Chernobyl

Boris Noordenbos

Subproject 2 focuses on memory and conspiracy narratives regarding the 1986 catastrophe at the nuclear power plant near Chernobyl’ (Chornobil’ in Ukrainian; Charnobyl’ in Belarusian). In contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – the countries where public health and the environment were most severely affected – the nuclear disaster serves as a frequent focal point for antagonistic perspectives on the Soviet regime and its lasting legacies. Official and grassroots memory practices in Russia have often regurgitated a Soviet-style insistence on the self-sacrificing heroism of the Chernobyl clean-up workers, equating the “[v]ictory over radiation [...] with the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany” (Johnson 2019: 118). In Belarus, where the largest contaminated territories are located, the authoritarian Lukashenko-government has presented its endeavors to resettle these regions in similarly vindictive terms (Kasperski 2013: 123-125), thereby contributing to an obfuscation of the catastrophe’s ongoing health effects (Kuchinskaya 2014). Alternative interpretations in Ukraine and Belarus challenge these triumphant perspectives (Nikolayenko 2015: 232; Briukhovetska 2016: 112-113), sometimes framing the disaster in conspiratorial terms, as an intentional, Moscow-orchestrated calamity (Johnson 2019: 127; Kasperski 2013: 131-132).

Cultural imaginations studied in this section of the project include the widely acclaimed Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future by the Belarusian Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich. The book includes 500 accounts by people who were affected by the disaster and reveals the centrality of conspiracy talk and World War II memory in popular Belarusian discourses on “Charnobyl’.” Western cultural engagements will be considered too, including the documentary film The Russian Woodpecker(2015) by the American director Chad Gracia. The film charts Chernobyl’-themed conspiracy theories in Ukraine, showing how they have gained additional momentum since the Maidan Revolution of 2014. The internationally acclaimed HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which borrows profusely from Alexievich’s book, too, has a place in the corpus, albeit largely indirectly, to the extent that it has impacted cultural imaginations in post-socialist Europe.

While these Western productions have contributed to what may be called the “cosmopolitan memory” (Levy and Sznaider 2006) of Chernobyl’, the research will give center stage to Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian cultural expressions which sometimes resist precisely this “globalization” of Chernobyl’ memory. The research zeroes in on audiovisual media, and spotlights the (conspiratorial) ways in which recent cultural imaginations visualize Chernobyl’’s persistent –  yet ultimately invisible – threats. Tourist excursions to Chernobyl’/Chornobil’ – from before Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine – are analyzed, too. Special attention is devoted to how various tours, targeting different audiences, capitalized on well-known film and game tropes, and how they mobilized memory and suspicion as part of a dark tourism experience.

The Russian war against Ukraine has radically changed the significance of “Chernobyl’”, reminding many of the impossibility to accept the “pastness” of the Soviet past. The seizure of the Chornobil’ area in the first week of the war, the Russian shelling of the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (the largest one in Europe), and the ongoing fighting in that area, have triggered a wave of mnemonic and conspiratorial references to the 1986 catastrophe. While Ukrainian and Western officials repeatedly warned against a “second Chernobyl” (with even more devastating effects than the 1986 disaster), pro-Kremlin media outlets went presented accounts of Russian-initiated fighting at Zaporizhzhia as American-orchestrated scaremongering. Today, suspicion-filled narratives about “Chernobyl’” have acquired an unexpectedly prominent place in the military and mnemonic wars raging on the European continent.

Image: still from The Russian Woodpecker (dir. Chad Gracia, 2015), Roast Beef Productions, Rattapallax Productions, Gracia Films. 

Works Cited

Briukhovetska, Olga. “‘Nuclear Belonging’: ‘Chernobyl’ in Belarusian, Ukrainian (and Russian) Films.” Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian Film: Screen as Battlefield, edited by Sander Brouwer, Brill, 2016, pp. 95-121.

Johnson, Emily D. “Remembering Chernobyl Through the Lens of Post-Soviet Nostalgia.” Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies, edited by Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos and Ksenia Robbe, Routledge, 2019, pp. 115-32.

Kasperski, Tatiana. “The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident and Identity Strategies in Belarus.” History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Memory Games, edited by Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 121-35.

Kuchinskaya, Olga. The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl, MIT Press, 2014.

Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Temple University Press, 2006.

Nikolayenko, Olena. “Marching Against the Dictator: Chernobyl Path in Belarus.” Social Movement Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2015, pp. 230-6.