Cyprus-Forum.com

[miltiades]

I must be the ONLY member that has .....never insulted any apart from those who bloody well deserved it !!!!By the way I have met both of these gentlemen and I love them both .

[Robin Hood]

STUD

But it was not a 100% Ukraine responsibility... that is just propaganda.

That is fact! It cannot be otherwise. The plant was in Ukraine, owned by the Ukraine Govt. and operated by Ukrainians. The accident was caused by mal-practice by Ukrainian engineers/operators, you have said that yourself ...... not ‘Head Office’ personnel from Moscow. So the accident was a 100% Ukraine responsibility but the subsequent cover-up was, as I explained, IMO was a joint responsibility. The accusation that it was “.......all about Russia!” was foolish and just plain wrong!

The later collapse of the USSR and emergence of so many countries as individual nation states, eg the Balitic States, Georgia, Ukraine, etc., out of the wreck was what pissed Putin off and why there is so much trouble in Ukraine, including the Russian Invasion of Crimea, as well as in parts of Georgia. He is trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire.

I respect that you have your view but I can’t agree with you .... but I will explain why and that will take more than just a one liner or a precis version leaving out details.

I too have links to the old communist USSR system as my wife is Polish and lived the regime until she left Poland in1970 as a 25 year old before the collapse of the old USSR. Each State in the USSR had, through the communist party system, a great deal of control over the nationals that lived there. When the system collapsed and Yeltsin took over, it was the Party Elite in all those States that raped and pillaged their countries, grabbing all they could before things changed ..... that happened in Poland as well. Many of the party Elite who had been a privileged class, then threw their Party cards in the bin and suddenly morphed into good freedom loving capitalists ........ and took advantage of their dwindling power and stole everything they could.

In my wife’s days in Poland the average Pole was skinny and undernourished and every day was a struggle to survive. She walked to school for over an hour each way. The Elite went to privileged schools for Party Elite and were driven there by one of the parents.

An example of abuse of privilege: It took my wife three years to get out of Poland legally. She could have made it earlier if she had paid bribes to the local Communist Party big wig or one of his aids ..... or let him have his way with her. She could not afford the bribe and refused to comply with the latter (No MeToo in those days!). So each application she made was just thrown away ..... until she went to work for a European Company in Poland. They had the contacts to make Mr.Big do what he was supposed to do and give her both a passport and a visa to leave the country. She left and didn’t return for some 20 years and by that time with a UK Passport!

Both higher education and adequate medicine was something only the Elite had access to, for the rest it was the local very basic State school or a Govt. Health Centre with as much stock as the people’s markets! My wife even had her appendix removed in her 20’s, without a general anaesthetic because they didn’t have any, it was a local injection, a stick between the teeth and she was tied down for the operation.

Not so the Elite! There were shops that were only open to the Party Elite full of imported goods, food, clothes and electrical goods that the ordinary citizen could only dream of. My wife never eat a banana or an orange, Mars Bar or even a cream cake until she came to the UK. The shops that served the population had vast racks of empty shelves where ordinary food items should have been. But there was plenty of cheap Vodka!

If you were able to get meat it was duck/goose/chicken/rabbit or pork ..... and you didn’t buy it ..... you bred it in your garden if you lived as she did, in a small town, where they had land but could only provide enough for their own use. Large farms had the produce taken, loaded onto trains and sent to Russia and the large cities in Poland where it went first to the shops that served the Elite and what was left was sold to the ordinary people. To get in the queue to the point you got your ration, a system controlled by the local Party Boss, you could start queuing at 4am, stand for a couple of hours in the cold and often by the time you got to your turn there was nothing left. No such restrictions for the Elite.

The Party Elite were frequently grossly overweight, it was a sign of high office, and were never subjected to the deprivations of the average citizens. Those citizens that had been the subject of this abuse of power started to turn on them and settle old scores as the Party power base collapsed and in Poland SOLIDARITY became the symbol ...... the rest is history!

