Spring 1986. A Ukrainian man named Vasili Ignatenko it is consumed in the Moscow clinic number 6. He is a firefighter, one of the first to come to put out the fire at the Chernobyl power plant after the reactor exploded. He agonizes by drowning with his own entrails. His body has received 1,600 roentgens, when the lethal dose is 400. He dies. They dress him in full dress uniform. Because the radiation has swollen his feet so much, they can’t find suitable shoes to put him on. The authorities do not deliver the body to the wife, pregnant, nor those of the rest of his companions to the families.
“They are very radioactive and they will be buried in a Moscow cemetery in a special way. In some welded zinc coffins, under some concrete plates. You must sign these documents for us… We need your consent.”
Svetlana Aleksievich, ‘Voices from Chernobyl’ (Debate, 2015).
COFFIN 2
During the military campaign in Afghanistan (1979-89), which intended to stop the advance of the ‘Mujahideen’, baptized the cargo plane (Antonov AN-12 model) that was repatriating the corpses to the USSR as the ‘Black Tulip’. 15,000 Soviet soldiers died. The coffins were zinc boxes covered with wooden planks.
“Sometimes they put them in the coffins with nothing: the old uniforms are not enough for everyone either. The splintered wood, the rusty nails… Today they have brought new dead to the refrigerator. They smell like wild boar meat when it’s rancid. Will someone believe me if I write about this? & rdquor ;.
Svetlana Aleksiévich, ‘The Zinc Boys’ (Debate, 2016).
nth coffin
In the Chechen war they also put the corpses in zinc coffins, bodies of conscript soldiers, kids from remote regions, from the provinces, from Saratov, Kazan, Novosibirsk. The mothers, desperate, went out to look for them at the front without fearing the whiplash of the shells.
The same thing is happening today.
Ukrainian women also go out to look for their husbands and children.
Tomorrow I will applaud Svetlana Aleksievich, the Belarusian Nobel laureate, until the palms of my hands turn red, tomorrow when he picks up the XXXIV Catalunya International Award for his career at the Generalitat. Aleksievich has a cyclopean, sidereal ear. No one like her has heard the pain in the territory of what was the Soviet Union, the chorus of polyphonic and anonymous pain.
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“I have always been attracted to that tiny space, the space that a single human being occupies, only one… Because, really, that’s where everything happens & rdquor ;.
Svetlana Aleksievich, ‘The end of Homo sovieticus’ (Cliff, 2015).