The bravest me the world has ever known: Liquidators sent to the rooftop of the destroyer Reactor 4, to replace German-made robots that broke down due to the heavy exposure to radiation, as that place needed to be cleaned up from all the radioactive debris expelled from the explosion of the reactor in order to allow construction crews to finish the Sarcophagus, the structure designed to contain the building and stop the spread of radiation to the atmosphere.
Here you can see them alongside one of the broken robots, and hence their name, Biorobots, since they had been sent to a place deemed only suitable for robots, not humans nor any other living being.
The completion of the Sarcophagus was for them what flying the Soviet flag over the Reichstag meant to the Red Army: Total victory over a ruthless, savage enemy.
And they actually raised their own flag once it was completed, a symbol of their battle over the atom.
A few notes on this. The Germans and US did have robots that could stand the radiation levels but because the USSR was so preoccupied with denying the level of contamination (and admitting they made mistakes) they lied about the radiation level and the West Germans supplied robots that weren’t built to survive. Essentially pride prevented the government from actually asking for what they needed, and they were forced to use humans in short term radiation runs to do the work. Biorobot is a crude term for disposable human.
It’s very easy for Americans to view Russians as The Enemy, because of the actions of a statistically small number of Oligarchs with outsized power and influence. It’s so important that we remember that Russian citizens love their children just like American citizens do, and that there are (and in this case were) Russian citizens who were willing to risk their lives in service of the greater good of humanity.
I’ve been watching the Chernobyl series, and while it shows how incompetent and obsessed with secrecy the Communist Party was, it also shows incomprehensible acts of heroism and sacrifice that saved literally thousands of lives (maybe even more).
As I’ve been watching Chernobyl, I’ve been confronting my presumptions about Russia and Russians in the 80s, and realizing just how effective American government propaganda was in convincing me that RUSSIANS (cue scary music and probably a flash of lightning with maybe a Wilhelm scream thrown in) were scary, dangerous, and wanted to destroy everything I cared about (so my Star Wars figures and my video games). I was incapable of considering that there were people in Russia who would risk their lives or even sacrifice their lives, for the good of their fellow humans.
These men are heroes, and they should be honored for the heroic things they did.
roguetelemetry
wilwheaton
