Svetlana Alexievich: Democracy Has Not Retreated, It Is Rearming, Adapting To New Times

Nobel Prize winner - on memory and the future.

April 26 marked the 40th anniversary of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The unlearned lessons of the greatest man-made catastrophe of the XX century and the long-term consequences of the Chernobyl accident for the residents of Belarus - an exclusive interview Radye Svaboda with the Nobel Prize winner and author of the book "Chernobyl.html">"Radyo Svaboda" with Nobel Prize winner, author of the book "Chernobyl Prayer" Svetlana Alexievich.

"I remember purple puddles and the rain I was caught in"

- Do you remember that day, April 26, 1986?

- For me personally it was a very hard day. My sister was dying in Borovlyany. And I was in serious condition. But I remember the purple puddles and the rain I got caught in. What happened became clear only later. I returned home.

My friend from Sweden called me and told me that there had been an explosion in Chernobyl. I, of course, was a child of my time and replied, "No, everything is calm here, no one is saying anything." It was I who reassured her.

- How quickly did you realize the scale of the tragedy?

- As always, I felt like a witness. Men were sent there as liquidators; they were terrified. I remember how scared my neighbor was. She told me that they had no children, and if her husband was taken there, they would have no one left.

- That fear was already there. And I was immediately turned on. It's that state when something happens and you have to capture it. But it wasn't until a few months later that I realized the metaphysics of what was happening.

- And when did you start recording people's testimonies? When you recorded the wife of the liquidator Vasily Ignatenko, who was one of the first to arrive at the site of the fire at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, received a lethal dose of radiation and died in agony in Moscow a couple of weeks later?

- It was later, maybe towards the end of the first year. She was already living in Kiev. I asked her to come to Minsk. And her husband's parents lived in Bragin, and she wanted to go to Bragin later. So I signed her up. I remember how excited I was when she found her husband in the Moscow hospital. She desperately wanted to hug and kiss him, but the doctors and even the orderlies told her, "Stand back, you can't, he is now an object to be deactivated." That moved me. It felt like something unknown to us was happening. And even when I started writing the book, I had nothing to draw on culturally. When I wrote about the war, there was already a whole body of literature on the subject. When I wrote about other things, they also existed in the culture, but Chernobyl was not in it. And that was the hardest part. I had to appeal to people. The culture was powerless. Only witnesses could say something.

I remember a helicopter pilot who called me several times. He was persistent. I explained to him that I didn't have time. But he would say, "I'm begging you. I will come, because you will come back (I was going somewhere at that time), and I may be gone." And it was not a man who came, but some shadow of a man. He was the pilot of the helicopter that was dropping sand on that reactor. That was the idea at the time. Later it became clear that it was dangerous, because the radiation would spread even further into the area, but they didn't know that at the time. And he started to tell me. He was in such a hurry. And then all of a sudden he said: "Write it down, I beg you, write it all down. Because you won't understand, I won't understand, but others will come, maybe they will understand. Something happened that we were not prepared for. I was right there. I'm leaving, and I want you to write this down." I encountered this many times afterward.

- How much was left that didn't make it into the book Chernobyl Prayer? What you wrote down but decided not to include?"

- What's left is not so important. I think I used anything that was new that we couldn't figure out. Across the board, people were repeating themselves. That's not so important. What's important is the idea. What these testimonies carry. I think I tried to keep new testimonies.

- For me personally, "Chernobyl Prayer" is your strongest book. Its subtitle is "Chronicle of the Future." Are we already in that future?"

- When the Fukushima accident happened, I went there. I acted on my subtitle, "Chronicle of the Future." It was just like ours there. The same displaced people, the same confused people, the same abandoned towns and villages as ours. And when I talked to people, I heard the same things I heard back home in Belarus. It was many years after Chernobyl, and I realized: yes, this is the future. Mankind has invented technologies that it cannot cope with. It cannot cope with them psychologically, and with the consequences that may arise. All of this is with us now.

For example, the war in Ukraine. When the Russians took over Chernobyl, they forced soldiers to dig trenches near the station. And a week later, all those soldiers ended up in the hospital. This shows that man has invented technology, but does not know its dangers or what to expect from it. And the lesson of Chernobyl has not been learned. If it had been learned, soldiers would not have been forced to dig trenches there. When the general was asked why they did it, he said, "Well, it's been 20 or 30 years." He didn't even know exactly how long. The effects of Chernobyl will probably last for fifty human generations or more; it doesn't fit in the mind of the average person. And the culture hasn't internalized this stuff.

- You say that as you worked on this topic you realized: you're practically the first, no one before you has really delved into this. How did researching the topic and talking to survivors change you as a writer and as a person?"

