Highlights from the “Voices From Chornobyl” anniversary reading at the Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood, April 26, 2009. Shot and edited by Lysandra Petersson. Featuring the talents of:
Vasily Shimansky..…..Bradford Beacom
Anna Sushko…….Enci
Grigory……..Aaron Lyons / Brian M. Cole
Sergei Gurin……..Shawn MacAulay / Tyrone Giordano*
A Solitary Human Voice………Kristin Mochnick / Catherine MacKinnon
Katya Shimansky……Kappa Victoria Wood / Evelina Gaina
Writer and Director: Cindy Marie Jenkins
Inspired by the book Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Published by Galina Dursthoff, Inc.
As Mikhail Gorbachev became the Communist Party’s General Secretary and the de facto leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he became aware of much that we would learn for sure only later. He saw the way in which the unbridled growth of the defense industry during the cold war had polluted the country. He realized that life expectancy had been in decline since 1964. And the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power station vividly demonstrated to him the dangers both of bureaucratic bodies getting carried away with their grandiose designs, and of keeping everything hidden behind a veil of secrecy. In addition, the collapse of Soviet agriculture showed him the uselessness of using chemicals extensively on farms.
The former Soviet leader opened a dialogue with the West and helped to end the deadlock of the cold war
All of this seems to have made Gorbachev exceptionally sensitive to voices that spelled out the risks of using pesticides; the dangers of reversing the flow of Russian rivers; the perils that a continuing arms race would present to the health of the people and the country’s ecology.
As Gorbachev realized that the fall of the Soviet system was imminent, he strove — and succeeded — to ensure that there was a peaceful, nonviolent transition of the closed and totalitarian Soviet society to democracy and openness. This is Gorbachev’s historical achievement. Once he embarked on that quest, greater ecological awareness of how the state was managed inevitably followed. Along with it came a new openness with regard to ecological data, together with popular participation in decision-making that affected the environment.
Once the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Gorbachev used his authority and experience to launch Green Cross International in the wake of the 1992 U.N. Rio Conference on Environment and Development. The Green Cross has emerged as a worldwide environmental-protection body that addresses everything from climate change to chemical contamination. “We are facing a global environmental crisis, a conflict between man and nature,” Gorbachev told an Australian newspaper last year. “And that means we need a dramatic change in politics, in attitudes.” If the world had more such leaders, we would be far better equipped to handle such challenges as global warming, the decline in ocean species and biological diversity, and all the other global ecological issues of our time.
Alexei Yablokov is Chairman of the Green Russia political faction and Vice Chair of the Russian Democratic Party Yabloko
Filed under: People, History — Cindy Marie Jenkins @ 8:17 pm
Chernobyl voices: Lena and Anya Kostuchenko
Lena Kostuchenko, 39, and her daughter Anya, 19 Chernobyl zone evacuees in Kiev
I was five months’ pregnant when the accident occurred. My husband and I were spending the weekend at my mother’s house in Kopachi (a village just south of the power station). We woke up on Saturday morning and decided to go to Chernihiv, the nearest big town, to buy maternity clothes.At the bus stop we saw lots of fire engines and troop carriers on the main road. We waited and waited, but no bus came. Eventually a policeman told us there would be no buses, because there had been an accident.There had been small accidents before, so we did not worry. We worked in the garden all day.
In 2004, Anya caught meningitis and was in a coma for three days
On the Sunday I had to go to work in Pripyat. Again there were no buses, so we set off on foot. But I began to feel very ill, before I had got half way. My husband helped me home, then walked to Pripyat alone.
When he got back, he said the town had been evacuated. By then I had got out of bed and wandered outside. Another policeman finally told me the truth - he said there was high radiation and pregnant women should get out at all costs. At that time I did not know what radiation was.
Abortions
Police were blocking the main road, but we drove to Ivankiv via back roads. Two days later I ended up in hospital. Doctors threw away my clothes, and “decontaminated” me with a cold shower.
There were lots of other pregnant women there. The doctors said all would have abortions, or induced births. They did some of the abortions quickly, then changed their mind and said we would all give birth, after all.
We went to Chop (on the Hungarian border) then to Mykolayiv (near the Black Sea). In each new town, I had to throw away the clothes I had bought in the last one. They must have been contaminated by my own radioactive body.
I gave birth to Anya two months early. She was big - 2.5kg (5.5lbs) and 49cm tall - but her nails had not formed and she was a yellowish colour, so she was put in an incubator. I was not allowed to see her for eight days.
Blood disease
Later, when we moved to Kiev, specialists hospitalised her on sight. Her haemoglobin count was about a quarter or a third of the normal level. At that time you could not say it was because of Chernobyl - it could be anything except Chernobyl. Much later a haematology professor told me I had been very unlucky: I was in the wrong place at the wrong time of my pregnancy.
Anya is like a house plant. She has a very rare blood disease and almost no immunity. In 2004 she caught meningitis and was in a coma for three days. A doctor told me it was all over, but she pulled through.
In the 1990s a law was passed, which promised benefits to Chernobyl invalids, but it said nothing about child invalids. Together with some other parents I formed an organisation, Flowers in the Wormwood, which successfully lobbied for the law to be changed.
There is a tendency now to play down the problem of Chernobyl, and, if possible, to forget it. Once the 20th anniversary has passed, I think the state will begin to withdraw support.
Filed under: History — Cindy Marie Jenkins @ 8:04 pm
I am posting this because:
(a) I need a break from the next play I am writing
(b) I am going to develop the character of Stepanov further for the next Draft of Chronicle of the Future
(c) the bbc site is very extensive
1986: Soviets admit nuclear accident
The Soviet Union has acknowledged there has been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The report, from the official news agency, Tass, said there had been casualties but gave no details of numbers. It said aid was being sent to the injured.
The report said that one of the reactors had been damaged in the accident, but gave no further details beyond saying that measures were being taken to “eliminate the consequences of the accident”. It also claimed the accident was the first at a Soviet power station.
The report was the first confirmation of a major nuclear catastrophe since monitoring stations in Sweden, Finland and Norway began reporting sudden high discharges of radioactivity in the atmosphere two days ago.
Meltdown
The accident is believed to be the most serious in the history of nuclear power, worse even than that at the Three-Mile Island power station in the United States in 1979, when there was some release of radioactivity but nobody was injured.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, just north of Kiev, consists of four nuclear reactors, known as light-water cooled, graphite-moderated reactors - a type hardly used outside the Soviet Union.
Nuclear experts say the levels of radioactivity recorded indicate that the nuclear core of the damaged reactor may have melted down.
Full-scale alert
The number of casualties, both immediately and in the future, from radiation sickness, is expected to be high, although the exact number may never be known. It is not believed, however, that there is any risk to the health of anyone outside the Soviet Union.
The discharge of radioactivity was so great that by the time the fallout reached Sweden, 1,000 miles away, it was still powerful enough to register twice the natural level of radioactivity in the atmosphere.
The sudden jump in radioactivity levels was enough to prompt a full-scale alert in Sweden, which initially believed the accident had happened at its own nuclear power station, on the Baltic coast. The evacuation of 600 workers had been ordered before experts realised that the source of the radioactivity must have been within the Soviet Union.
Chernobyl remains the world’s worst civil nuclear disaster. It emerged that design flaws had led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off the reactor.
Estimates of the numbers affected vary tremendously. A report in 2005 by the Chernobyl Forum, set up by a number of bodies including the World Health Organisation, the UN and governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, concluded that fewer than 50 people, most of them workers at the plant, died as a result of exposure to radiation. Most of them died immediately after the disaster, but some survived until as late as 2004.
The forum estimates up to 9,000 people could eventually die from radiation exposure - although Greenpeace claims the figure could be much higher, up to 93,000.
The contamination spread across neighbouring Belarus, and into Europe. In north Wales, sheep on some 350 farms still have to be tested for radiation before their meat can be eaten.
A concrete sarcophagus was hastily built to cover the damaged reactor, but it is weakening over time. It is due to be replaced in 2007.
Chernobyl continued to produce electricity for another 14 years, until international pressure forced its closure in 2000.
An official exclusion zone around the plant remains in place, extending for 30 kilometres (18 miles). It is one of the most radioactive spots on Earth.
I did some search on MySpace. I typed in the search “Chornobyl” and a bunch of stuff came up. A lot of people write about the incident and I also found some people who are personally affected by it.
One couple for example adopted two children from Chornobyl. Find out for yourself by going to MySpace.
Filed under: History — Cindy Marie Jenkins @ 11:15 pm
September 28, 2007By Kristen Scott
LAist Interview: Director/Adaptor of Voices from Chornobyl, Cindy Marie Jenkins
While searching for a one-act play to direct at an upcoming director’s festival, playwright, dramaturge, adaptor, and director Cindy Marie Jenkins stumbled across a collection of interviews from individuals affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Deeply moved by the stories of these survivors, Jenkins immediately began adapting the interviews for the stage. Voices from Chornobyl premiered at Open Fist and was later showcased at L.A’s annual theatre festival, EdgeFest. Now in its third incarnation, Voices from Chornobyl will be a part of the Empty Stage’s New Voices Series Sept. 30th and Oct. 14th.
