{"id":8737,"date":"2016-04-25T22:17:21","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T03:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8737"},"modified":"2016-04-25T22:17:21","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T03:17:21","slug":"30-years-or-30000-spectral-stories-of-chernobyl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/04\/25\/30-years-or-30000-spectral-stories-of-chernobyl\/","title":{"rendered":"30 Years (or 30,000): Spectral stories of Chernobyl"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"12936507_10156686380240175_3276137965878156821_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ll be giving this talk<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Kansas on\u00a0Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the\u00a030th anniversary\u00a0of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech about the accident. Pravda<\/em> (Truth<\/em>)\u00a0first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7.<\/p>\n

The future of the Soviet Union hinged on\u00a0that 18 day\u00a0period between the accident and the Politburo’s\u00a0admissions about it. If there was a single event that precipitated the USSR’s unraveling, it was the Chernobyl accident.\u00a0Without the accident, its\u00a0aftermath — including the quiet but chaotic departures of Party officials and their families while May Day parades went on as if all was normal in Kyiv (80 miles away and literally downstream from the accident) and Moscow, followed ultimately by\u00a0the sending in of over half a million “liquidators” to deal directly with the impacts of the disaster — and without the meanings that were wrested out of both\u00a0by the Soviet populace, it’s entirely possible there would still be a Soviet Union today.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0talk will tell seven stories about the accident, each of them interpreting it within different\u00a0spatio-temporal reference frames:\u00a0(1) histories of the Soviet Union, its growth and eventual collapse;\u00a0(2) legacies of the ethnic mixing and \u201cpurification\u201d of the northern Ukrainian borderlands;\u00a0(3) the Cold War arms\/space race and its legacy of militarized \u201cblack sites,\u201d containment strategies, and conspiracy theories;\u00a0(4) the growth of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement;\u00a0(5) scientific and “biopolitical” experiments on biotic populations;\u00a0(6) \u201cstalker\u201d and zombie subcultures; and (7) the Anthropocene and its scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic conceptualization.<\/p>\n

In the end, I’ll argue that the “Zone of Alienation” — the 1000 square mile exclusion zone that has largely been taken over by “wild nature” (except for the tourists, the few hundred\u00a0elderly resettlers, and the intrepid “stalkers”) — is as good a metaphor as any for the position of humanity today. As in the epigraph to Tarkovsky’s Stalker<\/em> (1979), the prescient film that got read onto the Chernobyl disaster by so many Soviet citizens seven years later, we can ask ourselves:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was it? A meteorite that fell to earth? Or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, there appeared in our small land a miracle of miracles:\u00a0the ZONE.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question is, who is on the inside and who is on the outside? And how long will the borders hold?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll be giving this talk\u00a0at the University of Kansas on\u00a0Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the\u00a030th anniversary\u00a0of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech about the accident. Pravda (Truth)\u00a0first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7. The future of the Soviet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688615],"tags":[123667,350234,16780,212,350232,350233,317,318,16902,350231],"class_list":["post-8737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropo_scene","tag-anthropocene","tag-anti-nuclear-movement","tag-biopolitics","tag-chernobyl","tag-cold-war","tag-nuclear-power","tag-stalker","tag-tarkovsky","tag-ukraine","tag-ussr"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2gV","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9620,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/04\/15\/anthroposcenic-chernobyl-in-text-image\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":0},"title":"Anthropo(s)cenic Chernobyl* in image & text","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 15, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"My Gund Institute research talk from a few months ago, on \"Navigating Earth's 'Zone of Alienation': Chernobyl and the Search for Adequate Images of the Anthropocene,\" can now be viewed online (see link below). It consists mostly of out-takes from my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, forthcoming later this year from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/0UT7jqMeAgA\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8908,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/07\/30\/anthropocenic-sublime\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":1},"title":"Anthropocenic sublime","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 30, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I'll be giving the following talk at the \"Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene\" workshop\u00a0at the National University of Singapore this coming week. Navigating the Zone of Alienation: Chernobyl and the Anthropocenic Sublime Abstract: This two-part talk will interpret the Chernobyl nuclear accident and its \u201cZone of Alienation\u201d (Zona vidchuzhennia)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12370,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/02\/25\/the-event-of-ch%c9%b5rnobyl-resonance-renewed\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":2},"title":"The event of Ch\u0275rnobyl (resonance renewed)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 25, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"My recent 2022 Mohyla Lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, \"The Ch\u0275rnobyl Event: Ecology, Media, and the Anthropocene,\" is now available to be watched online. (That \"\u0275\" in \"Ch\u0275rnobyl\" is intentional; I discuss it in the talk.) In addition to updating some of my work on the Ch\u0275rnobyl \"hyper-event\" and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/42Z9l3Stob8\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3670,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/26\/year-25-a-c-after-chernobyl-a-love-letter\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":3},"title":"Year 25 A.C. (after Chernobyl)–a love letter","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I was going to post something to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but Sarah Phillips has already posted something so good, saying many of the things I would have wanted to say, that I will simply link to her article at Somatosphere and add some personal\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/04\/stalker-275x220.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1064,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/26\/chernobyl-may-day-the-revolution-of-risk-society\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":4},"title":"Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that's coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"radar_10.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/04\/radar_10.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3675,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/29\/stalking-the-cinema-stalking-the-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":5},"title":"Stalking the cinema stalking the world","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/04\/tarkovsky.stalker-275x207.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8737"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8745,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737\/revisions\/8745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}