On Chernobyl's 36th Anniversary, a Ukrainian Reflects

This week saw the 36th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster -- which had occurred just days before the Soviet Union's annual May Day celebration in 1986 -- and featured lots of patriotic outdoor parades.

Lev Golinkin was 6 years old when he lived in the Ukrainian town of Kharkiv. Moscow had remained silent, refusing to admit anything had occurred until the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl was detected in Sweden, making it impossible to hide the catastrophe, Golinkin remembers. The days and weeks that followed were filled with a torrent of rumors and innuendo swirling around living rooms across the USSR while Moscow continued to pile over the explosion with secrecy and obfuscation. The Politburo loosened restrictions on freedom of speech. Everyone knew that the Kremlin was lying. There was no rationalizing away the radiation. The hollow horror of the Soviet Union was exposed when Moscow refused to cancel May Day festivities. The collapse of the USSR was caused more by Chernobyl than any other factor, according to Gorbachev. It is not possible to arrive at an accurate estimate of the impact of Chernobyl because of Moscow's secret surrounding the disaster. Generations of citizens in the Soviets in Kremlin were tolerant of bloodshed for nearly 70 years. The same thing is happening during the war in Ukraine. The media formats are not the same. We fled the Soviet Union in 1989. It feels like the intervening decades between the fall of communism and the present day have passed, and watching the horrors unfold from America is very strange.