1378 Reviews of HBO’s Chernobyl

Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future [2019]), ing for all six wardmates—no obligatory Soviet hero- and Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The ism, but a desperate reach for agency, normalcy, and Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster humanity (Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer,12). [2019]). Not the German-made series Dark,asci-fi Televisual mass culture has long played a role in thriller premiering in 2017 about a number of small- shaping memories, fracturing or merging them, and town generations warped by the moral transgressions galvanizing them for political aims. Just a decade ago, that are inseparable from a local nuclear power sta- optimism about its potential was ascendant. Disaster- tion’s construction and its radioactive waste depot in a film scholars prophesied a future for the genre’s “new Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/4/1378/5581179 by Harvard Library user on 01 April 2020 crypt turned time-travel tunnel. responsibilities”: involvement instead of seduction, In contrast to Dark, which overwhelms with tangled empathy instead of entertainment, and awareness in- timelines (1953, 1986, 2019, and beyond—and before) stead of escapism (see, for instance, Stephen Keane, and insinuates that Chernobyls lurk anywhere, Cher- Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe [2006], nobyl beckons with a simpler plot and a palatable So- 107). Memory scholars ventured that screen fictions viet flavor. Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the pregnant wife of bring private ordeals into the public consciousness, the dying liquidator Vasily Ignatenko (her story is bor- upending the traditional modes of historical knowledge rowed from Alexievich), becomes a quintessential ro- production, forging “unexpected alliances across mance heroine retrofitted for really existing socialism. chasms of difference,” and kindling new forms of self- To reunite with her husband, she navigates the loveless awareness and solidarity (Alison Landsberg, Pros- corridors of Soviet institutions, sneaking past their thetic Memory: The Transformation of American Re- emotion-deprived human pillars. Yet Lyudmilla’sorigi- membrance in the Age of Mass Culture [2004], 3). nal account in Alexievich is less black and white; her Such enthusiasm has since grown quieter. Will fiction journey to her husband’s ward is paved with the kind- shame in the age of grift cause it to rise—or to fall de- ness of strangers and friends: “You poor, poor thing,” finitively? she hears often, and her reunion with Vasily is not YULIYA KOMSKA strictly accomplished by the twosome. The original Dartmouth College story touchingly details her dogged dedication to cook-

Since it aired, starting in May 2019, HBO’s Chernobyl it are highly misleading: at best they reflectwhatpeo- series has been subjected to a lot of scrutiny regarding ple were told, or remembered, but, as historians well its accuracy. There’smuchtobecriticalof.The“fear know, there can be a gap between perceptions and of the bullet” atmosphere it invokes is more appropri- reality. One could, in a very charitable mode, read the ate for the Stalin era than the Gorbachev; its depiction “radioactive fireman” narrative as being a reflection of of accident hazards is often dramatically exaggerated a subjective experience, but that isn’t really how it is (there was never any risk of a multiple-megaton explo- shown. Nobody who lacked a sufficient understanding sion); and while high levels of radiation exposure can of how radioactivity works would be expected to think indeed produce some nasty effects (including “sun- that the show was not trying to indicate that the mother burns” and blistering), it doesn’t make people so radio- had not in fact had a fatal dose of radiation on account active that, once cleaned and decontaminated, they can of her post-accident time spent with her husband, “but “contagiously” spread radiation to those around them the baby absorbed it instead.” (Birth defects and spon- (much less have that radiation be selectively absorbed taneous abortions are indeed well-documented side- by a fetus, to save the mother). effects of radioactive exposures, though it is not be- This is just to name a few of the basic factual cause they selectively absorb radioactivity to “save the “howlers,” ignoring a lot of the more subtle technical mother,” but because developing and rapidly growing errors, and not to even get into whether the “blame cells are particularly vulnerable to the cellular and ge- Dyatlov” line of argumentation (not coincidentally, the netic damage caused by ionizing radiation. They can same approach taken by the Soviet Union itself!) is a also occur naturally as well, which is why it is difficult poor way to think about the cause(s) of the accident. to attribute causality in individual cases, as opposed to Some of these errors are in service of the plot. The epidemiological studies that look at “excess” occur- “radioactive fireman” narrative thread that moves rences from the norm. But once his clothing was through each episode is clearly a key way to humanize stripped from him, and he was washed, her fireman the accident, and is taken wholesale from the prologue husband would not have been sufficiently radioactive to Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl to give his wife any kind of significant dose.) (2005). Alexievich’s collection of oral history inter- There are some errors that are not really in the ser- views has much value, but some of the descriptions in vice of the plot. The “megaton” explosion threatened

