Andrei Glukhov

Andrei Glukhov appears among the men sent to dig beneath the burning reactor, a political officer whose job is to keep the miners working under impossible conditions. He is blunt, unsentimental, and impatient with fear or hesitation, treating the crisis as a problem of discipline and manpower rather than of dread.

Ferns plays him without a flicker of sympathy for the audience's comfort, which is exactly right: Glukhov is the state's voice made flesh, indifferent to the men's suffering because indifference is the job. In a series built on the cost of lies, he's a small, chilling reminder of how easily cruelty passes for competence.