'Conversations about truth and representation continue to dominate political and media discourses around the world. One of the most popular US-produced TV shows of 2019, HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl uses the 1986 nuclear disaster to allegorically engage issues about misinformation and fake news in contemporary American and Russian political discourse. Yet in making a show about “truth”, Chernobyl illustrates how truth is constructed. Going beyond the conflations and condensations characteristics of historical fiction, Chernobyl creates a new epistemological understanding of history by framing events in ways that serve its contemporary concerns. In order to defend the truth, it must lie about the past, making it more desolate and more deadly.
The significance of Chernobyl is not just the claims it makes, but rather that the audience’s discourse around Chernobyl accepts the claims. In addition to critical success in the United States, the show was also extremely popular in Russia. The show raised conversations about the nature of the political regime, censorship, transparency and social justice in Russia and further enabled increasing commodification of the nuclear disaster site in Ukraine. To capture Russian audience’s reception, we used both a quantitative graphing mapping the spread of Chernobyl discourse over 2019 across Russian language social media, and a qualitative analysis of a random sampling of comments from VK, Twitter and Facebook as well as analysing media coverage of the show-centred debates by both state-owned and private Russian media.
The remarkably wide response to the show demonstrates that the Chernobyl disaster largely remains an unspoken scar on the collective memory in Russia where the current regime is actively engaged in celebration of its past and contemporary military and geopolitical victories. This is particularly visible among the young urban viewers, who receive Western forms of mass knowledge production as a counter to suspicion about Russian mass media’s presumed alignment with the current political regime (Omelchenko, 2019; Szostek, 2016). Chernobyl becomes a counter-narrative framed by Russian viewers as oppositional, but such reading is problematic given the show’s particularly specific allegory. As Western forms of mass knowledge production dominate among the young audiences (Pilkington et al., 2002) in spaces like Russia and have the power to shape conversations about politics and history, we argue that shows such as HBO’s Chernobyl become an important case study for a critical analysis of the contemporary global media in context of misinformation and post-truth. Much academic attention has focused on Russian influence on American social media discourse, but the reverse is under-discussed. There is a need for a critical reflection around such shows that position themselves as an alternative and truthful voice in non-Western states.'