Vichnaya Pamyat

title: Vichnaya Pamyat
author: The Chernobyl Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Chernobyl Podcast
published: 2019-06-04T01:00:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/PSM5964079443.mp3?updated=1701795597

word_count: 8662

This podcast is sponsored by Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. When you own your own business, you own every decision. I'm Angus, a founder of Elastic. We're the design studio that created the Game of Thrones main title. When you start a business, you're creating a world. I love that thing of like, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to figure it out. You have to innovate and you have to travel into the unknown. Our small world can change the big world. For business world builders everywhere, the business card that rewards every decision you make, Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, and a member FDIC, subject credit approval, terms apply. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth, sooner or later that debt is paid. Hello, this is Peter Segal, a hosting the fifth and final episode of the Chernobyl podcast. We have been following along with the broadcast of the Chernobyl mini-series on HBO and on Sky, and after every episode we have been talking with Craig Mason, the creator of the show, the executive producer, and the sole writer, and it's been a privilege to do so, Craig. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. You've been an excellent interlocutor. Thank you. Yes. We'd like to use big words with each other. Indeed. In the basis of our relationship at any rate, let's dig into this episode. The episode opens with life before the explosion, the day of the explosion. Right. And I have to say, I've seen this trick before to go back in time before some disaster, but for some reason, it seemed extraordinarily resonant and emotional this time. Obviously, because we've spent four hours seeing what happened next, knowing what is in front of these people is quite terrifying. Because of that scene, it led to a number of moments for me watching it, or I kept thinking that somebody could stop it. That's exactly right. And somebody could have stopped it. Right. And in fact, this opening little montage around Pripyat eventually turns into a scene where three men are sitting in an office, Sprukanov, Famine, and Dyatlov. And they're discussing something that later on, we will find out was the first moment it could have been stopped. Right. And they failed to, in no small part, because we find out here, and this is true that there was an expectation, a general expectation of promotion. The idea being that if this gets solved, perhaps Sprukanov gets bumped upstairs. Famine takes his job. Dyatlov, in particular, from what I read was motivated to get off the work floor, as they say. He wanted to get out of the control room, get out of the working floor, and get into an office and become more of a boss. But the moment before where we're moving around, Pripyat, for me, what we wanted to do there was just show, not just happy life, but rather kind of wistful. We're tapping in again, I think, to that Soviet sense of great bitterland, the kind of bittersweet yearning for a memory of a place. So it's not so much that we're asking people to go, look at how ironic they're all happy and they're alive. It's more than we're asking people to feel a kind of wistful melancholy for this place that they never got a chance to know. Right. It's interesting. It works. Let me put it this way. If you had shown us that sequence, at the very beginning, I would have bounced off. I would have said, come on, this lovely life in this Soviet town, come on, you're trying to, you're trying to tug in my heartstrings, you're trying to make me care when it all goes to hell, and I would have resented the manipulation. Because of what we've seen, because of the horrors, both in terms of what happened to the people, what happened to the town, everything from the dying fireman to the dead cow. It actually is extraordinarily powerful because we are almost looking back on that moment with nostalgia. Yeah, from the perspective of knowing what happened. Nostalgia. And again, we had talked about this earlier that Pripyat as an atom town was this incredibly desirable place to live. And you can see that here. There are flowers. There's a pool. You know, most small Russian cities did not have a community pool of that size. And Pripyat got one. Yeah. It was exactly what we had hoped for, this sense of nostalgia. A certain sense of what could have been because the truth is we're showing people a little glimpse of a life that we denied them. I mean, look, the normal way of doing the show is in fact, that's the first scene of this series, right? And then you see people going to work and they talk about things and they just, and like you, I just felt that that would have been a bit unearned. Yeah. And it was extraordinarily effective in reminding us what had been lost. Anyway, the scene with the three administrators has a wonderful bit of acting. I've tried to point these out when I've noticed them with Fomine at the end of the scene getting up and just moving over. Yeah. And if he had sat at the desk it would have been too much. Right. But just being behind it and kind of rubbing his back against the wall like a puppy who wanted to be scratched, it was just beautiful. And you got a sense of this guy imagining his future, the next step up the ladder. So Fomine is played by Adrian Rollins who was spectacular and made this amazing half of a duo with Con O'Neal who plays Rukana. And in many ways, I kind of secretly want to watch a Rosencrantz and Gilnay Cernor just those two guys and their life together as they move through. Adrian Rollins, if people find him vaguely familiar, I mean he's been in all sorts of things but the thing people have