I didn't much care for the Chernobyl miniseries when it first aired: from Craig Mazin's fascination with the "deep russian soul"1 to which both the catastrophe of Chernobyl and the heroic efforts to clean it up are attributed, to the usage of Voices Of Chernobyl in multiple places as told-by-camera fact (when it is in fact somewhat mythologized oral history). The DPs, costume designers, location scouts and so on have clearly spent a lot of research time to make this show look and feel believable. However, this kind of attention to details is not even remotely borne out by the script, which might as well have stepped out of an 1980 Hollywood blockbuster about the no-good Russkies.
The most obvious question about the entire show is "who is this for?". It would fit right at home in the middle of the Cold War, as multiple times the actors practically turn towards the camera to explain the evils of communism. However, with no living communist countries remaining, it feels like it's shooting its ideological shot toward a mysterious target. Who is that target? Western lefties? The Chinese Communist Party? Red pensioners in the former eastern bloc feeling nostalgic for the good old days? The extremely unspecific "corruption" and "lies" in America in the age of Trump? God only knows.
The thing that I noticed a lot more on rewatch in this show is that all the characters in it have an alphabetized list of Soviet sins, which they will reference liberally - deportations, Holodomor, gatekeeping Jewish scientists, show trials, et cetera. The show asks us "what is the cost of lies?", with the answer being "ecological catastrophe"2. And with that question, i think, it misunderstands how repressive governments (including the USSR and the current Russian Federation) work in practice.
Thing is, if you find an actual person in a dictatorship that's propping up the regime, and you asked them "do you feel guilty for the murders, the war crimes, the oppression of marginalized groups that you enabled?" they would not answer "i am complicit but i like it", they would say "none of these things happen like you say they did, and if they did, the victims deserved it". In real life, nobody would name-check the Holodomor or reference anti-jewish firings in conversation - because practically nobody thought or talked that way before Glasnost and the USSR's demise. This observation is stupidly obvious when I type it out, but i think it needs to be said - agents of the regime are not consciously lying, and they are not consciously thinking of themselves as Bad Guys! They are correcting their vision of reality to what conforms to their pre-existing beliefs. They are captured by the same ideological framework that they advocate for. Any change in beliefs and behavior after that is going to be very long and slow, if it happens at all.
Eventually, you could say that this inflexible vision of reality was the downfall of the Soviet secret police - they observed and tried to put a stop to what they believed to be threats (a lot of it including rock music and dance parties), but not the actual threats facing the state, leaving them blindsided to the simultaneous rise of nationalist movements following a plummet in standards of living. What an unaffected observer would take notice of, they would simply consider an outlier because it didn't fit into their picture of the world.
This process is by no means soviet or russian - a lot of history's huge changes seemed impossible until they suddenly became inevitable. May we see this turn for fossil fuels, for warmongering empires, and for the capitalist mode of production, and may we bring it into being.
Annotations
1: if someone is trying to tell you about the "deep russian soul that knows only suffering", they are either a rube or they are trying to use you up for cannon fodder. as an example: see all the current pro-war propaganda cluttering Russian television and internet. Come to the army and die for the homeland like a true Russian! It's what your mother birthed you to do!
Also: lots of characters in the show are Ukrainian, Georgian, Jewish, Belarusian, and so on! Please retire the idea of soviet and russian citizens as a homogenous mass of people.
2: I think it also misattributes the disaster in Chernobyl to lies, coverups and cost-cutting - the real reason for it was a lot more complicated, mostly stemming from the unbelievably lax soviet nuclear safety culture, unchecked faults in the reactor design and instrumentation, and unpredictable water pump behavior. A containment building or enabled automatic safeties wouldn't help matters, and it's not clear that knowledge of the positive scram effect would help the staff much. The tinpot dictator behavior among the senior NPP staff is also pretty much dramatic license.