All I could gather about Khodemchuk

Khodemchuk was the first victim of the Chernobyl disaster, dying the moment the reactor exploded. He was never buried as his body -well, if there even was one after the explosion- was never found. In this post, I will write about his life and fortunately quick death, and share the verifiable facts I could find.

Valery Khodemchuk was born on 24/3/1951 in Krapyvnia, the youngest of four children. His mother, Anna, worked in a collective farm and his father, Ilya, was a soldier. After he was done with enlistment and returned home, he was missing a leg and battling PTSD, and soon died, when Khodemchuk was around a year and a half old. Throughout his childhood, he was a shy and quiet kid, but devoted to his family.

When he was of age, Khodemchuk enlisted in the army. Upon his honorable discharge, he was given a ticket to Pripyat by the komsomol. It was a town that he enjoyed as he could hunt in the nearby marshes and lived close to his mother. At first, he worked as a truck driver, but on 4/9/1973, he became a boiler operator at the Chernobyl NPP. During a lunch break, Khodemchuk and one of the canteen workers, Natalia, got to meet each other and became close. Once, he visited Natalia at her parents' home in the village of Kopachi, where he announced that he wanted to marry her, and her parents had no problem with that. Their wedding was on 22/4/1975. Soon, they had their first child, a daughter, Larysa, and four years later, a son, Oleg. They were a close family and Khodemchuk liked taking his son for drives on his car and always defended his daughter even if she'd misbehave. The family would often take trips down the nearby Pripyat river in a rented boat, go fishing, and pick mushrooms. Khodemchuk and Natalia were very close too. The family lived at apartment 39 of number 8, on Lesi Ukrainki street. 

When it came to his job, he was not a boiler operator for long, getting promoted to a senior boiler operator of the thermal and underground communications shop, and to a main circulation pump operator in Unit 2. Khodemchuk's portrait was hung in Pripyat board of honor and he had received an Order of the Badge of Honor for outstanding productivity and an Order of the Labor Glory, second class, for accomplishments in labor before 30. When Unit 4 was launched, Khodemchuk was again given a different job, senior operator of the seventh shift of main circulation pump operators. On his birthday in 1986, he celebrated it with his mother, as she was turning 70. At that time, Khodemchuk was pale, some of his hair was falling out, and his hands were clammy, which hints that he was possibly involved in another nuclear accident.

On 25/4/1986, Khodemchuk was getting ready for his shift while talking to Natalia about how difficult the shift would be with having to shut down the reactor. She was watching a romantic film at the time, and asked him if he had married her for love or for convenience, and he said of course, for love.

When he arrived to the plant and was changing into his uniform, Khodemchuk saw that it was dirty and was disgusted by it, going to get new clothes. A gas circuit engineer, Vladimir Semikopov, told him that it didn't matter since on their next shift, they would have new and clean clothes anyways. The two of them went to their workplace, the north pump hall, where Khodemchuk would replace Mikhail Rybochkin. He asked some questions and read the operational log and grew more and more alarmed when he discovered that the ECCS had been disconnected. Khodemchuk refused to accept the shift handover and even the reactor shop shift foreman was made aware of that. Rybochkin said that he could keep the shift until the morning but whatever desicion Khodemchuk was to make, he'd have to make it right then and there, as Rybochkin had to take the bus back to Pripyat and didn't want to lose it. Unusually hesitant and agitated, Khodemchuk accepted the shift. After a call from Valery Perevozchenko to see if he was working or not, Khodemchuk got ready for the shift, reluctantly, as he'd have to manage all eight circulation pumps. Along with him were the operators Viktor Degtyarenko, Gennady Rusanovsky, and on the south pump hall, Roman Levchuk and Alexander Odintsov. The last man later had a minute-long conversation with Boris Rogozhkin, Alexander Akimov and Alexander Orlenko about changes in the program and the crossed-out redundant steps of it. Until the test was complete, the pump operators were mostly waiting, checking equipment, checking for anything that would require maintenance, and making sure everything was in order. At 00:56, Khodemchuk was called from the control room. All eight main circulation pumps would have to be activated, four pumps would be down during the experiment, and the other four would be running on a seperate power supply for coolant after the reactor was shut down. At 1:03AM, pump 12 was activated and there was a problem with it which was relayed to the control room by Degtyarenko. Four minutes later, pump 22 was started up. The pump operators had to observe the pumps to make sure that there was nothing wrong with them. At 1:13AM, a phone call from the control room instructed the operators to stay on the landing at the right. Some of the operators began to move away from the pump hall. At 1:22 AM, the lower electrical feed for pump 22 had failed, and so Khodemchuk called, most likely, Odintsov, another operator, and made his way to the pump to recharge it. He was crouched down by it and would have heard the deafening sounds that filled the building, such as pipers rupturing and equipment failing, as a rumble turned to a roar, and explosion after explosion occured. At the time of the explosion, Khodemchuk was in the middle of the pump hall, and so he was unable to run away or seek shelter, leading to his death, being crushed instantly by debris.