probably seen him in the most is the Harry Potter movie. He played Harry Potter's father. Oh wow. Yeah, he's Harry Potter's dad. Yes, we see in those flashbacks and in the mirror of eraset. That's a lot better. Well done, the mirror of eraset. My nerddom contains worlds, right? Indeed, indeed. But Fomine actually had this, we had a scene and we removed it again for issues of time. And this one I missed. There's only we could do about it because there were other scenes that connected to it that had to go as well. But Fomine attempts suicide. Yes. In reality, he's put in prison and he attempts to kill himself by taking his glasses, breaking them and using the shards to slice his wrists. This in fact delayed the trial for a number of months. And after the trial, you know, we now know what the sentencing was, he was taken out of his prison term early for mental health reasons and sent to a hospital. And he stayed there for quite some time. He was a very troubled guy. And in many ways, you know, what Adrian brought to this character which I thought was beautiful was a sense of weakness. Yeah, an internal weakness. Which you see in all his interactions. Yeah, he's weak and he's wanting. But the weak and wanting people, I think are the ones when the denial bubble finally bursts. And the truth of what has happened crashes in. The shame they feel, I think, is the greatest of all and no surprise that he attempted to take his life. Yeah, although it'll be interesting to talk about that in contrast with the outlaw of during the trial, the sequence coming up. Right. So we leave them and we learn about this test and the basic motivation to do the test because promotion awaits. Yeah. If it's successful, they get rewarded. Right. There's a little bit of a mystery here. But what we need to know is a couple of things that as you said, there are certain kind of motivations behind the scenes that we hadn't been aware of. But another one is that, I think Bruchanov says, we're not gonna have any stability issues running at low power. So there's an awareness that if you run this thing at low power, it is unstable. Why doesn't matter at this point? All we need to know is that they know. That they're all ready in this moment, playing a little fast and loose. That what they ought to do is, as Bruchanov says, do we need to scrap it or what? And the answer there should have been, yes. And we will find out why once we get to the trial. Exactly. So we come back from the credits, Legasov is on the street in Moscow. We know instantly because he's at home in Moscow that some months have passed. I almost get the sense because of the normalcy of his life as it seems, is this almost like the crisis at Chernobyl is if not over-contained. Yes. At this point, there is a sarcophagus around it. It is managed. The work goes on, but the the immediacy is over. Right. And he does not need to be there anymore. Right. So he's not, he's buying cigarettes or a newspaper. And of course, he's intercepted by the KGB. And then we find out that the setup for what I thought was going to be a heroic moment in Vienna was nothing of the kind. Nothing of the kind. He, I mean, I hesitate to use the word failed, but he did not do the heroic thing in Vienna. And in many ways, I can understand why. Younger people don't know and some older people may have forgotten. But when citizens of the Soviet Union left the Soviet Union to travel to Western nations like Austria, for instance, they were being watched extraordinarily carefully for fear of defection. Right. So the thought that he could just sort of freelance something in front of people, I think he knew very well that wasn't gonna work. And he did, in fact, so this is historical. He goes to Vienna. He does speak in front of this conference and he speaks at enormous length. And also speaks in a way that no one had heard a Soviet scientist speak before. He admits that there were training problems. He admits that there were safety regulation issues. He admits that the people in the room made terrible mistakes. These were things that no one had ever heard any Soviet scientist say. And they gave him extraordinary credit. I mean, the line, you know, finally a Soviet scientist we can trust, we can believe. That's a real comment from a newspaper. And I think it was actually quite brilliant what the Soviet Union did there. They kind of let him say almost everything so that he would be honest. Exactly. What were the Soviet scientists ever admitted anything? Correct. He admitted so much. But of course, he omitted what we will find out is the key piece of information. And he's complimented for this by our KGB head. Right. Statecraft. Statecraft calls it. Statecraft LaGosov. Statecraft. Yeah. We go to LaGosov's apartment. He's working on some drawings or he's studying some drawings. And I didn't quite catch what that was. Yeah, they were blueprints. He was sort of going through the understanding is that he's going to go to this trial. Right. And now, let me just stop and say he was not at the trial. So an enormous dramatic license here that I take in five out of necessity. Right. I could have absolutely portrayed this trial exactly as it unfolded with other people, but we wouldn't have known who they were. Right. And we wouldn't have cared. So this is dramatic license. He was not there. Serbino was not there. Other people handled this. Right. The trial also took weeks and was quite boring. Yeah. How early in your process did you conceive of the trial as a dramatic climax of this thing? In the very beginning. For me at least, there's no way to know how to start something unless I know how it ends. Right. I need to know that. And the trial I thought was crucial because it allowed me to both conclude these stories and conclude LaGosov story in a way that I could dramatize because in fact, the choices he makes at the trial are choices that he