title: 1:23:45
author: The Chernobyl Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Chernobyl Podcast
published: 2019-05-06T21:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/PSM2697322292.mp3?updated=1701791965
word_count: 9220
When life gets unpredictable, preparation matters. In medicine, it's all about staying alert. Ready for whatever comes through the door? On the road, it's no different. That's why Volvo designs vehicles to help anticipate risk, reduce harm, and protect lives. The Volvo XC90's advanced safety systems inspire confident decisions wherever the road takes you. The Volvo XC90 for life. Proud sponsor of the Pit Podcast. Learn more at VolvoCars.com slash US. What is the cost of lives? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? Hi, this is Peter Segal, and I'm Craig Mason. And I'm sitting with Craig to record the first episode of the Chernobyl Podcast, a podcast about the HBO mini series, Chernobyl, which was written and created by Craig Mason. The intent here is to talk with Craig about where the show came from, why he created it, the experience of making it, and how closely the... DocuDrama, would you call it a DocuDrama? I guess so, a dramatic retelling of history, or how closely it tracks real history, where it differs and why, and ultimately why it was made at this time and place. Yeah, and of those many wonderful reasons to do this, the one that was most important to me from the jump, was a chance to set the record straight about what we do that is very accurate to history, what we do that is a little bit sideways to it and what we do to compress or change. It knows, in no small part, because the show is essentially about the cost of lies, the danger of narrative. And I didn't want us to... I guess, miss a chance or transparency if we had one. So, I've never actually heard this kind of thing before in relation to dramatic retellings of history, so I'm kind of curious to see how it all works if people are horrified by this or enlightened. I don't know. I think they'll definitely be horrified speaking as someone who just recently saw the miniseries. What else happens, I think, is up to them. This episode of the Chernobyl podcast concerns episode one of the Chernobyl miniseries titled 12345, which of course, was the reading in the clock when the explosion at Chernobyl happened. Let's start then with the beginning. You were guessing around 20 or so in 1986 when this all happened, maybe a little younger? I was younger. Yeah, I was 15. 15? Yeah, it was 15 years old. I remember it. I don't remember it quite as starkly as I remember the incident that occurred about three months earlier, which was the the challenger disaster. Right. But I definitely remember that it happened. I remember that the entire world seemed concerned. It wasn't simply a local thing. And beyond that, it sort of devolved fairly quickly into a very simple notion. Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant and it blew up. That's it. Right. I was a little older then. And what do I remember? I remember that Chernobyl blew up. It was bad, but it ended up being OK in the Soviet light about it. That's exactly right. And it's a bit of a shame that so much of the takeaway from that is that the Soviets lied and the Soviets created this system that would have led to that. All of which is true and all of which is a large part of the story that we tell. Because it's an important part. What we did not get on our side of the news was how, I like to say, only this could have only happened in the Soviet Union. Only the Soviet Union could have solved this problem. What the Soviet citizenry did to sacrifice and solve was nothing short of remarkable. And we in the West, I don't think, had any sense of how multilayered this disaster was and how in many ways the explosion was really just the beginning of a series of events that are increasingly hard to believe. Well, yes. A lot of this podcast, just as a spoiler alert, is going to be me saying to Craig, really? And he'll say, yes. And it was even weirder, presumably. In a number of cases. But let's start here. So this is what we knew about Chernobyl. It's what you know. It happened in your childhood. It happened in my young adulthood. We remember this. It happened. It went away. Then the Soviet Union fell a few years later. And we just forgot about it. If you would ask me, before I started watching this series, what I knew about Chernobyl, I'd say, yeah. OK, that happened. And I know that there's a big concrete sarcophagus over it. And nobody can go near it. And it's kind of cool, I might have said, because people have been removed from the area around it. So there's been this weird kind of renaissance of nature, which is kind of nifty. And I've seen film of like deer leaping about it. It's kind of nice. So I would have, before this began, I would have said that was a problem that happened 30 years ago. And it's all over. And there's really no problem when we kind of have this cool abandoned city, which is fun. Yeah. Assuming that that's where you were before you started your exploration of the project, what started you on this exploration? I knew that Chernobyl exploded, but I didn't know why. And it struck me as such an odd lapse, because if you say to people what happened to the Titanic, they'll tell you it's sank. And if you say how, they'll tell you iceberg. Everybody knows it hit an iceberg. Nobody seemed to know offhand why and how Chernobyl blew up. So I just began to read. You know, one of those lovely evenings at home where you just start internetting yourself into a coma and I started reading in two things jumped out. And both of those things emerge in episode one, one of which emerges immediately. The first thing is that the night of the explosion, they were running a safety test. That's the kind of fact that any writer will stop and say, oh, OK, that is deeply ironic in the most disturbing of ways. Why? Well, if you're running a safety test and the result of the safety test is the least safe thing that could have ever possibly happened, you start to wonder what gap between intention and results existed here? How is that even possible? I can understand if you're in every submarine movie, there's the whole crushed depth scene. The whole