All I could gather about Yuvchenko
Yuvchenko is not seen as often as others connected to the Chernobyl disaster, however has given many interviews about the night and has been mentioned in multiple books about the disaster. It is a pity that he does not appear more often in Chernobyl related media. This post contains everything I could find about him.
Alexander Yuvchenko was born on 25/10/1961 and grew up in Tiraspol of Moldova. At thirteen, he was one of the first members of the city's rowing club and three years later, his team won second place in the All-Union Youth Competition, where teams from the whole Soviet Union competed, and he became the junior league champion in Moldova. He was also very talented in physics and math and dreamed of a futuristic job at a nuclear power plant. Even though he showed great promise as a rower and could have pursued the sport he loved so much, against the objections of his trainer, he chose to go to university. Yuvchenko majored in nuclear physics in Odessa. While still in Tiraspol, he also met his future wife, Natalia, with whom he was in the same class at school, who also studied in university in Odessa, she majored in Russian philology. Years later, after the two of them dated on and off, they married in August of 1982 and a year later they had a son.
Current day Tiraspol.
When Yuvchenko graduated in 1983, he decided to work at Chernobyl since it was the most prestigious nuclear power plant in the country, he had been there for his internship, and married couples would be allocated an apartment soon after moving to Pripyat. For a year, he lived in a dormitory until him and his family were given an apartment in Stroiteley Prospekt in 1984. Natalia ended up teaching Russian language and literature and was a teacher to a fourth-grade class.
When Yuvchenko was twenty four, he was the deputy secretary of the plant's komsomol. When he had free time, he enjoyed playing ice hockey with his friends from the power plant. He loved his job at the plant and had been promoted from circulation pump operator to senior mechanical engineer. He was also offered the full-time job of first secretary of the city's komsomol, which he refused even if they insisted as it meant that he'd lose his power plant job. He managed to keep his job. Eventually, him and his wife began thinking about another child. However, in the second half of April of 1986, their son fell ill and even if Natalia took time off work to care for him, he did not get any better. When she returned to work, by the time she left, Yuvchenko would have come back from the plant, and the kid was his responsibility. On the 25th of the month, Natalia was watching TV and Yuvchenko was strangely restless after not having slept in twenty four hours, and when he was drinking coffee before work, he asked her to join him and keep him company. At work, he expected a quiet night, as his only duty would be to oversee the reactor's cooling. Perevozchenko had told Yuvchenko and his coworker Agulov to go paint something and the two of them stopped for a cigarette in Yuvchenko's office before going to the reactor hall to get paint.
When the explosion happened, Yuvchenko heard a thud and then the explosion, and he described that the one meter thick concrete walls moved like rubber and that a shockwave blew away the door, that there was darkness because the lights failed, that steam was blown inside the room, that there was dust everywhere and a horrible hissing noise, and he believed that either something very heavy had fallen or war had begun. He hid somewhere safe and attempted to contact the control room but failed, and then was told to bring stretchers. After grabbing a stretcher, he came across a man who was horribly burnt from steam and whose face was bloodied and uniform -originally white- had turned black. The man was in shock and only when he spoke did Yuvchenko understand that it was his friend, Viktor Degtyarenko, telling him that he was near the pumps and another operator had stayed behind and that Yuvchenko had to go help him. The operator nearby, Gennady Rusanovsky, was also in a similar state and shivering for shock but waved Yuvchenko away and told him to look for Khodemchuk.
Yuri Tregub had been sent to manually turn on the taps of the emergency high pressure coolant system which would flood the reactor core with water. It was impossible for one person to perform that task by themselves, and thus Yuvchenko instructed the injured on where to go and he accompanied Tregub. The nearest entrance was blocked and the two of them got down some stairs, where water reached their knees. The door to that room was jammed shut and the two of them glimpsed inside through a small gap to see that everything there had been destroyed and that the roof above was gone. Yuvchenko and Tregub were the first to realise the true extent of the accident. It was clear that Khodemchuk was dead. Yuvchenko spotted a pillar of blue light that went upwards into the night sky and was transfixed by it, until Tregub yanked him away, and the two of them headed to the control room.
