Posted by osm3000 11/20/2025
"And when I visited the Chernobyl station after the accident and saw what was happening there, I myself drew a precise and unequivocal conclusion, that the Chernobyl disaster is an apotheosis, the pinnacle of all the mismanagement that has been carried out for decades in our country."
The show is obviously a "based on a true story" dramatization that invented personas, added tension where little existed, and so forth. But the overall thesis checks out: it was a massive failure of governance before the disaster and during it, including the well-documented fact that the Soviets were initially withholding information from the rest of the world and turning down aid.
> The fault of Anatoly Pavlovich Alexandrov is that he, albeit reluctantly, consented. He was against it, objected to it together with the experts, but then went on to meet the stubborn requirements of State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Energy, that stations can be built without containments.
> Sidorenko Viktor Alekseyevich, the director of the Department of Nuclear Reactors at our institute, the author of this doctoral dissertation and this book, was expelled from the institute. He had to leave the institute. Because his own colleagues didn’t understand him. But why didn’t they understand him? Because his colleagues got bonuses from the Ministry; because the institute was part of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Do you understand? They see the director, who is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and their [own] salary is lousy. If he doesn’t get a bonus of 100 roubles, he will survive. But I get only 180 and for me, a bonus of 100 roubles is important. If I “squeal” about the cost of these containments, then I will not get a bonus. If I say something wrong, I will not be published and my dissertation will fail.
The series was also told completely in ~8 hours of content, yet this event clearly took longer than 8 hours to play out. Why no critique on that?
[1]:https://youtu.be/OHrVlyU3suk?t=45
Did the author miss the ending?
The true story of Chernobyl isn’t going to land with folk today. We’ve lost the attention span for anything longer than a slick miniseries with A list actors. Even then, most people I know haven’t seen the show, which is amazing.
There are only 24 hours in a day and no one gets more. This results in shifting preferences for consumption patterns over time.
I hear boomers spend all their time in movie theaters instead of sitting down and reading a good book. Don't they know movies are evil and are going to rot their brains?
I hear Gen X loves to watch TV. What a bunch of 'slackers'. What's with these shows like Sienfeld? Its a show about nothing! Why would anyone watch that?
I hear millennials are spending all their time playing video games instead of watching quality TV. What is it with this PlayStation nonsense? Its a TOY!
I hear Gen-Z loves to just sit around and watch people play games instead of playing them. Have their brains completely rotted?
I hear Gen Alpha does not even bother with people playing and just watches the output of game engines as the old kids would say 'I don't even': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WePNs-G7puA
Long story short: Cultural preferences change over time. My view is Let them cook :)
Sure. And historically, major such changes also often came with meaningful societal consequences. Shifts in power, wealth concentration, equality, capability, liberty, resilience, stability, cohesion, ingenuity, all sorts of thing.
You can hold whatever view you'd like, but assuming a cultural change is inherently for the best just because its a big or widespread one might leave you a little blindsided someday.
I will concede that I default to the positive view that generations will find a way to figure things out for themselves.
For example Gen-Z seems to be growing up with a lot of anxiety caused by screen time + a mean towards more demanding expectations growing up.
This is leading towards a greater acceptance towards 'disconnecting' from all tech as they age and a greater acceptance for treating hallicugunans as a form of medicine that makes sense for some people and not as a thing to fear. And these people are only in their 20s. Who knows what they will eventually turn out as.
Although it's sort of ironic that the living generation most famous for radically questioning the demanding society they were growing up into and opening their minds to escape and growth through hallucingens is the same one that's since been assigned a pejorative name by those same kids and cast by them as the great villian of our age.
So maybe something like that, if history repeats as much as it seems to.
Probably more that I'm not aware of but it's common enough phenomenon.
Sure, but in those times, he would be compelled to say such things. That doesn't mean he believed it.
It seems the main faults that OP finds in the show are that Legasov had issues with his government, when in "reality" he thought they were great. But is that "reality," or oppression?
I also don't see the fault in highlighting him as the "main" scientist; it's a show.
The Soviet government did something to shut that person up (and in the series Legasov implies he was part of that, I can't even find what he did exactly), repressed the knowledge (declaring it a state secret) ... and then a decade later Chernobyl exploded.
