Coming to Terms with the Soviet Myth of Heroism Twenty-five Years After the Chernobyl’ Nuclear Disaster: An Interpretation of Aleksandr Mindadze’s Existential Action Movie Innocent Saturday

Title: Coming to Terms with the Soviet Myth of Heroism Twenty-five Years After the Chernobyl’ Nuclear Disaster: An Interpretation of Aleksandr Mindadze’s Existential Action Movie Innocent Saturday

Author: Johanna Lindbladh

Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)

Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, Soviet Union, film, reception, Chernobyl’, nuclear accident, Mindadze, Innocent Saturday, myth of heroism, existentialism, Bakhtin, non-alibi in Being

Abstract: This essay presents an analysis of the Russian director Alexandr Mindadze’s feature film Innocent Saturday, released precisely 25 years after the Chernobyl’ accident in Ukraine.  In a comparative study between the Russian-speaking and non-Russian-speaking reception of the film, I will show that the philosophical dimension, depicting Chernobyl’ not as a “great” historical, technological event, but in terms of how it affected peoples’ minds and feelings, constitutes the main theme in the Russian reception, but is more or less absent in the non-Russian-speaking reception. Building upon this divergence in reception, I will further explore the theme of Soviet heroism in a hermeneutical analysis of the film. My conclusions are that Mindadze, in depicting a hero who “does not escape”, points towards the existential impossibility of “escaping from your own self”, thus challenging not only the rules of an action movie, but also the Soviet myth of heroism, still a politically intense debate in the former Soviet Union.

URL: http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2002/1965

Approaching the Void – Chernobyl’ in Text and Image

Title: Approaching the Void – Chernobyl’ in Text and Image

Author: Andrea Zink

Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)

Keywords: documentary (works of art), (inapt) comparisons, questions, perplexity, nothingness

Abstract: How, if at all, can the worst-case scenario nuclear accident be represented artistically? Chernobyl’ poses problems for writers, visual artists and film makers alike. For all the eventfulness of the first days and weeks following the accident, the area now seems devoid of life and activity. Nevertheless, the documentary prose writers Jurij Ščerbak and Svetlana Aleksievich, the photographer Robert Polidori and the documentary film maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter have managed to capture in text and image the events of 26 April 1986 and their consequences. Above all, they convey the sense of shock and helplessness that reigned following the accident. They achieve this by working with monologues, underscoring the isolation of those affected, subverting supposedly apt comparisons (for example with the First World War) and revealing the emptiness of existence through a carefully calculated silence.

URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2007

Chernobyl in the eyes: mythology as a basis of individual memories and social imaginaries of a “Chernobyl child”

Title: Chernobyl in the eyes: mythology as a basis of individual memories and social imaginaries of a “Chernobyl child”

Author: Svetlana Bodrunova

Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)

Keywords: mythologization of culture, social myths, Chernobyl disaster, Chernobyl children, social memory

Abstract: Some five to seven years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, a whole culture of helping “Chernobyl children” grew in the regions most affected by the radioactive fallout, fuelled by the presence of several international charity bodies such as the Red Cross and national charities of some Western countries. For the generation of Belarusian children who travelled abroad via ‘health trips’, this activity was both a positive and a traumatic cross-cultural experience that contributed to the growth of the Chernobyl mythology and subculture. Based on personal memories of the author’s five trips to Germany, France, and Italy, evidence given by her friends and relatives interviewed on their travels to Germany and Italy, as well as on the content analysis of online communities in the biggest Russian-speaking social network Vkontakte, the author argues that all aspects of living in the Chernobyl-affected area, which was subject to the special care of both domestic and foreign authorities(including the ‘humanitarian aid’ aspect), were (to varying extents) based on a Chernobyl mythology that played a big role in constructing the “Chernobyl zeitgeist” for the young inhabitants of the “zone”.

URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/1994

Ordinary Tragedy: “Perestroika” of Collective Memory about Chernobyl Disaster in Belarusian History Textbooks

Title: Ordinary Tragedy: “Perestroika” of Collective Memory about Chernobyl Disaster in Belarusian History Textbooks

Author: Andrei Dudchik, Marharyta Fabrykant

Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)

Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, perestroika, Belarus, discourse, narrative, biopolitics, collective memory.

