Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Viktor Latun was studying history at university and working in a factory when he was conscripted as a construction worker in the Zone. The military bosses celebrated the workers’ heroism but didn’t know anything about radiation, he recalls. Everyone drank to excess at night, and “vodka was more valuable than gold” (195) because supplies were scarce in the chronic-shortage economy. But Soviet consumers knew how to compensate for unavailable goods: “Everything in the villages around us had been drunk: the vodka, the moonshine, the lotion, the nail polish, the aerosols” (195). Viktor recalls how their nightly drunken conversations inevitably became philosophical debates about “the fate of the country and the design of the universe. […] Are we a great empire, or not, will we defeat the Americans, or not?” (195). They rarely discussed concerns about personal safety and the lack of protective gear, he says, suggesting that many liquidators didn’t prioritize self-preservation.

Nadezhda Burakova (a doctor) and her husband decided to return to their village after the evacuation because elsewhere they were feared and treated like “lepers.” She explains, “Here, we’re all Chernobylites. We’re not afraid of one another” (198). Comparing their fate unfavorably with that of the war generation, she argues that winning the war “gave them a very strong life-energy […].