Why We Couldn't Stop Watching Chernobyl
Вставка
- Опубліковано 6 сер 2019
- I have recently become sponsored by Audible, so if you are interested in a FREE 30-day trial with audible, along with a FREE book, use my personalized link below to sign up with no strings attached. Every person that does helps out the channel in a tremendous way! Thanks!
www.audibletrial.com/Savagebooks1
Come take a look at the writing that made HBO's Chernobyl so great!
Music: • Vichnaya Pamyat | Cher...
Credits and Sources:
deadline.com/2019/06/chernoby...
www.hollywoodreporter.com/liv...
BAFTA Guru- Craig Mazin Interview
• Craig Mazin on Writing...
ChernobylTV- Half Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Now • Half-Lives: The Cherno...
Wall Street Journal- Chernobyl: Drone Footage
• Chernobyl: Drone Foota...
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty- The Chernobyl Disaster: How it Happened • The Chernobyl Disaster...
MercatorInfogr- 25 years after Chernobyl Accident-
• 25 years after Chernob... - Фільми й анімація
How the hell did Craig Mazin go from writing Scary Movie sequels, Hangover II and III... to writing Chernobyl? Does he have two separate brains?
Boris Müller creative genius is creative genius
@@C-RENITY That doesn't answer the question.
chasm671 I think you’ll find it does
@@C-RENITY No. I already found it doesn't.
chasm671 ok smarty pants
those last words... "what is the cost of lies?" always gives me chills
@hammertapping 1. The woman (as explained by the show) was just the unification of all the scientists who helped legasov in chernobyl
2.The trial was just a way to show it without having to introduce new characters
@hammertapping Apparently you missed the point entirely. Sad.
@hammertapping I don't think you understand what the word "narrative" means. A narrative is just a story. Of which Chernobyl is an extremely well crafted one. It never claims to be 100% historically accurate, so there is no reason to call it "false", much less "a lie".
As for your huge walls of texts, I have no time to read yours nor to respond in kind. This is UA-cam, not a fucking debate forum.
@@renx81 there's a difference between lie and false information. False information can be passed to suspected person who do not posses critical thinking or critical knowledge to resist it. If there's a blame to make, it is quite insignificant and possibly not too important. Lies are based on willingness of a person to falsify information to suit his interest, and this is definitely a harmful action. However, most of the time people do both of those things - they do not want to change their views and want to keep themselves ignorant and ignore details, and lie to themselves and others ever so slightly. This can be exploited very effectively by such "revelations" who claim the truth for them, playing on their emotions.
Chernobyl is a misinformation, and a deliberate lie, and a PR campaign, generously oiled with money, fame and finger pointing. In fact, the series itself is just a top of the iceberg of multi-million campaign of defamation and smearing. To not see even a fraction of this is to remain ignorant, quite willingly so.
hammertapping You must be Russian, your excuses for the behavior of the USSR State and it’s fabricated lies to the International Community is telling.
HBO going from "she kinda forgot about the iron fleet" to "what is the cost of lies?" is one of the best studio turn arounds in a one month span in TV history.
To be fair to HBO, they wanted to fund GoT for 3 more seasons. The showrunners are the massive hack frauds
let go of your GOT bullshit. Youll be a better human
@@steveg6035 Hey, we can be perfectly good humans and still be just a petty bitch to GoT's showrunners because they deserve it.
@@PolliitoAle of course you can be good humans, but if you used the calories it takes to endlessly suck your thumb over GOT even just to stare at a wall, you would be just that much better.
Chernobyl felt like a breath of fresh air after the confusing horror show finale of game of thrones
I liked how from the first episode it seemed to tease the audience with the visual of the exploding reactor but never showed it. Everyone was warned not to get too close to it, limiting what the audience could see through the characters' POV, like the cleaners on the roof who were instructed not to look over the root top. Anytime some form of technology would get close to it, it would break down. It reinforced the feeling of an almost mythological power at work, like not looking directly at the sun or you'll be blinded, or not being able to see the face of Jevohah. All the way up until the last episode where events of the explosion is narrated in detail.
Brilliant show and brilliant writing.
hayabusa1x this is a great point, i never thought of that!
hayabusa1x brilliant comment
It is a staple of horror movies: don't show the horror, let the audience imagine it ourselves. Our imagination is always more horrifying than what we can see.
@@harmenbreedeveld8026 and reinforcing that this is *REAL* thing... you can dismiss a ghost or a devil and called it that was my imagination.. while you cant do that when dealing with the radiation...
@@Ruzaraneh Yes, that is what makes it extra horrible. Our brains have some idea of what is coming. Then, our brains also do not really understand it, so again ... our imagination can run wild. And it did :-)
it's really strange to me reading these comments how many people don't know about chernobyl and its effects. i live in germany and we are still not supposed to eat mushrooms, venison and boar of certain german regions because of radioactivity.
The US equivalent is people born after 9/11 who don’t know just how weird things got.
THIS! I was 8 when Chernobyl happened. I grew up in Norway. I remember seeing the images on the news. I remember sheep having to be slaughtered because of radiation and people not to eat wild foraged foods like mushrooms. Animals are still monitored to this day for radiation, especially in years where the is a lot of wind from the east. Then again, watching the US population first hand, they are experts at just moving on in their lives when something bad happens. I mean, there are mass-shootings daily in this country and still nothing is done. Germany banned nuclear reactors after Fukushima. Australia and New Zealand tightened gun laws after mass shootings in their own country.
@@NoorAnomaly there are actually 7 nuclear reactors still working in Germany, they'll be shut down in the next few years though. But it's the same as with our planned coal phase-out in 2038, things are not happening fast enough, even though we know the consequences. What the U.S. are doing is certainly insanely damaging and and ignorant, especially in terms of climate change and gun control, but I think we need to take responsibility for our own countries' faults as well.
@@NoorAnomaly If you ban everything because of a few accidents, you will never be able to progress. Instead look for safer ways. The only real issue that caused the Fukushima disaster was because of poor design planning to protect against tsunami's, and was focused more for earthquake protection. Examples being that the emergency generators were in low-level buildings right along the water.. In the basements... Combined with an inadequate tsunami wall (6 meters high, wave was 15.) Had they been higher, the coolant pumps wouldn't have lost power and the plant wouldn't have had three meltdowns. Now I'm no geography expert but I don't think Germany has an issue with tsunami's to have to worry about that.
If you look up Canada's Candu Reactor design and videos of the safety systems, you'd see those reactors are incredibly safe as they used both the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters to be able to learn how to make it safer. Because lets face it. Nuclear is the only reliable way to get sufficient, stable power that is clean. And for the waste there are ways to reprocess it (Expensive so as of currently not efficient but over time that can change, just like other green methods) to the point that 20 years of unusable waste fits on a single truck.
I'd also gladly go into crime statistics in the US with you but I'd rather not open that can of worms.
(Video regarding the Candu reactors in a total station blackout(Worst case scenario))
ua-cam.com/video/vggzl9OngaM/v-deo.html
@@dkat4320 the problem with nuclear reactors in germany was not only that they weren't safe enough in case of earthquakes (which they weren't, even though earthquakes are not a big threat here), but also the issue of permanent disposal, which is highly problematic and has been protested against for decades. I'm glad we are moving away from that towards alternative solutions. also, seeing nuclear disasters simply as "mistakes to learn from" is a perspective we in terms of humankind cannot afford to have. millions of people have been negatively affected by these disasters in terms of death, (hereditary) illness, relocation and of course radioactive contamination for decades and centuries. if something goes wrong (which it has) the consequences are simply not bearable, as we have learnt from these disasters. i think we must find viable alternatives, and we already have.
