Conspiracy Theories in Eastern Europe

Tropes and Trends

Anastasiya Astapova, Onoriu Colăcel, Corneliu Pintilescu, Tamás Scheibner, Anastasiya Astapova, Corneliu Pintilescu, Tamás Scheibner, Onoriu Colăcel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000214796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection of state-of-the-art essays explores conspiracy cultures in post-socialist Eastern Europe, ranging from the nineteenth century to contemporary manifestations.

Conspiracy theories about Freemasons, Communists and Jews, about the Chernobyl disaster, and about George Soros and the globalist elite have been particularly influential in Eastern Europe, but they have also been among the most prominent worldwide. This volume explores such conspiracy theories in the context of local Eastern European histories and discourses. The chapters identify four major factors that have influenced cultures of conspiracy in Eastern Europe: nationalism (including ethnocentrism and antisemitism), the socialist past, the transition period, and globalization. The research focuses on the impact of imperial legacies, nation-building, and the Cold War in the creation of conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe; the effects of the fall of the Iron Curtain and conspiracism in a new democratic setting; and manifestations of viral conspiracy theories in contemporary Eastern Europe and their worldwide circulation with the global rise of populism. Bringing together a diverse landscape of Eastern European conspiracism that is a result of repeated exchange with the "West, " the book includes case studies that examine the history, legacy, and impact of conspiracy cultures of Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, the former Yugoslav countries, and the former Soviet Union.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of conspiracy theories, as well as those in the areas of political science, area studies, media studies, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, and history, among others. Politicians, educators, and journalists will find this book a useful resource in countering disinformation in and about the region.

Part I

Conspiracy culture under Socialism and its afterlife in Eastern Europe

1 Chernobyl conspiracy theories

From American sabotage to the biggest hoax of the century

Anastasiya Astapova

On April 26, 1986, the RMBK reactor exploded in the fourth energy block of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, next to the Russian and Belarusian borders. A total of 31 people died during or immediately after the accident from the explosion, fire, or radiation exposure (Mould 2000, 29). Subsequently, hundreds of thousands of locals were evacuated from homes polluted with radiation, while hundreds of thousands of so-called liquidators were mobilized from all over the Soviet Union to eliminate the consequences of the radiation releases. Both the evacuees and liquidators are considered to have received large doses of radiation, with Ukraine recognizing almost 90,000 of its citizens as Chernobyl invalids of the most severely affected category; Russia and Belarus recognize 50,000 and 9,000 individuals, respectively (Plokhy 2006, 328). The Soviet Union commission investigation followed by a court trial concluded that human error and problems with the RMBK reactor, which turned out to be unstable at low power, were to blame for the explosion.

These details are perhaps the only elements of Chernobyl history that most journalists, power engineers, writers, historians, healthcare specialists, and ordinary citizens agree on. The rest of the story, which happened just over 30 years ago, remains a point for multiple disagreements. Even the particular numbers of, for instance, liquidators or evacuees varies from one academic publication to another, with a difference of as many as 400,000–800,000 liquidators and 200,000–350,000 evacuees (Bay and Oughton 2005, 239; Ingram 2005, 62). Needless to say, it is not only factual information about the tragedy that remains obscure: theories about the true reasons for the accident have been circulating ever since the day it happened and have been changing in response to historical and ideological needs. This chapter is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to document and catalog alternative explanations and conspiracy theories associated with Chernobyl as they changed throughout recent history.

The major sources for this chapter are (1) academic publications, mainly from the disciplines of history, medicine, and power engineering, but also those from folklore, sociology, and anthropology, all often mentioning alternative explanations for the tragedy; (2) collections of memoirs, interviews with eyewitnesses, oral histories, and accounts of observers and contemporaries of the accident and its aftermath; (3) various writings and manifestos published by nationalist-minded politicians in Belarus and Ukraine in the 1990s; (4) social media, blogs, and other internet publications on the issue; and (5) mass media publications. I draw from materials published in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and English to compile a fuller inventory of Chernobyl conspiracy theories. Among the most frequently cited sources are two books: a collection of interviews with Chernobyl survivors compiled by Nobel Prize–winning writer Svetlana Alexievich ([1997] 2016) and what might be the most comprehensive history book on Chernobyl today, written by the historian Serhii Plokhii (2018).

