The price of lies
6 Jun 2019 15:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asthfghl"After the Chernobyl series, the world ought to not be the same any more", a local columnist wrote here after the finale of the HBO mini-series ended. And it made me thinking. This is scary. You know what's scary? The fact that no, the world WILL remain the same. Things will keep being done the same old way over and over again. Because people don't change.
Or maybe they do, and I'm just being too nihilistic here (must be a byproduct of aging).
A lot has been written around the Interwebs about this movie, especially around here in East Europe - that's normal. I've been regularly discussing each episode with a friend of mine who was born in 1986 (I'm a bit older, I was born in 1978). So she was a baby back then, during the Chernobyl disaster. She told me that her mother had been told by a friend, who was working at a women's magazine, not to walk outside with the baby for a week, but they didn't want to tell why exactly. "Just don't bring the baby outside for a while", she had said. This seemed odd to my friend's mother, because her friend was known as a rational person who doesn't believe in conspiracies, occult stuff, or the meaning of dreams or anything like that. But she kept insisting that the baby wasn't safe outdoors, and she even added, "And don't give her milk from the shop". What then? Humana? It was nowhere to be found around the shops back then. Banana stew? We only had access to bananas around Christmas time. What's going on? Why all this secrecy? No one would say.
Well, the worried mother figured her friend knew something that she didn't, probably from her husband who was member of the Komsomol, the communist youth organization, so he must have told her something important about the milk. Some disease on the cows perhaps? But what did this have to do with babies going outdoors?
A little later, the news said some incident had occurred at Chernobyl, but no need to worry. Some fire or something. All the panic was useless and ridiculous. Some English tourists had suddenly interrupted their visit to Ukraine and hurried back home. How funny. Haha! Funny stupid English tourists.
A little later, someone mentioned on the news that it was kind of useful if people started taking iodine pills, just in case. You know, nothing dangerous had happened anywhere, but we better start taking precautions. Fine. Except, iodine was just as rare as Humana or bananas in the shops. My own mother recalled our neighbor suddenly starting washing their balcony three times a day for some reason. The neighbor worked at a school, and her husband was the local party boss, so she must have received mysterious instructions to wash her balcony several times a day. In the meantime, the rest of us commonfolk kept making salads from lettuces that had been picked up under radioactive skies. But we didn't know that at the time, of course, since we didn't have the proper connections. The lettuce will forever remain the symbol of Chernobyl, just as the banana became the symbol of the empty shops in communist times. We were being served little half-truths garnered with lies, one at a time, just as we were being treated to old, rotten half-bananas at Christmas, while mostly relying on radioactive lettuces for most of the rest of the time. Ya know: communism.
So, while we were watching Chernobyl with my friend these days, one episode after another, and discussing each of them, she began expressing her bewilderment with all that secrecy. "Fine, there was an incident, shouldn't protecting people's lives be the first priority now?", she mused. I tried explaining, using ideological slogans from that epoch, and offering some specific examples how things worked back then. She still didn't seem to understand. "Didn't those folks at least have a self-preservation instinct?", she wondered. "Why did they insist on personally staying there?" How the hell can I answer that question? We're talking of a totally different mindset here, one that doesn't necessarily exist today.
Later, I talked with some other friends and colleagues, some of whom were young parents back then. And I realized the case of my friend's confusion isn't isolated, not at all. Young people everywhere universally fail to understand why on Earth was the truth hidden from the people. And I began to think, isn't this actually great? Young people not having the mindset that would make them understand and relate to such a grotesque inhumanity. They can't understand it, they can't accept it, therefore they can't allow it to happen again. Right? Am I not right? Please tell me that I am!
"Every little lie brings us further into debt to the truth", prof. Legasov says in the movie. "Sooner or later, that debt must be repaid. And this is how a nuclear reactor gets blown up - through lies!" Also, Gorbachev is seen saying, "The Chernobyl disaster is the most probable cause of the collapse of the USSR". A bit of a stretch, but it did help. So in a way, that's how empires are brought down - through lies. And it's inherently awesome that young people cannot understand the meaning and usefulness of lies. They're not wired for it. Or maybe I'm just being too naive here? Sorry, that's the effect that stories like these tend to have on me - I tend to swing from one fringe emotion to another.
As I went through the episodes, I was initially thinking, well, there won't be much to say about this story, once it's told. Everything is perfectly said within it, after all. You don't experience it through words. The feeling is just so overwhelming that words seem weak, so better spare them, and stick to feeling the thing. I was wrong. This movie is THE thing to talk about. And God, isn't it being discussed everywhere I turn! Everyone wants to voice their own truth about it. Turns out, there are so many truths around that we've got a loud chorus yelling over each other and at each other, each side wanting to make their truth THE One Truth.
