The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
In those first days, there were mixed feelings. I remember two: fear and insult. Everything had happened and there was no information: the government was silent, the doctors were silent. The regions waited for directions from the oblast, the oblast from Minsk, and Minsk from Moscow. It was a long, long chain, and at the end of it a few people made the decisions. We turned out to be defenseless. That was the main feeling in those days. A few people were deciding our fate, the fate of millions.
At the same time, a few people could kill us all. They weren’t maniacs, and they weren’t criminals. They were just ordinary workers at a nuclear power plant. When I understood that, I experienced a very strong shock. Chernobyl opened an abyss, something beyond Kolyma, Auschwitz, the Holocaust. A person with an ax and a bow, or a person with a grenade launcher and gas chambers, can’t kill everyone. But with an atom …
I’m not a philosopher and I won’t philosophize. Better to tell you what I remember. There was the panic in the first days: some people ran to the pharmacy and bought up all the iodine, others stopped going to the market, buying milk, meat, and especially lamb. Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping that it would be made of good meat. Then we found out that it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it. We turned out to be defenseless. But you know that already. I want to tell you about something else, about how we were a Soviet generation.
My friends—they were doctors and teachers, the local intelligentsia. We had our own circle, we’d get together at my house and drink coffee. Two old friends were there, one of them was a doctor, and they both had little kids.
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From a letter from Lyudmila Polenkaya, village teacher, evacuated from the Chernobyl Zone
--Svetlana Alexievich