Chernobyl... and Ignalina

Things finally seem like they're setting down. The apartment search, the visas quest, filing taxes abroad, the Kraków conference, the V2 presentation: all sorted. The funny thing is that now we've less than three weeks of classes left, and then final exams. If we hadn't carved out the extra time, we'd be on the brink of returning already. Unreal.

I have a lot of things in mind to download here--I hope I have (or take) the opportunity in the coming weeks and months to do so. I think this desire to say NOTHING when things sort of go off the rails has led to a lot of... circumspection these past three (six? eighteen?) months. And that's probably all for the best.

But it's time to write again. To blog, but to also do some academic writing: something bigger. It's time, isn't it?

We shall see.

But tonight, let me just touch briefly on a documentary film that LTV just screened call A Different Chernobyl (Ukraine, 2011). The film wasn't interested in going over the 1986 tragedy one more time--rather, it wanted to paint a portrait of the town and its inhabitants...

And you couldn't help but think about Ignalina and its Chernobyl-style reactor--how it could have just as easily been Lithuanian Aukštaitija that suffered the worst of a reactor meltdown. Loreta's dad's home village of Dysna is easily within 30km of Ignalina (the range of the Zone).

Like the crackdown on the Maidan pointed to an alternative history for Lithuania, so too this disaster could have been even more a part of Lithuanian history instead. I'm convinced: there is much for Baltic scholars to learn from the experience of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

The film shows people going back once a year--May 9th, or V-E Day (per the USSR and then Russia). Once a year, for a day (more than that is unsafe)--to remember and celebrate what was.

Interested readers need to seek out Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997)--harrowing, heartbreaking, and absolutely vital.