Status Updates From Černobiļa. Lūgšana

One kolkhoz chairman would bring a case of vodka to the radiation specialists so they’d cross his village off the lists for evacuation; another would bring the same case so that they’d put his village on the list—he’s already been promised a three-room apartment in Minsk. No one checked the radiation reports. It was just your average Russian chaos.

Here’s what I remember. In the first days after the accident, all the books at the library about radiation, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even about X-rays, disappeared. Some people said it was an order from above, so people wouldn’t panic.