters by how they look, I guess a lot has happened in two episodes, but it seems masterfully written and acted so far. The dynamic between Harris and the minister type bloke was instantly great, like the way he seems actually quite effective within the confines of what's possible in such a system.

It's interesting seeing Gorbachev portrayed at the centre of such a system, I guess I feel all I remember about him was this heroic treatment of him in western media and even when I was at primary school, which I suppose was some bizarre lionising bullshit due to the fall of communism.

Also the whole thing looks incredible.

yeah the design is so very impressive and convincing on every scale, from the reactor to the civilian scenes, everything is so real looking. I can't still can't get that image out of my head when the worker looks right into the burning core of the reactor in ep 1, incredible scene.

I'm just getting to the bit in the book that deals with the firemen attempting to extinguish the fire on the huge shared turbine hall roof. It is actually even more horrific and chaotic than the version presented in the series. Some of the firemen are kicking lumps of radioactive graphite out of the way, not realising these little glowing lumps have already condemned lots of them to a very painful death within hours/days. Molten bitumen is practically gluing some of them to the spot. One of them describing it as worse than anything the pen of Dante could have imagined. They don't even understand the implications of the reactor core blowing open and are only trained in dealing ordinary fires, and are more concerned with the broken oil pump threatening to release 200 tonnes of machine oil onto the floor turning it into a total inferno. It is a hellish clusterfuck even before you factor in the off the scale radiation bombardment and the threat of half of Europe getting sterilised.

Just started this series, and fucking hell

I mean, having read Svetlana Alexievich's book I'm not sure why I'm doing this to myself, but here we are

Now looking at the writewr/creator's IMDB credits, and having some serious cognitive dissonance.

The Huntsman: Winter's War (written by)
2013 The Hangover Part III (written by)
2013 Identity Thief (screenplay) / (story)
2011 The Hangover Part II (written by)
2008 Superhero Movie (written by)
2006 Scary Movie 4 (screenplay) / (story)
2003 Scary Movie 3 (written by)
1998 Senseless (written by)
1997 RocketMan (screenplay) / (story)

This is like finding out Threads was a Benny Hill project

That Darn Cat 2 next?

“We were doing our research, we came across this description of coal miners in the Soviet Union as being a particularly irascible, difficult group that operated outside of the normal fear bubble that everybody was in because they knew that they were necessary. In fact, they’d gone on strike a few times and Gorbachev said that he was more scared of the coal miners than anyone else,”

even though the miners were played for straight grim-faced lols, it's interesting what the writer said about them.

lol I've just realised the miners spokesman is ex-Eastenders Scottish character, who was so dull and unmemorable I can't even remember his name.

Very grim lols, but believable, too, I thought.

Watching this, am simultaneously appalled at a political system that could basically force so many people to sacrifice themselves so horribly, and astonishingly grateful that they did.

some grim lols needed after so much radiation horror, but it was cut with much sadness as well. I mean most of the grim lols were the overt machismo of these lads, but it's quite touching at the end - even though lol naked miners.

Another good touch was him (J Harris character) realising (or maybe he knew at the time) that the couple at the bar asking him innocuously nosy questions were KGB agents, making sure he wasn't spreading fear and blabbing to people.

Is that what that was? I didn't pick up on that. In that same scene, why did he ask for the other glass?

in the next ep they are being tailed by them. My take was that he was aware that the even some distance from the reactor the radiation levels were something like at least 4 times the amount legally allowed for nuclear workers, let alone civilians and much worse in some places. So an upright cup catches irradiated dust particles?

a quite chilling witness account from Pripyat from one bloke was he was blithely going about his business, supping a few beers on the roof and sunbathing. But he could sense something different in the atmosphere, and feel his skin burning much faster than it usually does on a sunny day.

Yeah, I assumed he wanted a cup that had been rim-down so the innards were clean.

Jared Harris really is a gem.

Yeah, he's a fine actor and then some.

He has so much integrity in every character I've seen him play. I hope he continues to get more work. He was brilliant in The Terror as well which didn't seem to get any traction in the UK but was very enjoyable.

All of this feels so well studied and just so real, albeit with scenes like the one with the chief of the KGB that are sort of classic spy fiction but absolutely note perfect.

