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Episode: The Happiness of All Mankind

Author: HBO
Duration: 00:46:17

Episode Shownotes

Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss the penultimate episode of Chernobyl. Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) consider using lunar rovers to remove radioactive debris, while Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) faces government hurdles in determining the truth about the cause of the explosion.

Sagal and Mazin go deep on the exclusion zone; from where they filmed it, to the first person accounts the rooftop cleanup is based on. And yes, they talk about the puppy scene. 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, hosts Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss the penultimate episode, "The Happiness of All Mankind." They explore the historical context of the Chernobyl disaster, including the struggle against oppressive regimes and the tragic history of Ukraine, referencing events such as Stalin's forced collectivization and the Holodomor famine. The hosts analyze the cleanup operations and the moral dilemmas faced by workers, termed 'biorobots,' who risked their lives removing radioactive material. The narrative intertwines personal and political challenges, particularly highlighting Valery Legasov's moral quandary regarding the truth about the disaster in a climate of fear and repression.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Happiness of All Mankind) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
I've known braver souls than you, Khomyuk. Men who had their moment and did nothing. Because when it's your life and the lives of everyone you love, your moral conviction doesn't mean anything. It leaves you.

00:00:15 Speaker_01
And all you want at that moment is not to be shot.

00:00:27 Speaker_03
Hi, and welcome to episode four of the Chernobyl podcast. It's the podcast you listen to when you've watched the HBO series Chernobyl and you just need to talk to somebody about it. Well, we are here for you. My name is Peter Sagal.

00:00:39 Speaker_03
I'm here with the series writer, producer, and creator, Craig Mazin. Good to be here, Peter. It's always good to be back with you. We are talking, of course, about the series Chernobyl being presented on HBO. and Sky.

00:00:51 Speaker_03
And today, of course, we're talking about episode four, the penultimate episode of this series, which I will admit right now is my favorite, I think, of the five, for three reasons.

00:01:02 Speaker_03
I guess these aren't spoilers, because everybody's watched the episode, I hope. Because of the real-time sequence on the roof with the bio-robots. Because of, I don't know what you want to call it, the self-contained story of Pavel, the liquidator.

00:01:15 Speaker_03
and because of one of the greatest tantrums I've ever seen performed on film by Stellan Skarsgård. Let's go through the episode, though, from the beginning. Another remarkable little scene with someone who really doesn't want to leave.

00:01:26 Speaker_03
And that is, uh, what I believe I used to call a babushka.

00:01:29 Speaker_04
Yes. So, I mean, and these were the people that were the most resistant. And for good reason. They were old. They had lived there their whole lives.

00:01:39 Speaker_04
I think when you're, say, 82, 83, your concern about a future impending death from radiation exposure is reasonably less than someone else's.

00:01:50 Speaker_04
And more to the point, your connection to the land you are on is greater than your need to be, quote-unquote, safe.

00:02:00 Speaker_04
And what I wanted to do with this, first of all, that story is inspired by a real account of a soldier who was moving through the zone and had to evacuate people, and there was a woman milking her cow, and she just didn't get it.

00:02:15 Speaker_04
And he would dump the milk out, and she would just keep milking again. And he would dump the milk out. And this would happen over and over. And I love the... the stubborn battle of it all.

00:02:24 Speaker_04
You know, like, okay, you'll keep milking and I'll keep dumping, because you can't drink it. And she's like, okay, but I'm not gonna go and I'm gonna keep milking. That felt so beautiful and desperate and bizarre.

00:02:37 Speaker_04
But it was also an opportunity for me to express where I thought Chernobyl sat in the larger historical picture. The history of tragedy. in the Soviet Union and in pre-Soviet czarist Russia. And in particular, the tragedy through Ukraine.

00:02:59 Speaker_04
Ukraine has always occupied this dangerous place, trapped between Europe proper and Russia. It is neither Europe, it is neither Asia, it is that Eurasian swath. It is incredibly valuable land, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.

00:03:16 Speaker_04
And it was also the first place that would get invaded when Napoleon felt like traipsing into Russia or Hitler felt like marching into Russia. It was through Ukraine. And unfortunately, on the other side, to the east, Ukraine was where Stalin...

00:03:31 Speaker_04
I think, visited his worst crimes. In the 30s, Stalin's forced collectivization, his villainization of what they called kulaks. These were... The liquidation of the kulaks. The liquidation of the kulaks. So, what were the terrible kulaks?

00:03:48 Speaker_04
They were basically farmers that were successful. So, farmers that were considered too bourgeois, too successful, maybe a little too wealthy.

00:03:58 Speaker_04
they had to be essentially removed from these farms so that the farms could be more... collective, quote-unquote. But really, Stalin just didn't like the fact that anybody could have any leverage whatsoever on the central position.

00:04:13 Speaker_04
of the Soviet Union, and if you allow some people to control food supply, they become powerful. The kulaks weren't simply removed, a lot of them were put on trial, they were imprisoned or killed.

00:04:23 Speaker_04
And the result, when you destroy the economic basis of agriculture, the result is a shortage of food. The other issue is that he was taking the food.

00:04:32 Speaker_04
And so, he would force people in Ukraine to work at length on farms to grow food that they were not allowed to eat. And they began to starve and die in the streets. There were bodies everywhere.

00:04:45 Speaker_04
This is one of the great genocides that people don't talk about.