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2019 Reviews of HBO’s Chernobyl 1379 is not accurate in the slightest, nor is the description of feel empowered to understand a complex political- the effects of a three- or four-megaton blast (it is exag- technical disaster, even if in some respects it oversim- geratedbyasignificant factor). Why do this? To plified that very complexity. heighten tension, sure. For “good television.” But what The very popularity of Chernobyl has understand- is the cost of “good television”?InaNew York Times ably led to a strong online presence of people wanting review published on June 2, 2019, science writer to ask, or talk, about it. Over the last few months, I’ve Henry Fountain wrote that the errors don’t “really mat- seen many questions related to the series on Reddit, ter,” because they are in the service of getting the “ba- Stack Exchange, Quora, and other online discussion or Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/4/1378/5581179 by Harvard Library user on 01 April 2020 sic truth right.” Whether this is accurate depends on question-answering websites. Often these are about whether you think they’ve gotten the “basic truth” cor- dissecting some of the technical assertions: the kinds rect, and on the cost of errors done in the name of a of questions one might ask if one knows a bit about the greater good. technical aspects and is suspicious of the show’s depic- But this is not really meant to be a fact-checking tion (the aforementioned “radioactive fireman” sce- piece; many of those are easy to find. I’m more inter- nario evoked most of these, as did the “megaton” fear, estedinhowChernobyl was watched, because both of which stand out as extremely dubious if you watched it was: according to HBO, over 50 percent of have a little understanding of the underlying technical HBO subscribers watched the series (over eight million aspects). Some of them were asking for clarification viewers), topping even Game of Thrones in terms of (“What does a reading 12,000 Roentgen mean?” asked market penetration, according to Travis Clark’s June one person to the physics board at Stack Exchange); 13, 2019, article on Business Insider.That’simpres- one was pushing back against the idea that all Russians sive for any series, much less one about a nuclear di- hated the series. saster in Ukraine that happened over thirty years ago— Some of these online outpourings were simply lau- the sort of thing that conventional wisdom typically datory. There are several Reddit forums (“subreddits”) says is not what people want to spend their entertain- devoted to the show, many of which are dominated by ment time watching. Chernobyl “memes,” mostly making fun of Dyatlov’s Why did they watch it? Without wanting to specu- authoritarian attitude (“RBMK Reactors Can’tEx- late (was it the advertising campaign, the acting, the plode, Change My Mind,” reads one that riffs off of production values, the lackluster nature of said last sea- another popular “Change My Mind” meme), or his son of Game of Thrones?), let’s just operationally “3.6 [Roentgen]—not great, not terrible” quote. These say that Chernobyl “worked as television,” whatever seem likely to be the product of young people (teen- its relationship with history and technical accuracy. agers, college students), people who were not alive at What did it “do” for its watchers? Entirely non- the time of the accident (and in full disclosure, I was systematically, I tried to ferret this out from friends and five when it happened, and have no memory of it what- colleagues (none of whom study nuclear topics) as soever myself). They are historically removed from it, they told me what it was they found interesting about its fears, and its consequences, and perhaps that is the series. The general gist was along these lines: they what enables its easy translation into humor. knew nothing about Chernobyl except that it was a ter- The most interesting responses I’ve seen are in reac- rible nuclear accident, and the series “brought to life” tion to articles that dispute key aspects of the show. the people involved and explained the technical These seem to generally come in two forms. The first aspects in language they could make sense of. Which is a denial that the show, as entertainment, has any real is to say, it appears to have opened the “black box” of responsibility to the truth. It’s “just a show,” and, as the Chernobyl accident in a way that was accessible, one Reddit user asserted, people shouldn’t try to under- which is no easy thing. stand a complex historical/technical event from a piece Most books on Chernobyl from the 1990s and early of entertainment. Of course, we know that most people 2000s are densely technical and require significant in- do learn about such things from media products, and tellectual investment. Even the more accessible ones, that media products have had outsized influences on which tell a more human story (like Serhii Plokhy’s popular discourse on nuclear issues in particular (on 2018 book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Ca- this, see Spencer R. Weart’s2012bookThe Rise of tastrophe) still require quite a mental investment for Nuclear Fear). Films like On the Beach, Dr. Strange- people unfamiliar with Soviet history, with its labyrin- love, The China Syndrome,andThe Day After have thine bureaucracies, and with how nuclear reactors had profound impacts on how we process the “real” work. How many histories of Chernobyl start with a risk of nuclear technologies. complex diagram of an RBMK reactor and an attempt Occasionally there is a more thoughtful response, to explain what a positive void coefficient is? How one that takes to heart the core message that Chernobyl many require wading through descriptions of the over- is trying to convey about the importance of living in a lapping responsibilities of opaque agencies like society based on truth and not falsehood. For example, Minenergo and Sredmash? The show made viewers one Reddit user, after reading a “debunking” article,

