Chernobyl

The most important moment in Chernobyl, a tightly plotted and well-executed tragedy, lies in Boris Shcherbina’s (Stellan Skarsgard) monologue outside the courtroom in the irradiated ghost town near the nuclear reactors of Chernobyl: “we never think it will happen to us.” He couldn’t, or wouldn’t believe that his efforts in handling the crisis would result in his death, and yet the radiation poisoning has already taken its effect less than a year after his arrival. The people of Pripyat built their town on a ground splashed with the blood of the casualties of WWII, a re-construction enacted in the belief that such violence would never visit itself upon them again. The best and worst qualities of mankind are defined by this optimism: we can see all the facts of history laid before us, bare to the nerve, and yet we will always think that we will prove the exception to the rule.

The danger in watching Chernobyl is to think that the lies of the Soviets are singular, unrepeatable, and belonging only to the past. Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) asks, “What is the cost of lies,” and perhaps the simplest answer is that the cost is measured in innocent lives – men and women who make sacrifices not because they are compelled by bold purpose, but because it is simply what is required in the situation that their government has forced upon them. The show may not be historically perfect (there is an excellent New Yorker article that talks about its mistakes – https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong – and also, why are you watching TV for historical accuracy? We tell stories to make more comprehensible our lives and their million chaotic events) but it works best as a critique of the type of exceptionalism that all world powers are susceptible to.

At some point, lies must not be accepted as a byproduct of competent statecraft. The truth must be told, but more importantly, the people must accept that truth for all it ugly glory. What is the cost of lies? The cost is equal to the power of truths that must be released, like opening a safety valve, to keep the world in balance.