makes in real life in different ways, in different contexts, in different places. And the price that he suffers, he suffered. Right. But also it allowed me a chance to finally. Yeah. Finally, show what happened that night. Because for me, this is this incredible, it's like a murder mystery that we've been waiting to watch. Right. And a trial would help us do that. Yeah. So we're on our way to the trial, which was in Chernobyl. Chernobyl city. So why the Russian law or Soviet law essentially stated that you needed to try a crime roughly within the district in which it occurred. In this case, they absolutely could have waved that. They chose not to, in part because they wanted to show people that it was safe now. Right, it was not. Of course. And so everybody's still to wash their shoes very carefully. And it was just an absurd place to hold a trial. And yet they did about 20 kilometers away from the reactor. Before we get into the trial scenes, I want to talk about Kamyuk's challenge to LaGasa, basically saying, if you stand up at this trial and tell the truth, it will make a difference because of the audience of the trial, which he refers to as the real jury. The real jury, right. Is that based in fact, or was that invented by you as a dramatist to motivate LaGasa's ultimate choice? It's inspired by factual circumstances because he was not there. And scientists, there was no little jury there that he could convince. However, what's going on in this time, aside from the trial where I've kind of compressed all this stuff, is a bit of a battle in the scientific community as a result of Chernobyl. And it begins to manifest as a fear among some that LaGasa and his desire for openness is going to basically draw unwanted attention to some of the people in the Soviet scientific community that had been helping to suppress these things. On the other side, you had scientists who were desperate for this information to come out. Usually the power structure was the people who wanted to keep the lid on things were above and the people who wanted to talk were below. And the people on top start to win. LaGasa enters this strange period in his life where instead of receiving certain awards that he was expected to receive, instead of receiving certain commendations and support from his fellow academicians, he starts getting the opposite. He starts getting pushback and rejection. He's left off a list of people that receive awards, even though he's done this remarkable thing. He's also now starting to suffer from ill health effects. And LaGasa, in fact, does not commit suicide without having attempted it prior. He makes an attempt. He ends up in the hospital. He's now, again, I think a combination of the stress of the rejection of the scientific community. So the tapes, his taped memoirs, kind of posthumously win over enough scientists to make this happen. I just want to clarify this. So we were saying in real life, he was being truthful about what happened. Yes, attempting to. Attempting to and was getting pushback from his own community. Correct. Correct. From the people that were the establishment of that community. And there was a real fear in the upper echelons of the Soviet nuclear industry that they were going to get in trouble. Because they had presided over a number of accidents. They had covered it up. They had allowed this design to proceed, knowing full well, it had inherent flaws. The people who were running the Soviet Union, they didn't understand the science at all. They were relying on these people. And in fact, in a Soviet state that had no religion and that had turned science into a bit of a religion, there was a growing sense after Chernobyl that the Soviet community had over-empowered a lot of these scientists and that these scientists had behaved arrogantly. So there was this interesting political battle going on that Lagosov found himself in the middle of. And that is kind of what I'm dramatizing in a very reductive way, the only way I could without turning into like a side soap opera about, you know, Karchato politics. And you had enough complexity to deal with in an hour of TV. A few spinning plates. A few spinning plates. So let's leave the politics of the Soviet and scientific community aside for the moment. And let's move into the trial. You've been to the room where the trial took place. Indeed. So this was a cultural center in the town of Chernobyl. It was where they would put on small shows, plays and play instruments for the locals. And they converted it into this trial room. So it had all of these auditorium type seats and a stage. And the Soviets put some curtains up. They put three big chairs on the stage for the judges. And we, Luke Hall, again, did a remarkable job. I mean, if you look at pictures from our show of our set and pictures of the actual trial, it's nearly identical. It's remarkable. We felt that was incredibly important again to duplicate as best we could because it's so specific, it's so weird. The two different colored curtains and the judges on a stage and the three guys in that weird little thing with two soldiers on either side. And cameras and lights. Here's Luke Hall, the production designer for Chernobyl. It's funny, it's just like, because what looks like a really simple set was actually that was quite a complex one to put together. It felt like it was right, I suppose. It didn't look too smart, actually. And actually, Jacob sent a reference for the scene quite early on. I think we were all kind of working too, which was a scene from the Godfather too, when they're in the trial. And it had that sort of energy and that echoey noise. And it's a visually, we're just always trying to keep that in mind. You want to see cables running from the microphones and you want to see paper strewn. And it's not perfect. It's in process. People have been there a while, they're tired of it, but