00:04:48 Speaker_03
In fact, she uses a word that I had never heard. -"Holodomor." Exactly. And I thought I was pretty up on your history of genocides in the 20th century, but it turns out I didn't know about that.

00:04:57 Speaker_04
No, this is a terrible, terrible story, and they estimate somewhere around three million civilians died in this forced starvation. And I wanted someone to basically say, this isn't new. This is not new. This is, in fact, how it goes around here.

00:05:13 Speaker_04
I thought it was so cruel of fate to have visited Chernobyl on this place, on Ukraine. CRAIG. Which it had enough, frankly.

00:05:23 Speaker_00
CRAIG.

00:05:23 Speaker_04
It had enough, and yet, one final, well, I wish I could have said final, but unfortunately, right now, there's a little bit of a situation going on in eastern Ukraine, in Crimea.

00:05:33 Speaker_04
But in terms of the Soviet crimes, this was the final Soviet crime against Ukraine, and it was a big one.

00:05:39 Speaker_03
Yeah. The soldier in the open ends up being somewhat merciful. It's a great little fake, congratulations, in terms of the gunshot and the cow toppling over.

00:05:49 Speaker_03
I think we should let, especially for this episode, we need to assure everybody, as the ASPCA likes to say, no animals were harmed in the making of this episode. Did you get a stunt cow that could fall over?

00:06:00 Speaker_04
We built one. Oh, really?

00:06:02 Speaker_03
That's a fake cow?

00:06:03 Speaker_04
So we have a real cow that she's milking. And then we have a fake cow that we can stand in and topple over. And then we use a little bit of VFX magic to defakify some of the faker aspects of the fake cow. But yes, of course, the cow is totally unharmed.

00:06:18 Speaker_04
Do not worry. cow lovers as you eat your hamburgers.

00:06:22 Speaker_03
Don't panic. Don't worry. They didn't do anything mean to this cow, like raise it in an industrial farm. But let's not go there. Maybe we just need this moment of levity. It is hilarious to think, it's like, cut, bring in the stunt cow.

00:06:36 Speaker_03
And they're rolling the cow on wheels, I imagine, like something out of Monty Python.

00:06:39 Speaker_04
But anyway. When you're making a show like this, there are probably more... bizarre, amusing things that happen behind the scene where it just, this is weird. We're out in the middle of a field wheeling in the fake cow.

00:06:52 Speaker_04
But I do think that there was a kind of innate respect for elders in the Soviet Union, and I think that...

00:07:05 Speaker_04
One thing that seems, in my research, was a shared experience of all people was a respect for the Great War and the things that people went through.

00:07:14 Speaker_04
It's getting back to that poem again, that there was that, okay, when an old person starts talking about these things, you shut up and you listen. Even if your head hurts, even if you're tired, even if you have to get her out of there.

00:07:24 Speaker_04
Eventually, you're gonna have to shoot her cow and she's gonna have to go, but you listen.

00:07:28 Speaker_03
Right, exactly. And then you shoot the cow. And then you shoot the cow. And then you get her on the bus back. Do we actually see her getting on the bus? We don't see her getting on the bus. It's implied that she gets on the bus. She gets on the bus.

00:07:37 Speaker_04
Also, no humans were injured in the making of this. It's June Watson, wonderful actor. She was great. Yes, she's amazing and the last person we would have wanted to harm.

00:07:46 Speaker_03
Yes, don't hurt June Watson. All right, we check in as the episode now begins, after the credits, with Lyudmila, who's now moved to Kiev. And we're gonna see her again, but we're not gonna focus on her. Her pregnancy is happening in the background.

00:08:00 Speaker_03
And it's obvious that you wanna make sure that her story continues in the background of this episode.

00:08:07 Speaker_04
Yeah, well, this episode is where time really starts to expand. And so, over the course of these episodes, time has been expanding slowly. The first episode was like a day, the second... Not even.

00:08:17 Speaker_04
The first episode essentially takes place over eight hours. And then the second episode, we're dealing with a day, a day and a half, a third, is weeks. Now we're talking about months.

00:08:27 Speaker_04
Now we're into the long war, and this is a totally different point of view of the accident. There is no running around like a chicken without a head on. There's no panic.

00:08:37 Speaker_04
There's more of a sense of the slow ground war, a slog, that is going to take a long time and won't kill you right away. It'll just chew you up slowly. Much different vibe in this episode.

00:08:51 Speaker_03
I just realized this, that of course, using Lydmilla marking her pregnancy is a way of just establishing, as they say in the screenwriting classes, a clock.

00:08:58 Speaker_04
There's a clock.

00:08:58 Speaker_03
There's a clock in this episode. We know because her pregnancy continues and completes by the end of this episode, right? That that's how long it's taken. Here we learn at the top of the episode about the roof.

00:09:09 Speaker_03
And by the way, this is the first time I'll mention this. We had talked when we began this podcast series about the things that, well, I remembered about Chernobyl.

00:09:17 Speaker_03
And one of the things that I remembered, but didn't mention then, was the idea of the sarcophagus. That eventually, and I knew this, it was covered with concrete in a sarcophagus to protect it.

00:09:29 Speaker_03
And I had vaguely known that a lot of people lost their lives or were endangering themselves to build it. we never see the sarcophagus being built. Which, was that a proactive choice on your part?

