Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters: Graphic Novel

Growing up in Soviet Ukraine, “Genya” had to be part of the “1%.” That is not a demagogic reference to economic standing. It is an acknowledgement of the discrimination she faced because of her Jewish heritage. Plus, there was a nuclear catastrophe during her childhood. Yevgenia Nayberg illustrates her own graphic memoir of growing up Ukrainian in the fateful year of 1986 in Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters, which releases today in stores.

There will be no gruesome images of Ukrainian fire-fighters keeling over in sub-standard hazmat suits, because Nayberg wasn’t there to see it. She was “just” a kid, but Chernobyl still loomed large over her childhood.

In fact, Nayberg and her mother successfully found refuge in Russia with her aunt and cousin throughout most of the crisis mismanagement. However, they both returned to Kyiv earlier than most, so Nayberg could sit for her art school exam.

Indeed, her memoir still has much to say about the Soviet experience, especially her realization that nobody believed the state media. Obviously, that lack of trust made everything worse. Nayberg also gently but firmly documents the Soviet Union’s pervasive anti-Semitism. Consequently, Nayberg had to study and practice harder than anyone else, because only 1% of Jewish applicants would be admitted.

Of course, she was also a young girl dealing with school and her peers, so there are plenty of coming-of-age episodes that young readers will readily identify with. Just about any reader who had a youthful passion for art and drawing will relate to her as a character, even if they do not share her memories of sweeping her apartment with Geiger-counters.

Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad, Graphic Novel

All the alleged sins of the capitalist system were committed by the socialist Soviets when they constructed the V. I. Lenin Power Station, a.k.a. Chernobyl. Cut-rate materials were used, because of budget cuts. They did not even bother building containment domes, because safety was a secondary concern (if that). As a result, the project came in under budget and ahead of schedule, so it looked like a “win,” at least for a while. Then when disaster literally struck, the government tried to cover it up, regardless of the danger to average citizens. Readers take a deep dive into the worst nuclear disaster of all-time in Matyas Namai’s graphic novel (or graphic history) Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad, which is now on-sale.

Many people do not realize the Soviet Union also covered up what is now considered the third worst nuclear disaster ever at the Mayak Combine in 1957, but the rest of world did not hear about it until two decades later. Unlike other accounts of the mismanagement at Pripyak (dubbed “Atomgrad”), Namai spends a good deal of time on the construction, explaining how politics and propaganda demands trumped safety. In retrospect, having the same people responsible for agricultural collectives that produced famine shift to constructing nuclear power facilities sounds like a profoundly dangerous proposition.

Once again, nuclear scientist Valery Legasov and Party boss Boris Shcherbina play active roles in the response, but Namai casts them in a far less heroic light than the HBO miniseries. The cover-up is thoroughly documented, fully implicating Gorbachev himself. At every step, it was the average Ukrainians living in Pripyat and the surrounding areas who suffered the most.

Namai provides a detailed and methodical explanation of what happened at every step. It is a damning indictment of a government that valued ideology above all else. There can be no doubt after reading The Fall of Atomgrad that socialism kills.

Even though many historical figures appear (almost always unflatteringly) in Namai’s narrative, they are rarely developed as characters per se. Namai’s Chernobyl is text-heavy, but it does not read like a novel. Yet, it is still a gripping page-turner, in the grimmest way possible.

Voices from Chernobyl, on OVID.tv

When watching this documentary, the parallels between the Soviet Union’s response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Chinese Communist Party’s response to the Wuhan Covid outbreak look eerily comparable. Reports were covered-ep and whistle-blowers were silenced, resulting in thousands of deaths that might have been prevented. Yet, Nobel Prize winning oral historian Svetlana Alexievich’s book was not just an expose. It also thoroughly documented and expressed the love and grief of survivors. Luxembourgian filmmaker Pol Cruchten adapted her book with his artistically rendered documentary, Voices from Chernobyl, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

The words are spoken in French, but they are adapted from the Ukrainian and Russian of survivors—if “survivor” is the right term. Many widows of reclamation workers and fire-fighters remain in mourning years after the disaster. Alexievich also talked to a teacher, who explains how damaged her young students have been by the incident. Physically, they are under-sized and sickly, while psychologically, they are preoccupied with death. Counter-intuitively, she are her colleagues are oddly pleased to see any signs of traditional school children misbehavior, since it signals signs of inner life.

