Chernobyl Prayer

by Svetlana Alexievich

(Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99)

LAST year, Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. Alexievich – the first Belarusian and the first journalist to win the prize – creates collections of vital testimonies, collages of valuable personal experience, relating to transformative trials and ruptures in Soviet history.

In War’s Unwomanly Face (1985) and Boys In Zinc (1990), Alexievich recorded the memories of former soldiers – respectively women who as young girls enlisted to fight in the Second World War, and men who as young boys endured the horrors of the war in Afghanistan. In the epic, wide-ranging Second-Hand Time (2013) Alexievich documented the demise of the USSR, while in an earlier book, Enchanted With Death (1993), she narrowed her gaze to focus on Soviet citizens who were driven to suicide by their country’s disintegration. In each book, Alexievich strives to capture an accurate version of events – not history as written by the victors or corrupted into party-line propaganda but history as it happened, as told by those who witnessed it and were buffeted by it.

As with many a writer outside the Anglophone world who goes from relative unknown to Nobel laureate – think Patrick Modiano in 2014 – there has been a huge effort since Alexievich’s win to reissue or publish for the first time work from her back catalogue. Penguin has just added her to its Modern Classics range, and plans to release four of her titles this year and next. The first and arguably finest of those, Chernobyl Prayer, was previously published in 1997 and now appears with a fresh translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. It also appears at a timely juncture, exactly 30 years on from what Alexievich considers “the gravest technological catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Alexievich begins the book by quoting some sobering facts. The Chernobyl disaster contaminated 23 per cent of Belarus’s land. Before Chernobyl, the incidence of cancer in the country was 82 in 100,000; today it has risen to 6,000 in 100,000. Only one person in 14 dies of old age; the majority of deaths occur among people in the 46-50 bracket. Risking both adverse effects on her health and the wrath of Alexander Lukashenko’s autocratic regime, Alexievich journeyed into “the Zone” and recorded more than 500 interviews with those who survived but remain scarred by the tragedy.

The first “monologue” in the book is also the most affecting. Lyudmila was the wife of a fireman who was called out to the power station in the early hours of April 26, 1986. After working without protective clothing, he and the rest of the fire crew were taken to Moscow to be treated. One by one, they went from bloated to blistered, and moved from an open ward to a special pressure chamber. A pregnant Lyudmila bribed her way into the hospital to see her husband change colour and choke on his innards. “You mustn’t forget this isn’t your husband,” a nurse told her, “it’s a highly contaminated radioactive object.” He was buried in a sealed zinc coffin under slabs of concrete. Lyudmila’s baby lived for only four hours. Today she suffers strokes. “I’m living in a real and unreal world at the same time,” she says.

Other witnesses recount how they were evacuated from their homes but instructed to leave behind their animals, crops and belongings. Some recall being stoic (“We survived Stalin, survived the war!”), others feared the worst. Particularly fascinating are the accounts of soldiers tasked with the clean-up operation – a job which came to include shooting pets, felling trees, catching looters and burying food, houses and sometimes whole villages.

As we read these monologues, wishing they were fiction rather than fact, we can’t help but be shocked by the attitude of the authorities. Soldiers are offered three times their salary in danger money and are then slung in – “like we were sandbags”. Those less fortunate are tricked into believing they are being sent off for training. Desertion isn’t an option: “Anyone who abandons the Motherland in her hour of need is a traitor.” Doctors tell the sick they are imagining their illnesses; one official shouts at the mother of a severely disabled child: “You’re after Chernobyl benefits!” Press coverage is distorted and filming is banned.

“I’ve started wondering whether it’s better to remember or forget,” says one interviewee, and it is at such moments that we are glad that Alexievich undertook this project and encouraged people to cast back and open up. She includes insightful contributions from academics and politicians who, from a safe distance, attempt to historicise and contextualise the tragedy. In addition, we hear from an angry physicist who wants somebody to answer for Chernobyl, and a rabid “defender of Soviet power” who rants about a Gorbachev-CIA conspiracy and insists that “if Chernobyl hadn’t exploded, our great power would never have collapsed”.

However, Chernobyl Prayer is at its most engrossing – and wrenching – when we are sifting the painful memories, unvarnished horrors and heartfelt emotions of those who were at the epicentre of the disaster. Many break down while telling their tales. Most today are either treated as outcasts or living in, as one woman terms it, the “Chernobyl Gulag”. After Lyudmila speaks – “a lone human voice” – Alexievich assembles the rest of her previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. The result is a remarkable oral history, an essential read.