point is to take this thing down and see how much it can take. All right, well, if it collapses in that scene, I get it. But if you're trying to just see, like, if you're taking a car out for a spin and you've gotten to this section where it's not acceleration, it's breaking distance, how does that make the car explode? What is going on there? So I found that shocking. And the second fact that grabbed me was that the man that was in many respects put in charge of the cleanup and the general, I call it a war against the atom post-explosion, was an academician named Valeri Lagosov, and Valeri Lagosov commits suicide two years to the day after the explosion. Right. And that, of course, immediately gets me wondering why? So when you're pitching this idea to HBO and Sky, how are you presenting it as something that people would want to and even need to watch? The way I like to think of it is what is the relevance to everyone. I mean, ultimately we can tell any particular story, but there needs to be some sort of universal relevance, or it just becomes a story in and of itself about the event, which at that point I refer to those things as homework. Right. I'm not interested in making homework for people. The reason that I was compelled to write about Chernobyl was, I mean, in part because it was filling in these large gaps of a story that we all knew and yet didn't know, but primarily, it's because it is a story about the cost of lies. This is the first line of the whole show, and this is the theme that we are going to continue with as people watch these episodes, that when people choose to lie, and when people choose to believe the lie, and when everyone engages in a very kind of passive conspiracy to promote the lie over the truth, we can get away with it for a very long time, but the truth just doesn't care. And it will get you in the end. And the people that suffer ultimately are not the people that are telling the lie. It's everyone else. And that is where we start to see real truth. In the behavior of human beings who are motivated to save their fellow man, their fellow woman, their loved ones, that's where truth is. And so for me, and this, by the way, as before, our entire planet seemed to be coming gulfed in a war on truth, for me, this was an important kind of a story to tell about the value of truth versus narrative, which because we are, I think, as humans, we are so susceptible to storytelling. It's why we tell stories. We like them. Stories are sometimes very good ways of conveying interesting truths and facts, but just as simply, the stories can be weaponized against us to teach us and tell us anything. So of course I choose narrative to tell an anti-narrative story, but that's why I think this is relevant now. Maybe more relevant now. In fact, yes, definitely more relevant now than it was when I started writing it, which was, and I think we should just point this out, before the 2016 election. Yes, it was. It was, I think I started in 2015 on the writing. Yeah. Because I will say speaking for myself, it's impossible to watch this mini-series with its tale of government malfeasance and lies and bureaucratic, let's just say incentives, taking the place of, shall we say, other motives without thinking about what's going on in America and across the world today. Let's talk a little bit about production, which covers the whole series, but becomes into play quite vividly in this episode, both in terms of its realism and its departure and realism, first thing, no Russian accents. Right, yeah, big decision that we made early on. And what propelled that decision and when did you make it and what was the thinking? Well, we had an initial thought that maybe what we would do, we didn't want to do the, you know, the Boris Natasha. The Russian accent can turn comic with very little effort. Yes. So at first we thought maybe we would just have people do these sort of vaguely Eastern European sort of, you know, so if I'm talking like this, I'm not really doing a strong accent, but it's a little, and what we found very quickly was that actors will act accents. Yes, they will not act, they will act accents and we were losing everything about these people that we kind of loved. Honestly, I think maybe after one or two auditions, we just said, okay, new rule, we're not doing that anymore. And I remembered there's a, I don't know if you ever saw this movie, it was an HBO film actually called Citizen X. As many years ago, Stephen Ray and Donald Sutherland's true story of a serial killer in Soviet Ukraine. And I recalled that their accents all over the plate, they had South African accent, they had an English accent, they had American accent, some people were sort of trying, some people weren't, Max von Sido shows up and just talks like his Swedish self, and it works perfectly fine because they're not speaking Russian. So I get it, now that meant no Americans, because I think for an American audience, the one thing that will pull you out of that is an American accent, right? That just sounds silly. But beyond that, yeah, we just, we occasionally ask people to maybe take the edge off a little bit, like in Game of Thrones, anyone from Manchester will be asked to push that a bit. Right, so that they're the Northerners. They're clearly the Northerners. We would sort of say, take the edge off a little bit, but here and there we would just let somebody be Irish or Scottish because they sounded great and their character was good. Right, and of course, as people are speaking to each other, there's no consciousness that they're speaking in Russian. They're just talking to each other. Correct. And so we're hearing them as they would have heard themselves. And that's really what we went for, and my hope is that the accent thing just fades away within seconds. You just stop caring about it because that's ultimately completely irrelevant to what was going on, which is essentially what goes on in all situations regardless of language, panic, fear, love, excitement, worry, all these things, these emotions. Right. One thing that struck me as a guy who grew up with a barc and Natasha cartoons is that they all call each other comrade all the time. Right. That almost struck me as like, you know, a parody of the Soviet Union. Yeah, it