1:23:45

What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?

Hi, this is Peter Sagal. And I'm Craig Mazin. And I'm sitting with Craig to record the first episode of the Chernobyl podcast, a podcast about the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which was written and created by Craig Mazin. The intent here is to talk with Craig about where the show came from, why he created it, the experience of making it.

and how closely the docudrama, would you call it a docudrama? I guess so, a dramatic retelling of history, for sure. Right. How closely it tracks real history, where it differs and why, and ultimately...

why it was made at this time and place. Yeah, and of those many wonderful reasons to do this, the one that was most important to me from the jump was a chance to set the record straight about what... we do that is very accurate to history what we do that is a little bit sideways to it and what we do to compress or change in no small part because the show is

essentially about the cost of lies, the danger of narrative. And I didn't want us to, I guess, miss a chance for transparency if we had one. So I've never actually heard... this kind of thing before in relation to dramatic...

retellings of history, so I'm kind of curious to see how it all works, if people are horrified by this or enlightened. I don't know. I think they'll definitely be horrified. Speaking as someone who just recently saw the miniseries, what else happens, I think, is up to them. This episode of the Chernobyl podcast... This podcast concerns episode one of the Chernobyl miniseries titled 1-23-45, which of course was the reading on the clock when the explosion at Chernobyl happened. Let's start...

Then, with the beginning, you were, I'm guessing, around... 20 or so in 1986 when this all happened? Maybe a little younger? I was younger. I was 15. 15? Okay. I was 15 years old. I remember it. I don't remember it quite as starkly as I remember the incident that occurred.

about three months earlier, which was the Challenger disaster. But I definitely remember that it happened. I remember that the entire world seemed concerned. It wasn't simply a local thing. And beyond that, it sort of devolved fairly quickly into... a very simple notion. Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant, and it blew up. That's it. Right. I was a little older then, and what do I remember? I remember that Chernobyl blew up. It was bad.

but it ended up being okay, and the Soviets lied about it. That's exactly right. And it's a bit of a shame that... So much of the takeaway from that is that the Soviets lied, and the Soviets created this system that would have led to that. All of which is true, and all of which is a large part of the story that we tell. Because it's an important part. What we did not get...

on our side of the news was how, I like to say, this could have only happened in the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union could have solved this problem. What the Soviet citizenry did to sacrifice and solve... was nothing short of remarkable. And we in the West, I don't think, had any sense of how...

multi-layered this disaster was and how, in many ways, the explosion was really just the beginning of a series of events that are increasingly hard to believe. Well, yes. A lot of this podcast, just as a spoiler alert, is going to be me saying... to Craig.

really? And he'll say, yes. And it was even weirder, presumably. In a number of cases. But let's start here. So this is what we knew about Chernobyl. It's what you know. It happened in your childhood. It happened in my young adulthood. We remember this. It happened. It went away. Soviet Union fell a few years later and we just forgot about it. If you would ask me...

Before I started watching this series, what I knew about Chernobyl, I'd say, yeah, okay, that happened, and I know that there's a big concrete sarcophagus over it, and nobody can go near it, and it's kind of cool, I might have said, because... people have been removed from the area around it, so there's been this weird kind of renaissance of nature, which is kind of nifty. And I've seen, you know, film of, like, deer leaping about. It's kind of nice. So I would have...

Before this began, I would have said, that was a problem that happened 30 years ago, and it's all over, and there's really no problem when we kind of have this cool abandoned city, which is fun. Yeah. Assuming that that's where you were before you started your...

exploration of the project, what started you on this exploration? I knew that Chernobyl exploded, but I didn't know why. And it struck me as such an odd lapse, because if you say to people... what happened to the Titanic, they'll tell you it sank. And if you say how, they'll tell you iceberg. Everybody knows it hit an iceberg. Nobody seemed to know offhand why and how Chernobyl blew up. So I just began...

You know, one of those lovely evenings at home where you just start internetting yourself into a coma. And I started reading and two things jumped out. And both of those things emerge in episode one, one of which emerges immediately. The first thing is that the night of the explosion, they were running a safety test. That's the kind of fact that... any writer will stop and say, oh, okay, that is deeply ironic in the most disturbing of ways. Why? Well...

If you're running a safety test and the result of the safety test is the least safe thing that could have ever possibly happened, you start to wonder what gap between intention and result... existed here. How is that even possible? I can understand if you're...

You know, in every submarine movie, there's the whole crush depth scene, you know? The whole point is to take this thing down and see how much it can take. All right, well, if it collapses in that scene, I get it. But if you're trying to just see... Like if you're taking a car out for a spin and you've gotten to this section where it's not acceleration, it's braking distance. How does that make the car explode? What is going on there? So I found that shocking.

