1:23:45 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Chernobyl Podcast

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Episode: 1:23:45

Author: HBO
Duration: 00:53:49

Episode Shownotes

April 26, 1986, Ukrainian SSR. Plant workers and firefighters put their lives on the line to control a catastrophic 1986 explosion at a Soviet nuclear power plant. Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss these events and more behind the series premiere of Chernobyl. They talk about what drew Mazin to

this story, and dig into when and why he deviated from what really happened. The Chernobyl Podcast is produced by HBO in conjunction with Pineapple Street Media. Original music by Kaan Erbay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of The Chernobyl Podcast, Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin analyze the catastrophic Chernobyl disaster, detailing the web of lies that contributed to the explosion and its aftermath. They explore themes of truth versus deception and the human cost of misinformation. Mazin discusses the artistic choices made in the miniseries to convey an accurate portrayal, and emphasizes the importance of authenticity for those affected by the tragedy. Key figures like Dyatlov exemplify denial in the crisis, while the actions of firefighters highlight the swiftly escalating consequences of the disaster.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (1:23:45) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_02
What is the cost of lies?

00:00:07 Speaker_03
It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?

00:00:28 Speaker_05
Hi, this is Peter Sagal. And I'm Craig Mazin. And I'm sitting with Craig to record the first episode of The Chernobyl Podcast, a podcast about the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which was written and created by Craig Mazin.

00:00:41 Speaker_05
The intent here is to talk with Craig about where the show came from, why he created it, the experience of making it, and how closely the docudrama, would you call it a docudrama? I guess so, a dramatic retelling of history.

00:00:56 Speaker_05
How closely it tracks real history, where it differs and why, and ultimately, why it was made at this time and place.

00:01:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, and of those many wonderful reasons to do this, the one that was most important to me from the jump...

00:01:12 Speaker_01
was a chance to set the record straight about what we do that is very accurate to history, what we do that is a little bit sideways to it, and what we do to compress or change, in no small part because the show is essentially about the cost of lies, the danger of narrative.

00:01:28 Speaker_01
and I didn't want us to, I guess, miss a chance for transparency if we had one. So, I've never actually heard this kind of thing before in relation to dramatic retellings of history, so I'm kind of curious to see how it all works.

00:01:43 Speaker_01
If people are horrified by this or enlightened, I don't know. I think they'll definitely be horrified.

00:01:48 Speaker_05
Speaking as someone who just recently saw the miniseries, what else happens, I think, is up to them.

00:01:53 Speaker_05
This episode of the Chernobyl Podcast concerns episode one of the Chernobyl miniseries titled 1-23-45, which, of course, was the reading on the clock when the explosion at Chernobyl happened. Let's start then with the beginning.

00:02:10 Speaker_05
You were, I'm guessing, around... or so in 1986 when this all happened? Maybe a little younger? I was younger.

00:02:17 Speaker_01
I was 15. Yeah, I was 15 years old. I remember it. I don't remember it quite as starkly as I remember the incident that occurred about three months earlier, which was the Challenger disaster. But I definitely remember that it happened.

00:02:32 Speaker_01
I remember that the entire world seemed concerned. It wasn't simply a local thing. And beyond that, it sort of devolved fairly quickly into a very simple notion. Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant, and it blew up. That's it.

00:02:47 Speaker_05
Right. I was a little older then, and what do I remember? I remember that Chernobyl blew up, it was bad, but it ended up being okay, and the Soviets lied about it.

00:02:58 Speaker_01
That's exactly right. And it's a bit of a shame that so much of the takeaway from that is that the Soviets lied and the Soviets created this system that would have led to that.

00:03:08 Speaker_01
All of which is true, and all of which is a large part of the story that we tell. Because it's an important part. What we did not get...

00:03:16 Speaker_01
on our side of the news was how, I like to say, this could have only happened in the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union could have solved this problem. What the Soviet citizenry did to sacrifice and solve was nothing short of remarkable.

00:03:32 Speaker_01
And we, in the West, I don't think had any sense of how multi-layered this disaster was, and how, in many ways, the explosion was really just the beginning of a series of events that are increasingly hard to believe.

00:03:48 Speaker_05
Well, yes. A lot of this podcast, just as a spoiler alert, is going to be me saying to Craig, -"Really?" And he'll say, -"Yes." And it was even weirder, presumably. In a number of cases. But let's start here.

00:04:00 Speaker_05
So this is what we knew about Chernobyl, it's what you know, it happened in your childhood, it happened in my young adulthood, we remember this, it happened, it went away. Then the Soviet Union fell a few years later, and we just forgot about it.

00:04:11 Speaker_05
If you would ask me,

00:04:13 Speaker_05
Before I started watching this series, what I knew about Chernobyl, I'd say, yeah, okay, that happened, and I know that there's a big concrete sarcophagus over it, and nobody can go near it, and it's kind of cool, I might have said, because people have been removed from the area around it, so there's been this weird kind of renaissance of nature, which is kind of nifty, and I've seen, you know, film of, like, deer leaping about.

00:04:35 Speaker_05
It's kind of nice. So, I would've, before this began, I would've said, that was a problem that happened 30 years ago and it's all over and there's really no problem when we kind of have this cool abandoned city, which is fun.

00:04:46 Speaker_05
Assuming that that's where you were before you started your exploration of the project, what started you on this exploration?

00:04:55 Speaker_01
I knew that Chernobyl exploded, but I didn't know why. And it struck me as such an odd lapse, because if you say to people, what happened to the Titanic, they'll tell you it sank. And if you say how, they'll tell you iceberg.

00:05:09 Speaker_01
Everybody knows it hit an iceberg. Nobody seemed to know offhand why and how Chernobyl blew up. So I just began to read. You know, one of those lovely evenings at home where you just start internetting yourself... into a coma.

00:05:25 Speaker_01
And I started reading and two things jumped out. And both of those things emerge in episode one, one of which emerges immediately. The first thing is that the night of the explosion, they were running a safety test.

