Russia Hates the Highest-Rated US TV Show in History, Launches 'Mini-Crusade'
Russia plans to produce its own TV version of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in response to the HBO series that is drawing rave reviews in America and criticism in Russia.
The Russian response to HBO’s dramatization of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in Ukraine series is sponsored by the network NTV, which the Russian natural gas firm Gazprom owns, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Russia’s culture ministry, which has chipped in about $460,000, will partially back the new series, according to The Reporter.
Russia’s efforts to have the last word come as “Chernobyl” currently sits atop the Internet Movie Database’s website as the top-rated TV show of all time with a 9.7 rating.
But according to Ilya Seplin, who wrote about the series in an Op-Ed in The Moscow Times, things are different in Russia, where “the pro-Kremlin media have launched a mini-crusade against it.”
Seplin said the Russian response to the HBO series will even have a Cold War theme of spy vs. spy.
He wrote that the Russian series will be “based on the premise that the CIA sent an agent to the Chernobyl zone to carry out acts of sabotage.”
Russia is making its own version of Chernobyl that will blame AMERICA and the CIA https://t.co/FmsErbD5lm
— Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) June 7, 2019
“As justification for the story, the film’s director, Alexei Muradov, cited fringe conspiracy theorists: ‘One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station,'” Seplin quoted Muradov as saying.
In the meantime, Russian media attacked the HBO series.
Daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda “raised suspicions that competitors of state-atomic center Rosatom were using the series to tarnish this country’s image as a nuclear power,” Seplin wrote.
Stanislav Natanzon of Rossia 24, a major Russian news channel, said “Chernobyl” was wrong to claim officials of the then-Soviet Union were reluctant to admit any mistakes “and that this reluctance led to terrible consequences,” Seplin wrote.
One commentator Seplin cited said it was not a question of what was shown, but who did the showing.
“If Anglo-Saxons film something about Russians, it definitely will not correspond to the truth,” Seplin quoted columnist Anatoly Vasserman as saying.
“Those people always get it wrong. ‘Nuff said.”
Just finished Chernobyl, what a great and interesting tv mini series about the Chernobyl disaster back in 1986.
Top rated tv show atm on IMDB.#Chernobyl #HBO pic.twitter.com/F03Q2kCl44— Chris (@acupofchris) June 7, 2019
In his Op-Ed, Seplin noted the Chernobyl disaster and those who were heroes in a tragedy the Kremlin downplayed for years have never received adequate treatment in the Russian media.
“The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down. And this is the real reason they find fault with HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ series,” he wrote.
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