The same process happened in Russia and Yeltsin just let his friends and relatives and the Party Elite take what they wanted and the economy was stripped of much of its wealth, including its industrial wealth, that being sold off to mainly western corporations. Much of the wealth ending up in London, Frankfurt, Paris and Washington.

When Putin got into power he clamped down on the party Elite and their abuse of privilege that was derived from their Party Membership Status and made them pay back a lot of what was stolen. I have no doubt many of those that thought they would get away with their plunder found out to their cost that Putin would track them down and they would pay the ultimate price. Of course there were also those that did get away with it ..... I supposed you could say they were the Privileged of the new ‘free market system’? Anyone who lives in Cyprus knows how the Privilege system works.

From what you have said about your late Father-in-Law and the circles he moved in, he was most probably an Elite member of The Communist Party and would have been a beneficiary of the privileges that high party membership bestowed on both them and their families. (Before you leap down my throat, I am not in anyway suggesting he was anything other than the honest and respectable person you described, but many were not very nice people.) Therefore when this system of Party privilege was taken down the people that previously benefitted, obviously became vehement Putin hater’s ........... I understand that feeling as I would also resent losing something that contributed so much to my privileged lifestyle.

But that resentment and hatred has nothing to do with the way Putin has run the Country since and that is evident when you start looking at all the improvements to income, pensions, lifestyle, health, education, literacy and life expectancy etc. that he has achieved in his time in office. But changes take time and there have been some areas that have been slow to recover, not helped by the US sanctions either, but even that effect is rapidly declining.

The content of your above statement?

• If you look into the events, Russia did NOT invade Crimea! The story does not stand up to any investigation. After the Coup in Ukraine, the people of Crimea exercised their UN defined right to self determination and duly voted for independence and then for annexation by Russia for protection.

• The nine day war with Georgia was clearly identified as being started by Georgia attacking Sth.Ossetia by both the UN and the EU Commissions that investigated the event. Russia was acting as a Peacekeeping force between the two and lost quite a few military peacekeepers in the attack. Of course, Russia knew what was likely to happen and responded immediately with a rapid and devastating retaliation against Georgian forces.

• Putin has absolutely no wish to rebuild the Soviet Union. Putin did not stay in Georgia when he thrashed them .... within hours he withdrew the Russian Forces and if he wanted Ukraine, he could be in Kiev within 48hrs. I cannot think of a single incident of Russia maintaining forces or an illegal presence in another country since the Russian Federation came into being.

The facts that dispute your perception and indicate your comments as being primarily Propaganda based, is all available on-line but it takes tenacity to sort out fact from fiction and it gets more difficult every day as Internet algorithm censorship tightens its grip on the freedom of access to information. It is not worth the effort to just to rouse a response of TLDR!

We both have views, opposing views, but don’t let us fall out over it?

[Pyrpolizer]

The most basic thing I learned at school about slowing down the neutrons in a nuclear reactor is to raise the core, so that less neutrons hit the core and the whole radioactive process slows down.
Yet this reactor had almost 2000 "fuel cores" basically metal rods with radioactive material and the robot replacing/removing the rods could only handle one at a time, so for the routine slowing down they were lowering graphite rods with the same effect in slowing down the neutrons. The process was working fine for routine tasks but they knew it would fail in case of an emergency shut down, as it already did at 3 other plans, However in none of those three anything dramatic happened, because as soon as they realized there had problems they just abandoned the test
and brought the reactor back to normal.

Despite the improvements in the design It was clearly very irresponsible for those people at Chernobyl to a)start the test without proper supervision and b)To continue the test after they got the first signs it wouldn't work.
The whole catastrophe happened because of just 1 minute delay in letting the damn thing go back to normal !!

Now on whether it was the fault of Ukrania as a satellite state or Russia as the controlling center: Does it really matter? The were all USSR, under the same corrupt elitist system. in fact I 'd bet the whole team of nuclear Engineers in Moscow was "multinational", thus included Ukrainians as well.

