I’ve only recently watched the HBO mini-serie on Chernobyl and I can’t but recommend it too highly. The cast is superb and the series is quite effective in conveying a sense of what happened in those terrible days. It is also a commentary on the Soviet regime, and a rather effective one. The main point it raises is that the Soviet Union was an inextricable web of lies. It is not only that those responsible for the nuclear disaster were lying about what they did or did not do: that would be understandable and I suppose it would happen almost anywhere. When faced with the possibility of a life sentence, your relationship with the truth becomes all of a sudden more flexible.
The series does not pretend that human beings were different under the Soviet regime than they are under Putin, or Biden, or Mario Draghi. In fact, the series is a catalog of remarkable and brave individuals, who put their own lives in jeopardy for the sake of saving others’ lives.
Yet the system is begotten by lies. It is not only that, in a bureaucracy, incentives for career advancement are such that people become overtly “flexible” with the truth, reporting only the good things and avoiding responsibility for the others. Once again, something similar may happen in non-socialist regimes too- think about life in a big corporation.
The system’s most striking feature is the existence of an “official truth”, which everybody knows has little resemblance with the actual truth and yet it is there, and it influences peoples’ behavior. Once the official truth is in the book, it cannot be openly challenged. Once some information is erased from the books, no decision can be taken on its basis.
The KGB enforces lie upon lie, for the sake of national greatness. This comes even to the point of censoring scientific papers, making it impossible to the scientific community to work as it should.
In the ongoing discussion on meritocracy, we sometimes are tempted to see the USSR as a meritocracy. In a sense, it was. Think about sports or arts: only the promising people could practice them (an essential element of a free society is that people can try to pursue what they want, even if they’re not particularly good at it). On paper, a bureaucracy is a meritocratic system, particularly when it accords such an important role to research, science and technology. But if everything is founded upon lies, then it is built on thin ice. Anyway, besides my ramblings, do yourself a favor and watch the series.
READER COMMENTS
Student of Liberty
Aug 19 2021 at 5:25am
I believe it does happen in big corporations and the reason is that these are “socialist” institutions. A big corporation internal functioning is not driven by market prices and a lot of them are struggling with a decision process that is very similar to central planning.
Daniel Klein
Aug 22 2021 at 4:09pm
Thanks, Alberto, well captured. I too recommend the series highly.
Todd Kreider
Aug 23 2021 at 5:01pm
Chernobyl is a sensationalist series that doesn’t get basic science about radiation correct, which is a huge aspect of people think about Chernobyl.
Forbes: “A top US medical doctor who treated radiation victims in Chernobyl has criticized HBO’s depiction of the accident and radiation’s health effects as inaccurate and “dangerous.””
To claim “Chernobyl reactor number 4 is now a nuclear bomb, one that goes off “hour after hour” and “will not stop until the entire continent is dead” is ridiculous. Radiation does not travel person to person like a virus as the series claims; those with high doses of radiation are always shown covered with blood when that is not reality; radiation did not cause the helicopter crash as shown in the series; the idea that a baby died because it “absorbed radiation” from its father is ridiculous and there is no evidence that radiation caused any birth defects.
More from Forbes: “Says UCLA’s Dr. Robert Gale, “We estimate incorrect advice from physicians regarding the relationship between maternal radiation exposure from Chernobyl and birth defects resulted in more than one million unnecessary abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe.”…. “Another absurd scene from the miniseries takes place in the local hospital that appears to show children suffering from acute radiation syndrome. That did not happen. The only cases of ARS were among the firefighters and the workers, none in the public, even from the local town of Pripyat. Certainly not in any children.” – James Conca
About 60 people died from the Chernobyl accident, almost all at the plant working on putting out the fire, not hundreds of thousands or millions
Todd Kreider
Aug 23 2021 at 5:22pm
Russian-American columnist, Massa Gessen, criticized Chernobyl in a New Yorker article, “What HBO’s Chernobyl got Right and Got Horribly Wrong”, with respect to the political aspects:
1) Several characters act in fear of getting shot but that didn’t happen post Stalin. “By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.”
2) In Episode 3, Legasov asks, rhetorically, “Forgive me—maybe I’ve just spent too much time in my lab, or maybe I’m just stupid. Is this really the way it all works? An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lives that is made by some apparatchik, some career Party man?” Yes, of course this is the way it works, and, no, he hasn’t been in his lab so long that he didn’t realize that this is how it works. The fact of the matter is, if he didn’t know how it worked, he would never have had a lab.”
3) “Unlike other characters, [Khomyuk] is made up—according to the closing titles, she represents dozens of scientists who helped investigate the cause of the disaster. Khomyuk appears to embody every possible Hollywood fantasy. She is a truth-knower: the first time we see her, she is already figuring out that something has gone terribly wrong, and she is grasping it terribly fast, unlike the dense men at the actual scene of the disaster, who seem to need hours to take it in. She is also a truth-seeker: she interviews dozens of people…, digs up a scientific paper that has been censored, and figures out exactly what happened, minute by minute. She also gets herself arrested and then immediately seated at a meeting on the disaster, led by Gorbachev.
“None of this is possible, and all of it is hackneyed. The problem is not just that Khomyuk is a fiction; it’s that the kind of expert knowledge she represents is a fiction. The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong
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