This mini series took a real life event and turned it into a show more thrilling to watch than Stranger Things. I was surprised by how little explanation was given during the series and believe that the true masterpiece of this show was not in the acting or the cinematography, but the perspective it gave us. It was refreshing to see content that instead of focusing on the how and why showed us the who, and what happened to them.
Just keep in mind it's not the real who, and not what really happened.
The series is based on a book that was presented in the beginning of the video. The book very much like Solzhenitsyn's "GULAG archipelago" translated into the reality of Chernobyl disaster. With same narrative and same major ideas, to boot, no wonder that author received Nobel prize as well.
@@jonesjohnson6301 It is based on the PERSPECTIVE of the people that went through that. So to them, that's how it really happened. That's how they told the story, from their subjective experience. I've been to Chernobyl/Pripyat and to several museums while In Chernobyl City/Kiev, and trust me, the story they tell is really close to what actually happened.
The funniest part that there was a recent (couple of weeks ago) accident with nuclear engine, that caused some levels of contamination and a dozen of direct casualties, including those of medics not being warned about patients contaminated status. And the government works the same way it was working in 1986 trying to cover tracks and top secreting everything, that is hilarious, as there were numerous Russian videos "debunking" western propaganda in Chernobyl series and describing soviet unions are state of freedom and transparency.
@@mezmerya5130 no, the incident a couple of weeks ago was in fact an event similar to the creation of movie "Chernobyl". Something happened, and nobody understood what, and nobody cared to understand, and before official explanations could be issued they've created completely fictional story about "nuclear blast" and "contamination". Remember kids: western media is incapable of learning from their mistakes.
The whole 'And we'll be dead in five years...' scene is one of the most impactful scenes I've seen in recent memory, Skarsgard's reaction to that line was so powerful, you could feel the weight of the statement hit him like a ton of graphite. Just amazing.
especially cause he is right, one kills himself by suicide and the other is dead within three
"The world almost ended, and I didn't know." Exactly the sucker punch that the series expertly delivers.
Which is ridiculously hyperbolic.
@@trinidad17 True, the Black Sea and connected rivers were almost poisoned by radiation to the point of making them unihabitable for 1000 of years, but that indeed is in no way the end of the world, except in a figurative sense. Luckily, the Soviets killed a few hundred miners in order to prevent that after the explosion.
@@Porpentein However the sad part is that in the end the core never melted through the concrete so the work done by the miners was actually in vain. They were made to do it because there was a possibility of it melting through the concrete. I am saying it after listening to a few accounts of relevant people and also Craig himself said it in the podcast.
@@muhammadsajid.official It was not in bain, at that moment no one couldn't have known. Also the concrete helped and is still helping to contain the radiation.
My mother's friend was one of the men from Russia send there he was very young and never came back. And while at first they didn't know why they were sent there or the gravety of the situation once there they stayed and keep working while being poisoned by radiation.
At least this young man my mother knew was just sent there without any explanation and not given any special suit while working in the main focus of radiation.
Saying they died in vain is just like saying that the sacrifice they made has no value, because some once there and once undestanding the situation stayed because they felt they were protecing their nation. And they in fact did.
I rewatched this God damn show 6 times, HBO's saving grace after the game of thrones disaster
We should all file a class action lawsuit against for Hbo for ptsd after the sheer suck that was GOT season 8.
they need at least 10 Chernobyl quality shows to make up for GoT s8.
Just got done with Chernobyl. What a great series! i'm about to watch GoT season 8. Should I not watch it, or skip certain episodes?
@@LittleMopeHead skip the whole season and leave season 7 to be the eternal cliff hanger
@@LittleMopeHead Uh.. just go in with low expectations and leave your brain at the door.
As a navy reactor operator, I was shown classified videos on the Chernobyl accident analysis in the early 1990s, and I've followed it closely for decades as a personal and professional interest. Compared to the average viewer, I'm a relative expert on what happened there, so I expected to find nothing but factual inaccuracies to poke holes in when I watched this miniseries. Instead, I absolutely loved it, it was just that well done. It stayed away from a deep technical analysis of the reactor design flaws and the operational mistakes made, of which there were far more than were shown, and focused on the people involved. It really brought the horror home, and made the operators there relatable, as opposed to making me scream "how could you idiots not know the coolant pumps would cavitate and lose flow when you stopped pulling steam off the separator drums" at my TV. Just plain superb storytelling on HBO's part.
As another former navy nuke ET, I was also surprised with how much science they actually used in the show, quite a bit over dramatized but I had to convince myself it was a show that had to make money and not a documentary to exclusively educate. The part I was most surprised about were the details brought to light behind the miners and the water table, I didn't think they would get that far into that story! Overall it was an entertaining and mostly honest portrayal of those events and I wouldn't be a surprised if this is something they show at prototype now about the importance of conservative actions and trusting your indications.
I'm just a little dismayed at how the show managed the information leading some people to mainly focus on the results and not the incredible neglect, both in the design and Soviet management that lead to said results, and how just how incredibly unique those circumstances were. It did touch on them here and there but they should have spent more of the show's run time going further down that rabbit hole.
@@anydaynow01 Especially how much errors were done during design phase, i.e. intially designers thought they can fit much longer rods into reactor, when it turned out impossible however, they made next bad assumption about water film colling which never worked, etc..., therefore they left reactor with bad rod construction with too much water displaced at the bottom, etc... Nikolay Dollezhall, the main designer was warned many times about the issues, but he ignored them. Legasov was also in Kurchatov institute, he promoted RBMK design despite knowing it's deficiencies.
@Robert Allan BINGO!
@@anydaynow01 It's not taught at prototype, but it is in power school.
I only saw two inaccuracies, the dog scene and the pregnancy. The dog scene may or may not have happened in real life, a lot of debate there, but it's fitting for the show so no arguments here. The pregnant woman saying "my baby absorbed the radiation and saved my life" was used as proof that the show was wrong, but I think those people are missing the point, she's not a scientist or operator, she's a grieving mother and widow looking for meaning in something she barely understands. It's a great show.
" When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. "
The most scariest truth.
Donald J Trump
another good quote "Why worry about something that's not going to happen?"
Yep. Look at global warming today, just saying the term offends folks so much the truth is buried until the effects are too disastrous
It's not like climate change, covid, and the biodiversity crises exist right? Right?
My mother remembers Chernobyl. All she told me was that some plants died, kids were born with some birth defects, and her school was visited by government agents giving anti radiation pills
UA-cam Video: You should read Voices from Chernobyl.
Me: Oh yeah that sounds interesting.
UA-cam Video: yeah, oh by the way let me know if you want audible, they have a lot of good audio books.
Me: Do they have Voices from Chernobyl?
Audible: No.
Thanks for the laugh.
In the U.K. the book is called Chernobyl Prayer + it is one of the greatest books I've ever read.