00:05:40 Speaker_01
That's the kind of fact that any writer will stop and say, oh, okay, that is deeply ironic in the most disturbing of ways. Why?

00:05:52 Speaker_01
Well, if you're running a safety test and the result of the safety test is the least safe thing that could have ever possibly happened, you start to wonder what gap between intention and result existed here. How is that even possible?

00:06:10 Speaker_01
I can understand if you're, you know, in every submarine movie, there's the whole crush depth scene, you know? The whole point is to take this thing down and see how much it can take. All right, well, if it collapses in that scene, I get it.

00:06:24 Speaker_01
But if you're trying to just see, like if you're taking a car out for a spin and you've gotten to the section where it's not acceleration, it's braking distance, how does that make the car explode? What is going on there? So I found that shocking.

00:06:38 Speaker_01
And the second fact that grabbed me was that the man that was, in many respects, put in charge of the cleanup and the general, I call it a war, against the atom post-explosion was an academician named Valery Legasov.

00:06:53 Speaker_01
And Valery Legasov commits suicide two years to the day after the explosion. And that, of course, immediately gets me wondering why.

00:07:03 Speaker_05
So, when you're pitching this idea to HBO and Sky, how are you presenting it as something that people would want to and even need to watch?

00:07:14 Speaker_01
The way I like to think of it is, what is the relevance to everyone?

00:07:16 Speaker_01
I mean, ultimately, we can tell any particular story, but there needs to be some sort of universal relevance, or it just becomes a story in and of itself about the event, which, at that point, I refer to those things as homework.

00:07:30 Speaker_01
I'm not interested in making homework for people.

00:07:32 Speaker_01
The reason that I was compelled to write about Chernobyl was, I mean, in part because it was filling in these large gaps of a story that we all knew and yet didn't know, but primarily, it's because it is a story about the cost of lies.

00:07:49 Speaker_01
This is the first line of the whole show, and this is the theme that we are going to continue with as people watch these episodes.

00:07:57 Speaker_01
that when people choose to lie, and when people choose to believe the lie, and when everyone engages in a very kind of passive conspiracy to promote the lie over the truth, we can get away with it for a very long time, but the truth just doesn't care.

00:08:17 Speaker_01
And it will get you in the end. And the people that suffer, ultimately, are not the people that are telling the lie. It's everyone else.

00:08:25 Speaker_01
And that is where we start to see real truth in the behavior of human beings who are motivated to save their fellow man, their fellow woman, their loved ones. That's where truth is.

00:08:40 Speaker_01
And so, for me, and this, by the way, was before our entire planet seemed to become engulfed in a war on truth. For me, this was an important kind of story to tell about the value of truth versus narrative. Which, because we are, I think...

00:08:59 Speaker_01
As humans, we are so susceptible to storytelling. It's why we tell stories. We like them. Stories are sometimes very good ways of conveying interesting truths and facts.

00:09:12 Speaker_01
But just as simply, stories can be weaponized against us to teach us and tell us anything. So, of course, I choose narrative to tell an anti-narrative story. But that's why I think this is relevant now.

00:09:25 Speaker_01
Maybe more relevant now, in fact, yes, definitely more relevant now than it was when I started writing it. Which was, and I think we should just point this out, before the 2016 election.

00:09:34 Speaker_05
Yes, it was. It was, uh, I think I started in 2015 on the writing, yeah. Because I will say, speaking for myself, it's impossible to watch this miniseries

00:09:44 Speaker_05
with its tale of government malfeasance and lies and bureaucratic, let's just say, incentives, uh, taking the place of, shall we say, other motives, uh, without thinking about what's going on in America and across the world today.

00:09:59 Speaker_05
Let's talk a little bit about production, which covers the whole series, but becomes into play quite vividly in this episode, both in terms of its realism and its departures from realism. First thing, no Russian accents.

00:10:10 Speaker_01
Right. Yeah, big decision that we made early on.

00:10:12 Speaker_05
And what propelled that decision, and when did you make it, and what was the thinking?

00:10:16 Speaker_01
Well, we had an initial thought that maybe what we would do... We didn't want to do, you know, the Boris and Natasha. The Russian accent can turn comic with very little effort.

00:10:30 Speaker_01
So at first we thought maybe we would just have people do these sort of vaguely Eastern European sort of, you know, so if I'm talking like this, I'm not really doing a strong accent, but it's a little...

00:10:40 Speaker_01
And what we found very quickly was that actors will act accents. They will not act. They will act accents. And we were losing everything about these people that we kind of loved.

00:10:53 Speaker_01
Honestly, I think maybe after one or two auditions, we just said, okay, new rule, we're not doing that anymore.

00:10:58 Speaker_01
And I remembered there's a, I don't know if you ever saw this movie, it was an HBO film actually, called Citizen X. It was many years ago, Stephen Ray and Donald Sutherland. True story of a serial killer in Soviet Ukraine.

00:11:12 Speaker_01
And I recalled that there were accents all over the place. They had a South African accent, they had an English accent, they had an American accent. Some people were sort of trying, some people weren't.

00:11:20 Speaker_01
Max von Sydow shows up and just talks like his Swedish self. And it works perfectly fine, because they're not speaking Russian. So, I get it.

00:11:28 Speaker_01
Now, that meant no Americans, um, because I think for an American audience, the one thing that will pull you out of that is an American accent. That just sounds silly.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
But beyond that, yeah, we just, uh, we occasionally ask people to maybe take the edge off a little bit. You know, like in Game of Thrones, anyone from Manchester will be asked to push that a bit. So that they're free. They're the Northerners.

00:11:50 Speaker_01
They're clearly the Northerners. And we would sort of say, like, you know, take the edge off a little bit, but here and there, we would just let somebody be Irish or Scottish because they sounded great and their character was good.

00:11:59 Speaker_05
Right. And of course, as people are speaking to each other, there's no consciousness that they're speaking in Russian. They're just talking to each other. And so we're hearing them as they would have heard themselves.