In this chapter, I document the conspiracy theories according to their chronology; however, this is not always possible and should not be considered absolutely accurate. I show how conspiracy theories appeared as a first response to the tragedy and were modified in accordance with dominant and alternative statehood narratives. The expansive mythology and folklore surrounding the Chernobyl accident is worth a description to begin with and will allow us to better understand the context of conspiracy theories as well.

Chernobyl mythology and folklore

Chernobyl exploded only a little more than a year after Mikhail Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet state. For the Soviet government, he was a novel face who had come to power due to the support of many who were tired of economic failure, corruption, and lack of freedom. He won public support by promising to promote openness and eliminate censorship (Plokhii 2018, 9). However, what he promised in theory encountered difficulties in practice, and Chernobyl became, perhaps, the first serious challenge to his program. For decades, the Soviet government had been concealing information about the victims of Joseph Stalin’s terror, Gulag camps, and other nuclear accidents (most infamously, the Kyshtym nuclear power plant disaster in 1957 was kept top secret). When news about Chernobyl reached Moscow, it was too hard for Gorbachev alone (even if he wanted this) to act differently and to make the event public (Ingram 2005, 52). There was no precedent in Soviet history of how to deal with such disasters openly.

The first official report on the accident appeared on April 29, only three days after the explosion, in the newspaper Pravda Ukrainy; however, neither this nor further brief official announcements showed that there was any real reason to worry. In the meantime, in what would soon become the exclusion zones, people were enjoying the spring warmth and sunbathing; on May 1, clueless citizens participated in the traditional Soviet Parade, spending hours outdoors. It was not until May 14 that Mikhail Gorbachev finally made an official statement about the details of the accident. Even then, people did not get adequate instructions and information about protecting themselves from the radiation.

Due to the lack of comments and the aura of secrecy in official Soviet discourse, rumors were perceived as a better source of information than the Soviet mass media. A widespread narrative theme was that of certain signs people could read from nature, signaling danger while the politicians remained silent. People noticed strangled moles in the garden and the disappearance of bugs, wasps, beetles, or worms, which indicated strong radiation. “The radio didn’t say anything, the papers weren’t either, but the bees knew,” some commented (Alexievich 2005, 51–53).

A whole repertoire of folk remedies developed that were believed to cure radiation poisoning, such as cucumbers and fresh milk from the area that many brought to their relatives who had been exposed to radiation and were hospitalized. When people learned that iodine tablets might help as antidotes for radiation poisoning, the tablets immediately sold out, and many bought iodine liquid instead, which sent hundreds to the hospital with serious throat damage (Ingram 2005, 59). Another widely accepted remedy was vodka, which was, in fact, supplied and recommended to firefighters and liquidators. Rumors stated that Stolichnaya vodka was the best antidote to strontium; folk remedies based on vodka with other infusions circulated in recipes (ibid., 43; Alexievich 2016, 106, 138).

Repeatedly, rumors appeared about new explosions, whether in Chernobyl or in other places, directly after the tragedy and years later. Folklorist Larisa Fialkova, who lived in Kyiv at the time of the accident, remembers how she once was walking in a park and was approached by a stranger who urgently told her about an explosion of the reactor at the Kyiv nuclear physics research institute, recommending that she go home (Fialkova 2001, 184–85). Years after, when doing excavations very close to the reactor, military reservists came across two old mines from World War II, and the rumor spread that someone intended to blow up the sarcophagus that had been built over the reactor following the tragedy (Marples 1990, 17). In fact, many questioned the state of the station’s sarcophagus, which was allegedly very poorly constructed, with nothing but a few logs as a roof (Bodrunova 2012, 21).

The effects of invisible radiation were hard to imagine, and with the lack of official comment on its impact, the folk imagination developed narratives about grotesque mutations in humans and animals caused by radiation. Rumors developed of three-headed birds, two-headed calves, hens that were pecking foxes to death, bald hedgehogs, mushrooms the size of a human head, birds with two beaks, pikes without heads and fins, giant mosquitoes, and many other mutants in the Chernobyl area (ibid., 21; Alexievich 2016, 124, 137, 141). Similar mutations were soon ascribed to humans: that children from Chernobyl parents have an unknown yellow fluid pulsing through them instead of blood and that they are extremely smart (Alexievich 2016, 142). At the same time, humor appeared, resting on self-reflexivity about such rumors and their oddity.

A grandfather and his grandson are walking over the ground of Chernobyl.

“Grandpa, is it true that once there was a beautiful town here?”

“True, grandson, true,” grandfather replies, patting him on his head.

“Is it true, grandpa, that people lived in it?”

