Thirty-nine years have passed since the explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but the information waves surrounding this tragedy do not subside. Serhii Myrnyi, former commander of a radiation reconnaissance platoon, and now a writer and ecologist, named Chernobyl as an “infotrauma” and “the first major accident of the globalized media world.” Indeed, Chernobyl did not just shake the world, it changed the very foundations of the global information space.
Since then, post-Chernobyl texts—documentary and artistic, realistic and postmodern—have been constantly updating the narrative of this event. Today, the “nuclear” discourse is actively supported by products of mass culture: computer games, mobile applications, popular communities. The exclusion zone became an attractive tourist destination and was included in the list of objects of so-called “dark tourism”. Conducted by us analysis of this phenomenon makes it possible to understand how Chernobyl turned into a powerful cultural code integrated into global mechanisms of memory, identity and media consumption.
Chernobyl as an informational trauma of global society
Once upon a time in the 1991 documentary “The apocalypse is approaching. Chernobyl is nearby” director Roman Sergienko contrasted Pripyat with Pompeii: they say, the city near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant will remain dead forever. But several decades have passed, and the world has fundamentally changed. What seemed impossible then has become commonplace.
Chernobyl went through a series of reinterpretations. The change of contexts, political eras and the constant discrepancy between what was experienced and what was expressed ensured a long life of “post-Chernobyl” in the world discourse. The catastrophe created a kind of chronotope that divided history into “before” and “after”, leaving a crack in the global picture of the world, in the value systems and ideological priorities of many societies.
Jean Baudrillard, postmodern philosopher, even remarked: “After Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall no longer existed.” Due to the Chernobyl disaster, humanity entered a new era, where the fear of the nuclear threat became part of everyday consciousness.
The “post-Chernobyl” period has received various names: Postapocalypse, the era of nuclear culture, the past that refuses to die. But the concept of trauma became the most stable definition. The Chernobyl tragedy was etched in the mind not as a separate event, but as a deep collective wound.
As you know, the history of Ukrainians is full of collective traumas that shaped the national character: Holodomor, repressions of the 1930s, World War II. Chernobyl is another tragedy that stretched across space and time and still hurts even those who did not witness it directly.
Social psychologist Petro Gornostay appeals attention to the factors that make a tragedy a national trauma: the scale of the event, the psychological conditions of suffering, the impossibility of confronting the tragedy and the prohibition of free emotional response. In the case of Chernobyl, these factors were exacerbated by political circumstances and information technology.
In the first days after the disaster, the Soviet authorities hushed up its real scale. The official messages were extremely laconic and detached: “An accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, one of the nuclear reactors was damaged…Information gaps created anxiety, fear, and mistrust.
In 1987, against the background of soothing official narratives, it was possible to partially dampen the tension. But already the following year, when unofficial channels began to reveal the truth, it became obvious: the information about Chernobyl was incomplete, manipulative and dosed.
German researcher Burkhard von der Meulen noted, that the wave of contradictory reports after the information vacuum turned into a “bad caricature of mass information”, undermined trust in the state and science. Publicist Tilman Frasch noted that the disaster and the silencing of its consequences finally destroyed confidence in the future.
With the beginning of the era of glasnost, society experienced a secondary panic: diverse, often contradictory narratives poured into the public space, which only increased the confusion. At the same time, Chernobyl has finally established itself in the global consciousness as a symbol of humanity’s tragic transition into a new era — an era where information and truth are crucial for survival.
20 years later: Chernobyl in the mirror of the world media
Exactly 20 years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the topic is again making waves in the world media. In 2006, the Chernobyl disaster became for the West not only an object of memory, but also a source of deep philosophical generalizations that change the very idea of the world order and the limits of human responsibility. Comfort no longer seems safe where the shadow of nuclear genocide exists.
By the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, the Western press is literally bursting with reflections that are looking for new civilizational landmarks, understood through the Chernobyl experience. However, along with this there are also loud reproaches: international institutions – IAEA, WHO, UN – are accused of large-scale silence of the real consequences of the accident and avoidance of public debate.
Spanish media describe Chernobyl as “the most extreme symbol of technological progress that has become the enemy of life itself.” In the article “Chernobyl technological blindness” publicist Jose Semper speak about the new collective nature of risk: we no longer risk as individuals, we risk as humanity. He recalls Hannah Arendt’s warning: people do not become slaves to machines, but to their own practical knowledge and technical artifacts, even if they bring death.
The French media offer a different point of view: for them, Chernobyl is primarily a disaster of absence. Ruined villages, evicted residents, dead forests and animals represent an emptiness that is hard to fathom. Philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuis after a visit to the thirty-kilometer zone writes: “Emotions are not born from what we see, but from what we know or think we know. Imagining absence is not an easy task“.