00:09:38 Speaker_04
And this is an area where I did deviate a bit from the timeline because it would have started to have been built towards the end of this episode. We would have seen large concrete panels being put in place and started to be erected in place.

00:09:51 Speaker_04
they were already building it, you know. The issue was, we can't get really to the top of this thing with that stuff on the roof. So they would have started by this point, but for me, I felt like I didn't want to start something and not finish it.

00:10:04 Speaker_04
And also, frankly, the sarcophagus itself wasn't really, I think, dramatically fascinating. It was just the solution that they came up with at the time.

00:10:14 Speaker_03
Instead of focusing on the building of the sarcophagus, we focus on the clearing of the roofs. And this is another instance where the problem they're facing seems almost ridiculously simple. Like video game simple.

00:10:25 Speaker_03
In order to complete this mission, you have to remove the rubble from the roof. But as Legasov explains, that's the problem.

00:10:32 Speaker_03
There's all this stuff on the roof, they have to throw it back into the reactor so they can build the sarcophagus over the reactor. It's that simple.

00:10:40 Speaker_03
And of course, the material is, as we've discussed, that highly radioactive graphite that landed on the roof at the explosion, which we, again, we'll see in episode five. It was really that simple? They just needed to get the stuff off the roof.

00:10:50 Speaker_04
They needed to get the stuff off the roof. This was, um, incredibly radioactive material. And even if they weren't building the sarcophagus, which obviously they needed to get up there to do that,

00:11:00 Speaker_04
rain, wind, anything that would pick that stuff up and move it around, you couldn't leave it up there. It was firing radiation into the air still and would not stop.

00:11:11 Speaker_04
The division of the roofs into those three sections, a little fact that I, just because of the way we kind of brought General Tarakanov, who's a real man, into this episode, we had to kind of have our characters tell him that they had named these three

00:11:25 Speaker_04
sections of the roof. In reality, he named them, those things, after his, I think, his nieces. Yeah. Um... Yeah, I guess like... I guess Masha was really difficult.

00:11:37 Speaker_00
Uh, difficult child.

00:11:39 Speaker_04
Yeah, she was rough, but this was the biggest and yet simplest problem they faced, and where it went was another one of those things where I think a lot of people say, -"Really?" And the answer is, absolutely.

00:11:54 Speaker_03
Yeah, that was in my notebook. Really? Again, we intercut this in the episode, but let's just focus on this for now. So, the problem I have is I had to get stuff on the roof, it's highly radioactive, you can't send people up there.

00:12:05 Speaker_03
And one thing we just need to establish as a baseline, which is that I picked up, is that your exposure to radiation is cumulative and it doesn't go away.

00:12:15 Speaker_03
So, for example, if I were to be exposed to this level of radiation, as we find out later, a limit of 90 seconds, that's it for my life. Lifetime dose. Lifetime dose.

00:12:24 Speaker_03
I mean, it's not like I wait a little while and I recover and I can go back and do it again. I'm done.

00:12:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, after a certain number, you're sort of done. Workers in the radiation industry, I shouldn't say radiation, but medical radiation or nuclear power industry, they have certain dosages that they're allowed maximum per year.

00:12:42 Speaker_04
with the expectation that they will work this long and it will add up to this much. And you do wear cumulative, I mean, you'll see throughout the episode, everyone always is wearing a little badge.

00:12:52 Speaker_04
It's a little black, it's just essentially a little film strip, or sometimes what looks like a pen light, which was another version of it, all... authentic and accurate to the time, and these were... And we wore them.

00:13:02 Speaker_04
When we went to Chernobyl, we have a little thing clipped to our shirt, and at the end of our time, they take it. And what those things are is essentially it's a little piece of film. And from that piece of film, they can check exposure.

00:13:14 Speaker_04
How much radiation has this film been exposed to?

00:13:17 Speaker_03
Yeah, just like, and kids, this will be amazing to you, we used to have, like, photo film that changed when you exposed it to visible radiation. Let's back up for a second. Film...

00:13:26 Speaker_03
Well, kids, was this thing... This chemical thing, and then if you expose it to kinds of radiation, it would change. Exactly. We'll call it magic plastic. Exactly. All right. Sorry.

00:13:35 Speaker_04
Magic picture plastic. So, they do check, and in this case, when you're talking about that much radiation, it's a function of how close you are, how strong the source is, and how long you're there. That's the math problem.

00:13:48 Speaker_04
So, there are some sources that are so strong that you can't... A second is too long. And of course, protection can help a little bit.

00:13:57 Speaker_04
In this case, what they were contemplating on that one section of roof was an amount that would essentially lifetime dose you in about a minute and a half. That's with wearing lead and rubber and boots and all the rest of it.

00:14:10 Speaker_04
By the way, parenthetically, rubber and plastic protect you from radiation? Because that comes up a lot in the series. They do wear a lot of rubber. I think that's mostly to seal off air. In other words, that's gonna keep air out and therefore particles.

00:14:21 Speaker_04
But lead is the big deal. Now, if you look at the sequence where these guys are going in the roof, and we'll get to how that decision was made, you'll see that they're wearing what looks like dark, crinkly tinfoil. That is lead.

00:14:34 Speaker_04
But you'd ask, like, why are they, why is it done like that, where it's kind of punched, holes are punched crudely and wires are holding... It looks like homemade armor. It was. There was absolutely no real lead protection for any of these people.