And the second fact that grabbed me was that the man that was in many respects put in charge of the cleanup and the general... I call it a war against the atom. Post-explosion was an academician named Valery Legasov, and Valery Legasov commits suicide two years to the day after the explosion. And that, of course, immediately gets me wondering, why? So, when you were pitching this idea to HBO and Sky, how were you presenting it as something that people would want to and even need to watch?

The way I like to think of it is, what is the relevance to everyone? I mean, ultimately, we can tell any particular story, but there needs to be some sort of universal relevance. Or it just becomes a story in and of itself about... which, at that point, I refer to those things as homework. I'm not interested in making homework for people. The reason that I was compelled to write about Chernobyl was...

I mean, in part because it was filling in these large gaps of a story that we all knew and yet didn't know, but primarily, it's because it is a story about the cost of lies. This is the first... line of the whole show and this is the theme that we are going to continue with as people watch these episodes that when people choose to lie and when people choose to believe the lie

And when everyone engages in a very kind of passive conspiracy to promote the lie over the truth, we can get away with it for a very long time, but the truth just doesn't care. And it will get you. And the people that suffer, ultimately, are not the people that are telling the lie. It's everyone else. And that is where we start to see real truth. In the behavior of human beings who are...

motivated to save their fellow man, their fellow woman, their loved ones, that's where truth is. And so, for me, and this by the way was before... our entire planet seemed to become engulfed in a war on truth. For me, this was an important kind of story to tell about the value of truth versus narrative. Which, because we are, I think...

As humans, we are so susceptible to storytelling, it's why we tell stories. We like them. Stories are sometimes very good ways of conveying interesting truths and facts. But... Just as simply, stories can be weaponized against us to teach us and tell us anything. So, of course, I choose narrative.

Tell an anti-narrative story. But that's why I think this is relevant now. Maybe more relevant now. In fact, yes, definitely more relevant now than it was when I started writing it. Which was, and I think we should just... before the 2016 election. Yes, it was. I think I started in 2015 on the writing. Yeah. Because I will say, speaking for myself, it's impossible to watch this miniseries.

with its tale of government malfeasance and lies and bureaucratic, let's just say, incentives, taking the place of, shall we say, other...

without thinking about what's going on in America and across the world today. Let's talk a little bit about production, which covers the whole series, but becomes into play... quite vividly in this episode, both in terms of its realism and its departures in realism. First thing, no Russian accents. Right. Yeah, big decision that we made early on. And what propelled that decision, and when did you make it, and what was the thinking?

Well, we had an initial thought that maybe what we would do... We didn't want to do the, you know, the Boris and Natasha. The Russian accent can turn comic with... very little effort. So at first we thought maybe we would just have people do these sort of vaguely Eastern European sort of, you know, so if I'm talking like this, it's... I'm not really doing a strong accent, but it's a little...

And what we found very quickly was that actors will act accents. Yes. They will not act. They will act accents. And... we were losing everything about these people that we kind of loved. Honestly, I think maybe after one or two auditions, we just said, okay, new rule, we're not doing that anymore. And I remembered there's a...

I don't know if you ever saw this movie, it was an HBO film, actually, called Citizen X. This was many years ago, Stephen Ray and Donald Sutherland. True story of a serial killer in Soviet Ukraine. And I recalled that...

There were accents all over the place. They had a South African accent, they had an English accent, they had an American accent. Some people were sort of trying, some people weren't. Max von Sydow shows up and just talks like his Swedish self. And it works perfectly fine, because they're not speaking Russian. So... Now, that meant no Americans. Um, because I think for an American audience, the one thing that will pull you out of that is an American accent. That just sounds silly.

But beyond that, yeah, we just occasionally ask people to maybe take the edge off a little bit. You know, like in Game of Thrones, anyone from Manchester will be asked to push that a bit. Right, so that they're the northerners. They're clearly the northerners. would sort of say, like, you know, take the edge off a little bit, but here and there we would just let somebody be Irish or Scottish because they sounded great and their character was good. Right.

And of course, as people are speaking to each other, there's no consciousness that they're speaking in Russian. They're just talking to each other. And so we're hearing them as they would have heard themselves. And that's really what we went for. And my hope is that the acts and thing just fades away within seconds. You just stop caring about it because that's ultimately completely irrelevant to what was going on, which is essentially what...

Goes on in all situations regardless of language. Panic, fear, love, excitement, you know, worry, all these things, just emotions. Right. One thing that struck me as a guy who grew up with Boris and Natasha cartoons is that... they all call each other comrade all the time. That almost struck me as like, you know, a parody of the Soviet Union. Yeah, it struck me as a parody of the Soviet Union as well, to the extent that I didn't really include that frequently in the initial drafts, but...

