Who says the old Soviet Union is late and unlamented? Russia and Vladimir Vladimirovich's government is still around and groaning. The former KGB man must have studied his recent history, and knows from whence he sprung. Didn't he call the collapse of the USSR a catastrophe for the world?
When some of us think catastrophe, we don't think of the apparatchiks at the Kremlin losing their jobs in '91. We think more of, say, Chernobyl. Now that was a disaster. And one the Soviets kept under wraps, and might have never admitted to, if radiation hadn't seeped across borders, and alarms started going off in Sweden. The Swedes thought maybe one of their nuclear plants had sprung a leak, and hurriedly began investigating.
On an afternoon some 600 miles away from Chernobyl, workers at a Stockholm nuclear plant began having trouble getting out of work. They kept setting off the Geiger counters. They went back inside the plant, kept looking for the trouble (and the leak) and wondered how they'd been contaminated. Their thought: Somebody had set off a nuclear bomb on the other side of the border.
Days after these stories began appearing the press, and the Swedes began contacting the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Soviets finally admitted what happened. Dozens of people were killed in the explosion and fire and from radiation poison in the first few months. How many thousands died after that is an ongoing controversy. But the UN says at least 4,000. (For the record, nobody can find evidence of anybody being hurt at Three Mile Island.)
HBO has a hit series called Chernobyl. Critics praise its attention to detail. And how it presents the reality that was life in 1986 USSR. For Americans reading at home, consider the series more Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp than Kurt Russell's Tombstone.
The series is even a hit in Russia. From ABC News: "It received the highest-ever rating for a television show on IMDb, as well as a 9.1 rating on Russian equivalent KinoPoisk."
So the new apparatchiks in the new Kremlin are fighting back.
The Russian government, through state television, is prepping its own television series, also called Chernobyl, which confuses things. Maybe that's a feature, not a bug.
The new Russian-government-backed series has, shall we say, another take on the accident. And it doesn't get all hung up on "accuracy" and "reality."
In this telling, the CIA is behind the disaster!
More from ABC: The movie's "director, Aleksey Muradov, told the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda that his version would include an alternative theory of the disaster. According to a description of the show, the plot will focus on a fictional contest between an American CIA agent who infiltrates the power station to gather intelligence and a KGB counter-intelligence officer hunting him.
"'Why are you surprised?' the director Muradov told Komsomolskaya Pravda. 'The hypothesis about American interference in the work of the Chernobyl power station exists. Many histories don't rule out that on the day of the explosion an agent of the enemy security services was working at the station. Till this day it has not been established whether his activity was connected with the explosion.'"
Aha! Till this day it has not been established whether or not a CIA agent was or was not there and whether his being or not being there might have caused or not caused this alternative theory. What more proof does one need? Who are you going to believe, Russia's Ministry of Culture or your lyin' eyes?
This might remind Gentle Reader of another show (self-described as a "documentary") on another cable network, Showtime. It was called The Untold History of the United States, by the one and thankfully only Oliver Stone, he of the constant conspiracy. It made the papers a couple of times because it apparently Blamed America First, and made the U.S. the bad guys during the last bloody century. We say apparently, because like most Americans, we never saw a minute. All we know we read in the papers. (Rogers, W.)
But Uncle Joe would have been proud all around. Of his protege running the show in Moscow, and of all the useful idiots still making noise in the Western media.
Editorial on 06/13/2019