struck me as a parody of the Soviet Union as well to the extent that I didn't really include that frequently in the initial drafts, but I did have some people who had grown up in the Soviet Union and Soviet Ukraine looked through the scripts one moment in particular went through everything. And one of the things she told me, there were a couple of interesting things I remember. For instance, in the beginning of episode one when LaGasov puts food out for his cat, I just, you know, had him pouring cat food into the bowl. She said, we didn't have pet food. There's no pet food in the Soviet Union. You gave them the food you didn't want. So that was fascinating. But the other thing she said was comrade was essentially the thing you would use to refer to people. It was the all purpose reference. You wouldn't call people by their last names only generally. If you wanted to be somewhat formal in a business like manner, you would call them perhaps by their first name in their middle name, which is a patronemic, which is a whole complicated. Whole other thing. It's a whole other thing. It's a whole McGillah. It is a whole McGillah as some people say. Yes. And I didn't want to get into the, because the truth is while that probably is the most accurate and authentic way to do it, it is unwieldy for English listeners. But comrade or tolarish was a very common reference and people would use it all the time. And so she would occasionally flag things and say, no, that should be comrade, Shurbina, not Shurbina. And so I started putting them in. Right. Second question is production design and realism. I've now seen some photographs after seeing it. And it is pretty accurate what you've presented in terms of both the exterior, the interior of the power plant and Pripyat itself, the city around it. I'm assuming you didn't actually film at Chernobyl and Pripyat. So how did, briefly, how did the production crew go about recreating all this? Well, first of all, I would have shot at Chernobyl and Pripyat except the problem is Chernobyl and Pripyat do not at all look like they did in 1986. So they look like the result of 30 years of neglect and exclusion zone. It was an obsession for us, honestly. Our production designer, Luke Hall, worked very closely with our costume designer, Odiel Dix-Murrow. We just became obsessed with showing things as they were. I think for me, for Johann Rank, our director, the Sovietness of things and the Soviet specificity of things was half of what is fascinating about this. I mean, we're seeing an event that, as we say, you know, in the show at some point, it has never occurred on this planet before, but we're also seeing it in a place that most of us have never been to before, which is this inside behind the Iron Curtain in 1986, not from an American perspective, but actually as it was. We were shooting primarily in Lithuania, a little bit in Ukraine. So our crews, they were alive when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union and Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Many of the places that we shot and were constructed, most of them were constructed during the Soviet era, it's real. And we were able to get the real clothing and the firefighters, these are the outfits that we put together were down to the rivet, Odiel did an incredible job of making them realistic, exactly correct. We were helped sometimes by the fact that in the Soviet Union, if they made, for instance, a minor helmet. Yeah. There was one minor helmet. So you didn't have to figure out, okay, which miners wore this brand? Or a apron, there was one. It was called a minor helmet. And that's the one you have. The advantage of poor consumer choice. Correct. But Luke and I and Johann spent a long, long time pouring over as many photographs as we could, blueprints in terms of appropriate, we found a neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania, that had been constructed in a similar time in a similar fashion. One of the upsides of former Soviet republic is that they were building things there, very similar to the way they were building them, you know, a thousand miles away. One blueprint pretty much. I mean, it was these brutalist, you know, block towers. So we found a neighborhood that was very close and basically made our Pripyat out of that. And then of course, with the help of some, you know, pretty remarkable visual effects from Dean Egg's fantastic company that's been doing all of our effects. We were able to properly bring that to life. But again, all of it based on extensive research. Why? I mean, it's not going to be dramatically important to a viewer if the control room looks exactly like the control room of reactor number four. Which it does. I'm sure it does. Down to the bottom. So what was driving you? I was always aware that I was telling a story that meant an enormous amount to the people that lived through it. There are people alive today, thousands, tens of thousands of people alive today, who have lost people they love because of Chernobyl, whose lives have been shortened because of Chernobyl. There are people walking, a lot of people walking around without a thyroid because of Chernobyl. And it was important for me to tell that story accurately. I think about the stories that we have routinely told in the West, stories about the Holocaust, stories about World War II, where we try very hard to be accurate because it's a sign of respect. And for me, I wanted people who lived through that. Including some people in that control room that night who are still alive to watch this and say, they cared. They cared, they got it right. When life gets unpredictable, preparation matters. In medicine, it's all about staying alert. Ready for whatever comes through the door. On the road, it's no different. That's why Volvo designs vehicles to help anticipate risk, reduce harm and protect lives. The Volvo XC90's advanced safety systems inspire confident decisions wherever the road takes you. The Volvo XC90 for life. Proud sponsor of the Pit podcast. Learn more at VolvoCars.com slash US. All right, let's focus on episode one, which is dramatically challenging. We meet Lagassev. He immediately kills himself. Right. And we won't see him again until the very end of the episode. That