Degtyarenko made his way out of the room, where he found Yuvchenko, whom he told to go rescue Rusanovsky. Yuvchenko only recognised him by his voice, and when he went to the other man, Rusanovsky told him to go rescue Khodemchuk, who was still in the pump hall. He only saw a hole and the night sky where the pump room used to be. Afterwards, Perevozchenko was tasked with ensuring the safety of all of his workers. All of them had been accounted for other than Khodemchuk, and he needed to be found, be it alive or dead. He searched all around the north pump hall. A group of workers, Alexander Yuvchenko, Alexander Agulov, Anatoly Dyatlov and Perevozchenko, as well as a dosimetrist that the other four dismissed, were the main people searching for him, trying to enter the rubble, calling out for him from the top of the destroyed hall. Possibly, he could have been in room 435, which was a reserve room for passing cables without bothering the workers. There was a hole through white Yuvchenko and Agulov tried to get through but were unable to. Perevozchenko used a wooden board to bridge across the debris and go to the door of the room. Even when the shifts changed, people were still searching for Khodemchuk. Due to the radiation levels worsening, the search was called off.

On the morning of the 26th, Khodemchuk was supposed to help his family sow potatoes in their garden. When he did not come, his mother grew more and more anxious as the time passed, since it was very unlike him to do such a thing. Meanwhile, Natalia was looking for him. Having dropped of her children at their aunt's apartment, she went to the hospital and then the morgue. Eventually, she got into contact with the power plant by a neighbor who called the director Viktor Brukhanov himself demanding for information about Khodemchuk, and two men came to her own apartment to tell her that Khodemchuk was missing, that the search had stopped, but if she wanted to, it could start again. She didn't want them to risk their lives, saying that her children would be orphans, and that there was no need for others to be as well. When asked if she needed help, she responded that she didn't, because there was no body to bury. Natalia didn't tell her children what had happened but Larysa sensed that something terrible had happened, and she hugged her father's coat and cried.

However, according to a coworker of Khodemchuk, Alexander Zelentsov, the firefighter Grigori Khmel while searching for any fires not yet extinguished managed to spot something white in the rubble, but when he returned with other firefighters to recover the body, the radiation levels were too intense for them and they had to rescue themselves. Therefore, there was a possibility that Khodemchuk could have survived the explosion and died trying to escape. Though it is very unlikely that such story is true, since neither Grigori Khmel nor his son Petr Khmel have said anything about that story, and Zelentsov has changed the story over time. And so, it is simply more of a myth, possibly told by Khmel to comfort Khodemchuk's coworkers.

Natalia was evacuated to Bolotnya, where Khodemchuk's half brother lived, and she told him how Khodemchuk was dead, and he made her promise that she wouldn't tell his mother about it. What was said to Anna was that Khodemchuk was in Moscow, along with the other critically ill patients. That gave her hope for her son's supposed recovery, while Natalia was battling through breakdowns. Anna only found out about the death of her son when Gorbachev announced his death on national television. Larysa had been told a week earlier, as she had been searching for him at Anna's house.

After the explosion, it was impossible to retrieve Khodemchuk's body, that is if there was any part of it that could be recognised as him. He received a ceremonial burial: instead of his body, a shirt of his was buried, the one he had taken off before work. In the Mitino cemetary, Khodemchuk has a grave. In the power plant, at the nearest spot where his body was presumed to be as that was the last room that he was seen alive in, a bronze plaque was erected, showing the sillouette of Khodemchuk and marked with Natalia's handprints. It was decorated with flowers and given cigarettes and spare candy. Among the first visitors were Anna and Natalia, as well as other Chernobyl engineers, and even operators from Three Mile Island. As the NPP was shut down, the memorial was updated, and most tours allow visitors to pay their respects. The text on the plaque translates as follows: They didn't leave their duty, bravely facing the fight. A monument to them should be erected in every heart. Khodemchuk Valery Illych. 24.03.1951. 26.04.1986. Senior Operator of Chernobyl NPP.

In 2009, on her father's birthday, Larysa had a grandson, which she saw as a sign from God. Natalia was gravely injured on 14/11/2025 by a Russian Shahed drone, which destroyed her apartment and left her covered in burns. She died a day later in the hospital. May both Khodemchuk and Natalia rest in peace.

Khodemchuk and Natalia.