What was it about the stories of these individuals that compelled you to compile them into a play?
CMJ: There was such poetry in their descriptions. Conflicted feelings about being interviewed, about their land, and ultimately radiation. They are tied to their land and their homes in ways that I had never experienced. The beauty in their horror and how they went on living their lives. How they were treated. Who knew what. Also, before I read the book, if you had asked me about Chernobyl, I barely would have been able to mumble out “nuclear-something-or-other.” I wondered how many other Americans knew little about the event? How many Los Angeles residents knew where the nearest nuclear plant or landfill was? I sure didn’t. At that time, the misinformation about the WMD’s was uncovered, so the themes of leadership and ignorance rang true in me.
On a purely theatrical side ,I love working with a play like an orchestra, and storytelling through sounds only. Then opening my eyes and matching the physical environment with the words, all in a very close collaboration with the actors and designers. When I’m processing a new adaptation (we’re on Draft 13 and 3 fully-produced productions), I re-read the entire book and find a unique way of record-keeping, which sounds very clinical, but I need to process the entire book again before finding the new voices for a new adaptation.
What is the overall theme of Voices from Chornobyl?
CMJ: Living. How do you live within radiation? How do you live away from home? How do you live in your home when the earth betrays you? Survival of the mind and of the body. The subtitle is “Chronicle of the Future” and that is really the theme - how do we survive in this world we’ve created, and how will our children survive?
One of the voices in the play talks about being a “Chernobyl person.” What is a “Chernobyl person”? Can this term be more broadly applied outside the world of the play? If so, to whom?
CMJ: A Chernobyl person is one who is labeled. We all know how easy it is to label people and then not regard them as anything but the group into which they’ve been put. People are afraid of Chernobyl people (I am speaking of the people interviewed in the book) and afraid that they glow in the dark. Young children and adults alike are labeled. Family members won’t allow Chernobyl people to live with them when they were evacuated. That quote “You are a normal person. A regular person. You go to work, you go on vacation once a year, you eat dinner with your family. Then one day all of a sudden you become a Chernobyl person. A freak.” I’ve heard that sentiment expressed by cancer victims, new mothers, anyone who can be labeled. A label lets society remain ignorant. “They” have to deal with it and no one else. “We” don’t have to deal with their issues.
But we do! The more I immerse myself in Chernobyl-land, the more I realize that we all have to deal with “their” issues. We all breathe the same air. We all live on the same planet. Just because it happened in the Ukraine doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the ramifications of it. For instance, every day I receive headlines that have the words “Chernobyl power plant” in the title. Anytime that the word “nuclear” is even brought up, someone uses Chernobyl as a tool against nuclear power, when it’s actually nearly impossible for the accident to occur in that same way.
Those 2 examples might appear to contradict each other. That is because I have never set out for this piece to be anti-nuclear, anti-Soviet or anything like that. I want people to walk away from it with their own stories and to just be more aware and active in supporting their environment.
How has Voices from Chornobyl been received by L.A. audiences?
CMJ: Very well, but we need more exposure. After the original production, I had the book in the lobby and they sold like hotcakes. People said they wanted to go home and learn more about it. That is what I want. After the Edgefest production, strangers came up to me and wanted to know more; that is actually how we were invited to be part of the Empty Stage Theatre’s New Voices Festival, from someone seeing the show at Edgefest.
We are working on more exposure, linking our website www.voicesfromchornobyl.com to Chernobyl websites with more traffic, working closely with the publisher. A charity in the UK wants to host a reading on the anniversary of the accident in 2008. That’s great, but I don’t want to preach to the converted. I want to convert and I want the converted to take a long hard look at their world and find out what they can do to save it.
What are you hoping audiences will take away from the play?
CMJ: I saw a great bumper sticker today : “Ignore the environment. It will just go away.” I want people to walk out of the theater and for the images and the words to seep into their actions. Walk to the store and bring your own bag; let cyclists who are obeying the rules of the road to share the roads with you. Arrange your life around the world and not the other way around. Keep your perspective wider than the dashboard. Instead of labeling, listen to people and their experiences and learn what you can. We are all part of the same world and must work together.
Voices from Chornobyl plays at the Empty Stage Theatre Sept. 30th & Oct. 14th at 7pm. Tickets are $20 and available by emailing Bookshoptheatre@gmail.com. For more information visit www.voicesfromchornobyl.com.
* Ride your BIKE to the show on either Sept. 30th or Oct. 14th and get $5 off the ticket price!! More information is available at www.illuminatela.com.
In 2004, Anya caught meningitis and was in a coma for three days 