I did have some people who had grown up in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Ukraine, look through the scripts. One woman in particular went through everything. And one of the things she told me, there were a couple of interesting things I remember. For instance, in the beginning of episode one, when Legasso... puts food out for his cat. I just had him pouring cat food into the bowl. She said, we didn't have pet food. There's no pet food in the Soviet Union. You gave them the food you didn't want.

So, that was fascinating. But the other thing she said was, comrade was essentially the thing you would use to refer to people. It was the all-purpose reference. You wouldn't call people by their last names only, generally. Um, if you wanted to be...

somewhat formal in a business-like manner, you would call them perhaps by their first name and their middle name, which is a patronymic, which is a whole complicated... Whole other thing. It's a whole other thing. It's a whole Megillah. It is a whole Megillah, as some people say. Yes. And I didn't want to get into, because the truth is, while that probably is the most accurate and authentic way to do it, it is unwieldy for English listeners. But Comrade, or Tawarish, was a very common...

just reference, and people would use it all the time. And so she would occasionally flag things and say, no, that should be Comrade Sherbina, not Sherbina. And so I started putting them in. Right. Second question is...

production design and realism. I've now seen some photographs after seeing it, and it is pretty accurate, what you've presented in terms of both the exterior, the interior of the power plant, and Pripyat itself, the city around it. I'm assuming you didn't actually film at Chernobyl and Pripyat. So how did, briefly, how did the production crew go about recreating all this?

Well, first of all, I would have. I would have shot at Chernobyl and Pripyat, except the problem is Chernobyl and Pripyat do not at all look like they did in 1986. They look like the result of 30 years of neglect and exclusion zone. Um... It was an obsession for us, honestly. Our production designer, Luke Hull, worked very closely with our costume designer, Odile Dix-Moureux. We just became obsessed with showing things as they were.

I think for me, for Johan Renck, our director, the Sovietness of things and the Soviet specificity of things was half of what... is fascinating about this. I mean, we're seeing an event that, as we say, you know, in the show, at some point has never occurred on this planet before.

but we're also seeing it in a place that most of us have never been to before, which is this inside behind the Iron Curtain in 1986, not from an American perspective, but actually as it was. We were shooting primarily in Lithuania. a little bit in Ukraine. So our crews, they were alive when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union and Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Many of the places that we shot in were constructed.

most of them were constructed during the Soviet era. It's real. And we were able to get the real clothing. And the firefighters, these are the outfits that we put together were... Down to the rivet, Odile did an incredible job of making them realistic. Exactly correct. We were helped sometimes by the fact that in the Soviet Union, if they made, for instance, a minor helmet... Yeah.

There was one minor helmet. So you didn't have to figure out like, okay, which minors wore this brand or that brand? There was one. It was called minor helmet. And that's the one. The advantage of... Poor consumer choices. Correct. But Luke and I and Johan spent a long, long time poring over as many photographs as we could, blueprints. In terms of Pripyat, we found...

a neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania, that had been constructed in a similar time, in a similar fashion. Again, one of the upsides of former Soviet Republic is that...

They were building things there, very similar to the way they were building them, you know, a thousand miles away. One blueprint. Pretty much. I mean, it was... it was these brutalist, you know, block towers. So we found a neighborhood that was very close, and... basically made our Pripyat out of that, and then of course with the help of some, you know...

pretty remarkable visual effects from DNEG, a fantastic company that's been doing all of our effects, we were able to properly bring that to life. But again, all of it based on extensive research. Why? I mean, it's not going to be dramatically important to a viewer if the control room looks exactly like the control room of reactor number four. Which it does. I'm sure it does. Down to the bottom. So what was driving you? I was always aware that I was telling a story that...

meant an enormous amount to the people that lived through it. There are people alive today, thousands, tens of thousands of people alive today who have... lost people they love because of Chernobyl, whose lives have been shortened because of Chernobyl. There are people walking, a lot of people walking around without a thyroid because of Chernobyl.

it was important for me to tell that story accurately. I think about the stories that we have routinely told in the West, stories about the Holocaust, stories about World War II, where we try very hard to be accurate because it's a sign of respect. And for me, I wanted people who lived through that, including some people in that control room that night who are still alive, to watch this and say, they cared. They cared. They got it right.

All right, let's focus on episode one, which is dramatically challenging. We meet Legasov, he immediately kills himself. Right. And we won't see him again until the very end of the episode. That is correct. So as we all know... Screenwriting 101, introduce your hero, kill him and ignore him. Exactly. You can tell that I've grown weary of writing normal narrative. We meet him, he's recording those tapes. What is the cost of lies? And that's not a

device that you used to get his voice in the film. He actually recorded tapes. He did. So there's a number of things here that are absolutely accurate to history, and then some things that I fiddled with a little bit just to be able to tell the story. So, here's a good... Right off the bat, let's talk about what's real and what's not. Legasov does in fact hang himself.

two years to the day after the explosion. Does he hang himself at exactly that time? Which we'll come to understand why that time is so important. No one can say, that was really my way of just imparting that I believe this must have been intentional. The date couldn't have been an accident.