is correct. So as we all know, screenwriting 101, introduce your hero, Killamintignor. Exactly. You could tell that I've grown weary. I'm just writing normal narrative. We meet him, he's recording those tapes. What is the cost of life? And that's not a device that you use to get his voice in the film. He actually recorded tapes. He did. So there's a number of things here that are absolutely accurate to history. And then some things that I've fiddled with a little bit just to be able to tell the story. So here's a good, right off the bat, let's talk about what's real and what's not. Lagassev does, in fact, hang himself two years to the day after the explosion. Does he hang himself at exactly that time, which will come to understand why that time is so important? No one can say that was really my way of just imparting that I believe this must have been intentional. The date couldn't have been an accident. He did record his memoirs on audio tapes. They were not quite as flowery and thematic as the dialogue I've given here. The reason that people like you were put in this earth is to make other people sound better in retrospect, right? I hope I did him proudly. In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame? He did spell out a lot of his concerns about the Soviet nuclear industry and the way things had gone. And in terms of how those tapes got disseminated, I couldn't really find any good answers. So I just sort of went with some Confederate pick them up and took them and spread them about. One thing that I've left out of Lagosov's story and it's left out right off the bat is his family. He had a wife, he had children. And I made a choice early on to not include them in this story mostly because so much of this story was going to be about his efforts in Chernobyl and his relationships with the people that he was fighting this war with. And I just didn't want to have those scenes of come home because the family that's left behind in these sort of wartime movies inevitably descends into a kind of whininess. And I didn't want to do that to them, but I do want to acknowledge of course that they existed. Right. We then go to Chernobyl on the day of the accident and I thought this was interesting and we will revisit this moment again in the series but we see the accident not from the perspective of there, it's not a huge special effect shot. Right. It is in the distance and it is silent from the window of another character who doesn't even notice it. Precisely. I wanted people to know first of all this is not going to be told the way you would expect it to be told. If somebody says to me, look I'm making a series about Chernobyl I think, okay, we're gonna start with the day and then there's gonna be things and then it's gonna explode and then there's gonna be calls and people and get, and I just didn't want to do it like that at all. I wanted to just start with the explosion. I wanted to start and also didn't want to hide the fact that Lagassev commits suicide. Right. Anybody who watches this show, who then Googles it 10 minutes after watching will go, okay, he's gonna commit suicide. Well, not to wait four episodes for, no, no, no, I'm just, here it is. Yep, that's it. And the explosion which you know is gonna happen, you're not gonna wait for that either. Right. There it is. What's fascinating to me is not that Chernobyl exploded, it's how close people were and how unaware they were and how that night just unfolds in a way that I had no idea and folded and would have never predicted in a million years. I should ask because this happened in the Soviet Union because of the secrecy and the cover up which begins almost immediately, how do we know what happened? Great question. Great question. And the answer to it is we sort of know a lot. We definitely know a little. There are a ton of competing narratives out there and I encountered this as I did my research. A lot of times the name of the game was which one of these accounts do I believe? And I tried as best as I could to actually opt for the less dramatic account. We got a lot of information out of the Soviet Union or what was the former Soviet Union once it collapsed. A lot of information came out. A lot of scientists who had been with Lagosov were able to then tell their stories. They wrote books and then a lot of Western researchers and authors were able to go and talk to the people who had been there and collect their narratives. There's an incredible book called Voices of Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexević which is a, it's essentially a collection of first person accounts. So a lot of information did come out and in fact in that first scene in the control room a number of the things that are said were said. For instance, Akimov says, the Lord, we did everything right. Something strange has happened. He said that. Little lines like that are quite, they make me feel something when they happen in the show because I know we are essentially reproducing truth there. That's, and some of those things, I don't think I would have ever thought to write. In fact, I'm not sure I would believe it necessarily without knowing that it happened. Right. Long ago when I taught playwriting, I used to tell my students the worst reason to put something on stage is that it really happened, because I don't care if I'm watching it. I don't know, I don't care if your mother really said that to you. Show me how and why it was relevant. Make it relevant to me. I'm guessing just that this was something that you had to grapple with a lot. Things happen in this first episode that are almost impossible to believe. Correct. Very challenging. It really came out the most through the character, the real person on a Tollia Diattlov. Diattlov is the guy in charge. Yes, he's played by Paul Ritter. He's got the gray hair and the sort of grayish mustache. He's in charge. And he was in charge of the room that night. And Anatoly Diattlov makes a series of, well, when we eventually do see all the events leading up to this, which we will, I won't tell people when, but we will. We will see a number of borderline and explicable choices by him, but with a hint of motivation. In this episode where we're watching Aftermath, what we're seeing repeatedly from