While reading the portion of Alexievich’s book for class, I found myself returning to the question we discussed when reading Shalamov’s short stories: which side is nature on? Is it colluding with the “enemy” or whoever is bringing the most pain to a large group of people? Or is it siding with the victim? In “A Child’s Drawings,” Shalamov accuses nature, “Nature in the north is not impersonal or indifferent; it is in conspiracy with those who sent us here” (Shalamov, 136). In this work, Shalamov reveals the cruelties of this northern environment and of the Soviet government in subjecting even an innocent child to these horrors to the point where this cruel corner of the world was all he knew: “The child saw nothing, remembered nothing but the yellow houses, barbed wire, guard towers, German shepherds, guards with submachine guns, and a blue, blue sky” (Shalmov, 138).

Alexievich presents a variety of different views, many of which also express a sense of betrayal towards nature and humanity in the aftermath of the disaster. Simple acts of sustenance were suddenly dangerous: “We’d always lived off our potatoes, and then suddenly—we’re not allowed to!…They advised us to work in our gardens in masks and rubber gloves” (Alexievich, 26). In this case, it seemed that nature and the government were colluding to deprive citizens of their food, nourishment, and homes. One person recalls, “The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there’d be a soldier to make sure that when she was done milking, she poured the mild out on the ground…The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them very quietly, but in fact they had to be buried” (Alexievich, 37). Now the soldiers are enforcing the new order, despite the fact that it is the radiation in the ground and animals that would harm these people. Although they are only trying to help, and keep the populace healthy to a degree, it nonetheless appears that nature and the soldiers are conspiring to spread hunger and attack the populace. The situations in the two authors’ works originate under very different conditions, as Shalamov describes an purposefully derived method of imprisonment and Chernobyl was an accident; yet the parallels indicate a distrust of the government and the truly confused and disastrous times for a large swathe of the Russian population.