“True, grandson, true,” sighs grandfather, patting him on his other head.

(Fialkova 2001, 191)

“What is seven times seven?” The answer: “Ask a Chernobyl survivor, they’ll count on their fingers.”

(Alexievich 2016, 51)

With the liberalization and collapse of the Soviet Union, religious freedom permitted missionaries from abroad to spread the word of their faiths, the influx of New Age beliefs, and the return of Christian practices as legitimate. During this time, imports from the Western New Age mixed together with the concepts of alternative spiritual health and complementary medicine, such as folk healing, which was traditional in a vast part of the Soviet territory (Menzel 2013, 279). A number of folk practices and beliefs developed. People watched hours of TV sessions in which sorcerers who called themselves “psychics” “energized” water, and there were attempts to fix Chernobyl via magic. Svetlana Alexievich presents an account according to which a traditional folk healer, Parashka, signed contracts with several farms and was paid a lot of money upon promising to lower the background gamma radiation and drive away evil spirits in Chernobyl over the course of the summer (Alexievich 2016, 159–60).

Many legends also relied on religion or the supernatural to explain the Chernobyl accident. One claims that the Chernobyl power station was built on the site of a ruined Hasidic cemetery, and this blasphemy caused the catastrophe (Fialkova 2001, 197). Another legend is associated with the meaning of the word “Chernobyl”—“wormwood” in Ukrainian—and the fact that the New Testament book of Revelation refers to the fall from heaven of a great star called Wormwood “burning as it were a lamp.” It was as though people had not paid attention to a religious prophecy (Plokhy 2019, 27). With the peak of UFO fascination in the second half of the 1980s (Menzel 2013, 271), many considered a UFO attack to be the true reason for the accident. Witnesses claimed that they had seen a strange light in the sky above the station before the explosion. Someone even took a picture of it and saw an ethereal body in the photograph (Alexievich 2016, 142). Others argued that UFO intervention during the blast saved the disaster from becoming a global nuclear event. The UFO hovered over a newly smoking reactor, stopped the smoke, and sped off (Conroy 2018).

Chernobyl folklore is by no means local and enjoys global proliferation. Initially, this was due to the spontaneous generation of rumors and jokes in different languages, migration by their narrators, phone communication, print media, and television programs; later, popular culture and the internet contributed to its spread and development (Fialkova 2001, 138). Over time, moreover, the folk imagination has constructed more complex narratives: conspiracy theories related to the accident connecting many dots and explaining it in some unexpected ways.

Immediate conspiracy theories: the CIA sabotage

The immediate reaction explaining Chernobyl as the result of sabotage is documented in many written sources. For instance, the main female protagonist of Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of interviews, Liudmila, was desperate to save her husband, Vasily—a fireman who had been among the first to arrive at the fire during the Chernobyl accident and thus receive the largest radiation dose. He and other firemen were transported to Moscow, and Liudmila, despite being pregnant, made her way to find her husband. Vasily explained the incident to her as “Most likely sabotage. Somebody must have done it deliberately. That’s what all the guys [other firemen] reckon” (Alexievich 2016, 11). Various sources suggest that professionals working for the plant, Chernobyl locals, and intelligence services initially believed the accident to be a work of sabotage. Immediately after the tragedy, KGB agents rushed to investigate the plant’s files and records and to interrogate survivors dying in their hospital beds (Brown 2019, 7) and increased surveillance over the nearby nuclear plants and the area adjacent to Chernobyl (Plokhii 2018, 183)—all as a result of the suspicion of Western sabotage.

In the meantime, the suspected saboteurs—Westerners—demanded information. On April 28, two days after the accident, a radiation spike was registered at the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden. Unable to find the reason, Sweden contacted the closest states, including the Soviet Union, inquiring about the possible radiation leak. The Soviets denied it, but suspicion from Sweden and other Western countries persisted (Sveriges Radio 2011). As a result, they tried to make their own investigations, the only source of which, with no official information available, could be rumors from anonymous informants, which presented them with difficulty in fact checking (Brown 2019, 156). Little wonder then that the first foreign reports on the accident exaggerated the immediate damage. On April 29, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Eastern Europe in the global traffic of conspiracy theories
• Part I Conspiracy culture under Socialism and its afterlife in Eastern Europe
• Part II “The enemy within”: Jews and Freemasons
• Part III After independence: nation-building and victimhood narratives
• Part IV Eastern Europe goes global: conspiracy theories and the rise of populism
• Index