He did record his memoirs on audio tapes. They were not quite as flowery and thematic as the dialogue I've given here. The reason that people like you were put in this earth is to make other people sound better in retrospect, Craig. I hope I did him proudly. In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame. He did spell out a lot of his concerns about the Soviet nuclear industry and the way things had gone. And in terms of how those tapes got...

disseminated, I couldn't really find any good answers, so I just sort of went with some Confederate, picked them up and took them and spread them about. One thing that I've left out... of Legasov's story, and it's left out right off the bat, is his family. He had a wife, he had children. And I made a choice early on to not include them in the story.

mostly because so much of this story was gonna be about his efforts in Chernobyl and his relationships with the people that he was fighting this war with. And I just didn't wanna have those scenes of... come home, you know, because the family that's left behind in these sort of wartime movies inevitably descends into a kind of whininess, and I didn't want to do that to them, but I do want to acknowledge, of course, that they existed. Right.

We then go to Chernobyl on the day of the accident, and I thought this was interesting, and we will revisit this moment again in the series, but we see the accident not from the perspective of there, it's not a huge special effects shot. Right. It is in the distance and it is silent from the window of another character who doesn't even notice it. Precisely. I wanted people to know, first of all, this is not going to be...

the way you would expect it to be told. If somebody says to me, look, I'm making a series about Chernobyl, I think, okay, we're gonna start with the day, and then there's gonna be things, and then it's gonna explode, and then there's gonna be calls, and people, and I just didn't wanna do it like that at all.

I wanted to just start with the explosion. I wanted to start, and also didn't wanna hide the fact that Legasov commits suicide. Anybody who watches this show, who then Googles it 10 minutes after watching, will go, okay, he's gonna commit suicide. Well, not to wait four episodes from, no, no.

I'm just, here it is. That's it. And the explosion, which you know is gonna happen, you're not gonna wait for that either. There it is. What's fascinating to me is... not that Chernobyl exploded, it's how close people were, and how unaware they were, and how that night just unfolds in a way that I had no idea had unfolded, and would have never predicted in a million years.

I should ask, because this happened in the Soviet Union, because of the secrecy and the cover-up, which begins almost immediately, how do we know what happened? How do you know what happened? Great question. And the answer to it is... We sort of know a lot. We definitely know a little. There are a ton of competing narratives out there. And I encountered this as I did my research. A lot of times...

the name of the game was, which one of these accounts do I believe? And I tried as best as I could to actually opt for the less dramatic account. We... got a lot of information out of the Soviet Union or what was the former Soviet Union once it collapsed. A lot of information came out. A lot of scientists who had been with Legasov...

were able to then tell their stories. They wrote books. And then a lot of Western researchers and authors were able to go and talk to the people who had been there and collect their narratives. There's an incredible book called Voices of Chernobyl. by Svetlana Alekseevich, which is a... It's essentially a collection of first-person accounts. So a lot of information did come out, and...

In fact, in that first scene in the control room, a number of the things that are said were said. For instance, Akimov says... Don't worry, we did everything right. Something... something strange has happened. He said that. Little lines like that are quite... They make me feel something when they happen in the show, because I know we are essentially reproducing truth there. And that's... And some of those things, I don't think I would have ever...

In fact, I'm not sure I would believe it necessarily without knowing that it happened. Right. Long ago, when I taught playwriting, I used to tell my students... the worst reason to put something on stage is that it really happened. Because I don't care if I'm watching it. I don't care if your mother really said that to you. Show me how and why it was relevant. Make it relevant to me. I'm guessing...

Just that this was something that you had to grapple with a lot. Things happen in this first episode that are almost impossible to believe. Correct. Very challenging. And it really came out the most through... the character, the real person, Anatoly Dyatlov. Dyatlov is the guy in charge. Yes, he's played by Paul Ritter. He's got the gray hair and the sort of grayish mustache. He's in charge. And he was in charge of the room that night.

And Anatoly Dyatlov makes a series of... Well, when we eventually do see all the events leading up to this, which we will, I won't tell people when, but we will. We will see a number of... borderline inexplicable choices by him, but with a hint of motivation. In this episode, where we're watching Aftermath, what we're seeing repeatedly from Dyatlov is denial. That denial is real. It happened.

It went down exactly like that within seconds. So just so people understand, because the geography of the plant is a little bit of a question mark for a lot of people. This is a very large facility and it is very long. It takes maybe 20, 30 minutes to walk. one into the other. And the general structure of the power plant was that there were four nuclear reactors. Each one was in this large square building.

