Komsomolskaya Pravda

Problems with the show

In an editorial for Komsomolskaya Pravda, special correspondent Alexander Kots shares his thoughts about why he thinks HBO’s “Chernobyl” miniseries is American propaganda. To establish his authority on the subject, Kots starts by reminiscing about a few days he spent squatting in abandoned apartments in Pripyat in 2006 for a report about the nuclear accident’s 20th anniversary.

What’s Kots’s beef with the HBO show? He offers a few specific quibbles: there were no glassed-in balconies or dual-pane windows in Pripyat, he says, and the helicopter crash at the power plant actually happened in early October, not in the immediate firefighting effort. Also, based on what Lyudmila Ignatenko told Svetlana Alexievich, Vasily Ignatenko’s hospital room actually had a pretty good view of Moscow. “Chernobyl” also embraces certain gruff ethnic stereotypes about Russians, Kots says, citing two invented events: the confrontation between the coal minister and the miners, and the miners stripping nude in the summer heat while tunneling under the power plant. These scenes are “on the creators’ consciences,” he says.

Kots also claims that HBO’s miniseries fails to capture the love story between Vasily and Lyudmila Ignatenko. Despite the fact that the show gives significant screen time to Lyudmila’s devotion to her husband and the tragic final days they spent together at a hospital in Moscow, Kots says “Chernobyl” is really about soulless KGB operatives, noble scientists, “captive nations,” and Politburo careerists “saving their own skin at the expense of their enslaved people.” He says the show focuses on these political points, while ignoring the “heroism of Russians who saved the world from catastrophe.”

Kots finishes with an somewhat unexpected parting salvo, criticizing Russian filmmakers for failing to produce their own quality content about the Chernobyl disaster.

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“Regarding the details… I don’t remember any glassed-in balconies in Pripyat. And nobody even dreamed of insulated dual-pane windows in 1986.”

“The helicopter crashed near the reactor not in the first few days, but on October 2.”

“This is a show about careerists from the Politburo saving their own skin at the expense of a humiliated and enslaved people, driven by the idea of their own mission’s importance.”

“From a propaganda point of view, it’s a perfect film, but it lacks the human nerve that makes the heart ache.”

Problems with the show

Special correspondent Dmitry Steshin says HBO’s new miniseries “Chernobyl” is a vast conspiracy to undermine global public support for Russian nuclear power. Steshin starts by making it clear that he doesn’t like the show because he believes it misrepresents history. He says he knows the disaster personally, having visited Pripyat in 2006 as a reporter, when he interviewed former power plant staff and “liquidators,” ate locally sourced food (it’s harmless, he implies), and read survivors’ memoirs.

Specifically, Steshin faults HBO's miniseries for exaggerating how long it took the plant’s management to realize that the reactor exploded. He also mocks responders’ search for higher-powered dosimeters and radiometers, and ridicules the idea of a supervisor threatening his subordinate with execution (he’s apparently referring to assistant chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov threatening to “make things worse” for shift supervisor Alexander Akimov, when Akimov hesitates to obey his orders).

Ignoring the positive reviews “Chernobyl” has received in Russia, Steshin says the show’s “inaccuracies” and “lies” are obvious to Russian viewers, but he believes the intended audience is everyone else.

Steshin thinks HBO is trying to weaken global confidence in Russian nuclear power — specifically Rosatom. Why now? Steshin credits Western sanctions against Russia with forcing the U.S., France, Great Britain, and China to fight over access to deposits in “Namibia, Niger, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Brazil,” while Rosatom has utilized its “full autonomy.” Steshin points out that Rosatom has grown rapidly and cornered more than half the world's nuclear plant construction market (though he omits that fact that the company still has just 17 percent of the global nuclear fuel market). “According to analysts,” Steshin says, the European Union will be the next epicenter of “competition between the nuclear giants.” The stakes of HBO’s show, he warns, are a “very profitable business on a global scale.”

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