Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about. […] People look at you differently.”

Former Pripyat resident Nikolai Kalugin expresses the widely shared sentiment that living through an unprecedented nuclear disaster imposed a new identity on the survivors, setting them apart from the rest of humanity in a fundamental way. Because the world had never experienced a disaster like this, no one could predict its long-term impact on the local population.

“We have a drink and they start cursing the kolkhoz chairman. ‘We’re not going, period. We lived through the war, now it’s radiation.’ Even if we have to bury ourselves, we’re not going!”

An elderly villager who returned home after the evacuation recalls how she and her neighbors reacted dismissively to news of the impending evacuation. Members of this generation were less fearful of radiation than younger people were, because this invisible, abstract threat seemed trivial compared to the tangible horrors they experienced or witnessed during World War II.

“What’s it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? What color is it? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it’s black. But if it’s colorless, then it’s like God. God is everywhere, but you can’t see Him.”

This remark from Anna Badaeva, a returned villager, illustrates how the rural population lacked the scientific education to understand radiation. The only way she can make sense of an invisible force of such potency is to invoke the supernatural.