00:14:51 Speaker_04
So what they started to do was scavenge lead from the other parts of the nuclear power plant. Buildings one through three. Because certain machinery in there was covered in lead to protect it from radiation. They just started taking that lead.

00:15:05 Speaker_04
Lead is incredibly soft. Hammer it out, make aprons out of it. Or, we'll come to understand, the egg baskets. It was all homemade. And that is so upsetting to me.

00:15:18 Speaker_04
I mean, I know in the United States, sometimes people are shocked to hear that our soldiers have to actually buy their own body armor, you know, to upgrade what we give them normally. But there's something. Yes. We give them something.

00:15:29 Speaker_04
They didn't give them anything. Nothing. They had to make their own.

00:15:33 Speaker_03
let's get to how they, the people who had to make their armor to go up on the roof, got to that point. So we go through the sequence and they're using Russian Lunar Landers. Lunacogs, yes. Lunacogs, they managed to clean off the first two roofs.

00:15:45 Speaker_03
And then we get to the Joker. By the way, where did you get a police robot? We built it. You built it?

00:15:51 Speaker_04
We built Joker, yes. Yeah, the Lunacogs that you see in the show are mostly CGI.

00:15:58 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:15:58 Speaker_04
So, the initial shots of the Lunacods are actually just, uh, like a cart with a grip pushing it. It's kind of amusing to watch it on that way, but then they were replaced by the CG creations.

00:16:11 Speaker_04
But the Joker, we wanted a real thing because it was gonna arrive and be on this truck and move around. And so we had it constructed for us. And that is exactly what it looks like with the script of Joker. In fact, online, you can find photos of Joker.

00:16:27 Speaker_04
in a garbage heap in the zone. It's there. Because as we find out pretty quickly, it dies. And it's killed by the radiation. Killed by the radiation, which is not something they expected to happen.

00:16:38 Speaker_04
The whole point of getting Joker was that we're told it is designed to withstand this kind of radiation. And it doesn't. And the reason why it doesn't is

00:16:50 Speaker_04
as we point out in the show, and this is the cause of the Great Tantrum, is the Soviets, and this is mind-blowing to me, they refused to tell anyone how bad the situation was.

00:17:02 Speaker_04
Even then, months later, after the world was aware of Chernobyl and what it meant, they were still soft-pedaling just how bad it was to the point where they refused to tell the West Germans. how much radiation was actually on that roof.

00:17:16 Speaker_03
So the West Germans said, we can hit that number you've given us. Yeah, our machine will function in that environment, when of course the environment was how many times worse? A hundred times worse?

00:17:25 Speaker_04
A thousand times worse? Not a hundred times. I think they told them maybe it was like 2,000 roentgen per hour, and it was more like 9,000 or 10,000 or 12,000. So, I mean, it was just... it was 600% or 700% more than it could handle.

00:17:33 Speaker_04
And what blows my mind is the Soviet... power system thought, that's okay. Why not? You know, let's just see. It's the same kind of attitude that leads to Chernobyl in the first place.

00:17:54 Speaker_03
PETER Right. I mean, it is weird because, I mean, you can imagine that kind of lie being told, a husband coming home. Oh, I had two drinks when he had five. And we all are familiar with that.

00:18:05 Speaker_03
Well, I'll just try to get away with this lie because it's less embarrassing. But to apply that to the level of a state dealing with an emergency of this nature is extraordinary to think about.

00:18:16 Speaker_03
That they'd rather not be, as you point out later, not be humiliated.

00:18:21 Speaker_04
CRAIG And just so people don't think that the only casualty here is a robot, in reality, when Joker was put on the roof initially, they believe it wasn't moving because it was stuck on a piece of graphite.

00:18:37 Speaker_04
And so they sent a couple of guys up there to attach a winch to it and move it physically. So they were the first people, I think, to kind of roam around on Masha with the protection that they had very briefly. And they did.

00:18:50 Speaker_04
They got it free of that graphite so it was able to move around, and then it quickly just died because of the radiation.

00:18:57 Speaker_03
And did it sit up there for the duration? Is it still there? Did they get it off the roof?

00:19:00 Speaker_04
They got it off the roof. They put it in a, uh, one of the many sort of collections of Chernobyl garbage. So, irradiated, contaminated. Correct. Vast vehicle graveyards and burial pits. And it's there. And it's still quite radioactive. Right.

00:19:19 Speaker_04
And thus we finally get to biorobots. Biorobots. The notion of biorobots, that's what they were called, came about because there was an attempt to do anything but.

00:19:31 Speaker_04
These ideas that they talk about, dropping molten lead, firing exploding bullets, these were entertained. And one by one dismissed as insane. And in the end, the only option they had was to send men.

00:19:46 Speaker_03
And as we see, they started from the presumption that a human being could be out on that route for a total of 90 seconds. Lifetime.

00:19:55 Speaker_03
The extent of this operation is a little clearer in the script, where you make it very clear that this happened over a series of months. Right. They would bring in crews of men who were ordered to do this. Were they military? Were they just conscripted?

00:20:11 Speaker_03
They were conscripted. They were conscripted guys that were brought there. The general would give them this briefing, which he gave over and over and over and over again.

00:20:20 Speaker_04
And by the way, the briefing he gives them, I would say 90% of what you hear from Ralph Einerson, who plays Tarakanov, is actually what Tarakanov said.

