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Svetlana Alexievich is obsessed by Chernobyl. For years she has travelled to the "zone", the radioactive area, talking with firemen and soldiers, with "liquidators" who cleared out the radioactive rubble from the ruins of the power plant, with survivors and people who have returned to their homes. Her findings are collected in a book, "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster". It is an echolocation of the catastrophe. Svetlana Alexievich, who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Belarus, lives in Sweden. We have yet to understand Chernobyl, she says. It is a foreign text.25/04/2006
Chernobyl: the unreadable sign
Chernobyl changed space and time, and it lies beyond the boundaries of culture. Belarussian writer Svetlana Alexievich talks to Sonja Zekri about the nuclear disaster which has only just begun.
Süddeutsche Zeitung: On April 26, 1986 ...
Svetlana Alexievich: ... I was in Minsk, in hospital, visiting my sister who was dying of cancer. The doctors had just told us that there was no hope, then came the clouds, the black rain. The next day a journalist from Sweden rang me and said: Do you know what has happened to you over there? A Belarussian friend was sitting next to me and played it down: Come on, that's just Western provocation.
I soon went to the zone, in the Gomel district, to bury my sister. Men had already been fetched in to work, the first evacuations were under way. Everybody knew about it.
Michail Gorbachev did not make a public appearance until nine days after the accident. Was this embittering?
You know, journalists always ask the same thing. Were you lied to? The Soviet power never told the truth. That was nothing new! What interests me is something else. The pause.
The pause?
In the zone helicopters were taking off, technicians were running about in their thousands, but no one had any explanations. It was a new reality. It was forbidden to sit on the ground. It was forbidden to stand under a tree for any length of time. Fishermen said they couldn't find any worms, that the worms had bored a meter and a half down into the earth. Nature had obviously received signals. I find this fascinating. People reported they'd not only seen a fire, but also a raspberry-coloured glow and that they'd never thought death could be so beautiful. Former Afghanistan fighters were flown in with helicopters and machine guns and were asking: What good are our helicopters here? An entire culture collapsed, the familiar culture of war.
And yet, the blockade on information, the hubris of unbounded technology euphoria – was Chernobyl not a Soviet catastrophe?
But people didn't say all there was to say in France and Germany either. No one could imagine that the peaceful and the military atom was one and the same. Of course Chernobyl brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union – together with the war in Afghanistan. People in the zone were throwing away Party books and Komosol (Communist Union of Youth) insignia. They had been told: Either you stay or you leave the party. Were they supposed to save their children or stay true to the Party? What a choice!
There were no boundaries after Chernobyl. Spaces dissolved.
I continue to be amazed that people have failed to understand Chernobyl as a new way of seeing the world. Chernobyl changed space, but politicians still talk about things in terms of today, there, nearby, foreign. It's so strange. What does near or far mean when the cloud was hanging over Europe on the second day and over China on the fourth? Even a country that doesn't build reactors will be hit by the fallout from another country.
The catastrophe as negative globalisation...
Chernobyl also changed time. Radionuclides take hundreds of thousands of years to degrade. This is too much for the human imagination. And yet the politicians are deliberately calculating the victim numbers lower than they are. In Belarus alone, two liquidators die every day. They have dozens of diseases: kidney failure, infarcts. Children have radioactive levels that are way above the norm. Chernobyl has only just begun.
If Chernobyl is the future, how are we supposed to live with it?
Two catastrophes have taken place in Belarus: the catastrophe of capitalism and the cosmic catastrophe. People can understand the former - poverty, misery, the new way of life - but they cannot grasp the cosmic catastrophe. Ukraine and Belarus are a sort of laboratory, you could collect the evidence, evaluate it and share it with humanity. But the Belarussian government is committing an assault on its own people and on humanity at large. One scientist who proved that even low doses of radiation can lead to illness was thrown into prison and only released after international protests. Instead there is much talk of optimism. Belarus is a closed-off, abject country. My book has appeared in 21 states but is banned in Belarussian. Otherwise people would ask: Where is the medicine? Where are the church masses? Where are the uncontaminated provisions? A totalitarian regime saves itself first.
Is Chernobyl aiding the regime?
I don't know. On the other hand, Lukashenko is shouting to the world: We need humanitarian help! Money! Technology! And to his own people he says: Everything's alright. The people in the zone get kopeks, nothing else.
Villages, streets, forests have been buried – as if man could free himself from a world turned hostile.
We are used to earth, water and air being safe. Most of the people in the zone are farmers, they stored milk, tomatoes, it was crazy. They said: An apple is an apple, an egg is an egg, the water is so clean, the milk so white. This was a new face of evil. In one village an old woman asked me: Is this supposed to be war? The sun is shining, the birds are singing. Suddenly it became clear that the entire culture of terror was a culture of war. Bombs, grenades, we knew about them. But this was different.
Yet the rhetoric, the analogies, the heroism all came from the war. There were no robots but the liquidators shovelled radioactive waste out of the reactor and later raised the Soviet flag – like forty years ago on top of the Reichstag.
To a certain extent they all committed suicide. They gave their lives to save Europe. I asked them later: Would you do it again? Almost all of them said: Yes, we had to do it. There were 800,000 liquidators. In France, someone said he doubted whether you could find so many people prepared to give their lives in the West. The people didn't know what was lying in wait for them, this terrible death, that strong men would fall apart in one or two years. They even threw away their face masks: too hot. And yet they saved the world. But then when I saw women who were washing the liquidators' contaminated clothes with their bare hands – that was a crime. They should have been given washing machines. Nobody said anything to them.
You see, they were Soviet people. I'm not sure if you would find so many volunteers in Belarus today. Today the people know that their life is unique, that it belongs to them alone.
Has man learnt from Chernobyl?
As a race? Primo Levi said that after Auschwitz man is the same as before Auschwitz. Seen this way, you have to say that after Chernobyl man is the same as before Chernobyl.
We are changing - from a civilisation of fear to a civilisation of catastrophes. Progress has become dangerous, for both humankind and nature. Hurricanes and floods are causing losses almost as great as those caused by wars. Belarus lost a quarter of its population in the Second World War. Today, however, one in five Belarussians is suffering from the after effects of Chernobyl, and a third of the country is contaminated.
We cannot read the sign of Chernobyl - it's a foreign text. None of the great writers has dealt with this subject, nor has any philosopher. Chernobyl lies beyond the boundaries of culture.
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The article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 22 April, 2006.
"Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" is available in paperback from Picador publishers. Read exerpts here.
Sonja Zekri is a feuilleton editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung
Translation: lp