Johanna Lindbladh, Lund University

2010-2016

The Memory of Chernobyl in Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian Testimony, Film and Fiction

The aim of this project has been to study and interpret the memory of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine 1986, based on Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian testimony, film and fiction (1986-2011). Two studies have been completed within this project and the results presented in four scientific articles. In both studies, a connection has been established between the memory of the collapsed reactor in 1986 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, between Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring) begun in 1985 and the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The connection between the memory of Chernobyl and the disintegration of the Soviet Union appears in my analyses of the material as an essential structural element, in the sense that the memory was consistently related to an ideological and psychological questioning both of the Soviet system and of the culture of war, which glorified death, heroism and blind faith in the great idea. Differences between the three nations of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were overshadowed by their common indictment of and confrontation with the Soviet past, so my original intention of studying the memory of Chernobyl in this comparative context turned out at an early stage in the research process to be less relevant. Instead, the project's focus was transferred to the dividing line that has emerged in representations of Chernobyl over time, displaying a distinct shift from the collective to the individual level. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the memory of Chernobyl was associated with various degenerate features of the Soviet system: stagnation, corruption, censorship, a state inclined to defend its own interests at the cost of the individual. Post-soviet representations, however, depict Chernobyl in connection with the acute need of coming to terms with the past and the idea of homo sovieticus, which was based on heroic ideals, a thirst for great ideas, and an inability to define the unique worth of a human being in relation to the collective.

Study 1: The Chernobyl disaster depicted as a critique of a system
In my initial study, the ambition was to exemplify and try to understand the background to the connection between the actual nuclear disaster in 1986 and the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later, an interconnection that emerged as highly significant in the examined material. Three notional motifs were identified in the analysis. The results of this study were presented in the scientific article "Chernobyl as the Beginning of the End of the Soviet Union" (Lindbladh 2014 a). I have also discussed the unique symbolic meaning ascribed to the nuclear disaster in the Soviet context in two newspaper articles:"Hjälplösa hjältar" (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 13 April 2011) and "K-märkt kraft" (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 26 April 2011).

The first motif is the peaceful atom (mirnyi atom), a concept which was promoted as a political slogan towards the end of the 1950s, when the first Soviet nuclear power plants were founded under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Obviously, the concept has ideological overtones, referring to Lenin's utopia of 1920 and ideals of a technologically highly developed, communist country: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country". When the devastating consequences of Chernobyl, the first nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union that the regime was unable to silence, became known to the broader public, the peaceful atom was converted into a symbol of a technologically highly developed, corrupt system that deprived the individual of any kind of human rights. Analyses of how Chernobyl is depicted in testimonies, in film and literature during this period illustrate how the peaceful atom was inverted, thus becoming a symbol of the collapsed Soviet Union, and of the impoverishment of Soviet war-culture.

The second motif is the myth of the nuclear town Pripyat. Before the disaster, Pripyat, situated 3 km from the power plant, was a symbol of the young, highly educated Soviet citizen, fulfilling his or her duty towards the motherland, thanks to their position at a power plant providing the Soviet Union with electricity. Situated in the centre of the forbidden zone (zona otchuzhdenia), Pripyat soon after the disaster was reduced to a ghost town, transformed with time into a powerful symbol, both spiritually and ideologically, of the fall of communism and the Soviet Union. A comparative study addressing the myth of this "plutopia" alongside the myth of St Petersburg, as it took shape in Russian 19th-century literature - Peter the Great's "window towards the west" and a symbol of western European rationalism and technological development - discusses similarities between the two cities, represented in the collective consciousness as being exposed to the punishment of God (referring, for example, to the flooding of St Petersburg in 1825, depicted by Alexander Pushkin in his poem The Bronze Horseman).

The third motif is the Chernobyl disaster represented as a war. War is a recurring metaphor, not only in the testimonies of the clean-up workers, but also in fiction depicting ordinary life in the radioactive zone: as in a war, the clean-up workers were expected to act heroically and defend their motherland; as in a war, people were evacuated from their homes; and just like war veterans, the clean-up workers returned home from the radioactive zone both physically and psychologically injured (compare the veteran-chernobylets with the veteran-afganets). The metaphoric connection between the Chernobyl disaster and war becomes specific in the sense that an external enemy is missing. The fact that the enemy in the radioactive zone is represented by the peaceful atom, one of the most prominent flagships of the Soviet state, contributes to the 'defamiliarization' or estrangment (ostranenie) of war as a phenomenon. Analysis shows that the metaphor of war contributed to triggering disbelief in the Soviet man (homo sovieticus), who had been fostered according to the codex of war but who, having experienced Chernobyl, feels the need to raise the question: Why should I sacrifice my life in a war on behalf of the peaceful atom (the symbol of Soviet power and communism)? "