And then in between those big squares were these long corridors where you had things like control rooms and so on and so forth. When Chernobyl reactor four blows up, it's all the way at one end of the plant. The guys in the control room, they hear and feel a succession of thuds. One thud and then a really big thud. Most of the force of this explosion was vertical.

So right off the bat, when I was researching, one of my questions was, how is anybody even alive there? Well, this is how. I mean, the explosion ejects materials almost straight up, almost a mile into the air. But these guys in the control room, what they hear and feel is something blew up. And almost immediately, Dyatlov concludes that what's happened is there is a tank.

a control system tank that has collected hydrogen and ignited and exploded. Like a little Hindenburg hydrogen. A little mini Hindenburg. And so what he's contemplating here is essentially a serious... industrial accident, but by no means a nuclear holocaust. And for the longest time I wrestled with this, just as I think Dyatlov must have internally been wrestling somewhat. I think that what...

I forget and have to remind myself all the time is, the word Chernobyl means a million things to us all in an instant. But right before it blew up, it meant nothing. that nuclear reactor, and in fact, no nuclear reactor, had ever been thought to be capable of exploding. And so, I tried to integrate that into my understanding of the denial. There's another moment...

And I can't remember right now if it's a bit of dialogue or a stage direction where a character, and we're gonna get into these people running around the control room trying to find out what happened, where it's like he's been told to go over and look down into the reactor. Yeah. which he knows if you look down into an open nuclear reactor, you're dead. But there's a moment, I think you're describing his thought process, and he says, well, he's going to go over and look over it. And...

If he doesn't see what he thinks he's going to see, the open reactor, then he needs to know that. And if he is going to see what he thinks he's going to see, it doesn't matter because he's already dead. And so there does seem to be this aspect of these guys saying, the reason we can't...

believe the worst happened is because if the worst happened, we're all dead now. And so that seems to be, just as a human thing, I'm not going to believe that I'm already dead. There must be some other explanation. And there were gradations of that. across the various people, depending on where they were and what they saw.

So all the people in the control room that we depict were there. Those are their names. There were a few other people that we left out that weren't quite as relevant to the story that we're telling. So they were a bit insulated, but two men immediately run in. The first... is a guy named brojnik who's working in the turbine hall and he says the turbine hall is on fire it's exactly what happened he did run in he did say that which you could say could be a result of a control system tank explosion

The second guy who runs in is a guy named Parvashenko. Parvashenko, we will see later on where he was working. Parvashenko saw way more. Right. And when Parvashenko arrives in that control room, he tells them, and this is true.

that essentially the core exploded. And they basically say to him, no, that's not correct. He... proceeds on, everything he does from that point forward, this is the real man, and we reflect it somewhat in what we show, he did with the full understanding that he was likely a dead man walking.

There were a number of people who did things like that that night. We couldn't tell all the stories, but they were remarkable. One of the workers at the plant who became aware of the full scope of the accident fairly early on... Did what he could to make things better. He went home. He took a nap. He woke up and then he went back. There was this sense that if you had broken through the denial.

and gotten on the other side of it, which was an understanding of reality, you had an obligation to do what you could to prevent it from getting worse. Conversely, you have guys like Akimov and Taptunov, who are the two guys that are working the control board that night. They're the ones who, towards the end of this episode, are opening the valves by hand. Right. Even though they know...

on some level. That it is utterly pointless. On some level. That they're basically spraying water into the air because that is such an extraordinary moment when Dyatlov says, you need to go do this. And they know it's... because Dyatlov's whole picture of the situation, i.e., they need to get water in the core, is ridiculous, because there is no core. It's gone. It's blown up. It's a huge atomic pile. But they go.

Years ago, I read John Keegan's book about World War I, and he writes about trench warfare. And he writes about how these guys in the trenches, British soldiers, went over the top and were immediately killed. And... He writes about why they did that. And I met him once. He did a book reading, and I said, okay, you explain why the first guys went over. What about the second guys? What about the second guys? Right, right. They just saw everybody they knew.

follow their orders, do it according to the book, and immediately be killed by machine gun fire, and then they went. I thought of that very vividly and specifically thinking about those specific two characters. They knew... this was pointless. They knew if they went out there, they were dead, and they were right about that. How much did you have to think about those men, their minds, at that moment? A lot. So much of...

writing a moment like that is asking, what do I want people to feel here? What is the emotional truth that I want them to believe? And I have to make certain choices. I have to decide in some ways... States of mind that I don't have access to, but behind all of this is this almost heartbreaking social circumstance that these people grew up. In the Soviet Union, where community and communism, these words have connected roots, it was understood that you were part of a collective.

and that you were there to support your fellow man and your fellow woman. These kind of pro-social messages were promoted by people that I don't think were very pro-social at all. the leadership of the Soviet Union, but the people often did believe it and feel it. And you can see this in all of the history of... 20th century Russia and the surrounding areas that the Soviet Union encompassed. So I think some of this was a sense of... I don't know what else to call it, but...