Still, I could discern at least two dominant sides, Two Truths if you like. Just like everything political, religious, or historic, especially things concerning our not-so-distant past, and especially the Soviet empire and our own place within it or rather somewhere in its periphery, there are sides opposing each other. Vehemently, fiercely, almost violently. They hurl insults at each other, they dehumanize each other, they smear each other, they accuse each other of all sins possible.
- The movie is anti-Russian!, one says.
- No way, it's pro-Russian!, the other counters.
- All scenes are very authentic!, the first one insists.
- No, Americans can't make movies about Russians! The window framing was plastic, and there was no plastic window framing back then! The setting is artificial, they didn't even shoot the scenes in Ukraine but in Lithuania!
- The actors speak with a British accent, that's ridiculous!
- The danger has been over-hyped, just 31 people died in the incident according to official data!
- You're crazy, the direct victims were 93 thousand, and further 300 thousand were displaced, and 600 thousand worked in the no-entry zone after the incident, and no one really knows the number of dead, suffering, ill, and traumatized victims!
- No such scientist named Ulyana Khomlyuk ever existed, the Russian media has verified this! The awesome honest protagonist is just another American propaganda invention!
- You idiot, that's a fiction movie, not a documentary, of course Ulyana is a collective character that personifies the dozens of honest scientists who sought the truth, do you mean to say that just because such a woman never existed, there were no honest scientists at the time?
- The Russians should've made this movie, and they didn't; so now they're raging with envy that HBO did it instead, and they're nitpicking little discrepancies to discredit it! Russians can never make such an honest account of their own misdeeds, they'd bend over backwards, even sacrifice themselves rather than admitting a mistake and a lie!
- Nonsense! The movie is propaganda, plain and simple! It was made to undermine the competition from the Russian nuclear power technology at the European and Asian markets! Russian technology is superior, and the West can't swallow this!
- No, it's not propaganda, it doesn't accuse the Russian people but the system! The people are shown being good, it's the system that's evil!
- The system was alright! Nothing wrong with the system!
- Sure thing, except it killed innocent people!
- No one is innocent, including you!
- And you're evil!
- No, U!
And so on, and so forth... You know, the usual pro-Russia / anti-Russia divide, with all its trademark methods and soundbites being employed, even when the story is an industrial incident and the ensuing human tragedy. Everyone thinks they own the Truth, even in the face of the one fact that matters: we ALL lived under radioactive clouds, for fuck's sake! ALL OF US!!!
There's a memorable scene in the 5th episode, Boris Shcherbyna, the deputy chairman of the Soviet cabinet, now terminally ill from his stay in the danger zone, is sitting at a bench, waiting for the trial that everyone knows is a farce that would never allow the truth to be openly pronounced. He's so sick he's now spitting blood. A small caterpillar climbs up his leg. He picks it up and watches it as the tiny creature makes its way up his leg in its own awkward way.
"Such a beauty!", Mr Shcherbyna whispers to himself. He looks sad and desperate. He knows he is doomed. He'll probably die before the fleeting life of this little creature has expired. At some level, he's even more miserable than this tiny caterpillar, even though he could crush it with no effort if he likes. He is already crushed. The system has swallowed him, chewed him up and spat him out. He's a lesser creature to the system than this caterpillar is to him. Except, no one up there has ever thought of him as "a beauty", no one ever felt sympathy for him within that system.
Shcherbyna, like so many others, had bought the big lie that clearing up the debris in the wake of the Chernobyl incident was safe. "I don't believe the Kremlin, but I chose to believe them because they gave me the command". Yes, when you're clad in power, all instincts go silent.
Shortly after that scene, at the trial, Shcherbyna would order the court (because he's the Party representative, so he could direct justice whichever way he likes) to allow prof. Legasov to speak the truth after all - although even that wouldn't matter to the system. And the truth is, the government had saved lots of roubles by neglecting safety. Valery Legasov is also badly ill, he's dying too. So exactly two years after the Chernobyl incident, he hangs himself in his room (that's how the series starts). He leaves at least that, one truth behind, as a legacy. That's all he could contribute at that point. Regurgitate the truth like a dying tick, then expire, hoping that even if no one pays attention at the time, the truth will get back to a life of its own when the time comes.
Well, that time has come. That's actually what every one of us ought to do now. Honor the truth. It's pointless to argue about the details, about people's motivations, it's the big picture that matters. The one big true picture. Because there's always just one. And it doesn't have to be pronounced with words, because words could be treacherous. The moment we start saying them, the picture starts to get blurred. It's enough to see it and feel it. This movie, for all its flaws, does a good justice to that picture. And there wouldn't be any argument about it if we lived in a better world, where human life was more important than ideology. But we do not live in that world, do we? Or maybe we do? Seeing the reactions of my younger friend, I do have hope.
