This is John Batson, a conversation with Professor Juliana Pilon about a new memoir published posthumously by Alexei Navalny, who was murdered by the Putin forces in jail in 2024. Born 1976,

Navalny, sacrificed his life in order to stand up to the Soviet,

now Russian regime that practices deception, lying. Here we have a moment that Juliana describes in Navalny's life when he was 10 years old and his grandparents

lived close enough in paradise to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that failed.

And what happened in the five days afterwards and how it taught Navalny

that he lived in then-Sov Soviet Union, a nation of lies,

lies that did not change when Vladimir Putin became the absolute power in the Kremlin.

Here's Julianna Pillon on Navalny's memory of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

More of this tonight.

First, he describes this region.

It was beautiful.

His grandparents had a beautiful farm.

It was simply paradise for him.

And then the Chernobyl meltdown happened.

Five days later was going to be May Day.

And May Day is when everybody has to celebrate the Communist Party.

The question was, do we tell everyone to leave the area? Because right now,

there's radiation coming out that the sooner you leave, the better. And you may have been

able to save the people who were able to leave right away. Instead, nothing was said. This five days

after the explosion, the May Day Parade in Kiev nearby, so you're talking about a huge

part of Ukraine. And it, for propaganda purposes, the whole area was finally displaced until hundreds of thousands

died from radiation and afterward, his own parents, for example.

...