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Power Government

On Chernobyl's 36th Anniversary, a Ukrainian Reflects (cnn.com) 38

Posted by EditorDavid from the meltdown-memories dept.
This week saw the 36th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster -- which had occurred just days before the Soviet Union's annual May Day celebration in 1986 -- and featured lots of patriotic outdoor parades.

At the time Lev Golinkin was a 6-year-old living less than 300 miles away in the Ukrainian town now called Kharkiv. Writing for CNN, Golinkin remembers that Moscow "had remained silent, refusing to admit anything had occurred until the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl was detected in Scandinavia on April 28, making it impossible to hide the catastrophe any longer." Even then, Golinkin remembers that they "grossly downpayed the issue...." On April 29, three days after the Chernobyl disaster, Moscow issued a terse television announcement informing citizens that a reactor was damaged and aid was being provided to those who required it. The announcement was less than 20 seconds

The days and weeks that followed were filled with a torrent of rumors and innuendo swirling around living rooms across the USSR while Moscow continued to pile over the explosion with secrecy and obfuscation. The Politburo began to loosen up restrictions on freedom of speech, but the confusion remained. No one knew the truth, but everyone knew the Kremlin was lying -- and that was about the only certainty around...

[T]here was no rationalizing away the radiation. Moscow's refusal to cancel May Day festivities exposed the hollow horror of the Soviet Union -- even the most faithful believers in communism realized they lived in a country that thrust millions of people into danger just so it could hold a parade. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev himself admitted Chernobyl -- which eroded faith in the Soviet system, poisoned vast tracts of land and cost billions to clean up -- contributed to the collapse of the USSR more than any other factor. Decades of Moscow's secrecy around the disaster makes it impossible to arrive at an accurate estimate of casuaties, and to this day, experts continue to guess and reassess the true impact of Chernobyl....

For nearly 70 years, the Soviets in Kremlin had generations of citizens tolerate bloodshed papered over by mendacity and propaganda. The same is happening today, during Moscow's savage war in Ukraine. The media formats may be somewhat different, but the lies continue...

My family and I fled the Soviet Union in 1989. Watching the horrors in Ukraine unfold from America is surreal, in no small part because it feels like the intervening decades between the falls of communism and today have evaporated.
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On Chernobyl's 36th Anniversary, a Ukrainian Reflects More

On Chernobyl's 36th Anniversary, a Ukrainian Reflects

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  • ...not great, not terrible.

  • Really, gamma emitters aside, you worry about alpha and beta emitters that are dug up and transferred into the atmosphere (in humans, inhaled or eaten). Things like Strontium-90 with a half-life around 29 years, for example. The worst of the trans-uranic elements probably have decayed to background radiation by now. The world should not throw out fission due to this; there are good solutions that would never result in this. Some of them solve the nuclear waste problem and can never melt down (MSRs are technically already melted down, lol). On the plus side, trans-uranic elements get burned in a fast reactor. MSRs aren't necessarily the be-all-end-all, any fast fission reactor can burn nuclear waste and actinides. Shame the US abandoned developing them in 1994 (I could say all the wrong reasons the IFR was canceled, but it was pretty much all of them); hopefully private enterprise makes up for it soon.

  • Seriously? They couldn't find a person that was an adult at the time? They are taking testimonies from 6-year olds that had no chance of understanding any context at the time? What kind of fucked up journalism is that?

  • Say what, now? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pseudonym ( 62607 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @05:15AM (#62495924)

    the Ukrainian town now called Kharkiv

    Do you by any chance mean the former capital of Ukraine, which had a population of 1.5 million in 1986, and that has been called "Kharkiv" since 1654 unless you happen to speak Russian?

    • Do you by any chance mean the former capital of Ukraine, which had a population of 1.5 million in 1986, and that has been called "Kharkiv" since 1654 unless you happen to speak Russian?

      ... unless you happen to speak Russian, like a lot of Ukrainians do, including, natively, the current president of Ukraine.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by DVLNSD ( 9457327 )
        This might come as a surprise to you, but many people speak more than one language. Zelensky as many others that were born in USSR speak russian, but that's not his native language.

        • This might come as a surprise to you, but many people speak more than one language.

          No, I speak several.

          Zelensky as many others that were born in USSR speak russian, but that's not his native language.

          Are you sure? [wikipedia.org]

          Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        So, Zelensky isn't Ukrainian enough for you?

        • The fact that the president is a native Russian speaker is used to poke at the Russian propaganda that claims ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine are discriminated against. These claims mostly come from separatists in Donbas, the ones who want to unite with Russia and who are baffled that their neighbors flee the Russian army by going west.

        • So, Zelensky isn't Ukrainian enough for you?

          No, just found it ironic, considering what I was responding to. If we're going to sneer at those who "happen to speak Russian" ...

        • When did Zelenskyy ever refer to Kharkiv as a "town"?

    • at the time the accident happened, didn't the soviet union call it Kharkov?

  • That's an odd mutation. Does DC [wikipedia.org] know about him?

