The Soviet period

The Soviet period appears in these testimonies less as a settled historical backdrop than as a lived promise whose meaning changes after catastrophe. Speakers recall wartime childhoods, faith in a powerful country, and ordinary family attachments; later, Chernobyl and the dissolution of the Soviet Union make those memories harder to reconcile with what happened. The result is not one verdict on an era, but a set of personal accounts in which loyalty, fear, silence, and dislocation coexist.

A promise of security, remembered through war

One speaker recalls the assurance given during Soviet times: hardship had followed a great war, but the country now possessed a mighty army and no one would defeat it. The memory becomes bitterly ironic when the speaker describes people beginning to shoot one another. The violence is no longer an invading army’s attack as remembered by a grandfather who marched to Germany, but neighbors and former schoolmates turning on each other. The account measures the collapse of security not only in political terms but in the intimacy of betrayal: people who once sat beside one another at school now kill and rape each other.

The language of war also shapes how people interpret Chernobyl. A woman whose family lost seventeen people in an earlier war says that Chernobyl is like a war with nowhere to hide—not underground, underwater, or in the air. In another recollection, an old woman kneels before her house during an evacuation and refuses to leave the graves of her two sons, killed in the earlier war. The sky is clear and the apple trees are blooming; there is no shooting, yet the authorities are evacuating her. The scene exposes the mismatch between visible signs of peace and an invisible danger that the old woman cannot recognize as war. The recollection makes Chernobyl legible through the Soviet population’s inherited vocabulary of wartime loss, even as it shows how inadequate that vocabulary can be.

Everyday life and the limits of official knowledge

The era’s political claims sit beside ordinary scenes of family life. One woman recalls falling in love and marrying after her village was first considered for evacuation and then removed from the lists because the government lacked money. Their daughter survived severe congenital conditions, underwent four operations by age four, and grew up largely in hospital, where she played at treating dolls. Her account joins the intimate hopes of marriage and parenthood to the uncertainty of living in a contaminated place; the family’s future is shaped by decisions made beyond the household, while the consequences are borne in its daily routines.

Other testimonies show how knowledge itself was constrained. In an account of Chernobyl, authorities repeatedly claimed during the first ten days that the situation was under control, even as the reactor burned and released radioactive material. The same retrospective account stresses the contradiction: the government concealed the scale of the disaster while sending thousands of men to confront it, dropping sand onto the fire from helicopters and later clearing radioactive debris from the roof. The machines failed in the radiation; the men would become sick weeks or months later. The contrast makes the period’s governing failure concrete: public reassurance and secrecy accompanied a frantic, dangerous response whose human cost emerged only afterward.

The dissolution as a loss of home

For one refugee from Tajikistan, the Soviet Union and Tajikistan become two homelands lost at once. The family’s flight from war leads not to a secure new beginning but to a railway station where officials delay them over their possessions. They must unpack clothes, mattresses, a broken refrigerator, and two bags of books while being questioned about what they are carrying. The books include Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned; the absurdity of having to explain such familiar household belongings sharpens the disorientation of fleeing a war for the first time. The speaker’s recollection links the end of the Soviet Union to the loss of a political home and to the material humiliations of refuge.

That loss is measured against an earlier sense of importance. The refugee had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in railway troops; after arrival, work means cleaning floors at the town council. Some people show sympathy, while others accuse refugees of stealing potatoes. The speaker’s family history of displacement thus continues in diminished circumstances: a former military rank gives way to insecure work and suspicion, while the country that once organized the speaker’s sense of belonging is gone.

Memory after the era

The book’s testimonies return to the Soviet past from a later moment, when memories are acknowledged as fragile and emotional rather than exact records. A speaker wonders whether people remember in order to establish truth, secure justice, free themselves, or find shelter in the past, then describes memory as a person’s emotionally charged guess about the self. The distinction matters across these accounts: the past is not presented as a single, seamless history, but as recollection shaped by what a speaker can bear to tell and by the later events that have changed its meaning.

A decade after Chernobyl, one account lists the conflicting ways people respond: some believe everything has passed, some expect things to turn out well, some fear imminent death, and others want to leave or insist that life must continue. The speaker describes two million people living on poisoned land in a country of ten million and sees them as raw material for a scientific experiment, studied by visitors from Moscow, Petersburg, Japan, Germany, and Austria. The passage turns an earlier promise of collective security into a question about who controls knowledge and who bears its risks.

Private life also carries the past forward. A widow says she told a later husband the whole truth: her lifelong love remained with Vasya, and she never invited the new husband into the home because that was where Vasya belonged. Another woman, whose husband had been called up for Chernobyl, says that after his death their son became the reason she continued living; she visits him at a mental hospital, where he still asks when his father will return. Such accounts do not make the Soviet period a closed chapter. Its losses persist in rooms, family stories, and questions that have no answer, while the act of remembering becomes a way to name what official assurances could not contain.