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Sophie Pinkham

Sophie Pinkham is a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s Slavic Department. She is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine.
 (June 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

Ukraine’s New Leading Man

The Ukrainian television series Servant of the People, which aired from 2015 until this year, is the story of Vasyl Holoborodko, a dedicated history teacher in his late thirties who lives with his parents. His father is a taxi driver, his mother a neurologist, and his sister a train conductor.

The Chernobyl Syndrome

A worker measuring radiation after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, August 1986

Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

by Kate Brown

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham
On the night of April 25, 1986, during a planned maintenance shutdown at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, one of the four reactors overheated and began to burn. As plant engineers scrambled to regain control of it, they thought for a moment that there had been an earthquake. In fact, a buildup of steam had propelled the two-hundred-ton concrete top of the reactor’s casing into the air, with masses of radioactive material following close behind when the core exploded. The plant workers had been assured again and again of the safety of the “peaceful atom,” and they couldn’t imagine that the reactor had exploded. Firefighters rushed to the scene without special equipment or a clear understanding of the potential risks; they had not been trained to deal with a nuclear explosion, because such training would have involved acknowledging that an explosion was possible.