00:20:31 Speaker_07
You will enter reactor building three. Climb the stairs, but do not immediately proceed to the roof. When you get to the top, wait inside behind the entrance to the roof and catch your breath. You'll need it for what comes next.

00:20:45 Speaker_03
How do we know that's what he said?

00:20:46 Speaker_04
We have a documentary. A documentary was made, so you can watch film of him saying this. the man who's narrating, who was one of the... He was, in fact, one of the guys who winched the Joker off that rubble.

00:21:01 Speaker_04
He said it was almost like a prayer that Tarakanov would say over and over and over.

00:21:05 Speaker_04
So, when you listen to that, if some of it sounds a little odd or unscreenwriterly, it's because that's exactly what he said, and I just... You know, I'm a sucker for that. I just love that. You know, I have to do that.

00:21:17 Speaker_04
Similarly, what we hear from him at the very end is exactly what he said.

00:21:21 Speaker_07
Congratulations, comrades. You are the last of 3,828 men."

00:21:26 Speaker_03
We lead our way up to a reenactment of one of those, I don't know what you want to call it, sorties out onto the roof. It's in real time. If people were to time it on their watches while watching the show, it's 90 seconds or thereabouts.

00:21:41 Speaker_03
Three thousand men did this. got suited up, went to the roof, go, ran out, threw maybe one, maybe two pieces of rubble off the roof with shovels. Right. Heavy. Heavy stuff. Ran back in. And they were done. And they were done. Forever.

00:21:56 Speaker_04
Done permanently in the zone. They get sent home. So, we don't do a lot of tricks on the show. You know, Johan and I aren't big in fancy tricks. We don't do a lot of crazy camera moves because we felt that that would interrupt the reality of things.

00:22:09 Speaker_04
This is one where, you know, from the script stage, I just thought, the only value is being with somebody, is being with them for the whole thing and feeling it.

00:22:17 Speaker_04
What that would be like, because it's this terrifying 90 seconds, in a place no one is supposed to be at all. And the fact that they're even up there is evidence of a just a systemic failure.

00:22:33 Speaker_04
And the fact that these people had to be burned up there, so many of them, I presume so many of them, had shortened lives. There's just no question.

00:22:43 Speaker_03
There's a lot of things that you can ask about the biorobots, where they came from, what their experience was going there and coming out, but in order to address those questions, we can go over to the other plot thread of this episode, which is the story of Pavel.

00:22:54 Speaker_03
Right. tens of thousands of men were conscripted. Hundreds of thousands of men were conscripted, brought to the exclusion zone, and put to work liquidating. Obviously, you chose to focus on the one person's experience to stand in for the whole.

00:23:12 Speaker_03
How did you choose this person and this job?

00:23:16 Speaker_04
So, there were some stories in Svetlana Alekseevich's book, Voices of Chernobyl, that liquidators told. And one of the stories was about a liquidator said, our job was to go around from village to village.

00:23:32 Speaker_04
with hunting rifles and killed the pets that had been abandoned there. And he told these stories, and he was kind of a tough guy, you know, the way he described it all.

00:23:41 Speaker_04
And he describes a scene that eventually we do not include in the show, mercifully, I think.

00:23:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, we'll talk about that, because it remained in the script.

00:23:48 Speaker_04
We'll get to that one. People probably think I've abused them with this episode. They have no idea what could have been, but I thought, what a fascinating idea to follow an innocent along with that guy and watch this unfold in his eyes because...

00:24:09 Speaker_04
we've seen what this does to people, what radiation does to people, we haven't seen what these choices do to people. And that, I thought, was a really fascinating thing to focus on.

00:24:19 Speaker_03
Right. So, Pavel is a kid. He's just some kid who was conscripted, some guy showed up with a gun, presumably still in his holster, and said, you're coming with me, you're going to Chernobyl.

00:24:30 Speaker_04
It was a summons, you know, they received papers that said, show up at this place, you're going to Chernobyl, and that's what they did. people to Afghanistan, by the way.

00:24:37 Speaker_03
Same deal. And he gets there and he comes into this enormous camp. Which I'm going to guess, because of the things we discussed, is very accurate to the actual camps that were built. Yeah, we tried to be as accurate as we could.

00:24:48 Speaker_04
They would create these camps in various areas where they would either, you know, there were some clear fields or sometimes they would take over existing things. We actually went and visited what was essentially like a... a holiday camp in the woods.

00:25:04 Speaker_04
I can't remember the name of it, but it was like, basically, like, the theme was fairy tales. So you're in the woods, there's some cabins, there's some buildings, and then there are wooden statues of mermaids, and it's so bizarre.

00:25:19 Speaker_04
That's actually where Brukanov ended up getting sent to. And one of the things our guides showed us was a pit with boots. All of the boots that the liquidators had left behind. It was just remarkable to look at these things.

00:25:32 Speaker_04
They had a massive operation, but this is what the Soviets knew. They knew how to mobilize men. And it was men. That's the other thing, you know, the question comes up. I mean, there were some women. We did some research to find out how many.

00:25:48 Speaker_04
And the best number we could come up with was about 3,000 to 5,000 women out of a revolving number of approaching 600,000. Mostly there as medical personnel or support. Cooks, chefs, I mean, still a very sexist system. But largely it was...

00:26:09 Speaker_03
Right. Speaking of men, Pavel shows up, an innocent, and meets Bacho, who we find out pretty quickly is an Afghanistan war veteran. He's a veteran of the system. You go where you're told, you kill who you're told to kill.

