Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Sergei Gurin was a cameraman sent to film liquidators at work in the Zone. He recalls instinctively ignoring grisly scenes like the “giant pit, where they’re burying the cows with a bulldozer” (110), and instead filming in “the great tradition of our patriotic documentaries: the bulldozer drivers are reading Pravda, the headline in huge block letters: ‘The nation will not abandon those in trouble!’” (110). He realizes that he has been thoroughly conditioned by Soviet propaganda and derides himself one of many “peddlers of the apocalypse” (111). His time in the Zone has convinced him that, even during emergencies, most people “aren’t heroes,” that “the mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. […] Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat” (116). So great was his disillusionment that he now films “only animals.” The disaster brought him closer to the animal world, and he suggests a sense of kinship with Saint Francis of Assisi, who “preached to the birds” (118).

Arkady Bogdankevich, a rural medical attendant, more or less refuses to engage in the interview, chastising Alexievich for coming to ask questions without offering any material assistance.