- Each of my books is part of my journey to understand where I live, in what time, and among what people I live. That was my goal - to record the history of the red man, the man of utopia. But Chernobyl took me further than that. It threw me into the unknown. It was like that with every book in its own way, but especially with Chernobyl. It was a special leap in my consciousness. It was something that people didn't know then and still don't know now.

- "When I walked the Chernobyl soil in the zone, I didn't feel like a Belarusian at all; I felt like a representative of some biological species. Not a Frenchwoman or an American, but exactly a representative of a biospecies. I saw suffering animals and birds; I had a feeling that living beings were suffering and that I was part of it," you said in an interview five years ago. There is now war in Ukraine and the Middle East. Has that dulled the pain of Chernobyl?"

- Not for me personally. But for the mass consciousness... Perhaps the pain has shifted to something more concrete. There is a war going on. Kharkov is burning, Odessa is being bombed. People talk about it. But Chernobyl has been relegated to the background. That's how human consciousness works, but it doesn't mean that Chernobyl has become less dangerous, less terrible.

Belarusians are still people-"black boxes", recording information for the future: how to live with Chernobyl, how to drink Chernobyl, how to eat Chernobyl? And that's what we do. We drink this water because it's impossible to control everything that happens underground. And people die from it, but the cause of death is written down as heart attack, stroke. Maybe it's all the Chernobyl accumulation in the water and food we consume. You could say that we are living with something we haven't realized. But of course we are reacting to what is happening today.

Today things are happening that can shake the ordinary consciousness, any consciousness. I think that after the war in Ukraine, each of us is in a state of puzzlement: how could this happen? Or what is happening now in the East, in Tehran? And what does it threaten? Perhaps it threatens some kind of catastrophe. As Trump said: civilization will disappear before your eyes. And we're all talking about World War III. Terrifying things are happening to us. But that doesn't mean that Chernobyl isn't doing its job.

- In an earlier interview, you said that you thought the British-American TV series Chernobyl was the best of the many screen adaptations and theatrical productions of Chernobyl Prayer. How many film adaptations and productions have there been over the years?

- There have been seven films, I guess. I stopped following it because I was no longer interested in what they were telling. When something of my work is adapted or put on stage, I'm always interested in what the director sees - how far he looks, what else new things he's picked up. But it's very rare for me to come across something like this. Honestly, I was surprised that the show was watched all over the world. I come to Mexico and everyone is talking about the Chernobyl series; I come to Austria and everyone is talking about it there too. They have achieved something; although some of the moments seem simplistic to me, they still managed to touch the consciousness of ordinary people around the world.

- If you were writing "Chernobyl Prayer" today, how would it be different?"

- It's hard to say. My understanding hasn't changed. When I was in Fukushima, it was exactly the same. It's not just the facts themselves that are important, but what you take from them. I don't think I could go any further, but perhaps today people who have lived with Chernobyl for a long time could be a continuation of this topic if I sat down and wrote a sequel. I'd write about how people live with it, how they come to terms with the horror, how they make it almost domestic. There were touching things in there that are hard to interrupt with anything.

I remember we arrived in a village and there was a soldier walking along, escorting an old woman. She was carrying eggs in a basket. And she says, "Let's go bury the eggs." There was a pit behind the village; that's where they threw everything. The woman cried anyway. Eggs are eggs. And people were forced to wash firewood. Soldiers washed roofs. It was madness for the people. There was nothing to eat; they brought only some pasta, which they ate. And they said: "How can it be? Grandfathers and great-grandfathers ate, but we can't." Their consciousness was turned upside down. It's hard to find something more powerful, but the material is there - how people live with that horror, how they live with it today.

- And if you think back to the COVID-19 pandemic, was the horror that people experienced similar to what you witnessed after Chernobyl? Were there any parallels?"

- I thought about that. It seemed to me that something similar was happening. I remember one report where a woman was burying her parents, according to the commentator. And the first year was just a horror. They weren't allowed to see their elderly relatives, couldn't say goodbye, couldn't go to the hospital. And, my God, the way she rushed to that casket. And I realized it was the same madness we went through in Chernobyl, over and over again. I remembered it instantly. It was very similar. Then and we somehow developed a collective immunity or got used to the thought. We learned to live with that horror as well.

I don't know what lies ahead and how we will learn to live with it. But this experience must be processed, it must not be forgotten. What happened in Chernobyl, I think, to some extent was necessary for people during the pandemic. There was a sense of something cosmic then, too. Like the whole world was affected. I didn't feel like anyone did it. It felt like something was happening in nature itself, and humanity was facing new challenges.

- And people have already forgotten these new challenges too, they only remember them occasionally. I suppose it's a peculiarity of the human psyche not to remember, to put it aside. Not to draw conclusions, not to work on mistakes so as not to repeat them. Can we say that this is what happened with both Covid and Chernobyl?