00:26:22 Speaker_03
You enjoy the benefits, which are vodka and the occasional sausage. And you move on with it. Before, of course, we go off to do it, we get the egg basket. The egg basket, that's exactly what it was called.

00:26:35 Speaker_04
And that was real. Give me an egg basket.

00:26:38 Speaker_02
No, I've only got the one and I... Give me the fucking basket. Okay. He's with me. You understand? Nobody fucks with him. We make these from lead scrub. Put it on under your balls.

00:26:54 Speaker_06
Now?

00:26:55 Speaker_02
No, no, you can wait until the radiation gives you a cunt. Yes, now. Over your clothes.

00:27:03 Speaker_04
Fucking shit.

00:27:05 Speaker_04
One of the Liquidator's accounts, not only does he describe the egg basket, but he's very adamant, right about this, tell this, that we made these things and we called them egg baskets and we put them on under our crotches to protect our balls... from radiation.

00:27:22 Speaker_03
I have to say, the moment where Pavel's like, all right, and he says, undoing his pants, and Bacha says, no, you don't put them, you put them on over your clothes. I totally would have done that. I would have been like, okay, I'll just...

00:27:33 Speaker_03
I know, Pavel. Sticking with Pavel, their wonderful day in the exclusion zone. The details that you offer that I assume you got from a first-person account are chilling. For example, they'll come to you, the animals, because they want to be fed.

00:27:49 Speaker_03
They associate humans with being fed.

00:27:50 Speaker_04
They're domesticated.

00:27:51 Speaker_03
their pets. So, you start shooting them after they come to you for food, they run away, well, then you go inside because they all seek shelter inside.

00:27:59 Speaker_03
And the fact that he knows this, that he's been able to do this long enough to understand the pattern of the behavior, is in and of itself, horrifying. You know?

00:28:09 Speaker_04
That is what war does to you. And a lot of the guys that were in the exclusion zone were Afghan veterans. veterans of Afghanistan. And so they had experienced this already with humans. And this was seemingly much easier.

00:28:26 Speaker_04
And you slowly lose touch with norms. There are new norms that are coming in to replace the old ones, and the new norms are... simpler rules, like, for instance, don't let them suffer.

00:28:40 Speaker_04
Which, that was just something that I thought... someone would create as a kind of dignity-preserving rule.

00:28:50 Speaker_03
At least I'm not making them suffer. At least I'm not making them suffer. He almost has anger about it. Correct.

00:28:55 Speaker_04
And I think, you know, he tells Pavel a story about the first time he killed someone. And what is implied in that story is that he didn't kill that man quickly, and that man suffered.

00:29:08 Speaker_04
And this is kind of the nightmare that probably knocks him awake at night, and this is why when he goes through here, okay, this part of dignity, I will maintain this, and if I do, everything will be fine.

00:29:21 Speaker_03
PETER Right. And everything else he puts aside and just deals with it, has lunch. It's almost as if he's, like, looking at Pavel. Pavel's, like, not eating his lunch. All right, well, you know, I'll get a little bit more for myself.

00:29:31 Speaker_03
And then we get, of course, to what will be known forevermore as the Chernobyl puppy scene.

00:29:37 Speaker_04
Yes. Yes, the Chernobyl puppy. Before we get to the Chernobyl puppy scene, there's a moment where we reveal this propaganda banner.

00:29:44 Speaker_03
Oh, God. Which is, of course, the title of the episode.

00:29:46 Speaker_04
The title of the episode. And that is, again, taken from a liquidator's account. And I just... That was one of those things where I stopped. I just stared at the page.

00:29:57 Speaker_04
Because again, as a writer, if you were to dare come up with something like this, you would just be tarred and feathered for being on the nose, but... for the happiness of all mankind...

00:30:09 Speaker_04
And it was just strung there over an abandoned village where the people had been evacuated because of radiation, and men are there to kill their pets, the pets that have been left behind.

00:30:20 Speaker_04
And it's just this bizarre celebratory banner with that ridiculous slogan. The most over-the-top nonsense.

00:30:31 Speaker_03
It's almost as if you make it in big enough letters and make the banner big enough, people might believe it.

00:30:35 Speaker_04
for the happiness of all mankind. Of all mankind.

00:30:38 Speaker_03
Yes. Certain lies have to be shouted. We have our lunch, and then we move on. And we find our puppies.

00:30:45 Speaker_04
Yeah, and that also happened. That's a real story. And there was a scene following that that we shot and did not choose to include that was also real.

00:30:56 Speaker_03
Do you even want to describe? Because it's pretty tough, that scene. And I can't be upset as sort of brilliantly dramatic and powerful as it would have been. I can't be upset that you cut it.

00:31:06 Speaker_04
Well, I would say to people that they should read Voices from Chernobyl, which is sometimes Voices of Chernobyl, and sometimes it's Chernobyl Prayer. But they should read that book. It's a wonderful book. The account is in there.

00:31:17 Speaker_04
Long story short, one of the dogs, a puppy, is not... And they would put the animals in a pit and bury them in concrete because they were irradiated.

00:31:27 Speaker_04
And the liquidator in his account wants to put it out of its misery so it's not buried alive, but they've used all their bullets.

00:31:38 Speaker_04
And it... Again, it was the kind of thing where I felt sick writing it, but I had to, and we shot it, and it was too much. It was just too much.

