The real Mikhail Shadov did not deserve this portrayal. He was working since he was 15 in the coal mines (mostly - mechanical department), by the age of 22 he became so successful in that field - he got promoted to management. By 1986 he was 59 years old (so - horrible miscast ;) ). All the miners had utmost respect for him. He was an inspirational figure, not to mention - he risked his own health (59 YEARS OLD) during the Chernobyl operation ON THE SPOT (and - he never had any machine gun convoy - he didn't need AK 47 to talk to the miners). Since then he've become one of the most well-respected geologists in Russia. The real miners did not deserve that portrayal: they were all ex-soldiers with strict discipline and iron will, not to mention - moral compass so strong - it makes Superman look like a wussy. They had an "I hate to do that, but if I refuse - I won't be able to live with myself" attitude. And they were true heroes. And to see such a well-executed TV-show treating all of them like dirt is just appauling.
I thought the miners came across as brilliant men in the HBO series. They've portrayed them like the British working class to make them relatable. Speaking as a British person myself, they've captured the spirit of the working man doing the shittiest jobs for the higher ups marvellously.
I think it's a perfect description of the nVidiaTM ExperienceTM buying a GPU from them. This joke is literally what plays in my mind when I think about Ampere and Lovelace. Apple too, only instead of burning all that fuel and making all that noise it dies from a loose cable and you have to pay $2500 to throw it in a landfill and replace it with something made by Uighur child slaves.
It's a great metaphor for pretty much most products of soviet industry: crude, wasteful in terms of required quantity of material and fuel, disastrous for the environment, and not doing a very good job of what it's supposed to do.
@@NAANsoft 5.45mm variant with a few changes. The AK47 actually wasn't in service for too long, and was replaced by the AKM. They then switched from 7.62x39 to 5.45
In this scene here, they are all AKM’s (7.62x39mm) just fitted with the Muzzle Brake from the AK-74 to make them look like if they are AK-74’s. Which in reality during the 1980’s and the Chernobyl incident, they should all be using the AK-74 instead. Which is not common for AKM’s to normally have an AK-74 muzzle brake on, but it is possible and you can attach them. Besides… in a funny sense you can kinda call that a foreshadowing to the AK-103 years later, which is the AK-74M chambered in 7.62 instead of 5.45x39mm.
@@Sen-115DK Not all Russians would be rearmed to AK-74 in 1986. Especially not garrison soldiers we see here also dressed in older M68 uniforms. AKMs were rather common sight even in Chechen war. AND today in Ukraine war Russians still issue them
Do you think it's the mines that end up making them tough or in order to survive in that type of work you need to be tough right off the bat? I've always wondered. Like in Donestk, where the miners became one of the best army units
@@stanleyqc2244 the men were tough right off the bat. Then the mines take that tough man, and make him even tougher. Put some strong sharp men together, and they sharpen each other even further like pieces of iron being rubbed together.
God bless the coal miners of Chernobyl they saved millions and millions of white people in the weeks after Chernobyl god bless the coal mines from chenobyl and remember white lives matter
Jon Jonas why are you replying to your own comments as well as liking them? Is it because your not getting any attention? Lol you internet troll I can see you all from miles away! 👀 👀
Facts. The Russian miners got the melted reactor core under control by telling it that it did not have enough gamma for all of them. Kill as many as you can, and the ones that are left will beat the living isotopes out of you. Seriously though, these were brave, selfless men.
I love how he turns to the old fella at 2:53 every construction site has one of these old blokes. he might not be in charge but you respect him like he is.
The symbolism of each miner leaving a literal black mark on the minister just kills me. Every mark, he knows, represents someone he just sent to their death. Absolute genius. Perfect scene.
@@Rhino1188 well to be fair most were gonna die from lung cancer anyway... But most survived. Very few liquidators died within a decade of the accident.
i hadnt realize that. that does make it perfect. i always thought the miners were just being petty just for a laugh because it obvious they dont respect the government agents or the military. so they patted the suit as one last show of defiance. ya know, "okay, we'll go but not because you told us to".
may be he was the minister of some republic? You know they were a federation so each republic had their own governing body... I am not sure they represent the same official ...
I know. It's so dramatic but pretty much true, had they not done the damage control they did. There's a great line where someone says "you are dealing with something that has occurred on this planet before."
It's ironic how dumb the Soviet government was with how they mishandled it though. The robot from Germany being the biggest example. They wasted MONTHS waiting for that piece of crap to show up and die 3 seconds after being turned on. During that time everyone there was sitting around getting radiation exposure that likely lead to a great deal of suffering and death down the road. All because the Soviets were afraid of "looking weak". When the stakes are GLOBAL APOCALYPSE level, no one gives a crap about how you look in the newspaper headlines.
The acting is wonderful; the hesitation and pity in the minister's eyes because he knew the miners are about to be sent to their deaths, the understanding in the miners eyes when the minister finally told them the severity of the situation, and the mutual and muted respect and sadness in both the minister and miners eyes when they were patting him.