LOL!!! That's sad and clever @David Dawson
Lol
In case you haven't bought it as a hard copy, I highly encourage you to do it. After reading the third last chapter "childrens choir" it send me down an incomparable emotional spiral of anger and sadness. Never had that before, not even remotely
Having Vichnaya Pamyat as a background music to this video was really great choice
That music is so haunting. I cannot help but look it up every couple weeks. 'Eternal Remembrance' or 'Never Forget'. A perfect epitaph to a tragic, heroic story of real suffering, real perseverance, and the very real consequences of denying truth until reality shows it does not care what your politics say it must be.
i was hoping someone would point this out. great track
Makes me cry. Every. Single. Time.
@@Debilitator47 it's a hymn that is sung by Ukrainians in memorials for the deceased, so there's a very viscerally human element embedded in it, even throughout the variations of its melodic composition
@@wayfaringspacepoetYeah, I looked it up after I watched the show. Really beautiful.
This show gave me feelings of cosmic horror
Accurate. Man messing with something he can't fully control.
"Behold! I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
Because we already know the extension of the disaster while we wait anxiously for the characters to bit by bit see the big picture ;-;
@@tehbonehead it's not that we cant control it, it's that the government hid prior events similar to but less extreme than Chernobyl. Every nuclear fuckup can be laid at the feet of human beings who thought they could play fast and loose with the power of the atom. It's almost anti-lovecraftian.
@@NutNapalm Comrade Dyatlov seemed pretty confident that he could control Reactor 4 that night... The source doesn't matter; whenever humans mess with that kind of power, eventually we *will* screw up right royally.
@Ewelina You might want to give the first season of The Terror a try. Jared Harris is also in a lead role in it, (as is Adam Nagaitis, who plays a *very* different character from poor Vasilliy the noble firefighter!) and although it's got some supernatural-ish elements, it's more of an existential horror story based on true, tragic events: the disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in the Arctic over 150 years ago. If you think you'd enjoy a series that begins by flat out telling you that you're about to watch an expedition that had no survivors, and that stirs your curiousity, you'll probably get hooked on The Terror.
“Spoilers for Chernobyl”
This his hilarious.
I clicked off the video because I don’t know what happened yet
Lol
Pussy is hilarious
It's like spoilers to "9/11"
I spoiled the Bible to other kids in elementary school saying Jesus gets killed in the end.
@@GeorgeWashington76 But he came back to live in the end. (He never really died)
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor explodes. Lies."
To me, one of the best lines in any medium ever. Still gives me goosebumps every time.
The thing is, this only worked on western nations. If you’re from former eastern block (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus etc) you know this story is still alive and kicking in our minds. My family comes from Poland and I can tell you the misinformation was a real huge issue, the people in Poland only found out about this after a week. We remember the soviet rule, we remember the misinformation and think the creators of the series did a brilliant job showing expandable people were to the Soviet Union.
"No matter how scientific or boring..."
Mate.
It was only one of those. Guess which one...
@@longlostwraith5106 it was neither
@@ivanmonahhov2314 it wasn't scientific?
@@silyu97 has a lot of errors , which have a pattern. The thermal explosion numbers if water reaches corium were a very powerful thermonuclear bomb level of power and then they gave explosion radius numbers above estimated 100 megaton thermo-nuclear bomb.Reasons for using RBMK reactors were omitted. The maximum reading of dozimeter which became a meme were also semi-manufactured. Basically I can rewatch the show and bitch about it in realtime.
@@ivanmonahhov2314 So could i. But i still like it for the tribute to the people loosing everything ans especially the ones cleaning up that mess. It's inaccurate alright ... but not in human tragedy!
I'm not even old. I live Europe. I remember when Chernobyl happened. The immense fear. The milk being dumped, the vegetables being destroyed. What's not to remember.
That show is a freaking masterpiece
To paraphrase one of my favorite movies; "no...it is better than that."
of propoganda.
D'aw does it still sting sweetie?
@@Debilitator47 nah watched as a comedy. There is so much bullshit there. The fact they only drank vodka , the helicopter scene , the lie about the cause of evacuation delay , almost everything about that fictional character , the scene with access to restricted documents, the lie about robots.
It's anti nuclear bs.
You have to read Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. It's starts off heavy by dedicated whole chapters to such things like how the USSR operated, how nuclear fission works, how the new RBMK reactors were built, how cutting costs and party loyalty were more important than being clever and abled, how ever present the KGB were, communism in the 80s, etc. By the time you get into the events themselves you'll have a significant understanding of how this disaster unfolded and how it was practically inevitable. It's a fascinating book.
So he gives a shit about people and just focuses on the USSR instead of anything else? Thanks now I know what book to never read.
@@belisarius6949 I think maybe they meant that the book will fill in the missing information from the show for anyone who wants to understand why and how it all happened
@@belisarius6949 It was a book recommendation, calm down.
@@GerryBolger Chernobyl was very much avoidable though. A lot of things had to fall together for it to actually happen.
GerryBolger
Sounds great.
The show is even more harrowing when you DO know something about Chernobyl. Who lives and who dies. And why.
When they found out the watertanks were full, my reaction was "Oh yeah, the steam explosion....shiiiiiiit" even before they explained why it was a problem.
And while some people say that the steam explosion wouldn't have been that strong, Soviet Scientists at the time believed it could be, and that was really all that mattered.
Also the fact that all the divers survived and Alexandr Yuvchenko, the guy who holds the door open for the guys that enter the reactor room and stare into the core, also survived...having had to endure multiple skin grafts and surgeries to stay alive...
Chrinik I had a similar feeling, I read voices from Chernobyl when I was 13, researched, watched documentaries and read books etc but not once in 15 years of having an interest in the Chernobyl disaster did I come across the “Suicide Squad” divers until I seen the HBO Series. Such a well put together series and very informative
Chrinik Yuvchenko loved for a long time, but he passed away recently
@@kerbo312 That's unfortunate.
Given what I have read, I wonder if the water was what protected the divers - in water radiation cannot penetrate as far as in the air so even though there were radioactive particles in that water, they didn't do close to as much damage as the same concentration in the air would have done.
@@kamilerastene5275 late answer but yeah, it's the water.
You can swim near the surface of modern nuclear reactors and get less radiation poisoning than by just living on a granit-rich ground.
The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Anatoly Dyatlov noticed the graphite in the hallway. He pretended he hadn't.
This is actually completely false myth spreaded by HBO. Dyatlov was not such asshole in reality. They needed a villain, and based events on the book by Medvedev, which contains a lot of false information. Designers of reactor are most responsible.
@@cytrynowy_melon6604 It's kind of ironic how many liberties they took in a show about the importance of truth. I worry most about the damaging effect it may have on public perception of nuclear power, which is pretty important to solving global warming.
@@Eudaletism kinda ironic that the control room is underground, not above... :/
The explanation of how the reactor works was amazing. I kind of knew how nuclear reactors work -- my brother has a Master's in nuclear engineering, and he's walked me through stuff -- but the tower with the cards was just brilliant. "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth." This mini-series was astonishing, and is a must-see.
My dad used to be a nuclear physicist working for the PLAN. He watched the series with me and explained everything episode by episode it was an amazing experience.
the problem with this kind of fictional storytelling, around historical events.... and the irony of the lie theme of this film.... is that it dances back and forth between telling you what happened, and crafting its own truths for the sake of storytelling.
