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Chernobyl: indelible
reminder of a bankrupt political system
Governments that systematically turn a blind eye to the well-being of their
citizens ultimately condemn themselves to abject defeat and lasting infamy
By Yulia Tymoshenko
It began as a gray and muddy spring day, like so many others in my homeland. It
ended in dread and mourning.
Of course, none of us knew the precise moment when catastrophe struck at
Chernobyl 25 years ago. Back then, we lived under a system that denied ordinary
people any right whatsoever to know about even essential facts and events. So we
were kept in the dark about the radiation leaking from the shattered reactor at
Chernobyl ˇX and blown by the wind over northern Europe.
However, perhaps the most bizarre fact about the Chernobyl disaster, we now
know, is that then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was also kept in the dark about the
magnitude of the disaster.
Indeed, it may be this very fact that finally condemned the old system to the
dustbin of history a mere five years later. No regime built on limitless
self-delusion is capable of retaining a shred of legitimacy once the scale of
its self-deception is exposed.
Because only fragments of reliable information reached ordinary Ukrainians at
the time, my memories of Chernobyl are necessarily sketchy. I recall now only
the first hushed, frightened whispers of disaster from a family friend. I
remember the abject fear I felt for my young daughter. A virtual torrent of near
hysterical hearsay and trickledown stories about the disaster soon followed.
All of these memories, of course, remain indelible. However, even 25 years later
I find it difficult to connect what I really know of the disaster with when I
came to know it.
Today, the Chernobyl meltdown is judged severely in both moral and metaphysical
terms. It cast a dark shadow over humanity, one unseen since the atomic bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
However, unlike Japanˇ¦s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant crisis,
Chernobylˇ¦s real lesson is not about nuclear-plant safety. It is about official
arrogance and indifference to suffering, and a cult of secrecy that allowed
information to be shared only among a narrow elite obsessed with stability.
Ukrainians are being reminded of the consequences of this mindset right now ˇX by
a government that has slashed health benefits for the men who heroically fought
to contain the Chernobyl disaster.
So, what was the source of the carelessness with which the Chernobyl crisis was
handled? What caused such arrogant unconcern for the health of those who lived
near the plant, for those heroic men and women who tried to limit the damage
(whom officials still treat as pawns) and for the millions who lived beneath the
radioactive cloud as it spread?
Government indifference is a strange and unnatural state of mind, in which the
lines between crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, and good and evil
blur. Having grown up in the USSR, I know that Soviet leaders practically made
contempt for suffering and moral concerns the foundation of their philosophy of
rule. Unaccountable governments are almost inevitably unconcerned about their
citizensˇ¦ fate.
Can indifference ever be a virtue? Of course, in times of horror such as the
Holocaust and Ukraineˇ¦s Holodomyr, isolated and powerless individuals may
swaddle themselves in indifference simply to retain some shred of sanity. But,
even then, it can never be justified fully, and the nameless, nagging guilt of
which Primo Levi wrote so movingly invariably follows.
It is official indifference, however, that is truly unpardonable, perhaps
because indifferent officials never feel the guilt of which Levi wrote. Indeed,
for some political leaders, indifference is seductive. It is so much easier to
avert your eyes from citizens than to grapple with their plight. It is so much
easier ˇX and often less costly ˇX to avoid individualsˇ¦ tragic circumstances than
it is to adjust your policies to their needs.
For the state official who turns his back on suffering, his countryˇ¦s citizens
lack consequence. Their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible
anguish is worthless, a cipherˇ¦s despair.
Such indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can actually be
artistically and politically creative. Alexander Pushkin wrote some of his
greatest poems as a result of anger; Beethovenˇ¦s great symphonies were written
in the grip of overpowering emotions and Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Aung
San Suu Kyi all endured imprisonment because they were angry at the injustice
they had witnessed.
Indifference, by contrast, is never creative, for it means that no response to
injustice, and no help for the suffering, will ever come. It is the tool of
governments that are, in fact, the enemy of their people, for it benefits only
the ruler ˇX never the victim, whose pain is magnified by neglect.
Political prisoners, hungry children, the homeless Chernobyl refugees, or the
irradiated workers in need of a lifetime of medical help ˇX to dismiss their
plight, to refuse to offer some spark of hope, is to exile them to a netherworld
of helplessness. Government officials who deny human solidarity in this way deny
their own humanity.
From his prison cell awaiting his execution by Adolf Hitlerˇ¦s Gestapo, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer declared that we must all ˇ§share in Godˇ¦s suffering.ˇ¨ Indifference
for Bonhoeffer was not only a sin, but also a type of punishment. This is
perhaps the central lesson of Chernobyl: Governments that systematically turn a
blind eye to their citizensˇ¦ fate ultimately condemn themselves.
Yulia Tymoshenko was twice prime minister of Ukraine.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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