The casting seems fairly meticulous, I noticed even the hospital receptionist is the Irish actress Caolfhinn Dunne, I don't even know if she will appear again but I found that interesting given how most of the roles seem perfectly cast.

Horrific scenes with the victims in the hospital.

he will definitely get plenty of work, he seems to be the go-to fellow to bring integrity and quality to all sorts of rubbish - but he is always a massive pleasure to watch.

Must have been a hard slog in relative obscurity until the last few years when you're Richard Harris's son.

I mean as far as sense of self goes rather than it being as hard as broke and unemployed actors.

i totally forgot he plays Andy Warhol in a pretty forgettable 90's movie, maybe he is one of those actors that was solid but dull in his youth, but has matured into a top notch performer?

lol, I'd also forgotten he was in Fringe, he was excellent in that deranged but very watchable nonsense as well.

I think he had some solid parts over the years but his recurring role on Fringe and, more importantly, Mad Men, bumped his profile up a bit

He's played more than one nice but doomed men who end up hanging themself.

I wish I could watch this, but I don't have HBO, so I'll wait for the video. The documentaries on YouTube are disturbing enough, and the touring by bike site and those videos creeped me out for a long time. But for me, the saddest part was when people in Sweden noted heightened radioactivity in the air, and determined that the source was somewhere in the Soviet Union...it was not reported in any news until days later.

On a related note, I found this calendar amusing (Flickr is down for maintenance so I can't link to it right now). I have a perverse sense of humor, I hope it doesn't offend.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/mihalshozda/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-nude-calendar-2019/

I’m glad people who lived in the Soviet Union at the time are as impressed with this show as I am

I have just finished watching Episode 1 of Chernobyl on @HBO. My perspective is that of someone born and raised in the Soviet Union who has vivid memories of 1986, the catastrophe itself and how it was handled by the Soviet politicians and the state media...

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) May 24, 2019

Yeah it is a very good book, which shows rather than sensationalised horror - the series is quite restrained and sparing the viewer a lot of it.

And also you learned there wasnt really a clever and decisive jh character making wise decisions about containing the disaster it was much more chaotic.

Probably two bad posts but am on my phone a nd walking and slightly fresh.

Watching this, am simultaneously appalled at a political system that could basically force so many people to sacrifice themselves so horribly, and astonishingly grateful that they did.

I don't know if it's dramatic license or not, but the show does a good job of suggesting that their sacrifice is more voluntary than that. The guys who agree to go and turn off the water don't do it because of the four hundred roubles, or because they've been forced. They do it because they know what will happen if they don't do it. It needs to be done, as Stellan Skarsgard says. And I definitely got the same impression from the miners. This is work that needs to be done, and they're the only people who can do it.

Yeah - it’s noted in that book that some miners were reluctant but others absolutely did it out civic duty and were insulted by cash. Some compared it to the duty that makes you enlist for war

The Soviet miners weren't broken like their UK counterparts and had quite high self-esteem in relation to their importance in the Soviet system, and were probably fed on macho Stakhanovite myths (like most miners were tbf) which don't exactly encourage health and safety awareness to say the least. It probably would be fair to say the numbers of people willing to sacrifice themselves might be much lower these days. And we'd all die, lol.

The guys who agree to go and turn off the water don't do it because of the four hundred roubles, or because they've been forced. They do it because they know what will happen if they don't do it. It needs to be done

I'm also glad this part was handled factually - the old stories that used to do the rounds was those 3 went in, did their fix, and either fell down dead on the spot or died the next day. Neither of which turned out to be true (one of ems still alive and one was alive til 2005)

Another thread from yer man

I have finished watching the 3rd episode of @HBO's #Chernobyl. The second ended on a cliffhanger, so I kept on through midnight, which, in retrospect, was a bold decision... Well, "every generation must have its sacrifice." I will review it in the thread below...

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) May 26, 2019

excellent thread. next time I see an old friend who has been on the NHS waiting list for a sinus operation for 2 years, I'll tell him he needs to try bringing some chocolate and cognac "vzyatkas" to his next appointment.

Thats a great thread!

is it true that britishes pronounce the element with atomic no. 53 as eye-oh-deen

a bit like you lot with aloo-minum

fraid so, and we do it with chlorine, bromine, fluorine too

I thought young ugly-mug actor whose name I can't recall was very good as sensitive ingenue called up into pet liquidation squad in last ep.