And then you get an army of people that believe they now know the history of what happened, but actually have incredibly flawed understandings of the reality of what happened.
This show that's focused on "the costs of lies", expresses it so by selling its own brand of them.
Trollsama- Yeah, just look at stuff like Shakespeare's historical plays or even Roman historians that were more concerned with politics than preserving historical truth. Chernobyl is a good show, recent Netflix films The Outlaw King and The King (Henry V) are good movies, but all of them are varying degrees of bad history.
Even a lot of History today is clouded by political agenda. Which institutions get funding, which journals and articles get published, which accounts become a part of popular history. And I suspect this isn't always intentional. While you may sometimes get a journal editor or College dean or Institute head or fiction publisher or movie producer or, most obviously, think-tank directly making these choices based on ideology I think the problem is systemic. It's just a consequence of living in a State that culture reflects the will of the State.
Thats just a consequence of history in general. All things fade with time, memory most of all. No media can accurately portray the events of the past 100%. The only accounts that can be fully trusted are those that lived through them in their entirety and even those are dodgy since the way people see events can vary wildly. Most media have to find ways to fill in the blanks because there is just no way to get everything, no way to have definitive and absolute truth. Its not intentionally lying, it just has no choice but to try a fill in the blanks or you otherwise have a jumbled incoherent mess that teaches people nothing.
History itself is hearsay and can be very inaccurate. The phrase “History is written by victors” is a great example of how history can be extremely and easily manipulated. It’s hard to get accurate information when human error is involved.
A nuclear physicist named Vassili Nesterenko thought the second explosion at the power plant would be a “3-5 megaton explosion”, however scientists in present time believe it would have only been a several kiloton explosion. Vassili Nesterenko was one of the physicists who helped with the disaster and yet he accidentally lied in a 1996 interview about the scale of the second possible explosion, because he must have thought his calculations were true.
This comment accurately explains how exactly the lies about my own country are created and propagated. Netflix shows have taken this to a new height. We Hindus are portrayed as some kind of demons by our own society (which is made up of 79% Hindus). Leaders like Modi are maligned in the exact same way. They say we hate the Muslims and torture them, while its the exact opposite that is true. Half-truths and forming a narrative around it is how the psychology of the masses is mobilized to create political movements that are detrimental to everything such movements purport they support. They claim to be working for stopping religious tensions, for peace and for the minorities. Yet in reality they are fanning religious tensions, working to disrupt peace and working to appease one minority at the cost of all other minorities and the majority itself.
A small example is the recent riots in USA. The looting that occurred showed the reality of that movement. In India too we had a similar movement that claimed that Modi's government was planning to throw Muslims out of India. These were baseless allegations with no anchor in reality. The government was targeting illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who have stolen Indian jobs and tilted the electoral politics in the states bordering that country. Later, Investigation agencies found that these protests were highly organized and protesters paid and organized by a radical Muslim outfit the previous version of which was banned in India. Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ed-finds-financial-links-between-pfi-and-anti-caa-protests-in-up-sources/articleshow/73662688.cms
Another example, Kashmir. I am sure you have heard in your news media that Kashmir is under "occupation" by India. The truth is that both by domestic and international law, Kashmir is a sovereign part of India. They say Muslims are being raped and tortured there while offering absolutely no proof. These people have been caught passing pictures of violence in Palestine dressed as pictures of Kashmir, not in some tweet, but in formal institutions such as UN itself ( www.firstpost.com/world/pakistan-shows-gaza-war-victims-photo-as-face-of-indian-atrocities-draws-flak-4076457.html ). But no one would tell you how Hindus and Sikhs of Kashmir were chased out by mobs threatening to rape and kill them (actually killing 1000+), leading to forced exodus of 140,000 Hindus and Sikhs ( source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_of_Kashmiri_Hindus ). If India is such a tyrant and led by a "Hindu Nationalist Nazi" Modi, why have Hindus of Kashmir not been resettled in Kashmir yet? Because Modi is no a Nazi and neither are the rest of Hindus nor is the Indian Army.
Kashmir has been almost in a state of civil war since the 1990s. 5 August last year, Modi took the decision of taking away their special status that allowed the State of Kashmir's political parties (led by two political families for decades) to foment trouble and point the finger at India. Modi took away the powers from these politicians and arrested sepratist leaders in an unprecedented move. This is Kashmir now, see for yourself: ua-cam.com/video/IJejZuNdAtY/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/bWrVIq2VRQ8/v-deo.html
No incidents of Kashmiris throwing stones at Indian Army or Police, rapid development of infrastructure, people feeling hopeful of finally getting jobs. A complete U-turn from just one year ago when every day stones were thrown at Indian police and Army, slogans were raised against India, mobs roamed the towns. Youth who used to raise the banners of ISIS and Taliban have now started to look up to their future. A hopeless situation that was created for the people by the separatists and local politicians in the name of freedom from "Hindu" India has now been turned on its head. Muslims people of Kashmir have realized where their well-being lies. This video shows exactly how the lies were spun earlier: ua-cam.com/video/HokEN1tfLy4/v-deo.html
Sorry that I went on a rant. Just something I felt very strongly while reading this comment.
Not only do they not have an understanding of the history, they have no understanding of the science. This is abundantly clear in the comment section of this video.
"It feels like a fiction but it blows us away with the certainty of its reality" I did not use those words but that's exactly what I meant when i woke up my sister at 1am to talk to her about the show. I told her "everytime a decision is made, they explain something that happened or just.. anything, everytime it feels like it should be just a show, that this should be an impossible, fantastic event. But it isn't, we know it's real and that just makes it horrifying"
Except it is not real. It is all pulled out of thin air inside Mazin's proverbial head.
To quote the video: 3:05 "Craig Mazin understood perfectly just where the knowledge of Chernobyl ended and our ignorance on the matter began". I think it perfectly describes the situation.
@@StelzCat The reality was actually much worse than what can be shown on normal TV.
@@zzip0 of course it was worse - it was a life-long drama, not a horror movie. It is simply impossible to translate it on TV, impossible to understand for popcorn-munching generation of morons. It's not like Mazin even tries.
@@StelzCat Actually Mazin is doing his job really well. And he spares some really ugly details.
Mazin is also very restrained. For example I knew a couple who claimed to have had passioned open-air sex on the roof of one of the apartment blocks, while watching the blue light of the burning powerplant on the first night. Compared to this, the hated by putinists scene at the "bridge of death" looks very measured and innocent.
As for the horror movie, life in USSR had this strange property that your life could transform into a horror in a second. You can find eye-witness stories on youtube, which are real horror about Chernobyl. For example one of the military personnel whos job was to measure radiation around tells how they were driving around in specialized armored vehicle on the first night measuring horrific levels of radiation... At one moment one of them made a mistake and wrongly attributed high gamma radiation to high level neutrons... Therefore they all thought that nuclear explosion will follow in minutes.... They made a cold calculation that they have no chance to escape fast sufficiently far and expected to die any second.... Few minutes later they realized that the measurement is wrong.
@@zzip0 I am not interested in what kind of job was assigned to Mazin and how well he has done it, I am only interested in truth. If his job was to create a blockbuster, or a horror movie, or a propaganda, or a myth - I don't care. I only care about what sort of mental harm he inflicts on people.
