Make the old bottles explode

“It is June. Let’s hope Someone is kind, just in time.”

The ending montage of Chernobyl, showing photos, videos and documents of the real historical people while Vichnaya Pamyat played, was respectfully and deftly made, while also very beautiful. What I love best about it, however, is the reminder that the three men who went on a suicide mission to drain the water from underneath the reactor in episode 2 (Ananenko, Bezpalov, Baranov) actually survived. They could have died, but they did not. I think it is important to remember that sometimes, people do the brave thing, and they live. They went into the darkness knowing they might not come out, that they might die in unspeakable pain, and then they came out, and then they lived for two more decades, three. We tend to assume that taking on a lethal risk means martyrdom, that being ready to die means you die. I remember when tumblr was all a-flutter about about Pyotr Baranovsky, one of the men who saved the St Basil Cathedral when Stalin was set on demolishing it, and got sent to the Gulag for his pains. He was a martyr who died for art, for beauty, for religion: except he wasn’t, he survived the Gulag, he survived exile, he made it back home in one piece, and lived for 50 more years restoring old buildings and running museums. Sometimes, people do the brave thing and live. (Same with Karig Sára, the whisteblower who tried to reveal that the Communist Party was stealing the 1947 Hungarian elections, and also ended up in the Gulag. She spent six years in abominable circumstances. And then she came home, and lived 40 more eventful years as a high-ranking editor and folklorist.)