Dan Snow's History Hit - Chernobyl: Memories of a Survivor

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

On April 26th 1986 reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded sending a vast plume of radioactive material into the atmosphere, but what was it like for ordinary people nearby? It was the worst nuclear accident to that point in history and the catastrophic response to that meltdown and the mishandling of the messages around the accident helped to hasten the end of the Soviet Union itself. In this episode, Dan is joined by Sophia Moskalenko who was ten at the time and living in Kyiv around 60 miles from the site of the accident. She movingly describes her life before the explosion, the trauma of the events afterwards and the long term effect on her mental and physical wellbeing.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. I'm just sitting on a boat, bobbing up and down in a marina on the third most populated island in this wonderful North Atlantic archipelago, the British Isles, whatever you want to call it, this wonderful set of islands that we live on. The third most populated island, which of course is Portsmouth, Port Sea Island. The most densely populated part of this archipelago, these isles after London. There you go. Lots of people live on this little island of Portsmouth. And I'm here because I'm making the Bismarck 80 show for History Hit TV. It'll be out, obviously, next month.

The end of next month is the anniversary of the remarkable story of one of the last big gunned battleship jewels in history as the Royal Navy attempted to sink Bismarck. We're up this morning at five o'clock trying to get the sunrise remembering that fateful day in the North Atlantic when Hood and Prince of Wales decided to engage with Bismarck as the sun came up on that cold May morning and now I'm enjoying a quiet beer in the marina at the end of this long day and I've got to say I'm watching couples take ridiculous shots for Instagram. I'm looking at men take the tops off and get horrifically sunburnt whilst

shouting at high-vis cloud security guards and I can say everybody there's good news from the front here. Nature is healing. We're getting back to normal. Everything's going to be okay. Speaking of nature healing or not healing, on April the 26th 1986, 35 years ago, Chernobyl's reactor number four exploded 60 miles away from the capital of Soviet Ukraine, Kiev. It was the worst nuclear accident in history to that point. The catastrophic response to that meltdown, the mishandling of the messages, the mishandling of the event itself, hastened the collapse, the breakup of the Soviet Union itself. I'm very lucky in this podcast. I'm talking to a survivor. I'm talking to the very talented Sevilla Moskalenko. She was a 10-year-old living in Kiev at the time, and I wanted to ask her what she knew and when she knew it. She's written about

this very compellingly, and it's impossible not to find her testimony deeply moving. I hope you enjoy this special anniversary podcast talking about an event that came to define the history and politics of the late 20th century. If you want more history, then go to historyhit.tv. It's the world's best digital history channel. Historyhit.tv, you get your documentaries there. It's like Netflix for history, but you also get all of these podcasts, all the back episodes of this podcast stretching five years back without any ads at all, no breaks.

So you can just enjoy them all without my stupid appeals for your money on behalf of some of the world's leading brands. So please head over to historyhit.tv. You can join the revolution there. You can also watch this documentary on the hunt for the Bismarck when it comes out next month. In the meantime, everyone, please enjoy this conversation with Sofia Moskalenko. Sofia, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I was so struck by your description of your life before the meltdown.

Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like growing up in Kiev in Soviet Ukraine? It was just my life. So for me, it was living in this communal style apartment where several families shared the kitchen and the bathroom and the toilet and going to school every day in my school uniform and being a young pioneer, which was this stage of development we all had to go through where we pledged allegiance to the Communist Party. So I had my red tie that we wore every day. And I was very proud of that. And I was very proud of being a Soviet child. That was something that was in my mind almost every day. There was a lot of that put into us at school and through the TV and the parades and

everything. So that was an important part of my identity, being a Soviet citizen. I love that on the wall of the shared bathroom, you had different toilet seats, right? Well, yeah, because we weren't animals. We didn't like sitting on a seat that somebody had just sat on and did their business on. But yeah, it was a little bit disgusting now that I think about it, But yeah, it was a little bit disgusting now that I think about it, having lived in the West for the rest of my life. Then it was just part of normal, as was waiting in the morning to use the bathroom in a line in front of it and waiting to brush your teeth and things like that. What do you remember about that day? What do you remember about April 1986? It was April 26th, I think.

