You're reading: Scion Seeks Revival Of Ancestral Hometown

HLUKHIV, Ukraine – An empty pedestal stands in the central square of Hlukhiv, a forlorn city of 35,000 people in Sumy Oblast, 300 kilometers northeast of Kyiv and only 15 kilometers from the Russian border. Previously, it bore a large statue of Communist leader Vladimir Lenin.

But there’s a new power in charge of Hlukhiv now – its new mayor, Michel Terestchenko. One of his first actions after the election in October was to order the removal of the statue. It was taken down on Dec. 7.

For Terestchenko, 61, the issue was personal.

He is a descendant of the Terestchenko family, one of the Russian Empire’s richest industrial dynasties, who built schools, orphanages and churches in Hlukhiv and Kyiv. Terestchenko’s grandfather Mikhail was forced to flee to France when Lenin came to power.

Now Terestchenko is back in his ancestral home as the third mayor of Hlukhiv in the family. The French-born Ukrainian won the election in October with more than 60 percent of the vote. With a supporting majority in the City Council, he hopes to give a fresh start to Hlukhiv, a city he says was on the edge of dying.

“Young people had no prospects, as the social lift was totally frozen. The only options were contraband, corruption and smuggling,” Terestchenko says.

Authorities in the former regime of President Viktor Yanukovych “liked it when people were poor, because it was easier to buy them and to get all the administrative resources,” he adds.

Fighting corruption is the priority for Terestchenko. He says that for last 18 years, the city was under the control of lawmaker Andriy Derkach, until Terestchenko defeated his protégé, former Hlukhiv Mayor Yuriy Burlaka, a former member of fugitive Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

Terestchenko says that he faced pressure during the election campaign he won. He couldn’t hold any meeting with voters in public halls or find billboards to place his campaign posters. So he held his meetings on the streets, meeting mostly with the elderly. Surprisingly for him, his pro-European position didn’t turn away the “babushkas.”

“The babushkas were my biggest supporters. They defended me like bodyguards,” he says with a smile.

Terestchenko says the corruption in Hlukhiv was “pure banditry.”

Prosecutors carried out political orders, tenders were not transparent, and crimes were not investigated.

All this led to the closure of most of the factories and plants in the town.

Terestchenko in particular named Hlukhiv’s meat factory, bakery, textile factory, food plant and our engineering plants – where 6,000 people worked – as victims of the city’s corruption.

Moreover, people couldn’t get a well-paid job if they had no ties to the authorities, according to Terestchenko. That made young people leave the city in search of better career opportunities.

The mayor has launched an anti-corruption commission in the city hall that investigates the cases filed by civic organizations. But to deliver justice, the city needs an honest city prosecutor, the mayor says.

The current prosecutor opened six investigations against Terestchenko. He suggests that the mayor lied in his income declaration, made libelous statements about lawmaker Derkach in an interview to newspaper Day, and evaded taxes.

Terestchenko says all the cases are politically motivated. He plans to ask Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to replace the prosecutor.

Another obstacle that the new mayor of Hlukhiv faces is the administrative reform of Sumy Oblast, which has divided the town into two parts and taken away its status as a district center.

Terestchenko says he’s trying to persuade Kyiv to reverse the decision on Hlukhiv, otherwise the city will lose a number of services and the district’s state hospital.

Terestchenko created a team of volunteers who are currently working on a six-month plan to transform City Hall. He wants to eliminate corruption in City Hall by changing the procedure so that a citizen coming to city hall would be in touch with only one official. This one official will be collecting the documents required by the client from all the departments.

The mayor says that the same change worked well in Horlivka of Donetsk Oblast before the war broke out.

“For 40 years the goal of those lovely ladies in city hall was to fill in forms. They forgot that the only goal is to make Hlukhiv citizens happy with their service,” the mayor says.

Terestchenko also has an ambitious plan to develop tourism in Hlukhiv, which was an administrative center for the Zaporizhian Cossack state in the 18th century. He wants to reconstruct the historical center, creating reconstructions of the houses of the hetmans, Ukrainian military commanders, who lived in the city, where people dressed in period costume will blow glass or cook traditional dishes.

“We can be as successful a tourist city as Lviv, why not?” Terestchenko says.

For the new mayor, making a success of Hlukhiv is not just a local or even regional affair – it’s a matter of international significance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants the left bank of Ukraine to be weak, so he can create a buffer zone between the occupied territories and the rest of Ukraine,” Terestchenko says. “Hlukhiv is a lovely city, and I don’t want it to have anything to do with that.”

See a photo gallery of Hlukhiv here.

Kyiv Post writer Anna Yakutenko can be reached at [email protected].