Or maybe they do, and I'm just being too nihilistic here (must be a byproduct of aging).
A lot has been written around the Interwebs about this movie, especially around here in East Europe - that's normal. I've been regularly discussing each episode with a friend of mine who was born in 1986 (I'm a bit older, I was born in 1978). So she was a baby back then, during the Chernobyl disaster. She told me that her mother had been told by a friend, who was working at a women's magazine, not to walk outside with the baby for a week, but they didn't want to tell why exactly. "Just don't bring the baby outside for a while", she had said. This seemed odd to my friend's mother, because her friend was known as a rational person who doesn't believe in conspiracies, occult stuff, or the meaning of dreams or anything like that. But she kept insisting that the baby wasn't safe outdoors, and she even added, "And don't give her milk from the shop". What then? Humana? It was nowhere to be found around the shops back then. Banana stew? We only had access to bananas around Christmas time. What's going on? Why all this secrecy? No one would say.
Well, the worried mother figured her friend knew something that she didn't, probably from her husband who was member of the Komsomol, the communist youth organization, so he must have told her something important about the milk. Some disease on the cows perhaps? But what did this have to do with babies going outdoors?
A little later, the news said some incident had occurred at Chernobyl, but no need to worry. Some fire or something. All the panic was useless and ridiculous. Some English tourists had suddenly interrupted their visit to Ukraine and hurried back home. How funny. Haha! Funny stupid English tourists.
A little later, someone mentioned on the news that it was kind of useful if people started taking iodine pills, just in case. You know, nothing dangerous had happened anywhere, but we better start taking precautions. Fine. Except, iodine was just as rare as Humana or bananas in the shops. My own mother recalled our neighbor suddenly starting washing their balcony three times a day for some reason. The neighbor worked at a school, and her husband was the local party boss, so she must have received mysterious instructions to wash her balcony several times a day. In the meantime, the rest of us commonfolk kept making salads from lettuces that had been picked up under radioactive skies. But we didn't know that at the time, of course, since we didn't have the proper connections. The lettuce will forever remain the symbol of Chernobyl, just as the banana became the symbol of the empty shops in communist times. We were being served little half-truths garnered with lies, one at a time, just as we were being treated to old, rotten half-bananas at Christmas, while mostly relying on radioactive lettuces for most of the rest of the time. Ya know: communism.
So, while we were watching Chernobyl with my friend these days, one episode after another, and discussing each of them, she began expressing her bewilderment with all that secrecy. "Fine, there was an incident, shouldn't protecting people's lives be the first priority now?", she mused. I tried explaining, using ideological slogans from that epoch, and offering some specific examples how things worked back then. She still didn't seem to understand. "Didn't those folks at least have a self-preservation instinct?", she wondered. "Why did they insist on personally staying there?" How the hell can I answer that question? We're talking of a totally different mindset here, one that doesn't necessarily exist today.
Later, I talked with some other friends and colleagues, some of whom were young parents back then. And I realized the case of my friend's confusion isn't isolated, not at all. Young people everywhere universally fail to understand why on Earth was the truth hidden from the people. And I began to think, isn't this actually great? Young people not having the mindset that would make them understand and relate to such a grotesque inhumanity. They can't understand it, they can't accept it, therefore they can't allow it to happen again. Right? Am I not right? Please tell me that I am!
"Every little lie brings us further into debt to the truth", prof. Legasov says in the movie. "Sooner or later, that debt must be repaid. And this is how a nuclear reactor gets blown up - through lies!" Also, Gorbachev is seen saying, "The Chernobyl disaster is the most probable cause of the collapse of the USSR". A bit of a stretch, but it did help. So in a way, that's how empires are brought down - through lies. And it's inherently awesome that young people cannot understand the meaning and usefulness of lies. They're not wired for it. Or maybe I'm just being too naive here? Sorry, that's the effect that stories like these tend to have on me - I tend to swing from one fringe emotion to another.
As I went through the episodes, I was initially thinking, well, there won't be much to say about this story, once it's told. Everything is perfectly said within it, after all. You don't experience it through words. The feeling is just so overwhelming that words seem weak, so better spare them, and stick to feeling the thing. I was wrong. This movie is THE thing to talk about. And God, isn't it being discussed everywhere I turn! Everyone wants to voice their own truth about it. Turns out, there are so many truths around that we've got a loud chorus yelling over each other and at each other, each side wanting to make their truth THE One Truth.
