Object:
Uncle Grisha's plastic bucket
The exhibition of the Museum of Resistance presents a plastic bucket with which Uncle Grisha collected money to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine during the occupation.
«I was riding as if through a minefield»
This is a story about how in Kherson, right in front of the inviders, Uncle Grisha collected and handed over half a million hryvnias to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Hryhoriy Yanchenko is known in Kherson, in Ukraine, and even abroad as Uncle Grisha. 77-year-old legless man in a wheelchair collected 4 million hryvnias for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since 2014 and himself regularly traveled to the front lines in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
During the occupation of Kherson, Uncle Grisha's continued to drive around the city on an electric wheelchair to collect money for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And he also got an idea to turn on Ukrainian music to support the people of Kherson:
"I didn't want to drive around silently and just collect money. I took a loudspeaker, uploaded the national anthem of Ukraine, “Сhervona Kalyna”, patriotic and Ukrainian folk songs to a flash drive, so that they would remind people that Kherson is Ukraine. The music could be heard from the distance of 300–400 meters, and I saw how people smiled, sang along, and their spirits rose."
Sometimes Uncle Grisha even deliberately provoked the enemy. On July 3, on his birthday, he changed his trademark telnyashka to a white embroidered shirt, and on Independence Day, August 24, he went out in a red and black embroidered shirt, in the colors of the Right Sector – in an occupied city, where even for a yellow and blue ribbon a person could be taken to the basement. Every morning, Uncle Grisha set out on his routes, as if driving through a minefield, but every day by noon his transparent bucket was filled with bills.
All the people of Kherson understood who Uncle Grisha was collecting for. Even Russian rubles, which the invaders gave to pensioners, were in his bucket.
"There were cases when the invaders themselves donated money for the Armed Forces of Ukraine - some Buryats who did not understand either the songs or the Ukrainian language. They just saw that a disabled person was driving in his wheelchair."
Uncle Grisha sent money from the bucket to volunteers in Zaporizhia and Transcarpathia, and they bought and delivered what the soldiers needed.
Hryhoriy Yanchenko is an honorary citizen of Kherson, a Knight of the Order "National Hero of Ukraine", one of the symbols of an unconquered and unbroken city. When people meet him, they often call him a legend of Kherson, but Uncle Grisha disagrees:
"You see, I'm not a legend. I am just a person who cares and worries about our country, about Ukraine. I do what I have to do. That's all."
Summer 2022. In occupied Kherson Hryhoriy Yanchenko raises money to help the Ukrainian army. Photo: Oleksandr Kornyakov/ mediaplatform Vgoru
Photo from the archive of Svitlana Dumynska