00:12:10 Speaker_01
And that's really what we went for. And my hope is that the accent thing just fades away within seconds.

00:12:17 Speaker_01
You just stop caring about it because that's ultimately completely irrelevant to what was going on, which is essentially what goes on in all situations regardless of language.

00:12:27 Speaker_01
Panic, fear, love, excitement, you know, worry, all these things, just emotions.

00:12:32 Speaker_05
One thing that struck me as a guy who grew up with Boris and Natasha cartoons is that they all call each other comrade all the time. That almost struck me as like, you know, a parody of the Soviet Union.

00:12:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, it struck me as a parody of the Soviet Union as well, to the extent that I didn't really include that frequently in the initial drafts, but I did have some people who had grown up in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Ukraine, look through the scripts, one woman in particular,

00:12:59 Speaker_01
went through everything. And one of the things she told me, there were a couple of interesting things I remember.

00:13:03 Speaker_01
For instance, in the beginning of episode one, when Legasov puts food out for his cat, I just, you know, had him pouring cat food into the bowl. She said, we didn't have pet food. There's no pet food in the Soviet Union.

00:13:14 Speaker_01
You gave them the food you didn't want. So that was fascinating. But the other thing she said was, comrade was essentially the thing you would use to refer to people. It was the all-purpose reference.

00:13:26 Speaker_01
You wouldn't call people by their last names only, generally. If you wanted to be somewhat formal in a business-like manner, you would call them perhaps by their first name and their middle name, which is a patronymic, which is a whole...

00:13:38 Speaker_01
complicated... It's a whole other thing. It's a whole Megillah. It is a whole Megillah, as some people say.

00:13:46 Speaker_01
And I didn't want to get into, because the truth is, while that probably is the most accurate and authentic way to do it, it is unwieldy for English listeners.

00:13:55 Speaker_01
But Comrade or Tolarish was a very common just reference and people would use it all the time. And so she would occasionally flag things and say, no, that should be Comrade Shcherbina, not Shcherbina. And so I started putting them in.

00:14:09 Speaker_06
Right.

00:14:10 Speaker_05
Second question is production design and realism. I've now seen some photographs after seeing it, and it is pretty accurate what you've presented in terms of both the exterior, the interior of the power plant, and Pripyat itself, the city around it.

00:14:25 Speaker_05
I'm assuming you didn't actually film at Chernobyl and Pripyat. So, how did, briefly, how did the production crew go about recreating all this?

00:14:33 Speaker_01
Well, first of all, I would've. I would've shot at Chernobyl and Pripyat, except the problem is Chernobyl and Pripyat do not at all look like they did in 1986. They look like the result of 30 years of neglect and exclusion zone.

00:14:46 Speaker_01
It was an obsession for us, honestly. Our production designer, Luke Hull, worked very closely with our costume designer, Odile Dix-Moreau. We just became obsessed with showing things as they were.

00:15:01 Speaker_01
I think for me, for Johan Renck, our director, the Sovietness of things and the Soviet specificity of things was half of what is fascinating about this.

00:15:11 Speaker_01
I mean, we're seeing an event that, as we say, you know, in the show, at some point, has never occurred on this planet before.

00:15:19 Speaker_01
But we're also seeing it in a place that most of us have never been to before, which is this inside behind the Iron Curtain in 1986. Not from an American perspective, but actually as it was.

00:15:31 Speaker_01
We were shooting primarily in Lithuania, a little bit in Ukraine. So our crews, they were alive when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union and Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

00:15:44 Speaker_01
Many of the places that we shot in were constructed, most of them were constructed during the Soviet era. It's real. And we were able to get the real clothing. And the firefighters, these are the outfits that we put together were...

00:15:59 Speaker_01
down to the rivet, Odile did an incredible job of making them realistic, exactly correct. We were helped sometimes by the fact that in the Soviet Union, if they made, for instance, a miner helmet, there was one miner helmet.

00:16:13 Speaker_01
So you didn't have to figure out, like, okay, which miners wore this brand or that brand. There was one. It was called miner helmet, and that's the one. You know? Poor consumer choices. CRAIG MCLUCKIEN Correct.

00:16:22 Speaker_01
But Luke and I and Johan spent a long, long time poring over as many photographs as we could, blueprints. In terms of Pripyat, we found a neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania that had been constructed in a similar time, in a similar fashion.

00:16:40 Speaker_01
Again, one of the upsides of former Soviet Republic is that they were building things there. It was very similar to the way they were building them, you know, a thousand miles away. One blueprint. Pretty much.

00:16:51 Speaker_01
I mean, it was these brutalist, you know, block towers. So, we found a neighborhood that was very close and basically made our Pripyat out of that.

00:17:01 Speaker_01
And then, of course, with the help of some, you know, pretty remarkable visual effects from DNEG, this fantastic company that's been doing all of our effects, we were able to properly bring that to life.

00:17:11 Speaker_01
But again, all of it based on extensive research.

00:17:15 Speaker_05
Why? I mean, it's not gonna be dramatically important to a viewer if the control room looks exactly like the control room of reactor number four.

00:17:23 Speaker_01
Which it does. I'm sure it does. So what was driving you? I was always aware that I was telling a story that meant an enormous amount to the people that lived through it.

00:17:34 Speaker_01
There are people alive today, thousands, tens of thousands of people alive today, who have lost people they love because of Chernobyl, whose lives have been shortened because of Chernobyl.

00:17:44 Speaker_01
There are people walking, a lot of people walking around without a thyroid because of Chernobyl. And it was important for me to tell that story accurately. I think about the stories that we have routinely told in the West.

00:17:56 Speaker_01
Stories about the Holocaust, stories about World War II, where we try very hard to be accurate because it's a sign of respect.

00:18:03 Speaker_01
And for me, I wanted people who lived through that, including some people in that control room that night who are still alive, to watch this and say, they cared. They cared, they got it right.

