“We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Is there anything more frightening than people?”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Somos guerreros. Mi padre, en todo el tiempo que recuerdo, llevó ropa militar, aunque no lo era. Pensar en el dinero era de burgueses; preocuparte por tu propia vida, no patriótico. El estado normal era el hambre. Ellos, nuestros padres, sobrevivieron al desastre, por tanto también nosotros debíamos superarlo. No había otra manera de convertirse en un hombre de verdad. Nos han enseñado a luchar y a sobrevivir bajo cualquier circunstancia. A mí mismo, después del servicio militar, la vida civil me resultaba insulsa. Salíamos en grupo por la noche a la ciudad en busca de emociones fuertes.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“They asked all sorts of questions, but one really cut into my memory. This boy, stammering and blushing, you could tell he was one of the quiet ones, asked: "Why couldn't anyone help the animals?" This was already a person from the future. I couldn't answer that question. Our art is all about the sufferings and loves of people, but not of everything living. We don't descend to their level: animals, plants, that other world. And with Chernobyl man just waved his hand at everything.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Even if it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We came home. I took off all the clothes that I'd worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. he really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain...You can write the rest of this yourself. I don't want to talk anymore.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“At night I wake up from my mother saying, "Sonny, why aren't you saying anything? You're not asleep, you're lying there with your eyes open. And your light's on." I don't say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I've come back from. And I can't tell anyone.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I've wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren't writing much about it -- they write about the war, or the camps, but here they're silent. Why? Do you think it's an accident? If we'd beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we'd understood Chernobyl. But we don't know how to capture any meaning from it. We're not capable of it. We can't place it in our human experience or our human time-frame. So what's better, to remember or to forget?”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. "What are you shooting?" people say to me. "Look around you. There's a war on in Chechnya." But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn't he who condescended to them?”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“His friend proposed to me. He'd been in love with me long ago, back when we were in school. Then he married my friend, and then they got divorced. "You'll live like a queen."
He owns a store, has a huge apartment in the city, he had a dacha. I thought and thought about it. Then one day he came in drunk: "You're not going to forget your hero, is that it?" He went to Chernobyl, and I refused. I'm alive, and he's a memorial.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Sometimes I think it'd be better if you didn't write about us. Then people wouldn't be so afraid. No one talks about cancer in the home of a person who's sick with it. And if someone is in jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“They wash the windows, the roof, the door, all of it. Then a crane drags the house from its spot and puts it down into the pit. There's dolls and books and cans all scattered around. The excavator picks them up. Then it covers everything with sand and clay, leveling it. And then instead of a village, you have an empty field. They sowed our land with corn. Our house is lying there, and our school and our village council office. My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We started thinking about it -- I guess it must have been -- three years later. One of the guys got sick, then another. Someone died. Another went insane and killed himself. That's when we started thinking. But we'll only really understand in about 20-30 years. For me, Afghanistan (I was there two years) and then Chernobyl (I was there three months), are the most memorable moments of my life.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I was in Afghanistan too. It was easier there. They just shot you.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We're lonely. We're strangers here. They even bury us separately, not like they do other people. It's like we're aliens from outer space. I'd have been better off dying in Afghanistan. Honest, I get thoughts like that. In Afghanistan death was a normal thing. You could understand it there.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That's why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our "courage and heroism.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Okay, maybe you could move the ones that were above the earth, but what about the ones who were in the earth -- the bugs and the worms? And the ones in the sky? How do you evacuate a pigeon or a sparrow? What do you do with them? We don't have any way of giving them, the necessary information. It's also a philosophical dilemma. A perestroika of our feelings is happening here.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“There's one diagnosis for everything -- Chernobyl. No matter what happens, everyone says: Chernobyl. People get mad at us: "You're sick because you're afraid. You're sick from fear. Radiophobia." But then why do little kids get sick and die? They don't know fear, they don't understand it yet.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“You felt sorry for everyone there. Even the flies, even the pigeons. Everyone should be able to live. The flies should be able to fly, and the wasps, the cockroaches should be able to crawl. You don't even want to hurt a cockroach.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We had lead underwear, we wore it over our pants. Write that. We had good jokes, too. Here's one: An American robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, , and then -- breaks down. The Russian robot is up there two hours! Then a command comes in over the loudspeaker: "Private Ivanov! In two hours you're welcome to come down and have a cigarette break." Ha-Ha! [laughs.]”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“They held political discussions with us -- they explained that we were heroes, accomplishing things, on the front line. It was all military language. But what's a bec? A curie? What's a milliroentgen? We ask our commander, he can't answer that, they didn't teach it at the military academy. Milli, micro, it's all Chinese to him. "What do you need to know for? Just do what you're ordered. Here you're soldiers." Yes, soldiers -- but not convicts.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“My prayer is simple. I say it silently. 'Lord, i cry unto me! Give ear!' Man is crafty only in evil, but he's so simple and open in his plain words of love. Even for philosophers, the word is only an approximation of the thought they have experienced. The word genuinely attunes to what's in our soul only in prayer, and in prayerful thoughts. I can feel it physically. 'Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!' And man too. Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man. That's it.”