Diattlov is denial. Right. That denial is real. It happened. It went down exactly like that. Within seconds. So just so people understand, because the geography of the plant is a little bit of a question mark for a lot of people, this is a very large facility, and it is very long. It takes maybe 20, 30 minutes to walk from one into the other. And the general structure of the power plant was that there were four nuclear reactors. Each one was in this large square building. And then in between those big squares, where these long corridors, where you had things like control rooms and so on and so forth, when Chernobyl reactor four blows up, it's at the all the way at one end of the plant. The guys in the control room, they hear and feel a succession of thuds, one thud, and then a really big thud. Most of the force of this explosion was vertical. So right off the bat, when I was researching one of my questions was, how was anybody even alive there? Well, this is how. I mean, the explosion ejects materials almost straight up, almost a mile into the air. But these guys in the control room, what they hear and feel is something blew up. And almost immediately, de-Altlove concludes that what's happened is there is a tank, a control system tank that has collected hydrogen and ignited and exploded. Like a little Hindenburg, hydrogen. A little mini Hindenburg. And so what he's contemplating here is essentially a serious industrial accident, but by no means a nuclear holocaust. And for the longest time, I wrestled with this. Just as I think de-Altlove must have internally been wrestling somewhat. I think that what I forget and have to remind myself all the time is the word Chernobyl means a million things to us all in an instant. But right before it blew up, it meant nothing. That nuclear reactor, and in fact, no nuclear reactor, had ever been thought to be capable of exploding. Yes. And so I tried to integrate that into my understanding of the denial. There's another moment. And I can't remember right now if it's a bit of dialogue or a stage reaction where a character and we're going to get into these people running around the control room trying to find out what happened. Where he's been told to go over and look down into the reactor, which he knows if you look down into an open nuclear reactor you're dead. But there's a moment. I think you're describing his thought process. He says, well, he's going to go over and look over it. And if he doesn't see what he thinks he's going to see, the open reactor, then he needs to know that. And if he is going to see what he thinks he's going to see, it doesn't matter because he's already dead. Correct. And so there does seem to be this aspect of these guys saying the reason we can't believe the worst happened is because if the worst happened, we're all dead now. And so that seems to be just as a human thing. I'm not going to believe that I'm already dead. There must be some other explanation. And there were gradations of that across the various people depending on where they were and what they saw. So all the people in the control room that we depict were there. Those are their names. There were a few other people that we left out. They weren't quite as relevant to the story that we're telling. So they were a bit insulated, but two men immediately run in. The first is a guy named Braschnik who's working in the turbine hall. And he says the turbine hall is on fire. It's exactly what happened. He did run in. He did say that, which you could say could be a result of a control system tank explosion. The second guy runs in as a guy named Per Vashenko. Per Vashenko, we will see later on where he was working. Per Vashenko saw way more. And when Per Vashenko arrives in that control room, he tells them, and this is true, that essentially the core exploded. And they basically say to him, no. That's not correct. He proceeds on. Everything he does from that point forward, this is the real man. And we reflect it somewhat in what we show. He did with the full understanding that he was likely a dead man walking. There were a number of people who did things like that that night. We couldn't tell all the stories, but they were remarkable. One of the workers at the plant who became aware of the full scope of the accident fairly early on did what he could to make things better. He went home. He took a nap. He woke up and then he went back. There was this sense that if you had broken through the denial and gotten on the other side of it, which was an understanding of reality, you had an obligation to do what you could to prevent it from getting worse. Conversely, you have guys like Akima von Tup Tunov, who are the two guys that are working the control board that night. They're the ones who towards the end of this episode are opening the valves by hand. Right. Even though they know on some level that it is utterly pointless, that they are basically spring water into the air, because that is such an extraordinary moment when the outlove says, you need to go do this. And they know it's pointless, because the outlove's whole picture of the situation, i.e., they need to get water in the core is ridiculous, because there is no core. It's gone. It's blown up. It's a huge atomic pile. But they go. Yeah. Years ago, I read John Keegan's book about World War One, and he writes about trench warfare. And he writes about how these guys in the trenches, British soldiers, went over the top, and were immediately killed. And he writes about why they did that. And I met him once. I did a book reading. And I said, OK, you explain why the first guy's went over. What about the second guy? What about the second guy? Right. They just saw everybody they knew, follow their orders, do it according to the book, and immediately be killed by machine gunfire, and then they went. I thought of that very vividly and specifically, thinking about those specific two characters. They knew this was pointless. They knew if they went out there, they were dead, and they were right about that. How much did you have to think about those men, their minds at that moment? A lot. So much of writing a moment like that is asking, what do I want people to feel here? What is the emotional truth that I want them to believe? And I have to make