What is a nuclear threat to the world these days was experienced firsthand in the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories in 1986. Today, 36 years have passed since the night in which the fourth nuclear reactor of the Chornobyl power plant ‘(the Ukrainian variant of Chernobyl’) exploded, causing the largest nuclear catastrophe in the history of the planet. Perhaps today no one will remember it because these days we are experiencing a new nuclear threat.
Europe tries to avoid nuclear conflict, Russia uses the threat as the most powerful weapon in its hands to achieve its ends, Ukraine and Belarus know from experience what the consequences of a nuclear explosion are.
The historian Serhii Plokhy in his book dedicated to Chornobyl ‘, recently also published in the Italian translation, highlights the factors that led to the tragedy, mentioning the superficial Soviet approach in organizing work, the personal factor in the command chain called not deliver bad news to their superiors and the total absence of transparency between the apparatus and the people in managing the emergency.
History, after decades of research on the catastrophe, has been able to give some answers on what happened that night and the following weeks of spring 1986. But what remains in the memories of the Ukrainians and Belarusians are the still vivid images of the inhabitants of those areas. died from radiation, without knowing at that moment for how and why, perhaps even held by the hand until the last sigh, the long lines of buses several days after the explosion with the displaced who never saw their home again, the diseases that soon consumed the passengers of those buses, the inhabitants who remained in the adjacent areas and the liquidators and builders of the sarcophagus above reactor number four.
The memories remain alive despite the villages engulfed by the lively nature and remained present on the maps only with the signs, some ovens in the houses that emerge out of the green, some monuments to the fallen in the Second World War in the places that were once the center of the country. These memories have moved and expanded together with the people displaced immediately, but also with those who left the areas around Chornobyl ‘, divided into four territories with respect to the level of contagion.
Those people started life all over again in cities like Sumy, Perejaslav, Kiev, Poltava. Some of them with the Russian invasion were forced to relive the experience of displacement.
Because of these memories, Ukrainians and Belarusians would never have gone digging in the Red Forest or camped in abandoned villages like Polis’ke, where they found five tortured bodies of young local males in a basement. These are the memories that divide the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian people and if even in independent Ukraine the management of the prison areas cannot be defined as ideal, the memory of the survivors, handed down for generations, remains the ideal document to understand better than any other. , what is the nuclear threat both locally and globally.
These are the umpteenth lessons from the past that we have not learned until the end, the lessons that re-emerge in these dark days with the feeling that we have already lived this story, but the fact of reliving it confirms that nothing has been learned or has not been wanted to learn. And after the never-ending Chornobyl tragedy, Russia shamelessly threatens the world, confirming that in the Chornobyl tragedy her memory is different from that of the Ukrainians. The Russian memory is that of those who centrally managed the nuclear reactor tragedy in Moscow in the worst possible way. But it is also that of those who in many other cases, including in recent days, have never wanted to admit his responsibilities.
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