Maria Protsenko drew a map by hand while the young soldiers hung over her shoulder. When the civil defense on the morning of Saturday 26 april 1986 had been knocking on the 40-year-old chefsarkitekten it was to ask her about the maps she designed, Pripjat, and its associated nuclear power plant, Chernobyl. She had for a moment become perplexed: a map she had, but no copier.
In the Soviet union had kopiatorerna controlled since they were invented. In The book ”The Red Web” (2015) is told about Vladimir Fridkin, the engineer in the 50’s invented the socialistdiktaturens first copy. 1957 uppsöktes Fridkin of a nice woman from the KGB, who told me that it would be seized. ”People can copy prohibited material.” The copier was struck in the rubble, and the only thing that survived was a disc plate, which was put up in the ladies ‘ room at the institute where Fridkin worked.
the state’s fear of the censurtrotsande kopiatorerna. Thus did not know Maria Protsenko immediately how she could help the stressed-out soldiers, who hours after the explosion in Chernobyl’s fourth reactor received in the mission to measure how high the radiation was in all areas of the city. But Protsenko was not the type who stood nonplussed. She sat simply down and began to draw a map for them for the hand. It was still streets, houses and avenues of trees, which she herself had designed, in the growing town built to house the nuclear power plant the Chernobyl employees.
Protsenkos work is characterized by an aesthetic sense that it protested against the soviet designbojorna of standardization and serial production. On the night of the Chernobyl reactor four blew up slept she happy in the belief that tomorrow’s work would go on to discuss the Pripjats new sixth district, which would be built to accommodate the employees in the planned new power station Chernobyl-2. When she woke up was a blue pillar of light that a blåglödgat sword up in the sky above the Chernobyl broken ceiling, created by the ionized air above the wide-open reactor, and a new time randades.
depicted gray and gripping in HBO’s new series ”Chernobyl”, directed by Johan Renck and with, among others, Stellan Skarsgård in front of the camera. The critically acclaimed series has come out with so far two of the five sections, and is probably as realistic a lavish wager to the series based on real events can be. But there are distractions, I think. Köttsåren that the irradiated firemen incurs. To a effektsökande bolmande black smoke pumps out of the reactor, when it is really only a step a deceptively thin and soft white mist out of it.
Emily Watson as Ulana Khomyuk in ”Chernobyl”. Photo: HBO Nordic
DN:s a review of ”Chernobyl” is available here.
And so to Maria Protsenko is not mentioned. I get to know her in the recently published book ”Midnight in Chernobyl”, written by Adam Higginbotham, a monstrous feat to the report, which consists of up to 70% of the story and 30 per cent of notes and bibliography. Higginbothams book is equal parts a description of the fasadfixerade and arrogant state that could give birth to a ticking time bomb as Chernobyl and the course of events when the work was blown up and its consequences, and Protsenko is decidedly one of the book’s most fascinating characters.
, you can say. She was born at the border to China by the sino-Russian parents and saw the dictatorship’s cruelty up close, first when her grandfather disappeared in Stalin’s Gulag, then when her two brothers who had been refused visits to the doctor died of diphtheria, and finally, when her sorrowful father fell in a opiumberoende and her mother took her and fled to Kazakhstan. Because of her chinese origin, she was never party membership, but still she managed to climb and became Pripjats chief architect. After the accident, she thought the last to the evacuation of the city she built was only temporary. Longer than any other care she, yes, loved, the place that has already died.
In the ”Chernobyl” on HBO is a nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk, a fictional representative for all the researchers trying to understand and convince the sluggish state of the institutional shortcomings that lay behind the accident, one of the relatively few prominent women. It is a shame that HBO missed or rejected Maria Protsenko, a stubborn visionary, who fought in the hidden. In ”Midnight in Chernobyl,” she shows Higginbotham a book from Pripjat, and says that it still smells like ozone. Higginbotham does not know the scent, and then blows she even radioactive dust of it so he gets it in the nose and throat. Then says she is against the upset Higginbotham: ”If it was dangerous had I not taken it.” Such people, I want to see on tv.
Read more texts by Jack Werner here. For example: Why has Facebook become boring.