[Robin Hood]

Pyrpolizer:

Now on whether it was the fault of Ukraine as a satellite state or Russia as the controlling center: Does it really matter? The were all USSR, under the same corrupt elitist system. in fact I 'd bet the whole team of nuclear Engineers in Moscow was "multinational", thus included Ukrainians as well.

No, it doesn’t matter at all. The immediate response to an event like this is always for those in positions of responsibility to ‘guard-their-own-ass’ and that applies to any event where someone is going to have to take the can for it. Those that know they have a weakness will endeavour to hide it or shove it onto someone else’s desk! Their Nationality is really an irrelevance, they exist and follow the same modus operandi in all societies and similar situations.

[Londonrake]

I must be the ONLY member that has .....never insulted any apart from those who bloody well deserved it !!!!By the way I have met both of these gentlemen and I love them both .

Been away for a few days and come back to all this mess.

Yes Milti. I think we're both also fond of you. I have a suggestion. We should meet in...........................mmmmmm................Reykjavik? With you in the chair. Plenty of red wine to be supplied of course. Well, come on, you can't take it with you!

[Londonrake]

This looks interesting (sorry - paywalled again - )

"It was about how close to reality we could get': How the terrifying Chernobyl disaster was recreated for a new TV drama

No effort was spared to bring a Soviet-era nuclear catastrophe to life for a new big-budget TV drama. Jared Harris and Emily Watson tell Lucy Davies how the Chernobyl disaster and its terrifying aftermath were recreated to the last detail – from the horror of radiation poisoning to the peculiar challenges of glasnost underwear

On a blazing afternoon in the countryside outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a rack of underpants is twitching in the breeze. Not just any underpants: the specimens hanging here, in the vast shadow cast by a recreation of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, are the drabbest and most saggy of man-briefs, disintegrating at the seams – we’re a long way from Daz and microfibres now.

Vintage Soviet clothing not usually being something people hang on to, costume designers for the forthcoming HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl, which dramatises the story of the 1986 explosion and its aftermath, have had a Herculean task on their pin-pricked hands.

Flea markets in Minsk, Kiev, Moscow and Kaunas have been stripped of their 1980s polyester and hand-knitted best. There’s been a run on glasnost-era spectacles and watches on Ukrainian eBay. Mouldering bolts of fabric were unearthed from a local clothing factory that had closed in the late ’80s, and used to run up 30 suits. They’re here now: a rainbow of brown, brown-grey, grey-brown and beige.

‘At the fittings,’ says Jared Harris, who plays Valery Legasov, the scientist chosen by the Kremlin to investigate the accident, who grasped its appalling dimensions more quickly than his colleagues, ‘they said, “Do you have a colour you don’t like?” And I said, “Yes, beige.”’ He laughs. ‘Everything I had to wear was beige. It was scratchy and sweaty and unflattering. I don’t think we have another Mad Men fashion revolution on our hands.’
‘After a while you become quite fond of it,’ insists Odile Dicks-Mireaux, head of costume. ‘It’s a bit Shoreditch, isn’t it? A bit Marni?’

If you were born before the late 1970s, you probably remember Chernobyl. Or a version of it at least – and there were many. The wishful thinking and myth-making that has shrouded every account of it since, began within minutes of the blast, as first the control-room operatives, then a domino chain of command all the way to the Kremlin, clung furiously to the illusion that the consequences (400 times as much radioactive fallout as Hiroshima) could be controlled. Honesty mattered far less than the Soviet system’s survival.

‘Even in modern, liberal countries in Europe, governments tried to play things down to avoid panic,’ says the director Johan Renck (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead). ‘In Britain, they insisted the radioactive cloud had stopped at the North Sea. In France, they said that it had made a detour. People believed whichever story matched their fears.’

