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‘Chernobyl’ And Communism

The lessons, both particular and universal, of the great HBO miniseries
Screen Shot 2019-05-31 at 8.49.29 AM

Are you watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl? If not, you are missing some of the best television ever made. I don’t subscribe to HBO, but got a seven-day free trial through Roku, I think it was. You can watch the previous four episodes of the show, and the series finale on Monday. Please do it. It’s incredible. I might end up subscribing to HBO after this, simply because I want to support in some way works of art like this.

It also surely must count as one of the most powerful anti-communist messages ever committed to film. It’s up there with The Lives Of Others, though not as explicitly anti-communist. It doesn’t have to be. The horror of this true-life story is overwhelming.

The series dramatizes the story of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster by centering on particular characters. We see the unspeakable destruction caused by the plant explosion and widespread radioactive contamination. But what we also see is that the accident itself, and the human suffering it caused, was a direct byproduct of Soviet police-state communism. Mind you, this happened under Gorbachev, not Brezhnev or Stalin. The system itself was so rotten that lies were built into its fabric, in ways that brought the entire thing down. The state’s scientists knew that the kind of reactor in use at Chernobyl was deadly under certain conditions, but kept that knowledge secret from its own experts. The first thing the Soviets cared about when the disaster happened was managing the information to save face. Human lives were expendable. This happens over and over in the series. You come to see that life itself — human life, and all life — is chaff to the Communist Party. Maintaining the system, and the reputation of the system in the eyes of the world, at all costs is the only thing that matters.

The heroes here are ordinary people, like the coal miners and Soviet soldiers who come in and risk their lives to do things that cannot be done otherwise. Why do they do it? Because it’s the right thing to do. These are the people that the corrupt system grinds up, and always ground up, but there they are trying to save others from the consequence of the elite’s actions. I suspect that I’m making this sound moralistic and dull, but trust me, it’s anything but in this series. In episode four, there’s a sequence in which a new soldier has to learn from two experienced soldiers, veterans of the Afghan war, how to kill people’s pets without remorse. They have to do this because the pets, which had to be left behind in the evacuation, are too radioactive to be allowed to live. The young man, Pavel, has to harden his conscience, and the older men teach him how to do it, based on their Afghan experience. That, and vodka.

That sequence shows you how the soul-deadening communist system destroys what is human within people. The whole damn show does that. I can’t stop thinking about it. The radiation that poisons everybody and everything is communism.

If it were only a show about communism, it would still be spectacular. But see, Chernobyl is a show about utopia, institutions, and human nature. A Catholic friend disillusioned with the Church, who is also a fan of the show, texted me the other night to say how much the themes of the series resonate with him, regarding the corruption in the Catholic institution. He’s right about that. You see the same mindless destruction of ordinary people at the hands of an arrogant, morally vacant elite who only want to preserve their own privileges, and protect the institution’s image. You see the fear people had to stand up to the system, and how hard it was for any truth tellers to go against the entrenched powers to proclaim what was actually being done to folks by those who ran the system. Contrariwise, you see the plain people who continue to serve, despite knowing the kind of leadership they are serving, not out of fear, but out of fidelity to something higher than the system. You see the power of the Lie, but also its ultimate weakness. You cannot keep reality at bay forever. Truth really will out.

It’s not just Catholicism, of course. This is how we humans are. The family whose patriarch is an abusive drunk, but which won’t allow its members to tell the truth about it, and who punish those who speak up. The company where people see wrongdoing and even self-sabotage, but keep their mouths shut because the boss will blow up at them if they raise their voices, and may even fire them. The professors who bow to the Lie in their universities, because their career depends on pretending that things they know to be false are true — them, and the commissars who enforce the Lie, because they really believe that they are achieving justice, and a better world, through imposing it. The willingness of people who don’t have anything clear to gain by agreeing to the Lie, but who do so because it’s easier, or because they are afraid both of punishment and of what the world would be like without the ideology and its institutional expression to tell them what to do, and to allow them to make sense of their lives.

A friend of mine spoke out once within her extended family to protest the behavior of an emotionally abusive member of her own family. She was told by an older family member that she was right, but she ought to just learn to put up with it for the sake of keeping the family together. The system depended on everyone’s consent, and there was no sense that the system could and should be reformed. To question it at all was to put the entire thing at risk. There’s some of that in Chernobyl too.

“Live not by lies,” counseled Solzhenitsyn. When you watch Chernobyl, you understand exactly why he said it. And if you think about how what you might call chernobylism irradiates the lives of most of us, in some way, you understand that Solzhenitsyn was speaking to Soviet citizens when he said that, but really, whether he knew it or not, he was talking to all of us.

Here’s the trailer for the show. Please, watch Chernobyl. It’s unforgettable:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8&w=525&h=300]

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