certain choices. I have to decide in some ways, states of mind that I don't have access to. But behind all of this is this almost heart-breaking social circumstance. That these people grew up in the Soviet Union, where community and communism, these words, have connected roots, it was understood that you were part of a collective, and that you were there to support your fellow man and your fellow woman. These kind of prosocial messages were promoted by people that I don't think were very prosocial at all. The leadership of the Soviet Union, but the people often did believe it and feel it. And you can see this in all of the history of 20th century Russia and the surrounding areas that the Soviet Union encompassed. So I think some of this was a sense of, I don't know what else to call it, but Soviet civic duty. It is very noble and admirable and beautiful, and then of course profoundly sad underneath it. But it's why I say, if this had happened in the United States, I think, for instance, if three mile island had exploded in this regard, I think what would happen is that we would have evacuated the area very quickly and then just, I don't know, put a rope around a large section of the middle Atlantic and said no one can go there anymore and we're, because we can't send people in because they'll die. Right. And that would have been it. Yeah. And this will come up again in later episodes, exactly how this either insane self-sacrifice, this brainwashing, this extraordinary nobility, there are a hundred ways of looking at it, played an extraordinarily important role. Let's turn right now though to the opposite, which are the managers of the plan. Sure. You can't off, you can't off, you can't off. And Foment. Yeah, Foment. I mean, I have to learn all these pronunciations. Yes, and we'll work on it. And these guys, unlike some of the other characters you've been talking about so far, these seem familiar. The Soviet Apparachic. The guys who care nothing about anything except their stature, the fear of what's coming from above and their contempt for the people who were below them. Yeah, there's a little bit of that going on for sure. I suppose there's a lot of it going on. I mean, a little background on those guys, some things that I did not include but are interesting facts nonetheless. Victor Bruchanov did not really come from a nuclear power background. He was in the power industry. Of course, who was put in charge of these things wasn't generally a question of merit. And just so that people don't think that I get into unnecessary Soviet bashing, we have this problem everywhere. Victor Bruchanov was certainly a classic Soviet bureaucrat. Foment was a more interesting character in many ways. Foment was there working as essentially the head nuclear physicist supervising the entire thing. And then you had individual deputies like Diattlova or this guy, Sitnikov, who shows up later. But Foment essentially is kind of the head scientist of Chernobyl. Foment got his degree in nuclear physics throughout essentially a mail order school. So Foment was not trained as a nuclear physicist at all. He got that mail order degree essentially to check a box so that he could get this job. Once again, a certain kind of patronage and loyalty system in place. Foment was a very sad character. He had been in a car accident that had really, I guess it had infected him deeply. He had gone through a long depressed state. He had finally come out of it. And I think he saw an opportunity to perhaps do better for himself at Chernobyl, which again did not have the connotation that it does now. It's just a place. It's just a place. But one thing that is true, and we'll get a little bit more into Bruchanov in particular, who I also think in many ways was in a very difficult spot. Because I try and understand. We'll get more into those guys in a later episode. But in this episode, I think the important thing to understand about those two guys is, they were told something by Diyalov. Right. They were told that this was not a nuclear core explosion, that the core was fine. They were also told that radiation was three points in Rondkin per hour. I think they probably knew that that number was weird. Yeah. Because strangely specific, strangely specific, it turned out to be maximum reading on those low-limit decimeters. And they chose immediately to believe it. And I think in a very Soviet way, once they bought into that and reported that up the chain, the inherent cost to reversing and saying, I'm sorry, we got that wrong, was massive, almost unthinkable. And there's a moment Bruchanov says, I've got a call and tell my boss about this. I'm not gonna, I don't wanna do that. And there is that moment of almost relief when Diyalov says to them, oh no, it's fine. And they're like, well, if you're saying it's fine, then I can report that it's fine, and it will be on you. Correct. Which is interesting and terrifying, because at no point do they ever seem concerned with the actual truth. They just wanna know that they're not going to be in trouble. Yes, I think once they had a sense that it was not the impossible, but rather the possible and the mundane. It's very bad, by the way. Yeah. At that point, everything becomes about managing the outcomes for yourself. There's no concern about the outcome for the world. So Diyalov has to call his superior, they have to call their superiors. And that point where Bruchanov explains to the local executive committee, the chain of phone calls that has occurred, that's real. Yes, so that's what happened. There was a series of phone calls over the course of the night that eventually make their way to Gorbachev. Really? Yeah, that's how it worked. I call you, you call him, he calls him, he calls him, and he calls Gorbachev. Right. One by one by one. Each one of them decides, how can I kick the substairs, and each one of them repeats a lie that they do not yet know as a lie, that essentially was conceived seconds after the explosion by a desperate man who was incapable in a very human way of entertaining the thought that the impossible had occurred. Right. There's a scene in the episode where the local committee, as you say, comes into the plant, they're in the plant, in fact, you'll be safe here, guys, don't