Chernobyl’s Radioactive Memory: Confronting the Impact of Nuclear Fallout by Haley J. Laurila A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Slavic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2020 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Herbert J. Eagle, Chair Professor Mikhail Krutikov Professor Michael Makin Professor Sarah Phillips, Indiana University Svitlana Rogovyk Haley J. Laurila [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1454-5979 © Haley J. Laurila 2020 Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my husband who is my biggest cheerleader. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. First and foremost, my committee, who put up with my last-minute changes and befuddling lack of administrative organiZation. Their helpful comments proved incredibly insightful. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues, who provided vital moral support and whose enthusiastic encouragement kept me motivated. For their help with childcare, I thank my family, without which I would not have been able to find the time to write this dissertation. Most of all, I would like. to thank my husband, Evan, who has always been supportive, no matter how disruptive and chaotic the writing process became. iii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract v Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Chernobyl’s Documentary Half-Lives: Invisibility and the Shaping of Memory 35 Chapter 2 Materiality and Memory: The Rhetoric of Chernobyl’s Memorial Spaces 110 Chapter 3 A Terrible Kaleidoscope: The Anthropocene Lyric in Chernobyl Poetry 188 Chapter 4 Virtual Encounters: Prosthetic Memories of Chernobyl in Popular Culture 276 Conclusion Chernobyl’s Radioactive Legacy: Nuclear Waste and Anti-Nuclear Activism 364 iv Abstract This dissertation examines the accretive violence wrought by nuclear power on bodies and spaces through a study of Chernobyl’s transnational memory. By examining this infamous disaster, I clarify the process by which power renders those impacts invisible, as well as the ways in which memory can assist in making the real impacts of nuclear power visible. I use the term ‘radioactive memory’ to explain the potential of these memories to combat dominant narratives of nuclear power that attempt to contain the disaster’s radioactive excess. The term also encompasses the potential of any engagement with Chernobyl to provoke a deeper understanding of how nuclear power affects communities and the environment. I show how memory of nuclear disaster is conditioned in a variety of ways through multimodal and multifaceted interactions and encounters with Chernobyl in film, literature, tourism, and memorial practices. I employ a wide variety of theoretical approaches and frameworks in order to account for the myriad of possible engagements with the disaster’s memory. This dissertation challenges the idea that Chernobyl is a singular and isolated event, and instead locates it within a constellation of nuclear violence that includes an expansive history of nuclear disaster. Recent examinations on Chernobyl nuclear disaster have centered on its historical Soviet context, which while valuable, do not account for the influence of states, the nuclear industry, and other vested institutions in maintaining the global nuclear apparatus. Memory offers a generative arena for revealing the human costs and risks of living in a nuclear-powered world. A close examination of Chernobyl’s memory reveals how its impacts, along with the impacts of all nuclear disasters, concern everyone, because radiation cannot be contained within set spatial and temporal boundaries. In bringing more v awareness to the mechanisms of memory that offer evidence of nuclear power’s destructive consequences, we might then be able to take responsibility for the bodily and psychological trauma inflicted by our own complicity in allowing nuclear power to develop unchecked. In doing so, we might also be able to envision a non-nuclear alternative for the future. vi Introduction What’s it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? It is white, or what? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it’s black. Like earth. But if it’s colorless, then it’s like God. God is everywhere, but you can’t see Him. They scare us! The apples are hanging in the garden, the leaves are on the trees, the potatoes are in the fields. I don’t think there was any Chernobyl, they made it up. Anna Badaeva, from Voices from Chernobyl In the early hours of the morning of April 26, 1986, reactor number four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant suffered a steam explosion that exposed the reactor’s core after a test of the electrical systems and backup power generators went wrong. The resulting catastrophe would become known as the world’s worst nuclear disaster as radiation spewed from the reactor’s core for months while liquidators worked to contain the disaster. The Soviet state also worked