United in tragedy

The woman was Natalia Khodymchuk, the widow of Valery Khodymchuk, who died on 26 April 1986 when reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, beginning the series of events that would lead to the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Having heroically remained at his workplace until the bitter end, Khodymchuk remains inside the reactor today, as his remains were never recovered from the radioactive fire that consumed him. Posthumously awarded both Soviet, and Ukrainian post-independence honours, Khodymchuk, was officially deemed to have been Chernobyl’s first victim.

Following the events of April 1986, Natalia Khodymchuk was evacuated from the exclusion zone with her son and daughter, and subsequently moved into a brand new, 18-storey block of flats on the outskirts of Kyiv, where, ironically, there was almost nothing but another power station.

At the time, cynics said that the “Chernobyl veterans” had been deliberately placed together and their children sent to their own schools and kindergartens on the outskirts of the city to ensure that they couldn’t pass their radiation sickness on to the rest of Kyiv’s population.

But that cynicism soon faded, especially once it emerged that radioactive fallout from Chernobyl had spread to Kyiv as well, and people were advised not to take their children to that year’s May Day parade in the city centre. Yet the message from Moscow was always the same: the accident had been localised, there was no threat, and Soviet citizens should not listen to enemy propaganda. 

In 1996, to mark the 10th anniversary of his death, Khodymchuk was symbolically buried alongside 30 other fire-fighters and members of power plant staff at Moscow’s Mitinskoe Cemetery, all of whom had been buried there for decades.

Unlike Khodymchuk, those already buried at the site had died in Moscow’s Hospital Number Six within months of the disaster. Hospital Six was the only medical facility in the USSR able to diagnose patients with “radiation sickness”. Indeed, all Chernobyl “victims” were buried in zinc coffins and had their graves filled in with concrete to create their own mini-sarcophagi.

Natalia placed her prized possession, the shirt Khodymchuk had worn before leaving for his fatal last shift, into her husband’s notional coffin. “I didn’t wash it. I could smell Valery on the shirt for a long time,” Natalia said almost 40 years later.

Following the severe injuries she sustained earlier this month, Natalia’s friends and family from the Chernobyl veterans’ organisation came to visit her in the burns unit. Even then, she was keen to talk about her late husband, and appeared worried that people would forget certain details of his life or otherwise get the facts of his tragic death wrong. 

The story of Valery and Natalia meeting at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is as simple as the plot of any Soviet film about love on the production line. She was a canteen worker in the town of Pripyat, he was a young nuclear technician who went there for lunch. They went dancing at weekends in her village, Kopachi, after which Valery would make the long walk back home.

“One time, Valera showed up unexpectedly, midweek. I was at my loom, weaving a rug with flowers,” Natalia recalls in her memoirs. “I was embarrassed that he saw how poor my home life was and what sort of clothes I wore around the house. But he had come to propose.” 

Initially, the newlyweds lived in a mobile home until they received an apartment in Pripyat, the town where Chernobyl workers lived that has now been deserted for almost four decades. 

Every year, Natalia Khodymchuk went to Moscow’s Mitinskoe Cemetery for two decades in a row, until the war in Donbas made the trip too difficult once Ukrainians became undesirable guests in Russia. After that, Khodymchuk chose to leave her flowers each year at either the memorial plaque or the chapel in Chernobyl instead.

However, once the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, even the road to Chernobyl was closed, and the exclusion zone was rapidly occupied by Russian forces. That same year, Natalia became a grandmother, and her grand-daughter was named Valeria, after her grandfather, pictures of whom still hang on the walls of the family home. 

In the early hours of 14 November, a Shahed struck the building in Kyiv where many Chernobyl survivors — pensioners with a mass of chronic diseases — were living. Where could they run to and hide every night? Their possessions consisted of little more than the awards they received for their valiant work and the few family photo albums they were able to take with them as they fled from Pripyat 40 years ago. 

Among the residents was a Hero of Ukraine, Oleksiy Ananenko, a former mechanical engineer at Chernobyl and one of three volunteers who, putting their own lives at great risk, managed to prevent a second explosion at the power plant. Had it happened, the consequences for the rest of Europe could have been catastrophic.

A sarcophagus now covers the site of the disaster, and a poem on a memorial plaque dedicated to Khodymchuk’s sacrifice reads: You did not leave your post, You stood like men in battle. A monument should be raised to you in every heart.