I just finished watching the first part of the Chernobyl mini-series on HBO. In the movie, there's a scene where they show people were spectating the explosion, dancing in the fallout, picking up pieces of radiated materials, etc. They show that many people did not see it as dangerous at all. I could not believe that in the mid 80s (a good ~40 years after the atomic bomb), it wouldn't be well known that this is a dangerous situation and that radiation is destructive to every living thing around it. Especially since nukes were a huge danger to both sides of the cold war... I don't know this myself but I imagine that the Soviets would have some sort of educational material about what to do if an American nuke hit (like we had for theirs). Did they think radiation from a power plant was fine but radiation from an American nuke would be dangerous?
There was a lot in the movie about the Soviets wanting to cover up the disaster. But did they also downplay how dangerous radiation is beforehand, to the engineers working there and the people living in town? Even many of the engineers in the movie seemed surprised by how destructive it was.
Is this due to them genuinely not knowing better/lacking the education, or was there a purposeful effort to mislead people on the potential dangers of living near/working with radiation? Or were people actually aware and this is in the movie for drama?
The people of the Soviet Union generally knew radiation was bad for you and that a nuclear meltdown was not good. This wasn't the issue.
The problem was, for the initial days after the accident, many of those in the Soviet hierarchy refused to believe it was as bad as it actually was. Even some of the people who went there and saw it themselves — their disbelief was so potent that they did things that in retrospect we would see as totally insane, like kick the graphite they saw out of the way, not accepting that it was highly radioactive and part of the reactor core.
In general the amount of systematic disbelief — a desire for it not to be true — seems to have had a strong grip on the people involved with the initial accident. It is an interesting thing to ask why this is. Some of it was genuine uncertainty about what was happening or had happened — it was a chaotic situation and hard to make sense of. Much of the radiation detection equipment did not go up to high levels and so was "maxed out" at levels that seemed like a problem but not too bad... but the actual levels were much higher than they could show. And, perhaps ultimately, the Soviet bureaucracy was an issue: a failure on this magnitude would mean not only the end of careers, but probably prison. Many of these people seemed to just be in denial about the reality for the reason that they really didn't want to believe it.
The people who performed best at Chernobyl were the ones who were specifically trained for nuclear fallout — the Civil Defense corps. They understood how to measure the radiation effectively and make sense of it, and what needed to be done as a consequence. They weren't always listened to, however; the Soviet bureaucracy did not put them at the head of the operation.
One of the things about accidents and large-scale disasters that is difficult to capture in retrospect is the amount of uncertainty that always surrounds them. Even the people at Hiroshima had a very hard time coming to grips with the idea that the entire city was destroyed, that it was one bomb that did it, etc. At Chernobyl there seems to have been similar levels of confusion, mixed with a desire not to believe, mixed with inadequate procedures and instrumentation that were themselves part of a culture that refused to believe that such a thing could be possible (even though the designers of the reactor knew that this was a possibility). It is an interesting case study in the dangerous intersections of risky technologies with pathological organizations. One can have an organization that is totally deluded at some level (the recent documentary on Theranos is an interesting case-study in that), but eventually the rubber hits the road and reality comes whooshing in again, to disastrous effect.
For a really good account of the Chernobyl accident and esp. this issue of figuring out what was going on, see esp. Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, which goes much deeper into the bureaucratic response and human factors than any other book I've read on it (most focus on the technical aspects, which are important, but not the whole story).