And it is very particular how same people who despise USSR are also talking ill about Russia in general, are afraid of "putinists" and "the government". They live in a specially framed world, invented by people like cinema directors, cinema critics, politicians, journalists and newspaper editors. They know nothing about a reality. The can all go to hell.
Pffft. Yeah my mom's still alive, in her mid fourties and well, so try again saying that eye witnesses are a dying breed. Hah.
I am joking. Well not about my mom being from Pripjat. That part's true. One of her recurring nightmares is her trying to get home but she can never reach her house. And if she manages to reach her house she can never reach the floor her apartment is on.
She was 12 when it happened, and she still remembers all of the streets and all the places she went to with her friends.
I was looking forward to watching this show. Saw the trailers and ads. Knew it was going to be good. But had no idea it was going to be a masterpiece.
Nailed it yet again, my man. More near-perfect content.
Now I just have to find something else to analyze until your next video...
Haha glad you liked John! This was a particularly hard one to put together
Savage Books have you considered opening a Patreon account? I’d love to support your videos through more than just views.
For those of you contesting the veracity of some facts, I suggest watching the documentary "Chernobyl.3828" from the Ukrainian Government.
I was alive when the disaster happened, watched this documentary after I've grown up to understand really how it was fixed.
People contesting this wasn't a continental scale disaster, you're right: Because people sacrificed their lives so it didn't happen. Had they been as selfish as some people are showing in the comment section, we'd be dead.
A. J. Even if some of the stuff wouldn’t have happened like sleeping into ground water, they risked their lives to make sure it didn’t happen, I’m astounded at the sacrifice and bravery of those people
People who say it wasn't a continent-scale disaster...tell that to the children in Corsica who developed leukemia from the fall out all the while the French government lied through their crooked teeth and claimed no fall out occurred. The West lied just as much as the Soviets about this disaster and who bad it could have been. To try to diminish just what was at stake is to spit on the heroes who became crippled and or died to keep it from getting that far. Piss on these scoffers.
Even with an NLRT model the number of cancer deaths in Europe would be in the 10,000 range, over 30years. A large number in absolute terms but an undetectable increase when millions die each year from cancer. In fact even the Chernobyl liquidators show no detectable increase in leukaemia, hard to see how you could attribute individual cases in Corsica to Chernobyl.
A. J. funny how StelzCat is nowhere to be seen under this comment, that communist prick
@@colinmacdonald1869 Plus it should be mentioned that most of these cancers would be thyroid cancer, in those unfortunate enough to have ingested radioactive iodine during the short time it existed -a cancer with a very high survival rate nevertheless. (98% 5y survival I think?)
2:09 i wouldnt use stalker as an example since it probably did the best job to be set in chernobyl
I was 11 when this happened.. scared me shitless then, watched the show, scared me shitless again.
I have read several books on the subject and watched documentaries, but I'm having a hard time bringing myself to watch the series. Just the trailer scares the crap out of me. But at the same time, it looks so well made. Jared Harris is SO underrated as an actor, he's incredible.
The escalation of stakes is the one area where the show really does stretch the history of the actual disaster. The continent spanning threat they bring up was only proposed weeks after incident and was assuming that all the fissile material in the reactor would detonate like a nuclear bomb. No one in the actual response committee actually thought the explosion when the meltdown hit the bubbler pool would be continent ending. The primary issue with that explosion was a.) it would destroy the concrete pad preventing the meltdown from reaching the water table and b.) it would damage/destroy reactor 3, which was still running at that point because they could not safely remove the nuclear material from it in the period after the explosion. The actual size of the explosion would not have exceeded the original explosion that destroyed reactor building 4. Also the "bridge of death" in the show did not kill those people, several people who observed the fire from nearby locations did suffer from minor radiation poisoning, but not the acute (and consistently deadly) radiation poisoning that the firemen and plant operators suffered.
Exactly! The UN reports I respect say that *maybe* 4000 people will eventually die from Chernobyl's fallout, but that figure itself is based on a mathematical guess called the Linear No Threshold model which *assumes* that there is "no safe level" of radiation. It's an old assumption from an old study that has been questioned with modern science, and there may actually be BENEFITS to slightly increased radiation exposure as it may stimulate the body's cancer fighting abilities. The science is not clear. But the one thing you can be sure of is that coal kills about 3 million people a year, and that's not taking climate change into account! And these reports that Chernobyl might kill a million people or so are driven by anti-nuclear activists. "From 1986 onward, the total death toll of the disaster has lacked complete consensus; as peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet and other sources have noted, it remains contested most extremely among a wide range of anti-nuclear lay groups.[1]"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
I agree that the stakes were inflated for dramatic effect in the show. But supposed Kilo tonnage of an explosion doesn't paint the whole picture of what radioactive fallout can do. When they said continent spanning threat, they didn't mean all the people in the continent would die of the radiation. It means a large part of the continent(Not the whole continent) would be slowly poisoned by the fallout people may seem unaffected, but birth defects would increase, cancer would increase, crops wouldn't grow as well etc. Direct resultant deaths is a bad metric to figure out the effect of radioactive contamination.
Yeah it's ironic that a show about the dangers of telling lies takes more than a few liberties with the truth. I've read about Chernobyl a few times over the years and lots of the events don't line up, and some parts are played up/total fabrications. It seems someone has written up most of it on the wikipedia entry for the series if anyone wants to inform themselves.
Another layer to the irony is that a video about ignorance and a voyeuristic media completely overlooks this.
@Hal 9000 It's not about defending how the USSR handled the situation, they obviously fucked it all to hell and a lot less people may have died had they handled it better. It's about people exaggerating the danger of radiation exposure in order to scare people from embracing nuclear energy, which may be the only legitimate solution to the global warming crisis we're experiencing right now that could be enacted in time to stop the oceans from killing millions.
@@deadringer6759 To be fair, the bridge of death wasn't a total fabrication, it was a local legend. That being said, expressing a local legend as if true is... troubling.
The way you describe episode 1 reminds me so much of In This Corner of the World, an animated film about civilian life in Hiroshima during WW2. You know what’s coming. The whole audience knows. But you have to watch it unfold, slowly, as the characters don’t see the warnings, as they get closer and closer to The Day. The dates showing up on screen hype up this anxiety. And surprisingly, it’s such a powerful, captivating narrative device. Somehow I couldn’t stop watching.
Jared Harris describing the morbid allure of the first episode as "..a deconstructed Godzilla story.." makes my respect for this man multiply 12345 times.
What a series.
What an excellent analysis.
Sidd Sen And Godzilla himself is a metaphor for the atomic bomb...
It's funny he mentions Godzilla as an example. The very first Godzilla film (Gojira, 1954) was, itself, a deconstruction of monster movies. It was an allegory to the suffering caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to the Tokyo fire bombings. Not only did it portray the human cost and misery, the film was sympathetic to the monster, who was an enraged, yet confused victim of the bomb, and only wished to be left alone. It was less of an atomic monster movie and more of a war horror/tragedy story.
@@Sierra026 not really, it was filmed half-year after Bikini Atoll bombing, which caused a so much environmental damage and human suffering it could be compared to Chernobyl by itself. Yet nobody mentions it at all, not even remotely, so my respect to them naturally remains at zero.
you mean 1:23:45 times?
