“So when the tragedy does hit, you feel that this wasn’t the distant world of grim Soviet citizens. “This whole other reality existed, of people swimming in the sea and having ordinary lives,” he says to the Guardian. These were real people, Jones emphasizes, who didn’t expect the outcome they were dealt. “An authoritarian regime was lying about it, and Chinese citizens were starting to voice their disquiet publicly.”īut footage taken before April 1986 also offered insight into life before the nuclear accident destroyed a once-healthy part of Ukraine. “I was interested in the idea that this invisible enemy was threatening us,” Jones told the Guardian. In fact, his initial thought was to relate it to Covid-19. Jones could not have foreseen the resonance this documentary-about the fall of the Soviet Union as much as the nuclear disaster-could have in current events. In a sad twist of fate, the documentary was delivered as a completed work just days before Russia invaded Ukraine. It was a logistical nightmare that involved scouring Russia and Ukraine, contending with elaborate bureaucratic processes and navigating Covid-19 restrictions. It was so chilling.”įinding this early footage convinced him that there must be more, but the search proved difficult. “Then you start to see these white flashes on the film because of the insanely high level of radiation. “You can see mothers pushing babies around and kids playing football in the sand,” Jones told the Guardian. Though deadly radiation was pumping through the city where power plant workers and their families lived, residents were walking around like normal. “It referenced footage that was shot in Pripyat the weekend after the accident,” he told the Guardian’s Stuart Heritage.
In many ways, the documentary suggests, budding distrust of the Soviet handling of the nuclear disaster was the start of the government’s downfall.įilmmaker James Jones was initially spurred to research Chernobyl after he came across a footnote in a book about the disaster. In fact, Richard Gray reported for BBC Future in 2019, tussles over the death and injury count are ongoing-and challenging, because “Establishing the links between radiation exposure and long-term health effects … is a difficult task.”Ĭhernobyl had another victim: the U.S.S.R.
The numbers remain controversial, and it may be impossible to ever get a truly accurate reckoning of the accident’s toll. As many as 270,000 people living in those countries may have developed cancer because of the high levels of radiation they experienced. A 2006 Greenpeace International report estimated that as many as 93,000 people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia may have died as a result from illnesses connected to radiation exposure.
As Live Science ’s Mindy Weisberger reported in 2019, cancer rates in Ukrainian children who lived in the area increased by more than 90 percent. Two plant workers died from the explosion and 28 others, including firefighters sent to put out the flames, succumbed to radiation poisoning, reports Live Science ’s Mindy Weisberger with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) data.īut the true toll of the disaster was much higher. death count from Chernobyl remains at just 31 people. The documentary notes that the official U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union never fully admitted the extent of the atrocity. propaganda films that commend the Soviets on their success in handling the explosion-essentially hiding the whole truth. Meanwhile, the public was in the dark about both the botched response to the nuclear emergency and the ongoing danger of radiation that lingered near the plant. Everyone from “soldiers to miners” attempted to contain the radiation at Chernobyl, not necessarily understanding how unsafe it was. In large part, the footage shows efforts to clean up the plant and the surrounding area after the explosion, reports Collider ’s Margarida Bastos. “This talk about radiation is nonsense, guys,” they say. In a stark contrast, a crew of men offer seemingly unconcerned responses in a translated interview. In a newly-released trailer, disturbing images flash across the screen one by one: a crackle from a radiation detector, a helicopter falling from the sky and the charred remains of the hollowed-out plant. But learning about the tragedy and seeing it firsthand are two entirely different things.Ĭhernobyl: The Lost Tapes, a new documentary premiering on HBO Max on June 22, uses never-before-seen footage to show how the meltdown harmed the lives of nearby residents for decades to come-and extent to which the Soviet Union suppressed the truth about the disaster’s severity. The horrors of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine are well known-the early-morning meltdown of one of the plant’s reactors on April 26, 1986, became the deadliest nuclear accident in history.
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