Soviet civic duty. It is, it is very noble and admirable and beautiful. And then of course, profoundly sad underneath it. But it's why I say if this had happened in the United States, I think For instance, if Three Mile Island had exploded in this regard, I think what would happen is that we would have evacuated the area very quickly and then just...

I don't know, put a rope around a large section of the middle Atlantic and said, no one can go there anymore, because we can't send people in because they'll die. And that would have been it. Yeah. And this will come up again in later episodes. Exactly how this either insane self-sacrifice, this brainwashing, this extraordinary nobility, there are a hundred ways of looking at it, played an extraordinarily important role.

Let's turn right now, though, to the opposite, which are the managers of the plant. Sure. Brukhanov. Brukhanov. And Fomin. Yeah, Fomin. I have to learn all these pronunciations. Yes, and we'll work on it. And these guys, unlike... some of the other characters we've been talking about so far, these seem familiar. The Soviet apparatchik. The guys who care nothing about anything except their stature, the fear of what's coming from above.

and their contempt for the people who were below them. Yeah, there's a little bit of that going on for sure. I suppose there's a lot of it going on. I mean, a little background on those guys. Some things that I did not include, but are interesting facts nonetheless. Viktor Rukanov...

did not really come from a nuclear power background. He was in the power industry. Of course, who was put in charge of these things wasn't generally a question of merit. And just so that people don't think that I get into kind of... unnecessary Soviet bashing, we had this problem everywhere. Viktor Burkhanov was certainly a kind of a classic Soviet bureaucrat. Femin was a more interesting character in many ways. Femin... was there working as essentially the head nuclear physicist.

supervising the entire thing. And then you had individual deputies like Dyatlov or this guy Sitnikov, who shows up later. But Femin essentially is kind of the head scientist of Chernobyl. Femin... got his degree in nuclear physics through essentially a mail-order school. So, Famine was not trained as a nuclear physicist at all. He got that mail-order degree essentially to check a box so that he could get this job.

Once again, a certain kind of patronage and loyalty system in place. Famine was a very sad character. He had been in a car accident that had really, uh... I guess it had infected him deeply. He had gone through a long, depressed state. He had finally come out of it. And I think he saw... an opportunity to perhaps do better for himself at Chernobyl, which, again, did not have the connotation that it does now. It's just a place. Yeah, it's just a place. It's just a place.

But one thing that is true, and we'll get a little bit more into Bruckanov in particular, who I also think, in many ways, was in a very difficult spot. Because I try and understand... Yeah. We'll get more into those guys in a later episode, but in this episode, I think the important thing to understand about those two guys is, they were told something by Dyatlov. They were told that this was not...

a nuclear core explosion, that the core was fine. They were also told that radiation was 3.6 Ronkin per hour. I think they probably knew that that number was weird. Yeah.

Strangely specific. Strangely specific, it turns out, is the maximum reading on those low-limit dosimeters. And they chose immediately to believe it. And I think in a very Soviet way, once they bought into that... and reported that up the chain, the inherent cost to reversing and saying, I'm sorry, we got that wrong, was massive, almost unthinkable. And there's a moment Brikhanov says, I've got to call and tell my boss about this. Can you believe I'm not going to, I don't want to do that.

And there is that moment of almost relief when Dyalav says to them, oh, no, it's fine. And they're like, well, if you're saying it's fine, then I can report that it's fine and it will be on you. Correct. Which is interesting and terrifying because at no point... do they ever seem concerned with the actual truth? They just wanna know that they're not going to be in trouble. Yes, I think once they had a sense...

that it was not the impossible, but rather the possible and the mundane. It's very bad, by the way. At that point, everything becomes about managing... the outcomes for yourself. There's no concern about the outcome for the world. So Dyatlov has to call his superior. They have to call their superiors. And, you know, that point where...

Brukhanov explains to the local executive committee the chain of phone calls that has occurred. That's real. So that's what happened. There was a series of phone calls over the course of the night. that eventually make their way to Gorbachev. Really? Yeah. That's how it worked. I call you, you call him, he calls him, he calls him, and he calls Gorbachev. Right.

One by one by one, each one of them decides, how can I kick this upstairs? And each one of them repeats a lie that they do not yet know is a lie that... essentially was conceived seconds after the explosion by a desperate man who was incapable, in a very human way, of entertaining the thought that the impossible had occurred. Right.

