Academician Valery Legasov, along with Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Boris Shcherbina, fly by helicopter to the smoking Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

- Fly right over the reactor! - Shcherbina orders the pilot.

“If we fly over the reactor,” says Legasov, “we will die in two weeks!”

- Fly! - insists Shcherbina. - Or I'll shoot you!

“Fly,” says the academician to the pilot, “and tomorrow you will beg to be shot dead!”

The pilot looks anxiously at the academician, then at the vice-chairman and deploys the helicopter from the reactor.

At this point, it becomes clear that the credibility in the HBO series "Chernobyl" is over, the movie began.

This week, the second episode of the American series dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster - an event causing national and international memory itch - was released.

The main feature of that catastrophe is that nothing like this happened in the history of mankind before it and, fortunately, did not happen afterwards - people had to deal with an extraordinary phenomenon and for non-specialists mysterious, sinister. For specialists, it is disastrous and temporarily beyond the control.

In the first series of the mini-series, two years after the catastrophe, the protagonist writes down everything he knows about the accident on audio cassettes, hides them in a cache near the yard dump, drinks a glass, smokes a cigarette and ends up suicide.

This is a dotted and fairly accurate depiction of the last days of the life of a real Soviet academic.

Academician Legasov was one of the main leaders in the aftermath of the explosion at the Chernobyl NPP - he appreciated the scale of the disaster, he came up with a mixture that needed to close the destroyed reactor, he insisted on the evacuation of Pripyat, he gave a five-hour report at the Vienna IAEA conference in August 1986. It is believed that this report has softened the subsequent reaction of Western countries to the accident.

And he actually recorded several audio cassettes and actually committed suicide in 1988.

This is the fate of the ancient or at least Shakespearean hero: nobility, intelligence, heroism and tragic death.

And it seems that in it the writers of the series saw something mysterious, attractive and inexplicable - in him, in the hero, not in the reactor, not in reaction to the accident of the Soviet government, not in danger of consequences.

All this is also important, but all this has become the entourage for a story dedicated to man.

The easiest way to interpret the history of the Chernobyl accident as the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is an uncontrollable reaction, the incompetence of those responsible, the superiority of ideology over common sense, unpredictable and monstrous consequences.

So far, the series is pleasantly surprised by the fact that the creators are moving away from this seeming stereotype.

In one of the episodes at the meeting of the station management in the first hours after the accident, the old Bolshevik said that it was impossible to distract people from all sorts of petty messages about evacuation from what was most important for him - from work. But in the next episode, the same party old man with sad eyes obediently sits on a bus with the rest of the population of Pripyat.

In the series, it turns out that the human is ideologically superior simply to the law of life. And even the Soviet Union is obtained by a society of people, and not labor anthropomorphic robots. But what kind of people! The people who created the giant universe, which is interesting to study and 30 years after its death.

And the world of the Soviet man in the series is recreated brilliantly. It can be hard for me to put up with the inconsistencies of the era in the frame - I see an alarm clock on the nightstand, which could not be in Moscow in 1986, and that’s it, the film disappeared for me.

But everything in Chernobyl, from the tile in the kitchen to the door handles, from cigarettes to carafes on the tables of officials, from the bin to the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus BSSR is neurosurgery. The concentration of objects of Soviet material culture in the frame makes each of them a museum piece.

In fact, this series was an attempt to understand not the causes of the disaster, but to restore the shell of Soviet life as a sarcophagus, under which there was a society that gave birth to heroes, civilization, Victory, a peaceful atom, old communists, beautiful wives and courageous firefighters, dedicated physicians and self-satisfied leaders, genius physicists and just honest people.

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The series has its own plot, which is at odds with the historical reality, but here it is important to remember that the series is an artistic work, there are standards of the genre, there are screenplay needs.

In the second series, a female physicist from Minsk, Ulyana Yuryevna Khomyuk, appears. She discovers in her closet a detailed plan of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and hurries with him to the crash site to explain to Academician Legasov that it is not enough to fill the reactor with a mixture — you need to pump out the water from the compartment it accumulated there because fire trucks pumped it there all night, which means that the water from overheating can create the effect of a hydrogen bomb.

Each viewer will understand that such a plot line is simply a tribute to following the modern scenic canon. There could be no nuclear power plant drawings in the closet, it is impossible to get from one republic to the disaster area in another for several hours, after all, who would have let it go? But so necessary for the plot.

Approximately the same need can be attributed to the story of three workers who, for 400 bonus rubles and after an inspiring speech of heroism, agree to sail under the reactor through infected channels in order to open the valves and release water dangerous for all of Europe. Question: where? This is an artistic convention. And there will be a lot of such conventions in the series.

But it is not important. It is important that due to the pedantic approach and the scale of the topic, the series suddenly reveals a world - long gone, but alive. Fascinating and harsh world of Soviet man.

A world that is still fonit.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.