If 'Chernobyl' was made by Russians

“Chernobyl,” the HBO mini-series that ends on Monday in the US, isn’t easy to watch as someone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1986 and who has since visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone. But, like many of my compatriots, I’m watching it — and thinking it should have been made in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus, not by an American entertainment channel.
 
There are two reasons for this. One is authenticity — despite a valiant attempt at it, the series falls short. But the other, more important reason is that this kind of harsh sermon on the importance of listening to experts and running a government for the people, not for its own sake, should have come from one of the affected countries. Those countries, apparently, haven’t learned the lessons well enough to make a movie like this.
 
The authenticity part will probably be lost not just on Western viewers but also on the younger generation of post-Soviet ones, too. The producers tried hard to re-create the late Soviet material culture, even though it does look as though they found the objects at a flea market — they look 30 years the worse for wear.
 
I know for a fact from several reporting trips that Russian miners don’t drink vodka right at the mine, before they wash off the coal dust. And in the late ’80s, they didn’t require soldiers with assault rifles to keep them in check when a minister addressed them. For that matter, the soldiers in the series appear to hold their weapons US style, butt to the armpit, not Soviet-style, across the chest.
 
All these inaccuracies, big and small, mitigate the harshness of the movie for viewers with friends and family affected by the disaster. They serve as a filter, a reminder that this is, after all, an American TV series, not a documentary, and that none of the horrible things on the screen are real.
 
But even with that filter, the tough messages of the series come through loud and clear. For one thing, people are often unprepared for the enormity of something like the Chernobyl disaster; they tend to get confused, and try to fool themselves into thinking that the world isn’t actually collapsing around them. That goes both for people on the immediate scene and for the big bosses saddled with the final responsibility. These are situations when experts should be called in immediately and allowed to make decisions unhindered by political expediency or established chains of command. No amount of heroism and fatalism, powerfully portrayed in the series, is an adequate replacement for expertise.
 
Of course, coverups and defensiveness in such situations are heinous crimes; the Soviet Union tersely admitted the Chernobyl disaster to the world two days after it took place, and Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev took 18 days before he spoke about it to the nation. By then, much of the area around the power plant had been evacuated, but May Day parades had taken place in nearby cities even though it could have been dangerous for people to be out in the open. By the time he felt free to speak, Gorbachev focused on criticising Western reports blaming the Soviet Union for the disaster. The reports would have been there in any case, but they would have been more accurate had the Soviet Union not tried to conceal the extent of the damage.
 
Remarkably, some Russian reactions to the series are in that vein, too. It’s clear to most Russian viewers, though, that the HBO production is not some kind of American propaganda effort.
 
The question that keeps popping up in my mind is why none of the three ex-Soviet countries most affected by Chernobyl has produced such a powerful re-creation of the 1986 events for the world’s edification. It would have made sense for Russia, with its current nuclear leadership, to show that it has learned the lessons.
 
Yet somehow it was the network that produced “Game of Thrones” that found the courage, the money and the considerable skill that went into the making of “Chernobyl.” Now, the world at large will know the story from this version. That the post-Soviet nations left it to the HBO is, of course, not comparable with the original Soviet failure to report openly on the disaster. It is, however, a regrettable sin of omission that in the 33 years that have passed since Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 blew up that the post-Soviet world hasn’t produced anything as compelling as HBO’s flawed but riveting product.