General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums3 Russians that saved millions of lives
On the evening of 2 May, 1986, six days after a massive explosion devastated the Lenin nuclear power station at Chernobyl, the damaged reactor was sinking and burning through its strengthened floor and was in danger of collapsing into rooms flooded with water. This would trigger a nuclear explosion that would spread radiation across half of Europe and kill millions. Three men volunteered to dive into what they knew were lethally radioactive waters to open a release valve to prevent this from happening.
These three ( monumentalized in the above) donned wet suits and knowing that it was a suicide mission dove into the radioactive waters to open a value which if left shut would have caused a massive blow-out spreading radioactivity and death. The men died days later from radioactive poisoning and were so contaminated they had to be buried in lead coffins.
More at:
http://imgur.com/gallery/quoGC
tonyt53
(5,737 posts)Adrahil
(13,340 posts)Igel
(35,197 posts)No problem with the word "hero", even though it was their job.
At the same time, apparently all three survived their suicide mission. One doesn't have to be a dead hero to be a hero.
"Russian" here is at least partly ethnicity. Rather like saying Ted Cruz is Cuban. There's a clash between ethnicity and "nationality" in many instances and English has to hyphenate to make clear the difference (and then can't stop with the hyphenating when it's not necessary). Russian, at least, has russkii for the ethnicity and rossiiskii for the citizenship, so when a fully Kazakh name is listed as being "Russian" you can reconstruct what kind of Russian it is. When it's a Ukrainian name like Ananenko, you have to look at the first name and then ponder whether it's Russified or not. So Ukrainians called Ondrei routinely went by Andrei, and Oleksy's often went by Alexei.
Esp. in the Russifying USSR, where if you were monolingual Ukrainian it was almost like being monolingual Spanish in the US, but if you spoke Russian fluently you could deny Ukrainianness and pass as Russian. Passing for Russian in the USSR was often like passing for white in the US (except that as a Ukrainian you were certainly better than Turkic peoples or Siberian folk).
malaise
(267,823 posts)They are heroes
lpbk2713
(42,696 posts)The world is deeply indebted to them and to Vasili Arkhipov.