Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovskiy

Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovskiy appears in the testimony as chairman of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fishermen, a position that placed him between local hunters and the authorities directing work in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. His account of the animal-culling order is not an abstract report: it follows what happened when an official command reached a community expected to carry it out without even basic protective equipment.

Position and Assignment

The regional executive summoned Verzhikovskiy as the hunters’ chairman and told him that household cats and dogs remained in the zone and had to be exterminated to prevent an epidemic. The instruction turned the hunters’ local knowledge and practical skills into instruments of an emergency operation. Verzhikovskiy called the hunters together the next day and explained what they had been ordered to do, but they did not want to go without protective gear. Civil defense had no respirators to provide. He eventually obtained masks from a cement factory; they were only thin coverings intended to protect against cement dust, not respirators.

Organizing the Culling

Verzhikovskiy assembled two brigades of twenty hunters apiece. Each had a veterinarian and a representative from the epidemic center, and the crews were supplied with a tractor fitted with a scoop and a dump truck. The operation had an organized structure, but its workers still lacked proper protection. When the hunters encountered soldiers in the zone, the soldiers had masks, gloves, and armored personnel carriers; the hunters wore shirts and handkerchiefs over their noses. They returned to their families in the same shirts and boots. The disparity made the danger of the work visible without making it any less compulsory.

The brigades spent two months moving through the zone, including dozens of evacuated villages in the region, among them Babchin and Tulgovichi. On their first visits, dogs were still near their homes, apparently waiting for their owners to return. They ran toward the hunters when they heard human voices. The crews shot them in houses, barns, and yards, then dragged the bodies into the street and loaded them onto the dump truck. Verzhikovskiy stresses that the animals were household pets: they did not fear people or guns, and could not understand why the people they approached were killing them.

The abandoned settlements contained more than dogs. The hunters saw a turtle near an empty house, fish left in aquariums, rabbits running loose from open cages, and otters shut inside enclosures. They let the otters go when water was nearby. The contrast between animals that could be released and pets killed under orders sharpens the account’s moral and practical disorder: everything had been left behind, but not everything could be rescued. Evacuation had been presented to residents as a temporary absence of three days, with children told they were going to the circus; people expected to come back. The animals’ waiting, and their attempts to follow the buses as soldiers pushed them away, turned that false promise into a scene of abandonment.

The poodle and the memory that remains

At Masaly, six kilometers from the reactor, the hunters encountered an odor they could not explain: iodine and a sourness in the air. The dogs there had to be shot at close range. One female dog, lying on the floor with her puppies, leapt toward a hunter; after she was shot, the puppies licked their paws and played nearby, and they too were killed. A small black poodle stayed with the hunters in memory. They loaded a dump truck until it was full, then drove the bodies to what they called a cemetery: in practice, a deep pit. The procedure was supposed to protect groundwater, use cellophane insulation, and locate the burial site on elevated ground, but those requirements were not followed.

The account dwells on what happened at the pit. Some animals were still alive or only wounded when they were tipped from the truck and began howling. The little poodle tried to climb back out, but the hunters had no bullets left. They pushed it back into the hole and buried it alive. The speaker returns to the poodle’s fate as an unresolved burden rather than a completed task: it was a household animal, and the people responsible for killing it could not give it even a quick death.

That failure becomes the detail that survives when the larger operation recedes. The hunters’ recollection returns to the arithmetic of the day: twenty men, not a single bullet remaining. In the same testimony, one hunter recalls killing a fox as a child and later swearing not to kill another doe, whose expressive eyes had made the act unbearable. Against the bureaucratic purpose of preventing an epidemic, these memories insist on individual encounters—with animals that approached human voices, and with a poodle that could not be spared the consequences of an order.

The Collective Voice of the Hunters

The testimony is framed as three monologues about a single bullet, with Verzhikovskiy identified alongside two hunters, Andrei and Vladimir, who withheld their full names. That structure places his account within a shared record rather than making every first-person detail exclusively his: the hunters speak from a common operation, but their memories retain individual points of pain. One hunter’s recollection of first killing a fox as a child, then vowing never to kill another doe because of its expressive eyes, gives the group’s work a history that predates the evacuation. Set beside the later culling, that early reluctance makes the hunters’ role harder to reduce either to willing violence or to impersonal obedience. Verzhikovskiy’s place in the testimony is therefore both practical and representative: as chairman, he organized the men, while the joined voices preserve how the order was experienced by those sent to carry it out.