Russia's Version of 'Chernobyl' Will ... Blame American Spies

Some of you have been avoiding HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, and I get it, even though it has all those indistinguishable actors from Game of Thrones in it. It’s a really hard show to watch, and as riveting as it is, I usually had to psych myself up for a few hours to watch each episode. But it was worth it, and there is a lot of humanity coursing through to prevent you from falling into complete despair (at least, once you get past that first episode or two). It’s a fascinating story that none of us really understood before, because the Soviet Union/Russia didn’t want us to understand. It digs beneath the Russian disinformation campaign the way only something made 40 years after the event really can.

Of course, Russia is not all that happy to have its warts out there for the world to see, even if Chernobyl also does elevate a few heroes. Russia wanted us to believe a few bumbling fools were responsible for Chernobyl, rather than expose its own systemic problems. Now that Chernoby is out there, Russia wants to make its own version, which is a a lot like having Donald Trump script a movie about his own inauguration.

Indeed, Russia’s version of Chernobyl, which is already in post-production, will lay the blame at the foot of … the CIA? From the Washington Post:

The Russian series apparently is part of this patriotic pushback. According to the Times, the production will be anchored in the premise that a CIA operative was at Chernobyl conducting sabotage. The series follows a group of KGB officials working to track down the infiltrator.

“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,” the director, Alexei Muradov, told the Times.

“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,” he wrote this week. “And this is the real reason they find fault with HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ series.”

Of course, their version is not rooted in reality, but I suspect our own President will buy into the Russian version of events anyway.

Speaking of which, Chernobyl came from creator Craig Mazin, who recall was college roommates with Ted Cruz, and who has spent the last several years completely shitting publicly all over Cruz. Kayleigh surfaced this tweet in Slack, which is Ben Shapiro and a bunch of conservative jackasses fawning all over Chernobyl while Ted Cruz just sits there looking blankly while smoking a cigar.

Okay, this is legitimately amazing. A bunch of conservatives sit around and talk about how much they like #ChernobylHBO. For the moment, put aside that they're missing the larger point.

Just note who has to sit there and listen to them do it.

https://t.co/kGB3KeMzf4

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) May 29, 2019