Midnight in Chernobyl

This will tell you almost more than you need to know about the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. The level of detail in Adam Higginbotham’s account of the steps leading up to the explosion is, at times, overwhelming. Trying to keep track of it all requires concentration. A lot of it.

I’m not trying to criticise this book. Far from it. Piers Paul Read’s Ablaze was – I think – the first account and was only limited by its proximity to the actual events. Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy was more up to date but – for me, at least - dry and academic. No sense of the lives affected. Adam Higginbotham’s book, published in 2019, offers the fruits of access to a whole ocean of documents hitherto unreleased and is probably the most up to date and reliable telling of what happened before, during and in the years after the explosion. Despite the sometimes exhaustive – and exhausting – detail, it’s a compelling read. I learned a lot.

But, here’s the thing. The one account of the disaster that’s made the most impact on me, and which recounts what happened in a way I can not only understand but remember, is the HBO 5-part drama Chernobyl. 

Seeing the soldiers run out onto the roof of Reactor 3 to remove chunks of lethally radiated graphite with a shovel for no more than one minute is chilling. Watching the three men put on protective suits and wade down into the water under the bubble pools to open the sluice gates stopped my breath. And the scientist Legasov’s explanation of why what happened happened – even though he was in real life nowhere near the resulting trial – made the explosion comprehensible.

I’m not saying the books have no value. I’m not leading the call for popular history only. (Errol Flynn leading the Charge of the Light Brigade in India, anyone?) It’s just that sometimes, I think the real human impact of an event is best served by the cinema and TV. Then you see it, and feel it. 

And remember it.