With a screenplay by Craig Mazin (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) and a cast led by Harris, Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson, Chernobyl is nothing like the disaster movie you might imagine. ‘This is not a show about an explosion,’ explains Mazin. ‘When I pitched it, I said I wanted that to happen in the first three minutes. I had no interest in creating something like Titanic, where you have hours of film before the ship, which you know is going to sink, actually sinks.’

‘It’s a war movie,’ says the producer Sanne Wohlenberg (Wallander, Doctor Who), who is braving the waterlogged backlot in elegant ankle boots, when most of the crew look as if they are at Glastonbury. ‘But they’re fighting an invisible enemy. Something you can’t touch, yet you know it is all around you. How do you begin to fight it?’

‘Craig has made an extraordinary thing,’ says Watson, when we speak later by phone. ‘A 360- degree dissection of the disaster from many points of view, but it still feels very compelling. I think that’s because his research is very, very meticulous. He’s an obsessive. But he has a Hollywood muscle in his bag of tricks, which gives it a real page-turner feel.’

Watson plays Ulana Khomyuk, a fictional amalgam of the many Soviet scientists whose names we don’t know, who risked their freedom and reputations to demand the truth be told. ‘The idea of somebody finding a way to speak out in a state where you can’t speak out, really appealed to me,’ says Watson. ‘It was only with the greatest skill and heroism that people like Ulana managed to prevent a secondary explosion that would have been devastating to Europe. Ulana stands for all of those people who thought, “Well, we have nothing to lose, we will sacrifice our own destiny – our own lives, probably – to save the world.” The stakes don’t get much higher than that!’

We meet Khomyuk in episode two, face down in a stack of technical documents in her nuclear research lab in Belarus. Even though they are 250 miles from the explosion, the dosimeters have picked up massive levels of non-military radiation, and she is soon on her way to Chernobyl – the only woman in the room when the experts are brought in front of President Mikhail Gorbachev.

‘When I imagined Ulana’s backstory, she felt quite hard and precise,’ Watson says. ‘Belarus has a devastating history, and, to have been a woman and a scientist, she would have been tough but, importantly, guarded. You still see the remnants of it in the former Soviet countries now, in people over the age of 40. It’s a different acting to the touchy-feely English or American style.’

Chernobyl reunites Watson with Skarsgård, with whom she starred in her debut, Oscar-nominated role in Breaking the Waves (1996). In Chernobyl, Skarsgård plays Boris Shcherbina, a highly placed Soviet bureaucrat who was made head of the special commission investigating the accident. ‘He is part of the Soviet apparatus,’ explains Skarsgård, ‘and has been so for ever – he started under Stalin. But having been on what Craig calls “a glide path to obscurity”, he is thrust into a situation that he could have made so much worse, and originally he did, but then he tried very hard to make better.’

Skarsgård was adamant he didn’t want to look like the real Shcherbina – he and the make-up designer Daniel Parker cooked up instead ‘a semi-military tough guy, an older statesman, with a flat top’. When I meet Skarsgård in make-up, he is lying prostrate, while his face is blow-dried. ‘To prevent sweat bubbles,’ he says, gleefully. ‘Steady!’ hollers Parker as, hair by tiny hair, two bristly grey eyebrows are inched into place. ‘One millimetre in the wrong direction and you’ve got a different human being.’

Behind him on a shelf are dozens of lever-arch files stuffed with research into the effects of radiation. ‘It’s an enormous field,’ Parker admits. ‘There is footage of some of the Chernobyl victims in hospital, but we know some of it was fake. What I noticed immediately, though, was that the colours of the burns needed to come up through the prosthetic skin rather than be painted on top of it, as you would with a normal burn. I’ve had to invent a whole new method.’

Severe radiation poisoning, Parker explains, ‘is… well, the only thing I can compare it to is putting salt on to a slug. You have little atoms inside you, and they’re flying around like bullets, smashing through cells. Eventually these cells can’t handle it any more: they collapse. And so everything turns to jelly. There is nothing holding your skin on; it literally slips off like a sock. Your veins collapse so they can’t even put painkillers into you. It is beyond description. I had to find a way to do all that without it being comic or gratuitous.’

