On April 28, 1986, the Soviet news program Vremya made a 14-second announcement about an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. One of the plant’s nuclear reactors had been damaged, the broadcaster said. Mitigation actions were being taken, aid to those affected was being provided, and a government commission had been formed. The rest of the Soviet Union hummed along, making plans for the upcoming May Day holiday.

Although I lived just 100 miles from the border with Ukraine, it took me three months to begin attaching faces and names to the incident. I was vacationing with my mother near Sochi, on the Black Sea, when a group of women and children entered our hotel. They were Chernobyltsy, “people of Chernobyl.” They had a startled air around them, and the mood in the hot

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