HBO's "Chernobyl" gives voice to the horror of ordinary Soviet socialism

The nuclear glow of the colorless sky of Belarus Palissia is the most disturbing cinematography on television. The HBO mini-series "Chernobyl" is so dull that I almost feel the cement particles in my living room.

The small Soviet town is entirely made up of concrete towers and the government buildings have bare gray walls decorated only with the obligatory style of Lenin. The characters speak a bit of cement and the site of the explosion was eventually covered with material to prevent further leakage of radioactive material.

"Cement" is the title of the founding novel of socialist realism written by Fyodor Gladkov. I am sure that the creators of the miniseries are aware of this: they seem to have done an admirable job in becoming native.

Tribute to the native Andrey Tarkovsky

The film has the appearance of a Soviet "postcard" – or a film by Tarkovsky. While still in the USSR, the dissident director Andrei Tarkovsky had to work with inferior national films. In his 1979 science fiction classic "Stalker", he turns technical limitations into a creative advantage, using poisonous greens to create a haunting atmosphere.

Since "Stalker" takes place in a supernatural area guarded by the army, as a result of the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, when creating the zone of exclusion around From the reactor, the Russians began talking about Tarkovsky's film as a prophetic prediction of the nuclear disaster. It's always one thing: contemporary tour guides in the Zone call Stalkers.

Some critics objected to how the creator of the HBO series, Craig Mazin, dramatized the events, pointing out that, for example, only two factory employees had perished in the compound immediately after the accident. Explosion, while the film showed half a dozen people fatally tortured. These critics forget that they are watching a work of fiction. Therefore, being false but accurate is quite acceptable. Until now, the miniseries has been very accurate.

Scenes of factory workers walking, like Stalker's, in the heart of the reactor are a literal tribute to Tarkovsky. Beyond the imitation of the failing second world movie technology, this slow and charged action is strangely reminiscent of the master.

Scene after scene, director Johan Renck creates the atmosphere of psychological horror: birds and helicopters falling from the sky, invisible particles crossing the European continent, poisoning the soil between the two eastern Slavic capitals of Kiev and Minsk – and beyond of the.

Socialist aspects accentuate the horror

Make no mistake: the horror that the viewer attends on the screen is the horror of socialism. Of good socialism, notice. Not from the Stalinist era, but from the last decades of the Soviet Union where, although the Gulag has shrunk considerably, the country remains a smothering chasm of official lies, incompetence and fear. By the time reactor number four exploded on the shores of Pripyat, the new Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev has already called this period zastoior stagnation.

None of the artistic means employed by Mazin and Renck would successfully create an atmosphere of terror was the omnipresent KGB, nor the absolute secret and endless power journey of the nomenklatura, so lucidly inscribed in the screenplay. No matter that fewer people died at the factory the night of the explosion, what matters is that indifferent provincial microtyrans, called in the United States the "CYA mode," send again and again inferior to certain death, and the security apparatus did not care. They were more anxious to save face.

The incompetence and deadly insistence on the secret of the people in power contrast with the heroism of ordinary men that the regime cannibalizes to perpetuate itself and the precarious position of the intelligentsia.

Certainly, the Chernobyl heroes did not sacrifice themselves to support Gorbachev personally, but through a sense of duty, associated with a soldier mentality. Russia (and Ukraine, as well as Byelorussia) are really the kind to show their duty and, as in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, promises of future wages. Yet the regime would have immediately collapsed if it had not had the stoic courage of ordinary people.

Science is simply a tool of power

The voices of the intelligentsia shape the moral landscape of the series: the second episode, for example, begins with the broadcast on the radio of the realistic socialist poem of Konstantin Simonov on the retreating soldiers of the Red Army in the first months of the Great Patriotic War known there. To assimilate the heroism of the Chernobyl liquidators to that of the sacrifice of their fathers and grandfathers is a terrible honor if we consider that the official figure of 22 million dead had established the gold standard self-sacrifice in Russia.

The protagonist of the series, Valery Legasov (played by Jared Harris) is the nuclear scientist invited by the Kremlin to purge the disaster in the greatest secrecy. The first episode begins with his suicide, giving the viewer a clue that his collaboration with the regime will prove fatal. The scheme has little regard for its humanity and limited use for its expertise.

Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), also a nuclear engineer, is assured by a leader of the Belarussian Communist Party. His enlightened opinion on the dangers of nuclear radiation is therefore irrelevant because, as a representative of the proletariat, he knows better. His inflated qualification? A prior passage as director of a shoe factory. However, he is hardly a representative of the proletariat: such a position would allow him to take bribes and negotiate with the mafia.

In the West, the character of a female nuclear engineer can be read as a feminist trope, but in the land of developed socialism, it deserves a shrug of shoulders. Of course, many women had engineering degrees, but it was not the engineers who brought bacon home. A position like Khomyuk's could bring bragging points to his intelligentsia, but not much more.

The warehouse managers have all the respect, and apparatchiks called. After decades of watching Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev struggling to collect words on national television, we knew we were governed by some sober ignorant people.

No need to bang your head against the wall to try to convince the nomenklatura of anything. They had to be shameful by evacuating Pripyat. Ordinary people were powerless in front of the state. Like deadly nuclear particles, its invisible forces shaped our existence.

Authentic voices of the Soviet people's experience

Some might argue that the Chernobyl disaster alone can not be considered a criticism of the Soviet Union or of socialism in general. I am not of the same opinion: the biggest nuclear accident in the world is much more representative of the USSR than that of the Cosa Nostra in the United States; yet, "The godfather" is generally considered an exegesis of American capitalism.

Heavy attempts at concealment laid bare the lies of socialism as the Secretary-General tried to defend the opening.

The latter is a stretch, and the descending criminal mafia structure applies better to socialism and its post-Soviet mutations. "Chernobyl", on the other hand, effectively uses cultural appropriation to recreate the abominable atmosphere that followed the nuclear accident and highlight the problems inherent in socialism.

Mazin and Renck do not seem interested in distorting the story to mark cheap domestic political points. I hear through their work authentic voices of the Soviet people, and their voices alone. I appreciate their humor, I know their mentality.

The horror on the screen is only a dramatic moment in the daily Soviet experience, logical result of central planning, secrecy and the devaluation of individual life. It's exactly like that. I have never seen a better movie about this period of history.

The series received rave reviews in Russia, garnering high marks for its authenticity. Sometimes it takes a stranger to create a superbly authentic art.

As for the Soviet ecological catastrophes, Chernobyl was not the worst, but because others were hidden in the deepest part of the country, they were not detected by the Swedes in a few hours. In addition, the nuclear accident occurred at a time when state power had already been weakened by Gorbachev's nascent reforms, and attempts at concealment revealed the lies of socialism while the Secretary-General was trying to defend the opening. (Incidentally, one of these lies, the official figure of 28 dead, is still valid.)

Gorbachev himself felt that the nuclear incident was the last blow in the coffin of the USSR. What began as "Cement" has ended in the cement sarcophagus that now covers the reactor site. Well, in a way: the site is still burning.