We also hear (or in many OVID viewers case, read in subtitles) the words of the chief of the Belarusian nuclear authority, who had cautionary reports regarding the Chernobyl disaster stolen from his office. Had the authorities acted on his warnings, it would have saved hundreds of lives—maybe thousands, but the Soviets preferred to pretend nothing was wrong, in hopes of avoiding an international propaganda disaster. The lives of thousands of Ukrainians were disposable towards that end. Remember, good old Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary at this time—you can see his rotting portraits abandoned throughout the wreckage of Pripyat Cruchten’s cameras capture.

Instead of talking heads, Cruchten superimposes the words of Alexievich’s interview subjects over scenes of ghostly Pripyat or carefully composed tableaux, symbolically representing the horrors of Chernobyl. Stylistically, it is a lot like experimental hybrid films, such as Scars of Cambodia or Into the Crosswind. Cruchten’s cast are more like interpretive dancers than traditional thesps, but there is definitely something acutely expressive about their screen presences.

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, on HBO Max

Technically, these tapes weren’t lost, they were suppressed. The Soviet Union wanted to document their nuclear industry’s “finest hour” in the face of crisis, like NASA’s response to Apollo 13. However, when it became glaringly clear how ineffective, dishonest and counter-productive their crisis management was, to the powers-that-were (ultimately, that was Gorbachev), the Party reverted to censorship and propaganda to bury the truth. James Jones assembled the newly recovered footage into a vivid step-by-step chronicle of the nuclear disaster, as it really happened, in Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, which premieres tonight on HBO.

Right from the start, the authorities’ disregard for human life is shocking apparent. We watch unprotected families allowed to visit playgrounds the day after the core melt-down and massive release of radiation. Several times, Jones contrasts footage of the oblivious citizenry with the desperate crisis management underway at the reactor.

This pattern would continue after the incident, when the Communist Party basically declared an end to Chernobyl-related illness by fiat, mandating all physicians diagnose resulting radiation sickness as “Radiophobia.” Jones also discovered damning footage of the under-equipped reclamation teams, who were dispatched to clean and close-down the V.I. Lenin Power Station with insufficient warning of the risks they were running. Viewers can make that judgement, because we literally see their superiors sending them out with a few sheets of lead strapped to their torsos (like “cannon-fodder,” as one survivor puts it).

If anyone truly emerges as a villain in Lost Tapes, it would be Gorbachev, who lied to the world and to his people about the severity of the disaster, at great cost to Russian and Ukrainian lives. Far from the Soviet Nuclear bureaucracy’s “finest hour,” the incident almost blew up into a global catastrophe. Instead of slowing the reaction, an ill-conceived plan to drop sand on top of the reactor nearly caused it to collapse into earth beneath. There is a reason why the former General Secretary consistently polls so low in Russia.

Chernobyl 1986: The Abyss

Ironically, the heroes of this big Russian patriotic tearjerker are Ukrainian. That is what you call people who were born in Ukraine and subsequently lived there. Of course, at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, but not by choice. Regardless, a Ukrainian fireman saves the USSR from utter and complete catastrophe in Danila Kozlovsky’s Chernobyl 1986 (a.k.a. Chernobyl: Abyss), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Played by the director himself, Alexey Karpushin was a hot-shot Tom Cruise-ish fire-fighter, who just resigned from Pripyat fire department, so you know what that means. He hoped to finally figure out his relationship with local hairdresser Olga Savostina and the son he only recently learned he had. Instead, he rushes to extinguish the fires at Chernobyl reactor #4, in what turns out to be a doomed effort.

