The Happiness of All Mankind: One Word about Genocide
The fourth episode of HBO's miniseries Chernobyl (2019) is entitled "The Happiness of All Mankind". It's a slogan from a propaganda banner left hanging at a civic center in one of the towns in the exclusion zone near Chernobyl that were evacuated after the nuclear reactor explosion. Showrunner Craig Mazin notes that the banner is described in first-hand accounts from liquidators as described in Svetlana Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl.
"Liquidators" are what the hundreds of thousands of men sent to Chernobyl in the weeks and months after the explosion called themselves. If "liquidators" sounds more ominous than "cleanup crew"... well, it is. I'll get to that in a subsequent blog.
First I want to write about the opening scene of episode 4. Soldiers are evacuating people from the 30km exclusion zone. Not everyone wants to go.
In this scene one soldier confronts a babushka who doesn't want to leave. Babushka, BTW, is a transliteration of the Russian word for grandmother. It appears in Polish, too, as a borrowed word. It's used in both languages more loosely than in English as a term for any older woman.
Babushka doesn't want to leave. The soldier tells she must and explains it's for her own safety. She refuses again, giving a litany of all the deadly hardships she's lived through on this land: the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, the Holodomor, World War II, etc.
While she's arguing with the soldier she continues milking her cow. The soldier grabs the milk pail from her, steps outside the barn, and pours it out on the ground. BTW, the soldier is not doing this to punish her for disobedience. The reality is cows in this region are eating irradiated grass, and their milk is dangerously irradiated. It's poisonous to drink. That's why people have to be evacuated.
But the babushka is undeterred. She picks up the empty bucket, sets it back under the cow, and starts milking again.
The soldier, seemingly in a fit of anger and her stubborn disobedience, pulls out his pistol. We hear the BANG! of a shot- followed by WHUMPF! as the body hits the ground.
[Spoiler (click to open)]The cow falls over dead.
He shot the cow.
It actually makes sense. The cow was one of the things tying the woman to her farm. No cow means less left to stay here for. And the cow was going to be killed anyway. That's part of what those monstrously named liquidators did.
BTW, in the HBO podcast for episode 4, interviewer Peter Sagal asks showrunner Craig Mazin if they used a stunt cow for the scene. Mazin explains they used a real cow for the milking scenes then a prop cow for the dead cow tipping part of the scene. CGI was used to make the prop cow seem less fake. No animals were harmed in this filming!
It's worth calling out a word the babushka used in this scene. A single word. Holodomor. The miniseries doesn't explain it but instead leaves it there like a clue, an easter egg for curious people to use as the starting point for further research. And OMG, what a terrible easter egg. Holodomor was a genocide Stalin perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in the early 1930s by starving them. It's estimated that up to 5 million people died.
For this episode, for this scene, that background puts into better context why a person who lived through that isn't afraid of invisible radiation or a soldier with a pistol.
"Liquidators" are what the hundreds of thousands of men sent to Chernobyl in the weeks and months after the explosion called themselves. If "liquidators" sounds more ominous than "cleanup crew"... well, it is. I'll get to that in a subsequent blog.
First I want to write about the opening scene of episode 4. Soldiers are evacuating people from the 30km exclusion zone. Not everyone wants to go.
In this scene one soldier confronts a babushka who doesn't want to leave. Babushka, BTW, is a transliteration of the Russian word for grandmother. It appears in Polish, too, as a borrowed word. It's used in both languages more loosely than in English as a term for any older woman.
Babushka doesn't want to leave. The soldier tells she must and explains it's for her own safety. She refuses again, giving a litany of all the deadly hardships she's lived through on this land: the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, the Holodomor, World War II, etc.
While she's arguing with the soldier she continues milking her cow. The soldier grabs the milk pail from her, steps outside the barn, and pours it out on the ground. BTW, the soldier is not doing this to punish her for disobedience. The reality is cows in this region are eating irradiated grass, and their milk is dangerously irradiated. It's poisonous to drink. That's why people have to be evacuated.
But the babushka is undeterred. She picks up the empty bucket, sets it back under the cow, and starts milking again.
The soldier, seemingly in a fit of anger and her stubborn disobedience, pulls out his pistol. We hear the BANG! of a shot- followed by WHUMPF! as the body hits the ground.
[Spoiler (click to open)]The cow falls over dead.
He shot the cow.
It actually makes sense. The cow was one of the things tying the woman to her farm. No cow means less left to stay here for. And the cow was going to be killed anyway. That's part of what those monstrously named liquidators did.
BTW, in the HBO podcast for episode 4, interviewer Peter Sagal asks showrunner Craig Mazin if they used a stunt cow for the scene. Mazin explains they used a real cow for the milking scenes then a prop cow for the dead cow tipping part of the scene. CGI was used to make the prop cow seem less fake. No animals were harmed in this filming!
It's worth calling out a word the babushka used in this scene. A single word. Holodomor. The miniseries doesn't explain it but instead leaves it there like a clue, an easter egg for curious people to use as the starting point for further research. And OMG, what a terrible easter egg. Holodomor was a genocide Stalin perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in the early 1930s by starving them. It's estimated that up to 5 million people died.
For this episode, for this scene, that background puts into better context why a person who lived through that isn't afraid of invisible radiation or a soldier with a pistol.