Chernobyl: The Meltdown of the Soviet Union

In Citizen X, a 1995 film about Andrei Chikatilo, eventually convicted in 1992 of the murder of fifty-two women and children in the USSR, Lieutenant Viktor Burakov cannot persuade the provincial Committee for Crime that they have a serial killer in their midst. He is told, “We have no serial killers in the Soviet Union.” This kind of aberration, he is informed, is associated with Western moral corruption. The political resistance to reality resulted in an eight-year delay in Chikatilo’s eventual capture and dozens of preventable murders.

In the recent HBO series Chernobyl, about the nuclear disaster of 1986, the Russian bureaucracy will not accept at first that they’ve had a catastrophic failure of one of their prestigious “Peaceful Atom” nuclear facilities. A party apparatchik says, “The official position of the state is that global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union.”

Joe Dolce’s reviews appear in every Quadrant.
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