Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster [Paperback]

This book is a translation of interviews with survivors 10 years after Chernobyl. The first-person descriptions of living in the "Zone" after the disaster, and the implications of living in radioactivity is chilling and compelling. The book is full of heartbreaking stories of Russian people who survived WWII but then were confronted with another disaster of unbelievable magnitude. I absolutely couldn't put this book down, and feel that it should be promoted as one of the best books of the year. As we are now approaching the 20th anniversary of this event, I keep wondering how many of those people interviewed in 1996 are still alive. This book deserves a huge audience!

Occasionally I'll read first-hand accounts about human catastrophes in the modern world, such as Sudan or Rwanda or Katrina, because it offers a window into what I as a middle class American normally would never see or experience, hopefully making me a better and wiser person without becoming numb or a "dark tourist". Books are more subtle and rich than film and more rewarding in the end.

As an oral history this is a frightening experience (the term "experience" emphasized). Chernobyl has been largely hushed up and kept quiet, the scope of it is worse than most know or understand (occasionally we hear a few hundred or thousand people died and certain cancers are slightly up, don't believe it, much worse). Only about %5 of the nuclear material escaped so it was a minor accident on the scale of things. There is a %50 chance of another meltdown happening elsewhere in the world over the next 40 years (sourced in book). Had Chernobyl been a full meltdown much of Europe would be dieing off as we speak. 16 more Chernobyl-type reactors are still in operation (14 in Russia). As Alexievich says in her epitaph: "These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future."

The disaster of Chernobyl is still going today, it never ended, it is like AIDS - it just keeps getting worse, there is no cure for radiation which lasts 100s of 1000s of years. The radiated material is finding its way outside of the "Zone" and spreading slowly around the world. Down the rivers into the seas, blown on dust, carried out by hand by bandits in the form of trucks and TV's and scrap metal sold to Asian scrap metal firms which build the goods we buy, grown in food and sold on the world market. I put this book down thinking two things: where can I buy a gieger counter and where can I buy iodine.

Alexievic is a fascinating person her books published around the world in over 19 languages; translated authors don't get big billing in the USA but she is a world-class author and pretty well known in Europe. The Stalinst-Soviet style government of Belorussia (her home country) is not sympathetic to independent journalists (they end up dead). She has a fairly detailed personal website (I can't post links on Amazon but Google search on her name).

This book is a punch in the gut. There's no nicer way to say it. It's downright devastating. It's something that every single person should read. Even if you only know Chernobyl vaguely, two things are made painfully apparent by this book: whatever you've read about Chernobyl in the past has probably grossly underestimated the magnitude of the disaster; and the death and injury toll from the accident hasn't stopped yet. Not by a long shot.

In her quest to expose the human cost of Chernobyl, journalist Svetlana Alexievich presents three years' worth of interviews with a wide cross-section of individuals. Unlike most books about Chernobyl, the focus is on the people of Belarus, who were not evacuated as quickly as their southern neighbors in Ukraine. The breadth of the author's research is astounding. The reader meets the widow of one of the first responders to the Chernobyl accident, a young firefighter who arrived at the nuclear plant clad only in his street clothes and ended up suffering an agonizing death in a Moscow radiation ward only 14 days later. There are children who were evacuated from surrounding cities and parents of children who have died from radiation-related illnesses. There's a respected scientist who, learning of the Chernobyl disaster, made frantic calls to all the Soviet brass in Minsk he could think of, only to be ignored. There are elderly men and women who have returned to the Exclusion Zone to live in solitude, eating radioactive crops. There are liquidators who toiled for months shoring up the reactor's ruins, only to receive a medal, a certificate and a serious or terminal illness as thanks. There's even an ex-Soviet official who tries to justify the cover-ups surrounding the Chernobyl crisis.

No angle is ignored, and no detail, no matter how horrifying, is politely edited out. Alexievich allows her subjects to tell their stories honestly and frankly. Voices from Chernobyl presents a profound moment of truth for a situation that, for 20 years, has been seeped in denial and secrecy. Very highly recommended.