There's a scene in the episode where the local committee, as you say, comes into the plant. They're in the plant. In fact, you'll be safe here, guys. Don't worry. And there's almost a moment where a younger member of the committee says, wait a minute. Right. I've seen things outside. I've seen the fires. I've seen the rubble. There's been a major explosion. You're lying." All right, first question, did that really happen? Sort of. So the executive committee does...

come to that bunker. They do assemble there. And... What we know from the record... By the way, there's an excellent book that just came out called Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham, which I wish had been around when I did, because there's a lot of interesting details from that that kind of illuminate some of these things. What we know... about that executive committee was that there were essentially two competing thoughts. One of them was...

the kind of what I call the Soviet obsession with alarmism. So anything that came close to approaching bad news was just dismissed as alarmism. It was literally put into... It's like the... Soviet version of fake news. I don't want to believe what you just said, therefore I'm putting it in a category of philosophical, uh, mistake." Right. Then there were people within the executive committee who were very concerned.

and believed that this was much worse than it was. So what I essentially did was personify those two positions between a younger member of this group and an older member. I thought it was important to remind people, particularly in the West... that in 1986, there were still members, functioning members of the Communist Party, who had been alive during the Revolution. They were believers. They knew Lenin. They had seen him. Right.

This was not some kind of strange cult that had been separated from its religious founder by thousands of years. This was fresh. And I wanted to show how that functioned because... it was still very much a part of their lives. Right. So there's the character Zarkov, the oldest committee member who's sitting in the corner. Game of Thrones fans may recognize him from Winterfell. As Maester Lewin. And...

He gets up and he makes a speech. He points out that the real name of the Chernobyl power plant is the Lenin power plant. And he makes a speech about the Soviet ideals and how this is how we do things in the Soviet Union. But what was interesting was... The point of his speech was not, we will now fight for the fatherland and we will not sacrifice ourselves. But the point of his speech is, we are going to keep this secret. That is the correct Soviet response. We seal off the city.

No one leaves. And cut the phone lines, contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour. Yes comrades, we will all be rewarded for what we do here tonight. This is our moment to shine. That is, in fact, what they did. And there were people, as in the, I guess what you'd call Pripyat leadership, who felt strongly that the first thing you do in any situation like this is cut the phone lines.

That was literally their first move. Cut the phone lines, and don't let anyone in or out. The most important thing was to avoid the spread of a panic. So, when I read that, it occurred to me that... on some level, if you are part of a power structure that you understand is suppressive in a way, and that you are limiting people's freedoms in a way, you must be aware...

that there could be a spark that could lead to the truth spreading and people realizing and finally shaking off their shackles and saying, we're not gonna be a part of this anymore. That is essentially how the Berlin Wall came down. on some level, they must have all been aware that the Soviet Union was being glued together by a certain kind of magic, and they were not wrong, because it was not long for the world. The Soviet Union would be gone in five years.

So, when something like this happened, they said, cut the phone lines and no one comes and no one goes, because if this spreads, who knows? There's an interesting contradiction. which Orwell explained, really, with Double Think, in which they've decided simultaneously that there's nothing wrong, and no reason to worry, and also no one is ever going to know about this. Correct. And they were capable of proceeding, it seems, as if both were true.

And that is extraordinary. Yeah. They, I think, had a sort of a default position that anything that was counter to the story they had told their own people and the rest of the world... simply could not be publicized, or no one could know. Now, I think they knew, probably, that the rest of the world laughed at them. I think that the Soviets had a deep insecurity.

There's a great line in a later episode, which I'll give away now, where somebody says to somebody who wants to tell the truth about Chernobyl, he says, you want to humiliate a nation that is obsessed with not being humiliated. And that, I thought, captured this whole attitude quite well. Well, they...

Inside the Soviet Union, I think, uh, it was, there was probably more of a sense that people needed to believe those things. And yes, there were, the citizens were not stupid. They understood that there were great limitations to the system. But... Many of them, more of them, I think, than people understand, were kind of active believers. They believed that the West was decadent. They believed that their system was something worth saving.

I want to go through a couple of things for episode one before we leave it behind. And they're basically all part of my really. Yeah, let's do it. Really, the firefighters walked right up to the burning pile and sprayed an open nuclear reactor with water. Really? And there are...

even some details that I did not include. Some of them didn't have their jackets, and so they were just there in a t-shirt. A couple of them didn't have helmets. There are a number of stories from that night that are shocking that we just didn't have time for, but...

That's exactly what happened. They were told, essentially, there's a roof fire. And in the first episode, you hear that little, you know, whatever the, it's not a 911 call. I don't know what the, what 911 was, but that's the actual audio. Yes.