“Girls! Don't cry. We were always on the front lines. We were Stakhanovites. We lived through Stalin, through the war! If I didn't laugh and comfort myself, I'd have hanged myself long ago.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“You want another joke? After Chernobyl you can eat anything you want, but you have to bury your own shit in lead.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“In my opinion -- we're the raw materials for a scientific experiment, for an international laboratory. There are ten million Bellarussians, and two million of us live on poisoned land. It's a huge devil's laboratory.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“What should I do with my kid? I want to put him under my arm and get the hell out. But I have a Party card in my pocket. I can't do it.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I come home after everything -- my wife listens to me -- and then she says quietly, " I love you, but I won't let you have my son. I won't let anyone have him. Not Chernobyl, not Chechnya. Not anyone!" The fear has already settled into her.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Evil is not an actual substance. It is the absence of good, in the way that darkness is simply the absence of light.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin's Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: 'nuclear', 'explosion', 'heroes'. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“To write about that now, when only ten years have gone by. Write about it? I think it's senseless. You can't explain it, you can't understand it. We’ll still try to imagine something that looks like our own lives now. I've tried it and it doesn’t work. The Chernobyl explosion gave us the mythology of Chernobyl. The papers and magazines compete to see who can write the most frightening article. People who weren't there love to be frightened. Everyone read about mushrooms the size of human heads, but no one actually found them. So instead of writing, you should record. Document. Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl—there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“What is it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it’s black. Like earth. But if it’s colorless, then it’s like God. God is everywhere but you can’t see Him. They scare us! The apples are hanging in the garden, the leaves are on the trees, the potatoes are in the fields. I don’t think there was any Chernobyl, they made it up. They tricked people. My sister left with her husband. Not far from here, twenty kilometers. They lived there two months, and the neighbor comes running: ‘Your cow sent radiation to my cow! She’s falling down.’ ‘How’d she send it?’ 'Through the air, that’s how, like dust. It flies.’ 'Just fairy tales! Stories and more stories.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“No one listened to us! No one listened to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did!”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We came home. I took off all the clothes that I wore in there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my hat to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain… You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“—Todo lo que conocemos de los horrores y temores tiene más que ver con la
guerra. El gulag estalinista y Auschwitz son recientes adquisiciones del mal. La
historia siempre ha sido un relato de guerras y de caudillos, y la guerra constituía,
digamos, la medida del horror. Por eso, la gente confunde los conceptos de guerra y
catástrofe. En Chernóbil se diría que están presentes todos los rasgos de la guerra:
muchos soldados, evacuación, hogares abandonados… Se ha destruido el curso de la
vida. Las informaciones sobre Chernóbil están plagadas de términos bélicos: átomo,
explosión, héroes… Y esta circunstancia dificulta la comprensión de que nos
hallamos ante una nueva historia. Ha empezado la historia de las catástrofes… Pero
el hombre no quiere pensar en esto, porque nunca se ha parado a pensar en esto; se
esconde tras aquello que le resulta conocido. Tras el pasado.
Hasta los monumentos a los héroes de Chernóbil parecen militares.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Leonid Andréyev, del que ya le he hablado, tiene un relato. Un hombre que vivía en Jerusalén vio un día cómo junto a su casa conducían a Cristo. El hombre lo vio todo y lo oyó, pero entonces le dolía una muela. Ante sus ojos, Cristo cayó al suelo con la cruz a cuestas, cayó y lanzó un grito de dolor. El hombre que veía todo esto no salió de su casa a la calle porque le dolía una muela. Al cabo de dos días, cuando dejó de dolerle la muela, le contaron que Cristo había resucitado y entonces el hombre pensó: «Y yo que podía haber sido testigo del hecho, pero como me dolía la muela…».
¿Será posible que siempre ocurra igual? Los hombres nunca están a la altura de los grandes acontecimientos. Siempre les superan los hechos. Mi padre luchó en la defensa de Moscú en el 42. Pero no comprendió que había participado en un gran acontecimiento hasta pasadas decenas de años. Por los libros, las películas. Él, en cambio, recordaba: «Estaba metido en una trinchera. Disparaba. Quedé enterrado por una explosión. Los enfermeros me sacaron de allí medio vivo». Y nada más.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“We paid for the dormitory ourselves. For fourteen nights. It was a hospital for radiation poisoning. Fourteen nights. That’s how long it takes for person to die.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Akla duyulan inanç insanı terk ederse, ruhuna korku yerleşir, tıpkı vahşi insanda olduğu gibi. Bu durum canavarlar üretir.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Ve genel olarak anladım ki, hayattaki korkunç şeyler sessizce ve doğal bir şekilde gerçekleşiyor...”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Ama sanat, hasta birinden elde edilen serum gibi, başkalarının deneyimlerini bedeninize zerk edebilir. Çernobil, tam Dostoyevski’lik bir konu. İnsanı maruz gösterme girişimi. Ya da belki, her şey son derece basittir: Dünyaya parmak uçlarında yaklaşıp tam eşikte durmak lazımdır, kimbilir?!
Bu ilahi dünyayı hayretle seyredip… O şekilde sürdürmek lazımdır yaşamı…”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“En önemli şey yaşam ve ölüm. Başka bir şey yok. Sakın bunu tartmaya çalışmayın…
Anladım ki, sadece yaşadığınız anın anlamı var… Yaşadığımız anların…”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Oh Lyubochka, do you understand what I'm telling you, my sorrow? you'll carry it to people, maybe I won't be here anymore. I'll be in the ground. Under the roots..." Zinaida Kovalenko, Voices From Chernobyl”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“It's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding areas, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. . . In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. . . The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn't break down until weeks or months later, at which point they'd die horribly.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I'm a product of my time. I'm not a criminal.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I'm twelve years old and I'm an invalid. The mailman brings two pension checks to our house - for me and my grandad. When the girls in my class found out that I had cancer of the blood, they were afraid to sit next to me. They didn't want to touch me.
The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster