Chernobyl as Technoscience
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Technology and Culture, Volume 61, Number 4, October 2020, pp. 1178-1187
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/777612
[ Access provided at 7 Jan 2021 12:46 GMT from Goteborgs universitet ]
PUBLIC HISTORY
Chernobyl as Technoscience
E G L Ė R I N D Z E V I Č I Ū T Ė
ABSTRACT : This essay considers the TV miniseries Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) to
engage in a wider debate on the social and institutional production of technoscience. It explores whether the series resonates with the existing narratives
and interpretations of Soviet technoscience in scholarly historiography. The
author argues that although the series downplays important aspects of Soviet
history, such as international knowledge transfer, it successfully demonstrates the hybrid character of nuclear power and the complexity of the relationship between scientific expertise and policy decision-making.
Released in 2019, the TV miniseries Chernobyl has gripped viewers around
the world. The five-part series tells the story of the 1986 disaster at the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant in then Soviet-controlled Ukraine. In
graphic detail it reveals the impact of the massive explosion and the fallout,
on the people involved—from the thousands of plant workers living in the
purpose-built city of Prypiat, the scientists and politicians, to the rescue
workers who sacrificed their lives. Chernobyl topped the IMDB rankings as
highest rated TV series and won many awards, including three Emmys.
Scholars, writers, and journalists anatomized the series in their reviews in
leading press outlets and academic journals. For the director, Johan Renck,
Chernobyl was about human drama and emotions.1 For the writer, Craig
Mazin, it was about the danger of lies and conspiracy and the search for
Dr Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is associate professor of criminology and sociology at Kingston
University London. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences
Opened up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016). Her book in progress,
with the preliminary title The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future, examines the
politics and epistemology of prediction in late modern society. Dr Rindzevičiūtė is the
director and PI of the AHRC research networking project “Nuclear Cultural Heritage:
From Knowledge to Practice” (2018−20). She would like to thank the participants in the
webinar (Re)Placing Chernobyl (May 14, 2020), hosted by Kingston University and the
FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity, University College
London, for their input in the discussion informing this analysis.
©2020 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/20/6104-0010/1178–87
1. Renck, unpublished presentation. “Chernobyl” is Russian, “Chornobyl” is
Ukrainian. Similarly "Prypiat"and "Pripyat."
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truth.2 As with every influential work of art, however, the impact of Chernobyl exceeded the creators’ aspirations and the work took on a life of its
own. What does the popularity of Chernobyl, a story questioning the political management of an industrial accident in 1986, tell us about the current
understandings of technoscience, a form of scientific knowledge that cannot be separated from both technique and policy intervention? How does
the series reflect on the power relations that shaped Soviet technoscience
and in particular the nuclear industry? This essay does not scrutinize the
film nor judge its accuracy, but maps the cultural imaginaries of Soviet and
nuclear technoscience as they unfold.
In the series, the story of Chernobyl is told as a chain of dramatic events.
In this it resonates strongly with the scholarly traditions of presenting Soviet
science and technology through an event-driven narrative: historians trace
the great scientists, engineers, and inventors, by charting an innovation’s
discovery, adoption, and failure, while navigating conflicts between scientific, political, and cultural logics, including managing Cold War confrontation.3 This human and institutional actor-driven approach currently incorporates hybrid epistemologies, exploring the intersections of science and
technology with social and cultural sectors and their shaping by environmental agencies and man-made infrastructure.4 Scholars’ environmental,
digital, post-human, and transnational changes of focus are also manifest in
the re-examination of Soviet nuclearity that relied on mining, computer
simulation, urban planning, and cultural heritage-making.5
The story of Chernobyl, I suggest, operates at two distinct levels: plot
lines and representation. The entire plot centers around the failed attempts
to approach the nuclear reactor’s core and the ultimately successful attempts to achieve the “truth,” the reasons why the reactor failed catastrophically. The series culminates in the revelation of the ultimate invisible: a view of the reactor from the inside as it exploded. Having watched
the series three times, I was intrigued by the filmmakers’ ability to move
the plot forward in a way that holds the viewer’s attention and keeps them
in suspense, applying the same logic that underpins scientific epistemology: read correctly the signs of the unfolding reality (diagnosis), predict the
consequences (prognosis) and act accordingly.6
In Chernobyl, the plot is driven by the constant failure of diagnosis and
2. HBO, “The Chernobyl Podcast,” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thechernobyl-podcast/id1459712981.
3. Excellent studies include: Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and
Technology; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Josephson, Red Atom.
4. Collier, Post-Soviet Social; Obertreis, “Imperial Desert Dreams”; Rindzeviciute,
“Systems Analysis as Infrastructural Knowledge.”
5. For an extensive review, Guth et al., “Soviet Nuclear Technoscience.” Also Brown,
Plutopia; Storm, Krohn Andersson, and Rindzeviciute, “Urban Nuclear Reactors and the
Security Theatre”; Rindzeviciute, Power of Systems, chapter 6.
6. Fidora, “Divination and Scientific Prediction.”
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a political conflict over which diagnoses are recognized. In the first episode
already, when a control room worker insists “The core has exploded,” his
manager tells colleagues: “He is in shock, get him out of here.” But the information is not just dismissed. The information is also ambivalent. The
protagonists—residents of Pripyat, scientists, engineers, political administrators, physicians, miners, and the military—try to decode confusing signs,
to understand what they are seeing, and to speculate about what they cannot see. In doing so, the protagonists rely on what they already know. This
is not enough anymore: reality has just been changed. And a plethora of
non-humans also makes up that reality: dogs, cows, birds, and lush flora
alongside man-made infrastructures like the nuclear power plant, urban
landscapes, offices, and homes. The cinematographic presentation of this
heterogeneity, arguably inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer:
Voices from Chernobyl (published in Russian in 1997, English translation in
2017), is stunning. The continually failing diagnosis leads to what Russian
linguist Viktor Shklovskii describes as defamiliarization: habitual language
and perceptual categories are abolished in an encounter with materiality “as
if ” for the first time.7 If for Shklovskii, defamiliarization is a resource and
an aesthetic choice underpinning the technique of art, in Chernobyl it is a
constraint on knowledge (which also drives the plot). People offer their
speculations, scientists offer their expert evaluations, then in the next scene,
the viewer is confronted with a turbulently unfolding reality that refuses to
conform with these diagnoses. Emergency response tries to make the
changing reality more predictable—for instance, in the air drop, when helicopters dropped thousands of tons of sand and boron on the core. However, unexpected consequences keep emerging (melting core, radioactive
cows and dogs). This is a lesson from experiencing technoscience in action:
watch, listen, hypothesize, and, when the reality does not support the hypothesis, watch, listen, read all over again.
Hybrid Nuclearity
Nuclear technology thus defamiliarized is no longer confined to a sanitized laboratory space. It appears mundane, material, and networked. The
nuclear power plant manifests as an entourage of administrators, operators, scientists, emergency response teams, and supporting infrastructures.
In Chernobyl, however, the material infrastructure is more than just a stage
setting for human drama: things, interiors, landscapes, and industrial sites
convey strong messages. The reconfigured matter becomes an actant that
absorbs the viewer: unremarkable surfaces burn a touching hand, a funeral
involves pouring concrete into a grave. Moreover, the material dimension
communicates the image of Soviet technoscience as a loser—or perhaps a
hostage—in the Cold War race.