In the way, they met Valery Perevozchenko and the trainees sent to manually lower the control rods, Alexander Kudryavtsev and Viktor Proskuryakov. Yuvchenko told them that the reactor was destroyed but Perevozchenko did not believe him. Tregub left and Yuvchenko joined the group who would access the reactor from above. The mechanism that held the door to the reactor hall was broken and so Yuvchenko decided to stay behind and hold the door open himself while the others took his flashlight and went inside, he managed to only hold it open for a minute and was told that there was nothing to see.
After returning to the control room, Perevozchenko and Yuvchenko took a break to smoke and found out that Khodemchuk was still missing. The two of them along with Dyatlov went on a search for the missing man. They failed, return, and then tried again, where they met Agulov. The group split, Yuvchenko went with Agulov, and later Agulov found the other two men at the control room of Unit 3. By 3AM, Yuvchenko was vomiting, and he preferred to not think that it was radiation that had caused his health problems, but by 6 he could no longer stand and had to be helped to reach the infirmary.
At morning, Natalia waited for her husband but instead a woman came to tell her about the accident and that Yuvchenko was at the hospital. It was difficult for Natalia to find out what had happened to him but by the afternoon the two met at the back of the hospital. Yuvchenko's arm and shoulder were badly burned and the hair on his temples had turned white. Yuvchenko was flown to Moscow on the 27th.
His wife and mother set out to find him and eventually did. Natalia was allowed to enter the hospital and described Yuvchenko to be rather cheerful, and he did feel better as he was going through the latency period of acute radiation poisoning after having been exposed to 4,1 Gy. Yuvchenko would join conversations with others from the power plant discussing about what had happened that night. Yuvchenko had suffered beta and gamma burns which appeared after reaching Moscow and which darkened and spread to his body, peeling away. Red spots appeared on the back of his neck as well as lesions at the places on his body where he had held the door open, his left shoulder, hip and calf. On his shoulder specifically, the burns developed blisters, turned yellow and looked like wax, and became necrotic and peeled away like xerox powder when he was admitted to the intensive care unit. That was when Yuvchenko had to be put on morphine. Special equipment from Leningrad was brought in to determine if it was worth it to save his arm or not. His white blood cell count fell to zero and his hair fell out. He prayed to God every day to not die. During May, he came very close to death multiple times and his bone marrow only started functioning by June. To save his arm, a lot of skin and muscle had been removed. Yuvchenko had lost a ton of weight and had become addicted to morphine. While he was discharged in September, he was re-admitted after more burns on his legs and arms appeared. He lost count of how many skin transplants he ended up getting but in the first year, he had gotten fifteen. He also received a lot of blood and plasma transfusions, and was on an IV as he could not eat. Throughout the treatment, according to his wife, he spoke were quietly and slowly but retained clarity of mind. After the final hospital discharge, he tried to live as normally as possible. He did not talk about what had happened to him as it was stigmatised, however gave many interviews. He was also not allowed to come into contact with oil and gasoline since they could make his wounds come back. Generally, his wounds healed slowly, and any bleeding did not stop easily.
In 1996, Yuvchenko received a medal for his bravery on the night, and before that the Order of the Badge of Honor by the Soviet Union. In total, Yuvchenko had been awarded three times, the second was by Russia, getting the Order of Courage, and the third by Ukraine, getting the Order of Merit, third degree. Which one he got in 1996, I couldn't find. In December of 2000, he was invited to the nuclear power plant where he wandered around Unit 3 and felt his legs shake when he stood on the reactor. In 2006, Yuvchenko started losing weight again. He had also found work at another nuclear power plant and he was very happy about it, not afraid of nuclear energy. He also remained in contact with classmates from university. Him and his wife visited Greece that year, where once he challenged her to a rowing race, which she won. In 2007, Yuvchenko had gotten a fever that spiked up at night and since it didn't go away, he was taken to the doctor after missing all checkups until that year, where it was discovered that his spleen had become much bigger and his bone marrow started to fail. Yet again he was admitted to the same hospital as in 1986 and developed a tumor. In August of 2008, he was able to live outside the hospital and when he returned he still worked from his bed. In autumn, he had swelled up so much that he was unrecognizable. In October, he turned forty seven. In November, he would undergo surgery. His son worked at the hospital and so the two met often. On the 11th of the month, Yuvchenko fell into a coma and never woke up, dying of leukemia. His son called Natalia to tell her the news.
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