- Yes, people are not made to remember the past, but on the other hand, it helps them, oddly enough, to survive. Otherwise we'd all end up in a mental institution. So much fear for themselves, for their loved ones. Man is not made for such trials; he would not be able to withstand them. Forgetting or getting used to living with this horror is the very reason we somehow manage to live.

I think we need to learn not only courage - how people died there or how they saved each other - but also to learn from this horror and live on with this new understanding. But we focus more on courage because we have a military culture, and courage is a core value. But today, the core value is becoming knowledge. To understand where we are. We may not always be able to answer the question "why?" but at least we can make sense of the knowledge we have.

- Can we say that Chernobyl shaped entire generations of Belarusians, including those who waited for foreign aid, those who were indifferent ("radiation doesn't matter, I'll eat this food"), those who didn't survive, those who didn't learn lessons, those who sacrificed themselves, those who raised this topic, like Ales Adamovich?"

- Of course. Belarus is still a Chernobyl laboratory. Chernobyl is still with us. It is impossible to forget about it, because radiation is present; many radionuclides will be present for about a thousand years. How can it be forgotten? In our generation people die from some radionuclides; in the next generation they will die from other radionuclides that have accumulated. This will be with us for a long time. It's not like a war. Chernobyl is a long time coming. And it's too bad that we didn't have the culture and the understanding to realize that this has to be processed today. But I think now is the time for testimonies; we need to collect them. Evidence of Chernobyl, evidence of pandemics, evidence of new dictatorships. We may not be able to fully comprehend all of this today. I'm aware of what's going on in the culture, and I can't say that there is something that is fully understood, that answers all the questions. There is no such thing. I think things like war, the hatred that is building up in the world, makes us forget about Chernobyl or the pandemic for a while. There's something going on in the world that's bigger than us. Therein lies the whole problem. There's more going on than we're capable of comprehending. I think that writers, people of culture, should accumulate knowledge.

- The Belarusian authorities built the Astravets NPP according to the Russian design, under Russian control and with the involvement of Russian specialists. The Belarusian public does not have full information about how it was built and whether everything was done correctly. Of course, it is hard to imagine mass protests in a dictatorship, but nevertheless, there were no major public protests throughout the entire period of NPP construction and operation. Why do you think that is? Maybe because it is senseless to protest in Belarus? Or because people got tired and simply decided that it was not so important?

- It is difficult to protest in a dictatorship. Here we are out in 2020. We may not have done everything, but we still did something, we showed that we existed and that we were protesting. But we said it. And we became a nation, a people. But then, after Chernobyl, humanity, I think, came closer to the idea that we need to live differently in nature, that the time of violence against nature is over. We need to live differently with her, otherwise she will win. We see the huge climate change that is happening in the world. People cannot resist it.

At that time, people did a lot: in the Baltic States, in Sweden, people gave up nuclear power plants. And now these wars have started. If you listen to modern governments, everybody wants bombs. Those who have them are very happy to have them, they want more [nuclear] bombs, and those who don't have them also want bombs. And people are discarding the knowledge they acquired after Chernobyl. But they still exist. We knew that. That breakthrough happened. And now we've kind of backed off, and democracy has backed off. I would say the past is winning. We are plunging into some new Middle Ages.

I remember the footage on TV when hundreds of tanks from all over Russia, from different places, were heading towards the Ukrainian border. It was a horrifying sight. There was a sense of a new Middle Ages, especially for me, having traveled all over that Chernobyl land and experienced so many brand new feelings. For me, it was a victory of the past, a retreat of humanity from the heights we had managed to reach.

And I don't think democracy has retreated; rather, it is rearming, adapting to new times. I think our confusion will end, new generations will come, and perhaps new technologies will help us. Still, I hope people will be different, not as they are today.

- Has the experience of previous generations, who survived illness, loss of loved ones and relocation, been passed on to those born after 1986?

- I think it is still "encapsulated". I think it still lives in families, in family memory. It was the same when Stalin resettled small peoples, when people were sent to the Gulag - all this was also encapsulated in memory, in family memory. But then it came out, and then the whole world found out about it. I think that those who can, should collect it, not forget how their child died, how a loved one died, and why they died. They may have been told one thing, but they know very well, especially those who live there, in Narovla or somewhere else, they know what they died of.

- Is there a risk that this family memory will just disappear with the passing of people?

- I don't think so, because some radionuclides will live for thousands of years, and hot particles are immortal, they will just live in the ground. It will always be with us. Chernobyl is always with us. It's such a human naivety to think that 40 years have passed and it's all over. No, it will take hundreds of years. We will die and the radionuclides will live on.

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