I am from Minsk, Belarus, same as Ulana Khomyuk from the Chernobyl series. At the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe I was eleven, a fifth-grader at school. One day at the end of April, or it might be early May, I came back home after classes and saw my mother, who was a radiologist, talking on the phone to somebody very gravely. As soon as I opened the door with my key on a strap that we used to wear around necks, and stepped in, my mother asked me covering the telephone reciever with one hand if it was raining outside. I said it was drizzling a bit in the morning. She told me to immediately go and wash my hair, and so I did. Then she poured milk into a mug, added three drops of iodine and said that I had to drink that. I remember asking her if iodine was edible, and she just said that's what she was instructed to do by a friend. I drank it. Still my mum couldn't explain anything clearly, so I felt quite unaware of what was happening for quite a long time unti bits and pieces of what had happened started to unwrap after the collapse of the USSR. When I got older I read Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl/Chernobyl Prayer. It was a very hard and slow read as the stories told were horrifying. And now this series, four episodes of which I binge-watched yesterday, took me back to the eighties in the Soviet Belarus. I recognize everything in this half-docu, although I've never been to Pripyat. My mom is originally from a small town on the Dnieper - the mouth of the Pripyat river - in the Gomel region in the south of Belarus, and we used to visit it every year before the Chernobyl. Then we stopped, as we felt scared and cautious, and I went there again only when I was an adult. The series left me in tears. It all looks even more frightning than we could imagine. The course of events is being told quite clearly and accurately from what I've known. The actors look pretty Russian/Belarusian/Ukranian to me, and all the locations - from the regional hospitals and the nuclear plant interior to Minsk and Moscow administrative buildings and science institutions look very authentic and detectable. Ulana Khomyuk migh be a fictional character, but there was indeed such a character - Vassili Nesterenko, a Soviet and Belorusian physicist and a former director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (1977-1987) who informed the first secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus Nikolai Slunkov (whose BD is on April 26 by coincidence) that the dosimeters showed the elevated dose of ionizing radiation. Nesterenko also was one of the liquidators of the Chernobyl accident anc the aftermath - he threw liquid nitrogen containers from a helicopter on the burning reactor core. To do this he had to move into the middle of radioactive smoke. Despite the heavy radioactive contamination of the area, Vassili Nesterenko survived (he died in 2008). However, three out of the four passengers of his helicopter died from radioactive irradiation and contamination. And one more fact: the literal translation of Chernobyl (Chernaya Byl) is The Black True Tale.