TV docudrama about the 1986 nuclear plant explosion. Morgoth made a great video about it here:

The series opens just after the initial explosion, with a group of largely bewildered technicians in the control room, their chainsmoking manager Dyatlov alternately blaming them for everything and snapping that it’s just a minor leak (when in fact the core reactor has exploded). The action then moves higher up the chain of bureaucracy, all the way (briefly) to Gorbachov, and then comes to focus on Valery Legasov, Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy

and Boris Shcherbina, vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers

It is quite superb.

I enjoyed Chernobyl as study of responsibility through management. The initial manager, Dyatlov, is an appalling, stupid, venomous human being and as such typical of low-level team leaders in every organisation; I had several (female) managers like Dyatlov when I did office work: spiteful ignorant creatures who issue stupid orders and then, as here with Dyatlov, scream, “What did you do?” when things go wrong. I wouldn’t even label him a typical Soviet, he is simply what you get in every organisation if you incentivise quotas over reality. The whole series exemplifies many of Bruce Charlton’s critiques of our Ahrimanic age.

Shcherbina begins as a much higher-level version of Dyatlov, interested only in a skilful cover-up. However, as he is drawn into the horror – and the opening episode has an overwhelming, Cthulhu-esque ambience to it, as if something not merely harmful but actively evil has been unleashed – Shcherbina becomes a fully human man, a man indeed. The crucial point is when hundreds of miners are basically sent to their deaths to tunnel under the reactor, and the leader asks Shcherbina if his men will be taken care of; the correct Soviet/managerial response would be to smile and assure them that everything will be fine. Earlier in the show, the Minister of Coal had arrived in a nice blue suit to send the workers to Chernobyl:

They agree to the job and pat him on the shoulder and face with their coal-smeared hands; as one says:

“Now you look like the Minister of Coal”.

There is a powerful implied contrast between the blue-suited fop and the grimy workers (the latter will later strip naked to toil in the hot tunnel); a contrast between the born bureaucrat, and the men who work.

So when, some days later, the leader asks Shcherbina if his men will be taken care of, and Shcherbina says simply, honestly, “I don’t know”, it is a mark of Shcherbina’s own turning away from lies and “management”; a turning towards work and honesty. It’s a small moment, but Legasov gives him a startled glance, understanding the rarity of such clarity, of Gerontion’s “I would meet you upon this honestly”.

There are other ghastly managers. I especially loathed Viktor Bryukhanov, expertly played by Con O’Neill. He strongly reminded me of an apple polisher I knew at university, 20 years ago, a man who seemed to have been created in a managerial seminar. My apple polisher acquaintance was a thoroughly dishonest individual; he did not indulge in petty lies but rather angled his cunning, cowardly, mendacious self to reflect whatever pose would best serve his interests. Bryukhanov is just such a gloating, self-satisfied bureaucrat, a man thoroughly at home with lies and manipulation – indeed, he would despise the miners as naive simpletons, and be baffled and contemptuous of Shcherbina’s personal redemption; for a man like Bryukhanov, lies & manipulation are merely management tools.

You could view Chernobyl as a show about men in all their varieties of humanity & inhumanity: the life-shredding radiation unleashed by the uncaring, stupid Dyatlov; only contained through the enormous sacrifice of real workers; all of the credit, naturally, being taken by the management, by just the kinds of apple polishers who created the disaster through their embrace of unreality, their refusal of the real and the human.