Authenticity was paramount for director Renck. ‘It was always about how close to reality we could get,’ he explains. ‘To make you feel like you were actually there rather than in a movie theatre or on your sofa looking at a rendition of what happened.’

With this in mind, he arranged to meet some of the around 200,000 surviving liquidators – the 600,000 Soviet men and women who were ‘called upon’ (some were forced, some volunteered, most had no idea what they were really dealing with) to help clear up the fallout. They include the firefighters who put out the initial blaze, the plant operators who had to go back inside to drain the pool under the reactor, and the men who, because the robots sent on to the remaining roof to clear it of radioactive debris malfunctioned immediately, had to go up there and do the job by hand.

Each man was only allowed on the roof for three minutes, though they went up repeatedly, using shovels to lob chunks of graphite from the exploded reactor over the side. Every item of clothing had to be sanitised afterwards because fabric absorbs so much radiation. Hence those underpants, flapping in the wind.

‘I asked them if they were frightened,’ Renck tells me. ‘There was one nuclear physicist whose job it was to measure temperatures in the remnants of the power plant, and he said, “I was afraid of the dark. I was scared of concrete falling on my head. But all the other fears just kind of dissipated, because it had to be done.” Our series is critical of a totalitarian regime, but it definitely honours an incredibly heroic Soviet people.’

I ask Skarsgård if he thinks the tragedy would have played out differently somewhere else. ‘It could’ve happened in any country that claims it’s infallible,’ he answers. ‘But there are always people prepared to go the extra mile, to sacrifice their lives for the common good. I think probably with most big disasters, you see not only the bad side of humanity but also the good.’

Later that afternoon, I watch on the monitor as hundreds of local extras screech along the road to the plant on ancient yellow buses, sending clouds of dust into the air. These are the miners from Kiev and Donetsk who were tasked with digging 550ft of tunnel under the reactor remains, in temperatures of 60C. After a few takes, one of the men is pulled off a bus for being ‘too good-looking’, I overhear the costume team say. ‘Sorry, hunk!’ says one of the assistants.

The set was designed to be built around an existing structure on the backlot, so that the interior sets lead seamlessly on to the exterior one. It means the mine relates exactly to the position it would have had on the original Chernobyl site. ‘The point was to be fluid and kinetic,’ explains the production designer Luke Hull, ‘not hide that we are having to jump from room to room, interior to exterior.’

Long corridors and enclosed stairwells inside the studio make for a convincing recreation of the maze-like interior of the plant. Eventually you encounter, as the operatives did on the night of the disaster, a gaping hole. The view beyond is cataclysmic: a spaghetti of girders, pipes, tanks, cylinders and concrete rubble.

Some of it is polystyrene, but ‘we also destroyed a building’, says Hull. ‘HBO wanted receipts, and people who have debris don’t technically own it. Our way around that was to buy a building, knock it down and transport it here on trucks. It took a week to lay it out because the guy with the crane grabber only spoke Russian. It was very cost-effective, though.’

Hull won’t divulge his budget, save to say it was increased several times. There’s an ingenious, labyrinthine recreation of the tanks beneath the reactor core, its walls and ceilings made from parallel pipes, so that when you are inside, with torches leaping all over the place, it’s very difficult to tell which way is up or down. It’s hellish, like a great vascular system from which escape is impossible.

Dwarfing that was Pripyat, the city built in 1970 to house plant workers and their families, all 50,000 of whom had to be evacuated – though not until 36 hours after the accident. ‘I knew we could never recreate it,’ says Hull, ‘but we found a town here in Lithuania which had the same kind of “designed for living” look, quite a modern town, but built in a hurry. We turned car parks into green spaces, covered PVC windows in wallpaper paste, put in lots of roses – that’s one thing you notice in the real footage of the evacuation: the flowers.’