00:18:17 Speaker_05
All right, let's focus on episode one, which is dramatically challenging. We meet Legasov, he immediately kills himself. And we won't see him again until the very end of the episode.

00:18:27 Speaker_05
So, as we all know, screenwriting 101, introduce your hero, kill him and ignore him.

00:18:33 Speaker_01
You can tell that I've grown weary of writing normal narrative.

00:18:38 Speaker_05
We meet him, he's recording those tapes,

00:18:43 Speaker_02
What is the cost of lies?"

00:18:46 Speaker_05
And that's not a device that you use to get his voice in the film. He actually recorded tapes.

00:18:51 Speaker_01
He did. So there's a number of things here that are absolutely accurate to history, and then some things that I fiddled with a little bit just to be able to tell the story.

00:18:59 Speaker_01
So, here's a good right off the bat, let's talk about what's real and what's not. Legasov does, in fact, hang himself two years to the day after the explosion. Does he hang himself at exactly that time?

00:19:10 Speaker_01
Which we'll come to understand why that time is so important. No one can say. That was really my way of just imparting that I believe this must have been intentional. The date couldn't have been an accident. He did record his memoirs on audio tapes.

00:19:25 Speaker_01
They were not quite as flowery and thematic as the dialogue I've given here.

00:19:29 Speaker_05
The reason that people like you were put in this earth is to make other people sound better in retrospect, Craig.

00:19:35 Speaker_01
I hope I did him proudly.

00:19:36 Speaker_03
In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame.

00:19:46 Speaker_01
He did spell out a lot of his concerns about the Soviet nuclear industry and the way things had gone.

00:19:54 Speaker_01
And in terms of how those tapes got disseminated, I couldn't really find any good answers, so I just sort of went with some confederate, picked them up and took them and spread them about.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
One thing that I've left out of Legasov's story, and it's left out right off the bat, is his family. He had a wife, he had children. And I made a choice early on to not include them in the story, mostly because...

00:20:22 Speaker_01
so much of the story was gonna be about his efforts in Chernobyl and his relationships with the people that he was fighting this war with.

00:20:30 Speaker_01
And I just didn't want to have those scenes of come home, you know, because the family that's left behind in these sort of wartime movies inevitably descends into a kind of whininess.

00:20:42 Speaker_01
And I didn't want to do that to them, but I do want to acknowledge, of course, that they existed.

00:20:48 Speaker_05
We then go to Chernobyl on the day of the accident, and I thought this was interesting, and we will revisit this moment again in the series, but we see the accident not from the perspective of there, it's not a huge special effects shot.

00:21:02 Speaker_05
It is in the distance, and it is silent, from the window of another character, who doesn't even notice it.

00:21:08 Speaker_01
Precisely. I wanted people to know, first of all, this is not going to be told the way you would expect it to be told.

00:21:15 Speaker_01
If somebody says to me, look, I'm making a series about Chernobyl, I think, okay, we're gonna start with the day, and then there's gonna be things, and then it's gonna explode, and then there's gonna be calls, and people are gonna get... And I just didn't wanna do it like that at all.

00:21:27 Speaker_01
I wanted to just start with the explosion. I wanted to start, and also didn't wanna hide the fact that Legasov commits suicide. Anybody who watches this show, who then Googles it ten minutes after watching, will go, okay, he's gonna commit suicide.

00:21:39 Speaker_01
Well, not to wait four episodes from... No, no. No, no. I'm just... Here it is. That's it. And the explosion, which you know is gonna happen, you're not gonna wait for that either. There it is.

00:21:48 Speaker_01
What's fascinating to me is not that Chernobyl exploded, it's how close people were, and how unaware they were, and how that night just unfolds in a way that I had no idea it unfolded and would have never predicted in a million years.

00:22:04 Speaker_05
I should ask, because this happened in the Soviet Union, because of the secrecy and the cover-up, which begins almost immediately, how do we know what happened?

00:22:13 Speaker_01
Great question. Great question. And the answer to it is, we sort of know a lot. We definitely know a little. There are a ton of competing narratives out there. And I encountered this as I did my research.

00:22:30 Speaker_01
A lot of times, the name of the game was, which one of these accounts do I believe? and I tried as best as I could to actually opt for the less dramatic account.

00:22:40 Speaker_01
We got a lot of information out of the Soviet Union, or what was the former Soviet Union, once it collapsed. A lot of information came out. A lot of scientists who had been with Legasov were able to then tell their stories. They wrote books.

00:22:55 Speaker_01
And then a lot of Western researchers and authors were able to go and talk to the people who had been there and collect their narratives.

00:23:03 Speaker_01
There's an incredible book called Voices of Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, which is a... It's essentially a collection of first-person accounts. So, a lot of information did come out.

00:23:16 Speaker_01
And in fact, in that first scene in the control room, a number of the things that are said were said. For instance, Akimov says...

00:23:24 Speaker_03
Don't worry, we did everything right. Something... something strange has happened.

00:23:28 Speaker_01
He said that. Little lines like that are quite... They make me feel something when they happen in the show, because I know we are essentially reproducing truth there.

00:23:39 Speaker_01
And that's... And some of those things, I don't think I would have ever thought to write. In fact, I'm not sure I would believe it necessarily. without knowing that it happened. Right.

00:23:51 Speaker_05
Long ago, when I taught playwriting, I used to tell my students, the worst reason to put something on stage is that it really happened. Because I don't care if I'm watching it. I don't know, I don't care if your mother really said that to you.

00:24:04 Speaker_05
Show me how and why it was relevant. Make it relevant to me. I'm guessing just that this was something that you had to grapple with A lot. Things happen in this first episode that are almost impossible to believe. Correct.

00:24:19 Speaker_01
Uh, very challenging. And it really came out the most through the character, the real person, Anatoly Dyatlov. Dyatlov is the guy in charge. Yes, he's played by Paul Ritter. He's got the gray hair and the sort of grayish mustache. He's in charge.