  • Editorial sabotage of Slashdot continues. (Score:3)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @05:36AM (#62495940)

    The opinions of scientists and engineers are worthy of discussion, not some rando.

  • Nationalism trumps reason (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peppepz ( 1311345 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @06:11AM (#62495976)
    Nationalism poisons people's minds. People tend to trust the government's propaganda. Soviets were led by their government to believe that Chernobyl wasn't a big deal, and somehow this brainwash worked, because in the end it's more comfortable to believe that the State isn't that bad rather than to accept the fact that everything you have been told to care for was a lie.
    In the same way, modern Russians tend to believe the lies that their government endlessly feeds them, e.g. that the Ukrainians kill themselves in the thousands only to accuse the Russians of doing so. Even among the most aware, many will believe that yes, the invasion is a bad thing, but have you seen those Nazi tattoos? And how they disrespected Lenin's statues? Maybe they had it coming, somehow, after all?
    Because anything is better than accepting that the flag that you've been taught to honour and respect, the flag for which your grandparents "died for", is actually a symbol of oppression, murder and destruction.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      Indeed, nothing has changed in 40 years. This scene from the movie Airplane 2 in 1982 [youtube.com] is just as fresh in 2022. And timely because of the fires.

    • There used to be a /.er who was formerly a scientist with the Russian science establishment. His story was straightforward:

      A graduate student in nuclear engineering had a thesis idea for reactor efficiency improvements (good motivation) for the type of reactor at Chernobyl and applied for a test run.
      His particular idea was not well considered and his academic advisors and the plant safety people said no, high risk of reactor failure.
      So he went to his daddy who was a high-ranking member of the Soviet Politbu

    • Nationalism covers a lot of ground. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. Ie, subjugated provinces who want to be their own independent country equal to others are also nationalists. But then there are those who have a ethnic nationalism idea, where all those with the same supposed ethnic identity must be united, and that leads them to invadeing Sudatenland or Donbas, or killing off Tutsis. Then there's the state nationalism which supposed that one's nation or idnetity is superior to all others, which le

      • Patriotism is OK, nationalism in my opinion is just war in the making. In the past, kingdoms and empires were often multi-ethnic, and people would murder each other for religion or because of orders coming from the kings. Nowadays nations have taken that role. Inside of a nation, everyone has to be like us, otherwise he needs to be thrown out - even if he was born in the same land and his ancestor have lived there longer than ours. Or maybe it's them who feel different from us, and therefore they invent a n

  • My wife shows me a ton of things on OSINT feeds on Twitter showing Russian troops flying the Soviet colors and even wearing Soviet patches on their uniforms.

    Amazing to me that this stuff isn't being used against the Russians across the West and former Soviet blocs.

    Also kinda amazing that Putin hasn't put his foot so far up those units' asses they're coughing up blood and leather for potentially creating a propaganda nightmare for the Russian government.

  • .. in Wuhan, 2019/2020.

    Those Commie autocrat assholes never change their spots.

  • Mikhail Gorbachev (Score:3)

    by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @11:29AM (#62496774)
    Ended the cold war and dissolved the USSR, started glasnost and perestroika. Putin probably hates him for his reforms to improve the lives of the Russian people while simultaneously giving the West almost everything they dreamed about. Yet Russia never took off to be a prosperous nation - what went wrong to bring us full circle back to a cold war? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Mikhail Gorbachev (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @01:11PM (#62497110)

      The collapse left a power vaccuum. Yeltsin was not a very good leader, and it allowed crime bosses to take over. The other former soviet states were mostly left with a lot of "thank you that this nightmare is over", with a few others left with strongman autocrats. Russia however was left without a lot; they were the lynchpin in international communism, Stalin style (who believed Russia was to be the controlling center of it all). So Russia didn't have the "finally it's over!" feeling, they lost their superpower status, and like a bully found itself without friends. Putin took advantage of this after Yeltsin was out of the picture, he was cleaning up the crime (by being the boss of the crime bosses), and he was telling the population what they wanted to hear: Russia was great, we were the ones who destroyed Nazis, our proudest moment, we will be great again. But then altered the message too: everyone hates us, we must stick together, do not trust the west, do not trust opposition political parties, do not trust the internet.

      In so many ways, Putin repeats history in the same way that Hitler did. Unite a country in an economic shambles and full of despair, master the art of propaganda, invade other countries to unite a supposed ethnic commonality, use brutal military tactics against civilians. Will it also end in a bunker?

  • It's Chornobyl, not Chernobyl. Support Ukraine by using the correct spelling! Learn more: chornobyl spelling [spellingukraine.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Concurrence, though for sad reasons. Yeah, Russia screwed the pooch, but Chornobyl is definitely Ukraine's problem now.

      And counting it against Slashdot that yours is the only comment on the topic.

      I'm frankly surprised Putin ordered his troops to leave the zone. I expected Putin to try to fabricate evidence that the Ukrainians were working on a dirty bomb so he could use those lies as the basis for nuking Ukraine. I'm actually counting it as evidence that Putin still has enough sanity to understand he can't

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