The Painting On Chernobyl’s Wall: While Your Father Is Killing You

There is no painting that accidentally entered the frame in the 3rd episode of HBO’s 5-part Chernobyl series. And this painting is held on screen long enough to be noticed. When I understood why, something inside me sank.

It was during the Kremlin scenes. The characters were talking, the system was denying, officials were lying to one another. But at that moment I saw a painting hanging on the wall, and the camera did not want to move away from it. A few seconds. A very long few seconds.

Ivan The Terrible And His Son Ivan On 16 November 1581, Ilya Repin, 1885

“3.6 roentgen.” “This is just the Cherenkov effect.” “The core didn’t explode.” “Tell me how an RBMK reactor explodes?” In the middle of all this denial, all these lies, and the system’s inability to accept its own catastrophe, the painting on the wall was called: Ivan The Terrible And His Son Ivan, 16 November 1581. Or by its more striking name: Ivan The Terrible Killing His Son. It is a work by Ilya Repin. And screenwriter Craig Mazin did not place that painting in that scene, on that wall, right in the middle of the frame for nothing.

First, I Go To Mythology

I have Cronus in mind. The lord of the Titans, the god who came to power by castrating his father, but then, fearing that one of his own children would do the same to him, swallowed every child born to him alive. Rubens painted this myth. So did Goya. The difference between the two tells me a lot.

In Rubens’ painting, the scene is almost noble. Even while Cronus, with a divine body, devours a blond, plump, almost sleepy baby, there is still a kind of dignity on him. Everything feels as if it is happening in that beautiful, balanced, sunlit world of the Renaissance.

Saturn Devouring A Son, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636-1638

When I look at Goya’s version, I feel like I am disturbing something. As if I have shone a light into a dark room and caught him. Goya’s “killer” is not even human anymore. An in-between form, an animal, a thing. The victim in his hands is not a newborn baby, but an adult human being, and his head is already gone. In the eyes of the creature hunting him, there is an indescribable mixture: savagery, shock, and maybe fear.

Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya, 1819-1823

Goya paints this image on the walls of his own house. He has lost his hearing, withdrawn into himself, and the free, secular, modern Spain he had hoped for never arrives. In its place comes a harsher monarchy. And slowly, in a bloody and horrifying way, young Spain was being devoured by Cronus. After painting these images on the walls of his house, Goya leaves Spain for Bordeaux and spends the rest of his life there.

And Then Repin Arrives

Years pass. Russia’s most reformist tsar, Alexander II, is assassinated, and a completely opposite man comes after him: his son, Alexander III. A man opposed to everything his father had done, someone who looked at the country with Medusa’s eyes. It is this Alexander III who bans Ilya Repin’s Ivan The Terrible Killing His Son. The reason is clear: a direct attack on monarchical principles.

When I learned the background of the painting, I felt even more suffocated. Repin thinks through this painting within the bloody atmosphere of 1881: political violence, assassinations, executions, and the blood created by power. The painting is not only a father-son murder. It is a portrait of obeying power, and then feeling the conscience of the blood that power has created.

So What Did Ivan The Terrible Really Do?

According to the common historical account, the story goes back to 1581. Ivan accuses his son’s pregnant wife of “immorality” because of the way she is dressed. He beats her. His daughter-in-law miscarries, and his grandchild dies before being born. His son Ivan confronts his father to demand an explanation. The argument grows so much that Ivan the Terrible strikes his son on the head with the staff-spear in his hand. The son dies from this blow four days later.

Ivan suddenly takes his son into his arms. He realizes what he has done. He asks God for forgiveness. God does not answer. He has killed his own son.

The eyes of Ivan in Repin’s painting are just like Goya’s Saturn: open, frightened, shocked. Covered in blood.

And Now Chernobyl

I return to that scene in the series. The painting hanging on the wall of the Kremlin stays in the frame for a few seconds. And I think Mazin is telling us this: we are watching the story of people who believed in their system, in the father-state, in the power of the “peaceful atom.”

The people of Pripyat lived thinking that atoms were their friends. Until the morning of April 26, 1986. From that morning on, they slowly began to be killed by their father.

While sleeping in the warmth of cheap, clean, efficient nuclear energy, one day you wake up in pain that morphine cannot stop. Your skin disappears. Your organs disappear. Everything is blood and ruin. Because your intestines collapse, everything is covered in filth.

For anyone who wants to read another place where the things the modern world markets as “light,” “progress,” and “energy” turn into a disaster inside the human body, The Radium Girls: American Workers Who Died Making Glowing Watch Dials >> is one of the most painful examples of this dark line.

And your father denies it.

For anyone who wants to see a more personal and colder face of the father-son tragedy in Soviet history, Stalin’s Son Captured by the Nazis: The Tragic Story of Yakov Dzhugashvili >> opens another door into the same dark family metaphor.

While Your Father Is Killing You

Chernobyl told me, in a few seconds, about Rubens, Goya, Repin, and the myth of Cronus. They are all versions of the same story: power devours its own child in order to protect itself.

And every time, the same image remains behind. A father with open, shocked, blood-covered eyes.