The Chernobyl disaster, when Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on 26 April 1986, is the worst nuclear disaster and the costliest disaster to have occurred in human history. The effects of the Chernobyl disaster, brought about by the radioactive contamination that chiefly spread throughout the Soviet Union and virtually all of Europe, have had a significant impact on millions of people (in addition to direct and indirect deaths) and the environment, consequently serving as one of the greatest motivators for the anti-nuclear movement. Accordingly, both the incident itself and the aftermath have since been a prominent focus in the study and implementation of nuclear power around the world, and have also featured in numerous works of popular culture; film, literature, music, television, and video games, among other forms of arts and media, have either analyzed it in a non-fictional context or used it as a backdrop for fictional dystopian settings.
Overview The name "Chernobyl" has become synonymous with the concept of a nuclear energy disaster. Referencing the political damage from the inept initial response to the disaster, pundits sometimes use the phrase "Chernobyl moment" to describe alleged analogous damaging failures, such as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ukraine has announced an intention to open the disaster area to tourism. Numerous cultural works have referenced the disaster, some of which are listed in this article.
Film
Documentaries The Bell of Chernobyl (1987), a documentary film directed by Ukrainian filmmaker, Rollan Sergienko. Black Wind White Land (1993), a documentary film exploring the disaster and its consequences for the people of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. (2001) tells the story of Ljudmila Ignatenko and her husband Vasilij who was a firefighter responding to Chernobyl. Chernobyl Heart (2003), a documentary film observing the effects of the disaster on the health of children in the area. Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster (2006),Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster a BBC docudrama about the events at the Chernobyl plant during the accident and its immediate aftermath, focusing on the role of Valery Legasov. The Battle of Chernobyl (2006), a documentary with live footage at the time of the situation in Pripyat and the powerplant. Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl (2006), released by Seventh Art Productions to commemorate the disaster through poetry and first-hand accounts.https://web.archive.org/web/20110813131910/http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/scripts/article.pl?articleID=308 Movie Mail UK. Retrieved 31 July 2020. The film aired at film festivals and on TV, internationally, securing Best Short Documentary at Cinequest Film Festival and the Rhode Island “best score” award, with a screening at Tate Modern. The Unnamed Zone (2006), a Spanish documentary film about three young Ukrainian children directly affected by the disaster. White Horse (2008), a short documentary about a man returning to his Ukraine home for the first time in 20 years. Klitschko (2011), a documentary about the World Heavyweight Champions Vitali Klitschko and Wladimir Klitschko, which makes reference to their late father Wladimir Rodanovich Klitschko, a senior ranking Red Air Force officer was involved in the cleanup operation following the disaster who died in 2011. The Russian Woodpecker (2015), a documentary film that investigates the events leading to the Chernobyl disaster. Babushkas Of Chernobyl (2017), a documentary directed by Holly Morris exploring the daily lives of elderly women who live and farm in the Exclusion Zone. Back to Chernobyl (2020), a documentary by Roman Shumunov Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (2022), directed by James Jones, contains interviews with people who were there and newly discovered footage filmed at the plant by cameramen who worked alongside those who cleaned up the disaster.
Others (1990), a Soviet feature film about the accident and its consequences, the title referring to its main theme of disintegration of human relationships—personal and public. Chernobyl: The Final Warning (1991), explores the disaster. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) begins with the exploding moon Praxis of the home world of the Klingon Empire, itself an analog of the Soviet Union since Star Trek: The Original Series. In the film Naked (1993), starring David Thewlis, the eccentric protagonist Johnny quotes the Book of Revelation and remarks that the Russian translation of Chernobyl is "wormwood". This quote is also used as a sample in the album Orblivion (1997). The Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed On Your Mark (1995), a music video for Japanese pop duo Chage and Aska. This was essentially an animated music video lasting almost seven minutes. The opening scene shows a clean, old-fashioned, and apparently deserted small village which is dominated by a huge, asymmetrical version of the Chernobyl "sarcophagus". In a 1995 interview in Animage magazine, Miyazaki compared the sarcophagus in the video to Chernobyl, noting the survival of plant life. In the 1998 Godzilla film, the character Niko Tatopoulos visits the site of Chernobyl to analyze mutations on earthworms in the area of the meltdown. In the comedy film Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005), the character Deuce Bigalow meets Svetlana, a woman who was born in Chernobyl, and, as a result of the disaster, has a penis instead of a nose. The action film Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009) revolves around terrorists seizing control of Chernobyl and threatening to expose the reactor. In the time travel comedy film Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), the hot tub is converted to a time machine when an illegal Russian energy drink, "Chernobly", is spilled on its controls. The protagonists are transported to 1986, several weeks before the real-life Chernobyl disaster. The Russian-Ukrainian-German co-produced film В субботу (2011; international title Innocent Saturday) dramatizes the events in the town of Pripyat during the hours and days after the disaster, before the Soviet authorities decided to evacuate. The film was entered into the 61st Berlin International Film Festival. In the film Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), the Autobots and NEST travel to Chernobyl to retrieve ancient Cybertronian technology (initially, they were supposed to discover the source of a radiation leak). However, once it is retrieved Shockwave suddenly appears and ravages the plant along with a worm-like Decepticon named Driller. The horror film Chernobyl Diaries (2012) revolves around a group of college students who take an extreme tour into Pripyat, only to find themselves being stalked and hunted by a group of mysterious creatures. The final 20 minutes in the fifth film of the Die Hard series, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), are set in Chernobyl. In the film Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw (2019), the main antagonistic faction Eteon's biotech and weapons facility is located inside the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and soon after Luke Hobbs, Deckard Shaw, and Hattie Shaw drive a damaged truck into Pripyat. Chernobyl: Abyss (2021), a Russian film directed by and starring Danila Kozlovsky, centers on a fictionalized firefighter who becomes a liquidator.