worry. And there's almost a moment where a younger member of the committee says, wait a minute. I've seen things outside, I've seen the fires, I've seen the rubble, there's been a major explosion you're lying. All right, first question, did that really happen? Sort of. So the executive committee does come to that bunker. They do assemble there. And what we know from the record, by the way, is an excellent book that just came out called Midnight Internoble by Adam Hickomboth, in which I wish it had been around when I did, because there's a lot of interesting details from that that kind of illuminates some of these things. What we know about that executive committee was that there were essentially two competing thoughts. One of them was the kind of what I call the Soviet obsession with alarmism. So anything that came close to approaching bad news was just dismissed as alarmism. It was literally put into, it's like the Soviet version of fake news. I don't want to believe what you just said. Therefore, I'm putting it in the category philosophical mistake. Right. Then there were people within the executive committee who were very concerned and believed that this was much worse than it was. So what I essentially did was personify those two positions between a younger member of this group. And an older member, I thought it was important to remind people particularly in the West that in 1986, there were still members, functioning members of the Communist Party who had been alive during the revolution. They were believers. They knew Lenin. They had seen him. Right. This was not some kind of strange cult that had been separated from its religious founder by thousands of years. This was fresh. And I wanted to show how that functioned because it was still very much a part of their lives. Right. So there's the characters, Yarkov, the oldest committee member who's sitting in the corner, Game of Thrones fans may recognize him from Winterfell, because Mastro Lewin. And he gets up and he makes a speech. He points out that the real name of the Chernobyl power plant is the Lenin power plant. Or he makes a speech about the Soviet ideals and how this is how we do things in the Soviet Union. But what was interesting was, the point of his speech was not we will now fight for the fatherland and we will not sacrifice ourselves. But the point of his speech is, we are going to keep this secret. That is the correct Soviet response. We seal off the city. No one leaves and cut the phone lines and tame the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor. Yes, comrades. We will all be rewarded for what we do here tonight. This is our moment to shine. That is in fact what they did. And there were people, as in the, I guess you'd call, a prepient leadership who felt strongly that the first thing you do in any situation like this, is cut the phone lines. Those literally their first move, cut the phone lines and don't let anyone enter out. The most important thing was to avoid the spread of a panic. Right. So when I read that, it occurred to me that on some level, if you are part of a power structure that you understand is suppressive in a way and that you are limiting people's freedoms in a way, you must be aware that there could be a spark that could lead to the truth spreading and people realizing and finally shaking off their shackles and saying we're not gonna be a part of this anymore. That is essentially how the Berlin Wall came down. On some level, they must have all been aware that the Soviet Union was being glued together by a certain kind of magic and they were not wrong because it was not long for the world. The Soviet Union would be gone in five years. So when something like this happened, they said cut the phone lines and no one comes and no one goes because if this spreads, who knows? There's an interesting contradiction which, or well, explained really with double think in which they've decided simultaneously that there's nothing wrong and no reason to worry and also no one is ever going to know about this. Correct. And they were capable of proceeding, it seems as if both were true. And that is extraordinary. Yeah. They, I think, had a sort of a default position that anything that was counter to the story they had told their own people and the rest of the world simply could not be publicized or no one could know. Now, I think they knew probably that the rest of the world laughed at them. I think that the Soviets had a deep insecurity. There's a great line in a later episode, which I'll give away now, where somebody says, to somebody who wants to tell the truth about Chernobyl, he says, you want to humiliate a nation that is obsessed with not being humiliated. And that I thought captured this whole attitude quite well. Well, they, inside the Soviet Union, I think, it was, there was probably more of a sense that people needed to believe those things. And yes, the citizens were not stupid. They understood that there were great limitations to the system. But many of them, more of them, I think that people understand were kind of active believers. They believed that the West was decadent. They believed that their system was something worth saving. I want to go through a couple of things for episode one before we leave it behind. And they're basically all part of my really list. Yeah, let's do it. Really the firefighters walked right up to the burning pile and sprayed an open nuclear reactor with water. Really. There are some even some details that I did not include. Some of them didn't have their jackets. And so they were just there in a t-shirt. A couple of them didn't have helmets. There are a number of stories from that night that are shocking that we just didn't have time for. But that's exactly what happened. They were told, essentially, there's a roof fire. And in the first episode, you hear that little, you know, whatever the, it's not a 9-1-1 call. I don't know what the, what 9-1-1 was. But that's the actual audio from that night. And you can hear them saying, yeah, you got to get down there. There's a roof, the roof's on fire. That's it. They just thought it was a roof fire. And they showed up without any protection, which by the way, they didn't have any way. Right. And they fought that fire all night. And