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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

M. Gessen wrote a much better piece about the accuracy of HBO's Chernobyl:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher...

This piece seems a little confused, since Legasov wasn't the primary source for the show?

I've mentioned her article. I think she barely touched the topic of Chernobyl itself. Her points was about what the Soviet life was back then, and some depictions of this was incorrect.

For example (for her article)

> In Episode 2, for example, the Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) threatens to have Legasov shot if he doesn’t tell him how a nuclear reactor works. There are a lot of people throughout the series who appear to act out of fear of being shot. This is inaccurate: summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties. By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.

Her point was: this is not the Soviet way back then. My point is: these two people barely interacted directly, and one of them at least (Legasov) had a lot of respect for the other from the very beginning

Again, it's weird, because Legosov isn't even the primary source for the series, which is an explicitly fictionalized recounting of what happened. As Gessen points out, your thing about Legasov being part of a team is literally a character in the series!

> because Legosov isn't even the primary source for the series

I think it was explicit that the series framed the tapes as the "revelation"; the honest message of a dying man to the world to expose what actually happened

I think you're over-reading what was really just a dramatic framing for the series. The author was explicit that he used composite characters and multiple sources.

It's not a documentary! That doesn't mean you can't criticize it (Gessen sure did). It's that a lot of the kinds of criticisms you make don't make sense given what the show is.

The show makes reference to "Midnight in Chernobyl" in its epilogue, I think it's safe to say it was one of the main sources of information for the show (though of course they took liberties because it was a historical drama).

Mazin has talked about "Voices From Chernobyl" more than any other source.

I used as many sources as I could find. I was looking at research articles in scientific journals; I was looking at governmental reports; I was looking at books written by former Soviet scientists who were at Chernobyl; I was reading books by Western historians who had looked at Chernobyl. I watched documentaries; I read first-person documents.

And then there was Voices From Chernobyl, which is unique. What Svetlana Alexievich did there, I think, was capture an aspect of history we rarely see, which is the story of the people who you wouldn’t otherwise even know existed. We look at history from the point of view of the big movers, the big players, and she looks at history through the eyes of human beings. They’re all equal to her: Whether they are generals or party leaders or peasants, it doesn’t matter. And I thought that was just beautiful. It really inspired me.

So again this idea that anything not in the Legasov tapes was invented --- no. The show is a fictionalized retelling, but no, that criticism doesn't stand.

Mazin almost completely ignored the INSAG-7 report and in the last episode, they retell the same fictional story blaming the operators that Legasov himself presented in Vienna in 1986 to the IAEA meeting, which was published as the original INSAG-1 report.

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