SAGE International Australia ©, 9 April 2020 1 Chernobyl, Coronavirus, and the Art of the Authoritarian Cover-Up: Who is to Blame, and What is to be Done?1 By Dr. Jonathan Z. Ludwig Non-Resident Fellow Russia-Central Asia-US Member of the SIA Advisory Board & Teaching Assistant Professor of Russian at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA he HBO miniseries Chernobyl and the investigative history Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham both raise two important questions that have carried through the last two hundred years of Russian and Soviet history: Кто виноват? ‘Who is to blame?’ and Что делать? ‘What is to be done?’ In the case 1 I would like to thank Alicia Zalusky, (BA, Rice University), for initially suggesting a “paper examining Russia’s cultural anxieties of ‘who is to blame’ and ‘what is to be done’ in the context of the final episode of Chernobyl and how the episode proposes they be answered.” This paper is a continuation of that initial conversation, expanded in light of current events in another authoritarian regime. T