00:24:36 Speaker_01
And he was in charge of the room that night.

00:24:39 Speaker_01
And Anatoly Dyatlov makes a series of... Well, when we eventually do see all the events leading up to this, which we will, I won't tell people when, but we will, we will see a number of borderline inexplicable choices by him, but with a hint of motivation.

00:24:57 Speaker_01
In this episode, where we're watching aftermath, what we're seeing repeatedly from Dyatlov is denial. That denial is real. It happened. It went down exactly like that, within seconds.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
So, just so people understand, because the geography of the plant is a little bit of a question mark for a lot of people, this is a very large facility and it is very long. It takes maybe 20, 30 minutes to walk from one end to the other.

00:25:21 Speaker_01
And the general structure of the power plant was that there were four nuclear reactors. Each one was in this large square building.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
And then in between those big squares were these long corridors where you had things like control rooms and so on and so forth. When Chernobyl reactor four blows up, it's all the way at one end of the plant.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
The guys in the control room, they hear and feel a succession of thuds. One thud and then a really big thud. Most of the force of this explosion was vertical.

00:25:50 Speaker_01
So, right off the bat, when I was researching, one of my questions was, how is anybody even alive there? Well, this is how. I mean, the explosion ejects material almost straight up, almost a mile into the air.

00:26:04 Speaker_01
But these guys in the control room, what they hear and feel is something blew up. And almost immediately... Dyatlov concludes that what's happened is, there is a tank, a control system tank, that has collected hydrogen and ignited and exploded.

00:26:21 Speaker_01
Like a little Hindenburg hydrogen... A little mini Hindenburg. And so what he's contemplating here is essentially a serious industrial accident, but by no means a nuclear holocaust.

00:26:33 Speaker_01
And for the longest time, I wrestled with this, just as I think Dyatlov must have internally been wrestling somewhat.

00:26:40 Speaker_01
I think that what I forget, and have to remind myself all the time is, the word Chernobyl means a million things to us all in an instant. But right before it blew up, it meant nothing.

00:26:56 Speaker_01
That nuclear reactor, and in fact, no nuclear reactor, had ever been thought to be capable of exploding. And so, I tried to integrate that into my understanding of the denial.

00:27:10 Speaker_05
There's another moment, and I can't remember right now if it's a bit of dialogue or a stage direction where a character, and we're gonna get into these people running around the control room trying to find out what happened, where it's like he's been told to go over and look down into the reactor.

00:27:23 Speaker_05
which he knows, if you look down into an open nuclear reactor, you're dead. But there's a moment, I think you're describing his thought process, and he says, well, he's gonna go over and look over it.

00:27:33 Speaker_05
And if he doesn't see what he thinks he's gonna see, the open reactor, then he needs to know that. And if he is going to see what he thinks he's gonna see, it doesn't matter, because he's already dead.

00:27:44 Speaker_05
And so, there does seem to be this aspect of these guys saying, the reason we can't believe the worst happened is because if the worst happened, we're all dead now. And so that seems to be just as a human thing.

00:27:56 Speaker_05
I'm not going to believe that I'm already dead. There must be some other explanation.

00:28:00 Speaker_01
And there were gradations of that across the various people, depending on where they were and what they saw. So all the people in the control room that we depict were there. Those are their names.

00:28:13 Speaker_01
There were a few other people that we left out that weren't quite as relevant to the story that we're telling. So they were a bit insulated, but two men immediately run in.

00:28:21 Speaker_01
The first is a guy named Broznik, who's working in the turbine hall, and he says the turbine hall is on fire. It's exactly what happened. He did run in, he did say that. Which you could say could be a result of a control system tank explosion.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
The second guy who runs in is a guy named Pervischenko. Pervischenko, we will see later on where he was working. Pervischenko saw way more.

00:28:46 Speaker_01
And when Pervischenko arrives in that control room, he tells them, and this is true, that essentially, the core exploded. And they basically say to him, no. That's not correct. He proceeds on.

00:29:02 Speaker_01
Everything he does from that point forward, this is the real man, and we reflect it somewhat in what we show. He did with the full understanding that he was likely a dead man walking. There were a number of people who did things like that that night.

00:29:15 Speaker_01
We couldn't tell all the stories, but they were remarkable. One of the workers at the plant, who became aware of the full scope of the accident fairly early on, did what he could to make things better.

00:29:28 Speaker_01
He went home, he took a nap, he woke up, and then he went back.

00:29:32 Speaker_01
there was this sense that if you had broken through the denial and gotten on the other side of it, which was an understanding of reality, you had an obligation to do what you could to prevent it from getting worse.

00:29:48 Speaker_01
Conversely, you have guys like Akimov and Taptunov, who are the two guys that are working the control board that night. They're the ones who, towards the end of this episode, are opening the valves by hand.

00:30:00 Speaker_05
Even though they know that it is utterly pointless, that they're basically spraying water into the air, because that is such an extraordinary moment when Dyatlov says, -"You need to go do this."

00:30:15 Speaker_05
And they know it's pointless, because Dyatlov's whole picture of the situation, i.e. they need to get water in the core, is ridiculous, because there is no core. It's gone. It's blown up. It's a huge atomic pile. But they go.

00:30:27 Speaker_05
Years ago, I read John Keegan's book about World War I, and he writes about trench warfare. And he writes about how these guys in the trenches, British soldiers, went over the top and were immediately killed. And he writes about why they did that.

00:30:45 Speaker_05
And I met him once. He did a book reading, and I said, okay, you explain why the first guys went over.

00:30:50 Speaker_01
What about those second guys? What about the second guys?

00:30:53 Speaker_05
They just saw everybody they knew follow their orders, do it according to the book, and immediately be killed by machine gun fire, and then they went. I thought of that very vividly and specifically thinking about those specific two characters.