they're getting through it. How typical was this for a Soviet show trial? Well, this was in many ways the final Soviet show trial. So the answer is, I'm not sure, because they hadn't had a real good Soviet show trial in a long time. It had sort of fallen out of favor. What I did do, however, was look back at some transcripts from old Soviet show trials, Zenovia Evans, and others where you see some of the language that's used. And the prosecutor, who in this case, in Soviet law, at least in this case, actually outranked the judge, and really was sort of in charge of the judge. I mean, because again, show trial. The speech that he gives in the very beginning is partly taken from a speech that Brezhnev gave about on the anniversary of, I think, I don't know, Sputnik or something. And I just thought that language, I couldn't believe it when I read that. I was just looking for Soviet speeches, and I read this thing. I'm like, my God, they actually said something like our sole cause of the Leninist principles, and that was part kind of the deal. That's how they did it. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR is determined that justice be carried out on behalf of the people in accordance with the general goal of our party, as determined by its 20th, 21st and 22nd Congresses, which is a Leninist goal. It was ease, and will be the only immutable goal in the Soviet state. The path of Leninist principles shall be consistently and undividuatingly followed as it expresses the vital interests of the Soviet people. It hopes and aspirations as we guide the life of the party in state. The session of court is now open. Conrad Judge Milankadnikov presiding. The prosecutor, of course, is played by an actor whose name I will know. But you're Michael McAwan, Henny. Michael McAwan. Thank you. Who, of course, played Rus Bolton in Game of Thrones, really, my only criticism of you, Craig, as the creator of the show, is you should have given him more lines, because I miss him. I'm sure that he will also agree with you. I miss him. We used all of his life. I appreciate that. I know that we could get totally lost at this point in trying to parse the differences between what happened here and the episode and what was reality because of the dramatic necessity. But I do want to ask one more question about that, which is that the trial happens in a way that we're not used to in that these characters do presentations as part of the prosecution, not getting into who those people were. Is that generally accurate? Was that how this kind of trial was done? No. No, generally speaking, these show trials were very interrogative and a huge part of the show trial was the defendant's explaining to everyone how guilty they were sometimes trying to out-gilt them, like almost a contest. No, no, no, no, no, you don't know how guilty I am. All of this, this strange Kabuki theater to try and avoid the bullet. In this case, I did draw a little bit from some notes that people had taken who were there. Theotlov in particular was defiant. So the things that Theotlov says, we'll get to those are real. But these presentations and these are really meant to help the audience understand what happened that night. The good news for those of you who love accuracy as I do is that all of the descriptions of what happened that night, all of them are absolutely accurate down to the times. I have some questions about that, but the first thing I wanted to say is why was it so, I mean, backing up. One of the things we're always used to in all kinds of Hollywood things is simplification. Because audiences may not know the subject, audiences key on drama, not information, so everything is simplified. Military movies instead of complex things, they just got to capture that bridge. Scientific movies, we just have to make that connection or discover that formula. Like to take a random example, interstellar. The secret to interstellar space travel is a particular mathematical formula. That's all we need to know. Audience, just trust us. Unobtainium. Right, unobtainium to use the classic phrase. You made it very different choice. You were like, I want the people who've been with us for four hours so far to, and I'm not going to use the word endure, but enjoy, be interested in a general scientific lecture that accurately depicts what happened. Why was that important to you? Because it's the truth. And at this point, after portraying this scientist, who was a scientist, and all the things they went through, and to portray an inquisition into who is to blame, and what went wrong, it was incredibly important to me to share the truth. Also, for me, I find this fascinating. Why it blew up is that question, very first podcast we did. That's my question. I knew it blew up, but why? The actual why is fascinating, and in and of itself is a small drama about people and decisions. And I understand it, and I wanted people to understand it with me, and I hope that they do. I mean, it helps when you have world-class actors giving the lecture, but I tried really hard to frame everything within the context of dramatic moments based on human decisions and human motivations. And this explanation is so greatly aided for the viewer by the flashbacks to the control room. Precisely. Which also had emotional weight, because well, to put it bluntly, we see them with their skin back on. That's right. And that was terrifying. Like I said, there were moments, there was that wonderful moment skipping a head a bit, where Akimov says, I refuse to do this. And I swear to you, I was actually thinking, well, this is great. He won't do it, and it won't blow up. I know, isn't that amazing? Yeah. And of course, as we've been discussing in so many different contexts in this, he's threatened with destruction of his career, of his connections, everything. Accurate. You know, to get love's threat is not just, I will