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Episode: Vichnaya Pamyat

Author: HBO
Duration: 00:49:41

Episode Shownotes

Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss the fifth and final episode of Chernobyl. Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) risk their lives and reputations to expose the truth about Chernobyl. On the podcast, Mazin exposes the truth about the finale. He compares the

real show trial with the series's depiction, explaining where he took liberties and why. We’ll also hear from production designer Luke Hull about recreating the trial room. And finally, Sagal and Mazin talk about what’s happened since Chernobyl, and what they’ve taken away from this series. 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 the final episode titled "Vichnaya Pamyat" of The Chernobyl Podcast, Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin reflect on the emotional and personal aspects of the Chernobyl disaster, including the poignant memories of life in Pripyat and the motivations of key characters. They discuss the psychological toll of the tragedy, particularly on Valery Legasov and others during the show trial that aimed to uncover the truth. Mazin shares insights into the creative process of depicting the trial and its significance as a pivotal moment in the narrative. The episode concludes with a reflection on the broader implications of the disaster and the human propensity to confront or accept falsehoods in dire situations.

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

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_07
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.

00:00:12 Speaker_05
Hello, this is Peter Sagal, hosting the fifth and final episode of the Chernobyl podcast.

00:00:16 Speaker_05
We have been following along with the broadcast of the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO and on Sky, and after every episode, we have been talking with Craig Mazin, the creator of the show, the executive producer, and the sole writer.

00:00:28 Speaker_05
And it's been a privilege to do so, Craig. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. You've been an excellent interlocutor, as they say. Thank you. We like to use big words with each other.

00:00:36 Speaker_00
Indeed.

00:00:36 Speaker_05
It's the basis of our relationship. At any rate, let's dig into this episode The episode opens with life before the explosion. The day of the explosion. Right. And I have to say, I've seen this trick before to go back in time before some disaster.

00:00:53 Speaker_05
But for some reason, it seemed extraordinarily resonant and emotional this time. Obviously, because we've spent four hours seeing what happened next. Knowing what is in front of these people is quite terrifying.

00:01:07 Speaker_05
Because of that scene, it led to a number of moments for me watching it where I kept thinking that somebody could stop it.

00:01:13 Speaker_04
That's exactly right. And somebody could have stopped it.

00:01:16 Speaker_04
And in fact, this opening little montage around Pripyat eventually turns into a scene where three men are sitting in an office, Sprukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov, and they're discussing something that later on we will find out was the first moment it could have been stopped.

00:01:34 Speaker_04
And they fail to in no small part because we find out here, and this is true, that there was an expectation, a general expectation of promotion. The idea being that if this gets solved, perhaps Rukhanov gets bumped upstairs, Fomin takes his job.

00:01:49 Speaker_04
Dyatlov in particular, from what I read, was motivated to get off the work floor, as they say. He wanted to get out of the control room, get out of the working floor, and get into an office and become more of a boss.

00:02:02 Speaker_04
But the moment before, where we're moving around Pripyat, for me, What we wanted to do there was just show... not just happy life, but rather kind of wistful.

00:02:17 Speaker_04
We're tapping in again, I think, to that Soviet sense of great bitterland, the kind of bittersweet yearning for a memory of a place. So it's not so much that we're asking people to go, look how ironic. They're all happy and they're alive.

00:02:32 Speaker_04
It's more that we're asking people to feel a kind of wistful melancholy for this place that they never got a chance to know. Right. It's interesting.

00:02:42 Speaker_05
It works. Let me put it this way. If you had shown us that sequence at the very beginning, I would have bounced off it. I would have said, come on, this lovely life in this Soviet town. Come on. You're trying to tug on my heartstrings.

00:02:54 Speaker_05
You're trying to make me care when it all goes to hell. And I would have resented the manipulation.

00:02:59 Speaker_05
Because of what we've seen, because of the horrors, both in terms of what happened to the people, what happened to the town, everything from the dying firemen to the dead cow, it actually is extraordinarily powerful, because we're almost looking back on that moment with nostalgia, from the perspective of knowing what happened.

00:03:21 Speaker_04
And again, you know, we had talked about this earlier, that Pripyat as an atom town was this incredibly desirable place to live. And you can see that here. There are flowers, there's a pool.

00:03:31 Speaker_04
You know, most small Russian cities did not have a community pool of that size. And Pripyat got one. It was exactly what we had hoped for, this sense of nostalgia.

00:03:44 Speaker_04
A certain sense of what could have been, because the truth is, we're showing people a little glimpse of a life that we denied them. I mean, look, the normal way of doing the show is, in fact, that's the first scene of the series, right?

00:03:57 Speaker_04
And then you see people going to work, and they talk about things, and they just... And like you, I just felt that that would've been a bit unearned.

00:04:05 Speaker_05
Yeah, and it was extraordinarily effective in reminding us what had been lost. Anyway, the scene with the three administrators has a wonderful bit of acting.

00:04:17 Speaker_05
I've tried to point these out when I've noticed them, with Fomin at the end of the scene getting up and just moving over. And if he had sat at the desk, it would've been too much.

00:04:26 Speaker_05
But just being behind it and kind of rubbing his back against the wall like a puppy who wanted to be scratched, it was just beautiful. And you got a sense of this guy imagining his future, the next step up the ladder.

00:04:38 Speaker_04
So, Fomin is played by Adrian Rollins, who was spectacular and made this amazing half of a duo with Khan O'Neill, who plays Burkhanov.

00:04:49 Speaker_04
And in many ways, I kind of secretly want to watch a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of just those two guys and their... their life together as they move through.

00:04:58 Speaker_04
Adrian Rollins, if people find him vaguely familiar, I mean, he's been in all sorts of things, but the thing people have probably seen him in the most is the Harry Potter movies. He played Harry Potter's father.

