In the US, the journalist decided to show the series 'Chernobyl' to his stepfather - and accidentally found out that he was the liquidator

Glory Malamud is a Transnistrian mathematics journalist and teacher living in the United States. He tweets every episode of Chernobyl, his threads collect tens of thousands of likes, and the creator of the series Craig Mazin himself retweets them. Malamud decided to show the series to his stepfather - and accidentally found out that he was the liquidator of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which he never talked about - and now he does not want to remember. History describes Meduza.

Photo: shot from the official trailer for the Chernobyl mini-series,
YouTube / HBO

Slava Malamud was born in the city of Bender in the Moldavian SSR. He is now 45 years old, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland, teaches math at school and writes about hockey for the site The Hockey News.

I grew up in that part of Moldova, which is called Transnistria, now it is such an independent quasi-state. We emigrated to the USA at the beginning of the Transnistrian war - at the beginning of the 1990's - as refugees, I was then 17 years old. I worked for 13 for years as my own correspondent in North America for the Sport-Express newspaper, and now I sometimes write about sports, though more in English and in addition to my main job: I teach mathematics at school.

Photo: shot from the official trailer for the Chernobyl mini-series,
YouTube / HBO

I heard a lot about the Chernobyl series, then I looked when there was a long weekend in America, and decided to share [with readers on Twitter] my thoughts - not as an expert, but as a person who lived in that era who saw it all. with my own eyes; I have very vivid memories of her. I always watch Western movies and TV shows about Russian and Soviet life with a critical eye: they often misinterpret some events or confuse details. Say, the popular TV series “Americans”, which I really liked, there you could also find fault with some trifles. It is a little fun.

When I looked at “Chernobyl” (and 1986 is a very memorable year for me, I remember all these events well), it struck me how few things to complain about. This applies not only to the interior, clothing and so on - it is clear that people have worked very seriously on all of this. It's amazing how authentic characters are written out in terms of the mentality of the Soviet person - as far as possible for Western writers. As far as I know, the person who wrote this is an American, he has nothing to do with the USSR. Therefore, it is surprising how believable the characters and behavior of the characters.

On the subject: “Lift everyone!” - dispatchers talks in the first minutes after the Chernobyl explosion

And, of course, the details, there is an incredible amount of them. It is not even clear why they did it - after all, their target audience will not even notice it. I see that the license plate of the car in the frame is really the numbers of the Kiev region. Who will notice in America or in England? Therefore, it is amazing with what respect and meticulousness the creators of the series approached their work.

When I was a sports journalist, I was watching films like “Legend No. 17” or “Move up” because of the specific nature of the profession; and I could not understand: how is it possible, that there are very well documented events, many of whose participants are alive, and as a result, all the same, they misinterpreted the reality so much, and about their own country - not a stranger? Why do Russian writers do not respect their own history in the way that an American from Brooklyn respects her? My colleagues talked with the writers [of Russian films about sports], and they said: well, we are not making a documentary. But there is a difference between artistic assumption and frank misinterpretation of facts and details. It seems to me that Craig Mazin saw this border, and domestic writers intentionally overstep it, with some kind of personal motivation. It probably has something to do with politics or other messages that they want to communicate. But Mazin, who had no motivation to make his version of events, decided to make a product of exactly that quality by virtue of some of his convictions. (In a special podcastdedicated to the series, its creator Craig Mazin explained that the realism of the details is a tribute of authors to people who survived the Chernobyl disaster - approx. "Jellyfish".)

Photo: shot from the official trailer for the Chernobyl mini-series,
YouTube / HBO

At one time, I was impressed by the movie “Solo Voyage”, such a Soviet action movie about karate, in fact. There were American characters, they were mainly played by the Balts because of their “western” image. And as I remember now, there was an American general who played golf in a cap of the University of Iowa football team. That is, even then, Soviet directors could do such authentic things, give details that an ordinary Soviet audience might not recognize, but which work on a subconscious level, and you realize that before you really is an American - not a caricature, but a real one. And now they have some other priorities: they are not telling a real story, but some kind of their own. Even the example of these films about sports, about Kharlamov or about basketball shows how the director shows what it means for him, and not for the people who were there. Therefore, the characters are made of cardboard, descended from the poster, and foreigners - from caricature. In the first place comes propaganda, not art.

On the subject: CNN told about the most mysterious sights of the Chernobyl zone

And what Mazen does is true art. He moved to the heads of people from another country, from another era. It can be seen that the book by [Svetlana] Aleksievich made a big impression on him. (The story of the fireman's wife, Lyudmila Ignatenko, in the series - from the first chapter of the book Aleksiyevich “Chernobyl Prayer” - approx. "Jellyfish".) And in the penultimate, fourth, series, it is clear that the [Soviet] film “Go and See” had a great influence on him; a lot of frame-by-frame quotes are taken from there. I did not explain this in my thread, because for Americans the reference to “Go and see” surely will not say anything, but for me as a person who grew up in 1980-s, these quotes were clearly visible. For Meisin, this is the work of love, not the order of the Ministry of Culture — or how it works in Russia.

Shot from the fourth series of the Chernobyl series: the liquidators drop pieces of graphite from the roof of the fourth power unit.
HBO / Amadeatek

My stepfather, a retired lieutenant colonel Vladimir Weizman, who lives in the state of New York, is watching Channel One all the time, so I just wanted him to watch a normal movie. Here, I say, to you a film with a Russian dubbing, see what kind of Soviet military equipment there is. I was wondering how accurately they transferred the military uniform, he is an expert in this matter. And suddenly my stepfather declares to me: I was there, I don't want to look at it anymore. And I was somehow stunned, because he was not so secretive, he told about his service, as he served in the Far Eastern Military District, but he did not say anything about that.

It turned out that in May, 1986, two or three weeks after the explosion, he received a call and was alerted. And at first he didn’t even believe it, thought some kind of mistake. They said to him: raise all the chemical troops and advance to the Kiev region. And so he took there, to Pripyat, a detachment of liquidators from Moldova. And since he was from the senior commanders — he was then a captain in a major’s position, division commander — he was appointed deputy district commandant.

Photo: Malamud Family Glory Archive

It was May, the evacuation of villages around Pripyat continued. He was appointed responsible for the evacuation, he followed the dispatch of buses and caught marauders. There began a strong marauding: one village had already been taken out, the next one was not yet - people just came to an empty village and took everything they liked. He said that they all had a dose of 25 X-rays without even looking at the dosimeter: as he later realized, it was just the maximum dose [that could be collected for a business trip], and nobody knows how much they actually received. And if you are off scale for the maximum dose, then do not send you back, people need something.

Stepfather stayed there for only two or three weeks, and then he was sent back to Moldova, because at that time joint exercises of the USSR and the Bulgarian People’s Army were planned and they were decided not to cancel, so as not to give rise to unnecessary conversations. He was sent to lead the artillery battalion. He was lucky, of course, - the rest of the chemical army remained to be liquidated further [after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant], and he, as a senior commanding officer, was sent back to the exercises in Tiraspol.

My grandfather was a marine, he served in the Crimea and never told anything about the war, except for one occasion - when he got drunk at the end of 1980's. And his stepfather served in peacetime, but still he had some pretty hard memories of that. But he refused to tell about Chernobyl to someone other than me for a very Soviet reason: "I signed the document." Convictions that it was all a long time ago, that the Soviet Union no longer exists, did not act on him: “This is like an oath”

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