fire you, you will never work again. Yeah. Yeah, he was a real bully. We should have finished by now. The following protocol for reduction rate. You're procrastinating. Or 10 other men in this plant would have done it already. Kishenbaum, come get me when these old women are ready. Yes, go and write that note. Certain of those phrases, like you're procrastinating, was one thing that they said, you just kept going on about all night. You're procrastinating, you're procrastinating. Who would ever say something like that to people that are operating a nuclear reactor? Procrastinating. Since we've had them, let's talk about the outlook. Throughout this sequence, throughout this episode. He seems insanely reckless. Yes. As if he didn't know what a nuclear reactor was. I mean, presumably he had some expertise. We've discussed his past, the real characters past. He's a working with nuclear energy in different contexts. And yet he's treating this as if it's a toy, as if there's no danger to it. Yeah. And where in the world does that recklessness come from? Was it, is it just his ambition that I need to do this so we can finally get this test done? And so I can finally take that next chair as he discussed it in the prior to the prepaid scene? Or as it began to feel to me on repeated watchings, it was just that character, that man. He simply could not be denied what he wanted. He couldn't be contradicted. He was in charge and the more challenge that came back to him the harder he pushed. That was certainly his reputation. He was known as a difficult demanding man for whom nothing was ever good enough. The question of why we have to guess. Now we do have, he made statements afterwards, lengthy statements, which I've read, which I find not credible. And in fact, the lack of credibility is indicative in and of itself, that he still was kind of saying, no, this wasn't anything I did. I mean, yeah, we made some mistakes, but this was really because of, he chose to focus on the flaw without acknowledging that the flaw does not express itself unless you drive this nuclear reactor in the most bizarre and insane way. So I think in his mind, he is being reckless. He wants to report a completed test. He knows the test, by the way, at this point, is nonsense. Right, it's not gonna deliver any normal result, but he just wants to say he did it so that it could be signed off and done. The last thing I think the outlaw thought was that there would be an explosion. I think mostly what he thought was, if I can get this done in such a way that it shows a result that I can sort of present as real, then I've gotten away with this. So it's reckless and stupid and arrogant, but I don't think at any point he thought it was really dangerous. There was a certain cowboy mentality. And as you point out, to go back to the car metaphor that we've used before, in terms of turning the key and what happens, from one perspective, the only thing he really had to worry about was the car stalling and stopping entirely, that it was the last thing in his mind that it would ever blow up because as we know, those kinds of reactors don't blow up. They don't blow up. And I also think, and you make this very, very clear that even as this is happening in the level of tension and terror in the room is rising along with ultimately the reactor, they all thought they had a failsafe. Yes. They had a big off button. Correct. It always works. It's not a good thing to turn off your reactor, but you can do it if you need to. You scram the reactor. I mean, and that kind of emergency shut off button is a very comforting thing. Yeah. If you were to think, my God, it's not connected. That would be disconcerting, but what you would probably never suspect is that it would actually make things worse. That's the one thing the off button shouldn't do. Right. And it's funny looking back on episode one, looking at their confused faces at the moment after the explosion, you now begin to understand why they were so befuddled because things don't blow up when you press that button. Things stop. Things stop. And even after they pressed it, they could see that the power was going up dramatically. Yeah. And that just simply didn't make sense to any of them. To the point where they begin to rationalize that the panel's wrong, the thing is wrong, the explosion is a hydrogen tank and not the core, because none of what happened was feasible to them because they were not told. Right. The outlaw has a lot of experience at this point, but then you look at a guy like Tatunov who was 25 who had been on the job for I think four months. Yes. What does he know? Nothing. Right. They know nothing. Most of the people in the plant didn't even know what the test was happening. Right. And as we find out later, what happens has never happened before because it's never, even though there's this flaw in the control rods, no one has ever jammed the control rods into a reactor that's already skyrocketed. Well, exactly. So the, no one had ever combined the following. Turn off the pumps that send water into the core and also remove all of the control rods entirely, completely from, with the exception of six out of whatever, which is itself, I don't know much about nuclear reactors, but that in and of itself is reckless, right? It is reckless. I mean, the computer did say to them, you should shut this reactor down. This is crazy. And that's correct. And one of the things, by the way, that happened actually fairly swiftly after Chernobyl was a change in the roles of how many rods you could remove. Right. So no one had ever taken all the rods completely out and also shut off the water to a reactor. That, by the way, had what's known as a hotspot in it. This is something we couldn't really get into, but, you know, there's that moment when he switches off, go to local, take off local control and go to global control. Taptunov