00:05:09 Speaker_05
Yeah, he's Harry Potter's dad. Yeah, so we see in those flashbacks and in the Mirror of Erised, that's hilarious. Well done, the Mirror of Erised. Minerdom contains worlds, Craig.

00:05:18 Speaker_04
Indeed, indeed. But Fahmin actually had this, we had a scene and we removed it again for issues of time, and this one I missed. There's nothing we could do about it because there were other scenes connected to it that had to go as well.

00:05:32 Speaker_04
But Fahmin attempts suicide. In reality, he's put in prison and he attempts to kill himself by taking his glasses, breaking them, and using the shards to slice his wrists. This, in fact, delayed the trial. for a number of months.

00:05:49 Speaker_04
And after the trial, you know, we now know what the sentencing was, he was taken out of his prison term early for mental health reasons and sent to a hospital, and he stayed there for quite some time.

00:06:00 Speaker_04
He was a very troubled guy, and in many ways, you know, what Adrian brought to this character, which I thought was beautiful, was a sense of weakness. An internal weakness.

00:06:11 Speaker_05
PETER Yeah, which you see in all his interactions.

00:06:13 Speaker_04
Yeah, he's weak and he's wanting, but the weak and wanting people, I think, are the ones when the denial bubble finally bursts. And the truth of what has happened crashes in.

00:06:26 Speaker_04
The shame they feel, I think, is the greatest of all, and no surprise that he attempted to take his life.

00:06:32 Speaker_05
Yeah, although it'd be interesting to talk about that in contrast with the outlaw during the trial sequence coming up. So we leave them, and we learn about this test, and the basic motivation to do the test, because promotion awaits.

00:06:46 Speaker_05
If it's successful, they get rewarded.

00:06:48 Speaker_04
CRAIG Right. There's a little bit of a mystery here, but what we need to know is a couple of things that, as you said, there are certain kind of motivations behind the scenes that we hadn't been aware of.

00:06:59 Speaker_04
But another one is that, I think, Brukanov says, we're not gonna have any stability issues running at low power. So there's an awareness that if you run this thing at low power, it is unstable. Why? Doesn't matter at this point.

00:07:13 Speaker_04
All we need to know is that they know. That they're already, in this moment, playing a little fast and loose. That what they ought to do is, as Burkhanov says, do we need to scrap it or what? And the answer there should have been, yes.

00:07:29 Speaker_04
And we will find out why once we get to the trial.

00:07:32 Speaker_05
So, we come back from the credits, Legasov is on the street in Moscow. We know instantly, because he's at home in Moscow, that some months have passed.

00:07:39 Speaker_05
I almost get the sense, because of the normalcy of his life, it seems almost like the crisis at Chernobyl is, if not over, contained.

00:07:47 Speaker_04
Yes. At this point, there is a sarcophagus around it. It is managed. The work goes on, but the immediacy is over. And he does not need to be there anymore.

00:07:59 Speaker_05
Right. So he's not, he's buying cigarettes or a newspaper, and of course, he's intercepted by the KGB. And then we find out that the setup for what I thought was gonna be his heroic moment in Vienna was nothing of the kind.

00:08:13 Speaker_04
Nothing of the kind. He... I mean, I hesitate to use the word failed, but he did not do the heroic thing in Vienna. And in many ways, I can understand why. Younger people don't know, and some older people may have forgotten.

00:08:30 Speaker_04
But when citizens of the Soviet Union left the Soviet Union to travel to Western nations like Austria, for instance, they were being watched extraordinarily carefully for fear of defection.

00:08:43 Speaker_04
So the thought that he could just sort of freelance something in front of people, I think he knew very well that wasn't gonna work.

00:08:50 Speaker_04
And he did, in fact, and so this is historical, he goes to Vienna, he does speak in front of this conference, and he speaks at enormous length, and also speaks... in a way that no one had heard a Soviet scientist speak before.

00:09:04 Speaker_04
He admits that there were training problems. He admits that there were safety regulation issues. He admits that the people in the room made terrible mistakes.

00:09:11 Speaker_04
These were things that no one had ever heard any Soviet scientist say, and they gave him extraordinary credit. I mean, the line, you know, -"Finally, a Soviet scientist we can trust, we can believe." That's a real comment from a newspaper.

00:09:23 Speaker_04
And I think it was actually quite brilliant what the Soviet Union did there. They kind of let him say almost everything so that he would be believable. Exactly.

00:09:32 Speaker_05
He would be modest. Right. Where the Soviet side has ever admitted anything. And he admitted so much, but of course, he omitted what we will find out is the key piece of information. And he's complimented for this by our KGB head.

00:09:43 Speaker_05
-"Statecraft," he calls it.

00:09:45 Speaker_04
-"Statecraft."

00:09:46 Speaker_05
-"Statecraft Legasov." -"Statecraft." We go to Legasov's apartment. He's working on some drawings, or he's studying some drawings. And I didn't quite catch what that was.

00:09:55 Speaker_04
Yeah, they were blueprints. He was sort of going through, the understanding is that he's going to go to this trial. And now, let me just stop and say, he was not at the trial.

00:10:05 Speaker_04
So, an enormous, dramatic license here that I take in five, out of necessity. I could have absolutely portrayed this trial exactly as it unfolded. with other people, but we wouldn't have known who they were. And we wouldn't have cared.

00:10:21 Speaker_04
So this is a dramatic license. He was not there, Scherbina was not there, other people handled this. And the trial also took weeks and was quite boring.

00:10:30 Speaker_05
Yeah. How early in your process did you conceive of the trial as a dramatic climax of this thing?

00:10:37 Speaker_04
In the very beginning. For me, at least, there's no way to know how to start something unless I know how it ends. I need to know that.

