The Cost of Lies

Television Review

by Presbyter Matthew Brown

In April of 1986, in a small industrial town in the north of Ukraine, a test on a nuclear reactor went haywire, leading to an explosion and a fire that released massive amounts of radiation into the air. It is still considered the worst nuclear disaster in history. But Chernobyl isn’t history, it’s legend. For people around the globe, Chernobyl is the story of technological catastrophe. It functions as an archetype of human error and man’s inability to control his own technology. But the error of Chernobyl was not technical in nature; rather, it was rooted in a fatal flaw. Machines didn’t fail, people did. This series reminds us of the lesson of Chernobyl: that man has a very precarious relationship with the truth.

This year’s five-episode mini-series by HBO, titled “Chernobyl,” attracted more than 7 million viewers and received massive critical acclaim, earning a 9.4 rating on Internet Movie Database— tied for second place as the highest-rated TV show of all time. What makes this shocking is that the show’s writer, Craig Mazin, is better known for his work on less well-received films such as Scary Movie 4 and The Hangover Part III. Yet, Chernobyl delivers excellent writing, acting, and cinematography. It is a beautiful production, based partly on the book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by the Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich.

The first episode introduces us to the life of ordinary workers in Pripyat. The town is presented as an idyllic image of Soviet life as children play, mothers smile, and men head off to work. At the same time, the drab Soviet architecture, the blocky and cold apartment complexes, and the washed-out cadaver tones of the show’s cinematography communicate the falseness of this utopia. Everything seems fine but there is a sickness in which all the characters are colored. Long before we are presented with this falsehood in the story line, it is hinted at by the cinematography.

The acting—particularly of Jared Harris as the scientist Valery Legasov and of Stellan Skarsgard as the senior Communist Party official Boris Shcherbina—is superb. These two characters shoulder the load of mitigating the disaster and potentially saving millions of lives. Legasov realizes, long before anyone else, the magnitude of the disaster, and finds himself fighting against those who refuse to acknowledge the evidence. The degree of incompetency and group lying in the first episode is astounding. And the persistence of lies throughout the series, even in the face of the real possibility of repeating the disaster of Chernobyl, is unbelievable.

In one instance, the administrators of the Chernobyl plant dismiss Valery’s warnings because the dosimeters—devices for measuring radiation— read only 3 roentgen, a relatively low amount. But Legasov points out—as he did earlier at an important meeting with the USSR’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other high-ranking party officials—that 3 roentgen is the upper limit of those dosimeters. Legasov fights repeatedly and hard, eventually with the help of Boris Shcherbina, to get a highrange dosimeter. And ultimately—unsurprisingly to viewers—the new device reads 15,000 roentgen! “What does that mean?” asks Shcherbina. Legasov replies, “That means it is giving off nearly twice the radiation of the bomb at Hiroshima and that’s every single hour, hour after hour.”

As the story’s hero, Legasov is the lone voice speaking truth in a society gone mad from telling too many lies. His is a story of courage. In the final episode, “Vichnaya Pamyat”, which is set in a Soviet courtroom, he is faced with the moral task of telling truth even when doing so will mean suicide. He knows the disaster at Chernobyl would have ended far worse had it not been for his efforts.

Boris Shcherbina, sent by the Party to oversee the disaster’s containment, is transformed over the course of the series. At the outset, he epitomizes the self-delusion of Soviet society. But between Legasov’s efforts and the horrific experiences of Chernobyl, he comes to realize not only the magnitude of the disaster, but also the deep sickness of lies which pervades his country. Slowly, he understands how the system he’d believed in has betrayed him. Profound character transformation is difficult to portray convincingly, and it is a sign of good writing when it is executed well.

The climax of Shcherbina’s transformation comes when a robot, borrowed from the West Germans to perform a critical task in the cleanup, fails in its task. Shcherbina realizes the robot has failed because Chernobyl’s administrators were not truthful with the West Germans about the amount of radiation the robot would be exposed to. Had they been, perhaps modifications could have been made or another robot used. But protecting the Soviet image of superiority was more important than the lives of millions across Europe. The scene ends with Shcherbina having a meltdown of his own, screaming on the phone to his superiors—an almost unthinkable action for a Soviet bureaucrat. For him, that’s when the lies stopped.