almost certainly makes a mistake there. We don't quite know why the powered plummeted at that point. It should not have. It's either that the button was faulty, which I doubt, or Taptunov failed to reset a number. Right. So it fell, he blew it. Paranthetically, how do we know the step-by-step, second-by-second button, push-by-button, push-sequence of events? It was there like a log, as we might expect. A computer. So it's the SKA LA Scala. It was the central computer that would record all the instructions as they came through the panel. So there was a moment-by-moment registration of a number of decisions. And also, in the days following the accident, Taptunov and Akimov were interviewed as was Kirshenbaum, as was Stoljarchuk, both of whom survived. And so there was a picture that was put together of what happened. Now, the outlaw did, in fact, at the trial claim that he was in the toilet, that he never told them to raise the power, that they decided on their own to do this insane thing, that they were petrified to do. And then, in fact, he was in the toilet. And that's where you start to realize that the outlaw isn't just a stubborn man, but that he is something else. There's a special kind of arrogance to lie to a Soviet show trial judge. Especially when he has said in a prior episode, it doesn't matter what happens. I'm getting the bullet. And yet, I almost kind of admired him, that he never gave in. He never gave in. By the way, he never gave in even up to his death. I mean, he was still sort of saying, nobody would have everybody would have done what I did. It was totally normal and no. All right. We have a chance to see our three principal protagonist, Serbina Kamiok and Legasov, in this trial. We work our way up to the red and the blue cards. Yes. But you don't need to be a nuclear scientist to understand what happened at Chernobyl. You only need to know this. There are essentially two things that happen inside a nuclear reactor. The reactivity which generates power either goes up, or it goes down. That's it. What will the operators do is maintain balance? When did you hit upon that the red and blue cards as a way of depicting this very complex technical explanation? Well, I never wrote any of that without something like that in place. I think initially I was thinking about red marbles and blue marbles. But I knew that the only way to explain this was the way I had been able to absorb it myself. So I did speak with nuclear physicists. And I read about the operation of nuclear reactors and what it came down to for me was, okay, I understand this is a system of balance. I now have to show people how this all works. This goes up, this goes down. So some sort of binary representation. The fact is, when we came up with the cards, one of the things I sort of loved about the cards also was that we were writing the names on them in Cyrillic. So no one would know. Yes. And the fun part is you didn't need to. Right. It was just red pile and a blue pile. Red goes up, blue goes down. I did enjoy the fact that it was made of clear plastic. So you could see it from either camera angle, which was very convenient. Obviously the explanation takes a lot of the time of the episode. So I won't go over it here. But let's talk about the climax really of the whole series where the trial is about to end. He's about to reveal the deepest secret of why ultimately the last and most significant reason why this happened. The trial is about to end and then Shabena gets up and insists about enough for today. The defendants will be remanded in custody. Court will I haven't finished. It's still have evidence. It's not necessary. Your testimony is concluded. Irrana court is now adjourned. We will resume tomorrow with benefit. Now this was so dramatic and so reflective of their character choices that I'm assuming this is entirely fictional. Life is not that good. Correct. And this is really a product of the relationship that is formed between my characters of Shabena and Legasa. There is a wonderful photo of the two of them, the actual men together. I think in Vienna and they're laughing and they're close. And when I looked at that, I just thought to myself, well, there is a friendship here. You can't fake the look on their faces. There's an actual, a real comradeship, a real friendship. And they were in the fox hole together. And the fact of the matter is that Boris Shabena probably never did make any grand proclamation to let Legasa speak. But I could certainly imagine that he would have supported something like that by this point. Right. Legasa of because of Shabena's interruption, encouraging him to continue the trial, he's able to finally make the revelation. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies. Which is a wonderful, as we say, in the business, button on a dramatic theme. The final scene pretty much of the series is Legasa of paying his price, being told what's going to happen to him. And it's interesting. It reminded me of all things, well, probably not coincidentally, of what happens to Winston Smith at the end of 1984. I don't shoot him. I just let him go out in the world. That's right. And is that more or less what happened to Legasa? Yes, he was, he returned to his job. He returned to his office. His duties were reduced. There was an election to see who would start to take over the next generation of the Kurchatov Institute. He lost. He was shocked that he lost. Prior to the Chernobyl and his attempts to spread this information, I don't think he would have lost it all. Again, this was a pretty avid communist. One of the things that comes out in that scene is just how much of a communist he was, how much of a Soviet true believer he was. His father was not just a Soviet true believer. He was almost like one of the, well, this is jobs. Visitors, ideological enforcement. Yeah, and compliance. I mean, he was, he was