Anti-Panic: On Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices from Chernobyl"

Svetlana Alexievich | Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster | Picador | 2005 (orig. 1997) | 256 Pages | trans. Keith Gessen

Every crisis is a hassle. 

We rightly forget this much of the time. In the wake of a real disaster, annoyance is overshadowed by worry, fear, and harm. Damage has been done or avoided. Grief or relief take precedence. The surge of adrenaline incited by a crisis swallows up our more petty grievances even as the crisis breaks a life in two around itself: What I did before and what I have to do now.

This all happens in hindsight. Ahead of time we feel the vexation more acutely, anticipating the difference between before and after and praying to keep it as small as possible. It's this impulse that leads us to wait out the storm, to fight the fire ourselves, to downplay the warning signs that will come to seem obvious. By dealing with an emergency as quickly and as simply as possible, or by denying that a situation is an emergency at all, we convince ourselves that we'll make the return to normalcy that much easier. This is anti-panic. In Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, it is the simplest and most devastating reason that people tried to stay behind on the land poisoned by the nuclear accident. 

After the initial explosion, the Chernobyl disaster unfolded in slow-motion. No storm clouds gathered on the horizon, no wall of fire swept over the land. The danger of the radiation pouring from the damaged reactor was only visible in the ways the world reflected it back, the same way we can see what gravity does but not what it is. The disappearance of beetles and worms. White spots appearing throughout a vegetable plot. The combs of hens turning black instead of red. These changes were easier to recognize than the impact on a person. Depending on where in the impacted zone a family's house sat, every hour that remained could have, and indeed had, far-ranging consequences for their health.

Each of the unnamed voices in Alexievich's book can be plotted on a quadrant matrix of knowledge and action: what it knew and didn't know, what it did and didn't do. Some of those presented were never told that the flaming nuclear plant was dangerous but left anyway as part of larger evacuations or because they sussed out the danger themselves. Other people were told it was dangerous and so left because they believed whoever it was that was telling them, be it their friendly neighborhood nuclear scientist or a relative who had heard it from an in-law who had heard it from a neighbor. A third segment wasn’t told it was dangerous––rather quite the opposite––and stayed, even as markets refused to stock their goods and armies of conscripted soldier workers were brought in to slaughter their animals or bury their topsoil.

The fourth grouping was people who were told it was dangerous but stayed anyway, or tried to until forced them to leave by their own families or representatives of the state. Alexievich's multitude of speakers present many reasons for wanting to stay: A sincere belief in their own invulnerability to radiation or the curative powers of vodka to protect them from it. A deep and irreplaceable connection to the land that made abandoning it inconceivable. But the most interesting, most oft-recurring explanations are those of the people who just couldn't be bothered, for whom avoiding the inconvenience of the disruption was, at least at first, more important than removing themselves from harm's way. The impulse was for normal life to go on, even in the face of mass evacuations and officials in suits and masks and soldiers all but scorching the earth as part of the clean-up efforts:  

 "My good husband got home from the collective farm meeting and says, 'Tomorrow we're being evacuated,'" says a speaker in one of Alexievich's choruses, where a list of names of those interviewed is given but individual quotes are not attributed. "And I say, 'But what about the potatoes? We haven't dug them up.'" 

This is anti-panic. It's separate from external efforts to smother hysteria, a man yelling "Remain Calm!" through a bullhorn or a politician reading off bullet points as soberly as possible. Anti-panic is the inertia of the mundane, the restraining power of everyday life hoping to keep us from leaving it behind and entering crisis mode. After Chernobyl, it was a woman asking a journalist to look in after her cottage because it was time to harvest her vegetable garden or a wedding with guests and a band allowed to proceed in part as a propaganda victory.

Anyone who's ever smelled smoke and tried to rationalize it away knows that there's an opposing force there that isn't a measured response to a potential threat, but rather an irritation in the face of the possibility of disruption. Our minds resist flipping that switch because once we have entered crisis mode there's no time for anything but resolving the crisis, and we'd rather be doing other things, whether it's tending our potato patch or streaming the rest of Season 2 of whatever we're watching that week.

Alexievich writes (recounts; reports; chronicles…),

"Within a couple of months, it all seemed normal, it was just your life," said Alexander Kudryagin, a clean-up worker. "We picked plums, trawled for fish. What amazing pike there were! And bream. We dried the bream to go with our beer. You've probably heard all of this before. We played football. Went swimming! Ha ha...Believed in fate; deep down we were all fatalists, not chemists. Not rationalists. The Slav mentality." 

There are good and correct reasons for forestalling panic. Sometimes the warnings are overblown; sometimes a level head is needed more than the adrenaline. The large friendly letters reading "Don't Panic" printed on the cover of the titular book within a book of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have resonated with generations of readers because it tends to be good advice, when it can be managed. 

But anti-panic is not the same as this. It's not a level head prevailing, even if the people emerging from their homes in a storm-battered municipality try to frame it as such post facto. Instead it's a head stuck in the sand emerging to find it hasn't been punished for its callowness. One woman tells Alexievich of, "Soldiers, just boys, with their boots off, their clothes off, lying on the grass, sunbathing. 'Get up, you morons, or you'll die!' They laughed: 'Ha ha ha!'"

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It's important to recognize the difference today, when so many of the world's spinning plates seem to be teetering on the edge of crisis. Climate change and the creeping authoritarianism infecting many of the world's most powerful democracies do not come heralded by shaking ground or a funnel cloud dipping from the sky. They are closer to Chernobyl, less obvious in their impact. If you aren't studying melting glaciers or being highlighted as Other and therefore problematic by those seeking power, then you experience these plights more as the accrual of effects upon the world than as the Big One lining up to take its shot. That sort of thing is easy to tend your vegetable patch through, not knowing or just ignoring the ways your world is being poisoned around you. 

"I've watched the film about the Titanic a few times, and it reminded me of what I saw with my own eyes," Gennady Grushevoy, a member of the Belarusian Parliament and chairman of the Children of Chernobyl Foundation, tells Alexievich. "I experienced it myself, in the early days of Chernobyl. Everything was just like on the Titanic. You had the bottom of the ship already pierced, this tremendous surge of water was flooding the lower holds, overturning obstacles. While up above, the lights are bright, the music is playing, champagne is being served. Families carry on squabbling, love affairs are being kindled. And the water is gushing up the staircases, into the cabins…"

We may debate and disagree over the necessary course of action these slow-burning predicaments require, but the simplest, most devastating failure would be to ignore the apparent challenges in the hope that life will go on as before. The crises are here, and wishing away their attendant hassles won't change that. This is no time for anti-panic.

This review is a part of our Classics and Society Series, putting classic books in conversation with the present.