00:10:43 Speaker_04
And the trial, I thought, was crucial because it allowed me to both conclude these stories and conclude Legasov's story in a way that I could dramatize.

00:10:57 Speaker_04
Because, in fact, the choices he makes at the trial are choices that he makes in real life in different ways. In different contexts and different places. And the price that he suffers, he suffered.

00:11:06 Speaker_04
But also, it allowed me a chance to finally, finally show what happened that night. Because for me, this is this incredible, it's like a murder mystery that we've been waiting to watch. And a trial would help us do that.

00:11:23 Speaker_04
So, we're on our way to the trial, which was in Chernobyl. Chernobyl City. So, why the Russian law, or Soviet law, essentially stated that you needed to try a crime roughly within the district in which it occurred.

00:11:38 Speaker_04
In this case, they absolutely could've waived that. They chose not to in part because they wanted to show people that it was safe now. It was not.

00:11:48 Speaker_04
And so everybody still had to wash their shoes very carefully, and it was just an absurd place to hold a trial, and yet they did, about 20 kilometers away from the reactor.

00:11:58 Speaker_05
Before we get into the trial scenes, I want to talk about Kamyuk's challenge to Legasov, basically saying, if you stand up at this trial and tell the truth, it will make a difference because of the audience of the trial, which he refers to as the real jury.

00:12:11 Speaker_05
Is that based in fact, or was that invented by you as a dramatist to make, to motivate Legasov's ultimate choice?

00:12:18 Speaker_04
It's inspired by factual circumstances, because he was not there, and scientists, there was no, like, little jury there that he could convince.

00:12:26 Speaker_04
However, what's going on in this time, aside from the trial where I've kind of compressed all this stuff, is a bit of a battle in the scientific community as a result of Chernobyl.

00:12:39 Speaker_04
And it begins to manifest as a fear among some that Legasov and his desire for openness is going to basically draw unwanted attention to some of the people in the Soviet scientific community that had been helping to suppress these things.

00:12:56 Speaker_04
On the other side, you had scientists who were desperate for this information to come out. Usually, the power structure was the people who wanted to keep the lid on things were above, and the people who wanted to talk were below.

00:13:07 Speaker_04
and the people on top start to win.

00:13:10 Speaker_04
Legasov enters this strange period in his life where instead of receiving certain awards that he was expected to receive, instead of receiving certain commendations and support from his fellow academicians, he starts getting the opposite.

00:13:26 Speaker_04
He starts getting pushback and rejection. He's left off a list of people that receive awards, even though he's done this remarkable thing. He's also now starting to suffer from ill health effects.

00:13:38 Speaker_04
And Legasov, in fact, does not commit suicide without having attempted it prior. He makes an attempt, he ends up in the hospital, he's now, again, I think a combination of the stress of the rejection of the scientific community.

00:13:54 Speaker_04
So, the tapes, his taped memoirs, kind of posthumously win over enough scientists to make this happen.

00:14:03 Speaker_05
I just want to clarify this. We were saying in real life, he was being truthful about what happened.

00:14:09 Speaker_04
Yes.

00:14:10 Speaker_05
Attempting to. Attempting to. And was getting pushback from his own community.

00:14:13 Speaker_04
Correct. Correct. From the people that were the establishment of that community. And there was a real fear in the upper echelons of the Soviet nuclear industry that they were going to get in trouble. because they had presided over a number of accidents.

00:14:32 Speaker_04
They had covered it up. They had allowed this design to proceed, knowing full well it had inherent flaws. The people who were running the Soviet Union, they didn't understand the science at all. They were relying on these people.

00:14:45 Speaker_04
And in fact, in a Soviet state that had no religion, and that had kind of turned science into a bit of a religion,

00:14:55 Speaker_04
There was a growing sense after Chernobyl that the Soviet community had over-empowered a lot of these scientists, and that these scientists had behaved arrogantly.

00:15:06 Speaker_04
So there was this interesting political battle going on that Legasov found himself in the middle of. And that is kind of what I'm dramatizing in a very reductive way.

00:15:15 Speaker_04
The only way I could without turning into like a side soap opera about, you know, Kurchatov politics.

00:15:21 Speaker_05
And you had enough complexity to deal with in an hour of TV.

00:15:25 Speaker_04
A few spinning plates. A few spinning plates.

00:15:27 Speaker_05
So let's leave the politics of the Soviet scientific community aside for the moment. And let's move into the trial. You've been to the room where the trial took place.

00:15:35 Speaker_04
Indeed. So this was a cultural center in the town of Chernobyl. It was where they would put on small shows, plays, and play instruments for the locals. And they converted it into this trial room. So it had all of these auditorium-type seats and a stage.

00:15:53 Speaker_04
And the Soviets put some curtains up. They put three big chairs on the stage for the judges. And we, Luke, Hull, again, did a remarkable job.

00:16:02 Speaker_04
I mean, if you look at pictures from our show, of our set, and pictures of the actual trial, it's nearly identical. It's remarkable. We felt that was incredibly important, again, to duplicate as best we could because it's so specific, it's so weird.

00:16:17 Speaker_04
the two different colored curtains, and the judges on a stage, and the three guys in that weird little thing with two soldiers on either side, and cameras and lights.

00:16:27 Speaker_05
Here's Luke Hull, the production designer for Chernobyl.

00:16:31 Speaker_01
It's funny, because what looks like a really simple set was actually quite a complex one to put together. To feel like it was right, I suppose. It didn't look too smart, actually.

00:16:42 Speaker_01
And actually, Jakob sent out a reference for the scene quite early on that I think we were all kind of working to, which was a scene from The Godfather 2 when they're in the trial. And it had that sort of...

00:16:54 Speaker_01
energy and that echoey noise and so visually we just always try to keep that in mind. You know, you want to see cables running from the microphones and you want to see paper strewn and it's not perfect, it's in process.