”Chernobyl” focuses not only on the leadership, but also ventures into the lives of ordinary people affected by the fallout. It shows just how many people suffered as a result of the denial and cover up. We get an impressive cross-section of all the lives and different lots intertwined in this disaster. In each case, these ordinary people simply accept the official story line, even though it obviously didn’t add up. They don’t question or object even in the face of the surreal and absurd.

One story line that wends its way through most of the series is that of a young mother-to-be. Her husband, a firefighter and first responder to the disaster, suffers from radiation poisoning. Her love and care for him is inspiring, and the fate of her unborn child, tragic. But throughout her arduous journey, she too fails to admit to herself the obvious truth: that her husband is dying and that the story given her by the doctors is a lie.

There is a moving story of miners conscripted to dig beneath the power plant, knowing full well their own fate for doing so and yet knowing the fate of millions if they do not. The interaction between the party official who must coerce them to do this job is humorous, if you find the awkward funny. The official’s discomfort also speaks to the persistence of class differences, despite our best efforts to dispel them. For all their rough edges and impropriety, the miners possess an authenticity and self-confidence that is often lacking among the well to-do.

A tangential story is that of a young military man who, along with two older and experience-hardened men, is ordered to sweep through the abandoned villages and cities of the region to kill pets and farm animals, preventing them from infecting humans with radiation. The scene is surreal and gruesome; by the end, their pickup truck is piled high with animal corpses. It makes for a most odd and unfortunate coming-of-age story.

If there is criticism surrounding this series, it concerns inaccuracies of technical and biographical details as well as the role the series plays in refueling anti-nuclear hysteria. Fair enough. There are an inordinate amount of uninformed and overly emotional opinions regarding the future role of nuclear power in solving energy and environmental problems. We can blame Chernobyl for that hysteria to a large extent. But these criticisms miss the point of this series. It is not to scare us about the dangers of nuclear energy, but rather it is to warn us of the dangers of telling lies.

It’s the moral of the story of “Chernobyl” that makes the series great. It was not incompetence, or even inferior technology, that caused the disaster. It was moral failure, and, specifically, the failure to tell the truth. Chernobyl is what happens when a whole society stops being honest with itself. When we tell lies, repeat them, and pretend we believe them, our grip on reality grows weak. It is only when we are honest and truthful about our problems that we can hope to fix them. Denial is a sure way to remain stuck in the morass you find yourself in.

I am reminded of a quote from Metropolitan Anthony Bloom that can help us see the spiritual dimension of this series: “God can save the sinner you are, but not the saint you pretend to be.” Telling the truth, in every facet of our lives but especially in our spiritual life, is a matter of life and death. “Chernobyl” makes this plain to see. When we lie long enough and large enough, we risk a disaster like Chernobyl. But when we are honest with our sins and problems, we have hope. This is a lesson as relevant to our individual lives as it is to our own contemporary society.

To Mikhail Gorbachev, the Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” He saw it as a turning point that “opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.” In his book Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, the Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran explores the consequences of the lies that make disasters like Chernobyl possible. Preference falsification is when, because of social pressure, threats of violence, or to gain social favor, people pretend to agree with the prevailing opinion or order. Kuran argues this is why the Soviet Union fell so precipitously. Nearly everyone had stopped believing in the Soviet project, but everyone was still pretending they did. It just took the right circumstances, and brave souls, to get the dominos falling.

This ought to serve as a warning for us. Religious communities are acutely susceptible to preference falsification. We ought to be aware of our use of pressure, especially guilt, in producing falsified beliefs rather than adherence. It is a reminder of the impossibility of making anyone do or believe anything. It reminds us that creating a culture of honesty and openness in our parishes and in our homes is crucial to living authentic spiritual lives. We must be sensitive to the dangers of judging others and pressures toward conformity, which can have the exact opposite effect of what we desire. We can end up just like the Soviet society portrayed in this mini-series. And everything could come crashing down around us in a moment.

The series concludes with this haunting line from Valery Legasov: “And this at last is the gift of Chernobyl: That I, who once would fear the cost of truth, now only ask, what is the cost of lies?” The specter of lies that is Chernobyl should always haunt our dreams. Some nightmares are gifts.