One of the arcs in the script is the growing friendship between Shcherbina and Legasov, which plays out in a gruesome temporary office/command centre installed for them on the Chernobyl site. Hull and his team purchased an old mobile home for the purpose, ripping out the beds and ageing the interior.

Inside, torn, yellowed net curtains hang from grimy windows. Blueprints and maps of radiological survey zones are pinned to the walls. Half-drunk bottles of Russian-label Pepsi are on the table, the mugs are full of cigarette butts. The walls are a sort of mint-choc chip. ‘Instant bleak,’ I say, and Hull looks delighted.

‘It’s been pretty grim, the places we’ve been,’ agrees Harris. ‘Not even Gorbachev’s summer retreat in Vilnius is something I’d like to have. The hotel looks like a Soviet version of The Shining. Legasov’s apartment was amazing – a flat in Kaunas that the owner had not touched since the 1980s. It had old stoves, a wall-mounted phone, orangey-brown carpets. It was like going back in time.’

The real Legasov was married with children, but Mazin’s version is a bachelor and he cuts a very lonely figure. ‘I have a great deal of sympathy for him,’ says Harris, ‘because he’s right in the middle of it, but he has no agency at all. Essentially he’s the smartest guy in the room that nobody listens to, which is an interesting dynamic to carry into scenes: that you know the answer when no one’s going to do what you say. I think we probably all feel that way at one time or another.’

Is he the hero? ‘No, absolutely not. I think the heroes of the story are the people like the miners, who end up having to sacrifice themselves. They’ve got no choice about it but they do it willingly because they love their country. The rest of us are all slightly tainted in one way or another, complicit in some way, our stories are complicated.’

We aren’t given Legasov or Shcherbina or Khomyuk’s backstory. ‘I’m guessing Craig didn’t want to get too stuck in the weeds with all that,’ says Harris. ‘There was a certain momentum, a propulsion to the story that he wanted to maintain.’

Mazin agrees. ‘Watching this should feel like you are falling. Because I think that’s what it must have been like that night, having to make those decisions. I don’t want anyone to take a breath until we get to the third episode, when you start to understand that now something much more terrible must begin: the sacrifice of no one really knows how many people’s lives [figures are around the 50,000 to 90,000 mark] to fix what they had done.’

As the series moves toward the 1987 trial, in which six officials and technicians were charged with ‘blatant violation’ of safety regulations, the story does start to slow and deepen, adding an emotional layer to the drama, says executive producer Jane Featherstone of Sister Pictures. ‘The element that makes Chernobyl so gripping is that it combines something that was created by man but was somehow out of the reach of man, and I think that’s fascinating.’

For Wohlenberg, it boils down to the sequence of catastrophic decisions made in the control room, moments after the accident: ‘The human error of it is so staggeringly, astonishingly awful,’ she says, ‘but Craig makes us understand that if you said no within that system, you went to the gulag. I have thought so many times: what would have happened that night if they’d had a normal choice?’

‘I look at the world through that lens now,’ agrees Mazin. ‘There are dire circumstances in many tragedies – but what was so frustrating was thinking, “This didn’t have to happen, you didn’t have to die, that didn’t have to explode, you didn’t need to lose a child, none of this had to happen.”’

Chernobyl is on Sky Atlantic from 7 May

[Londonrake]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2019/05/ ... -riveting/

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[Londonrake]

"Chernobyl: The secrets they tried to bury - how the Soviet machine covered up a catastrophe"

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/cher ... astrophe1/

.

[CBBB]

Chernobyl is on Sky Atlantic from 7 May

I'll wait until it's finished and binge watch it.

[Londonrake]

Chernobyl is on Sky Atlantic from 7 May

I'll wait until it's finished and binge watch it.

You’ll get an overdose! Unless you wear your tin foil hat of course.