00:17:09 Speaker_01
People have been there a while, they're tired of it but they're Uh, getting through it.

00:17:13 Speaker_04
How typical was this for a Soviet show trial? Well, this was, in many ways, the final Soviet show trial. So the answer is, I'm not sure, because they hadn't had a real good Soviet show trial in a long time. It had sort of fallen out of favor.

00:17:29 Speaker_04
What I did do, however, was look back at some transcripts from old Soviet show trials, Zinoviev and others, where you see some of the language that's used.

00:17:38 Speaker_04
And the prosecutor, who in this case, in Soviet law, at least in this case, actually outranked the judge. And was sort of in charge of the judge. I mean, because again, show trial.

00:17:51 Speaker_04
The speech that he gives in the very beginning is partly taken from a speech that Brezhnev gave about, uh, on the anniversary of, I think, I don't know, um, Sputnik or something. And I just thought that language...

00:18:05 Speaker_04
I couldn't believe it when I read that. You know, I was just looking for Soviet speeches, and I read this thing, I'm like, my God, they actually said something like, our soul causes the Leninist government. That was part, kind of the deal.

00:18:16 Speaker_04
That's how they did it.

00:18:17 Speaker_00
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR has determined that justice be carried out on behalf of the people in accordance with the general goal of our party, as determined by its 20th, 21st, and 22nd Congresses, which is a Leninist goal.

00:18:35 Speaker_00
It was, is, and will be the only immutable goal in the Soviet state.

00:18:39 Speaker_00
The path of Leninist principles shall be consistently and undeviatingly followed as it expresses the vital interests of the Soviet people, its hopes and aspirations as we guide the life of the party and state. This session of court is now open.

00:18:53 Speaker_00
Comrade Judge Milan Kadnikov presiding.

00:18:56 Speaker_05
The Prosecutor, of course, is played by an actor whose name I will now butcher, Michael McAllagheny. MICHAEL MCALLAGHENY. Thank you. Who, of course, played Bruce Bolton in Game of Thrones.

00:19:05 Speaker_05
And my only criticism of you, Craig, as the creator of the show, is you should have given him more lines. Because I miss him.

00:19:11 Speaker_04
I'm sure that he will also agree with you. I miss him.

00:19:14 Speaker_05
We used all of his lines. I appreciate that.

00:19:17 Speaker_05
I know that we could get totally lost at this point in trying to parse the differences between what happened here and the episode and what was reality because of the dramatic necessity, but I do want to ask one more question about that, which is that the trial happens in a way that we're not used to, in that these characters do presentations as part of the prosecution.

00:19:38 Speaker_05
Without getting into who those people were, is that generally accurate? Was that how this kind of trial was done? No.

00:19:45 Speaker_04
No, generally speaking, these show trials were very interrogative, and a huge part of the show trial was the defendants explaining to everyone how guilty they were. Sometimes trying to out-guilt themselves. Like, almost a contest.

00:20:00 Speaker_04
No, no, no, you don't know how guilty I am. all this strange kabuki theater to try and avoid the bullet. In this case, I did draw a little bit from some notes that people had taken who were there. Dyatlov in particular was defiant.

00:20:14 Speaker_04
So the things that Dyatlov says, we'll get to those, are real. But these presentations and these are really meant to help the audience understand what happened that night.

00:20:25 Speaker_04
The good news, for those of you who love accuracy as I do, is that all of the descriptions of what happened that night, all of them, are absolutely accurate down to the times.

00:20:35 Speaker_05
I have some questions about that, but the first thing I wanted to say is why was it so... I mean, backing up. One of the things we're always used to in all kinds of Hollywood things is simplification.

00:20:47 Speaker_05
Because, you know, audiences may not know the subject, audiences key on drama, not information, so everything is simplified. Military movies, instead of complex things, they just got to capture that bridge.

00:20:58 Speaker_05
Scientific movies, we just have to, like, make that connection or discover that formula. Like, to take a random example, interstellar. The secret to interstellar space travel is a particular mathematical formula. That's all we need to know.

00:21:11 Speaker_05
Audience, just trust us. Unobtainium. Right, unobtainium, to use the classic phrase. You made a very different choice. You were like, I want the people who've been with us for four hours so far to... And I'm not gonna use the word endure, but enjoy.

00:21:26 Speaker_05
Be interested in a general scientific lecture that accurately depicts what happened. Why was that important to you?

00:21:33 Speaker_04
Because it's the truth. And at this point, after portraying this scientist, who was a scientist, and all the things they went through,

00:21:45 Speaker_04
and to portray an inquisition into who is to blame and what went wrong, it was incredibly important to me to share the truth. Also, for me, I find this fascinating. Why it blew up is that question, you know, on the very first podcast we did.

00:22:02 Speaker_04
That's my question. I knew it blew up, but why? The actual why is fascinating, and in and of itself is a small drama about people and decisions. and I understand it, and I wanted people to understand it with me. And I hope that they do.

00:22:20 Speaker_04
I mean, it helps when you have world-class actors giving the lecture, but I tried really hard to frame everything within the context of dramatic moments based on human decisions and human motivations. PETER Right.

00:22:33 Speaker_05
And this explanation is so greatly aided for the viewer by the flashbacks to the control room. Which also had emotional weight because, well, to put it bluntly, we see them with their skin back on. And that was terrifying.

00:22:46 Speaker_05
And like I said, there were moments, there was that wonderful moment, skipping ahead a bit, where Akimov says, I refuse to do this. And I swear to you, I was actually thinking, well, this is great. He won't do it and it won't blow up. I know.

00:23:00 Speaker_05
Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And of course, as we've been discussing in so many different contexts in this, he's threatened... Yeah. ...with the destruction of his career, of his connections, everything.

