A statement by Svetlana Aleksievich, whose book formed the basis of the Chernobyl series, about the Russian people:
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HBO series about Chernobyl. The Russian-speaking public, accustomed to receiving only selected "cranberries" from the Americans, could have been alarmed by this single phrase. Including the first episode, you sadly wait for the next bears on the street and people in earflaps lighting their cigarettes from a nuclear reactor … but a miracle happens, and the very first shots amaze with the authenticity with which the creators reproduced the Soviet reality.
Oh, these shabby apartments, where many probably grew up! Oh, those saucepans, carpets on the walls, and flowered nightgowns! The work with details is amazing, the atmosphere of inevitability presses and envelops the viewer in an amicable way, and all skepticism somehow disappears by itself. Are you ready to finally see an excellent and true picture about Chernobyl …
Little tragedies
The series kicks off with a bitter speech by Academician Valery Legasov about the “price of lies”. Having recorded it on a dictaphone, he hides the cassettes with his notes in the ventilation and, carefully leaving the cat with more food, hangs up. To explain the reasons for this act, they return us exactly two years and one minute earlier, and from the window of the fireman Ignatenko's apartment we observe the same explosion. What has already led to it, we will also be shown, but only in the fifth episode, beautifully looping the story.
Promotional video:
Like the book "Chernobyl Prayer" by Svetlana Aleksievich, which inspired screenwriter Craig Mazin, the series focuses on the stories of individuals. The accident is covered from different points of view, but always through the prism of destinies broken by it. We will see the destroyed station both from the inside, through the eyes of the personnel, and from the outside, while the firefighters fight with the radionuclide fire.
To some extent, "Chernobyl" is a collection of scary little stories. The nurse, who was still sleeping peacefully in the hospital at night (she has little work in Pripyat), is bewilderedly watching the line of ambulances rushing from the station. The fireman's wife sits at the bedside of her husband, rotting alive from radiation sickness. The green recruit looks with empty eyes at the streets where he just shot the dogs running towards him trustingly. They are united by a common invisible enemy - radiation.
Somewhere very far from all this, politics and scientists are constantly waging their war, trying to eliminate radiation and get to the bottom of the causes of the accident. If ordinary people are rather episodic characters (not counting the wife of the fireman Ignatenko), then the heroes from the "higher echelons" will go with us through the entire series. Academician Legasov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Shcherbina, Belarusian scientist Khomyuk - they own the main parties in this terrible symphony. But, despite this, the liquidators' "small tragedies" are no less remembered.
Everything related to the technical and artistic aspects of Chernobyl is impeccable. The actors give their best, and the work of the lesser known is not inferior to the role-playing of Stellan Skarsgard, Emily Watson and Jared Harris. Make-up artists did their best to reproduce the terrible consequences of radiation sickness. Color grading and disturbing ambient background complete the crushing picture. Instead of music, there is a hum, similar to the distant echoes of a siren, an intriguing electronic overflow and a hysterical crackle of a dosimeter.
Of all the genres, "Chernobyl" is closest to horror: to convey the horror of a monstrous force, which is much more terrible than zombies or any aliens from outer space, the series succeeded with a bang. You are scared when the heroes look into the mouth of an exploded reactor. It's scary when they descend into the dark, half-flooded tunnels of the fourth power unit. It's scary when "biorobots" crawl out onto the roof littered with radioactive debris. We are afraid of monsters, but we know that they do not exist. And Chernobyl - a nightmare in reality, which is easy to measure in rem and curie - was, is and can be repeated.
True, fear diminishes sharply if you understand that believing what is happening … not that it is impossible, but only with an eye. And if the viewer's acquaintance with the Chernobyl topic is not limited to reading the most popular tales, this inevitably happens.
Bigger tragedy
"Chernobyl" mixes truth and lies so subtly, in such skillful proportions that it is very difficult to separate one from the other. Forget about small blunders like double-glazed windows in Soviet houses or buses of the wrong color - to hell with them. Demonization of power and exaggeration of colors are much more important.
It would seem that Chernobyl is a win-win theme, which, with the proper skill of the film crew, will make the audience cry and see nightmares at night. But showing reality, it turns out, is not scary enough. Therefore, the "evil keijibi" is watching willful scientists, instead of investigating the causes of the disaster, and evil politicians threaten to throw colleagues out of the helicopter. The accidents are caused by the greedy leaders who are chasing the standards, and the disgusting managers of the nuclear power plant are so disgusting that in comparison, even Disney villains seem less straightforward. Liquidators are sent to certain death in the name of the highest good, and if someone does not want to do a dangerous duty too much, good soldiers with a Kalash will tell you where to go.
Where is the truth and where is the lie?
Well, for example, the test of the reactor was postponed not at all because of a mysterious "order from above", as the scriptwriters claim, but because a block at another power plant was banally cut out. There was a shortage of electricity, and a call from Kiev to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was ordered to compensate for this until the problems are eliminated. The crossed out lines in the instructions for the experiment are true: this is stated in Legasov's audio recordings. Only now nobody hid the cassettes in the ventilation of his cassettes, and those beautiful words with which the series begins and ends are not even mentioned.
The complete unpreparedness of the plant workers for the experiment is another lie. They were no better or worse than others. In addition to the young Toptunov, the experienced Yuri Tregub was at the reactor control panel, who, for the sake of testing, was delayed for the night shift. They completely distorted the character of Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov, confusing "rigidity" with "inadequacy." After the explosion, the station personnel did not wander in confusion around the fourth block, dying in secluded corners, as shown in the series, but heroically eliminated (as best they could) the consequences of the accident. When poor Sitnikov was ordered to check the reactor, he not only voluntarily climbed to the roof, but also walked around the entire block - this was the only way to get reliable data.
