Legacies of Chernobyl

Reading first person accounts from witnesses to the Chernobyl disaster humanizes the event, as many of you pointed out in class. This is surely one of the reasons Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is such a powerful book.

In the context of our course, they also add an important dimension to the broader history of the relationship between Soviet power and technological advance that we've been considering in past weeks. They paint vivid pictures of how individuals experienced, felt about, and concluded from a failure of technology, expertise, and governance. What do the voices tell us about this broader story? About what it meant to be a "hero" in the late Soviet Union? About Soviet identity and patriotism?

Here are some of the resources that we discussed in class.