As I was finishing Estee’s sixth birthday party and settling into a quiet spring afternoon, I realized my mind had gone somewhere else entirely.
April 26, 1986. 40 yrs ago this week. Back to Chernobyl.
For many, it is a tragedy depicted in HBO show, where they came to understand the full scale of what happened.
For me, it was not something to watch.
It happened on a Saturday. I was 11 years old, growing up in Belarus. That kid in the classroom on Monday morning.
And even over the next several months, without full information, you could feel it. Something had shifted.
At that age, you don’t understand systems. You understand signals.
The quiet.
The hesitation.
What isn’t being said.
My parents knew more than most. A friend from their school days worked at the physics institute and had seen the radiation readings spike. So while the official channels stayed quiet, a few families understood, quietly and privately, that something was very wrong.
They did what they could within a system that did not allow dissent. It came through in small things. Where we couldn’t play. What we couldn’t eat. The iodine pill.
Only later did I understand what they had known, and what they were doing. At the time, I just felt the fear in their eyes. Never spoken. Only translated.
It took years to understand this was not just an accident. It was a systemic failure of incentives, of communication, of leadership. A failure to act when action was still possible. A failure to tell the truth when truth mattered most.
The reactor exploded on April 26th. Officials waited 36 hours to begin evacuating Pripyat. 5 days later, they held the May Day parades on schedule.
I remember the heavy rain that came after. Only later did we learn they were seeding the clouds, forcing the radiation down before it could reach Moscow. Belarus absorbed roughly 70% of the fallout. We were under that rain. We didn’t know.
That is what stays with me. Not the scale of the disaster, but the gap. Between what was known and what was said. Between what could have been done and what was chosen instead.
Leadership gets described as vision, strategy, direction. But the real test is simpler, and harder. It is accountability.
Do you act on what you know, when it would be easier not to?
Do you own the decision, or let it diffuse into the system around you?
Systems don’t fail all at once. They fail in increments. In delayed decisions. In softened truths. In choosing what is easier over what is right. What they lose first is not control. It is trust. And once that goes, everything else follows.
I didn’t have the language for it at 11. I do now. That experience shaped the person I became. How I lead. How I treat the people around me. And how I am raising my daughter. I have learned, over the years, that most of life lives in shades of grey. But I have also learned, clearly and without apology, the difference between right and wrong.
And it is something I carry into every room I walk into.