Unfortunately, the little Savostina ragamuffin was passing by the plant just when the initial explosions happened, so he received a dangerous dose of radiation. Karpushin tries to be there for the family that is not ready to acknowledge him, but he soon decides the best thing he can do is leverage his expertise to secure a place for his son in the special charter to Switzerland, for advanced radiation treatment. Wait a minute, the USSR sent priority patients to Switzerland instead of their close ally, the medical Mecca of Cuba? Surely, that can’t be right?

Kozlovsky’s 1986 absolutely pales in comparison to HBO’s gripping Chernobyl miniseries, in which writer-creator Craig Mazin masterfully documented every corrupt and incompetent step that led to the disaster and the iffy response, as well as the subsequent cover-up. In this case, co-screenwriters Elena Ivanova and Aleksey Kazakov call out some of the Party malfeasance (because how could they not?), but ignore the Soviets’ systemic efforts to obscure the truth.

Instead, we get plenty of the torturous (to watch) Karpushin-Savostina romance. It takes a full half-hour before disaster finally strikes, which is way too long in a disaster movie. Kozlovsky and Oksana Akinshina are both big-name Russian romantic leads, but they share less sexual chemistry than Trump and AOC (who are obviously both turned on by raw power). By the way, according to wiki, Akinshina referred to feminism as “the destiny of ugly women,” so it sounds like she got the memo from Russia’s boss of bosses.

Chain ’19: Motherland (short doc)

The Soviet state was determined to prevent the existence of this film (and many others like it). When disaster struck the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the primary goal of the socialist regime—led by Mikhail Gorbachev—was to contain the truth, rather than the damage. They did neither. Several survivors of various ages attest to this fact in Colby Blackwill’s short documentary, Motherland, which screens tomorrow during the 2019 Chain Film Festival.

As one survivor explains, her brother-in-law happened to be fishing when the explosions rocked Chernobyl, so he rushed home to evacuate their family. Fortunately, he had a good idea of what trouble at the plant meant and how the Party would respond. They were probably one of the last cars out, before the Soviets blocked the roads, trapping the rest of the city of Pripyat within reach of Chernobyl’s deadly radiation.

Eventually, some of the elderly citizens were allowed to return to their homes in the surrounding Exclusion Zone, despite the lack of electricity, running water, or basic services of any kind. Frankly, it was probably considered a means of “disposing” some of the refuges who became a troubling embarrassment to the Soviets. Yet, they continue to live on defiantly. In what might be the most poignant moment of the film, one such octogenarian “babushka” ruefully laments the likelihood she will outlive her grown children in their early 50s, because they have long exhibited signs of radiation-related sicknesses.

Motherland is not the definitive document on Chernobyl, but it collects some valuable oral history. Blackwill presents it with great sensitivity and takes the ribbing of one of the babushkas with good humor. There is plenty of truth to be found within, despite the Communist Party’s best efforts. Highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about Chernobyl after the terrific HBO miniseries, Motherland screens tomorrow (8/12), as part of a program of short documentaries at this year’s Chain Film Festival.

Sundance ’18: Un Traductor

Malin is a professor of Russian literature living under the Castro regime, so he ought to be well prepared to deal with tragedy. However, his specialty was quite in favor with his dictator (at least until the whole Glasnost business started), so he enjoyed perks under the corrupt system. Unfortunately, the bill will come due just before the plug is pulled on Russian aid. Assigned to translate for young victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster transported to Cuba, Malin will become overwhelmed by the enormity of their suffering, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else around him in Rodrigo & Sebastián Barriuso’s Un Traductor (a Translator), which screens during the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Malin is closely based on the Barriuso Brothers’ father Manuel Barriuso Andino and his contemporary art gallerist wife Isona is also modeled on their mother, Magda González-Mora. As the film opens, Malin and Isona do not let trifles like human rights and free expression trouble them, because they live well. It therefore comes as a rude shock when the Russian lit department is summarily closed and the faculty are assigned to serve as translators for the newly arrived Chernobyl patients. Malin really draws the short straw: night shifts in the children’s ward. He threatens to quit, but when told to “take it up with Fidel” he duly straightens up and toes the line.

