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Comment by egao1980 | Hacker News Reader

egao1980

USSR in 1986 was not autharitarian as depicted in the series.

There were no inspections at gunpoint - people went to certain death to save lives of others. Knowingly. This is Cold War's 80s, even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation, including symptoms of radiation sickness etc.

Evacuation started as soon as disaster recovery team got evidence of dangerous levels of radiation, there were sanitary norms and pre-planned measures for any kind of problem at the station.

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> even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation

And yet crowds of schoolchildren were made to March in Kyiv for International Workers' Day right after the disaster, where they were exposed to radiation. Had Soviet society really been aware of the dangers, and leadership truly concerned with the welfare of the local people, that march would have never happened.

There was publication ban on the disaster, no one knew it was that serious.

Many people listened to BBC Russian Service, Radio Freedom/Radio Free Europe, RFI, VOA, etc. broadcasts on short waves. It wasn't that much of a secret.

Many? I doubt it. I went with my family to the parade and no one knew anything. We were living close to Minsk. My uncle was a policeman and one of the liquidators(later time, outer zones) and despite been high ranking officer he didn't know.

Pretty much everyone I knew, knew. Those who did not have a shortwave radio got gossip. Some of the details were murky, but the big picture was clear within a couple of days, way before official acknowledgement.

USSR tried to cover up information on the disaster. They said to soviet people: don't worry, we have this under control and refused to cancel May 1st parade in Kiev. People in affected areas found out about the dangers from western media first, only later the state admitted what had happened. The state later (months, years after the disaster) tried to suppress what Legasov had to say and refused to give him the medal.

Pretty bad record for the USSR government, and pretty well depicted in the series.

So by comment history, there is a pretty good chance this is someone working for the famed "Russian troll farms". Should we allow this kind of poster on HN?

Not sure about other comments, but this one isn’t necessarily wrong. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher... also takes issue with the execution threats.

I just read the comment history. Clearly a patriotic Russian, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable making this accusation.

I find it more fascinating to presume the comments are made by someone in good faith, who simply may be misinformed on some topics due to persistent exposure to their State’s propaganda.

I particularly liked the comment about not needing permission to protest. No, no, in Russia you do not need permission, but if your chosen time and place is not available the State will kindly select a suitable alternative for you!

Reminds me of some college campuses.

Hang around reddit enough and you see the pattern.

Comments only ever on one side of the issue. Lots of magical upvotes for any post. Any dissenting posts gets mass reported to the mods.

I hope my comment history will satisfy you. Basicly, some scenes in series are overdramatized. For example, Sitnikov was not convoyed by soldier to reactor roof - he went willingly, Dyatlov wasn't so bad as he portrayed and so on.

Luckily, it is a pretty recent period of history and many witnesses of it are still alive or died in recent past. You may be interested to see explaination from Dyatlov at first hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVthWR4cR1g This interview has been recorded in 1994, year before he died, but I'm not sure if there are English subtitles for it.

Thanks. Could you summarize what he has to say for us who don't understand him? I think that would be very interesting to many people, after watching the series.

He says everything in the control room was pretty routine, no misdeeds, no risky experiments, no drama, no questioning of orders, no worries as unpredictable behavior of the reactor happens, the reactor was just poorly designed. After the explosion he was confused and didn't know what happened and what to do. At some point after looking around, etc. he figured out that he needs to take measures to prevent new fires on the exploded reactor building. While they were busy taking measures they got sick, started vomiting. Eventually he got taken by the ambulance to the clinic. In the clinic he was questioned, eventually got arrested. Complains about USSR, that soviets wanted to blame the disaster on the reactor personal and that the judge only did what the politburo ordered.

Thank you. So it seems in assigning the blame between the personnel and the officials responsible for design, both parties were blaming the other party. I read somewhere that Legasov criticized the steps done in the control room and also the design and lack of oversight in designing/building the reactor. So the truth is probably somewhere in between and the blame is shared between the personnel and the officials/system.

Commenter in this branch put it all together just right. Also Dyatlov notes all industrial disasters was attributed to personnel error in Soviet Union, no matter which real reason it was, for political reasons.

I'll let myself add some reasoning about accusations against Dyatlov. Even if he violated some instructions (it is still not so clear), environment and way operations conducted in SU (and maybe in some modern countries too) implicitly require that. Management requires real results, not obedience to rules and instructions. Senior personnel has to deliver what is expected from them no matter how. But if something goes wrong, negligence to rules will be formal reason to blame. So, there was no evil layman who got himself near top of hierarchy and made evil decisions. All hierarchy consists of people who was installed at their positions for a reason and they do what is expected from them. Otherwise, replacement occurs.

Basically, if you replace in this situation Dyatlov with somebody of same rank, outcomes could be eventually same or even worse.

Interesting. So in short, even if Dyatlov did make some shortcut and violated safe practices, this was probably mainly due to corrupt system that forced people to violate the rules to maintain their jobs. This helped the higher ups to easily exploit the workers and easily find a scapegoat when necessary. The soviet system was real sick.

It's not just about losing job or other penalities, it is also about futility of resistance to corruption. If you are openly against system, you get replaced and your place will be taken by less experienced but more convenient person. Good leader in such situation should play politics and follow common rules in order to retain at least chance to make some decisions on his own and step in when situation is critical.

However, that trait is not unique to Soviet system only. If you look wider, you probably will be able to resemble Volkswagen scandal, Boeing MAX, Fukusima and so on. Boeing case looks clearly as outcome of "just make it fly" decision.

I glanced at their history and it seems that, yes, they are Russian, and a lot of their posts seem to have some anti-US sentiment, but automatically saying that makes them a member of the troll farm is a stretch. I see plenty of other Europeans, especially on sites like reddit, openly hating on the US. Hell, there are plenty of people from the US who do that. Unless I'm missing something glaring from their post history, which maybe I am, I don't think it's fair to say "this person is Russian, they are clearly a paid troll and should be banned."

Oh, evacuation of Party leaders' children started right away. General population, not so much.

Maybe because to call wife and say "take the children and leave" is easier than to evacuate the whole city for a few hours?

Or maybe because some people have access to the information and means to get somewhere else, and some are just proles and can be made to march under radioactive rain without being told anything.

I think a lot of people would think the fact that a nuclear power plant core had exploded was evidence enough that an evacuation was needed.

At first there were no signs of contamination outside of the station and it was unclear if reactor has exploded or not. Evacuation started as soon as that fact was established.

In one of the US nuclear incidents people died while evacuating in panic though no one got hurt at the power plant .

It's true. The totalitarianism of the USSR in 80-th is greatly exaggerated. I was born in 1974 and the first time when I heard the words "KGB" and "GULAG" was about 1989. Вefore that, I did't even realise that I lived in a totalitarian country. Everyone said what they wanted and thought what they wanted at home or whith friends (not publically). Agitation for communism was perceived like today's agitation for a green planet. My mother was a common worker and she became a member of communist party because (surprise!) she dreamed make the world better (it didn't work very well). And yes, I was a child. But these are my memories of the USSR, this is a fact. Do you think I'm lying? Now I am for democracy and even ran away from the police when we were protesting against our dictator Lukashenko.

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