The liquidator said that the authors of the Chernobyl series did not want to show it
The recent American-British TV series “Chernobyl” will make you remember the heroism of the liquidators of the Chernobyl accident, but nevertheless it is replete with a lot of historical inaccuracies.
Vyacheslav Grishin, a participant in the liquidation of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the president of the Chernobyl Russia Union, stated this in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda.
He noted that the series, on the one hand, “is a professionally filmed drama, excellent work by the actors, but he pointed out a number of absurdities and improbabilities, in particular the episode with the suicide of Valery Legasov.
“He didn’t hide the tapes with his recordings anywhere. In the film, suicide takes place in a small Soviet apartment. But he was deputy director of the leading nuclear institute - Kurchatov, and lived in a nice cottage! And the modest serial life of an academician lowers his importance.
The contents of the tapes, which allegedly pushed him to commit suicide, are also untrue. We talked with his widow, the reasons for suicide were different. His son had previously committed suicide, and Legasov voluntarily left this life not because of the Chernobyl accident. He was not elected to the academic council of the institute, he was not given the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor, personal reasons... Everything was intertwined into one knot, which Valery Alekseevich could not cut,” Grishin said.
He was also surprised by the liquidators’ tent city shown in the film.
“In May 1986, regiments and brigades arrived - chemical troops, engineering troops, and construction troops. And at first they were actually housed in tents. But then, in the shortest possible time, in parallel with the liquidation, capital towns were built, in June-July there were already shield barracks, a headquarters, a club... This is about the question of how the Soviet government did not care about people,” noted the president of the Chernobyl Russia Union.
In addition, the liquidator does not agree with one of the messages of the series about a totalitarian country in which people are not spared and are forced to die.
“But then no one forced anyone! Only volunteers went to dump graphite on the same roof! And, as a rule, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By the way, there was a closed order from the Minister of Defense to call for liquidation of those liable for military service no younger than 25 and no older than 45 with children. This already suggests that the authorities tried to carefully manage human resources. There were, of course, violations, but these were post-accident, when people got sick, fell unconscious, and the doctors said: look at your military ID, you have 10 x-rays in total,” says the publication’s interlocutor.
He also answered the question of what he thought was missing from the film.
“The most important thing is victory. All the work was done for her sake, people died for her. We called liquidation a war. And on the monument to the liquidators on Poklonnaya Hill is carved: “This was our war and our victory.” But for the authors of the series, she apparently was not the main one. But at least this series made us remember again about the Chernobyl victims, their dedication and heroism,” concluded Grishin.
See also: TV series “Chernobyl”: The West is preparing a strike on Ukraine and Russia.
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