Study 2: The Chernobyl disaster - apocalypse or resurrection?
The second study, covering post-Soviet depictions of the Chernobyl disaster, has resulted in three scientific articles: "Coming to Terms with the Soviet Myth of Heroism Twenty-five Years after the Chernobyl' Nuclear Disaster: An Interpretation of Aleksandr Mindadze's Existential Action Movie Innocent Saturday" (Lindbladh 2012); "Tjernobylkatastrofen: apokalyps eller pånyttfödelse?" (Lindbladh 2014 b); "Tjernobyl blev en moralisk väckarklocka i postsovjetisk film" (Lindbladh 2015). Post-Soviet film and literature depict Chernobyl in terms of an apocalypse. This dystopian vision of destruction isconsistently connected, however, to the possibility of moral rebirth. In other words, the radioactive zone is depicted as a paradoxical zone of freedom, in which unexplored dystopian and existential dimensions of life are revealed to the human being. Thus, both the zone and the radiation are represented as ambivalent metaphors, addressing destruction as well as resurrection, death as well as rebirth.

This study of the Chernobyl disaster, represented as an apocalypse leading to moral rebirth, contributes theoretically to a more profound understanding of Slavic cultural and literary history. In the Slavic context, the apocalypse is intimately connected to resurrection, which in turn partly is a reflection of Russian Orthodox belief that regards suffering as the only way to (moral) rebirth. This means that the heritage of Fedor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian symbolists and Andrei Tarkovsky continues to endure, a thesis verified by the analyses of my material.

In connection with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2015, I discussed this theme of suffering in my article "Kontroversiell kärlek: Aleksijevitjs intresse för individen går emot retoriken" (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 9 October 2015), taking my standpoint from the interconnection between death and love, suffering and rebirth, depicted in Svetlana Alexievich's book Voices from Chernobyl. This interpretation of the Slavic culture of suffering has generated the question: "How is this relationship between suffering and rebirth and hence freedom represented in Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Utopia?" I explored this topic in the newspaper article "Rotandet i sovjetiska trauman provocerar" (Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 2015), and my intention now is to expand this idea into a research project.

Publications

Vetenskapliga publikationer
Lindbladh, Johanna (2013) ”Coming to Terms with the Soviet Myth of Heroism Twenty-five Years after the Tjernobyl’ Nuclear Disaster: An Interpretation of Alexandr Mindadze’s Existential Action Movie Innocent Saturday”, The Anthropology of East Europe Review, vol. 30, nr. 1 (ss. 113-126)
Lindbladh, Johanna (2014 a) ”Chernobyl as the Beginning of the End of the Soviet Union”, Baltic Worlds, vol. VII, nr. 1 (ss. 4-12)
Lindbladh, Johanna (2014 b) ”Tjernobylkatastrofen: apokalyps eller pånyttfödelse?”, Nordisk Østforum, vol. 28, nr. 3 (ss. 239-257)
Lindbladh, Johanna (2015) ”Tjernobyl blev en moralisk väckarklocka i postsovjetisk film”, Respons nr. 5 (ss. 18-21)

Tidningsartiklar
Lindbladh, Johanna, ”Hjälplösa hjältar” (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 2011-04-13)
Lindbladh, Johanna, ”K¬-märkt kraft” (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 2011-04-26)
Lindbladh, Johanna, ”Rotandet i sovjetiska trauman provocerar” (Svenska Dagbladet, 2015-12-10)
Lindbladh, Johanna, ”Kontroversiell kärlek: Aleksijevitjs intresse för individen går emot retoriken” (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 2015-10-09)

Intervjuer
Forskning och framsteg
http://fof.se/tidning/2011/4/johanna-soker-tjernobyls-avtryck#overlay=tidning/2011/4/johanna-soker-tjernobyls-avtryck
Tidningen Lundagård
http://lundagard.se/2016/01/12/pa-forskningsfronten-i-lund/
Sydsvenska Dagbladet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbmJ_2k4OUA
Svenska Dagbladet
http://www.svd.se/aleksijevitj-har-manga-emot-sig
Sydnytt (2015-12-10)