For people who participated in or witnessed the grueling, months-long labor of containment and decontamination—and for their loved ones—a key question voiced or implied in the monologues is why the liquidators accepted their life-threatening lot so calmly and passively. Many speakers offer the same explanation: Decades of shared suffering, Communist indoctrination, and state surveillance and repression had conditioned them to obey orders unquestioningly and to willingly sacrifice their own interests for the greater good. According to chemical engineer Ivan Zhyvkov, “[N]obody complained. If we had to do it, we had to do it. The motherland called and we went. That’s just how we are” (160). This ethic helped the Soviets defeat fascism in World War II, and it came to define the Soviet mindset. Likewise, in Chernobyl, the bravery of liquidators and “biorobots” limited radiation exposure and prevented the disaster from escalating to globally catastrophic proportions. A schoolteacher recalls complying placidly with orders for the teachers to dig up contaminated soil, because although it felt oppressive, it was a “necessary task.” After all, this was what she’d taught her students: “To go, throw yourself on the fire, defend, sacrifice. The literature I taught wasn’t about life, it was about war” (144). Bravery came naturally to Soviet people, she suggests, because “we always lived in terror, we know how to live in terror, it’s our natural habitat. In this our people have no peers” (145).

Of course, this perpetual terror was a product not only of war but of terrorist violence perpetrated by the state on its own citizens. Stalinism ingrained in its survivors the habits of secrecy and unquestioning obedience to superiors. As nuclear engineer Marat Kokhanov explains, “[W]e kept quiet and carried out our orders without a murmur because of Party discipline. I was a Communist” (167). Collective farm directors sent workers to harvest contaminated crops because central planners hadn’t changed their output quotas. This extreme deference to hierarchy complicated the disaster response and facilitated the official cover-up, needlessly increasing radiation exposure for millions of citizens. However, several speakers say Chernobyl altered their mindset in this regard, as the regime’s mendacity on matters of life and death dispelled any lingering shreds of faith in government authority. One liquidator reports quitting the Communist Party three years later, a potentially life-altering move that could subject him to political persecution and certainly reduce his prospects for employment and advancement: “I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind” (69). However painful it may be, disillusionment liberated him from the compliant mindset born of authoritarian conditioning.

Along with shared suffering, the Soviet capacity for self-sacrifice was rooted in an anti-individualism cultivated by Communist ideology, military-style discipline, and the lived experience of collectivization. Gurin recalls, “As far back as I can remember, my father wore military clothing, though he wasn’t in the military. Thinking about money was bourgeois, thinking about your own life was unpatriotic” (113). Collectivism inspired selflessness among many ordinary Soviet citizens, but within the leadership it also fostered indifference to individual human suffering. Nuclear engineer Vasily Nesterenko notes, “We’re still Stalin’s country, you know. It was a country of authority, not people. The State always came first, and the value of a human life was zero” (213). In this regard, too, the sense of profound betrayal by the government changed the mental habits of some speakers, prompting them to take more responsibility for their own decisions and prioritize their own well-being over purported collective good.