The miners you can tell are the types of men who would say "We'll get it done, because we don't want our sons and daughters to have to deal with it." Men who put the future of others ahead of themselves. Even if they had charcoal all over themselves, there's not a one of them I wouldn't want to shake hands with out of respect and gratitude for what they did.
Except he said there were 45 guys with him and there were two soldiers with AK-47s guarding the minister. So assuming they didn't have even a single extra magazine except those in their rifles they had 60 bullets in total, which as a matter of fact is more than the 45 required. Don't say I must be fun at parties, I don't know I've never been to one.
@@Skoogplay125 your comment made me laugh, I mean that sincerely, it was witty. Your math is correct, but it is based on a false premise that the men would stand still and be shot. The reality is they would spread out and run at the soldiers from all directions. They might be able to kill five, maybe ten men before being tackled by a mob. They simply would not be able to do one shot one kill, they would pump most of their bullets into the first 5 to 10 men, then the rest would be upon them.
@@Skoogplay125 Guards who are there for show only rarely have magazines fully loaded you dunce. The miners knew that. Plus they were clearly pussies, and probably would have missed 90% of the time. They would have been skinned alive if they were dumb enough to resort to force.
@@chujiyo it mean that soviet machine consume tons of resources but does not work as intended. This allegory on the Soviet system Another soviet joke, just 4 word: Bought it. Brought. Turned on. Does not work.
Variations of that joke were quite common in Russia. Q: What makes a lot of noise, scratches the floor and is terribly annoying? A: A Soviet machine that is designed to do neither.
Send those white tough coal miners to America to guard the American border with Mexico before America turns into Mexico than god I live in England there isn't no Mexicans here our border is just water look at American right next to that idoit Mexico America is going to turn into Mexico soon
@@soapmctavish8821 Thank fucking God no one comes to Russia because everyone thinks it's some kind of a shit hole (Which it's not). Sometimes propaganda is good.
Note they're not turning him down or defying him. They just want to know. They want it explained to them what they're going to die for. And that's fair.
@Jimmy Rustling A complete lie you say? Oh, you mean just like all the lies that came to make this depiction? The depiction of how the Soviet Union attempted to cover up the world's deadliest nuclear disaster that will continue to cause issues on this planet for the next 510,000 years? Yeah.... complete lie. Entertainment is entitled to use an artistic license. The idea of this scene was to depict the way the Soviet way of life was, and how people felt - being under the boot of The Party.
cant agree more. those men and their names should be a lesson in school. just to show future generations what happened when you fuck around with things we are not fully understand.
@@peaveyst7 How can you understand something if you don't fuck around with it first anyway? Chernobyl was bad but something like it would have happened eventually.
God bless the coal miner of chenobyl these white men saved millions and millions of white lives in the weeks following Chernobyl they are the real meaning of white lives matter
There are many interviews with those miners. They say that nobody forced them to go. On the contrary, they tell that the minister said that nobody needed to go if he didn't want. In this scene everything is the opposite.
It’s creative license to show the toughness and bravery of the miners. Whether they were given orders or went entirely voluntarily, I think the point comes across fine in this scene. It’s made fairly clear by the supervisor that he and his man are not going anywhere unless told why, even with AK-47s pointed at them. After being leveled with, they go out of a sense of duty and a sense of what’s right and necessary.
@@faustosar6151 They didn't really need to: Soviet propaganda was quite effective, and most Soviet citizens didn't really become cynical and disillusioned until after the Chernobyl disaster--and the disastrous war in Afghanistan.
@@BoneistJ Actually, plenty of people in the gulags still considered themselves loyal communists and believed that Stalin had not ordered their arrest, though they also believed that everyone else in the gulag was a traitor. Not everybody, but a lot of them.
Saddest part about the miners is that the thing they were risking their lives to prevent, never ended up happening. It was a precaution to remove the sand under the reactor and replace it with cooling pipes to be filled with liquid nitrogen. They worked diligently and completed their job. But the “burn through” everyone feared never occurred. They had no choice in the end. Hero’s, every last one.
Just because the contingency didn't have to be used doesn't mean it wasn't necessary. With the improbable happening all the way down the line you can't leave a threat like that unresolved. It might have been necessary, so, it was absolutely necessary. Until the threat of a breakthrough was mathematically eliminated it was wise to take every precaution.
You say that like they did it for nothing. If there was even a tiny chance it could've happened, then it needed to be prevented. If they hadn't dug the tunnel and it HAD happened, it would be far far FAR worse than them digging it and not necessarily needing it. That's why they were heroes. Whether it was not needed or whether it was, they worked and sacrificed so much of themselves to prevent things from getting so much worse.
Men need to be molded into this through difficult times and understanding. Today? Men are not necessarily men, mostly boys. They rich easy lives, play video games, rarely socialize and are generally thin/awkward. But when the time comes, and it will, men will harden again. Times of peace bring weakness, weakness brings war, war breeds the strong, the strong bring peace.. peace breeds the weak.... etc.
2:00 Actually Unions in the Soviet Union were so strong that they are almost required to talk to you like that. Also all the miners signed up to do this voluntarily.