00:23:12 Speaker_04
Accurate.

00:23:13 Speaker_05
You know, Dyatlov's threat is not just, I will fire you, you will never work again.

00:23:17 Speaker_04
Yeah. Yeah, he was a real bully. He should've finished by now.

00:23:22 Speaker_07
We're following protocol for reduction rate.

00:23:24 Speaker_02
You're procrastinating. There are 10 other men in this plant would have done it already. Kirshenbaum, come get me when these old women are ready.

00:23:32 Speaker_06
Yes, Comrade Dyatlov.

00:23:34 Speaker_04
Certain of those phrases like, you're procrastinating, was one thing that they said he just kept going on about all night. You're procrastinating, you're procrastinating.

00:23:43 Speaker_04
Who would ever say something like that to people that are operating a nuclear reactor? Procrastinating.

00:23:49 Speaker_05
Since we've got him, let's talk about the outlaw throughout this sequence, throughout this episode. He seems... insanely reckless. As if he didn't know what a nuclear reactor was. I mean, presumably, he had some expertise.

00:24:06 Speaker_05
We've discussed his past, the real character's past. He's been working with nuclear energy in different contexts. And yet, he's treating this as if it's a toy, as if there's no danger to it. And where in the world does that recklessness come from?

00:24:20 Speaker_05
Was it just his ambition? That I need to do this so we can finally get this test done, and so I can finally take that next chair, as he discussed in the prior to the pre-credits scene.

00:24:29 Speaker_05
Or, as it began to feel to me on repeated watchings, it was just that character, that man. He simply could not be denied what he wanted. He couldn't be contradicted. He was in charge, and the more challenge that came back to him, the harder he pushed.

00:24:45 Speaker_04
That was certainly his reputation. He was known as a difficult, demanding man for whom nothing was ever good enough. The question of why, we have to guess. Now, we do have... He made statements afterwards.

00:25:00 Speaker_04
Lengthy statements, which I've read, which I find not credible. And, in fact, the lack of credibility is indicative in and of itself. That he still was kind of saying, no, this wasn't anything I did.

00:25:12 Speaker_04
I mean, yeah, we made some mistakes, but this was really because of... He chose to focus on the flaw without acknowledging that the flaw does not express itself. unless you drive this nuclear reactor in the most bizarre and insane way.

00:25:25 Speaker_04
So I think, in his mind, he is being reckless. He wants to report a completed test. He knows the test, by the way, at this point, is nonsense.

00:25:33 Speaker_04
It's not gonna deliver any normal result, but he just wants to say he did it so that it could be signed off and done. The last thing I think Dyatlov thought was that there would be an explosion.

00:25:44 Speaker_04
I think mostly what he thought was, if I can get this done in such a way that it shows a result that I can sort of present as real, then I'll have gotten away with this. So it's reckless.

00:25:55 Speaker_04
and stupid and arrogant, but I don't think at any point he thought it was really dangerous. There was a certain cowboy mentality there.

00:26:04 Speaker_05
And as you point out, to go back to the car metaphor that we've used before in terms of turning the key in what happens, from one perspective, the only thing he really had to worry about was the car stalling and stopping entirely.

00:26:15 Speaker_05
that it was the last thing in his mind that it would ever blow up, because, as we know, those kinds of reactors don't blow up.

00:26:23 Speaker_05
And I also think, and you make this very, very clear, that even as this is happening and the level of tension and terror in the room is rising, along with, ultimately, the reactor, They all thought they had a fail-safe. They had a big off button.

00:26:36 Speaker_05
It always works. It's not a good thing to turn off your reactor, but you can do it if you need to.

00:26:41 Speaker_04
You scram the reactor. I mean, and that kind of emergency shutoff button is a very comforting thing. Yeah. If you were to think, my God, it's not connected, that would be disconcerting.

00:26:52 Speaker_04
But what you would probably never suspect is that it would actually make things worse. That's the one thing the off button shouldn't do.

00:26:59 Speaker_05
PETER Right. And it's funny, looking back on episode one, looking at their confused faces at the moment after the explosion, you now begin to understand why they were so befuddled. Because things don't blow up when you press that button, things stop.

00:27:13 Speaker_04
CRAIG DUNN-LEE, JR. : Things stop. And even after they pressed it, they could see that the power was going up dramatically. And that just simply didn't make sense to any of them.

00:27:22 Speaker_04
To the point where they begin to rationalize that the panel's wrong, the thing is wrong, the explosion is a hydrogen tank and not the core, because none of what happened was feasible to them because they were not told.

00:27:36 Speaker_06
Right.

00:27:37 Speaker_04
Dyatlov has a lot of experience at this point. But then you look at a guy like Tuptunov, who is 25, who had been on the job for, I think, four months. What does he know? Nothing. They know nothing.

00:27:49 Speaker_04
Most of the people in the plant didn't even know a test was happening.

00:27:52 Speaker_05
Right. And as we find out later, what happens has never happened before because it's never... Even though there's this flaw in the control rods, No one has ever jammed the control rods into a reactor that's already skyrocketing.

00:28:07 Speaker_04
Well, exactly. So, the... No one had ever combined the following. Turn off the pumps that send water into the core, and also... remove all of the control rods entirely, completely. With the exception of six out of whatever, 211.

00:28:24 Speaker_05
Which is itself, I don't know much about nuclear reactors, but that in and of itself is reckless, right?

00:28:28 Speaker_04
It is reckless. I mean, the computer did say to them, you should shut this reactor down, this is crazy. And that's correct.

00:28:34 Speaker_04
And one of the things, by the way, that happened actually fairly swiftly after Chernobyl was a change in the rules of how many rods you could remove.

00:28:42 Speaker_04
So, no one had ever taken all the rods completely out and also shut off the water to a reactor that, by the way, had what's known as a hotspot in it.