Soon, Malin is leading a regular story-time. Not long after that, he starts to get deeply emotionally involved with the kids and their parents, especially young Alexi in the isolation ward and his school teacher father Vladimir. Meanwhile, with the cutting of Soviet aid, Cuban stores are now empty and Malin no longer receives gasoline vouchers—not that there is any gas left in filling stations anyway. The poor nutrition starts taking a toll on his son Javi’s health, but Malin hardly notices. He and the uber-pregnant Isona do not talk anymore, because he is so physically and emotionally exhausted.

Aside from Michael Moore, most grown adults now acknowledge the hype surrounding the Cuban medical system was really just hype. Still, it apparently beat the facilities available in both the USSR and Putin’s Russia, considering the Cuban Chernobyl program continued up through 2011. At times, the Barriusos clearly show a nostalgia for the Cuba Rodrigo never really knew. Yet, it is hard to gin up nostalgia for any of the circumstances surrounding the Chernobyl disaster.

Indeed, Un Traductor is not shy when it comes to playing on our emotions. There are an awful lot of sickly children in this film. Yet, the clear standout is Genadijs Dolganovs, who brings real dignity to the proceedings as Vladimir. His big climatic scene with Malin earns the inevitable lumps in the audience’s throats. Maricel Álvarez is also quite compelling as Gladys, the treasonous Argentine RN, who first busts Malin’s chops and then comes to respect his commitment. However, Brazilian international crossover star Rodrigo Santoro is problematically quite the cold fish as Malin and Yoandra Suárez’s Isona comes perilously close to a cliched scold.

In an enormously telling scene, Malin watches news footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, described as a “monument to socialist workers” or some such nonsense on the Cuban state news report, with conspicuous alarm. The fact that this was a triumph for human freedom and dignity is completely lost on him, and most likely the film. The truth is East Germans, Czech, Poles, and Hungarians do not look back on subsidizing Castro’s police state with much more fondness than the midnight knocks on the door and the invading tank columns. Frankly, the degree to which their economy depended on Soviet largess proves how dysfunctional the Socialist system was and remains. Decidedly mixed, Un Traductor should not be a high priority during the limited time of the festival, but for those with an abiding interest in the Chernobyl experience, it screens again tomorrow (1/22) in Provo and Friday (1/26) and Saturday (1/27) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance.

DOC NYC ’15: The Babushkas of Chernobyl

They saw starvation during the Holodomor, Stalin’s forced starvation of Ukraine and radiation sickness during the Chernobyl meltdown. The latter paled compared to the horrors of Stalin. Having persevered through Stalin’s terror, they were not about to let a little thing like radiation scare them off. Holly Morris & Anne Bogart visit several of the two hundred-some matronly survivors who returned to their once-abandoned homes in The Babushkas of Chernobyl (trailer here), which screens during this year’s DOC NYC.

The once bustling villages and mid-sized towns supporting the Soviet nuclear industry are now overgrown with weeds. Instead of a scorched wasteland, nature has largely taken back the so-called “Exclusion Zone.” According to PBS’s Nature, the wolf population has thrived in recent years. Considering their advanced age and vodka consumption, the “Babushkas” also seem to be doing relatively well. Valentyna Ivanivna attributes her longevity to the healing power of herbs, while Hanna Zavorotnya puts her faith in moonshine. They are probably both right.