In Germany, the Chernobyl accident gives rise to the concept of “Chernobyl trauma” (“Trauma von Tschernobyl”), which denotes not only physical consequences, but also a deep collective wound. German media associate the Chernobyl disaster with the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, pointing to the role of Soviet disinformation. For Germany, a country with a strong anti-nuclear movement, Chernobyl is yet another confirmation of a long-standing concern. It is not for nothing that sociologist Ulrich Beck writes his landmark work “Risk Society” at this time, where he describes Chernobyl as the end of the boundaries between “own” and “others”: after radiation contamination, there are no longer any distances that could protect us from each other.
Austrian edition Eurozine sharply criticizes attempts to commodify memory: photos of the disaster become objects of purchase and sale, and large agencies such as Corbis buy the rights to the works of Ukrainian photographers, such as Ihor Kostin – one of the first to film the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and remained in the exclusion zone from the first days.
It is significant that each new disaster seems to fuel the grand narrative of a global disaster. When the Fukushima accident occurred in 2011, the media around the world immediately resorted to Chernobyl images and symbols, even when the realities of the two tragedies were radically different. Thus, the “Berliner Zeitung” published a map of the radioactive cloud, which resembled Chernobyl more than Japan.
At the same time, the Western perception of Chernobyl is significantly different from the experience of those who survived the disaster on their own land. Journalists who visited the exclusion zone and spoke with local residents admit this. “The longer I stayed in Belarus, the further I moved away from my German image of Chernobyl“, — confessed journalist Merle Hilbeck after her trip to the infected areas.
In the European media, interest in the Chernobyl topic is cyclical: outbreaks of attention are repeated every five years. This is how the term “Chernobyl Year” was born, which marks every fifth anniversary of the accident.
After all, two main narratives co-exist in the understanding of Chernobyl today. The first insists that the accident is still ongoing, requiring memory, reflection and new lessons. The second, the counter-narrative, seeks to push the tragedy into the past, to present its consequences as the product of radiophobia, and therefore as something to be forgotten. As notes German researcher Karena Kalmbach, it is this struggle of memory and forgetting that determines what Chernobyl’s legacy will be in the future.
Post-memory of Chernobyl: to remember means to live
For an event to become a national disaster, one scale is not enough. We still need a community – alive, active, able to feel pain as a common one. An atomized society, divided into separate “I”, does not know how to mourn even the greatest tragedies together. It is communication that unites people into a community that forms collective memory and lays the foundations of post-memory — a mechanism that weaves trauma into the very fabric of national identity.
Trauma becomes discourse when a community emerges of those united by a common pain and a constant need to return to the past that defined the present. We ask important questions again and again:
Why do tragedies become an impetus for creativity?
Why does society look for itself in traumatic memories?
Why does Chernobyl remain a point of endless reflection and conflicting interpretations even today, when eyewitnesses are alive and can speak for themselves?
Social psychologists explain the postmemory phenomenon in different ways. Some say: “fasting” means overcoming trauma. Others — that it is its prolongation: the trauma lives on, blurring the line between the past and the present.
The American researcher Dominic LaCapra proposed the term “narrative fetishism” — society’s desire to get rid of pain through endless retelling, turning trauma into a media product. Victims’ testimonies gradually become not only stories, but also part of their self-presentation.
The Ukrainian author Serhii Myrnyi develops the same theme. He draws attention to how the media and society attach the label “victims of the Chernobyl disaster” to the liquidators. Such a name unknowingly creates in the residents of Chernobyl the feeling of their own life history as a continuous trauma. And meanwhile, says Mirny, wouldn’t it be more correct to call them something else – say, “Chernobyl veterans”? In our culture, the word “veteran” is full of dignity and honor, not just pity.
Postmemory is not a desire to forget. On the contrary: the post-traumatic state focuses on weaving the trauma into the fabric of everyday life. Russian researcher Serhii Ushakin says: the experience of loss becomes a narrative matrix that helps organize a torn, fragmented reality.
Chernobyl lives in our memory – both official and personal. It is in state strategies, political interpretations, and private testimonies. Post-Chernobyl is a special world where the truth is not one: it depends on the point of view of the witnesses and constantly changes along with the society.
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs claimed: we remember not so much the past as its reconstruction through the prism of the present. That is why residents of Chernobyl are forced to return again and again to what they experienced, living it through new social coordinates.
The trauma of Chernobyl demands to be experienced more than once. And it’s not just a memory — it’s a desire to retain authenticity, to defend “your” Chernobyl against layers of pseudo-memories.
A vivid example is testimony Svetlana Bodrunova, who was thirteen years old when her family had to leave their home near Gomel, one of the most polluted cities in Belarus. Her memories of the real Chernobyl stand next to the virtual versions of the disaster that young people, familiar with the tragedy only through games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R..
Individual memory is closely intertwined with group memory. The liquidators create unions, write books, found newspapers — they fight for their version of Chernobyl. Their memory is plural memory. It is a living resistance to oblivion. This is proof that postmemory is not the end of pain, but its continuous work within us.