somebody whose job was basically to make sure that you were Soviet enough. That's the, that's the environment that Legasa grew up in. And I think after the after Chernobyl and his, you know, increasing discussion of the issues involving the RBMKs, there was a concern from some people that he was grandstanding, but mostly a fear that he was going to expose some of the other scientists who were less heroic and less bold. So he begins to lose connection with his own community. He's growing increasingly sick. He is growing increasingly tired and increasingly depressed. And this begins a fairly rapid spiral downward, culminating in his decision to take his own life. And we are told with a title at the end that his tape memoirs actually made a huge difference in terms of the world finding out what really happened, the flaw with these reactors, his reactors are being repaired. Yeah, there was a sense from my research that the dissemination of his memoirs, his tape memoirs essentially gave everybody the courage to stand up and start talking about this, but only in combination with his suicide, that it was his suicide that was just not possible to ignore. Somebody like Lagosov should not commit suicide in the Soviet Union. And that statement was not something you could repress. It was bad optics, I mean, to use an option. And the world knew of Lagosov's intensely central role in the recovery at Chernobyl. He was the face of Soviet science in Vienna. And here he was killing himself two years to the day of the explosion, certainly not a coincidence. And in his memoirs, he speaks quite clearly about the need for reform in the scientific community and by extension, the people that control the scientific community. And so following that, there are increased efforts for transparency within the community. And the RBMK reactors do undergo procedures to reduce the possibility of something like Chernobyl happening again, the positive void coefficient, that kind of vicious cycle of steam turning the energy, that is reduced in the reactors. The graphite tips on the control rods that ended up causing the explosion, those are changed and altered. The rules about how far you can remove a lot of new rules are put into place. Essentially, a lot of rules that you would have thought wouldn't need to be there are now there. The end credits and the information they're in, which go on for a while. And I think that speaks to how interested you are in people knowing the reality and the aftermath. I'll let them speak for themselves with one exception. You quote Gorbachev saying the real reason that the Soviet Union collapse was because of Chernobyl. Yeah, why? Well, two things happened as a result of Chernobyl. One was an enormous expenditure of money. It was an amount of money that weren't expecting to spend and kind of didn't have. But the bigger issue was it exposed the worst kind of Soviet lie to the world. People understood that the Soviets would lie. But the Soviets could sort of lie and get away with it a little bit because there was always a little bit of wiggle room or plausible deniability. Or the nature of the lie was an enormous. In this case, they didn't tell the world that an entire continent was under threat of an open, nuclear reactor spewing smoke into the air. They didn't tell them and they didn't evacuate those people. And they were exposed as callous and craven. And they never really recovered from that blow. It for a nation that was obsessed with not being humiliated. I was just thinking. They were humiliated. They were right to be worried. Yes, they were. I mean, it's funny. I think about this image a lot recently for other reasons. But there's that very famous bit of tape of the dictator of Romania, who's called Chesco. Thank you. And the moment of his fall, where he came out to make a speech after the unrest and the crowd starts laughing at him and hooting and hollering. And that's when it's over. So in a weird way, the secret to power is people believing in it and respecting it and fearing it. And once they don't, you don't have any power anymore. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. They were able in various phases in the Soviet Union, the history of the Soviet Union, to visit terrible things upon their own people and yet still keep the people either believing out of faith or believing out of fear, which isn't really believing, but just submitting. But in this case, it seemed as if some sort of Genie had leapt out of the lamp and could not ever be put back in. In the same way that this nuclear reactor had opened up and that stuff that came out could not be put back in. Right. And so the Soviet Union begins to wobble. Gorbachev himself is, there's a coup against him. It fails, but shortly thereafter, one republic after another begins to declare independence and the whole thing collapses. We're at the end of five hours of television and five podcast episodes. And the worst question I feel to ask a writer is what do you want to say because you just said it for five hours. So let me ask you this instead. What did you find out making this TV show that you didn't know before about anything, the nature of people, the nature of states, the nature of science? I guess I would say that in these kinds of circumstances where great crimes are committed, it is remarkable to me how infrequently you can actually find somebody who is properly to blame that there is a general conspiracy of thought going on among humans just so that we can make it through our day. Every time we go through a green light, we are engaging in a conspiracy of thought with the people on the other side that they will stop at the red light. We are always doing this and relying upon each other. And the mistakes that some people make begin to conglomerate with mistakes and other people have made and the mistakes that they don't even know have been