00:28:51 Speaker_04
This is something we couldn't really get into, but, you know, there's that moment when he switches off, uh, go to local, take off local control and go to global control. Tatunov almost certainly makes a mistake there.

00:29:02 Speaker_04
We don't quite know why the power plummeted at that point. It should not have. It's either that the button was faulty, which I doubt, or Taptuna failed to reset a number. And so it fell. He blew it.

00:29:16 Speaker_05
Parenthetically, how do we know the step-by-step, second-by-second, button-push-by-button-push sequence of events? Was there, like, a log, as we might expect now?

00:29:25 Speaker_04
Yeah, a computer. So, it's S-K-A-L-A, Skala. It was the central computer that would record all the... instructions as they came through the panel. So there was a moment-by-moment registration of a number of decisions.

00:29:41 Speaker_04
And also, in the days following the accident, Toptunov and Akimov were interviewed, as was Kirshenbaum, as was Stolyarchuk, both of whom survived. And so there was a picture that was put together of what happened. Now Dyatlov...

00:29:55 Speaker_04
did, in fact, at the trial, claim that he was in the toilet, that he never told them to raise the power, that they decided on their own to do this insane thing that they were petrified to do. And that, in fact, he was in the toilet.

00:30:07 Speaker_04
And that's where you start to realize that Dyatlov isn't just a stubborn man, but that he is something else. There's a... There's a special kind of arrogance to lie to a Soviet show trial judge.

00:30:17 Speaker_05
Especially when he has said in a prior episode, it doesn't matter what happens, I'm getting the bullet. And yet, I almost kind of admired him that he never gave in.

00:30:26 Speaker_04
He never gave in. By the way, he never gave in even up to his death. I mean, he was still sort of saying, nobody would have, everybody would have done what I did. It was totally normal and... No.

00:30:36 Speaker_05
All right, we have a chance to see our three principal protagonists, Shurbina, Kamyuk, and Legasov in this trial. We work our way up to the red and the blue cards.

00:30:47 Speaker_07
Yes. But you don't need to be a nuclear scientist to understand what happened at Chernobyl. You only need to know this. There are essentially two things that happen inside a nuclear reactor. The reactivity which generates power either goes up

00:31:06 Speaker_07
or it goes down. That's it. All the operators do is maintain balance.

00:31:14 Speaker_05
When did you hit upon that, the red and blue cards, as a way of depicting this very complex technical explanation?

00:31:21 Speaker_04
Well, I never wrote any of that without something like that in place. I think initially I was thinking about red marbles and blue marbles, but I knew that the only way to explain this was the way I had been able to absorb it myself.

00:31:34 Speaker_04
So I did speak with nuclear physicists, and I read about the operation of nuclear reactors, and what it came down to for me was, okay, I understand this is a system of balance. I now have to show people how this all works. This goes up, this goes down.

00:31:48 Speaker_04
So, some sort of binary representation. The fact is, when we came up with the cards, one of the things I sort of loved about the cards also was that we were writing the names on them in Cyrillic. So no one would know.

00:31:59 Speaker_04
And the fun part is, you didn't need to.

00:32:01 Speaker_05
It was just a red pile and a blue pile.

00:32:04 Speaker_04
Red goes up, blue goes down.

00:32:05 Speaker_05
I did enjoy the fact that it was made of clear plastic, so you could see it from either camera angle, which was very convenient. Obviously, the explanation takes a lot of the time of the episode, so I won't go over it here. But let's talk...

00:32:21 Speaker_05
about the climax, really, of the whole series. Where the trial's about to end, he's about to reveal the deepest secret of why, ultimately, the last and most significant reason why this happened.

00:32:34 Speaker_05
The trial's about to end, and then Shurbina gets up and insists.

00:32:38 Speaker_07
We've had enough for today. The defendants will be remanded in custody. Court will... I haven't finished.

00:32:47 Speaker_00
I still have more evidence to give. It's not necessary. Your testimony is concluded. Your Honour. Court is now adjourned. We will resume tomorrow with... Let him finish!

00:32:59 Speaker_05
Now, this was so dramatic and so reflective of their character choices that I'm assuming this is entirely fictional. Life is not that good.

00:33:06 Speaker_04
Correct. And this is really a product of the relationship that has formed between my characters of Shurbina and Legasov. There is a wonderful photo of the two of them, the actual men, together, I think in Vienna, and they're laughing.

00:33:21 Speaker_04
And they're close. And when I looked at that, I just thought to myself, well, there is a friendship here. You can't fake the look on their faces. There's an actual... a real comradeship, a real friendship. And they were in the foxhole together.

00:33:36 Speaker_04
And the fact of the matter is that Boris Shcherbina probably never did make any grand, you know, proclamation to let Legasov speak, but I could certainly imagine that he would have supported something like that by this point.

00:33:50 Speaker_05
Right. Legasov, because of Shcherbina's interruption encouraging him to continue the trial, he's able to finally make the revelation.

00:34:00 Speaker_07
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes.

00:34:15 Speaker_05
Lies! Which is a wonderful, as we say in the business, button on a dramatic theme. The final scene, pretty much, of the series is Legasov paying his price, being told what's going to happen to him. And it's interesting.

00:34:32 Speaker_05
It reminded me, of all things, well, probably not coincidentally, of what happens to Winston Smith at the end of 1984. They don't shoot him. They just let him go out in the world. And that's... Is that more or less what happened to Legasov?

00:34:43 Speaker_04
Yes. He was... He returned to his job. He returned to his office. He... His duties were reduced. Uh, there was an election to see who would start to take over the next generation of the Kurchatov Institute. He lost. He was shocked that he lost.

00:34:59 Speaker_04
prior to the Chernobyl and his attempts to spread this information, I don't think he would've lost at all. Again, this was a pretty avid communist.