7. Shklovsky, “Art as Device.”
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The film’s visual aesthetic communicates the backwardness of Soviet
technoscientific modernity in the eyes of the West, what was then the First
world. Luminous light is reserved for nature (the sunny landscapes in
Pripyat) and the Kremlin. The rest of the Soviet nuclear world where people
live and work and the innards of the nuclear power plant, are submerged in
gloom. This is not a slick, cosy Nordic noir style darkness, but an ill-lit
world, which is “plausibly real” to the extent of being uncanny. No one looks
healthy, even the young characters. Many reviewers noted the pain-staking
attention to detail in the set designers’ reconstruction of mundane 1986 Soviet society—though spotting a few inconsistencies, such as plastic window
frames and school uniforms at weekends. This effect was achieved largely
thanks to the local production team in Lithuania, where much of the series
was filmed. Lithuanian costume and set designers were able to source objects and locations appropriate to the period of late socialism, when the
shortage-ridden economy was on the verge of collapse. In assembling Soviet
material culture, they navigated between local memories and the film producers’ expectations. For instance, the clothes were smart but slightly weird.
Indeed, as the costume designer explained, men’s clothes were often mismatched and the wrong size due to perennial shortages. In the late 1980s,
however, not everything was dilapidated—so the designers also included a
few clean, new-looking fashionable items.8 Although nuclear scientists and
engineers could enjoy comparatively privileged lifestyles, these were modest
compared to Western middle-class professionals. Some commentators suggested that the main protagonist, academician and deputy director of the
Kurchatov Institute, Valerii Legasov, who led the commission investigating
the disaster, would have lived in a fancier apartment, but then even leading
physicist Petr Kapitsa complained that a decent suit cost more than an elite
scientist could comfortably afford.9 Indeed, having an apartment, however
dilapidated or small, was already a sign of privilege.10
The impression of authenticity and the “realism” of the nuclear technology’s social and political worlds are not only down to detailed ethnography,
but also the use of cinematic language. Cinematographic realism, according
to the film theorist Michael Goddard, is an arrangement of accepted visual
culture regimes. The perception of an image as realistic can change with
shifts in visual culture. Goddard suggests that Chernobyl’s “realist” presentation of technology drew on the typical film sets that used East European industrial infrastructures shrouded in dust, like in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
(1979), filmed on an abandoned industrial site in Estonia, but also the labyrinth of underground canals in Andrzej Wajda’s Canal (1956), or the austere urban districts in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988).11 Chernobyl’s
8. Kalinkaitė-Matuliauskienė, “Serialo ‘Černobylis’ užkulisiai.”
9. Rindzevičiūtė, Power of Systems, 105.
10. Rogacheva, Private World of Soviet Scientists.
11. Michael Goddard, unpublished presentation at a webinar (Re)Placing Cher-
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human protagonists get their hands dirty, both in terms of regular dirt,
blood, and radioactive contamination. The association of dirt with danger
ties in with the enlightenment tradition that has imposed high standards of
cleanliness as a symbol of progress and rational modernity.12 To show that
Soviet high-tech modernity is not there yet, the character Anatolii Diatlov is
shown smoking in the control room. The inability to get labs clean, as communication sociologist Manuel Castells has described, kept the Soviets away
from what Castells and Kiselyova saw as the genuine information age.13 As
STS scholar of Soviet and American nuclear power Kate Brown noted, however, the Western capitalist imaginary of Soviet nuclear and medical institutions often mistook the dilapidated infrastructure and outdated technical
equipment for a lower level of expertise; this, as historians have shown, was
not always the case.14 The series also verifies that fact: in episode two, physicist Ulana Khomiuk is introduced sleeping on her desk in an office that has
seen better days, yet her laboratory equipment enables her to interpret the
signs correctly.