to contain the disaster by limiting the spread of information, censoring and shaping the reportage around the disaster, and refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the disaster to citiZens and to the outside world. However, despite somewhat successful attempts to censor the disaster, the lingering radiation tells another story and exists as evidence of both the deep past and deep future of radiation, which cannot be contained. The repetition of sentiments of containment and control and the actions that were undertaken to prevent people from understanding the true extent of the dangers of Chernobyl are disquieting. These actions have equally alarming consequences for 1 bodies and spaces, and it is not a stretch to call these actions violence, a violence that extends from the power of the state against the people it claims to protect. The reality of how this catastrophe was, and, frankly, is still being handled, is unsettling, but so is the reality that this seems to comprise the standard protocol for nuclear disasters. Those in power, usually the state and energy companies, in collusion with scientists and medical institutions, have a vested interest in keeping the nuclear enterprise going, an interest that overrides the destruction such an enterprise causes. Radiation is what Timothy Morton terms a ‘hyperobject,’ an entity “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). Given the fact that radiation spreads indiscriminately and has the capacity to linger for thousands of years, it becomes clear that Chernobyl is not an event that can be so easily contained. The completion of the sarcophagus around the exposed reactor ostensibly marked the end of the disaster, but in reality, Chernobyl is a continually unfolding catastrophe the contours of which are still being negotiated today, politically, economically, and culturally. Morton describes hyperobjects as viscous, nonlocal, and temporally vast, which inspires the framework that informs my own examination of Chernobyl’s impact. By ‘viscous’ Morton explains that “they ‘stick’ to beings that are involved with them”, while ‘nonlocal’ refers to fact of their wide reach, and in terms of temporality, hyperobjects “involve profoundly different temporalities than the human scale ones we are used to” (1). Undoubtedly, radiation is ‘viscous’ in the sense that it ‘sticks’ to things, often for a long time, and it is also absorbed by many surfaces, including the tissues of the body, bestowing upon it another kind of stickiness. Chernobyl also occupies nonlocal dimensions. As much as it is reassuring to think of Chernobyl being contained by the sarcophagus and the exclusion zone 2 established around it, the disaster extends spatially beyond any arbitrary boundary. It was spread not only by winds over Europe, but also carried in bodies that travel. Additionally, news of its occurrence and the common fears it provokes mean that the reach of its impact is limitless. Extrapolating further, I see Chernobyl as not only a global phenomenon, but also a localiZed manifestation of the non-localiZed phenomenon of the destructive use of nuclear power. Chernobyl’s radiation, in addition to the radiation emitted by other exercises of nuclear power, confirm that the disaster’s impact will continue to be felt beyond the span of mankind. Global warming, plastics, and toxic pollution also fall under the category of hyperobjects. Despite the vast spatial and temporal boundaries occupied by Chernobyl, its dimensions are too immense to grasp and therefore, feel far removed from everyday life, even as they are part of us, as Morton explains: “Not only do I fail to access hyperobjects at a distance, but it also becomes clearer with every passing day that “distance” is only a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things” (27). Distancing is containment, a defense mechanism that helps us assuage the uneasiness provoked by the awareness of their entanglement in everyday life. Considering the immensity of hyperobjects, we must wonder how to even begin to account for the varied impacts of Chernobyl, much less the radiation and nuclear power. Simultaneously so far and so close, pervasive yet forgettable, and so impactful but invisible, the radiation that has accumulated from the continued use of nuclear power requires a broad and expansive approach that can account for the deep impacts of events such as Chernobyl on time history, bodies, the environment, and culture. Memory proves generative in this respect. Andreas Huyssen, in Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, acknowledges that memory is an unwieldy subject matter, “one of those elusive topics” that “starts slipping and 3 sliding, eluding attempts to grasp it either culturally, sociologically, or scientifically” when we try to define it (3). Memory is multifaceted, expansive, and made all the more complex by the entanglement of the personal, social, and political that make up its shifting contours.