00:35:11 Speaker_04
You know, one of the things that comes out in that scene is just how much of a communist he was, how much of a Soviet true believer he was. His father... was not just a Soviet true believer, he was almost like one of the, um... What was his job?

00:35:25 Speaker_05
Ideological enforcement or something like that?

00:35:27 Speaker_04
Yeah, compliance. I mean, he was somebody whose job was basically to make sure that you were Soviet enough. That's the environment that Legasov grew up in.

00:35:36 Speaker_04
And I think after Chernobyl and his, um, you know, increasing discussion of the issues involving the RBMKs,

00:35:46 Speaker_04
There was a concern from some people that he was grandstanding, but mostly a fear that he was gonna expose some of the other scientists who were less heroic and less bold. So he begins to lose connection with his own community.

00:36:02 Speaker_04
He's growing increasingly sick, he's growing increasingly tired and increasingly depressed. And this begins a fairly rapid spiral downward, culminating in his decision to take his own life.

00:36:13 Speaker_05
And we are told, with a title at the end, that his taped memoirs actually made a huge difference in terms of the world finding out what really happened, the flaw with these reactors, these reactors are being repaired.

00:36:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, there was a sense from my research that the dissemination of his memoirs, his tape memoirs, essentially gave everybody the courage to stand up and start talking about this, but only in combination with his suicide.

00:36:41 Speaker_04
That it was his suicide that was just not possible to ignore. Somebody like Legasov should not commit suicide in the Soviet Union. And that statement was not something you could repress. It was bad optics. I mean, to use a modern term.

00:36:55 Speaker_05
And the world knew of Legasov's intensely central role in the recovery at Chernobyl.

00:37:01 Speaker_04
He was the face of Soviet science in Vienna. And here he was, killing himself, two years to the day of the explosion. Certainly not a coincidence.

00:37:13 Speaker_04
And in his memoirs, he speaks quite clearly about the need for reform in the scientific community, and by extension, the people that control the scientific community.

00:37:23 Speaker_04
And so, following that, there are increased efforts for transparency within the community. And the RBMK reactors do undergo procedures to reduce the possibility of something like Chernobyl happening again.

00:37:37 Speaker_04
The positive void coefficient, that kind of vicious cycle of steam turning to energy, that is reduced in the reactors. The graphite tips on the control rods that ended up causing the explosion, those are changed and altered.

00:37:49 Speaker_04
The rules about how far you can remove, a lot of new rules are put into place. Essentially, a lot of rules that you would have thought wouldn't need to be there are now there.

00:37:59 Speaker_05
The end credits and the information therein, which go on for a while, and I think that speaks to how interested you are in people knowing the reality and the aftermath. I'll let them speak for themselves with one exception.

00:38:09 Speaker_05
You quote Gorbachev saying the real reason that the Soviet Union collapsed was because of Chernobyl. Why?

00:38:15 Speaker_04
Well, two things happened as a result of Chernobyl. One was an enormous expenditure of money. It was an amount of money they weren't expecting to spend and kind of didn't have.

00:38:26 Speaker_04
But the bigger issue was it exposed the worst kind of Soviet lie to the world.

00:38:33 Speaker_04
People understood that the Soviets would lie, but the Soviets could sort of lie and get away with it a little bit because there was always a little bit of wiggle room or plausible deniability. or the nature of the lie wasn't enormous.

00:38:46 Speaker_04
In this case, they didn't tell the world that an entire continent was under threat of an open nuclear reactor spewing smoke into the air. They didn't tell them, and they didn't evacuate those people.

00:38:58 Speaker_04
And they were exposed as callous and craven, and they never really recovered from that blow. It... for a nation that was obsessed with not being humiliated?

00:39:07 Speaker_05
I was just thinking. They were humiliated. They were right to be worried. Yes, they were. They were humiliated.

00:39:12 Speaker_05
I mean, it's funny, I think about this image a lot recently for other reasons, but there's that very famous bit of tape of the dictator of Romania, uh, whose name... Ceaușescu. Thank you.

00:39:22 Speaker_05
And the moment of his fall, where he came out to make a speech after the unrest, and the crowd starts laughing at him. And hooting and hollering, and that's when it's over. So, in a weird way,

00:39:32 Speaker_05
The secret to power is people believing in it and respecting it and fearing it, and once they don't, you don't have any power anymore.

00:39:39 Speaker_04
CRAIG Yeah, it's a fascinating thing.

00:39:41 Speaker_04
They were able, in various phases in the Soviet Union, the history of the Soviet Union, to visit terrible things upon their own people, and yet still keep the people either believing out of faith or believing out of fear, which isn't really believing, but just submitting.

00:39:57 Speaker_04
But in this case, it seemed as if some sort of genie had leapt out of the lamp and could not ever be put back in, in the same way that this nuclear reactor had opened up and that stuff that came out could not be put back in.

00:40:11 Speaker_04
And so, the Soviet Union begins to wobble. Gorbachev himself is... There's a coup against him. It fails. But shortly thereafter, one republic after another begins to declare independence and the whole thing collapses.

00:40:25 Speaker_05
We're at the end of five hours of television and five podcast episodes. And the worst question I feel to ask a writer is, what do you want to say? Because you just said it for five hours. So let me ask you this instead.

00:40:39 Speaker_05
What did you find out making this TV show that you didn't know before? About anything. The nature of people, the nature of states, the nature of science.

00:40:50 Speaker_04
I guess I would say that in these kinds of circumstances where great crimes are committed... It is remarkable to me how infrequently you can actually find somebody who is properly to blame.

00:41:06 Speaker_04
That there is a general conspiracy of thought going on among humans. Just so that we can make it through our day.