Whereas Soviet material culture appears familiar and authentic through
established representation, what about Soviet power relations? A significant
scholarship theme is the tension between political ideology and “proper”
science. As I have argued elsewhere, much historiography of Soviet science
was based on the divide between politicized and pure technoscience. Once
this divide was transgressed, someone had to pay the price. Examples of
politicized science include myth-makers like biologist and agronomist Lysenko, the controversial “dictator” of Communistic biology during Stalin’s
regime; also the technological failures and high human and environmental
costs of gigantic industrial projects such as at the notorious heavy industry
cities of Magnitogorsk, with its polluting iron and steel works, and Norilsk,
where an ongoing industrial disaster is flooding local rivers in Russia with
thousands of tonnes of diesel oil, not to mention the SO2 and other emissions in the atmosphere.15 The examples of pure technoscience, both abstract and applied, such as fundamental mathematics, theoretical physics,
linguistics, computer science, and cybernetics, enjoy an “isles of freedom”
status such as special institutes where elite knowledge and technology workers practice alternative, more liberal lifestyles.16 Curiously, few historians
have suggested that politics and science could mix legitimately and co-produce a liberal order in an authoritarian context; such claims have only been
nobyl, Kingston University and the UCL, May 14, 2020, available online: https://youtu.
be/Itn0-OhzSBg.
12. Joyce, Rule of Freedom.
13. Castells and Kiselyova, Collapse of Soviet Communism.
14. Brown, Manual for Survival; Storm, Post Industrial Landscape Scars; Schmid,
Producing Power.
15. Josephson, “‘Projects of the Century’ in Soviet History.”
16. Gerovitch, “We Teach Them to Be Free”; Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom.
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made based on the analysis of Western liberalism.17 Recent scholarship argues that in Soviet authoritarian modernity, new scientific epistemological
standards co-evolving with new individual and institutional agencies, produced new politics. This assumed different degrees of “liberalism”: self-regulation, critical deliberation, and autonomization.18
I would like to suggest that the plot developed in Chernobyl resonates
with this paradigm of an emerging “liberal,” science-driven, and open society. According to philosopher of science Karl Popper’s classic tenet, the
process of testing and falsifying a hypothesis is fundamental for distinguishing the scientific method from common sense. The danger arises
when the scientific falsification and rigorous scrutiny become an organizational ritual. This is what happened at Chernobyl as showed by the series
and in reality: an inappropriate reactor shut-down test was carried out to
cover up management flaws. Amplifying this wrongdoing is the political
use of technoscience as a symbol of progress and power. Inconvenient information was suppressed: facts about the flaws in the reactor’s design
were not made available to operators. When these facts were revealed, the
consequences for those who disrupted the political veneer of “technology
under control” were grave: in the film, this was illustrated by Legasov’s suicide, a real life event two years after Chernobyl.
While this argument, summarized in Mazin’s “what is the cost of lies,”
is undoubtedly plausible and widely evidenced, it does not exhaust the
complexity of the Soviet technoscientific assemblage. Chernobyl’s imaginary geography is curiously confined and claustrophobic in the extreme.
The viewer can see inside the Politburo and even inside the exploding reactor, but the West is not revealed. Instead, the West exists in whispers, in
secondary reports of public and diplomatic reactions. This informational
isolation resonates with the narrative of the Soviet anomaly and the awkward relationship between Soviet and liberal technoscience scholarship.
The film misses the extent to which Soviet scientists participated in international projects. However, this is not surprising, because the history of
Soviet technoscience has been long written as a form of liberal critique of
the authoritarian regime and not as an integral part of the “universal” narrative and analytical framework of power, society, and knowledge.
Not a Soviet Other
This integration is emerging in the historiography of science diplomacy and environmental history, particularly in studies of technology
transfer and mitigating the negative impact of industrial development. In
Chernobyl, science diplomacy enters as part of the clean-up action, a give17. Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery; Otter, Victorian Eye.