The miners from Tula actually dug a tunnel under the reactor. Only at first, miners from other regions were brought there, closer, and the Tula people came to Chernobyl voluntarily. They were not driven by armed soldiers. They were not rude to the minister, who in reality was not a yellow-haired youth, and did not work naked. And the bitter irony is that their titanic work, like the dose they received in the process, was in vain - the concrete pad under the reactor never melted.
"Roof cats" (those who removed debris from the roof were called that way in Chernobyl; the concept of "biorobots" appeared later) did not rush around the site like headless chickens. They were given a clear task and were given detailed video instructions. There was a landfill where graphite and pipes were scattered about the way they lay on a real roof. Usually, the soldier was accompanied by a dosimetrist who went out on the roof first and left last - just to help the awkward recruits if they suddenly fell or got stuck. When the work was just beginning, dosimetrists personally showed what to clean first in order to effectively clear the passage.
The wreckage could be taken with hands - in leaded gloves. To facilitate the work of the "cats", a so-called "hydro-monitor" was erected on the roof: with a powerful pressure of water, it knocked small debris from the roof and beat in radioactive dust.
The roof zones were indeed given female names, only they were called differently - "Masha", "Lena" and "Natasha". Why they made this mistake is easy to understand: among the sources of information, Craig Mazin pointed out the documentary "Chernobyl-3828", which mentions one "Masha". The rest of the names, apparently, it was too lazy to look, so they came up with it at random. The liquidators were not soldered with boxes of vodka - on the “exclusion zone”, on the contrary, dry law reigned. If they wanted to drink, they took out moonshine or diluted alcohol, which was given out for disinfecting instruments.
In "Chernobyl Prayer", from where the line of Lyudmila Ignatenko was drawn, there are many touching and piercing scenes with a dying firefighter and his devoted wife. There is only one thing - how Lyudmila paints the beauty of Moscow to her husband instead of a stone courtyard outside the hospital window. From the chamber, she saw fireworks in honor of Victory Day and a beautiful view of the capital. The whole danger of staying next to her husband Lyudmila was repeatedly explained, and this was done by the hospital staff, and not the brave non-existent Khomyuk.
And on the funeral stage, it also feels like the show is having editing problems. The boots in Lyudmila's hands without a scene, as they unsuccessfully tried to put them on the dead man's swollen legs, raise questions. Not to mention the fact that the firefighters were not buried in a common grave - and certainly not poured with concrete in front of the widows
Legasov did not cut the truth at the trial. For that matter, he wasn't there at all. He read his report in Vienna, causing applause from Western colleagues and some discontent among his compatriots - others believed that he blurted out too much, honestly talking about the scale of the disaster and measures to eliminate it. Legasov had no idea about the “end effect” of the rods, although he had complaints about the design of the reactors. But at the trial, other people calmly spoke about the explosiveness of the reactor. The wicked KGB must have considered them too small bipods to threaten everyone in the narrow corridors (or too busy ripping out pages from reports that could save the country from the next disaster).
Nobody is forgotten, but it would be better to forget
The list of inaccuracies can be continued for a long time. And no, a feature film doesn't have to be true. Only now, all this gives off that same sour cranberry smell, to which we are used to in very truthful films like "Red Sparrow" or "Number 44".
Yes, there was a suppression of facts in Chernobyl. There was a lie, there were sacrifices and, the saddest thing, the sacrifices were in vain. But there was not all those lies and all the horrors that the creators composed to please their plan. It would seem that show the world the truth, because it itself is disgusting and strikes at emotions; but as in the series, the station staff make scapegoats, so the creators blame everything on the "bloody gebnya" and "building nightmares", forgetting about the banal human carelessness and hats.
In those days, many did not understand why radiation is terrible. Honest danger warnings were not always heard and listened to. Even after receiving the maximum dose and becoming acquainted with radiation sickness, some liquidators continued to work to protect others. Just because it was necessary.
Monument to the Terrified Heroes
The series is dedicated to “the memory of all who suffered and sacrificed themselves,” only this monument turned out to be strange. Instead of heroes who made great sacrifices, we, with rare (and only) exceptions, get people intimidated by the regime. Instead of the commanders who tried with all their might to minimize losses, they sent people to the slaughter. Recalling the general who, by his personal example, inspired the "roof cats" to work, the liquidator Valery Starodumov says: "The orders did not work there, the only principle that was applied was" do as I do. " It's not like what was shown in the series.
It is ironic that even in the credits, claiming to be absolutely documentary, the creators missed the typical Chernobyl myth about the "bridge of death". It is not easy to verify some of the "truthful" statements of the finale, but, according to eyewitnesses, Pripyat residents watched the accident only from their balconies, and at that time tall trees grew around the bridge, which blocked the view. This does not negate the fact that a huge dose of radiation fell on the bridge, which is why it still "fonites". However, the loud words about “none of those who watched from the bridge survived” in fact turn out to be the same false whipping up of drama, like a stone bag outside the window of a dying firefighter's ward.
HBO released an atmospheric and truthful thriller about how terrible a nuclear disaster is in principle … and a very mediocre story about a specific cataclysm, its victims and heroes. This is a great piece of art with stunning decorations, but they contain an almost complete set of Chernobyl horror stories and stereotypes about the USSR. The creators have something to respect, and one could say “thank you” to them if the viewing encouraged viewers to look for truthful materials on the topic, and not blindly believe what is shown on the screen. But due to the attention to detail, Chernobyl is very easy to earn the trust of the viewer. And as you know, the most dangerous and convincing lie is the subtly distorted truth.