made. And inevitably, there is a debt that gets built up. So LaGasov says with every lie we tell, we incur a debt to the truth. And to me, and this is kind of a bummer, no surprise after watching the show, I'm not sure humans are equipped to move through existence without lying to each other. There's a certain amount of lying that seems to be necessary or we just won't be able to make it through. It's the big lies we have to be really, really careful about because in the end, and this is where we started, the truth doesn't care. It doesn't care that we need to lie to each other to make it through the day. It just is. And in the case of something like Chernobyl, they lied and lied and lied and lied and lied. But always, always was this enormous tub full of incredibly dangerous elements that was ready to blow up if the proper conditions were met. That was always true. And I think about that all the time in relation to where we are now. Yeah. Sometimes it occurs to me with dismay that there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of nuclear missiles in the United States and silos. They're there. Now, is there a flaw? I don't know. I hope not. The fact that it has not been expressed yet doesn't mean it's not there. It just means we engage in this conspiracy that it doesn't seem like those will blow up or go off or anything like that. So I've become very attuned to the frail nature of the way we exist with each other. I don't know if there's a way around it, but I do think we can do certainly a lot better and at the very least, when we hear what we know to be a lie, we must confront it. If we are incapable of getting past some base level of lying, we must address the ones that we know are lies. And that, I think, is why Chernobyl is a story where we're telling now probably more than at any other time in my life. To me, out of all the extraordinary moments of drama and terror and find filmmaking and acting in the series, the one that keeps sticking with me that I keep going back to is Akimov and Toptenov going to the pumps because they know it's a lie. And they know if they go, they'll probably die and they know it won't do any good, but they go anyway. And we think of that kind of sacrifice usually in the way that we think of the divers later in the series as being heroic. Accomplishing something. They accomplished nothing. Nothing except that they did what they were told. And in a weird way that the urge to do what you're told, the urge to not make waves, the urge to accept a falsehood at extraordinary cost just shows how hard it is to stand up, to do what we think of because of a lifetime of TV and film is the noble right thing to do, to risk disapprobation, to risk real punishment. And that to me, that is extraordinarily relevant. And I think maybe even more personally, a lot of people think of how brave they would be. And think about what, think about doing something that would make everybody you know and love furious at you that would destroy your career, that would destroy your family. Think about that cost before you imagine that you would do the noble thing. Correct. We've reached the end of episode five of the Chernobyl podcast because we've reached the end of the Chernobyl TV show. It has been a great pleasure to be able to talk about the show in depth with its creator. And I hope that all of you out there have enjoyed it. The show of course will live on, on video and demand and in other ways. And I hope that as people discover the show who haven't already seen it, they discover this podcast because as I said, this is a show that makes you want to be able to talk about it. And it's been our pleasure to do so. So in the future, you can find this podcast at Apple Podcasts Stitcher, Spotify, NPR1. Wherever you get your podcast, it'll also be waiting for you on YouTube and HBO Go and HBO Now. You can use them as podcast apps. Why not? My name is Peter Segal. You can usually find me over an NPR and on a podcast called Weight Weight Don't Tell Me. If you want to hear Craig talk about things of interest to him, he is a podcast called Script Notes. This podcast was made possible by HBO Sky and Pineapple Street Media. It was co-hosted by me, Peter Segal with of course, Craig Mason. It was recorded at Patches Sound in Hollywood. Our team at Pineapple Street Media includes executive producers Max Linsky, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Barry Finkel. This podcast was produced by Christine Driscoll, Barry Finkel and Melissa Slotter, original music by Con Urbay. From Craig Mason's team, we have producer and the quickest fact checker around Jack Lesco. And thanks to you, Craig, is there anybody else there? You want to give a shout out to? Well, I just want to say thank you to HBO and Sky. They signed on to this early on. They believed in it. They made it all possible. It's been a joy working with both of them. And lastly, I want to say thanks to you. I roped you into this. I can't believe it worked. No, it has been a great pleasure. I'm honored to have been able to talk to you about this really, really great work of television. Thank you, Peter. I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for listening. This podcast is sponsored by Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. When you own your own business, you own every decision. I'm Angus, founder of Elastic. We're the design studio that created a Game of Thrones main title. When you start a business, you're creating a world. I love that thing of like, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to figure it out. You have to innovate and you have to travel into the unknown. Our small world can change the big world. For business world builders everywhere, the business card that rewards every decision you make, Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, and a member FDIC, subject credit approval, terms apply.