00:31:50 Speaker_04
Again, it was that little bit like when we talked about depicting the effects of radiation, acute radiation syndrome in episode three. You don't want to cross a line where you feel like you're excited about upsetting people, because we're not.

00:32:06 Speaker_04
You know, once we kind of got out of Pavel's head, I mostly want people to watch this and feel what Pavel feels. If we start feeling like we're there, you know, then I think it's gone too far.

00:32:17 Speaker_03
All right, we leave Pavel. We're talking about this episode in sort of dramatic through lines rather than scene by scene, but the third element of this is the continuation of the investigation. We return to the hospital.

00:32:32 Speaker_03
We try to have another conversation with Yatlov. whose attitude is, it doesn't matter.

00:32:38 Speaker_03
And it's interesting, because this is a guy who's defiant, but that's the moment where he's actually kind of accepting, where he's like, it doesn't matter what the story is. The lies will win and I will get the bullet.

00:32:50 Speaker_04
He knows, on some level, that... Even though he says, how do I even know it exploded? He knows it exploded. Certainly by this point. He shows him a picture just to make sure he knows.

00:33:03 Speaker_04
But I think he also knows in his heart of hearts that something is going on. He doesn't know what it is. What he's sure of as a fairly intelligent citizen of the Soviet Union is that he's going to be blamed for it. And most likely be put to death.

00:33:18 Speaker_04
That seems like a fair guess. And there is absolutely nothing this naive idiot can do about it. She's in here asking for the truth and searching for facts in this place? In this world? Why? It makes no sense to him.

00:33:36 Speaker_03
And in a way, he's right. There's a constant question that comes up and will again, how does an RBMK reactor explode? It's impossible. It can't happen.

00:33:46 Speaker_03
And that is the core of the mystery that the rest of this series, the final episode, is going to be obsessed with. She goes to a library, an archive. She's looking up, presumably, this kind of reactor had been used before.

00:33:58 Speaker_03
It had been part of the Soviet industrial process. And there's that interesting scene where she asks for certain documents. A guy appears. We're never told who the guy is, but we understand what he represents.

00:34:13 Speaker_03
He allows her to look at one book or article.

00:34:16 Speaker_04
CRAIG BENNETT Yes. And this is an invention to get across a fact. Which is that there was a report written by a nuclear engineer scientist named Volkov. And it regarded this flaw.

00:34:33 Speaker_04
The RBMK was designed to produce an enormous amount of power very cheaply. And to do that, certain things were implemented.

00:34:46 Speaker_04
And we get into what that is now, and this is a little bit of the science now, but before we get into how that science works, I guess the important fact to know is... people knew that there had been essentially a mini-Chernobyl.

00:34:59 Speaker_04
In fact, there had been a couple of mini-Chernobyls. And by mini-Chernobyl, I mean the phenomenon that led to Chernobyl exploding had happened writ small in a couple of other reactors earlier, years earlier.

00:35:12 Speaker_04
So, they understood that under certain conditions, this could happen.

00:35:18 Speaker_04
I don't think they ever contemplated that it would lead to an explosion, per se, because the conditions that would lead to the smaller problem occurring were kind of within the realm of expectation.

00:35:30 Speaker_04
Nobody ever expected that a reactor would be put through the paces that Dyatlov put it through that night. Then you combine it with this flaw, and then you have this disaster.

00:35:39 Speaker_03
What's important, and we're going to explore that in detail in episode five, but right now, what's important is Kolmiuk has found this out. She has certainly found that there is a secret about these reactors.

00:35:52 Speaker_03
And she comes back, and she's back at Chernobyl, and she's talking to Shcherbina, and she's talking to Legasov, and it turns out that Legasov knows.

00:36:02 Speaker_03
And he's always known that somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that it wasn't completely inexplicable how this reactor blew up. And we end the episode looking forward to this Vienna conference.

00:36:18 Speaker_03
So, at this point, we're, I don't know how many months, well, at least nine months after the accident, because, of course, the last image we have is Lyudmila without her baby. Nine months later, there's going to be a conference.

00:36:29 Speaker_03
I know it's in Vienna, this conference about atomic energy. And Legasov is going to go, and a discussion happens about telling the truth.

00:36:39 Speaker_01
They'll go after your family. They'll go after your friends.

00:36:42 Speaker_05
You have a chance to talk to the world, Valery. If that chance was mine... But it isn't, is it?

00:36:50 Speaker_01
I've known braver souls than you, Khomyuk. Men who had their moment and did nothing. Because when it's your life and the lives of everyone you love, your moral conviction doesn't mean anything. It leaves you.

00:37:05 Speaker_01
And all you want at that moment is not to be shot.

00:37:09 Speaker_03
And that's a really powerful moment, because we're talking about the value of telling the truth and standing up and telling the truth no matter what.

00:37:16 Speaker_03
And Srebrenica has this moment that I thought was both realistic to someone like him and also profoundly true. i.e., I've known braver men than you.

00:37:26 Speaker_03
And when the time came for them to tell the truth, damn the torpedoes, no matter the consequences, they couldn't do it. Because the consequences are real. This isn't, if you'd excuse me, a movie.

00:37:37 Speaker_03
This isn't where you stand up and tell the truth and you get applauded and the credits roll. This is where you stand up and you go to prison and your family goes to prison.

