Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
President Carter came there, but he was not calling shots on none of those issues. What you see with Chernobyl, and people who saw HBO series know that very well, the moment the high official arrives, everyone actually falls in line. It's the official who calls the shot. To move population from the city of Pripyat, you needed The okay coming from Moscow from the very top. So that is Soviet story.
And there is a global story of cutting corners to meet either deadlines, like it was with that test that they were running at that time, or to meet production quarters. This is not just socialist thing. You can replace production quarters with... profit and you get the same story. Some parts in that story are generally reflective of our today's world in general.
Others are very specific for Soviet Union, for Soviet experience. The biggest probably Soviet Part of that story is that, on the one hand, the government in Moscow and Kiev, they mobilize all resources to deal with that.
But they keep information about what is happening and the radiation clouds secret from the rest of the population, something that completely would be impossible and was impossible in the U.S., in the U.K., where other accidents happened. And then guess what? A few years later,
The Soviet Union collapses very much also thanks to the mobilization of people over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy. People writing about that subject call it eco-nationalism, ecological nationalism. which comes at least in part from withholding information from people.
In Ukraine, mobilization didn't start over the issues that led to independence, didn't start over the issue of language, or didn't start over the issue of national autonomy. It started under the slogans, tell us the truth about Chernobyl. We want to know whether we live in contaminated areas or not.
That was a very, very strong factor that crossed not just ethnic, religious, linguistic lines between members of the party and not members of the party of the top leadership and not in military and civilian because it turned out that the party card didn't protect you from being affected by radiation.
So the all-national mobilization happens, the first mass manifestations are about Chernobyl, not about anything else.
I was. I was. And I think that the... Many series are very truthful on a number of levels and very untruthful on some others. And they got excellent, very well, the macro and micro levels. So the macro level is the issue of the big truth. And the story there is very much built around the theme that I just discussed now. It's about the cost of lies, right? And the Soviet Union line.
to the people, and that's what the film explores. So that's, I call it, a big truth about Chernobyl. And they got a lot of minor things really, really very well. like the curtains on the windows, like how the houses looked from inside and outside. I didn't see any post-Soviet film or any Western film that would be so good at capturing those everyday details.
But then there is a huge gray area in between big truth and small truth of recreating the environment. That's how you get from one to another. Then you see the KGB officers coming and taking someone out of the meeting and arresting, which was not necessary. You see the Soviet boss threatening someone to throw the person from the helicopter, so
You get this Hollywood sort of things, despite the fact that it's an HBO series. And they're the best, really, as a film, in the fourth episode, where they completely decided just to hell with the reality and let's... Let's make a film. So they bring Legasov, one of the key characters, to these court meetings. They bring the key Soviet party boss, Shcherbina. He wasn't there.
They create a drama there. So they got the main thing, the big truth, right? And that's why I like this production.
You want to see this in images, visible, right? But the question, again, I just mentioned KGB marching in and some party leader giving a speech. They were not given that speech, but the sense was there and it was in the air. I, as people of my generation who were there, knew that and recognized that.
But for new generation, whether they are in Ukraine, in Russia, in US, in Britain, in Zimbabwe, anywhere, you have to do these little untruths and introduce them. I had a very interesting on-air conversation with
the author of the script amazing and I asked him the question of the film declared really the importance of the truth but how do you square that with the need in the film to really put it mildly to go beyond the measures of truth whatever understanding of that term is
Yes, I wrote a book on Chernobyl and then tried to understand Chernobyl better, but placing it in the context of other disasters as a historian and was looking at the political factors and social factors and cultural factors, not the physics or engineering part of the story. And the factors that are still with us are the
like it was the case in Chernobyl, the authoritarian regimes, right, and high centralization of the decision-making. And desire to cut corners and also the issues associated with secrecy. So that is with us. If you look at where the future of the nuclear industry is now at this point, it's the regimes and parts in the Middle East. That's a big new frontier.
The countries that are not particularly known for the history of democratic existence. where we also have the situation that we had at Three Mile Island, that we had at Chernobyl. This is the first generation engineers, nuclear engineers, right?
So people where the country doesn't have a lot of experience in generations after generations working in that particular industry, where it's all new, that is certainly an additional risk. What we got now with this current war is something that, not that people completely didn't expect, but didn't happen in the past. You see the war coming to the nuclear sites.
Showing 321–340 of 375 · page 17 of 19
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