This series has sparked an almost obsessive curiosity into nuclear accidents, especially Chernobyl. I have been watching videos about reactor designs and nuclear physics from the University of Illinois. It's really amazing stuff. I have had previous experience with nuclear power from working on submarines in a shipyard I worked in and acquired a pretty good basic knowledge of the working of the power plant of the submarine but the curiosity Chernobyl sparked in me carried it way further than it's ever been. Jared Harris And Stellan Skarsgard should get an academy award for their performances.
I so wish this was story was fiction. This even was heartbreaking, terrifying, and educational all rolled into one. I spent a few weeks after watching the show, researching how the reactors work.
It was historical fiction if that makes you feel any better. Much of the show is exaggerated to make the show better.
Damn.
I gotta watch this show.
How did you like the show?
Soviet Union not Russia... otherwise amasing video
Ask in which country the plant is located... always get some surprising answers sadly
Sadly modern day Russia isn't too different in those regards from the Soviet Union. Sure, there is more individual freedom, but everything is still about ego and self preservation. Sanctions or no sanctions - Russia's economy and society are so deeply ingrained with Soviet ideology and the glorious achievements of WW2 and the Cold War that nothing can change that and Putin made sure that it will remain that way for a long time. Just take a look at the panic they went into when their Nuclear Thermal Rocket detonated. Their first reaction was covering everything up. At least this time they had the decency of acknowledging that it happened right there and then (and that shouldn't be taken for granted - because if it weren't for the internet and free flow of information they would have definitely covered it up).
Amazing not Amasing
@@MrMuki61 Russia's economy is nothing like it was under the Soviet Union and it certainly doesn't follow Marxist-Leninist ideology. It has transformed from being almost entirely state owned to almost entirely privately owned. Society has changed immensely as well, instead of being a single party Communist State, it is now a de jure capitalist democracy and de facto a corrupt capitalist plutocracy. The only thing that has remained the same is the authoritarian nature and the lies...
@@lukeg8466 I wrote that in reference to the underlying mindset prevalent in Russia (and most ex-Soviet states), rather than the de jure situation. Other than that, completely agree.
I hate when people call Soviet goverment, "Russian goverment", or when they call Soviets "Russians" its not the same, when you say something like "Russian firefighters who were at the Chernobyl" they were not Russians, they were Soviets.
But Nazis were Germans? Soviets were all nations under USSR, Russians, Ukrainians, like Nazis. They were Russians and Soviets at the some times, Russia didn't disappear for couple of decades, with cultures, languages and people, to be magically replaced by Soviets.
@@bizzapandare1209 Yes Nazis were ONLY germans, the concept of nazism was made to promote germans/aryans as the top race above all races they most definitely weren't Yugoslavs, Greeks or Poles. Soviets were fifteen nations with Russians being the largest one. You could say all Russian are soviets but not all soviets are Russian.
@@bizzapandare1209 True, "Soviet" encompassed a large grouping of peoples. But in this case, the original comment is right. Saying "Russian" when the people this covers were from so many different regions/cultures does a disservice to them all, above all the Ukrainians who were affected the most.
@@milo1263 Are you serious? Austrians, Sudetan Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, the Silver Legion, the list of peoples who were Nazi's [either in the NSDAP directly or offshoots in other nations] is much longer than just what I've typed.
@@Tekisasubakani
Whooooosh!
Your head
I've watched a fair share of horror movies/tv shows but this series scared me more than anything I've ever seen
For all the americans watching here, imagine living in hungary 900 km (560 mi ) from Chernobyl and one morning walking out and see that all the trees are dead from the side where then wind blew, and noone saying anything, the tv is silent. Later learning that from that day u were destined to die in some form of mutation due to the radioactivity ur body suffered throu out the months/years of silence.
@@bojantesin5665 google buddy
@@bojantesin5665 Facts/withness cases(this u shoud google). But im open to listen to you, explaining why you mocking me, im honestly courious.
Ok, call bullshit on that story Péter, unless you can bring som kind of source. I tried google but no luck.
@Palotás Péter
Dude, nice story, but nonsense. The radioactive cloud traveled North-West after the explosion (i.e. past Hungary) and only then dispersed all over Europe, including Hungary. Trees being partially dead one morning? Come on...
Any consequences in central europe were miniscule. In former Yugoslavia, area bordering Hungary (Baranya area) there were some precautions taken, but absolutely no immediate or permanent consequences from Chernobyl disaster there.
This is a great video! I honestly thought I was alone in not knowing a whole lot about Chernoybl going into the show (idk, I thought I missed that day in history class or something), so this was really interesting to hear how you perceived that as a deliberate tool. Chernoybl is an absolutely brilliant and heart-wrenching show.
Just finished this yesterday (as you uploaded this video I was watching part 5).
They chose really good narrative POV in order to give something that feels whole, even though you (as a watcher) still don't know everything. Usually this thing might come out as boring (a nuclear reactor exploded and we follow a pregnant woman???) but the way they built tension and edit (cut from one plotline to another) just in the right time...
What I'm trying to say is that the creator knew what works and what doesn't work, and just bypassed that somehow.
3.6 k likes? Not great, not terrible.
Not great? You're delusional! Get to the infirmary.
You are in shock..get him out of here!!
(projectile vomits)
Oh snap
*Its not 3.6k likes. Its 20,000.*
This show really opened my eyes. Not only did it educate me on what happened at Chernobyl, but it educated me on the power of position. It showed me that not everything is as it seems and those in power aren’t always the best caretakers. It made me realize how a few naive people can cost the world.
Getting this recommended on the front page, I've read "why we should stop watching chernobyl"
It took me a solid 4 minutes until I realized, that this video is not to bash on the series, and that I've missred the title
Absolutely ADORE this channel. Great video sir
The soundtrack is one of the best I’ve heard for ANY TV show.
Stalker, a 1979 film, foreshadows the events of Chernobyl masterfully. That is a strange thing to say but there it is.
Roadside Picnic as well
Tarkovski 💚
Svetlana's book had me in tears the entire time. If there's one book i could get everyone to read it would be Voices From Chernobyl
the soviets have always amazed me with a very specific characteristic that they have, i lack the word to refer to it.
but whenever the good of the nation/people requires a huge sacrifice. they gladly give up their lives.
for example those miners were told "this is a thankless job. but we need someone to dig under the reactor. those who choose to do so will certainly die from it" and they went anyway.
that's a very rare characteristic everywhere else in the world, but seems relatively common among soviets.
Stopped watching this video half away through and binged the whole series in a night. Amazing watch, chilling and enthralling. Amazing video, great breakdown of the writing. I'll be saving this one in my writing favorites. :)
I sat down to watch the first episode last night and ended up watching the entire series in one sitting. Most incredible show ive seen in years.
I was born 23 days before Chernobyl and it's a trip to think that every moment of my life - every single moment besides those 23 days- Chernobyl has been there. It's the monster in the attic. It's horrifying.
This show was so impactful and moving that at many moments I just felt like weeping for these people and characters, they’re acting was probably some of the best I’ve seen so far and it was already so unbelievable
This show terrified me because my mom grew up very close to Chernobyl, they were giving her Iodine pills at school and everything. We still live quite close to it
Spot on on the over arching theme..... It’s about the weight of lies and the inevitable toll paid by the masses. Great video 👍
The hospital scene kinda pisses me off tho. There were no screaming irradiated babies and toddlers at the hospital on the night of the accident. That was pure fiction as the residents of Pripyat didn't know what had happened at that point and wouldn't for a few days.
