At 1.23am on 26 April 1986, reactor no 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant blew up, spewing immense amounts of radioactive material into the air. A major event of the 20th century had occurred. The Chernobyl explosion, 30 years ago this month, arguably played a key role in the demise of the Soviet Union – if only because it crushed whatever credibility remained of a system of authority whose claims included the safe mastery of technology.

For those countries most affected, the road to stable democracy has not been easy; for some it’s not even guaranteed. The territories worst hit by the disaster were Ukraine and Belarus. Today we tend to watch the political turmoil in Ukraine, including this week’s appointment of a new prime minister, as solely the result of recent crises – but that can be short-sighted.

The long shadow of Chernobyl Read more

Belarus rarely makes headlines – except perhaps when sanctions against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko are discussed. But understanding these countries’ travails requires going further back in time.

The then Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had launched his policy of glasnost, or openness, not long before the Chernobyl disaster – which then acted as a catalyst for change because of the lies it exposed. It was the final straw after a long list of atrocities suffered by nations that had endured the worst of Europe’s 20th-century bloodbaths. It is estimated, for example, that Belarus lost a third of its population in the second world war. Recovering from the cumulative effect of these ordeals was never going to be simple.

Indeed, many of the consequences of Chernobyl are yet to be explored. Three decades on, how does one even begin to describe what it is like to live with an invisible radioactive enemy? How does one convey what it was like to experience an event of that magnitude, when the skies darkened and the apocalypse seemed to be unfolding?

I travelled to the Chernobyl region in the 1990s, to try to fathom that legacy. And one thing that’s impossible to dismiss is the enduring political trauma that came out of the Chernobyl accident and everything that led to it.

Just like the radioactive caesium that seeped into the earth and continues to toxify the whole region, the Soviet legacy is hard to get rid of and may never disappear. And just as the Soviet authorities rushed to conceal the scale of the accident, we tend to underestimate the task the people of Ukraine and Belarus confront when trying to dismantle the structures of Sovietism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Euromaidan protests in Kiev: Russia reacted by launching a war. Photograph: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

This should matter to all Europeans, because these two states are at the heart of the continent, and the current tensions with Russia. What fate awaits their democratic aspirations will say much about where Europe is heading in the years to come.

The leading Belarusian opposition figure Andrei Sannikov, now in exile, has just published a gripping memoir of his life and his imprisonment under the dictatorship of Lukashenko, president since 1994. “Few people know that 70% of the radioactive fallout of the 1986 explosion landed on the territory of Belarus,” Sannikov points out. We forget how on that April morning, and in the following days, the wind never stopped blowing north from Chernobyl.

Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel literature prize winner whose work is all but banned in her native Belarus, has eloquently written about the psychological devastation left by Chernobyl. She quotes a survivor who says: “Back then everyone was saying, ‘We’re going to die, we’re going to die. By the year 2000, there won’t be any Belarusians left.’” In Alexievich’s words, Chernobyl, while an “accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness and deep-seated indifference toward the general population”.

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It is this cronyism and indifference that persist in many post-Soviet societies. Of course, Ukraine and Belarus have had different trajectories: Ukraine is today a democracy, albeit one with a war in its eastern regions; Belarus is an autocracy, in which any form of dissent is crushed. But as Sannikov reminds us, it would be a mistake to think Belarus is condemned to never-ending dictatorship. Its civil society may be smaller than Ukraine’s, but its activists have repeatedly attempted democratic uprisings, and will probably continue to do so.

The difference is that the last Belarusian street revolt, in December 2010, was violently and thoroughly repressed by Lukashenko’s police; Sannikov, a former presidential candidate, was later sentenced to five years in a labour camp. This obviously contrasts with the success of Ukraine’s 2013-14 Maidan democratic revolution, which led to a president’s overthrow – and to which Russia reacted by launching a war.

For most of us in the west, Chernobyl is remembered as a technological nightmare, the stuff of horror movies. For the people who lived in the region, it set the stage not just for horrendous physical consequences, but also for monumental political changes whose success can still not be assured. Realism dictates that democratic-minded Ukrainians and Belarusians should get all the European support they deserve.

In his book, Sannikov recalls how dissidents such as Natalya Gorbanevskaya reacted cautiously to the fall of the USSR. “It was as if they knew that the totalitarian virus let loose on the peoples of the former Soviet bloc was not destroyed.” Just as the toxic substances released by Chernobyl’s reactor were never destroyed.