So that day was just a normal day. What was unusual was that just a few days ago on April 22nd was Vladimir Lenin's birthday, which was when I became a young pioneer. So it was all very fresh for me. And I was riding on that wave of excitement and pride. And also April 23rd was my birthday. So the 26th was the weekend and we were preparing a cake with my mom for my birthday. And in every other way,

it was just a typical warm spring day with the windows open and flowers coming out in the garden and me spending a lot of time outdoors. You were what, 80 miles away? Maybe a little less because I was about 90 kilometers. So whatever that translates to. And I guess you guys didn't hear anything or feel anything. So was it rumors? How did it impact your life at first? translates to. And I guess you guys didn't hear anything or feel anything. So was it rumors? How

did it impact your life at first? Well, the stuff perhaps impact your life in a way that you couldn't see initially. So a couple of days afterwards, there was an announcement on TV. And since we only had really two and a half television stations, and all of them were government stations, it's not like we could have missed it, because that was all there was to see. And the official read a piece of paper without looking at the camera, a very dry announcement about there having been a fire at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and nothing to worry about. We didn't really worry about it until our neighbors, whose daughter was my good friend and who themselves were both nuclear physicists, alerted my mother to the fact that there was something really wrong and not at all the fire that we were told about on TV. And that indeed, we should not only worry, but take particular measures to protect ourselves.

But against this official announcement, it just didn't seem true. It didn't seem likely. It seemed like fake news in today's language. And we didn't really want to believe it because the measures that they were suggesting were kind of drastic, like don't go outside when it's so beautiful outside and don't send the kids to school. Like, what are they going to do if they're not going to go to school? And anyway, the way these scientists explained radiation to us was just so almost magical. It was this thing that you couldn't smell, you couldn't see,

you couldn't really sense in any way, but it was just deadly and it could kill you. And so weighing the idea of this magical substance against the government's announcement and against the costs of these proposed measures that our scientist neighbors suggested, the adults in my apartment, you know, the matriarchs of the three families, they discussed it and they decided they were not going to believe the scientist's account. There was no crack at that point in your belief in the Soviet system. And you personally sounded super pumped to be a young Soviet pioneer. But even with your parents' generation, there was faith, was there? Well, 1986, Gorbachev was already in power. And so this glasnost was already happening where we had news reports about all the atrocities during

the Stalin years. But I think there was a lot of investment, emotional investment, among all of us, and certainly for me, in preserving the good that we've come to love, whatever good that was. I think it's very human. We don't like to let go of things, and especially when there's such a huge uncertainty on the other end of letting it go. And especially when there's such a huge uncertainty on the other end of letting it go. And so that particular moment of revelation when the scientists told us the government was lying, we were able to defend against it collectively, you know, coming up with this rationale for discounting it. But little by little, our certainty was chipped away by other things that we saw, particularly from the government side.

Like they started cleaning the streets with these really huge, scary machines with two huge shower heads, spraying water with some suds in it, and then a rolling brush in the middle. And they did it relentlessly, like twice a day, early morning and then late at night. And they never used to do it before. And then we started hearing about how people were evacuated from the Chernobyl region. So the government did the evacuation at the same time as they were saying that there was nothing to worry about. And just these inconsistencies, then there were more and more of them, of course, because the government knew the truth.

They were beginning to shake our ground under us, so to speak. You listen to Downstone's History, we're talking Chernobyl with Sofia Moskalenka, who was there or nearby. More coming up after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles i'm james rogers and over on the warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in potsdamdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know.

The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history.

Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. We experience in the modern world, particularly around COVID, around fake news, when you're just confronted with a reality, like whether it's a truck,

whether it's unavoidable changes to your daily life. And at that stage, you start to think, what is going on here? Yeah, it was painful for me. It was a very traumatic coming of age. I don't know what to call it. My childhood really took a turn because a lot of the illusions that I think are part and parcel of being a child were just destroyed in front of me. And I think for adults, too, it was painful because we want to believe that our government is benevolent. We don't want to live in a country where the government is a monster. We want to believe that we're safe. We want to believe that we're not going to die of radiation poisoning or cancer.

want to believe that we're not going to die of radiation poisoning or cancer, considering the alternative is scary and painful and we want for it to go away and we can't. And so it's a massive cognitive dissonance. I'm a psychologist, which is very emotionally difficult. When did you maybe start to get scared about your own health, your own life? made me start to get scared about your own health, your own life. So the government evacuated all the school-aged children from Kiev, my hometown, to the south of Ukraine. My school class went to Crimea. And in this evacuation camp, there were additional stresses for me, which might have contributed to this dermatitis

developing on my skin. But it might also be that it was the result of being out in the open in the days after the fire, because dermatitis happens to be one of the disorders people develop after being exposed to radiation. So I started having these itchy spots between my fingers and on my head. And of course, with all the talk about cancer that I heard before being evacuated and all the other kids heard, I immediately thought that I was dying. I was going to die of cancer and this was it. And I would be lucky if it was skin cancer, I thought, because at least then they could cut away pieces of the skin, but maybe it was something more serious. And so that was also very traumatic for me. How long were you away from your parents in the Crimea?

