The consequences of the Chernobyl accident are accurately described in Svetlana Alexievich’s book “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster”

The book "Voices from Chernobyl" was published in 1997 by Belarusian journalist and essayist Svetlana Alexievich, who interviewed people affected by the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Although some consequences are correctly presented, the author mixes personal experiences and unfounded speculation, painting a picture that falls far from the scientific truth.

The film Rembrandt repeatedly refers to the book "Voices from Chernobyl," published in 1997 by Belarusian journalist and essayist Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. This book is a compendium of monologues based on interviews conducted by Alexievich between 1994 and 1996 with people from various backgrounds who lived through the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, notably in Ukraine and Belarus.

This powerful and terrifying book reflects the social, political, moral, and above all, personal tragedy caused by the accident at the power plant on April 26, 1986. Its publication was a great success. In the film, the testimonies are evoked and add to the climate of doubt portrayed.

Many of the things recounted are true, such as the effects of acute radiation suffered by a firefighter who worked to extinguish the fire at Reactor No. 4 (the Chernobyl reactor that exploded and ejected highly radioactive particles on its roof and elsewhere), or that pits were dug to bury irradiated animals or heavily contaminated equipment and vehicles. It is also true that the Soviet authorities at the time lied to the people (and the world), saying that the situation was under control, or that evacuees would return home in a few days (most of them were relocated elsewhere).

Rumors and speculation

However, when the book turns to speculation - some of it mind-boggling, told in part by a journalist who himself qualifies them as rumors that may or may not be true - we leave the realm of reality. 

Some of these rumors have been countered by studies conducted since the accident in contaminated territories:

• no mass graves containing thousands of human corpses have ever been unearthed in the area;
• animals living in the contaminated territories, apart from those in the forest near the plant who died in the first months after the accident, were able to resume their lives and thrive despite the higher radiation levels; 
• an increase in congenital malformations was not revealed by any studies submitted to international peer review, or conducted by international teams;
• evacuees were not deported to Siberia for internment, but rather transported to new communities built for them, far from the contaminated territories.

There are still rumors that are impossible to counter: who can prove that there was not an alien ship above the plant the day before the accident?

The official statistics

For those who would like to distinguish the truth when it comes to the consequences of the accident, we recommend consulting the reports from UNSCEAR, the United Nations Scientific Committee for Research on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, created in 1955. The committee, made up of experts from around the world, prepared a comprehensive review of the health situation around Chernobyl in a report approved in 2008 by the United Nations General Assembly:

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/uploads/documents/publications/UNSCEAR_2008_Annex-D-CORR.pdf

A brief summary of the effects of the accident on human health is published on the website of the Canadian Nuclear Regulatory Authority:

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/health-effects-chornobyl-accident/

Finally, the Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute(IRSN) - which became part of the French Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ASNR) in January 2025 - has been monitoring all aspects of the Chernobyl accident since the beginning, and regularly publishes documents intended for the public, the latest of which dates from 2021:

https://research-assessment.asnr.fr/news/chernobyl-35-years-later

The numbers

The assessment drawn by these experts on the health effects of the Chernobyl accident is as follows:

• 2 people died in the first hours due to physical trauma, thermal burns, and effects of radiation.
• Immediately after the accident, 237 of the 600 workers and rescue workers on site were hospitalized, 134 of whom were victims of acute radiation syndrome, 28 died within four months of the accident, and 19 others died by 2006.
• Of the 600 liquidators (workers involved in decontamination and cleaning operations) present at the time of the accident, those who received the highest doses developed leukemia or cataracts; the others did not develop solid cancers or leukemia, or other non-cancerous diseases that can be attributed to the accident (i.e. the incidence of these diseases is comparable to that of the general population ¹).  
• Some 530,000 liquidators on the site between 1986 and 1990 were exposed to doses ranging from 20 to 500 millisieverts (mSv) (120 mSv on average). The current regulatory reference dose limit in France for emergency teams is 300 mSv. The health of the Chernobyl liquidators continues to be closely monitored.
• Almost 7,000 cases of thyroid cancer among people in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia who were children or adolescents in 1986 could be attributed to exposure to radioactive iodine-131 due to the accident (external or internal exposure, including consumption of contaminated milk). The total number of cancers detected was more than double that, but the link could not be established between this increase and the level of doses; the explanation lies essentially in a "screening" effect in a vast program undertaken partly with the help of Western scientists. UNSCEAR was able to connect some 15 deaths from these cancers to exposure to the Chernobyl fallout (thyroid cancer is rarely fatal).
• Initially, 116,000 people were evacuated from an area within a 30 km radius of the plant. Later, some 220,000 people were displaced from less contaminated areas. They experienced a lot of stress, of all types, and several studies pointed to the deterioration of their physical and mental health (without concluding that it has an impact on the incidence of cancer).
• Living conditions in the region were disrupted by the fall of the Soviet Union and the separation of the three former Soviet republics affected by the accident.
• The health and environment of these regions have been, and continue to be, the subject of a large number of studies involving Western scientists whose work has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Criticism of Svetlana Alexievich's method

For those interested in Svetlana Alexievich's method of writing, a review was published in 2009 by Galia Ackerman, a historian at the University of Caen, and Fréderic Lemarchand, a sociologist. We learn, among other revelations, that Ms. Alexievich responded negatively to a request from them

“... to provide the interviews she had carried out in the contaminated areas to the Chernobyl fund that we wanted to create at the Caen Memorial [...] she replied to our great surprise, that she had kept no trace of these tapes, that this was not her vocation as a writer. Without traces or archives, we are very much in the realm of literature, and no longer dealing with ‘historical truth’ as advocated by the author.”