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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

> Legasov commended the swiftness and efficiency of the government response at all levels

Sure, but in those times, he would be compelled to say such things. That doesn't mean he believed it.

It seems the main faults that OP finds in the show are that Legasov had issues with his government, when in "reality" he thought they were great. But is that "reality," or oppression?

I also don't see the fault in highlighting him as the "main" scientist; it's a show.

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The main issue is what the Soviet government did before the disaster even happened. Someone, in the series it is implied it was a student, in Legasov's institution wrote a paper about what the risks was when AZ-5 was pressed. Apparently there was even a suggested redesign for the rods that would mitigate the risk (but it required lowering the maximum power output for the reactor, and thus required building more reactors, and so would increase the cost of the nuclear program by maybe 10-20%)

The Soviet government did something to shut that person up (and in the series Legasov implies he was part of that, I can't even find what he did exactly), repressed the knowledge (declaring it a state secret) ... and then a decade later Chernobyl exploded.

In other words: what happened is that the Soviet government refused to fix their nuclear reactors due to cost, and then that decision blew up Chernobyl, making tens to hundreds of thousands of victims.

Then, during the cleanup of the disaster, the KGB took additional measures to keep it hidden.

So yes it was oppression ... oppression is the cause of the disaster in the first place. And you can't forget that Legasov is not a hero: his career was built on oppression, not scientific accomplishment (there was a Soviet program to make sure Jewish students would fail at the institute. Legasov was the one implementing that). So of course Legasov can't be trusted.

Who knows, maybe the student who wrote that AZ-5 would blow up the reactor in the first place was one of the Jewish students whose career Legasov sabotaged.

Very well said, and an important reminder of the recursion of oppression

Everything about nuclear reactors was secret by default, no student would have known any details about the RBMK reactor.

The "positive scram effect" was discovered at Ignalina (where the miniseries were filmed) in 1983. The RBMK design organization NIKIET sent an official informational letter to the power plants and proposed changes to the design and operational procedures. The changes weren't implemented as "there was a widespread view that the conditions under which the positive scram effect would be important would never occur." The same as O-rings.

And there was no "a Soviet program to fail Jewish students". Just primitive ground-level anti-semitism.

As shown in the series, the article about AZ-5 increasing reactor power instead of decreasing it was classified a LOT higher and inaccessible to the researchers of the institute, and it was only that specific article. They explicitly hid the table of contents and that one article. It was explicitly suppressed, not accidentally classified along with a bunch of other stuff.

You do understand that the series is a fiction?

The scan of the letter is available online, there are no redactions and no security classification markings.

http://accidont.ru/PS_letter.html

> It seems the main faults that OP finds in the show are that Legasov had issues with his government, when in "reality" he thought they were great. But is that "reality," or oppression?

The tapes were framed in the HBO as an honest message of a dying man to the world to expose the lies that happened. Well, after Going through the tapes, I couldn't find any indication of that...only the opposite.

Now I concede that I don't really know what actually happened, and one can't put a price on the intensity of the situation for everyone at that time.

My point is simple: HBO series said Legasov's position was something that wasn't true

Sure, but in any case you're going to cherry-pick inaccuracies, wouldn't it be fair to balance them with the "remarkably accurate recreations," according to historians[0]? Especially since it's couched as a historical drama, not a documentary.

Should we debate the accuracy of Marvel movies?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190610100414/https://www.cbsne...

I am not sure why you are mentioning historians here. A proper historical view/investigation is way outside of my scope.

My angle is simple: they said it was accurate, and Legasov did so and said that...and in his own words, he negated most of that.

Is Legasov a good guy? I don't know. Was he honest in what he said? I don't know...but he said what he said!

> cherry-pick inaccuracies

Feel free to go to the tapes

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