00:31:06 Speaker_05
They knew this was pointless. They knew if they went out there, they were dead, and they were right about that. How much did you have to think about those men, their minds, at that moment?

00:31:18 Speaker_01
A lot. So much of writing a moment like that is asking, what do I want people to feel here? What is the emotional truth that I want them to believe? And I have to make certain choices.

00:31:30 Speaker_01
I have to decide, in some ways, states of mind that I don't have access to. But behind all of this is this almost heartbreaking social circumstance.

00:31:42 Speaker_01
That these people grew up in the Soviet Union, where community and communism, these words have connected roots. it was understood that you were part of a collective, and that you were there to support your fellow man and your fellow woman.

00:32:02 Speaker_01
These kind of pro-social messages were promoted by people that I don't think were very pro-social at all. the leadership of the Soviet Union, but the people often did believe it and feel it.

00:32:14 Speaker_01
And you can see this in all of the history of 20th century Russia and the surrounding areas that the Soviet Union encompassed. So, I think some of this was a sense of... I don't know what else to call it, but Soviet civic duty.

00:32:32 Speaker_01
It is very noble and admirable and beautiful, and then, of course, profoundly sad underneath it. But it's why I say, if this had happened in the United States...

00:32:42 Speaker_01
I think, for instance, if Three Mile Island had exploded in this regard, I think what would happen is that we would have evacuated the area very quickly and then just, I don't know, put a rope around a large section of the middle Atlantic and said, no one can go there anymore, and we're, because we can't send people in because they'll die.

00:33:00 Speaker_01
And that would have been it.

00:33:02 Speaker_05
Yeah, and this will come up again in later episodes, exactly how this either insane self-sacrifice, this brainwashing, this extraordinary nobility, there are a hundred ways of looking at it, played an extraordinarily important role.

00:33:16 Speaker_05
Let's turn right now, though, to the opposite, which are the managers of the plant. Bryukhanov and Fomin. Yeah, Fomin.

00:33:25 Speaker_01
I had to learn all these pronunciations.

00:33:26 Speaker_05
Yes, and we'll work on it. And these guys, unlike some of the other characters we've been talking about so far, these seem familiar. The Soviet apparatchik.

00:33:36 Speaker_05
The guys who care nothing about anything except their stature, the fear of what's coming from above, and their contempt for the people who are below them.

00:33:48 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's a little bit of that going on for sure. I suppose there's a lot of it going on. I mean, a little background on those guys. Some things that I did not include, but are interesting facts nonetheless.

00:33:58 Speaker_01
Viktor Rukhanov did not really come from a nuclear power background. He was in the power industry. Of course, who was put in charge of these things wasn't generally a question of merit.

00:34:11 Speaker_01
And just so that people don't think that I get into kind of... unnecessary Soviet bashing, we have this problem everywhere. Victor Burkhanov was certainly a kind of a classic Soviet bureaucrat. Fomin was a more interesting character in many ways.

00:34:26 Speaker_01
Fomin was there working as, essentially, the head nuclear physicist, supervising the entire thing. And then you had individual deputies like Dyatlov or this guy Sitnikov, who shows up later.

00:34:41 Speaker_01
But Fomin, essentially, is kind of the head scientist of Chernobyl. Fomin got his degree in nuclear physics through, essentially, a mail order school. So, Fahim was not trained as a nuclear physicist at all.

00:34:55 Speaker_01
He got that mail-order degree essentially to check a box so that he could get this job. Once again, a certain kind of patronage and loyalty system in place. Fahim was a very sad character.

00:35:07 Speaker_01
He had been in a car accident that had really, uh, I guess it had infected him deeply. He had gone through a long, depressed state. He had finally come out of it.

00:35:16 Speaker_01
And I think he saw an opportunity to perhaps do better for himself at Chernobyl, which again, did not have the connotation that it does now. It's just a place. It's just a place.

00:35:28 Speaker_01
But one thing that is true, and we'll get a little bit more into Rakhanov in particular, who I also think, in many ways, was in a very difficult spot. Because I try and understand. We'll get more into those guys in a later episode.

00:35:41 Speaker_01
But in this episode, I think the important thing to understand about those two guys is, They were told something by Dyatlov. They were told that this was not a nuclear core explosion, that the core was fine.

00:35:57 Speaker_01
They were also told that radiation was 3.6 roentgen per hour. I think they probably knew that that number was weird. Yeah. Strangely specific. Strangely specific. It turns out it was the maximum reading on those low-limit disseminators.

00:36:14 Speaker_01
and they chose immediately to believe it. And I think in a very Soviet way, once they bought into that and reported that up the chain, the inherent cost to reversing and saying, I'm sorry, we got that wrong, was massive, almost unthinkable.

00:36:30 Speaker_05
And there's a moment Brekunov says, uh, I've got to call and tell my boss about this. I'm not gonna, I don't want to do that. And there is that moment of almost relief when Dyalyov says to them, oh, no, it's fine.

00:36:41 Speaker_05
And they're like, well, if you're saying it's fine, then I can report that it's fine, and it will be on you." Which is interesting and terrifying, because at no point do they ever seem concerned with the actual truth.

00:36:54 Speaker_05
They just want to know that they're not going to be in trouble.

00:36:58 Speaker_01
Yes, I think once they had a sense that it was not the impossible, but rather the possible and the mundane. It's very bad, by the way. At that point, everything becomes about managing the outcomes for yourself.

00:37:14 Speaker_01
There's no concern about the outcome for the world. So, Dyatlov has to call his superior. They have to call their superiors.

00:37:21 Speaker_01
And, you know, that point where Brukanov explains to the local executive committee the chain of phone calls that has occurred, that's real. So that's what happened. There was a series of phone calls over the course of the night.

00:37:34 Speaker_01
that eventually make their way to Gorbachev. Yeah, that's how it worked. I call you, you call him, he calls him, he calls him, and he calls Gorbachev. One by one by one, each one of them decides, how can I kick this upstairs?

