Antaeus

The photo that recently appeared on Facebook was totally ordinarily looking amid thousands of brutal war images. It lacked gore, fire, hell, and deaths as well. Still, it touched on something with a profound meaning, picturing a soldier who stood in the field and held a bundle of winter grains in his hand. It looked like the archetype of Ukrainianness. The Day has found the photo’s subject and talked with him.

Yurii Fomenko is a special person. Kind, smiling, homely, with a typical Ukrainian face, he looks like an image from an ethnography textbook, picturing the archetypal Slav of our region. Agronomist and cereal researcher, he put on hold his business in Dnipropetrovsk in October 2014 and volunteered for the front. “A Ukrainian father never wanted to bequeath a saber to his son,” Fomenko said. “He wanted to bequeath him a book. With wisdom and knowledge, the son had to bring his enemies together.”

The soldier jokes all the time, even saying: “Think of me with a sense of humor.” “I am a truly famous author, since every village in Ukraine has had someone correcting my errors,” he laughed, and then added: “Well, it is not really fiction, but rather notes of a collective farm agronomist.” He described in this way his highly poetic and profoundly meaningful collections of The Mamais’ Land series. To see their true worth, it is enough to recall that phrase about a dawn near Luhansk: “Has not the world grown wiser overnight?”

Fomenko communicated with us out of his fortified room at a checkpoint near Horlivka. He had icons, pictures, and a flag hung there, and sat there with a cat in his lap. “This Mamai, painted by Halyna Nazarenko, was to an exhibition,” the soldier said pointing at the picture, “and this reproduction of the icon showing Christ wearing an embroidered shirt came from Kryvorivnia. Father Ivan is my friend and the parish priest of Kryvorivnia, where they filmed Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. You may say also that I have an insurgent hideout here, complete with a portrait of Stepan Bandera. By the way, it was Muscovites who presented it to me. This is my Haidamak hat, I will send you a photo of it separately.” He set up a little museum of his own in this way at a checkpoint in the hellhole that Ukraine’s far east has turned into. One detail adds a special flavor to this setting: an assault rifle and a holster which hang on the wall.

Are you in Horlivka now?

“We are holding the line between Horlivka and Debaltseve.”

That is, where the fighting was at its worst...

“It never got better here. Artillery assaults have subsided lately, but the enemy’s sabotage groups have grown more active. They wander across the area and do reconnaissance. It looks like they are preparing to attack. We have small skirmishes with these groups. They fight larger battles among themselves, probably dividing their turf.”

Is it the Russian army fighting mercenaries, or mercenaries fighting each other?

“See, when the Makhnovists entered this or that village back in the 1910s, they fought for a piece of land on which to sow wheat and feed their children. Meanwhile, the men who came here from Russia never did that and will never do. Slightly more intelligent of their field commanders tried not to publicize their names too much and have long moved away. They have taken their loot and fled. The men who remain here need looting to continue indefinitely. They divide checkpoints among themselves because they allow them to rip off ordinary people as the latter move from one place to another. Antagonisms exist between militant groupings as well as between the Russian army and the militants. Therefore, such skirmishes occur regularly. Honestly, I do not understand the Russian mentality. I can predict it, but still do not understand.”

How do you predict it, then?

“The mentality takes its shape over thousands of years spent under appropriate conditions. It is based on the skills learned round the clock. Agriculturalists and pastoralists have hasteless characters. They produce their output, and then sell it. Accordingly, they have the year planned, with predetermined dates for planting, harvesting, selling, and know what they need to buy. The Russians have a ‘gathering,’ extractive character. The strongest men went, killed a boar, drew the carcass home, the women gathered some berries. That is, they lived on what nature gave them.”

Were you born in the city or moved to one?

“I was born in Melitopol but am agrarian by trade. I spent about 10 months of my life in Melitopol, breathed the air which Dmytro Dontsov once breathed, got bathed in the Molochna River near Kamiana Mohyla hills, and then my parents took me to their homeland, located in the Kholodny Yar tract of the Chorny Lis forest. Thus, I grew up on the border of Kirovohrad and Cherkasy regions. I then graduated from school, college, did my time in the army. The Soviet army had me looking for a ‘specter of imperialism’ through the sights of my assault rifle. I then worked as a foreman for half a year before moving to Dnipropetrovsk where I have resided since 1990. I worked as an agronomist and then as deputy director at a farm for a decade, before launching a business of my own in 2000. I have put it on hold and volunteered for the war. Thus, I have gone back to looking for a ‘specter of imperialism’ through the sights of my assault rifle. I am a steppe native, feeling at home in the Chorny Lis and the steppe alike. My mother’s folks came from Chyhyryn, while my father is from Zvenyhorodka. Therefore, I am a hybrid Dnipro Ukrainian.”

You are a businessman, but have left your business and went to the front. Where is the line between the Ukrainian businessman and the Ukrainian soldier?

“It was the assault on our self-contained existence that has made me into the latter. There is an interesting point to it, though. I spoke today with a very interesting person, who goes about with grenades in his bandolier. I told him: ‘You know, Petrovych, should we be unable to emerge from our rooms in time, we will definitely need your grenades.’ He replied: ‘You know, if, God forbid, something happens, I would like to take several Muscovite invaders’ lives less than I would like to take the life of a regional executive committee head or some department chief who impoverished their industry.’ That is, he wanted to kill those who had allowed the invasion to happen, who robbed the country and bled her white, rather than the invaders. On further thought, I felt that there was some logic to his words. I always say that there are two types of Ukrainian. One loves Ukraine, and another loves its public purse. My historical research deals with reconstructing economic developments in some periods in certain areas. Such well-researched studies provide a reasonable opportunity to understand the past better than we can do it based on chronicles. What is a chronicle, after all? It depicts how we walked into a restaurant together, smashed its windows, and asked a bard the next day to blame Ivan for this case of drinking and window-smashing. Meanwhile, an economic chronicle relies on precise numbers and offers objective analysis. Our people farmed crops and bred animals. They had no use for haste and drank rarely. Our ancestors drank 14 proof drinks like some fruit compote, but they never drank hard liquors, because no drunk would dance hopak. That is, a hard-drinking people would never have invented hopak and kozachok dances. Yes, our people loved to lie in a small way. Each nation is likely guilty of it, but I maintain that the Ukrainians never had hard drinks in their culture.”

At this point, Fomenko was distracted from our discussion by a conversation with a soldier, and then explained: “We are driving off a sabotage group. It went into our territory and moves somewhere between our checkpoints.” We then continued...

What is the worst thing in the war?

“The need to rely only on myself and the man behind me. I do not let them hit his feet, while he fires at them over my head. Of course, we will never destroy enough of them, not because we cannot, but because Russia is fighting with numbers. They drive their drunken sheeple to the slaughter, like some beasts. They have a lot of cheap cannon fodder. The Russians won their wars in this way. They can lose a million or two, and will be unlikely to stop before losing the 20th million. They have 150 million people. Of these, 100 million have a really low living standard. They are poor both materially and morally. There is another aspect to this war as well. An American eats their hamburger, receives their monthly salary of 3,000 dollars, raises the flag and knows that they will be fine tomorrow too. A Russian, on the contrary, is always unhappy and therefore protest is always likely. Ninety percent of Russians certainly think they had it best under Nicholas II, and when a rebellion is brewing, the government launches another war – with Georgians, Moldovans, and now Ukrainians. They kill their potential rebels in these wars.”