In other words: what happened is that the Soviet government refused to fix their nuclear reactors due to cost, and then that decision blew up Chernobyl, making tens to hundreds of thousands of victims.
Then, during the cleanup of the disaster, the KGB took additional measures to keep it hidden.
So yes it was oppression ... oppression is the cause of the disaster in the first place. And you can't forget that Legasov is not a hero: his career was built on oppression, not scientific accomplishment (there was a Soviet program to make sure Jewish students would fail at the institute. Legasov was the one implementing that). So of course Legasov can't be trusted.
Who knows, maybe the student who wrote that AZ-5 would blow up the reactor in the first place was one of the Jewish students whose career Legasov sabotaged.
The "positive scram effect" was discovered at Ignalina (where the miniseries were filmed) in 1983. The RBMK design organization NIKIET sent an official informational letter to the power plants and proposed changes to the design and operational procedures. The changes weren't implemented as "there was a widespread view that the conditions under which the positive scram effect would be important would never occur." The same as O-rings.
And there was no "a Soviet program to fail Jewish students". Just primitive ground-level anti-semitism.
The scan of the letter is available online, there are no redactions and no security classification markings.
The tapes were framed in the HBO as an honest message of a dying man to the world to expose the lies that happened. Well, after Going through the tapes, I couldn't find any indication of that...only the opposite.
Now I concede that I don't really know what actually happened, and one can't put a price on the intensity of the situation for everyone at that time.
My point is simple: HBO series said Legasov's position was something that wasn't true
Should we debate the accuracy of Marvel movies?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190610100414/https://www.cbsne...
My angle is simple: they said it was accurate, and Legasov did so and said that...and in his own words, he negated most of that.
Is Legasov a good guy? I don't know. Was he honest in what he said? I don't know...but he said what he said!
> cherry-pick inaccuracies
Feel free to go to the tapes
I take it for granted that a lot of it was amped up for drama, but other sources (several documentaries) seem to agree on a lot of the actions and timelines. The show added motivations, and some fictional characters.
I also enjoyed Dopesick, and that's a subject that I have direct experience and knowledge of. I have pretty much the same issues with that show.
But I still enjoyed both of them as dramas.
If I want facts, I'll do my own research.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher...
This piece seems a little confused, since Legasov wasn't the primary source for the show?
For example (for her article)
> In Episode 2, for example, the Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) threatens to have Legasov shot if he doesn’t tell him how a nuclear reactor works. There are a lot of people throughout the series who appear to act out of fear of being shot. This is inaccurate: summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties. By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.
Her point was: this is not the Soviet way back then. My point is: these two people barely interacted directly, and one of them at least (Legasov) had a lot of respect for the other from the very beginning
I think it was explicit that the series framed the tapes as the "revelation"; the honest message of a dying man to the world to expose what actually happened
It's not a documentary! That doesn't mean you can't criticize it (Gessen sure did). It's that a lot of the kinds of criticisms you make don't make sense given what the show is.
I used as many sources as I could find. I was looking at research articles in scientific journals; I was looking at governmental reports; I was looking at books written by former Soviet scientists who were at Chernobyl; I was reading books by Western historians who had looked at Chernobyl. I watched documentaries; I read first-person documents.
And then there was Voices From Chernobyl, which is unique. What Svetlana Alexievich did there, I think, was capture an aspect of history we rarely see, which is the story of the people who you wouldn’t otherwise even know existed. We look at history from the point of view of the big movers, the big players, and she looks at history through the eyes of human beings. They’re all equal to her: Whether they are generals or party leaders or peasants, it doesn’t matter. And I thought that was just beautiful. It really inspired me.
So again this idea that anything not in the Legasov tapes was invented --- no. The show is a fictionalized retelling, but no, that criticism doesn't stand.
If there's one thing that pissed me off about the TV series, it was its poor to non-existent storytelling surrounding the helicopter crews who ran sortie after sortie right over the burning reactor—around the clock—knowing full well the grave risks posed by the radiation.
Instead, we were shown one disjointed helicopter crash scene amidst a still-burning reactor that made them look like bumbling fools attempting something futile.
In real life, the Chernobyl incident happened on 26 April, 1986. The Mi-8 crash where it struck the crane didn't happen until October 2nd, 1986.