00:37:47 Speaker_01
And each one of them repeats a lie that they do not yet know is a lie that essentially was conceived seconds after the explosion by a desperate man who was incapable, in a very human way, of entertaining the thought that the impossible had occurred.

00:38:07 Speaker_05
There's a scene in the episode where the local committee, as you say, comes into the plant. They're in the plant. In fact, you'll be safe here, guys, don't worry. And there's almost a moment where a younger member of the committee says, -"Wait a minute.

00:38:20 Speaker_05
I've seen things outside. I've seen the fires. I've seen the rubble. There's been a major explosion. You're lying." All right, first question, did that really happen?

00:38:31 Speaker_01
Sort of. So, the executive committee does come to that bunker. They do assemble there. And what we know from the record, um, by the way, there's an excellent book that just came out called Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham, which...

00:38:44 Speaker_01
I wish I'd been around when I did, because there's a lot of interesting details from that that kind of illuminates some of these things. What we know about that executive committee was that there were essentially two competing thoughts.

00:38:57 Speaker_01
One of them was the kind of what I call the Soviet obsession with alarmism. So anything that came close to approaching bad news was just dismissed as alarmism. It was literally put into... It's like the Soviet version of fake news.

00:39:14 Speaker_01
I don't want to believe what you just said, therefore I'm putting it in a category of philosophical mistake. Then there were people within the executive committee who were very concerned and believed that this was much worse than it was.

00:39:27 Speaker_01
So, what I essentially did was personify those two positions between a younger member of this group and an older member. I thought it was important to remind people, particularly in the West, that in 1986, there were still members from...

00:39:44 Speaker_01
functioning members of the Communist Party who had been alive during the revolution. They were believers. They knew Lenin. They had seen him.

00:39:53 Speaker_01
This was not some kind of strange cult that had been separated from its religious founder by thousands of years. This was fresh. And I wanted to show how that functioned because... it was still very much a part of their lives. Right.

00:40:10 Speaker_05
So there's the characters archive, the oldest committee member who's sitting in the corner. Game of Thrones fans may recognize him from Winterfell. As Maester Luwin. And he gets up and he makes a speech.

00:40:19 Speaker_05
He points out that the real name of the Chernobyl power plant is the Lenin Power Plant. And he makes a speech about the Soviet ideals and how this is how we do things in the Soviet Union.

00:40:28 Speaker_05
But what was interesting was, the point of his speech was not, we will now fight for the fatherland and we will not sacrifice ourselves, but the point of his speech is, we are going to keep this secret. That is the correct Soviet response.

00:40:41 Speaker_00
We seal off the city. No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour. Yes, comrades. We will all be rewarded for what we do here tonight.

00:41:09 Speaker_00
This is our moment to shine.

00:41:16 Speaker_01
That is, in fact, what they did. Um, and there were people, as in the, I guess, what you'd call Pripyat leadership, who felt strongly that the first thing you do in any situation like this is cut the phone lines. That was literally their first move.

00:41:30 Speaker_01
Cut the phone lines and don't let anyone in or out. The most important thing was to avoid the spread of a panic. So, when I read that, it occurred to me that on some level,

00:41:44 Speaker_01
if you are part of a power structure that you understand is suppressive in a way, and that you are limiting people's freedoms in a way, you must be aware that there could be a spark that could lead to the truth spreading and people realizing and finally shaking off their shackles and saying, we're not gonna be a part of this anymore.

00:42:07 Speaker_01
That is essentially how the Berlin Wall came down. On some level, they must have all been aware that the Soviet Union was being glued together by a certain kind of magic, and they were not wrong, because it was not long for the world.

00:42:22 Speaker_01
The Soviet Union would be gone in five years. So, when something like this happened, they said, cut the phone lines, and no one comes and no one goes, because if this spreads, who knows?

00:42:33 Speaker_05
There's an interesting contradiction, which Orwell explained, really, with doublethink, in which they've decided simultaneously that there's nothing wrong and no reason to worry, and also no one is ever going to know about this.

00:42:46 Speaker_05
And they were capable of proceeding, it seems, as if both were true. And that is extraordinary.

00:42:52 Speaker_01
CRAIG MCLUCKIE Yeah. They, I think, had a sort of a default position that anything that was counter to the story they had told their own people and the rest of the world simply could not be publicized or no one could know.

00:43:07 Speaker_01
Now, I think they knew, probably, that the rest of the world laughed at them. I think that the Soviets had a deep insecurity.

00:43:17 Speaker_05
There's a great line in a later episode, which I'll give away now, where somebody says to somebody who wants to tell the truth about Chernobyl, he says, you want to humiliate a nation that is obsessed with not being humiliated.

00:43:29 Speaker_05
And that, I thought, captured this whole attitude quite well.

00:43:31 Speaker_01
Well, they... Inside the Soviet Union, I think, uh, it was, there was probably more of a sense that people needed to believe those things. And yes, there were, the citizens were not stupid.

00:43:43 Speaker_01
They understood that there were great limitations to the system. But many of them, more of them, I think than people understand, were kind of active believers. They believed that the West was decadent.

00:43:56 Speaker_01
They believed that their system was something worth saving.

00:43:59 Speaker_05
I want to go through a couple of things for episode one before we leave it behind. And they're basically all part of my really list. Yeah, let's do it.

00:44:08 Speaker_05
Really, the firefighters walked right up to the burning pile and sprayed an open nuclear reactor with water.

00:44:14 Speaker_01
Really. And there are even some details that I did not include. Some of them didn't have their jackets, and so they were just there in a t-shirt. A couple of them didn't have helmets.

00:44:25 Speaker_01
There are a number of stories from that night that are shocking that we just didn't have time for, but... That's exactly what happened. They were told, essentially, there's a roof fire.

00:44:34 Speaker_01
And in the first episode, you hear that little, you know, whatever the... It's not a 911 call. I don't know what the, uh, what 911 is. But that's the actual audio from that night, and you can hear them saying, yeah, you gotta get down there.