Although the government still tightly controls access to the zone, they have semi-officially condoned the women’s recolonization, believing they will succumb to old age before the effects of radiation manifest in their bodies. It seems a quite reasonable position really. In contrast, Morris and Bogart also incorporate some of the video shot by the foolhardy thrill seekers venturing into the Exclusion Zone, often inspired by the Stalker video game. It is certainly fascinating footage to watch, but stupid as Hell.

Indeed, Morris and Bogart had to take a tag team approach to limit their exposure. We also get a series of timely reality checks from Vita Polyakova, a government guide, who shares the filmmakers’ affection for the Babushkas. Still, between the wolves and the returnees, you have to wonder if there are natural phenomena at work off-setting the effects of radiation.

Granted, the Babushkas are steadily passing away, but what can we expect. They survived the Holodomor, the National Socialist occupation, and in some cases terrible marriages. Frankly, their resiliency and ironic humor is impressive. They are almost as old as Bernie Sanders, but they have actually lived under the socialism he is so blindly devoted to. Perhaps we should listen to them when they tell us to keep plenty of moonshine and pig fat handy. Recommended for the rugged charm of its subjects and an intriguing view of a land few will visit, The Babushkas of Chernobyl screens this Wednesday (11/18) and Thursday (11/19) at the IFC Center, as part of the 20105 DOC NYC.

Sundance ’15: The Russian Woodpecker

If anyone has a right to be obsessed with Chernobyl, it would be filmmaker-set designer Fedor Alexandrovich. As a four year old child, he was evacuated from what is now the Exclusion Zone—and he has the radioactive material in his bones to prove it. Through his research, Alexandrovich pieced together a theory hypothesizing Chernobyl was not an accident, but a deliberate act of Soviet sabotage. At a time when the Russian military and their proxies are once again committing crimes against the Ukrainian people, Chad Gracia documents Alexandrovich’s deductions as well as the increasingly precarious state of Ukrainian national security in The Russian Woodpecker, which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

The titular woodpecker was a rhythmically regular radio signal that was thought to emanate from the old Soviet over-the-horizon radar station Duga-3, known to locals simply as the Duga. The Duga was massive and expensive, but it did not work very well. According to Alexandrovich, it would have failed a planned inspection, thereby causing great inconvenience for its high ranking sponsors, had events at Chernobyl not intervened. Can you see where he is going with this?

The Woodpecker ceased with the fall of Communism in 1989, but Ukrainians have recently started picking up an eerily similar signal. Like a prophet in the wilderness, the wild eyed and unruly coifed Alexandrovich had warned anyone willing to listen about the dangers of a resurgent neo-Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, his prophecies have been more vindicated than he would ever wish.

For obvious reasons, it is nearly impossible to untangle the tragic past from the perilous present in Woodpecker. While originally conceived as a short doc on the Duga and its annoying signal, the project expanded in scope due to the magnitude of Alexandrovich’s contentions and the relevance of current events. Those in Park City associated with the film are particularly worried about cinematographer Artem Ryzhkov, a war correspondent by trade, who was embedded with the unit hardest hit by the latest Russian orchestrated attacks.

The heavy significance that looms over Woodpecker makes it difficult to really enjoy Alexandrovich’s undeniable eccentricity, even before the multi-hyphenate artist starts to feel the heat as a high profile critic of Putin’s Russia. Essentially, Woodpecker begins as an idiosyncratic character study, evolves into a visually stunning tour of the Duga and the surrounding off-limits environs, and whipsaws into a real life chronicle of paranoia and defiance.

There are precious few documentaries that can compare to Woodpecker’s unclassifiable tone or its sense of urgency. Even if you do not fully buy into Alexandrovich’s theories, he and Gracia provide a great deal of Chernobyl background and context that will be new to most viewers. Highly compelling in an absolutely chilling kind of way, The Russian Woodpecker is definitely recommended for anyone interested in a fresh look at Ukrainian current events and recent history, The Russian Woodpecker screens again tomorrow (1/29) and Friday (1/30) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

SFIFF ’12: Land of Oblivion

On April 25^th, 1986, Pripyat was known as a model “Atomic City.”  Two days later, it was well on its way to being a radioactive ghost town.  The resulting physical and emotional damage done to the local Ukrainian populace is starkly dramatized in Michale Boganim’s Land of Oblivion (trailer here), which screens during the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

It rained on that fateful April 26^th, fixing the radiation in the area surrounding the nuclear power plant.  That was bad news for Pripyat, the bustling Ukrainian town built accommodate Chernobyl workers, but good for the rest of the world. 

