Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

"Probably quite a few people who will read this interview have watched the HBO and Sky miniseries on Chernobyl . The best way to think about Kate Brown’s book in my mind is that it tells the story of Chernobyl that was not there at all in the miniseries. It’s interesting and intriguing. It’s a book about the people and the environment that were left after the HBO cameras stopped rolling (Or, as cameras don’t roll anymore, when the digital cameras… ran out of digits?) What Manual for Survival also has in common with the book on the Bering Strait, Floating Coast , is that both books are written, to some extent, from below. Both authors use their expertise as historians, they go to the archives, but they combine that with their expertise as anthropologists and go and interview people. Kate Brown takes very seriously what people who lived through Chernobyl think about themselves, about the experience, about their health, about the environment. As academics, we always—or maybe often—come with a certain type of attitude that comes with our education and when we look at the local perceptions or knowledge we think, ‘Okay, this doesn’t make sense. We did this survey, or we did this health check, and it doesn’t show in your blood. What you’re saying is irrelevant, an element of folklore or something like that. Somebody else can study that.’ Kate Brown goes to those people and that’s where she starts. She listens to them and then she follows those leads. And those leads very often end up in the same archives, but allow her to ask different questions, the ones she would not ask otherwise. The book tells us a very different story about Chernobyl, one that we didn’t know when we were looking top down. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The title of the book is really powerful. What she’s trying to do is learn from that experience. By using local knowledge and local perspectives, she also tries to challenge some of the already established, prevailing stereotypes about Chernobyl. One of those is the question of what happened to the environment. People who go to Chernobyl, to the exclusion zone today say, ‘Okay, the wildlife is back. It’s flourishing. It’s better than it was when we were there.’ And yes, there is a point to that, in the sense that the worst thing that can happen to the environment is that we, humans, come there. Everyone else disappears. But there is also something that we don’t think about and this is the fact that not all the animals returned and those animals that did return are not as healthy as we think they are. There are major changes that are happening there. And she looks at the research done by scholars who don’t have that big microphone in front of them, who were marginalized by the field as a whole, and raises these questions. She’s very brave because she is trained as a historian, but she goes in and tries to understand and explain nuclear medicine, biology. She has been attacked for that, but her position is a very, very reasonable and important one. She says, ‘Okay, I’m raising these questions. Yes, maybe you who are trained in biology know more than I do. But, please, try to answer them.’ Again, it’s about the Soviet experience, but it’s also about taking Chernobyl away from saying, ‘Okay. It’s ideology, it’s the Communist Party, it’s a particular type of reactor that caused that’ and placing it in a different column and saying, ‘Ok, this is actually something that is global. This is something that we have to deal with.’ With nuclear energy in particular, with global warming, it’s easy to say, ‘Let’s go nuclear.’ Kate Brown’s position is, ‘Just hold your horses. Slow down. Let’s talk about this. Let’s think about whether this is indeed the best way to deal with the crisis that we face now.’"