Just started this. We've seen two episodes so far, this series is incredible. It's like an updated "Day After." Truly scary and unsettling. The score, by Hildur Guðnadóttir, is excellent. She's a cellist, but it sounds like scraping metal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTw1-nw5S4A

we just watched ep 1 last night

no matter how prepared you are from reading about it, it’s still a lot to take in when you watch it unfold even as a dramatization

the locals hanging around on the bridge taking in the view of the fire as the ash starts falling, or the firefighters inncuously rolling up with hoses, it’s all just continuous & varying degrees of D:

hooked, obv

I’m glad people who lived in the Soviet Union at the time are as impressed with this show as I am

...with at least one notable exception.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life. But resignation is a depressing and untelegenic spectacle. So the creators of “Chernobyl” imagine confrontation where confrontation was unthinkable—and, in doing so, they cross the line from conjuring a fiction to creating a lie. The Belarusian scientist Ulyana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is even more confrontational than Legasov. “I am a nuclear physicist,” she tells an apparatchik, in Episode 2. “Before you were Deputy Secretary, you worked in a shoe factory.” First, she’d never say this. Second, the apparatchik might have worked at a shoe factory, but, if he was an apparatchik, he was no cobbler; he has come up the Party ladder, which might indeed have begun at the factory—but in an office, not on the factory floor. The apparatchik—or, more accurately, the caricature of the apparatchik—pours himself a glass of vodka from a carafe that sits on his desk and responds, “Yes, I worked in a shoe factory. And now I’m in charge.” He toasts, in what appears to be the middle of the day: “To the workers of the world.” No. No carafe, no vodka in the workplace in front of a hostile stranger, and no boasting “I’m in charge.”

The biggest fiction in this scene, though, is Khomyuk herself. Unlike other characters, she is made up—according to the closing titles, she represents dozens of scientists who helped Legasov investigate the cause of the disaster. Khomyuk appears to embody every possible Hollywood fantasy. She is a truth-knower: the first time we see her, she is already figuring out that something has gone terribly wrong, and she is grasping it terribly fast, unlike the dense men at the actual scene of the disaster, who seem to need hours to take it in. She is also a truth-seeker: she interviews dozens of people (some of them as they are dying of radiation exposure), digs up a scientific paper that has been censored, and figures out exactly what happened, minute by minute. She also gets herself arrested and then immediately seated at a meeting on the disaster, led by Gorbachev. None of this is possible, and all of it is hackneyed. The problem is not just that Khomyuk is a fiction; it’s that the kind of expert knowledge she represents is a fiction. The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

In the absence of a Chernobyl narrative, the makers of the series have used the outlines of a disaster movie. There are a few terrible men who bring the disaster about, and a few brave and all-knowing ones, who ultimately save Europe from becoming uninhabitable and who tell the world the truth. It is true that Europe survived; it is not true that anyone got to the truth, or told it.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong

*funny* how life works out sometimes: just about everyone stood on that bridge perished soon afterwards... two of the suicide mission divers are still alive apparently.

it might have been better to include bigger groups of scientists and portray the group-think that really went on and the trouble some of them got into for being outspoken. And lots of other niggles. But I'm just glad to see some decent drama for once!

I knew that was Masha Gessen before I clicked the link.

I mean, same.

especially since she consulted on and handled the Russian dialogue in The Americans

I'm usually a little cranky about the addition of dramatic elements or taking poetic license when it comes to the actions of characters based on real life or composite figures so I understand the impulse to complain, but some of those gripes are in the realm of not understanding how creative nonfiction works versus documentaries

Now, the real complaint would be how the characters act as if they're in an American/British drama as opposed to a Russian one, right

If only Jared had employed that fucked up accent he used in the expanse, I might have believed that scene where he said: Just hoy a bit o' fucking sand an' barium on it lad :p

boron even.

Now, the real complaint would be how the characters act as if they're in an American/British drama as opposed to a Russian one, right

Yeah, it's minor and I get it, but it does irk me a little (esp. when one actor used "bloody" as a profanity). I joked with my wife that when Jared reads the report in Russian in the second episode he should have looked up and said in English "I don't understand a word of this!"

