Move over Oliver Stone — Chad Gracia’s award winning documentary The Russian Woodpecker is the ultimate conspiracy theory film. This hard-hitting movie makes Stone’s JFK look like a motion picture picnic in the park as it investigates whether the biggest manmade environmental “accident” in human history was, in fact, deliberately caused.
Photo by Artem Ryzhykov
Using archival footage, news clips, and original photographs and videos by cinematographer Artem Ryzhykov (including handheld undercover material secretly shot with GoPro cameras), The Russian Woodpecker takes us through the looking glass to Ukraine. The unlikely Alice of this Ukrainian “wondering-land” is Fedor Alexandrovich, a poet, painter, and theater artist who — according to the documentary — was irradiated by the April 26, 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl reactor when he was just four years old.
Alexandrovich, who now has a child of his own, has a grand obsession: What was really behind the Chernobyl atomic disaster, which spewed radiation across his native Ukraine? Gracia follows him on his quest to find out.
Throughout the film, the longhaired and bearded Alexandrovich appears to be a cross between the mad monk Rasputin and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In hot pursuit of the truth, he fearlessly — if not recklessly — enters the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone near the former nuclear reactor, followed by the intrepid cameraman Ryzhykov. There, in this eerie and irradiated no man’s land, Alexandrovich discovers the Duga radar installation in an off-limits military zone. The Duga lies at the heart of his conspiracy theory.
Artem Ryzhykov
This gigantic relic of the Cold War era was intended to serve as a missile early warning system. The Duga looks like an iron curtain or sorts, a pyramid-shaped network of gigantic radar antennas and towers that emitted radio frequencies between 1976 and 1989. These 10-hertz signals, which sounded like constant tapping, earned the Duga its nickname: the Russian Woodpecker. According to press notes, during the Cold War this radio signal was believed by some Americans to be “a Soviet mind control device.”
The iconoclastic Alexandrovich becomes convinced that the Duga is the secretive centerpiece of a byzantine plot to blow-up Chernobyl and then to cover it up. Alexandrovich’s far-fetched conspiracy theory is focused on a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik, identified in the film as Vasily Shamshin, who was appointed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR shortly before the Chernobyl meltdown. According to Alexandrovich, Shamshin had been closely involved with the Duga, which was a colossal failure. As portrayed in the film, this failure was due at least in part to the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, prevented the radar installation from penetrating North America.
With an inspection of the Duga pending, Shamshin was worried that the Duga would be seen as a 7 billion ruble – or roughly $7 billion – mistake, and would end his career in the upper echelon’s of the Communist Party. To take attention away from the Duga, the theory goes, he secretly arranged for the nuclear cataclysm to take place.
Alexandrovich believes that his Chernobyl theory is in keeping with a long line of abuses by Russia against Ukraine, including Stalin’s strategic use of mass famine in the 1930s and the current crisis pitting Ukraine against Moscow. The film depicts this adeptly, interweaving archival images of the famine with recent images of demonstrations at the Maidan, Kiev’s central square.
Throughout the film, Alexandrovich appears as a lone wolf crying in the wilderness, with claims based mostly on circumstantial evidence. He questions former Soviet officials, including radar specialists and unreconstructed Stalinists, who are recorded on undercover camera. One calls Alexandrovich’s conspiracy theory about the Chernobyl catastrophe “bullshit, malarkey, fantasies.” Another derides the hypothesis as “fairy tales” and the Ukrainian is warned, “there are things you shouldn’t blabber about.”
On the other hand, snipers shoot Ryzhykov, the videographer, during Alexandrovich’s investigations. And Alexandrovich claims the secret police threatened his family. Under the circumstances, one can’t help but wonder if he will have the nerve and courage to continue his crusade to unmask the potential cover-up.
In the end, the film leaves the viewer with many questions. Was the biggest manmade eco-accident actually a deliberate part of a nuclear conspiracy? Is Alexandrovich a paranoid conspiracy theorist, or is he a Woodward or Bernstein tracking down a story that makes Watergate pale in comparison?
Chad Gracia comes from a theater background and met Alexandrovich while he was a set designer for a Kiev play Gracia was also working on. Gracia’s motion picture directorial debut is auspicious — it contains stunning visuals and a compelling, cinematic journey to the heart of darkness. The Russian Woodpecker won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema-Documentary category and is a natural counterpart to other documentaries Mike Lerner has co-produced, including The Square, about the Egyptian Revolution, and especially Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, featuring the dissident female Russian rockers. Meanwhile, as Russian President Vladimir Putin flexes his military muscles in Syria, the current film ominously ends by noting that the Russian Woodpecker has returned to the airwaves and has been detected somewhere in the heart of Mother Russia.
In addition to Sundance, The Russian Woodpecker was screened at September’s Zurich Film Festival among several other film festivals. The documentary is opening in US theaters today at New York’s AMC Empire, and is also available online at iTunes, Amazon, and Vimeo. It will also be screened at Los Angeles’ Laemmle Music Hall beginning on October 30. For more information visit the film’s website.
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