Abstract: The paper focuses on discursive strategies that are used by authors of history textbooks to construct Belarusian collective memory of Chernobyl disaster within the more general narrative framework of the historical legacy of “perestroika”. Discourse and narrative analysis of the relevant chapters of five secondary school and nine university textbooks of the time period between 1995 and 2011 has revealed two distinct discursive strategies within a common narrative framework. First, the “organicist” discourse positions Chernobyl disaster as a threat to the Belarusian gene pool and thus invokes the sociobiological version of ethnic nationalism within biopower and biopolitics discourse. This strategy emphasizes the preserver of collective memory as a passive sufferer. The second, opposing strategy presents the Chernobyl disaster as one of the initial conditions, rather than the consequence of the preceding historical period, and offers a role of active struggler. Both strategies construct collective memories of tragedy as a form of historical continuity.

URL: https://www.scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/1998

Chernobyl’s Aftermath in Political Symbols, Monuments and Rituals: Remembering the Disaster in Belarus

Title: Chernobyl’s Aftermath in Political Symbols, Monuments and Rituals: Remembering the Disaster in Belarus

Author: Tatiana Kasperski

Reference: The Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol 30, No 1 (2012)

Keywords: Belarus, Chernobyl accident, nuclear disaster, memory, politics

Abstract: In spite of the still on-going health and environmental impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, this tragic event occupies only a minor place in the present-day political life of Belarus, the former Soviet republic most affected by the radioactive fallout. To understand the apparent weakness in public memory of the disaster, this paper provides an analysis of several kinds of commemorative events that have been organized by opposition political forces and by state officials since the end of the 1990s, and of the monuments dedicated to the Chernobyl accident in Belarus. It shows how these different forms of memory contributed to the erasure of the specific meaning of the accident by framing the disaster’s past in terms of a tragedy among other national tragedies, and by reducing it merely to a tool to attack political opponents and legitimize one’s own aspirations to power or by suggesting this past should be overcome as soon as possible.

URL: http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/2000

Immigrants from Chernobyl-affected areas in Israel: the link between health and social adjustment

Title: Immigrants from Chernobyl-affected areas in Israel: the link between health and social adjustment

Author: L.I Remennick

Reference: Social Science & Medicine Volume 54, Issue 2, January 2002, Pages 309–317

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(01)00030-2

Keywords: Israel; Chernobyl; Radiation exposure; immigrants (from Chernobyl-affected areas); Cumulative adversity, health effects, social adjustment

Abstract: The concept of cumulative adversity is a useful tool in the study of migration under chronic stress from past traumas. Drawing on this concept, the study explored long-term health and psychosocial effects of past radiation exposure among survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster who immigrated to Israel during the 1990s. Self-rated health status and indicators of social adjustment were compared in two groups of Russian immigrants: 180 persons from Chernobyl-affected areas and 200 immigrants from other areas of the former USSR. The semi-structured questionnaire was administered by Russian-speaking sociology students and analyzed by both quantitative and qualitative methods. In line with earlier research, both the somatic and mental health of Chernobyl survivors were significantly worse than in other immigrants of the same gender and age; a significant share of reported health problems were probably psychosomatic. Depression, sense of stigma and cancer-related anxiety were more prevalent in the study group. Immigrants from contaminated areas tended to use more health services (both conventional and alternative), but were less satisfied with their quality and providers’ attitude. The link between perceived health impairment and poorer social accommodation in the host country has been confirmed: Chernobyl-area immigrants experienced more severe occupational downgrading and were more disappointed with the results of their resettlement than other immigrants.

URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953601000302

http://www.impact.arq.org/doc/kennisbank/1000011072-1.pdf

Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city

Title: Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city

Author: Paul Dobraszczyk

Reference: City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Volume 14, Issue 4, 2010, pages 370-389

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.496190

Keywords: Chernobyl, urban apocalypse, industrial ruins, representation, cinema

Abstract: This paper offers a reading of urban ruin through a personal experience: a visit I made to the Chernobyl site in October 2007—first to the destroyed reactor and then to the ruined buildings of Pripyat, using my own photographs as documents. The paper situates this experience in the context of wider representations of technological ruin and the city. Pripyat may not be a city, let alone a metropolis, but its scale as a ruin is unique in the post‐war period. In the West, the ruined city usually only presents itself in fictive representations: that is, in literature and film and not in the flesh, so to speak. Experiencing the ruins of Pripyat may invite thoughts about the value, or otherwise, of industrial ruin; its unprecedented scale invites an altogether different meditation on the ruin of the city as a whole and perhaps, too, of civilisation itself.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2010.496190#.Ub6JDthLOM0

Chernobyl: Living with risk and uncertainty

Title: Chernobyl: Living with risk and uncertainty

Author: Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace, Professor Matthias Beck

Reference: Health, Risk & Society , Volume 8, Issue 2, 2006, pages 105-121

DOI:10.1080/13698570600677167

Keywords: Nuclear accidents, risk society, biographical disruption

Abstract: The nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 is a dramatic example of the type of incidents that are characteristic of a ‘risk society’. The consequences of the incident are indeterminate, the causes complex and future developments unpredictable. Nothing can compensate for its effects and it affects a broad population indiscriminately. This paper examines the lived experience of those who experienced biographical disruption as residents of the region on the basis of qualitative case studies carried out in 2003 in the Chernobyl regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Our analysis indicates that informants tend to view their future as highly uncertain and unpredictable; they experience uncertainty about whether they are already contaminated, and they have to take hazardous decisions about where to go and what to eat. Fear, rumours and experts compete in supplying information to residents about the actual and potential consequences of the disaster, but there is little trust in, and only limited awareness of, the information that is provided. Most informants continue with their lives and ‘do what they must’ or even ‘what they like’, even where the risks are known. They often describe their behaviour as being due to economic circumstances; where there is extreme poverty, even hazardous food sources are better than none. Unlike previous studies, we identify a pronounced tendency among informants not to separate the problems associated with the disaster from the hardships that have resulted from the break-up of the USSR, with both events creating a deep-seated sense of resignation and fatalism. Although most informants hold their governments to blame for lack of information, support and preventive measures, there is little or no collective action to have these put in place. This contrasts with previous research which has suggested that populations affected by disasters attribute crucial significance to that incident and, as a consequence, become increasingly politicized with regard to related policy agendas.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698570600677167#.Ub5-XdhLOM1

Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl: Introduction

Title: Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl: Introduction

Author: Melanie Arndt

Reference: Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam; Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30 (1) Spring 2012

Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy, memories, commemoration, Belarus

Abstract: This special issue of AEER is dedicated to memories, commemoration practices, and representations of Chernobyl. The idea for the issue was born during the final conference of the international research project “Politics and Society after Chernobyl” in Potsdam, Germany, in April 2011.The conference took place barely a month after the tsunami and the following nuclear accidents in Japan and just a few weeks before the 25^th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

URL:http://scholarworks.dlib.indiana.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/viewFile/2009/1959

Chernobyl Stories and Anthropological Shock in Hungary

Title:Chernobyl Stories and Anthropological Shock in Hungary

Author: Harper, Krista M.

Reference: Anthropological Quarterly. Jul2001, Vol. 74 Issue 3, p114-123. 10p.

Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, Anthropological Shock, Hungary

Abstract: The Budapest Chernobyl Day commemoration generated a creative outpouring of stories about parental responsibilities, scientific knowledge, environmental risks, and public participation. ! examine the stories and performances elicited by the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1996. In these “Chernobyl stories” activists criticized scientific and state paternalism while engaging in alternative practices of citizenship. The decade between the catastrophic explosion and its commemoration coincides with the development of the Hungarian environmental movement and the transformation from state socialism Chernobyl Day 1996 consequently became an opportunity for activists to reflect upon how the meaning of citizenship and public participation had changed in those years as well.

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/toc/anq74.3.html