HBO produced a miniseries on the Chernobyl disaster and I just finished watching it. I am sure that most viewers sat back with a reasoned approach and considered this historical artifact as something that happened long ago. Something that is now more lore than history. I have an image of 30′ somethings sitting on their couches, a cool one on the TV tray and their feet up on the coffee table, watching a reenactment, like a civil war reenactment, so distant so full of human truth but overtaken by a more interesting story arch embroidered specifically to enhance market share. They digest the information as though it was just another fictional story.

Until I watched this miniseries, the only information I had about Chernobyl was the concocted rhetoric that was first composed by the soviets themselves and then sanitized for the sake of revisionist history, where the victors are the good guys and somebody saved the day.

I was there. I didn’t realize I was, but in the summer of 1987 I was in Moscow at the first PC trade show sponsored by the government of the US to introduce the USSR to the emerging market of personal computers. It was at this exact moment in this same city that the crime and tragedy of Chernobyl was being adjudicated in the soviet court. You see, in 1987, the USSR was still real. The cold war was still cold and the world was just 5 seconds away from vaporization. I was in Moscow selling PC’s to people who payed for things in rubles and smoked cigarettes that tasted like horse shit.

When I was preparing to go to the Soviet Union for this tradeshow, I was interviewed by the FBI, or at least that’s who they said there were. I was background checked and scrutinized, and finally I landed in Moscow for a week. It was only a year earlier that the Chernobyl disaster happened, but as far as the world knew, it was just another nuclear accident like Three Mile Island that was controlled and quashed. Nothing to see here.

I can’t help but wonder now that I am facing my third bout with cancer what effect that trip may have had. For me, it simply reinforces what T.S. Elliot wrote, that the world shall not end with a bang but a whimper.