18. Rindzevičiūtė, “Systems Analysis.”
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and-take effort to obtain superior Western machinery while repairing the
reputational damage of a great power (episode four). The Soviet authorities were notorious for withholding data regarding public health, demography, economics, natural resources, environmental pollution, and nuclear
tests: Western and local scientists alike criticized this practice.19 Soviet scientists benefited from scientific diplomacy as it helped them obtain their
own Soviet data via international and transnational institutions such as the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Institute of
Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), United Nations programs, non-governmental scientific associations, and policy issue networks. The Chernobyl disaster happened when Soviet-U.S. cooperation in the nuclear winter
study, a computer simulation of the environmental effects of nuclear war,
was nearing completion (1983−86). Prominent scientists, such as the pronuclear physicist Evgenii Velikhov and the anti-nuclear mathematician
Nikita Moiseev, who led this research, also engaged in Chernobyl’s cleanup
procedures.20 While in 1990, Moiseev was critical of nuclear power and
called for wide-scale international scientific monitoring of the consequences of Chernobyl, Velikhov did not change his position towards nuclear reactors like Chernobyl or the future of nuclear power.21 This is just
one example of the international context overlooked in the film. That this
is not mentioned, sends a very strong message that knowledge between the
Cold War East and West blocs only flowed one way, with the West scrutinizing the underperforming East. We know this was not the case.22
The long-established binary dualisms, where proper science was considered to be separate from politics and where nature was seen as the opposite of culture appeared to melt in the disaster on the ground. As Gregory
Dufaud writes insightfully, although dualist categories have become suspect in science and technology studies, a focus on dualisms can be productive to historicize Soviet technoscience, particularly as an object of historical critique.23 The scientific and political autonomy of nuclear physicists
should be re-examined in light of research on the practical heteronomy of
nuclear engineers, entangled in the social, material, and technical realities
of power plants, their mundane operations, and organizational politics.24
19. Petryna, Life Exposed; Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility; Kasperski,
“From Legacy to Heritage.”
20. Velikhov was upset about how Soviet secrecy was portrayed in Chernobyl, insisting that no data was hidden. Panteleeva, “Akademik Velikhov: Amerikanskii fil’m
‘Chernobyl’- polnaia erunda,” Ekspress gazeta, June 24, 2019, https://www.eg.ru/society/
746782-akademik-velihov-amerikanskiy-film-171chernobyl187-8212-polnaya-erunda055961/
21. Moiseev and Barenboim, “The Chernobyl Environmental Problems.”
22. On history of science diplomacy, see Araphostatis and Laborie, “Governing
Technosciences in the Age of Grand Challenges.”
23. Dufaud, “The History of Science and Technology.”
24. Wendland, “Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the Atom.”
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The social space where Soviet regime was supported and opposed to
should also be approached with a sociological sensibility. For instance, Soviet organizations had a specific institutional logic and Albert Hirschman’s work on different social responses of employees to an organizational
crisis can explain their persistent (dys)functioning, where the “loyal”
members will never offer uncomfortable feedback about their organization. Indeed, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ or transparency was
aimed at changing precisely this form of organizational behavior. Also, a
focus on organizational narratives and sense-making, according to Barbara
Czarniawska, could clarify the range of scientists’ responses to Chernobyl.25 From health care to the military, many administrations had their
own cultures and practices that scholars are only beginning to unlock, like
Kate Brown in her Manual for Survival (2019). Chernobyl’s characters who
spoke truth to power might no longer appear as much of an aberration as
Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen perceived.26 Rather, they
expressed what science and technology historian Slava Gerovitch calls the
impossible contradiction the Soviet ideology imposed on scholars and engineers: “to be obedient state servants and, at the same time, to show creativity and independence of thought.”27
The public impact of Chernobyl challenges the idea that the Soviet experience is an anomaly. If this were the case, why has Chernobyl succeeded
so well in bringing back the nuclear problematique to social debates
around the world, as evidenced in the growth of publications in traditional
and social media, in the context of a deepening public indifference to the
nuclear risk? The problems that Soviets faced in nuclear technology speak
to current public sensibility, because they resonate with viewers’ experience of uncertainty regarding public and official “truths” and the power of
science to provide ultimate solutions. While Chernobyl revealed many
things, some debatable, it did make one point very clear: Soviet history is
not just a history of liberal democracy’s Other, it is part of our entangled
relationship with technoscience.
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