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In all my life, it never occurred to me that I would have to start this part of my life. At least not at the age that I currently am, just into my fifties. I have to start the part where I create my memoir. And this part is tragic, confusing and incomprehensible.
However, an event occurred, of such a scale, of such involvement of people with controversial interests, of errors and victories, failures and successes. There are so many different interpretations of how and why this happened, that it is in a way my duty to tell what I know, how I see and understand it and how had I witnessed the events that occured.
Valery Alekseyevich Legasov was a Soviet chemist who was part of the government commission to investigate the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The experience had a profound effect on him, both physically (he received exposure to high doses of radiation due to being at the scene of the accident) and mentally (his later efforts to advocate for improved safety in the Soviet nuclear industry made him a victim of harrassment). In June of 1987 he dictated his memoirs onto a series of cassette tapes, recounting his experiences at Chernobyl. Later that year, he also recorded an interview between himself and Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich. The next year, on the day after the second anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, he hanged himself. The motivations for his suicide remain unclear, but some journalists have suggested it was "a conscious attempt to draw attention to the lack of nuclear safety in the Soviet Union".
Transcripts of his tape recordings, in the original Russian, were published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda in 1988. In 2019, a volunteer project to translate these into English was launched on the Blogspot platform. The resulting English text is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and so I have republished it here in Geminispace. Many thanks to all those volunteers who donated their time and energy to make these fascinating and historically valuable recordings available to a wider audience! This Gemini conversion is dedicated to Shufei, who made me aware of the original translation project.
Original volunteer translation project, legasovtapetranslation.blogspot.com
Read about Legasov at Gemipedia
Read about the Chernobyl disaster at Gemipedia.