Literature The disaster is the plot-driving device in the Marvel Comics miniseries Meltdown (1988), featuring Wolverine and Havok. The novel Party Headquarters by the Bulgarian author Georgi Tenev deals with Chernobyl's impact on the integrity of the former Communist bloc in the late 1980s. A large episode of the book is set as an exchange of letters between the protagonist and "little unknown Soviet and Ukrainian comrade" describing the catastrophe. The Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache chose the term Chernobyl () as German Word of the Year 1986. Christa Wolf's 1987 novel Accident (German: Störfall) narrates, from the perspective of a female first-person narrator, the thoughts and events of the day on which the news about the Chernobyl accident have reached her and amounts to a criticism of utopian visions that ignore the human side of social progress.Arata Takeda (2015), "Towards global awareness of nuclear threat: Literary responses to nuclear disasters in Christa Wolf's Accident: A Day's News (1987) and Daniel de Roulet's You Didn't See Anything at Fukushima (2011)", in The Impact of Disaster: Social and Cultural Approaches to Fukushima and Chernobyl, eds. Thomas M. Bohn, Thomas Feldhoff, Lisette Gebhardt, and Arndt Graf (Berlin: EB-Publishers), pp. 195–214, here pp. 199–205. Frederik Pohl's novel Chernobyl (1987) relates the disaster from the viewpoint of individuals involved in it. Voices from Chernobyl, a non-fiction book by Svetlana Alexievich. In 2004, photographer Elena Filatova published a photo-essay on her website of an aleged solo motorcycle rides through Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The solo motorcycle ride story was later revealed to be a hoax; most of the photos had been taken during a guided tour, and some were not taken by her at all but found on the internet. Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon Press, 2004) ISBN 1-900564-34-3 and Half Life (Poems for Chernobyl) (Heaventree Press, 2004) ISBN 0-9545317-3-6 were based on first-hand accounts of the disaster, winning the Arvon prize and providing the source material for the award-winning art film, Heavy Water: a Film for Chernobyl (Seventh Art Productions, 2006). Martin Cruz Smith's novel, Wolves Eat Dogs (2005), is set mostly in Chernobyl, when the Moscow detective Arkady Renko investigates the murder of a powerful businessman in that area, after the businessman's partner has died in Moscow of radiation poisoning. Both victims are found to have had some involvement with the accident, 20 years earlier. Jim Shepard's "The Zero Meter Diving Team" (2007) is a short story about the disaster, narrated in the first person by Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky, chief engineer of the Soviet Department of Nuclear Energy. The story first appeared in Bomb magazine and later appeared in Shepard's short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (2007), Vintage Books. Darragh McKeon's novel All That is Solid Melts into Air (2014) uses the disaster as the backdrop for chronicling the end of the Soviet Union. In the Mort and Phil comics album Chernobil... ¡Qué cuchitril!, the titular characters have to investigate mysterious things happening in Chernobyl 25 years after the disaster. In volume 1 of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain trilogy, Professor Abraham Setrakian explains that the Master is naturally drawn to the sites of humanity's greatest disasters and atrocities. In volume 2, The Fall, corrupt businessman Eldritch Palmer meets with "The Master", the leader of the rogue vampires, in Pripyat, to plan the vampires' takeover of the world. Markiyan Kamysh's novel Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl(2022).
Music
Polish singer Jacek Kaczmarski wrote a song titled "Dzień Gniewu II (Czarnobyl)" (Day of Wrath II (Chernobyl), written in May 1986 and released a year later), about the day of the disaster in Pripyat, its citizens unaware of the unfolding tragedy. The song juxtaposes calm, ballada-like music with the perspective of imminent death (such as "Around the well in the backyard / wet, smiley faces / a child chases wheel / it is being killed as well"), serving as a protest song against the Soviet handling of the disaster and the secrecy that surrounded it. The 1986 song "Jijiji" by Argentinian rock band Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota was inspired by this incident David Bowie's 1987 song "Time Will Crawl" was inspired by the disaster.