A pro-government Russian television network is working on its own answer to the popular new show Chernobyl, which will implicate CIA sabotage in the 1986 nuclear disaster.
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HBO’s five-part series, which stars Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård, this week became the highest ever rated show worldwide and has proved a hit among Russian viewers, who have noted its attention to mundane detail of Soviet life.
But the show has been met with fierce criticism from pro-Kremlin media, which has argued the production is Western propaganda that exaggerates the extent of the disaster and the negligence of the Soviet government, and stereotypes Russians.
Now the Russian state has stepped in to correct the balance, with the Culture Ministry reportedly providing almost $500,000 in funding to a new production that will focus around a group of KGB officers tasked with uncovering a CIA spy who has infiltrated the plant.
The implication appears to be that the plot shows an American spy sabotaged the reactor. “One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station,” director Alexei Muradov was quoted as saying in the Moscow Times.
The show has been commissioned by NTV, which is owned by Gazprom Media, a branch of the state natural gas company, Gazprom. It is reportedly in post-production.
HBO’s show focuses on the immediate fallout of the explosion on April 26, 1986, in what is now Ukraine, considered to be the worst nuclear accident in history, which was caused by the failure of a safety test.
There has been no evidence found of CIA involvement. At least 31 people died in the rescue operation, with estimates suggesting thousands more dead as a result of the radiation, which spread across much of Europe.
The show depicts the devastating impact on the first responders and locals in the nearby town of Pripyat in sometimes gruesome detail, and delves into the Soviet bureaucracy which led to delays in evacuating and containing the effects of the disaster.
Criticisms of the show in Russia have ranged from trivial historical inaccuracies to the creation of characters and events that didn’t exist. “Regarding the details… I don’t remember any glassed-in balconies in Pripyat,” wrote journalist Alexander Kots in a piece for the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid. “And nobody even dreamed of insulated dual-pane windows in 1986.”
“Instead of thousands of scientists and leaders at different levels, they just show you [three],” a review published by Orthodox outlet Tsargrad said. “They also make the entire system working to solve this problem look stupid.”
But the main issue has been the negative tone of the show, which Russian critics say places blame for the disaster on the Soviet system while not enough screen time was devoted to the heroic efforts of cleanup crews.
“Chernobyl didn’t show us the main thing — our victory,” one tabloid headline read. In an op-ed published in the Moscow Times, Russian journalist Ilya Shepelin argued that the backlash in the pro-Kremlin media was simply shame that an American network made a better historical show set in the Soviet era than anything put out by Russian networks or studios.
“The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down,” Shepelin wrote. “And this is the real reason they find fault with HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ series.”