Ukraine War Day #506: A Photograph Bridges The Generations [concluded]

Dear Readers:

Today continuing (and concluding) this story by frontline reporter Grigory Kubatyan. We learned the identity of the soldier in the iconic Soviet photograph from the Great Patriotic War. His name was Alexei Yeremenko. A dedicated Communist and brave soldier, Yeremenko was the Political Commissar at the company level. He died heroically in battle outside of Luhansk almost exactly 80 years ago (July 12, 1942). His image was captured, just moments before his death, by renowned Soviet photographer Max Alpert.

Jump forward 80 years. The continuation of Yeremenko’s story takes place in the town where he perished. The name of the place is Khoroshee, which in Russian means “the good one”, as in “the nice village” or “the good place”.

Schoolteacher Olga Kriuchek keeps the memory alive.

And a nice village it is, filled with nice people. The people of Donbass are hard people, their roots are in the hard-scrabble industrial working class, they were always miners and factory workers, and also farmers; and they are fundamentally good and productive people, most of them. They don’t have much, but they have their history. Anybody who has visited any part of Russia knows that many streets and homes have their own little museums. Russians are a people who tend to their history like a gardener to his orchard. They remember everything. And this is one of the cruelest thing about the Ukrainian Nationalists: That they try to force people to either forget, or rewrite, their own history. To betray their ancestors and to twist their own legacy. At a very fundamental level, this is what this war is all about.

The School-Museum

Kubatyan: In the town of Khoroshee, which now resides within the Slavyanoserbsky Region of the Luhansk Peoples Republic, there stands a schoolhouse. In 2015 this school was named after Alexei Gordeevich Yeremenko. One of the classrooms was converted into a “Museum of Military Glory”. Here one can find portraits of fellow townsmen who went off to the front (there were 800 of them), including the 273 who never returned. There are portraits of widows as well. And of youngsters who graduated from the school and were forced to live under Nazi occupation. Teenagers who joined the Underground, who resisted and were captured and tortured by the fascists. Joining them are portraits of newer heroes, of the Special Military Operation, also graduates of this schoolhouse; of whom 15 have died in battle against NATO. In this museum, rusty Nazi weapons lie side by side with captured NATO equipment.

In the center of the exhibits – the portrait of Yeremenko, various other photographs and documents. In 2012 a visitor arrived here from Zaporozhie: Alexei Yeremenko’s son, Ivan.

Ivan Alexeevich Yeremenko (left) talks with famous Soviet photographer Max Alpert (right).

Like his father, Ivan Alexeevich is also a military veteran, a retired Colonel. He arrived along with his grandson, Alexei, who had been named in honor of his hero-great-grandfather.

[yalensis: Just to make the genealogy clearer, fortunately it is a straight line: We start with the Kombat himself, Alexei Gordeevich Yeremenko. His son is Ivan Alexeevich Yeremenko. Who has a son, Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko. Who has a son Alexei Andreevich Yeremenko. These last three members of the dynasty are missing now, and have not been heard from for several years.]

Meet Olga

Olga Kriuchek is the Director of the School in Khoroshee. For many years she corresponded with Ivan Alexeevich and with other fellow townspeople who knew “the Kombat“, as he was called, from the title given the famous photograph. Olga: Ivan Alexeevich dreamed of coming here some day, in order to bow to that place where his father perished. “Is there a monument there?” he would ask me. “Of course there is a monument,” I replied.

In 2012 Ivan Alexeevich stands in front of the main monument on the Lisichansk Road.

The children of the school also wrote letters to the son of the famous hero, and he always answered them. And he even wrote and published two books about his father; and donated them to the school.

Then 2014 happened. And the letters stopped. In 2017 Olga was finally able to contact him again. She invited him to come for the opening of the new museum in the schoolhouse. This time Ivan demurred: “You know, if I go there they will shove me into an SBU dungeon. Or even just shoot me.”

A year before the Special Military Operation, all correspondence and contact was lost. The Kombat’s son, Ivan, no longer answers his phone. Is he still alive? Nor has Olga been able to contact the Kombat’s grandson, Andrei who was also a Soviet officer, a Lieutenant-Colonel. Olga believes that such contact is now considered a crime in contemporary Ukraine. She even worries that the great-grandson, Alexei, might have been drafted into the Ukrainian army, to fight against everything that his hero-great-grandfather believed in.

What is known is that, starting in 2010, an ideological campaign was launched in Zaporozhie, with the aim of discrediting the Kombat himself. Articles were published with such titles as “Was the Kombat actually from Zaporozhie?” Some people questioned the photograph itself and declared it to be a fake. Some people even tried to scratch Yeremenko’s name off the bar-relief monument to his honor, that stood in Zaporozhie. Very early in this ideological game, the push was on to de-Communize Ukraine and replace all Soviet heroes with Bandera…

Ambush Near The Obelisk

Inside the schoolhouse, right next door to the “Museum of Military Glory” there is a room called the “Ethnographic Museum”. In this classroom, they teach the Russian language. They used to teach Ukrainian [as a second language], which is why the walls are decorated with Ukrainian symbols such as the embroidered blouse, and a model wattle-hut surrounded by sunflowers.

“For us, Ukraine died in 2014,” Olga tells the reporter somberly. “We were shelled so much that we had to hide in the basement every day. And then the school year began, and we decided, along with the teachers, that we would no longer have anything to do with the Ukrainian language. But we didn’t have enough Russian textbooks, so, instead of alphabet books we used books of Russian fairy tales written in large print. We made a decision to teach Russian as best we could, but that we were never going back to Ukrainian. Later, some volunteers brought us Russian alphabet primers. I consulted with our Ukrainian-language teacher: Should we leave Ukrainian as an elective subject? But she just gave a deep sigh and said, “It’s dead. It’s dead.” And now she teaches Russian.

Townspeople came to the schoolhouse to vote in the referendum, whether LPR should separate from Ukraine. After everybody in the town had voted, the ballots were taken to Luhansk.

“They called us on the phone to warn us that armed Right Sektor militants were lying in wait on the road near the Kombat monument,” Olga recalls. “Their job was to prevent the ballots from getting to the capital. We were able to warn the guys in time, and they changed their route.”

An obelisk marks the very spot on the battlefield where the Kombat perished.

Kubatyan: Olga takes us to the place called the “Commissar’s Field”, this is 10 kilometers from the town of Khoroshee, and this is the exact spot where Commissar Yeremenko perished in battle. An obelisk stands on the exact spot as depicted in the photograph. The inscription reads: “Descendants, Remember!” A small Russian flag is also inserted nearby. The schoolteachers tend to this monument and bring flowers here. This used to be a wheat field, but now it’s an apple orchard. The apples are so abundant that the owners of the orchard give away for free a part of the harvest to the schools and kindergartens of Luhansk.

And every year, on July 12, Luhansk residents gather around the main monument on the Lisichansk road and remember the Kombat’s feat of courage and military virtue.