It was three months. And when you returned back, what had changed in Kiev? What had changed in Ukraine? What had changed in Soviet society? I can only give you my personal perspective. I can't speak as a historian or a scholar of sociology at the time. But from my perspective, there was a definite shift among my friends and neighbors and my friends' parents toward deep skepticism and bitterness and the grievance against the government that wasn't there before. All of us now knew personally somebody who was either working as a firefighter there or as a medic or somehow had to go there and then developed health problems. A father of one friend developed cancer and died very quickly within less than a year. And that's something that hasn't happened to me before. None of the people my parents aged had died before that.

That was the first death and it had to do with Chernobyl. And so I think Chernobyl and the way the government dealt with it and then the collective trauma that we've all experienced, that was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union in our minds. You're going to come back on the podcast. We're very excited to get you on to talk about your day job because you're a very brilliant analyst of the QAnon and conspiracy phenomena. I mean, obviously you're the professional here, but I'm wondering, what is

the connection, do you think, between the path you've taken in life, which is combating fake news, pricking myths, questioning healthy cynicism about what we're told, skepticism, and your experience as a child? Thank you for the question. I think there's absolutely a connection. I am fascinated by how irrational people can be in beliefs that they hold and the costs that these beliefs can incur on their lives. It just seems like we can be so smart and so rational in one way, but then when it comes to these huge impersonal collectives like our country or our ethnic group or our religious group, we lose touch with very basic truths and can very easily be swayed one way or another, depending on who is doing the talking and the propaganda or who is putting a narrative

on the facts out there. And so I'm fascinated by it. And in the years that I've studied it, I have yet to be bored by the examples. And QAnon is the latest one, but it's definitely not the only example of a very large collective of people believing in completely unsubstantiated stories that drain their lives of connection and meaning and all good things. What about your enthusiasm as a child for your induction into the pioneers, your excitement about being part of this extraordinary project? your induction into the pioneers, your excitement about being part of this extraordinary project. Is that something that you look back on and just can dismiss as a kind of childish thing? Or is that something that you are still trying to understand? How you were swept up in this? I think we are all part of some system of meaning. We humans, we need to have an explanation for the larger things. We can't just exist here and now for better or worse. And so I was born into that system of meaning and I

happened to really actively participate in it. It made me excited and happy and proud. My kids were born into a different system of meaning and I see them being proud Americans and I see them being proud of their ethnic heritage and their religious tradition. And all of those have holes in them. I can make them cynical about any one of them. The question is, do I want to? And I think in childhood, fairy tales are really important. And sometimes in adulthood too, it's just important to keep in mind that they are fairy tales. Your childhood was cruelly interrupted by the explosion, the three months you're separated from the family, the skin condition you had.

When we're counting the casualties of Chernobyl, should we be mindful of the hundreds of thousands, millions of people like you who aren't included in any statistics? I certainly think so. I was actually one of the luckier people in a way because I ended up leaving Ukraine at the age of 18. But a lot of my friends stayed and had families. And a lot of my friends had children with congenital abnormalities, which you can produce different explanations for them, but certainly they can be due to the accumulation of radiation that their bodies experienced. A lot of people I know that stayed in Ukraine,

who were my parents' age when the Chernobyl exploded have developed cancer and died of it, my relatives. So Chernobyl is to this day haunting us, the survivors, and to this day taking a toll on all of us. And it's not clear when it's going to stop. The radiation is still there and people who carry its consequences in their bodies are still very much among us. My last question, is that anger? Now that you know more about it, all the things we've all learned from the histories and of course the

wonderful recent TV show, are you angry at people, individuals, or is that not helpful? or is that not helpful? I was actually really grateful to the show because anger was the one thing that I couldn't get to myself. With this experience of Chernobyl, I had different emotions, but because everybody around me at the time was so inconsistent and, you know,

maybe it's okay, maybe it's not okay. I didn't see a single adult behave in the way that the characters on the show behaved, where, you know, they slammed doors and punched desks or whatever. And although the show can be criticized for how realistic that portrayal was, because of course, high position scientists could not possibly behave that way and not end up having some serious trouble. That being said, the fact that I could see that emotion on the screen and I could vicariously experience it, it was immensely helpful to me because I really needed to get that perspective and to speak to that part of my experience because it was there it just had never

come up well thank you so much for sharing that experience with us today it's just extraordinary hearing about it and i'm looking forward to getting you back on the podcast talk about conspiracy q and on the rest of it so looking forward to that i'd be glad to thank you i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of

the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.