Ryhor Azaronak shared his version of who Gomselmash holding company owes for the creation of its first combine harvester on October 20, 2025, on his program "Azaronak. Directly."
"After all, everyone wanted to destroy it. Batska essentially assembled our Gomselmash combine harvester with his own hands. He told the story many times about how he arrived there and the place was, pardon me, dead in the water. The managers had run it into the ground. And he simply ordered to disassemble a combine harvester they had there, I think it was either Ukrainian or Canadian or German, or from some place else. And he went through it like this:
'Can you do this?' he'd ask an engineer or director there.
'I can.'
'And this?'
'I can.'
'And this?'
'This I can't.'
'What do we need for this?'
'This and that.'
'Ok, this and that. We'll find it, get it, steal it, make it.'
And that was it. That’s how we got our own combine harvester," the host said.
His words suggest that Aleksandr Lukashenko was the driving force behind creating the Belarusian combine harvester and personally oversaw its development. However, Gomselmash holding company's official website presents this chapter in the company's history differently.
According to project participant Viktar Susau's recollections, in 1995 the company's chief designer set out to create a combine harvester. Until then, the plant had mainly produced feed harvesting equipment, and creating a combine harvester could open a new direction for the company.
The proposal to manufacture their own machine, complete with documentation and economic justification, was sent to the Ministry of Industry, which deemed it impractical. However, in March 1996, Aleksandr Lukashenko visited the plant and, upon learning of the plan, backed the Homiel designers.
By summer of that year, an experimental model was ready, developed with the participation of leading specialists from CIS countries. In August, the first combine harvester was taken to the field. Lukashenko personally came to check its performance and approved serial production. Production began in 1999.
In other words, the initiative came from company employees. Lukashenko may have been involved in developing the combine harvester, but in the employee's account, his role doesn't appear as significant as Azaronak portrayed it.
