[May 3, 1986: A Party official and two soldiers arrive at a coal mine in Tula, Russian SFSR]
Who's in charge here?
I'm the crew chief.
I am Shchadov, Minister of Coal Industries.
We know who you are.
How many men do you have?
On this shift, 45 here, a hundred in total.
I need all one hundred men to gather their equipment and get on the trucks.
[smirking] Do you? To where?
That's classified.
Come on, then. Start shooting. You haven't got enough bullets for all of us. Kill as many as you can. Whoever's left, they'll beat the living piss out of each of you.
You can't talk to us like that!
Shut the fuck up! This is Tula. This is our mine. We don't leave unless we know why.
You're going to Chernobyl. Do you know what's happened there?
[somewhat less confident] We dig up coal, not bodies.
The reactor fuel is going to sink into the ground and poison the water from Kiev to the Black Sea. All of it. Forever, they say. They want you to stop that from happening.
And how are we supposed to do that?
They didn't tell me, because I don't need to know. Do you need to know, or have you heard enough?
[Glukhov stares at him for a moment, then walks up and pats him on the shoulder with his sooty hands before walking to the trucks. The other miners do likewise, dirtying up his clean suit and his face]
Now you look like the Minister of Coal.
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