MIDDLETOWN, Conn. – On Tuesday, April 26, students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear tragedy in Ukraine with a performance of “Voices from Chernobyl.” Adapted, produced and directed by Wesleyan history major Rachel Santee, “Voices from Chernobyl” consisted of 10 monologues taken from the book of the same title by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
Ms. Santee joined forces with Wesleyan student co-producers Anya Weinstock and Misha Iakovenko, an international student from Ukraine who was instrumental in involving the local Ukrainian community. This is the first adaptation of the book into performance.
“I picked up the book in an airport and read the book in one sitting while my flight was delayed,” Ms. Santee said. “It really hit home… [All the stories] were all told to the author, in their own homes, at their kitchen table… so I started imagining it.”
Each of the 10 consecutive five-minute monologues was a moving and distinct performance by Wesleyan students who had been chosen through an audition process. The characters represented real Chornobyl survivors, telling their stories around a kitchen table. The characters included spouses of first responders, mothers whose children had been born with severe birth defects, residents who refused to leave, Soviet apologists and scientists. Each explained the experience and tragic ramifications of being marked a contaminated Chornobyl-ite in the eyes of their families, their country and the world.
Myron Stachiw
From the collection “Chornobyl + 20: This is Our Land, We Still Live Here.” The window of the home of Baba Nastia, who is the sole resident of the village of Velyki Klishchi, once home to several thousand people. She refused to leave her home and the place where her parents and grandparents were buried. The village was evacuated in the early 1990s after it was determined to be very irradiated despite being nearly 50 kilometers from the striken reactor and a place to which some of the early evacuees of the exclusion zone were relocated in 1986.
The performance was introduced by Alex Kuzma, chief development officer of Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation and former executive director of the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund, who conveyed the magnitude, long-term impact and shocking political cover-up surrounding the Chornobyl tragedy.
Few people realize that “Chornobyl not only affected people in Ukraine, and Belarus… but radiation spread as far west as Austria, as far east as Russia, as far north as Finland, Norway,” Mr. Kuzma noted. He explained that “Even 26 years later, there were prohibitions on intakes of dairy products and meats in Norway, because these products were contaminated.”
“One of the most dangerous radioactive isotopes dispersed widely by Chornobyl was cesium-137 which has a half-life of 30 years. So, 30 years later, only half of this contaminant has begun to deteriorate, and there are other radioactive materials with a half-life of a hundred and one thousand years. So this disaster will be with us for a long, long time,” Mr. Kuzma said.
Accompanying the performance was a gallery exhibition titled “Chornobyl + 20: This is Our Land, We Still Live Here,” a series of photographs of towns surrounding Chornobyl, the collection of architectural historian, anthropologist and photographer Myron Stachiw and photographer/cinematographer Serhiy Marchenko of Kyiv.
The stunning collection of images was collected as part of Mr. Stachiw’s Fulbright Scholar Project (2004-2006) to study the process of cultural rescue undertaken by Ukrainian scholars within the territories of Ukraine that were heavily irradiated as a result of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant’s reactor explosion. The collection has been exhibited in Ukraine and United States, and is available for exhibition (contact [email protected]).
The event, held in Wesleyan’s historic Memorial Chapel and Zelnick Pavilion, was attended by over 100 Wesleyan students and faculty, as well as members of the Ukrainian community in Connecticut.