00:41:15 Speaker_04
Every time we go through a green light, we are engaging in a conspiracy of thought with the people on the other side that they will stop at the red light. We are always doing this and relying upon each other.

00:41:26 Speaker_04
And the mistakes that some people make begin to conglomerate with mistakes other people have made, and the mistakes that they don't even know have been made. And inevitably, there is a debt that gets built up.

00:41:40 Speaker_04
So, Legasov says, with every lie we tell, we incur a debt to the truth. And to me, And this is kind of a bummer. No surprise after watching the show. I'm not sure humans are equipped to move through existence without lying to each other.

00:41:58 Speaker_04
There's a certain amount of lying that seems to be necessary, or we just won't be able to make it through. It's the big lies we have to be really, really careful about, because in the end, and this is where we started, the truth doesn't care.

00:42:11 Speaker_04
It doesn't care that we need to lie to each other to make it through the day. It just is. And in the case of something like Chernobyl, they lied and lied and lied and lied and lied, but...

00:42:22 Speaker_04
Always, always was this enormous tub full of incredibly dangerous elements that was ready to blow up if the proper conditions were met. That was always true. And, uh, I think about that all the time in relation to where we are now.

00:42:43 Speaker_04
Um, sometimes it occurs to me with dismay that there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of nuclear missiles in the United States in silos. They're there. Now, is there a flaw? I don't know. I hope not.

00:42:57 Speaker_04
The fact that it has not been expressed yet doesn't mean it's not there. It just means we engage in this conspiracy that it doesn't seem like those will blow up or go off or anything like that.

00:43:08 Speaker_04
So, I've become very attuned to the frail nature of the way we exist with each other. I don't know if there's a way around it, but I do think we can do certainly a lot better, and at the very least,

00:43:20 Speaker_04
When we hear what we know to be a lie, we must confront it. If we are incapable of getting past some base level of lying, we must address the ones that we know are lies.

00:43:32 Speaker_04
And that, I think, is why Chernobyl is a story worth telling now probably more than at any other time in my life.

00:43:40 Speaker_05
To me, out of all the extraordinary moments of drama and terror and fine filmmaking and acting in the series, the one that keeps sticking with me, that I keep going back to, is Akimov and Topdanov going to the pumps.

00:43:53 Speaker_05
Because they know it's a lie, and they know if they go, they'll probably die, and they know it won't do any good, but they go anyway.

00:44:01 Speaker_05
And we think of that kind of sacrifice, usually, in the way that we think of the divers later in the series, as being heroic. Accomplishing something. They accomplished nothing... Nothing. ...except that they did what they were told.

00:44:15 Speaker_05
And in a weird way, that people, the urge to do what you're told, the urge to not make waves, the urge to accept a falsehood, at extraordinary cost, just shows how hard it is

00:44:29 Speaker_05
to stand up, to do what we think of because of a lifetime of TV and film is the noble right thing to do. To risk disapprobation, to risk real punishment. And that to me, I mean, that is extraordinarily relevant.

00:44:42 Speaker_05
And I think maybe even more personally, a lot of people think of how brave they would be. And think about what, think about doing something that would make everybody you know and love

00:44:54 Speaker_05
furious at you, that would destroy your career, that would destroy your family. Think about that cost before you... imagine that you would do the noble thing.

00:45:04 Speaker_05
We've reached the end of episode five of the Chernobyl podcast because we've reached the end of the Chernobyl TV show.

00:45:10 Speaker_05
It has been a great pleasure to be able to talk about the show in depth with its creator, and I hope that all of you out there have enjoyed it. The show, of course, will live on.

00:45:18 Speaker_05
on Video On Demand and in other ways, and I hope that as people discover the show who haven't already seen it, they discover this podcast, because as I said, this is a show that makes you want to be able to talk about it, and it's been our pleasure to do so.

00:45:30 Speaker_05
So in the future, you can find this podcast at... Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, NPR One, wherever you get your podcasts. It'll also be waiting for you on YouTube and HBO Go and HBO Now. You can use them as podcast apps. Why not?

00:45:48 Speaker_05
My name is Peter Sagal. You can usually find me over on NPR and on a podcast called Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. If you want to hear Craig talk about things of interest to him, he has a podcast called Script Notes.

00:45:59 Speaker_05
This podcast was made possible by HBO, Sky, and Pineapple Street Media. It was co-hosted by me, Peter Sagal, with, of course, Craig Mazin. It was recorded at Patches Sound in Hollywood.

00:46:10 Speaker_05
Our team at Pineapple Street Media includes executive producers Max Linsky, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Barry Finkel. This podcast was produced by Christine Driscoll, Barry Finkel, and Melissa Slaughter. Original music by Con Irby.

00:46:23 Speaker_05
From Craig Mazenstein, we have producer and the quickest fact checker around, Jack Lesko. And thanks to you, Craig. Is there anybody else there you want to give a shout-out to?

00:46:30 Speaker_04
Well, I just want to say thank you to HBO and Sky. They signed on to this early on, they believed in it, they made it all possible. It's been a joy working with them. both of them. And lastly, I want to say thanks to you. I roped you into this.

00:46:43 Speaker_04
I can't believe it worked.

00:46:45 Speaker_05
No, it has been a great pleasure. I'm honored to have been able to talk to you about this really, really great work of television.

00:46:51 Speaker_04
Thank you, Peter. I appreciate it.

00:46:52 Speaker_05
Thanks, everybody, for listening.

00:47:12 Speaker_06
I run a school for young women.

00:47:14 Speaker_03
We're not a threat to anyone. In the new HBO original series, Dune Prophecy, it is sisterhood above all. I'm Greta Johnson.

00:47:23 Speaker_02
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.

00:47:31 Speaker_03
Stream Dune Prophecy Sundays starting November 17th exclusively on Max, and you can listen to new episodes of the podcast every Sunday night.