I don't think it would have been improved by actors employing uniform daft commie accents throughout, although some tried to at times. It might have been improved if everyone spoke in Russian/Ukrainian, but I thought some of the strongest performances where from actors speaking in their normal accents.

I'm on my phone excuse spelling

there was a moment in the trial when skarsgard kinda grunts "let him finish" and it feels a lot like bootstrap bill is saying it. it took me out of it for awhile.

i guess bootstrap bill had a five pointed red star attached to his face so

The firefighter character is played by the actor who attempts to take over leadership of the crew in The Terror.

Cal, The lead Scottish miner was called Trevor in Eastenders (never a name I've known any Scotsman to have, tbh)

I'm usually a little cranky about the addition of dramatic elements or taking poetic license when it comes to the actions of characters based on real life or composite figures so I understand the impulse to complain, but some of those gripes are in the realm of not understanding how creative nonfiction works versus documentaries

tbh I think she did a good job of underlining that there's a difference between streamlining events/life for art, and mischaracterizing them, and that for her it mostly fell on the wrong side. (also it's not like she's unfamiliar with the medium!)

This also makes me wonder how far I could make any room in conversation with my staunchly Republican father who loves this show about the very obvious parallels to global warming and how his guys are treating it.

For that level of hairsplitting it's odd to criticise the scene where Shcherbina threatens to have Legasov shot if he doesn’t tell him how a nuclear reactor works and go on a riff about a supposed fear of shooting in other uncited characters when in fact Scherbina doesn't threaten to have him shot. He actually threatens to have him thrown out of the helicopter — which seems much more obviously hyperbolic and less "this scene is to show it was a society ruled by fear of the gun".

I also wonder if she missed some of the class implied by the British accents — I definitely got where class distinctions were supposed to lie in a way she says is wholly missed.

The bit where it does ring right is that ultimately it was the system itself to blame and that only partially comes across on screen at the expense of pointing at Dyatlov and co. I think that's fundamentally groping towards the same point as the "Game of Thrones was sociological storytelling until it wasn't" article that did the rounds a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, any careless and arrogant arsehole could have filled Dyatlov's slot and the system was churning out Dyatlovs by the score. But at the same time, it was actually Dyatlov and had he not acted the way he did in the chain of events, the explosion really might not have happened. Getting across both aspects is a tricky balance to strike, especially in a drama.

*reportedly acted, I guess

Mazin here v. much on the "it was fundamentally the society not Dyatlov The Villain" side of the fence, so he at least tried to get it over https://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/chernobyl-creator-explains-the-actions-of-dyatlov-the-man-who-insisted-the-test-took-place-671472

Just an aside, I think this was a really great use of ~television entertainment~ and it’s been a while since I’ve been this engrossed, moved, and thoughtful about wtf we’re doing here. Hope this wins a ton of awards and we can get more things of this caliber.

Was there any hype or anticipation for this? Seems to have come out of nowhere.

it does seem like that

finished ep 2
this show is emotionally destroying me by degrees
;_;
it is so good

Best TV thing I've seen for ages.

Listening to the soundtrack in isolation today, that lifted my mood.

Was there any hype or anticipation for this? Seems to have come out of nowhere.

My feeling is that this was a deliberate move on HBO and Sky's part. From an entertainment point of view, it does a fantastic job of making everyone forget about Game of Thrones and stop speculating about what HBO will do now its huge cash cow is gone. "We'll do this," say HBO and Sky, quietly, pushing Chernobyl at you and blindsiding you completely. But if they'd said beforehand that they were going to do that, people would have started watching Chernobyl with that in mind.

Although I could be giving them too much credit.

It's not worth much but it's worth noting that the show apparently is already the the highest rated (per imdb) TV show of all time, above the two Planet Earth docs, Breaking Bad, etc.

Yes, I feel like Sky in particular has always had something to hammock Game of Thrones to try and prevent churn on their pretty poor Now Entertainment package.