they did get incredibly close. And one of the firemen did pick up a piece of graphite in his hand. This is graphite from the core of a nuclear reactor. Right. And most of the deaths that occurred directly because of the radiation of that night were experienced by those men. And I think there's at least one reported one firefighter who said he reported saying, I said to everybody, it'll be amazing if any of us are alive by morning. Sometimes it's hard to tell if that's a little bit of a kind of revisionist history on people's parts. But we do know that a number of them reported tasting metal. Yeah, which is, I'm assuming a real thing that happens around intense radiation. It is a real thing apparently that happens around intense. There's not a lot of experience with this. Right. There have been a couple of incidents. This was the worst of them by far. Right. Yeah, but that really happened. And they really didn't tell anybody. They didn't evacuate the town. They didn't notify anybody. The episode ends with everybody waking up the morning after the explosion and going off to school and work. Yeah. So backing up for a second, the appropriate was about as close to what the Soviets had promised people as you could get. It was fairly utopian. These cities were called Adam cities. They were constructed to support, obviously to supply employment at the power plants, but also to then support those people around them. They were considered very, very desirable places to live unlike other regions where you would have shortages of food and supplies. The markets were stocked. There was no waiting in line. It was a reward to live in a place like this. So the accident occurs at 123 in the morning. By sunrise, you begin this the day of April 26. Not only were they not told throughout that entire day, there was a wedding. People were just walking around in the streets. It was a lovely day. One man, these are stories that I didn't include just for a time. One resident appropriate chose to get on the roof of his building to do some sunning. He got pretty sick. I don't know if he made it or not. They didn't keep great records, as you might imagine. But yes, that is a fact. They were walking around under a cloud of smoke billowing from an open nuclear reactor all day long. Right. At the end of episode one, does anybody know how bad this is? Other than the people inside the plant who have actually seen the open core. No, nobody knows. No. And yet we know we've seen the burns. We've seen the core. We've seen, and maybe the last thing I'll ask you about in episode one, is that beam of light heading upwards. That's Trinonkov. Well, I'm terrible with Russian. We found out that Charenkov actually turned out it wasn't the Charenkov effect. And that's another one of those little moments where the outlove engages in a strange denial. I don't think, I love, I don't think specifically said that that light was that although that was something that a lot of the scientists in the early hours were saying, oh, that light can happen with minimal radiation. But what that light was, that blue light, which was described by a lot of people and described as quite beautiful, was essentially the ionization of the air. The radiation was so intense, it was breaking the oxygen molecules apart. And creating this color, it was probably one of the things that drew a lot of the citizens appropriate to that bridge. That really happened. Yeah, they did that. They all stood there in this bridge and they all watched correct. How far away were they? About a kilometer. And that goes directly to another thing that I really struggled with, which was how little people knew about radiation. They simply didn't know. If you were I, were somewhere and someone said, oh, there's a fire at a nuclear power plant. It's not, but it's not the course, it's just a fire. You want to go see, we would say, no. Are you insane? I'm going to drive in the other direction. But they didn't know. There's a building in Pripyat that has a slogan on it that basically refers to the friendly atom. And they also believed that if there was anything that you, I mean, one of the characters mentions this thing about vodka, that's true. They believed that vodka essentially would decontaminate you of any kind of ill effects of radiation. If only. It is odd that the tone of the episode weirdly is almost out of a horror movie. In that people are going about their business in the way that people in horror movies do. And there's a horrible monster that is hunting them and killing them and they don't even know it. And it seems almost as if we as the viewers are put in their place that there's something terrible going on. You can't see it, but it's getting you. And there's so many moments in this episode which are equivalent to watching a harm movie. Like, don't go through that door. And yet they go through the door. Yeah. And those moments are all true. And on that note, we'll find out what happened both in terms of what led to this accident and what happened to the people who we've now just met. And subsequent episodes, episode two of Chernobyl airs next Monday, 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO. This is Peter Saga. I'm talking with Craig Maizen, the creator, producer and writer of Chernobyl. You can always listen to this podcast, review and rate it via Apple podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, wherever else you might choose to get your podcasts. Hey, how about the NPR1 app there out there? You can also listen to it via YouTube or the HBO Go and HBO Now apps. Once used for TV, now used for podcasts, I think it's evolving. Craig, thank you so much. This has been fascinating and not a little terrifying. Thank you, Peter. I can assure you it gets worse. Too near next week for even more depressing stories of real life disasters. When life gets unpredictable, preparation matters. In medicine, it's all about staying alert. Ready for whatever comes through the door. On the road, it's no different. This is why Volvo designs vehicles to help anticipate risk, reduce harm and protect lives. The Volvo XC90's advanced safety systems inspire confident decisions wherever the road takes you. The Volvo XC90 for life. 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