00:44:47 Speaker_01
The roof's on fire. That's it. They just thought it was a roof fire. And they showed up without any protection, which, by the way, they didn't have anyway. And they fought that fire all night.

00:44:59 Speaker_01
And they did get incredibly close, and one of the firemen did pick up a piece of graphite in his hand. This is graphite from the core of a nuclear reactor.

00:45:09 Speaker_01
And most of the deaths that occurred directly because of the radiation of that night were experienced by those...

00:45:20 Speaker_01
And I think there's at least one reported, one firefighter who said, he reported saying, I said to everybody, it'll be amazing if any of us are alive by morning.

00:45:30 Speaker_01
Sometimes it's hard to tell if that's a little bit of a kind of revisionist history on people's parts, but we do know that a number of them reported tasting metal.

00:45:38 Speaker_05
Yeah, which is, I'm assuming, a real thing that happens around intense radiation.

00:45:41 Speaker_01
It is a real thing, apparently, that happens around intense... There's not a lot of experience with this. There have been a couple of incidents. This was the worst of them by far. Yeah, but that really happened.

00:45:52 Speaker_05
And they really didn't tell anybody, they didn't evacuate the town, they didn't notify anybody. The episode ends with everybody waking up the morning after the explosion and going off to school and work.

00:46:02 Speaker_01
Yeah. So, backing up for a second, Pripyat was about as close to what the Soviets had promised people as you could get. It was fairly utopian. These cities were called atom cities.

00:46:14 Speaker_01
They were constructed to support, obviously, to supply employment at the power plants, but also to, you know, then support those people around them.

00:46:23 Speaker_01
They were considered very, very desirable places to live, unlike other regions where you would have shortages of food and supplies. The markets were stocked. There was no waiting in line. It was a reward to live in a place like this.

00:46:40 Speaker_01
So, the accident occurs at 1.23 in the morning. By sunrise, you begin the day of April 26. Not only were they not told throughout that entire day, There was a wedding. Uh, people were just walking around in the streets. It was a lovely day.

00:46:58 Speaker_01
One man, these are stories that I didn't include just for time, one resident of Peripia chose to get on the roof of his building to do some sunning. He got pretty sick and there's, I don't know if he made it or not.

00:47:11 Speaker_01
They didn't keep great records, as you might imagine. But yes, that is a fact. They were walking around under a cloud of smoke, billowing from an open nuclear reactor all day long. Right.

00:47:24 Speaker_05
At the end of episode one, does anybody know how bad this is? Other than the people inside the plant who've actually seen the open core?

00:47:35 Speaker_01
No.

00:47:36 Speaker_05
Nobody knows? No. And yet, we know. We've seen the burns. We've seen the core. We've seen... And maybe the last thing I'll ask you about in episode one is that beam of light heading upwards. That's Chernenkov? I'm terrible with Russian names.

00:47:50 Speaker_01
Have you found out? The Cherenkov effect. Actually, it turns out it wasn't the Cherenkov effect. And that's another one of those little moments where Dyatlov engages in a strange kind of...

00:48:01 Speaker_01
I don't think specifically said that that light was that, although that was something that a lot of the scientists in the early hours were saying, oh, that light can happen with minimal radiation.

00:48:13 Speaker_01
But what that light was, that blue light, which was described by a lot of people and described as quite beautiful, was essentially the ionization of the air.

00:48:21 Speaker_01
The radiation was so intense, it was breaking the oxygen molecules apart and creating this color. It was probably one of the things that drew a lot of the citizens appropriate to that bridge. That really happened. They did that.

00:48:39 Speaker_05
They all stood there in this bridge and they all watched.

00:48:41 Speaker_01
Correct. How far away were they? About a kilometer. And that goes directly to another thing that I really struggled with, which was how little people knew about radiation. They simply didn't know.

00:48:55 Speaker_01
If you or I were somewhere and someone said, oh, there's a fire at a nuclear power plant, but it's not the core, it's just a fire, you wanna go see, we would say, no. Are you insane? I'm gonna drive in the other direction. But they didn't know.

00:49:10 Speaker_01
There's a building in Pripyat that has a slogan on it that basically refers to the Friendly Atom. And they also believed that if there was anything that you... I mean, one of the characters mentions this thing about vodka. That's true.

00:49:24 Speaker_01
They believed that vodka essentially would decontaminate you of any kind of ill effects of radiation. If only.

00:49:32 Speaker_05
It is odd that the tone of the episode, weirdly, is almost that of a horror movie.

00:49:39 Speaker_05
In that people are going about their business in the way that people in horror movies do, and there's a horrible monster that is hunting them and killing them, and they don't even know it.

00:49:52 Speaker_05
And it seems almost as if we, as the viewers, are put in their place, that there's something terrible going on. You can't see it, but it's getting you. And there's so many moments in this episode which are equivalent to watching a horror movie.

00:50:04 Speaker_05
It's like, don't go through that door, and yet they go through the door. Yeah, and those moments are all true.

00:50:10 Speaker_05
And on that note... we'll find out what happened, both in terms of what led to this accident and what happened to the people who we've now just met in subsequent episodes. Episode two of Chernobyl airs next Monday, 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO.

00:50:28 Speaker_05
This is Peter Sagal. I've been talking with Craig Mazin, the creator, producer, and writer of Chernobyl.

00:50:34 Speaker_05
You can always listen to this podcast, review, and rate it via Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, wherever else you might choose to get your podcasts. Hey, how about the NPR One app? They're out there.

00:50:45 Speaker_05
You can also listen to it via YouTube or the HBO Go and HBO Now apps. Once used for TV, now used for podcasts. I think it's evolving. Craig, thank you so much. This has been fascinating and not a little terrifying. Thank you, Peter.

00:50:59 Speaker_05
I can assure you it gets worse. Tune in next week for even more depressing stories of real-life disasters.

00:51:20 Speaker_04
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