Making a bad situation worse, many Ukrainians would needlessly perish because of the Soviets’ reluctance to admit the severity of the crisis.  One of them will be Anya’s new husband Pyotr, a fireman pulled away from their wedding reception for lethal duty at Chernobyl.  The disaster will also rob young Valery of his father Alexei, a safety engineer expressly forbidden from warning Pripyat residents of the deadly reality he understood only too well.  In contradiction of Soviet policy, he sends Valery and his mother away on the first train out of town.  Faced with the guilt and futility of the situation, Alexei rooms the streets of Pripyat, handing out umbrellas as certain death rains from the sky.

Ten years later, Anya has not moved on with her life.  She works as a guide, taking curious French tourists and grieving survivors on tours of the no man’s land that was once her home.  One of her groups includes Alexei’s widow and Valery, who has become an angry teenager greatly desiring some closure.

Shot on-location in the forbidden zone, Oblivion looks downright spooky.  It clearly suggests the upcoming Oren Peli produced Chernobyl horror movie should be scary as all get-out, even they do an only halfway decent job of it.  Frankly, watching Anya lead her busloads of gawkers is rather jarring.  Obviously, this job is profoundly unhealthy for her, but she remains psychologically tethered to the ghost town.

While Oblivion abstains from graphic depictions of the radiation sickness, it presents an unambiguous indictment of the Soviet authorities’ rampant CYA-ing and callous indifference to Ukrainian suffering.  Like the character of Anya, it somewhat loses its way during the early scenes of the 1996 winter story arc, but when Boganim starts following the wayward Valery through Pripyat’s desolate streets and abandoned buildings, the film achieves an air of surreal high tragedy.

Admirably understated, former Bond-girl Olga Kurylenko’s work as Anya, in her native Ukrainian, is remarkably assured and shrewdly modulated.  As Alexei, Polish actor Andrzej Chyra is also quite restrained, yet touching.

In her first dramatic feature, Israeli-born French documentarian Boganim balances the intimate and the ominous fairly dexterously.  Oblivion also boasts a distinctive soundtrack from Polish jazz musician Leszek Możdżer.  Refraining from his experimentations with “treated” pianos, his themes are surprisingly upbeat and swinging, but they help propel the audience through much of the on-screen grimness.  Often visually arresting, Land of Oblivion is a well produced film, definitely recommended, particularly for those fascinated by the Chernobyl disaster and the Soviet era in general, when it screens again this Friday (4/27) and Sunday (4/29) during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

AFA Goes Nuclear: Pripyat

The Soviet Union was always colorless under the best of circumstances, but the restricted zone around the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power station remains profoundly bleak. As a result, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s decision to film his Chernobyl documentary in black-and-white was a rather inspired aesthetic choice. Yet, there are more people working and even living in the no man’s land than one would expect a mere twelve years (at the time of filming) after the disaster. Geyrhalter talked to many of them in Pripyat (trailer here), which screens this weekend at Anthology Film Archives as part of a block of nuclear-themed film programming built around Volker Sattel’s Under Control.

Very little was under control at Chernobyl on the fateful day of April 26th, 1986. As a result, Pripyat, a bustling industrial community built to house plant workers, became a literal ghost town. Though most inhabitants were eventually evacuated, the Soviet response was widely criticized as incompetent and even counter-productive. In fact, many of the so-called “liquidators” would later succumb to maladies caused by their inadequate protection. However, some residents illegally returned to their homes, frustrated with the authorities inability to find them permanent housing. Indeed, there is not much to be said in the film for either for Soviet or the subsequent pre-Orange authoritarian Ukrainian governments’ handling of the health and environmental risks of the radioactive area.

