Paris-born Michel Terestchenko doesn't plan to go back to France. In fact, the grandson of czarist Russia's last finance minister, Mykhailo Terestchenko, received a Ukrainian passport on March 23 from President Petro Poroshenko affirming that intention.
I have been living in Ukraine for 12 years, happily and successfully,” the 60-year-old flax and hemp cultivator said. “I only see fantastic development.”
Terestchenko said he wants more, namely to vote and be elected.
Specifically, he wants to help the people of Hlukhiv, a city in Sumy Oblast where his Linen of Desna flax business is located on ancestral land. Six months ago, Hlukhiv residents had asked him to run for mayor in elections that are scheduled to take place this autumn, Terestchenko says. “I first took it as a joke because I hardly spoke Ukrainian.”
His first visit to Hlukhiv was in 2002 with his father. The city of 35,000 people, located 400 kilometers from the eastern border with Russia, is where he found his Ukrainian ancestry, with its old buildings and hundreds of hectares of land that once belonged to his grandparents. “I felt that it was my roots and that I could have an interesting life there,” he says. “I could feel that I could be useful.”
The hospitality of Hlukhiv’s residents lured Terestchenko to Ukraine. “I was so intensely touched by the welcome of the people that I had the feeling that it was the son coming back to the family,” he says.
The area is only a part of his family’s legacy. As a successful sugar beet grower and maker, his grandfather was one of the richest people in imperial Russia.
The family also gained fame and admiration as philanthropists who founded hospitals, orphanages, universities and museums. After the Bolsheviks arrested Mykhailo and other ministers of the Provisional Government and placed into the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, he was allowed to move to Norwary in the spring of 1918. He eventually settled in France and died in on April 1, 1956 in Monaco.
After the visit, Terestchenko raised money from French investors and launched a small start-up flax crop business.
Mykhailo Terestchenko, the grandfather of Michel Terestchenko, was a sugar beet grower, philanthropist and one of the richest people in imperial Russia. (Terestchenko family archives)
The Hlukhiv businessman now operates 3,000 hectares of leased land where he grows flux and technical hemp crops and employs about 300 workers. But it wasn’t always an easy road. Terestchenko did not have much money when he first invested in Ukraine and starting a business was challenging.
The commitment, however, seems to have paid off. The week after Terestchenko announced that he is renouncing his French citizenship, his Facebook, email and phone were flooded with more than 3,000 messages of encouragement and congratulations. “It gives some hope to many Ukrainians, an example that there is some future and prospects in Ukraine.”
The passionate Ukraine-convert hopes that by giving up his French citizenship, he will also provide encouragement for those who have left Ukraine to start investing back into the country. Most importantly, he wants young people in Ukraine to think twice before emigrating. “The future that is waiting for them in Ukraine is by far nicer, more prospective and joyful than to live in the suburbs of Paris.”
Very soon, he believes, Ukraine will develop along the same lines as many other European countries.
The EuroMaidan Revolution inspired him to obtain Ukrainian citizenship. He knew that Ukrainians had ideals, but he wasn’t sure how seriously Ukrainians took them. Being among those who stood next to the famous Lenin statue when it fell in Kyiv’s center on Dec. 8, 2013, Terestchenko witnessed the uprising from its very heart.
Lawmaker and Maidan activist Olha Bohomolets helped him meet Poroshenko last week in order to exchange his French passport for a Ukrainian one. “I hope that the president had some encouragement to see that a French guy is able to leave his French citizenship because he trusts the president that Ukraine will be fine,” Terestchenko says.
“I strongly cherish your willingness and deed to become a Ukrainian in these difficult times,” Poroshenko told him.
Though Hlukhiv is close to the Russian border, Terestchenko doesn’t worry much. “If you start thinking about what can happen all the time – the war – you don’t do anything,” he says. Instead, the entrepreneur finds that building the town of Hlukhiv is the best recipe for softening Ukraine-Russia relations. Perhaps those just across the border in Russia will come to see Hlukhiv and Ukraine as examples and start changing life in Russia, he says.
But Terestchenko doesn’t see the people on the other side as necessarily Russians. Instead, he considers them as Ukrainians whose land was taken from them a long time ago. “They are on the other side of the border, and I am very sorry for them because life is not as interesting.”
Hlukhiv is prepared in the event that Russia attacks his town “We have to defend our land, our families, our houses, and we will do it.”
The town established a strong Samooborona, or voluntary self-defense unit. Terestchenko also initiated a project by which locals sew uniforms for the Ukrainian army. The project is made up entirely of volunteers, with about 150 taking part.
Terestchenko spends most of his time in the Sumy Oblast. On weekends he drives three hours on the Kyiv-Moscow Highway to visit Kyiv and to catch up on the capital’s social life.
Kyiv Post staff writer Ilya Timtchenko can be reached at [email protected].