Great vid man. Just binged this show for the 2nd time. Awesome
Great explanation how the writing and the direction worked. Awesome, thank you!
Watching the first episode I felt the anxiety and fear I usually feel watching an horror film because of my ignorance on the matter, you know the “fear of the unknown”.
The series is perfection it is important to honor the heroes and the people living through it so important today
@ComaBerenices It's not a documentary,it's a drama first and foremost.If you can't get that much through your thick skull,you've got no right to talk about actual scientists and facts.
Either way,there's really no need to be such a pedantic twat about it.The series depicts the events more realistically than anything that came out of the USSR or today's Russia so far and takes only a few artistic liberties...it's nowhere near to "half of the show is nonsense" as you state.
@@tunnar79 wait a second, dear mister, you can't say that it's "not a documentary" and immediately claim that it depicts events realistically. You can't say that we have "no right" to talk about science and facts and then claim that it takes "only few" artistic liberties?
Do you know that? Do you know how it is called? Did you even read what you've posted?
@@StelzCat Documentaries don't hold a monopoly over the realistic depiction of events,so I can freely say what I said.What kind of sideways buggered logic is hinting at something like "only documentaries are allowed to show the truth",anyway?!
As for your you having "no right",it's just a figure of speech,no need to overthink it.
Regarding the artistic liberties part,I wrote it in order to present that the show does indeed has some flaws (like conglomerating the 100+ scientists that worked on the case into a single woman), BUT (and this is the main point) it is a lot more factual regarding what happened than whatever else came out of current day Russia and the former USSR regarding Chernobyl.So no,it's nowhere near "sloppy and manipulative",nor is it "half nonsense" as the guy I replied to said.
@@tunnar79 yes they do. In a different sense than just artistic depiction, they hold the utmost monopoly because they depict reality verified by thousands, not the personal fantasy of the author or his team. Such falsification can be only explained by desire to bend the truth.
The problem is that you, apparently, don't know about anything what "comes out of USSR or Russia" and did not spend a single minute reading about it. You just assumed your knowledge of facts based on the propaganda and lies. I would probably surprise you by saying that the movie is based on the book that comes from former-USSR dissident writer, Svetlana Alexievich.
There are too many figures of speech in texts that praise this creation yet only take some moments to think about it really. People should be more respectful to their own intelligence. Instead they just say "we could not possibly doing things as stupid as this" and forget about it instantly.
@@StelzCat They most definitely do not.We'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
As for the fantasies of the authors,perhaps you know them better in your substance addled reveries,but what I know is that they did indeed keep close to the facts.
And no,unlike what I heard back then from my old Selga radio (and from current day Russian outlets talking about CIA terrorists blowing up the reactor),the show keeps itself pretty far from propaganda (no,saying the USSR's way of doing things was bad is NOT propaganda,it's just a proven fact).
Fuckin hell man,you sound exactly like one of those butthurt Russian communists who still think the USSR and the shitshow it created in E. Europe was something good.Perhaps you were lucky to be born after the fall of the USSR or lucky enough to be born into a family with rich political ties,sheltered by the realities of communism and that's why you have such a golden view of things....but things were anything but golden in those times.
Excellent narration and scoping of the writing process used for this piece.. Thank you....
The series made such an impact on people watching a drama about a historical event, that is still in people's minds. Mazin's focused on the experiences, was engaging!
10:02 "...how difficult arriving to such a truth-telling would be for everyone involved." That was the heart and soul of this monumental series.
Wonderful work, I think you really captured it. The human cost and the cost of lies, those are just as important now as they were when they were committed. I also loved the soundtrack a lot too.
Hayley ^_^
^_^
Congratulations! You have earned your place in the queue to pay for the cost of lies you have helped to spread! Unfortunately, the queue is very long, millions after millions of people who did not care to learn the truth by themselves and got trapped in delusion. It is going to take a long time to resolve everything (probably, the law of cause and effect is a finicky matter), but we promise you will not escape your reckoning.
I’m watching it again all the way through. Just seen episode one. I still can’t believe what I’ve just seen.
Just finished the series. Absolutely astonishing. Thank you so much for recommending this series!
I just finished Voices From Chernobyl.
Wow. So many feelings of despare, anger, fear. All because the government wanted to keep the truth hidden.
The government did not hide any information, it is a shroud of time and ignorance that keeps us from learning the truth. Author of the video admits it in the beginning of the video, if you are capable to understand that, after all.
StelzCat That is not what the video says. It does say that the event was forgotten “naturally” due to the passage of time. BUT it also says that that is what the government wanted to happen and tried to make happen.
Now whether that’s true or not is another question.
@@GrayCatbird1 I assume it is pretty natural, unfortunately, time and human ignorance can be easily exploited. The movie's assessment of government actions is complete fiction - none of the creators ever said anything about reading into official investigation, nor asking official investigators. There is no proof that government acted on any of these presumptions, in fact, if you count the time - Chernobyl happened in 1986, only 5 years later there was no government to speak of.
The movie is based almost entirely on book that was presented in the video, and the book itself is based on third-person witness, reinterpreted by author tract. You can't expect any unbiased views in here, the series is in fact so bad that it contradicts itself on regular basis, only cares to shock and affect people as much as possible.
@@StelzCat But how can you know whats the real truth? what's unbiased? - just because a witness apparently gave a trustworthy story? - how do you know they are not payed off by the govertment to cover the real truth?.
Many tragic events are full of controversy because how the fuck do we know who to trust? - just because someone that seems innocent enough to be trustworthy gives a history? - we weren't there we can't confirm it ourselves - if you look at it from that perspective, third person witness could be just as credible as a first person witness - there is no "truth" there is only who you choose to trust - that doesn't guarantee a 100% credible story - there will always be some sort of corruption going on to help public image, to help a friend out etc this world is full of people who think about themselves first and then others. In that sense, the series has the right idea. Not to mention that there was injustice in many aspects by the govertment in response to the victims or people guilty by this incident.
Its not the governments fault its the fault of the higher ups responsible to run the god damn reactor, they wanted to keep their jobs which paid them very well so they told lies. The ministers (the government) didnt know any better until the scientists told them the truth. Then it was too late. The ministers co-operated with scientists so they could curb the damage done. it was the fault of those three people and the people who were corrupt funnelled money from the reactors cost and produced one with cheap graphite rods those corrupt people were allied with the kgb.
I’ve watched this show, listened to the podcast, and read all the books. I have so many friends in Ukraine, so many friends who have a bad thyroid because of what happened. I’m even planning on taking a tour of Chernobyl and the surrounding cities and villages when I’m there for a mission trip this summer. It was awful, and needs to not be forgotten.
This show is total success when it comes to its goal which is to bring back into the light the story of this accident. Whether or not its factual is not the point because the real goal was to spark the viewers curiosity and realize that they really had no knowledge of the events, only bits and pieces. The fact that more people than ever are fact checking the show in comments and videos, constantly pointing out the mistakes and dramatizations is perfect because it further brings to light the actual events and feeds people's curiosity to research the actual events. So you're right, this show does play into our ignorance. Great video!