Most years has been quite forgettable; I wonder if even they knew what they had on their hands

bit insensitive to pull the cement mixer right up to the graves with the grieving widows right there! can you wait like 20 minutes, guy?

i'm sympathetic to the gessen article. there is quite a bit of heroic cornballism going on, and it would have been interesting to see more of the hierarchical deference that surely existed particularly among the apparatchiks, but it feels uncharitable. the very first scene of ep 1 explicitly dismisses the idea of dyatlov as the only, or even most responsible person. it's announcing it right up front: this is a TV drama, about particular characters, but they were not the only ones.

also her point about the shoemaker-turned-functionary feels a little undermined by slava malamud's unearthing of the photo of the actual coal minister who was... a former coal miner? NOT an office dude?

if you think this was a case of dramatic license gone mad you should see the liberties taken by that drama series gessen was a consultant on!

I really like Gessen as a writer and even though I largely disagree with that article I think the whole "this one person represents all the scientists" is a bit of a leap, plus it's a bit of a hero narrative, with a sprinkling of "if only they'd listened to the one woman" which obviously has noble roots but I'm not sure bureaucracy and idiocy on the scale of this event is more specific than the human condition.

Even before I knew the facts of that character the writing there felt a bit pushed and modish. A tiny bit. Fuck it tho, it is an amazing show.

I haven't enjoyed a HBO mini-series as much as this since the John Adams one and am quite happy to accept it's flaws and divergences from actual events.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48559289

But in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia's most widely-read tabloid, Mr Muradov said his version of the show "proposes an alternative view on the tragedy in Pripyat".

I can't wait for this version where capitalist mind control undermines the integrity of reactor core..

One columnist declared the show a plot to undermine Russia's current atomic agency.

louise menschokov?

with a sprinkling of "if only they'd listened to the one woman"

I definitely saw it as a chance for them to cast a woman in a major speaking role. Which I think is something Mazin suggests in the podcast.

for sure. i can see that. i guess it might be more interesting or bold to have given her some flaws tho, imo.

i present the apex of chernobylposting - "Steamed Core" pic.twitter.com/7bIxsMQFJ8

— Comrade Valentina ☭ (@leftistthot420) June 8, 2019

for sure. i can see that. i guess it might be more interesting or bold to have given her some flaws tho, imo.

Agreed. She's not really a character at all.

Watson didn't have too much to work with but I thought the feigned accent was a bit incongruous and unnecessary, especially with mostly the rest of the cast speaking in their normal accents.

Fuck it tho, it is an amazing show.

The review that got it right was iirc the NYTimes, which basically said here's what it gets right, here's what it gets wrong, but none of that really matters because it's so good and the broader beats are pretty accurate.

Anyone listen to the companion podcast with the creator and Peter Sagal from NPR? I assume it's serious, but his voice unfortunately is pretty inextricably linked to comedy.

That's the podcast I was talking about. I agree that it's a bit weird to hear them talk so chirpily about it.

interesting we don't have a dedicated thread for the TV drama. Anyway, I gave my dad the DVD at Christmas and I'm not sure where this comes from but he insists on pronouncing it 'SHER-nuh-bill' despite that not being how anyone says it in the show. Who says it that way???

It's a strange phenomenon. I have friends who have been in Beijing for years but still somehow call it "Beizhing"

how are you meant to say it?

'Bay-Djing'?

You can try to match the sounds / tones if you like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUIaFSbQ5nc

But this is a better approximation than "Beizhing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlHsHe1jRQk

I'm not sure my ear can discern the difference between that and the 'wrong way' other than a harder 'j' sound?

They use a /ʒ/ sound, like in "usually" - a sound which doesn't exist in Mandarin

This doesn't look very good

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/13/ukraine-wildfires-close-chernobyl-nuclear-site

"don't worry" (as long you don't live in Greece or Russia)

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2020/04/13/2200Z/chem/surface/level/overlay=cosc/orthographic=-340.70,44.22,2274/loc=30.076,51.262

The fire seems to be under control now, thankfully.

On a side note the 5G conspiracy has reached Svetlana Alekseivich:

This is the biggest challenge since the Chernobyl era. It remains to be understood that this is - is it really influenza, or is 5G already affecting the human immune system. In my opinion, scientists do not have a final conviction. There are some complex processes of further technological development - here the influence of man on the atmosphere, new technologies, and the inability of man as a biological being to sustain it all.

I've just watched this excellent show. For some reason I'm now watching the BBC Salisbury Poisonings - with Coronavirus I'm never touching anything again.