Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Anna Badaeva, another elderly returnee, recalls her lack of concern on the night of the explosion: “It’s on fire—so it’s on fire. A fire is temporary, no one was scared of it then. They didn’t know about the atom” (51). Although her village is less than 20 miles from the plant, she and her neighbors viewed this proximity as strictly a good thing, because it brought better provisions to their rural backwater location: “[T]hey had everything, like in Moscow” (51). Moreover, they were entirely unaware of its dangers; even now, Anna seems to not fully understand the nature of radioactive exposure: “They scare us and scare us with the radiation, but our lives have gotten better since the radiation came” because the village store now has “three kinds of salami” and even oranges (51). She even suggests that the disaster was a fabrication. However, moments later she notes that “all the men are dead. […] And all our women are empty, their female parts are ruined in one in three of them, they say” (52).

In this very brief monologue, elderly returnee Mariya Volchok implores the interviewer to help find her former neighbor, a woman with disabilities who is mute, so that the villagers can “go there and bring her back.