this made me SO SAD 😭

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Heroes of humanity

Those men were drafted

29:00
The song is about a soldier who's dying on a battlefield and asks a black bird (raven) that's waiting for him to pass so it can scavenge on his body, to go tell him mother and his lover that hes gone first, and then he will die so the raven can eat. It's beautiful but sooo sad.

Its easy to take our lives for granted and get caught up in every day trivial worries. Its nice to remember a story like this to put things in perspective.

"I would never shoot you, okay?"

cat nods

Regarding the pets: The thinking at the time was they would spread contamination, so it had to be done. Now they weren't thinking this, but it's also true: under the assumptions of how much contamination was out in the environment, they were going to suffer just as much as the people that got exposed, so this was putting them them down out of mercy, instead of letting them die of horrifying radiation sickness.

That being said - the contamination wasn't as bad as the worst projections at the time - it probably wasn't necessary to try to hunt them down, but hindsight is 20/20. Look up "Dogs of Chernobyl" sometime, it's kinda sweet - the dogs that did survive are now semi-wild packs, there's a charity (of the same name) that helps care for them.

Oh boy...episode 4...it is the toughest episode for almost everyone to watch and react to.
The cow was going to be killed regardless of whether she stayed or left...it was contaminated as was its milk.

Something that does not get mentioned in the show is that many of the men who went out onto those incredibly radioactive roof sections actually volunteered to go back out more than once in order to save others from having to be "biorobots".

The 90 seconds per man time limit for going out on that most dangerous roof section was specifically calculated to be equivalent to about 50% of the maximum allowable lifetime dosage for an average human male...so they were trying to specifically avoid killing anyone. Of course, see my note above about the many men that volunteered to go out on that roof section more than once...and there were certainly those like the man we see who ended up out on that roof for more than 90 seconds for any number of other reasons. But in any event, the Soviets knew that 90 seconds out there would mean each man would have a bout of radiation sickness to deal with, but they were definitely trying to keep every man's dosage to a survivable level.

Also, that huge revelation that the Soviet State knew about the fatal flaw in the shutdown system and both covered it up and did nothing to fix it, all the while lying to even the plant operators about the safety of the RBMK reactors, is something that could only happen in a totalitarian state like the USSR...where there is no free press or free scientific establishment for whistleblowers to talk to when they know about wrongdoing by the State.

Finally, the idea that the baby absorbed the radiation and saved the mother is not a scientific one...it is based on some things that people remembered other people saying years ago, so are subject to all the fallibilities of human memory. In reality, babies are at least ten times more sensitive to radiation than adult humans, so Ludmilla's baby could/would have gotten a lethal dose of radiation just from the initial exposure from being in Chernobyl.

The saddest thing in this episode was how it showed this poor young man, little more than a boy, who hadnt shot a gun or harmed anyone in his life- going from turning down vodka when he arrived, to a full-blown alcoholic, over the course of his service. Who wouldn't be if your job was disposing of people's abandoned pets? They provided the alcohol because they knew that if they didn't, suicide rates would skyrocket. But that kind of psychological damage will never go away. It's PTSD.

Bacho loves animals and this job is killing him inside, which is why he's so aggressive but also very caring and paternal in his own way. As a dog lover myself, I found this the hardest episode to watch. 😭😭😭

Not all pets were killed in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. While Soviet liquidation squads shot thousands of abandoned dogs and cats to prevent the spread of radioactive contamination, many animals survived by hiding or fleeing into the surrounding forests. Descendants of these pets still live in the exclusion zone today.

The actress who played Ludmilla also plays the title character in THE BRIDE which comes out March 2026.

Perfect timing 👌

One of my favourite, and most haunting quotes from media:

“I thought, well-- that's it, Bacho.
You put a bullet in someone.
You're not you anymore.
You'll never be you again.
But then you wake up the next morning, and... you're still you. And you realize-- that was you
all along.
You just didn't know.”

This is a tough one 😢

beautifull little lion you got there :)

I waited for you to finish episode five so I could binge watch all of them at once.

If it's any consolation, the part about the baby absorbing the radiation instead of the mother is false. That's not how radiation works. The baby did die, but the mother did not live at the expense of her child.

35:44.  HBO did a documentary in 2002 called Chernobyl Heart about the children born in the aftermath. The child’s death in utero was an act of mercy.  Don’t seek the documentary out. It’s heartbreaking.

PLEASE CONSIDER the mindset of all of us that were young shapeable minds at that point and being told that the USSR is evil and our way is the best way.  Leaders and voters alike.  No wonder there is so much separation in my generation.