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# I Am a Kievan
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/ia-kievlianin/
- Published: 2021-04-19T08:39:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:41:15.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: In the Press, Interviews, Society, People

I am a Kievan. And Chernobyl came into my life at the very moment it happened, on 26 April. More precisely, on the morning of the 27th. I was on my way to work on the metro, as usual. I still remember the name of the station, Arsenalna, where I met a friend, a cameraman at the studio I worked for. He said: "Listen, have you heard what happened at Chernobyl? They have sent every bus from the left bank out there, something has clearly happened." It would never have occurred to us what it really was.

In those years I lived opposite the building that was fashionable at the time, reserved for functionaries of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Komsomol. My mother lived on another floor of my block, and on the night of 28 April she ran to me at half past five in the morning: "I think something serious has happened. I woke in the night because of a noise, went out onto the balcony and saw people quietly, trying not to make a sound, unloading from the house where the Komsomol people live, with luggage and children, and driving away." My son was only a few months old, and we decided to send the family to relatives in Odessa. I went, and these are important details, to the Aeroflot ticket office, where there was not a single person. Why does this matter? Because exactly a day later it was already the year 1941 there: crush and crowds. On the plane, apart from my wife and the baby, there were about twenty other women with small children, exchanging knowing glances with one another, but nobody really knew anything.

A day later rumours had swept through the whole city. Something had happened: an explosion, a nuclear catastrophe? All sorts of recipes for fighting radiation began to circulate: draw a grid of iodine on your chest, and so on. It was also believed at the time that red wine was very beneficial because it washed out strontium. And everyone began drinking red wine with great vigour, having in effect "received permission" from the Ministry of Health. But seriously, people tried to leave. They went anywhere at all; by then everything was clear to everyone. Meanwhile no one in the government made an official statement, and people did not know what was really going on. Gorbachev spoke only on the 18th day after the explosion at the nuclear power plant, on 13 May. Yet on 1 May a demonstration was held in Kyiv, and on 5 and 6 May the "Peace Race" cycle race.

All of this has stayed in my memory down to the smallest details. And at the very beginning of May I was sent by the studio to film at the plant, and I was terribly glad, for it is for such moments that we documentary-makers work. I remember how, as we approached Chernobyl, endless barriers appeared, checkpoints, a wild quantity of machinery.

Over the next three years I kept going back there, and we shot various episodes for documentary films. But I never made a large film about the accident then, and the psychological gestalt remained unclosed.

It seems to me that it was the last nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union. Because at that moment Ukraine became fiercely sharpened: it did not forgive those 18 days of silence and took Gorbachev's actions extremely negatively. Because of this, centrifugal sentiments took hold in Ukraine which in fact had not been widespread in society before the accident, but after it began to grow actively. For Ukrainian writers, even those who came from Party literature, the Chernobyl catastrophe became the main theme. And the first heralds of national perestroika were precisely the Ukrainian writers connected in one way or another with Chernobyl.

The second important consequence: many young, active, well-educated people realised that they had to go somewhere, that it was dangerous to stay. Of my huge circle of 50 people, which included filmmakers, scientists and creative people, not one remained in Kyiv; all of them left.

And naturally, the greatest consequences concerned health. Early illnesses were immediately put down to Chernobyl. There had been no cancer in my family, but my mother died of it young, and her husband soon died too. And I naturally think that it is all Chernobyl. As do many other Kievans. It later turned out that child mortality from cancer in Kyiv is the highest in the world. In short, one could go on listing for a long time.

Alexander Rodnyansky in an [interview](https://www.forbes.ru/forbeslife/426627-ya-horosho-slyshu-teh-kto-v-menshinstve-aleksandr-rodnyanskiy-o-chernobyle?ref=theparnassian.com) with Forbes Life