Aviation was instrumental in containing the disaster during its early phases. Those crews helped save an untold number of lives. Their portrayal or lack thereof in the show was massively disrespectful to their contributions.
---
Between 27 April and 1 May, about 1800 helicopter flights deposit over 5,000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and neutron absorbing boron onto the burning reactor. It is now known that virtually none of the neutron absorbers reached the core. [0]
[0] https://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline...
In literal or figurative battles, there are plenty of examples of actions that are simultaneously indisputably brave and utterly futile.
I just naïvely assumed dumping 5,000 tons of material over a burning reactor probably did help significantly given the fire went out around days 10-12.
In retrospect, that assumption appears incorrect despite being congruent with the narrative of virtually every documentary I saw on Chernobyl in the late 90s/early 2000s:
"But I'm surprised that at Vienna they would have claimed that the core was smothered. It turns out, at least from my investigations, that the core froze by itself, solidified by itself, and stopped releasing." [0] (1994)
I was even able to find some research suggesting the aerial drops acted as an insulator, worsening subsequent radiation releases. At least they covered the glowing red target, which was thought to be a piece of the core ejected from the explosion and not the core itself as originally thought.
The divers at least appear to have saved the day from complete catastrophe, not to detract from the air crews' heroism.[1]
[0] https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=94-P13-000...
[1] https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-real-story-of-the-cher...
It is absolutely true that that scenario was impossible and couldn't actually happen. But as far as we can tell (documented in Voices of Chernobyl) someone at a similar meeting to the one portrayed in the TV show did really say that that could happen as portrayed in the TV show. But of course the audience is going to assume that things scientists say in shows like this are accurate.
My angle was: HBO series said Legasov's position was something that was by far not true
This is the basic difference between "based on" and documentary. Having worked as a screenwriter myself I can assure you that even if the script had been 100% factual, things would have been changed beyond the creators' control anyway.
1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/...
You know, some of us were already living then and it is not some distant event we have no knowledge of.
For example:
> Re: The soviet government did not want to evacuate the town of Pripyat
> Debunking: Legasov indicated the opposite. He said that the decision to evacuate was made quickly, even though the levels of radiation in the town were not considered to be dangerous.
WTF? The level of radiation was not considered to be dangerous when your reactor was blown open? Are you fucking kidding?
> Re: The government made an effort to conceal everything regarding the accident and what was happening.
> Legasov stated that this was not the case, and that information was not provided at the time because it didn't exist. The situation was very confusing, and information was scarce, coming from multiple conflicting sources and estimates, making it difficult to collect, filter, and access the correct information.
The accident happened on 26 April 1986, and on the 1st of May, _4 days later_ there was a celebration of Labour Day - a mandatory parade in Kyiv within just 100 km. And no-one knew about the disaster from the official sources. Only people with access to foreign radio knew about the disaster, others were happily marching with red flags on the streets breathing polluted air.
And so on, and so forth...
He claims that they had all the equipment ready and knew the actual levels, but at the same time were confused and information was scarce, and the level of radiation were not that bad - it this some type of propaganda for the dumb?
The KGB did their best to contain information about the disaster in general and the USSR wanted the May day parade to go on as-planned to make it look like things were fine. Even those with enough power or connections to be aware of the danger were pressured to participate. The May day parade was later often referred to in infamy by the Ukrainian independence movement following the disaster.
Most of my information comes from what I remember of reading "Midnight in Chernobyl" and "Chernobyl the History of a Nuclear Disaster"
Just like we have functional literacy and information literacy, there should be such a thing as Debunking Literacy. Are you actually debunking or just uncharitably interpreting?
In USSR everyone lied. Telling anything against the party will put you and your family in grave danger - it is basically a suicide. There were no free press, no activism, and all information was filtered by the party with complicated process of deciding what should be published and when and who gets punished for what.
People in the west have no understanding what it means to live all your life in such conditions so they try to interpret people as if it happened in their country.
It can be that the person was trying to make amends with the party to ease the social ostracization for his family, friends or colleagues. It doesn't mean the person is telling the truth at all, it means that he show loyalty to the party line by telling that the system was efficient and all his higher-ups were doing the best job.