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Some Russian views on @clmazin's great Chernobyl mini-series – a thread.
Inside Russia, people have been watching it on an HBO partner site or on high-quality pirate sites. Responses range from bilious via perceptive/valid criticism to liberal praise.
Inside Russia, people have been watching it on an HBO partner site or on high-quality pirate sites. Responses range from bilious via perceptive/valid criticism to liberal praise.
Most infamously, a Komsomolskaya Pravda journo thought the series was an American propaganda stunt to discredit Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear energy corporation. OK, then: kp.ru/daily/26981.7/…
This spluttering piece (via @Russia_calls) called “Stuffed with Chernobyl Mushrooms” argues that "the Anglo-Saxons" have removed everything great and heroic from the story, “replacing it with ignobility, carelessness and petty tyranny”. 
A former engineer at Reactor Four raises questions about how Dyatlov, Fomin and Bryukhanov are portrayed; is upset that brave Chernobyl staff shown “with trembling knees”. But overall impression “positive”; the series is “much needed”: bbc.com/ukrainian/feat…
I spoke to two liquidators. Oleg Solomein said some of the vodka-drinking-on-the-job was over the top and there was artistic license elsewhere but much about the series was striking and well done.
“Even a character like Shcherbina who appears autocratic in the beginning shows human qualities as the series goes on,” he said. Solomein thought the film was vital to return attention to the fate of the liquidators.
Sergei Trofimov, a liquidator who was in hospital for ten weeks after his stint at the destroyed reactor in 1986, said he did not like how some of the plant’s staff were shown in Chernobyl to be “idiots”.
But Trofimov said: “The main thing that’s shown right is that it was a catastrophe on a global scale and that people, in spite of mistakes and inaccuracies, mostly did the right thing and came out victorious.”
Daria Cherkudinova, a journalist in Moscow who was born six months before the disaster, told me:
Daria said she doubted such a production was possible in Russia because big budget series need state funding, which often ends with an unsophisticated “heroisation” of history.
Roman Volobuyev, 41, a film director, said in a FB post: Foreign filmmakers “love that Soviet kitsch with old apartment blocks, awful wallpaper and girls plastered in make up, and they’re ready to wheel it out at any opportunity – Chernobyl is the ideal example.>>
>>While we’re still trying to set up the lights to make everything more beautiful and less shameful.”
This tweet: “You’re watching Chernobyl and you think, ‘Damn, they overdid it with the German Joker robot, though.’ Then you Google it afterwards, and you’re like, Fuck’s sake!”
Russian-American filmmaker @michaelidov on the Chernobyl series:
.@ilya_shepelin praises [Eng] the “focus on the harrowing and self-sacrificing struggle that the Soviet people waged against the consequences of the explosion”, and says pro-Kremlin media are ashamed that an American channel “tells us about our own heroes” themoscowtimes.com/2019/06/04/put…
.@bershidsky argues [Eng] that such a “harsh sermon on the importance of listening to experts and running a government for the people, not for its own sake, should have come from one of the affected countries” bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
We may not have long to wait for Russian state TV’s take on the disaster. NTV is apparently filming its own version in which the KGB tries to track down - you guessed it - an American spy who’s up to no good near Chernobyl in 1986: ntv.ru/novosti/204324…
And finally: a screenwriter in the UK was ridiculed this week for suggesting there should have been characters of colour in the Chernobyl series. Today there are (unconfirmed) reports that there was indeed a black liquidator named Igor Khiryak: svoboda.org/a/33198/1/2998…
