Chernobyl Is Now
Chernobyl is a show that is resolutely and solemnly about the past made in such a rigorous way that it can’t happen but make me think about the lack of rigor in our day to day consumption and production of information. NPR produced a podcast with Craig Mazin, the writer and producer of Chernobyl, and Peter Sagal so that they could unpack the levels of obsessive detail on the show. It’s a worthy companion to the hit show, an almost real-time director’s commentary, much of which is Sagal asking Mazin “Really?! That really happened?!” And the answer is always yes, holy shit, yes.
Ok, to be fair to Sagal and Mazin, who are much more public radio friendly than I am, that was mostly my internal monologue in the space between Sagal asking the question and Mazin answering it. I took nuclear science in high school (#NerdAlert), back when I thought I would be a chemical engineer or something. My high school’s TV studio, such as it was, was a product of the fitful attention of the power company that ran the local nuclear power plant (they didn’t have to pay much in local taxes, so every now and then they did the school district some kind of technology related solid, heavy stress on then). Just barely more than an hour’s drive north from that high school are the gates of another nuclear emergency you might have heard of: Three Mile Island.
When you live that close to a nuclear catastrophe, the technical details of why what happened at Chernobyl turned into a disaster that broke the scale for how to measure nuclear disasters didn’t happen during America’s most famous nuclear cock-up are quite riveting (don’t worry, America has plenty of other nuclear ghosts to worry about, but let’s stick to core emergencies we know about). When Valery Legasov (Jared Harris, but YOU KNEW THAT, RIGHT?!) finally gets to answering a question about why all the pesky design decisions were made that cumulatively led to a reactor exploding, Harris delivers a throwaway reading of “‘cuz it’s cheaper” that is breathtakingly good, an indictment of the Soviet nuclear program in 2 seconds or less. In that episode, Legasov finally talks about water cooled, graphite moderated reactors for the briefest of moments, and it was such a relief to hear the words I’d been screaming at my monitor for weeks. It was thrilling to watch the show in no small part because nearly every bit of the nuclear science we are treated to in the show is not only accurate, cogent, and well articulated, it’s absolutely dramatic and full of tension.
Mazin and his production team dedicated themselves to getting thousands of minute details about dosimeters and tape recorders and cigarette lighters right, because the show is not just about how a particular nuclear reactor exploded, it’s about all the lies and short-cuts in the system that made it possible for that nuclear reactor to explode. The fifth episode is a big swerve away from verisimilitude in that it condenses the action of a weeks-long show trial into 1 hour and puts characters there when the real people never were (Masha Gessen is not a fan), but the episode isn’t really about the trial, so much as the opportunity to show the viewer exactly what happened in that control room that caused all the carnage, the murder whose mystery the show has been solving, as it were. It also allows Mazin to fully articulate Legasov’s angry summation of the collective behavior of every level of the Soviet bureaucracy: “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.” The show opens with Legasov asking the suspiciously rhetorical question “What is the cost of lies?” Chernobyl demonstrates quite clearly that this question is desperately, fundamentally literal.
The tl;dw version of Chernobyl is that inconvenient facts were suppressed all the time and the world went on as it always had for the Soviets, for 70 years or more, inconvenient facts or no . . . right up until a perfectly normal nuclear reactor turned into an open reactor core belching radioactive smoke over an entire continent and eventually the world. Science has a way of being very inconvenient for ideological systems like the Soviet one. You can only push so hard on physical facts before something like a nuclear reactor explodes and even a dedicated ideologue can only deny the gravity of the situation for, like, a day or two.
It is quite chilling to see that denial unfold in a scene in the first episode when the old Leninist on the local committee first lays out both the story they should tell and the things they will actually do to the people of Pripyat: “We seal off the city. No one leaves. Cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor.” It is particularly galling to know that he knows that “misinformation” in this formulation means “the truth” and the truth is the kind of horror that breaks people’s imaginations, at least the ones who live long to think about it (think “fake news” but if you’re wrong it liquefies your internal organs). It’s just that they have convinced themselves that it cannot be that bad, so the normal rules apply.
It was impossible for me to watch Chernobyl and not think about just how little the current Russian system differs from the Soviet one: it is still a fabric of lies supported by dedicated media outlets churning out narrative for a cynical public that understands the cost of doing business and generally despairs about ever doing it differently. Hell, Russia’s current regime is reacting to the success of Chernobyl by announcing that they will produce a version of their own . . . that tells the true story of the CIA’s involvement. It’s so easy as an American to fall back on calcified Cold War habits and just dismiss the infuriating system the show documents so meticulously, as all just so, well, Soviet. We can reach back into our historical locker of Marxist-Leninist disasters that resulted from that brand of aggressive ideological lies and just toss them on the table: The Holodomor and other self-inflicted famines, the brutal liquidation of the kulaks, the illogic of Stalin’s five year plans, the entire existence of the Gulag Archipelago, and the disgusting habit of arresting people and convincing them to confess to things that everyone knows they didn’t do. It’s soooo easy when the show ends to think “Well that can’t happen here.”
But it can. I mean, it is. Not necessarily the part that is specifically about nuclear reactors (again, never say never, it doesn’t have to be Chernobyl to be really bad, it could just be Fukushima Daiichi), but that part about systems of power whose players find the truth offensive and so they lie, they lie so egregiously and obviously that only those invested in that system would be tempted to pretend to believe it but that’s just enough people that they go along even when they know better. Chernobyl might be obsessed with the reality of the physical environment of Ukraine in 1986, but it is just as obsessed with the information environment of 2019.