From that night. And you can hear them saying, yeah, you got to get down there. There's a roof. The roof's on fire. That's it. They just thought it was a roof fire. And they showed up without any protection, which, by the way, they didn't have anyway. Right. And they fought that fire all night. And they did get incredibly close, and one of the firemen did pick up a piece of graphite in his hand. This is graphite from the core of a nuclear reactor. And...

Most of the deaths that occurred directly because of the radiation of that night were experienced by those men. And I think... There's at least one report of one firefighter who said, he reported saying, I said to everybody, it'll be amazing if any of us are alive by morning. Sometimes it's hard to tell if that's... A little bit of a kind of revisionist history on people's parts, but we do know that a number of them reported tasting metal.

Yeah, which is, I'm assuming, a real thing that happens around intense radiation. It is a real thing, apparently, that happens around intense... There's not a lot of experience with this. There have been a couple of incidents. This was the worst of them by far. Yeah, but that really happened.

And they really didn't tell anybody, they didn't evacuate the town, they didn't notify anybody. The episode ends with everybody waking up the morning after the explosion and going off to school and work. Yeah. So, backing up for a second, Pripyat was... about as close to what the Soviets had promised people as you could get. It was fairly utopian. These cities were called atom cities. They were constructed...

to support, obviously, to supply employment at the power plants, but also to, you know, then support those people around them. They were considered very, very, um, desirable places to live, unlike... Other regions where you would have shortages of food and supplies, the markets were stocked. There was no waiting in line. It was a reward to live in a place like this.

So the accident occurs at 1.23 in the morning. By sunrise, you begin the day of April 26th. Not only were they not told throughout that entire day, there was a wedding. Uh, people were just walking around in the streets. It was a lovely day. One man, these are stories that I didn't include just for time. One resident of Pripyat chose to get on the roof of his building to do some sunning.

He got pretty sick. I don't know if he made it or not. They didn't keep great records, as you might imagine. But yes, that is a fact. They were walking around under a cloud of smoke. billowing from an open nuclear reactor all day long. Right. At the end of episode one, does anybody know how bad this is? other than the people inside the plant who've actually seen the open core. No. Nobody knows. No. And yet, we know.

We've seen the burns. We've seen the core. We've seen... And maybe the last thing I'll ask you about in episode one is that beam of light heading upwards. That's... I'm terrible with Russian names. We found out. The Cherenkov effect. Actually, it turns out it wasn't the Cherenkov effect. And that's another one of those little moments where Dyatlov engages in a strange kind of denial. I don't...

I don't think specifically said that that light was that, although that was something that a lot of the scientists in the early hours were saying, oh, that light can happen with minimal radiation. But what that light was, that blue light, which was described... and described as quite beautiful, was essentially the ionization of the air. The radiation was so intense it was breaking the, you know, the oxygen molecules apart and creating this color. It was...

probably one of the things that drew a lot of the citizens appropriate to that bridge. That really happened. They did that. They all stood there in this bridge and they all watched. Correct. How far away were they? About a kilometer. And that goes directly to another thing that I really struggled with, which was how little people knew about radiation. They simply didn't know. If you or I...

and someone said, oh, there's a fire at a nuclear power plant, but it's not the core, it's just a fire, you wanna go see, we would say, no. Are you insane? I'm gonna drive in the other direction. But they didn't know. There's a building in Pripyat that has a slogan on it that basically refers to the friendly Adam. And they also believed that if there was anything that you... I mean, one of the characters mentions this thing about vodka, that's...

True. They believed that vodka essentially would decontaminate you of any kind of ill effects of radiation. If only. It is odd that the tone of the episode, weirdly... is almost that of a horror movie, in that people are going about their business in the way that people in horror movies do, and there's a horrible monster that is hunting them.

and killing them, and they don't even know it. And it seems almost as if we as the viewers are put in their place, that there's something terrible going on. You can't see it, but it's getting you. And there's so many moments in this episode which are equivalent to watching a horror movie. It's like, don't go through that door. And yet they go through the door. Yeah. And those moments are all true. And on that note, we'll find out...

What happened, both in terms of what led to this accident and what happened to the people who we've now just met? In subsequent episodes, episode two of Chernobyl airs next Monday, 9 p.m. Eastern. on HBO. This is Peter Sagal. I've been talking with Craig Mazin, the creator, producer, and writer of Chernobyl. You can always listen to this podcast, review, and rate it via...

Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, wherever else you might choose to get your podcasts. Hey, how about the NPR One app? They're out there. You can also listen to it via YouTube or the HBO Go and HBO Now apps once used for... TV, now used for podcasts. I think it's evolving. Craig, thank you so much. This has been fascinating and not a little terrifying. Thank you, Peter. I can assure you it gets worse. Tune in next week for even more depressing stories of real life disasters