From a story-telling or psy6chological viewpoint, or even a morals viewpoint, it was an excellent story. The problem is that at the moment we are trying to determine energy policy for the next, oh, 100 years. Are we going to go with running fossil fuels so far into the ground that plastics will be like gold in 2250? OR are we going to get past the fears and use what the universe gave us to bootstrap us into fusion energy in the future? We are in the cusp of a decision that will totally affect the next 3-5 generations, possibly far beyond that. One of the factors in that decision is whether to use fission power or not. And here comes "Chernobyl", saying things like "radiation is contagious" and "it killed people like flies on that Bridge of Death" and "if the corium gets to water there would be a 2.4 megaton blast". No, Mazin and Co. were making a psychological point with deep abstract application and had not a care about how it would affect anything beyond the next fiscal year. "Bits and pieces" is not a basis on which to build future national policy. I contend its accuracy is very important.
Really solid analysis of an outstanding miniseries on HBO. Thank you for your perspective from the storytelling POV! :)
I hope the book Voices from Chernobyl will release an audio book version
Soviet, not Russian, government suppressed the story of Chernobyl.
Wanted to write that myself, as this view is realy strong, It was soviet not russian, many goverment members were not russian, for example one of the judges who wanted to cover it up and throw all the blame on the engineers was latvian, most of those present in the start are ukrainian and so on so on. I would say the same can be said about ww2 where most say thats it russians while in fact its soviets. Many of them were not russian by ethnicity. But Russia was the strongest soviet "republic"
Russian as well. Most KGB archives remain classified to this day.
Just watched this series, speechless. Great video!
This video is fantastic - you did such a good job of explaining why this series was so captivating. My friends and I were constantly saying “I didn’t think this show would be something I could get into, but now I’m hooked”.
It also did an incredible job of helping the audience understand the stakes. I had no idea what a roentgen was. Even now I just have a vague understanding that it’s a measure of radiation levels. But the show did a fantastic job with helping you understand what this meant by using the same escalation technique. You started to understand that 3.6 roentgen was bad. No catastrophic, but definitely bad. Then they talk about the meters that immediately maxed out at 2,000 and I’m thinking “Shit...3.6 was considered dangerous but now it’s over 2,000? That’s crazy”. Then there was the famous “It’s not 3 roentgen...it’s 15,000” scene and I was absolutely floored. So despite not having a perfect understanding of this unit of measurement, the writers told the story in a way that made you understand how horrific a reading of 15,000 is.
You are looking at this tragedy as someone who obviously wasn’t an adult in 1986. Even on this side of the Iron Curtin we knew how terrible this was and that people were suffering terribly even if we didn’t know their names or fully understand the science. Don’t assume that everyone gets their history and empathy from television.
I was only a child but not being allowed to play outside for weeks and then not being allowed to eat venison or mushrooms for years made an impact on me.
Likewise. I was born a decade after the incident, in Hungary, but I was very much aware of its consequences, and even some of its particulars.
I find it a completely incorrect statement that 'we willingly forgot the chernobyl disaster'.
No. We absoljtely didnt, and we never will.
Excellent analysis! Hiding the truth will force reality to reassert itself.
The court scene of the last episode had me on the border of my seat. It was a court scene, filled with science facts, but it felt like a terror film
This is a fantastic review of the show! The show is amazing and you give the reasons why. Thanks so much!
Great video.
Frankly, I hesitated to watch this series, because I could be, perhaps, even more invested in the story. I am from Russia and albeit I do not have a connection to Chernobyl itself, it is still something directly linked to my country. I also feared a little bit that there would be more focus on the actions of the government, the so to speak "bad guys" rather than on the human emotions (it's a little bit sad to see Russians only as evil mafia in many movies, tbh). However, this series turned out to be very focused on human lives and emotions and human tragedies, not only governmental conspiracies.
Wonderfully done video. I wholly recommend Voices from Chernobyl. It goes even deeper into the stories of the people and is a harrowing read.
This is a fine video essay, Well done.
I'm reading Boy's in Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich atm, it's stunning
That'll be my next book to read then. I'm reading Chernobyl prayer
"The world almost ended and I didn't know" is exactly how my Mom felt looking back on the 80s. It's why this show freaked her out a bit :/
I can't get my parents to watch it. They were like - I don't wanna watch a show about communists - we lived that shit, we know. - and I argue that it is really good, but it didn't seem to matter.
I remember when it happened but we didn't know it almost ended the world.
My mom was in Leningrad, walking around under the warm spring rains which almost definitely brought some radioactive dust from the south, and she knew nothing about it. That's what she doesn't like to remember.
@@Ratboy2004 it didn't that's called hyperbole
The world was no where near ending. Lol
I had a pretty good understanding of what happened to the reactor since I was about 13, but even with that knowledge I was absolutely captivated by how the show presented the human aspect and put a human story to what happened.
i was initially surprised by how much i enjoyed this series since a friend who recommended it said it is a heavy drama. turned out it is more of a suspense thriller. i like horror and how the series presented an invisible danger that cooks you inside out amidst an uncaring government is just so terrifying.
Just to tell you guys how the Chernobyl incident could've been stopped, the guy at 4:30 is playing as the person who was in charge of the workers at the plant, and ignored them when they told him something was wrong.
It's hard to take your critique seriously when you keep referring to the "Russian government" instead of "Soviet Government". The two are not interchangeable.
Totally agree, especially when he says "Our heros are Soviet Scientist, the Dark Lord is Russia", this tells me that he isn't using Russian as a synonym for the Soviet union like a lot of Americans do, but he is deliberately choosing this phrasing knowing the distinction.
And saying that the whole of Russia was at stake?
That’s a hard disagree mate. Anybody with a basic knowledge of Soviet/Russian internal/external affairs know that they are totally interchangeable. Hell, the Federation is basically the Union but different words to the same tune of the national anthem
@@overdramaticnerd806 "A hard disagree" lol. OK, I'll bite and I'll address your points in order:
1. That's a really weak ad hominem attack not a refutation.
2. The Federation is not "basically the same as the (USSR)". You're showing your own ignorance here. Take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Soviet_states and learn just how many people you'd be upsetting with that sweeping generalisation, particularly the Ukrainians.
3. So what ? It's an iconic tune and surely the lyrics are the pertinent part. You know who else uses an edited anthem from a controversial period? Germany. How about this to rock your word: Before the adoption of The Star Spangled Banner, one of the de facto US national anthems, America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee), uses the tune to the UK national anthem. Ironic, huh?
Panserbjorn I’m just finishing up work rn and I’ll go way more in depth into what I meant when I get back home and address what you said here as well.
This series was brilliantly written. I was literally glued to the series and so many times, I paused and looked things up because I couldn't believe what I was seeing throughout the series. I was an infant when this happened, so I don't have living memory of it.
I don't know how no one else knew about Chernobyl. I've been interested in it for years because it terrified me. I remember learning about it when I was a kid.
I have always been interested in this disaster, I live in one of the former Soviet countries, so it never been to me "just abandoned buildings and namesake for blockbusters".
i red the book with the "vichnaya pamyat" soundtrack. it was so touching.
Very well done at explaining this show man
Well now I know my next book to read!!! Wow I’m so excited to read. This miniseries really inspired me to read more historial books