00:37:45 Speaker_04
And he's right. And he's absolutely right. And in fact, you know, for one of the things that was so remarkable about...

00:37:53 Speaker_04
Stellan Skarsgård is that he understood instinctively that when he's talking about, I've known braver men than you who have failed, he's talking about himself.

00:38:02 Speaker_04
Because every single one of those people at some point or another had a moment where they could have done, told the truth, done the right thing, been defiant.

00:38:11 Speaker_04
knowing full well that on the other side of that are bullets, or, you know, when they would disconnect you from everything and denounce you publicly, put you on these show trials. He's right. So, what's happening here is...

00:38:26 Speaker_04
a kind of devil and angel on the shoulders of Legasov, saying, listen, you can't not tell the truth. This has to stop. There are all of these other RBMK reactors out there. This is going to happen again.

00:38:40 Speaker_04
And on the other side is, what are you talking about? Telling the truth will get you nothing. Nothing. It will be denied. It will not be disseminated. All it will result in is your punishment. And they're both right.

00:38:53 Speaker_04
It is an untenable position for anybody to be in. And at that point, what I hope people are feeling, and they haven't seen episode five yet, so they don't know what's coming, is that he now has to make an impossible decision. And there may not be...

00:39:13 Speaker_04
a good outcome. Unlike most stories that are fictional and are designed to uplift or instruct, this one may not possibly have a happy ending. There may be no victory here. So, that's where I kind of want to leave people.

00:39:29 Speaker_04
I promise that for those of you who've come this far, episode five is going to be, I think, the most enlightening, and you will not leave wondering. You will be certain at the end about everything.

00:39:41 Speaker_04
But right now, you should be in uncertainty because this man faced what I think is one of the great dilemmas of all time.

00:39:49 Speaker_03
Yes, and he really did. It's interesting, we've talked about before how you choose not to show Legasov's family, his social circle. And they existed. He had a wife, he had kids. We don't see them. And for clarity and simplicity, that was a wise choice.

00:40:02 Speaker_03
But it's easy to forget when you're looking at Jared Harris, an actor, playing this part really, really well. that the real person was a real person. That he had very, very strong incentives not to rock any boats.

00:40:16 Speaker_03
Just as Shabina says, you think about your family.

00:40:20 Speaker_04
Your friends, your family, your status, your position, your job, your identity. I mean, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The need to belong is the first psychological need we have. That's what they take from you right off the bat.

00:40:34 Speaker_04
And against that... the noble path probably is pointless. There is no actual victory there. It's probably only a Pyrrhic victory.

00:40:45 Speaker_04
So, it's really difficult, but at the same token, when Komyuk tells him what happened to Lyudmila's baby, what she's driving home here is, this has to stop.

00:40:57 Speaker_03
That was another thing I was really curious about. If you look at the way that we've ended, you've ended, the prior three episodes, Fairly dramatic.

00:41:04 Speaker_03
The first episode, people playing in what they don't know is a poisonous atmosphere, a bird falls in the sky, go to black. Second episode, these men trying to literally save the world. In the dark. In the dark, and their flashlights go out, black.

00:41:17 Speaker_03
Episode three, the burial of these men who we've seen die, the concrete rising up over their coffins, pretty dramatic. pretty serious. This episode ends with a bereft woman alone in a room.

00:41:30 Speaker_04
Yeah. The ending of this episode is essentially an expression of the truth. The truth is that these young men were sent to this place to be radiated.

00:41:41 Speaker_04
The truth is that women lost their children and there's other brutally difficult and sad and heartbreaking stories and voices of Chernobyl. One in particular about a man who loses his daughter and... It's tragic, and it is ongoing. It is true.

00:42:01 Speaker_04
There is no happy ending there for them. There is no narrative close, right? It just goes on. That pain goes on. Forever. So the question now for the characters who still have decisions to make is, what do I do now in a world with that?

00:42:19 Speaker_04
Because that is now part of fact.

00:42:21 Speaker_03
Right. So we leave episode four with the stakes very clear and the choice very difficult facing our scientists and our principal characters.

00:42:32 Speaker_03
And we'll find out what happens, and we'll also find out what happened at Chernobyl in episode five, when we're back next week. This has been the Chernobyl Podcast, talking about episode four of the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO and on Sky.

00:42:48 Speaker_03
I am Peter Sagal, and I've had the honor of talking about the show with its creator, Craig Mazin. You can...

00:42:54 Speaker_03
listen to this podcast, which I assume you know because you've been listening to it, via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or wherever else you choose to get your podcast. It's also available on YouTube or the HBO Go and HBO Now apps.

00:43:11 Speaker_03
Don't just use them to watch TV, use them to listen to things. And, of course, we'd love it if you were to rate and recommend this podcast especially. You know, tweet it out.

00:43:21 Speaker_03
Just tell everybody that this is something they need to do, because you'll be wanting to talk about it when you see everybody this weekend.

00:43:28 Speaker_03
We will be back next week with the final episode of the Chernobyl podcast, talking about the final episode of Chernobyl. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Peter.

00:43:47 Speaker_05
I run a school for young women.

00:43:50 Speaker_00
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00:43:58 Speaker_08
And I'm Ahmed Ali Akbar. Join us on the official Dune Prophecy podcast, where we unpack each episode with the show's creators, cast, and crew.

00:44:06 Speaker_00
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