Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT ANSWERS

But haven’t you noticed that we don’t even talk about it among ourselves? In a few decades, in a hundred years, these will be mythic years.

I’m afraid of the rain. That’s what Chernobyl is. I’m afraid of snow, of the forest. This isn’t an abstraction, a mind game, but an actual human feeling. Chernobyl is in my home. It’s in the most precious thing: my son, who was born in the spring of 1986. Now he’s sick. Animals, even cockroaches, they know how much and when they should give birth. But people don’t know how to do that, God didn’t give us the power of foresight. A while ago in the papers it said that in Belarus alone, in 1993 there were 200,000 abortions. Because of Chernobyl. We all live with that fear now. Nature has sort of rolled up, waiting. Zarathustra would have said: “Oh, my sorrow! Where has the time gone?”

I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve searched for meaning in it. Chernobyl is the catastrophe of the Russian mind-set. Have you considered this? Of course I agree with those who write that it wasn’t just the reactor that exploded, but an entire system of values. But this explanation isn’t quite enough for me.

I’m a historian. I used to work on linguistics, the philosophy of language. We don’t just think in language, but language thinks us. When I was eighteen, or maybe a little earlier, when I began to read samizdat and discovered Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, I suddenly understood that my entire childhood, the childhood of my street, even though I grew up in a family that was part of the intelligentsia (my grandfather was a minister, my father a professor at the university at St. Petersburg), all of it was shot through with the language of the camps. For us as teenagers it was perfectly natural to call our fathers pakhan, our mothers makhan. “For every sneaky asshole there’s a dick with a screwdriver”—I learned that saying when I was nine years old. I didn’t know a single civilized word. Even our games, our sayings, our riddles were from the camps. Because the camps weren’t a different world, which existed far away in the jails. It was right here. Akhmatova wrote, “Half the country was put away, half the country sits in jail.” I think that this prison consciousness was inevitably going to collide with culture—with civilization, with the particle accelerator.

And of course we were raised with a particular Soviet form of paganism, which said that man was the crown of all creation, that it was his right to do anything with the world that he wanted. The Michurin formula: “We can’t wait for favors from Mother Nature, we need to take them from her ourselves.” It was an attempt to teach people the qualities that they didn’t naturally possess. We had the psychology of oppressors. Now everyone talks about God. But why didn’t they look for Him in the Gulag, or the jail cells of 1937, or at the Party meetings of 1948 when they started denouncing cosmopolitanism, or under Khrushchev when they were wrecking the old churches? The contemporary subtext of Russian religious belief is sly and false. They’re bombing peaceful homes in Chechnya, they’re destroying a small and proud people. That’s the only way we know how to do it, with the sword—the Kalashnikov instead of the word. And we scrape out the incinerated Russian tank drivers with shovels—what’s left of them. And nearby they’re standing with candles in the church. For Christmas.

What now? We need to find out whether we’re capable of the sort of total reconsideration of our entire history that the Germans and Japanese proved possible after the war. Do we have enough intellectual courage? People hardly talk about this. They talk about the market, about vouchers, about checks. Once again, we’re just barely surviving. All our energy is directed toward that. But our souls have been abandoned.

So what is all this for? This book you’re writing? The nights when I don’t sleep? If our life is just a flick of the match? There might be a few answers to this. It’s a primitive sort of fatalism. And there might be great answers to it, too. The Russian always needs to believe in something: in the railroad, in the frog (Bazarov), in Byzantium, in the atom. And now, in the market.

Bulgakov writes in A Cabal of Hypocrites: “I’ve sinned my whole life. I was an actor.” This is a consciousness of the sinfulness of art, of the amoral nature of looking into another person’s life. But maybe, like a small bit of disease, this could serve as inoculation against someone else’s mistakes. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. Or maybe the moral is simpler than that: you should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance? Into this miraculous world . . .

Aleksandr Revalskiy, historian