Asking men to risk their lives is one thing, asking them to sacrifice their lives is another. These dudes may have been willing to roll the dice when mining coal, but until informed that it was for the greater good, they were more than willing to swing a pick axe into a soldier's face when told to mine in cherobyl. Absolute badasses.
Indeed, and you can tell they had a full grasp of the situation and likely the consequences too. Notice the second he mentions Chernobyl, the miner's face changes to "Oh crap". They KNEW what they were going into, but just like they know mining coal is necessary to keep their cities powered, so to is going to Chernobyl to keep their families and country safe.
The scene seemed to suggest the soldiers would shoot the men if they refused. Maybe in 1936, but not in 1986. The Soviet Union was still a grim place to live but not the terror state it was under Stalin. At least the miners seemed to counter this idea by talking back to the soldiers and manhandling the official, both things that would have gotten you shot during Stalin's reign.
Maybe tear gas and beatings at demonstrations. But opening fire? Not that I have read about, unless it was an actual threat to the government. Certainly nothing would have happened when a bunch of people were just arguing.
@@richerthanyou5434 There's a huge difference between demonstrations and a group of 50 workers. Also they needed those men, they weren't going to shoot them.
@@partytor11 not all of them for sure. But dealing with stubborn bunch of workers while sending them to their death no less, means they'd have the pinch a hole in one or two of these guys. Desperate time calls for desperate measures. Too bad they underestimated the miners' tenacities.
You heard what the head guy said, those two don't have enough bullets for all of them and that's assuming they land every shot and their gun doesn't jam.
I love the portrayal of these guys. Miners are pretty much the same anywhere in the world. They work like hell, and haven't got time for a bunch of bullshit. These guys are a good representation of how most Soviet citizens were starting to feel about their government in the 1980s..
Michael Colgan, who is playing Mikhail Shchadov here also played Leonid Toptunov in the 2006 BBC docu-drama on Chernobyl "Surviving Disaster". I nice link between the two.
Miners were the heartbeat of countries and critical labor necessity during the first two world wars. You can say they outranked their leaders as the performed a critical task not too many others wanted to do, or be trained in. This fictional scene pretty much sums up their adroit approach to a request from bureaucracy.
This is so Russian scene. Looking like a cattles and badasses who doesn`t care about anything but still doing everything to save others. Even give their lifes for this. Telling you this as a Russian.
Yes you can tell both sides, Shadov and the miners, actually highly respect each other, but each side has to assert themselves before they can get down to real talk, so they posture for a bit. That done, Shadov levels with them and then they volunteer for the mission.
My favorite guy is the one who taps the minister at 3:21. The way he optimistically pats his hand on his shoulder just gives the impression that he’s saying “yea, I’m probably gonna die horribly, buts it’s on you chum!”
Fun fact: Michael Colgan has appeared in two separate depictions of the Chernobyl Disaster. The first being BBC's Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster from 2006 in which he appears as Leonid Toptunov, senior reactor control chief engineer of Reactor 4. The second was HBO's 2019 mini-series Chernobyl in which he depicts Mikhail Shchadov, Soviet Minister of Coal Industry.
Imagine being told that after years of ruining your body working in a mine, now you're being sent to dig a hole underneath a reactor undergoing core meltdown. I wonder what the reward the soviet union gave them was, if there was one at all.
I guess so many soviet ministers were out of place dumb, that it would be confusing to show a coal minister who knows what hes doing (the soviet union in all its stupid glory was so complex, that nobody outside it could understand all the weird exeptions to exeptions to special circumstances). The real Shadov was an man with experience and wasn't afraid to talk to the miners. But he was an exeption, there were far more taxi drivers turned into science academy party overlookers and math teachers going to potato farms as party officials - a clusterfuck that sometimes did work out great, but oftentimes turned into a lying, thieving, immoral two faced circus. I guess they decided to show the usual turnout instead of the actual exeptional truth.
Marks of coal on the communists suit represents each one of miners that had been sent to death. Perfect scene that shows USSR's attitude towards people
I love seeing Jeor Mormont from Game of thrones, anyone else notice all the GoT actors? I hope that most miners survived, they seemed to care not for their lives but for getting dangerous work done at any cost.
Despite some historical facts of this scene, and these miners overall, I think this scene was golden at least for me. This showed them as tough men, men with iron will who will do what ever is needed to be done. Just because it needs to be done. Nothing less, nothing more. They are men, who has job to do. And they did it no matter what. Remarkable people.. truely.
Russians are a specially tough people. Russian miners...well...I've been reading that the reactor was afraid to be exposed to the miners...and Norris is a meme wannabe near these guys. One thing is for sure, this scene and the one they went naked, made the top5 of the series best moments. No possible way to thank all these real life heroes for saving us of a much bigger environmental disaster. We own them each glass of water, piece of food and wildlife we enjoy everyday.
I love how the crew chief looks to what seems to be his mentor with the look “this is bad, I think we have to go” and getting the nod in return. Those were some very inspiring brave men. Real men. They helped save the world
Am I the only one who at first thought that the guy playing the minister of coal was Ben Mendelsohn? (He is actually Michael Colgan but he looks so much like Mendelsohn)
