The Chernobyl Tragedy – From the Memoirs of Nikolai Ryzhkov
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Couple vignettes from my memories of this disaster.
My physicist grandfather lived in Gomel during this time and when this happened during all the May holidays, he barricaded his entire family in his apartment for a month, sealing all the cracks around the windows
My parents skipped sending us from Moscow to Grodno, Belarus for the usual summer holidays because of the direction of the plume (NE) which I remember not liking one little bit. They and grandparents also forbade collection of any morel mushrooms which we used to pick in the forests all the time. I think the mushrooms also became considerably fewer in years past.
"I am ashamed to even remember how the well-known “Warrior with privileges” at the Supreme Council of the USSR mocked this old man, a participant in the Patriotic War,[WW2] Hero of the Soviet Union. Was it only she, mocked only him?"
and this:
"All these notorious activities with trying on gas masks and regarding the poorly drawn posters turned out to be unnecessary."
... stand out to me for various reasons.
This is history told by a participant first hand from a particular place and point in time with a local point of view but with some of the original shackles removed. It is a bit retrospective though.
I find this paragraph in particular to be very powerful:
"The time had come to reward the heroes. There were many of them in Chernobyl, as in every war. Helicopter pilots, chemists, firefighters, nuclear scientists, workers, scientists. I do not know what will become of our orders and medals, whether it will be honorable or shameful to bear the title of Hero of Socialist Labor tomorrow and whether the authorities will replace it with the title of Hero of Capitalist Labor. And with the Order of the October Revolution, everything is clear: It will become the Order of the August or December Counter-Revolution, or even the Devil’s October. I am sure that someday such awards will not be a sign of honor and heroism, but a symbol of betrayal and shame."
Communist parties, as always, cover up disasters to maintain "stability" (ie. credibility as the only governing party.)
The Chernobyl coverup became public, discrediting the party as incompetent at governing.
(At the moment the CCP is attempting to coverup a flood that entered a subway system and a major vehicle tunnel, possibly drowning 1,000 people. Witnesses are being warned to maintain the "local image.")
"Cars trapped in tunnel amid floods in China; Family washed away by mudslides | China in Focus"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjTMfgGlUcE
Let this be a lesson to US Marxists and their useful idiots.
I think this vaccination will be similar to chernobyl when looking back. People will be wondering why everyone went along with it.
I know this is just a low-tier trolling attempt, but sure, let me take the bait this one time - what damage exactly?
Regarding the else you have just written about... It's just so minuscule comparing to the real issues USSR and it's citizens had that I don't even know what to say about it. Just read some trustworthy books or even wikipedia about economics situation in late USSR and forget all you've just said. You literally don't give a shit about some fancy robots and nuclear disasters in some distant places when you have close to nothing to eat and nothing to put on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Tomb:_The_Last_Days_...
>There were HUGE amount of very different (and quite known to citizens) disasters before Chernobyl
Like what? Three most known disasters of the late Union were Chernobyl, Spitak earthquake, and Ufa train disaster, and the latter only became known because of Chernobyl which opened the valve on the freedom of the press a bit. All three clearly showed three things:
- that government was completely unprepared to natural and man-made disasters, so that the Army had to be involved (MChS was created in Russia after the breakup precisely in response to that, other republics did the same, largely)
- that the party didn't have the interest of people in mind, and was concerned with covering their own asses up first. People responded in the same way - just listen to 'Я вынес из Зоны' by Sergey Uryvin, it's a nice illustration of the atmosphere during liquidation.
- that Glasnost didn't work very well in practice
>Moreover handling of Chernobyl consequences was a much better than handling of other disasters of the past.
Only because it happened in a populated area, was not restricted to military, and was practically impossible to downplay or deny due to that. They still tried, demonstrating that Glasnost was only a declaration with little substance.
Chernobyl was a mere foot note in the Biographies of Gorbachev.
In fact, ethno national flareups in Nagorno-Karabakh, and rise of anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine and Baltics is perhaps the most critical factors that lead to the collapse of the USSR.
Even on a chronological basis, it would be attribute to Chernobyl. USSR collapsed in 1991 December. Even a month before it collapsed, it wasn't imagined or expected that it would simply collapse that way.
I wholeheartedly agree, even this simple documentary shows that things weren't really that simple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYD6ouVHXbo
> Even a month before it collapsed, it wasn't imagined ...
Oh I imagined, starting with the fall of Berlin Wall a lot citizens hoped for it collapse but no one really could be so certain. Why do people always need to single out just one cause?
TIL Marxism causes natural disaters, which apparently don't happen in the United States.
"We did everything that needed to be done, nothing wrong, all taken care of, dropped no ball at all, amazing job, all heroes. If there was anything, it was just other teams".
Valery Legasov : Yes, 3.6 roentgen, which, by the way, is not the equivalent of one chest X-ray, but rather 400 chest X-rays. That number has been bothering me for a different reason, though. It's also the maximum reading on low-limit dosimeters. They gave us the number they had. I think the true number is much, much higher. If I'm right, this fireman was holding the equivalent of 4 million chest X-rays in his hand.
I was just reading the article and a name popped up: "Mikhail Ivanovich Shchadov", who looked pretty flash in the series, so I looked the real guy up, and one commenter had this to say:
"Mikhail Ivanovich Shchadov, the coal industry minister, is portrayed as a young, weak and fop man who allegedly has nothing to do with coal mining and is far apart from the working class. In real life Shchadov was a strong, rigorous and togated minister who had worked in the coal industry since the age of 15. He was a former miner and mechanic in Siberia."
Literally every time I've looked up something from that series, this has happened. And I've looked up a lot of stuff, because a lot of it didn't seem realistic.
I get trying to make a story dramatic, but when the whole thrust of the movie is about the price of lies, what are we supposed to think? Genuinely baffled.
That rousing affirmation of the truth being in a courtroom scene that never happened - quite so, though "weird" doesn't quite cover it. On the subject of the individuals portrayed, I thought its depiction of Anatoly Dyatlov particularly slanderous.
Obviously, USSR citizens didn't know about it at all. But rumours persisted. I remember my mother listening to Turkish radio from a Black sea resort for the news on Chernobyl.