In Mazin’s commentary on the final episode with Sagal, he says he thinks it’s probably impossible for people to get through the day without lies and conspiracies of lies, lies we all, often unconsciously, participate in. I would take issue with the word lies there, but he’s absolutely right that humans need shared narratives that sit above the truth in order to get by. Human communication is a fraught, fractured, and imperfect process at the best of times and often we have to pretend otherwise just to keep going. His big takeaway though is that when you see a big lie, something you know is a lie, you have a responsibility to call it out. That’s as close he and Sagal ever come to talking about Russian misinformation campaigns throughout the world or the current President of the United States or China’s disappearance of the Uighurs or its erasure of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests or the Conservative Party’s extended Brexit delusions in Britain or whatever is happening to radicalize people on YouTube that YouTube won’t admit, or anti-vaxxers reversing the eradication of measles, let alone Fox News and that entire media culture, which has become synonymous with lying when the truth offends and finding the truth frequently offensive. Mazin doesn’t have to say any of that directly in his show or his commentary because just caring so passionately about the truth is enough to make us think about it.
Chernobyl’s core principles might be summed up in “What is the cost of lies?” but its most insightful line might just be: “You want to humiliate a nation that is obsessed with not being humiliated.” The unspoken corollary to that line is that the Soviet Union was constantly doing things that would get them humiliated. One grand narrative of the Soviet Union is of Soviet excellence and dominance and the entire lie of the system is bound up in insisting on this “truth,” against all evidence. Chernobyl is an instance when truth in the form of the smoking shell of a building that used to contain a nuclear reactor had such brutal physiological impact that it was sufficient to break the spell of the lie and arguably that particular system of lies . . . for a limited time (again, cf RT and the Mueller report on Russian cyber interference operations). The most seductive lie of all is wrapped in the need to maintain the impression of your imagined greatness.
“You want to humiliate a man obsessed with not being humiliated” might as well be on the masthead of the Washington Post, not because it’s their mission to humiliate Donald Trump, but because a steady reporting of simple facts is sufficient to humiliate a man as malevolently incompetent as Donald Trump. Being obsessed with not being humiliated is a precise summation of Donald Trump’s entire being; his Twitter feed is an unending stream of attempts to create a narrative that he thinks he controls completely apart from any reality. Fox News has wholeheartedly gone all in on supporting those narratives because they believe that keeps them and their friends relevant and in power and if they have to do that by adopting that old Soviet habit of abusing language to the point of semantic destruction, so be it. Fox and their ilk help people lie to themselves about Trump, about the United States, about their lives, and how to fix them, hell, about how they are broken. When Bryukhanov and Fomin, the two men in charge of the Chernobyl reactor, refuse to leave the conference room to see what’s left of the reactor for themselves but instead send someone else (to their early death) to do it instead, I immediately think of the many Republicans who refuse even to read the Mueller Report. To see with your own eyes, or to read the report yourself, would be to be responsible for the information in it and and that is the last thing they want.
Republicans today, like Fomin, Bryukhanov, and every other euphemism spewing apparatchik trying to save their jobs, bend their language and their behavior around what they think will be digestible and presentable to the powers that be; in the GOP’s case that’s Fox News. Their strategies for overcoming the disjoint between their words and the truth are all infuriating, none more so than the games of “I know I’m not, but what are you” they often play with Democrats or responsible media outlets. It’s all so depressing because this systemic appropriation of language has no consequences at all for hyperpartisans, except for occasionally being voted out of office for not being partisan enough or in the right way (no one’s being murdered with ice axes for it yet, so there’s that), as long as you don’t accidentally acknowledge the truth in the process, someone in the right wing media will give you a job. Political and informational truths like the Mueller Report can always be bent out of shape and warped and nothing will happen to you as a result, even if you never manage to tell yourself the truth about it. Such political truths are rarely capable of literally burning your skin, giving you cancer, or poisoning the groundwater for more generations in the future than have ever existed. Rarely, however, is not never. Climate change, like the inexorable physical realities at the core of a nuclear reactor, is a reality where the cost of lies can be measured in human lives and happiness. It isn’t happening all at once like it did at Chernobyl, but the time is coming and is now here when the reality will hurt so many people that it cannot be denied by narrative.
Chernobyl’s greatest gift might just be freeing us from the laziness of historical thinking, helping us to realize the failures of and around Chernobyl were not uniquely Soviet, they aren’t even uniquely Russian. The show’s relentless pursuit of truth is a stark reminder that when the EPA and other agencies are removing mentions of climate change from any web pages, when the Department of Energy’s talks non ironically about exporting freedom gas and “molecules of U.S. freedom,” when the White House prevents national security experts from submitting climate science based testimony to Congress, and major public figures horribly misrepresent basic facts on the regular, we too are incurring debts to the truth. We cannot sit back at the conclusion of the show and marvel at the stupidity of those idiot Soviets, cluck our tongues, and do nothing. What we mistook for failures of the Soviet system are part of a dangerous cultural pattern at work right now in the whole wide world, not just right here in these United States of America. It makes me furious that we just don’t seem to know how to make all this fucking lying stop. I certainly can’t make someone see or acknowledge the truth, as much as I want to try. I can just call out a lie when I see one, every time I see you. If enough of us do, maybe we can catch up on that debt to the truth before the creditors want more than our money.