Still, I could discern at least two dominant sides, Two Truths if you like. Just like everything political, religious, or historic, especially things concerning our not-so-distant past, and especially the Soviet empire and our own place within it or rather somewhere in its periphery, there are sides opposing each other. Vehemently, fiercely, almost violently. They hurl insults at each other, they dehumanize each other, they smear each other, they accuse each other of all sins possible.
- The movie is anti-Russian!, one says.
- No way, it's pro-Russian!, the other counters.
- All scenes are very authentic!, the first one insists.
- No, Americans can't make movies about Russians! The window framing was plastic, and there was no plastic window framing back then! The setting is artificial, they didn't even shoot the scenes in Ukraine but in Lithuania!
- The actors speak with a British accent, that's ridiculous!
- The danger has been over-hyped, just 31 people died in the incident according to official data!
- You're crazy, the direct victims were 93 thousand, and further 300 thousand were displaced, and 600 thousand worked in the no-entry zone after the incident, and no one really knows the number of dead, suffering, ill, and traumatized victims!
- No such scientist named Ulyana Khomlyuk ever existed, the Russian media has verified this! The awesome honest protagonist is just another American propaganda invention!
- You idiot, that's a fiction movie, not a documentary, of course Ulyana is a collective character that personifies the dozens of honest scientists who sought the truth, do you mean to say that just because such a woman never existed, there were no honest scientists at the time?
- The Russians should've made this movie, and they didn't; so now they're raging with envy that HBO did it instead, and they're nitpicking little discrepancies to discredit it! Russians can never make such an honest account of their own misdeeds, they'd bend over backwards, even sacrifice themselves rather than admitting a mistake and a lie!
- Nonsense! The movie is propaganda, plain and simple! It was made to undermine the competition from the Russian nuclear power technology at the European and Asian markets! Russian technology is superior, and the West can't swallow this!
- No, it's not propaganda, it doesn't accuse the Russian people but the system! The people are shown being good, it's the system that's evil!
- The system was alright! Nothing wrong with the system!
- Sure thing, except it killed innocent people!
- No one is innocent, including you!
- And you're evil!
- No, U!
And so on, and so forth... You know, the usual pro-Russia / anti-Russia divide, with all its trademark methods and soundbites being employed, even when the story is an industrial incident and the ensuing human tragedy. Everyone thinks they own the Truth, even in the face of the one fact that matters: we ALL lived under radioactive clouds, for fuck's sake! ALL OF US!!!
There's a memorable scene in the 5th episode, Boris Shcherbyna, the deputy chairman of the Soviet cabinet, now terminally ill from his stay in the danger zone, is sitting at a bench, waiting for the trial that everyone knows is a farce that would never allow the truth to be openly pronounced. He's so sick he's now spitting blood. A small caterpillar climbs up his leg. He picks it up and watches it as the tiny creature makes its way up his leg in its own awkward way.
"Such a beauty!", Mr Shcherbyna whispers to himself. He looks sad and desperate. He knows he is doomed. He'll probably die before the fleeting life of this little creature has expired. At some level, he's even more miserable than this tiny caterpillar, even though he could crush it with no effort if he likes. He is already crushed. The system has swallowed him, chewed him up and spat him out. He's a lesser creature to the system than this caterpillar is to him. Except, no one up there has ever thought of him as "a beauty", no one ever felt sympathy for him within that system.
Shcherbyna, like so many others, had bought the big lie that clearing up the debris in the wake of the Chernobyl incident was safe. "I don't believe the Kremlin, but I chose to believe them because they gave me the command". Yes, when you're clad in power, all instincts go silent.
Shortly after that scene, at the trial, Shcherbyna would order the court (because he's the Party representative, so he could direct justice whichever way he likes) to allow prof. Legasov to speak the truth after all - although even that wouldn't matter to the system. And the truth is, the government had saved lots of roubles by neglecting safety. Valery Legasov is also badly ill, he's dying too. So exactly two years after the Chernobyl incident, he hangs himself in his room (that's how the series starts). He leaves at least that, one truth behind, as a legacy. That's all he could contribute at that point. Regurgitate the truth like a dying tick, then expire, hoping that even if no one pays attention at the time, the truth will get back to a life of its own when the time comes.
Well, that time has come. That's actually what every one of us ought to do now. Honor the truth. It's pointless to argue about the details, about people's motivations, it's the big picture that matters. The one big true picture. Because there's always just one. And it doesn't have to be pronounced with words, because words could be treacherous. The moment we start saying them, the picture starts to get blurred. It's enough to see it and feel it. This movie, for all its flaws, does a good justice to that picture. And there wouldn't be any argument about it if we lived in a better world, where human life was more important than ideology. But we do not live in that world, do we? Or maybe we do? Seeing the reactions of my younger friend, I do have hope.
