WASHINGTON — The Chernobyl TV series about the world’s worst nuclear accident, which happened in Ukraine in 1986, is not only being praised for its dramatic excellence but is now also drawing the attention of academics studying the former Soviet Union.
The Kennan Institute in the American capital invited the drama’s creator and screenwriter, Craig Mazin, on June 26 to discuss how the series came about and the research he conducted to recreate an authentic Soviet look and feel in the scenes he shot.
Mazin explained that he got the idea for the series after reading an article in 2014 about the construction of the giant protective (safe confinement) shelter at the plant, called Chornobyl in Ukrainian.
It was being built to enclose the ruined reactor and the crumbling, temporary structure hurriedly thrown up to enclose it after an explosion caused by a test that went horribly wrong in April 1986.
He said: “It occurred to me, suddenly, on that day that [in 2014] I didn’t know why it exploded. If you go out …… and ask anyone, even the dumbest-looking people, what happened to the Titanic they will tell you [it hit] an iceberg. But if you ask people what happened at Chernobyl they’ll say it exploded. But if you ask them how, they won’t answer because they don’t know and I didn’t know.”
Mazin said that as he read more about the incident he had a sense of discovering a “secret war that nobody knew about” and he became “obsessed” with it. He wanted to portray the experience of living through the nightmarish accident from the perspective of the then “Soviet people.”
He said he particularly wanted to show the heroism of those involved in fighting to contain the dreadful consequences of the explosion and who had preserved compassion and a sense of humanity despite the awful political system they had been raised in.
“These were people who had inherited a century’s worth of catastrophe and misery and were still willing to do what needed to be done to save each other,” he said.
A lesson he hopes the series imparts is that eventually the truth cannot be avoided, however difficult it is.
Mazin said he tried to recreate as accurately as possible the feeling of the Soviet Union in all the backdrops, props, clothes and other details including a “certain Soviet posture” in the way people carried themselves.
He said much of the series was filmed in Lithuania and local staff would contribute to the authenticity he was trying to achieve by pointing out things that were beyond his experience when he was writing the script. Lithuanian film crew members explained, during the shooting of a scene where a character brought sandwiches to work in a brown paper bag that, in fact, people would typically bring their lunches to work in their briefcases.
Mazin said that the program-planners at U.S company HBO and Sky Atlantic in the U.K, which jointly produced the series, had envisaged a relatively small audience segment would be interested in the show. He had been pleasantly surprised by how popular the series has become and far outstripped its predicted audience figures.
The screenwriter noted that the series became popular in Russia and that had apparently displeased the Kremlin. He said he had heard Moscow was now planning its own dramatized television depiction of the tragedy.
Before Mazin took questions, the audience of academics, students and journalists watched the first episode of “Chernobyl” at a venue filled to overflowing at the Kennan Institute think tank which particularly focuses on Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Mazin said he did not believe that the nuclear disaster had been entirely forgotten by the world in the decades following the explosion but he thought it became a “curiosity” after the Soviet Union ended and psychologically people may have felt it belonged to a Soviet past without a direct connection to their present.
“But that’s not quite true,” he said. “The half-life of Plutonium [time for a nuclear element to decrease its potency by half] is 20,000 plus years and the lessons of Chernobyl have not ended, and there are many people walking around without a thyroid. I think we have a desire, over time, to make things O.K. but some things aren’t O.K. and that’s [the consequences of Chernobyl] one of them.”
He said his biggest regret was not including the infamous May Day parades in Kyiv and Minsk which Soviet authorities insisted should go ahead a few days after the disaster despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people participating or watching out in the open would be subjected to dangerous doses of radiation.
He said he had decided against featuring the parades for budget reasons: the scenes would have required a large number of extras in 1980s clothing that would have been prohibitively expensive to film.
The Kyiv Post asked what sort of reaction he had received from Ukrainians who saw the series or lived through the accident.
Mazin replied that the majority of messages, including tweets, had been very complimentary: “Ukrainians’ [responses] have been moving, really moving … it’s been incredibly positive, by and large. And that is what matters to me, and is moving to me and beautiful. Because we made it for them – Ukrainians – and for Belarusians and for anybody who went through it.”
