The Chernobyl tragedy also had a cathartic dimension of sorts, facilitating a return to oneself via purgation and repentance. For years, Soviet propaganda had terrified the populace by cultivating the idea of a threat - people lived in daily fear of nuclear war with the west but the blow had come from within, and the country was suddenly a danger to itself. It came to be regarded as a portent, a harbinger of societal disaster both domestic and global. Just a year on, however, it was the reverse - a media blackout around the disaster had become impossible to imagine.Ĭhernobyl grew into an extensive metaphor - a metaphor, in fact, for the entirety of Soviet life. The open discussion of the tragedy in the media, underpinned by criticism of the regime’s actions, was unprecedented in the history of the USSR, and would have been inconceivable even in 1986 (information on Chernobyl was initially suppressed, as per old habits).
Articles and books about the tragedy, which started to appear in 1987, constitute the first practical realisation of the theoretical notion of glasnost. Chernobyl thus occured between two critical phases of perestroika.