Some historical events are so catastrophic they resist comprehension. And yet they compel us to try to understand them, again and again.

Chernobyl is one of them.

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23am, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded, releasing a cloud of radioactive material that drifted across Europe and contaminated land inhabited by around five million people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Although it is impossible to calculate the total number of deaths attributable to the explosion and its after-effects, 31 people were killed immediately or died due to Acute Radiation Syndrome in the following months, while deaths in the years since could be as high as 10,000. Around 116,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometre exclusion zone in the two weeks following the accident.

As the radioactive dust settled on forests and rivers, poisoning water and food supplies, flora and fauna, it also embedded itself, indelibly, in the cultural imagination.

Forty years on, we are still working out what happened – and what it means.

An explosion that never ends

Countless books, documentaries and television dramas, as well as artworks, plays, video games and comics, grapple with the causes of the disaster and its aftermath. They seek to make visible what was invisible at the time: not just radiation and its effects on the human body, but the Soviet government’s attempts to cover up the accident.

This week, Ukrainian writer and illustrator Yevgenia Nayberg published her graphic memoir, Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters – a künstlerroman (artist’s novel) charting her coming-of-age as an artist under Chernobyl’s long shadow. Born and raised in Kyiv, Nayberg was 11 years old and preparing for art school when she heard on the radio that “one of the nuclear reactors was damaged”, but “the situation [was] under control”.

In a recent interview, Nayberg reflected that “the most difficult part” of writing the book was “trying to forget that I know the future”.

In her memoir, she insists on the accuracy of her memories and the truth of her lived experience, set in stark contrast to the secrecy and obfuscation that marked the Soviet government’s response.

“They are just repeating the same thing over and over again,” the young Nayberg declares. “That means they’re hiding something.” Her parents and grandparents arrive at the same conclusion. “They used to pretend that they trusted the news,” she observes. “Not anymore.”

In his 2006 essay Turning Point at Chernobyl, former president of the USSR – and the last Soviet leader – Mikhail Gorbachev argued “the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl […] was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later”. “There was the era before the disaster,” Gorbachev wrote, “and there is the very different era that has followed.”

Yet it was not the meltdown itself that led to “the collapse”, but what it revealed: the extent to which the Soviet government would lie to its own people and to the world. Gorbachev said nothing to the rest of the world until a full week later, when he assured a concerned global audience “the worst is behind us”. At the same time, he denounced the “mountain of lies” purportedly being spread by Western media.

It is hardly surprising, then, that a preoccupation with truth and deception drives almost every cultural retelling of the disaster. In the collective memory, Chernobyl is not an isolated event confined to the past, but a contagion that continues to mutate and........

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