Though the zone is not exactly over-crowded, Geyrhater & company seem to have little trouble finding the stray soul to speak with. Some are the recolonizers, predominantly senior citizens who are largely resigned to the potential health risks, but most were workers somehow connected to Chernobyl’s then still operational reactor number three (it was reactor four that experienced the fatal power surge). Frankly, the fact that Chernobyl was still in the fission business so long after the notorious accident will likely be a revelation to many viewers.

Geyrhalter’s silent panoramic shots of the abandoned city speak volumes. The black-and-white cinematography sans scored soundtrack fully captures the zone’s atmosphere of isolation and desolation. It is also somewhat unsettling to get a good look inside a still functioning Chernobyl reactor (not fully taken offline until 2000). Unlike the German plants filmed in Sattel’s Control or the nuclear waste storage facility featured in Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, the technology here definitely looks dated, resembling the buttons and dials of NASA films from the 1960’s.

Without question, Pripyat is a spooky film. However, with more passage of time, conditions for the surrounding environment have evidently improved greatly, at least according Klaus Feichtenberger’s Radioactive Wolves, recently broadcast on PBS’s Nature. Still, the fascinating existential oral history Geyrhalter collects clearly suggests the Soviet response should have been quicker, better organized, and more humane. Also a very artful documentary, Pripyat is an appropriate companion to Under Control, well worth seeing this Saturday (12/10) and Sunday (12/11) at the Anthology Film Archives.

Glow in the Dark Wolves

Driven to tame nature, the Soviet government declared war on wolves during its “land improvement” binges. Yet ironically, the Soviet Union’s greatest ecological disaster would eventually provide a safe haven for the wolves of Chernobyl. A group of German, Ukrainian, and Belarusian scientists track the apparently thriving wolf packs living around the notorious nuclear reactor in Klaus Feichtenberger’s Radioactive Wolves (promo here), the winner of the best habitat program award at the 2011 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, which kicks off the new season of Nature on PBS tomorrow night.

They really are radioactive. As a result, the scientists studying the wolves are limited in the amount of time they can spend in the wide no-man’s land surrounding Chernobyl and must take precautions not to ingest hair particles when interacting with the animals. Surprisingly, despite the initial devastation caused by the meltdown, the area has become a sheltered Eden for wildlife. As the top predators, the health of the wolves necessarily implies every creature below them in the food chain is also flourishing.

Radioactive largely follows the traditional format for nature films, mainly observing the wolves in their habitat and the scientists’ efforts to collar and examine them, with some explanatory narration from Harry Smith. However, it rather forthrightly addresses the Soviets’ massive assault on the environment, draining marshes to create a habitat-devastating system of canals. Nor does it paint a particularly flattering portrait of the Soviet response to the mounting Chernobyl debacle.

Feichtenberger and crew captured some truly striking images of the once bustling Pripyat ghost city, now reclaimed by the indigenous wildlife. Frankly, Radioactive is a somewhat bold production, because it largely undercuts the anti-nuclear campaign’s propaganda of scorched earth and lifeless wastelands as the inevitable consequence of nuclear power. Granted, humans cannot live in the zone, but nature has rebounded, reversing the damage of years of state economic planning.

Though twenty-five years have passed since the Chernobyl disaster, it is still too early for the scientists in Radioactive to make many sweeping conclusions. Still, it seems safe to say the reality is far better than nearly anyone would expect. Offering a rare opportunity to see an area where few humans will ever tread (much like the theatrical documentaries Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Into Eternity), Radioactive is exactly the sort of programming public television was intended to present. It airs this Wednesday (10/19) on PBS as part of the new season of Nature.

(Photos: Klaus Feichtenberger)