Chornobyl ‘liquidator’ kills himself after watching TV series about disaster

One of the men who worked amidst high radioactivity levels to quell the consequences of the 1986 disaster at the Chornobyl power station, committed suicide after watching the HBO serialized television dramatization about the world’s worst nuclear accident. 

Nagashibay Zhusupov,  a resident of the city of Aktobe in Kazakhstan, died after leaping from the roof of the five-story building he lived in, according to his daughter, Gaukhar, 25, who spoke to British internet publication MailOnline.

She said her 61-year old father had been depressed because the Soviet, and later, the Kazakh government, failed to honor promises to give him, and many others, better housing in reward for their heroism.

Zhusupov was one of the thousands of Soviet soldiers, firefighters and others drafted in to clean up the area around the devastated Number Four reactor which had exploded after an experiment went horribly wrong at the plant.

Called “liquidators,” they wore sparse protective clothing and, although sent into the most dangerous areas for only limited periods, they were still exposed to high radiation levels which killed many within weeks or months and others much later.

In common with many others who tackled the disaster, he was promised an apartment and a higher pension.  

But instead, said Gaukhar, her 61-year-old father received medals and certificates praising his heroism but the apartment never materialized and Zhusupov was forced to live with his wife and five children in a single-room of a communal building.

She said that watching the American-British serial “Chernobyl” HBO stirred up her father’s bitter disappointment at not getting the living quarters he had been promised by the Soviet government and which the Kazakh authorities were supposed to follow through on after declaring their own independence from the disintegrating USSR.

Gaukhar said that the authorities crossed his name off the waiting list for the apartment after he had waited 10 years and that had destroyed his health.

The head of the Kazakh “liquidators” organization, Bakitzhan Satov, said that Zhusupov had been one of the first men at the scene after the reactor explosion. Later he worked at the Soviet nuclear testing site in Semipalatinsk.

Some of Zhusupov’s friends said he felt humiliated by his government’s neglect and blamed them for living in poverty.  Watching the serial, they say revived those emotions and led him to take his own life in June.

The Kyiv Post met last month with the creator and screenwriter of the Chornobyl series, Craig Mazin, who said that he had an enormous response through social media, from viewers who had watched the series in the former Soviet Union.

He said most of the feedback was positive and much to it emotional as people who had been liquidators or just living in the affected area, watched the drama with their families and relived the ghastly events the series chronicles.

The explosion at Chornobyl produced clouds of radioactive waste which spread through swathes of Ukraine, neighboring Belarus, and countries as far westward as Britain. 

The force of the explosion also spewed out radioactive fragments from the reactor’s core in a vast area around the plant and it was amidst this deadly debris that Zhusupov and other liquidators worked. 

There is no agreement on how many people died or suffered from the effects of radiation. Soviet authorities did everything to conceal the human costs. That secrecy and disinformation is being continued today by the Kremlin – ultimately responsible for the Soviet-era tragedy.  

Some agencies say only a few dozen people died from radiation poisoning.  Other organizations say the death toll was in the thousands with thousands more doomed to die early because they were exposed to radiation, many of them as children, as the poisoned clouds traveled far from the disaster site.