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2019 1380 Reviews of HBO’s Chernobyl wrote: “It’s strange that I want to cling to the fictional than Chernobyl alone: it affects how people perceive version because I am so attached to it. Ironically, that’s nuclear power broadly, it affects how people respond the counter-point to the whole series. As incredible and to potential risks and hazards, and it could have severe entertaining as the series is, you have to maintain your consequences if there were some kind of radiological cynical search for the truth. It’s a good lesson from the incident in the future (e.g., increasing panic in ways show that even applies to the show itself” (Nick- that could be counterproductive to safety and recov- Moore30, July 1, 2019, comment on “Chernobyl HBO ery).

TV Series: What Really Happened and What Never As to the argument that a small lie can tell a bigger Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/4/1378/5581179 by Harvard Library user on 01 April 2020 Did!” from Reddit’s r/TVChernobyl subreddit). truth, I’m not sure that quite applies to the technical As someone who has consulted for Hollywood issues: the bigger truth isn’t aided by this kind of error, shows before (I was the historical consultant for the and ultimately, the effects of the Chernobyl accident WGN America show Manhattan, which is an alternate were bad enough to not require exaggeration. The his- history of the Manhattan Project), I understand a bit of torical issues strike me (perhaps wrongly) as less cru- the tension between scholarly accuracy and the needs cial here. Most Americans already have a cartoonish of entertainment. Shows that push for pure historical understanding of the Soviet Union, and so in this re- veracity not only don’t reach it (because that’s hard to spect Chernobyl was playing to the expectations of the do even with a book-length monograph, as any histo- audience. Toning down some of the impressions might rian knows), but tend to lack the narrative whole that have had a positive effect (that there are fears other good cinema requires. Historical narratives and cine- than the bullet that motivate people to do bad things is matic narratives are rarely a perfect mesh—and when an important point to make), but the long-term effect we find our historical narratives feeling too much like of such errors strikes me as likely less worrisome. a cinematic one, it’s usually a warning sign that we’re We might ask ourselves: Do the lessons that the missing a lot of nuance. American public learned from the Chernobyl series But there are better and worse mistakes, especially if outweigh the inaccuracies? I think it’stooearlytotell the underlying subject has real-world consequences. —it would be interesting to see whether there was any Nobody probably cares much that the writer of Cher- correlation between having seen the series and knowl- nobyl combined many secondary scientists into a sin- edge of nuclear issues, and scientific misconceptions. gle character for the purpose of the narrative arc of the If I were to be optimistic, I would say that at least plot—that isn’t really a fundamental error, even if it is Chernobyl put the accident on the public radar again, historically inaccurate (and, a historian of science like and showed that one can make popular television that myself might note, contributes to a common popular attempts (however effectively) to be a historical ac- understanding of how scientific knowledge is pro- count of a complicated political-technical event. For duced). But mischaracterizing the effects of radiation those of us who think that nuclear issues need more itself is a pretty fundamental problem, because most representation in popular media, that’s a good thing. people already have a poor understanding of the tech- ALEX WELLERSTEIN nical aspects, and this does impact a much wider world Stevens Institute of Technology

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2019