Eusebio R. Sheffield 
Larisa called me in April 2014 from her hometown of Makiivka near Donetsk. Terrified by the development of the pro-Russian uprising in the region, she said she was about to leave for central Ukraine. “I will not live under Russian rule,” she told me. “I am Russian, I know what Russia is.”
The truth is, I don’t know exactly what she meant. A woman in her fifties, who lived in Ukraine before its independence, Larisa may remember the Soviet Union, but not Putin’s Russian Federation. The apparent source of fear for her was also the source of excitement for many people in southeastern Ukraine, especially in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, commonly known as Donbass.
In 2014, Soviet nostalgia was still prevalent in this most industrialized and urbanized region of Ukraine, where the post-World War II Soviet Union was considered the glory days. This sentiment grew out of the rapid economic decline of the 1990s. For years, local politicians fed their supporters with claims that the only way to restore prosperity and glory to Donbas was to redevelop ties with Russia. They described Ukrainian independence as the source of all misfortunes. Unable to deliver comprehensive political and economic change, Ukrainian elites (locally and in Kyiv) have capitalized on popular discontent over the most sensitive issues of language and culture. The Russian elites, in turn, were always eager to help their Ukrainian allies by exploiting the same problems.
The Donbass has experienced several waves of migration. Catherine the Great resettled Christians from the Ottoman Empire, especially Greeks and Serbs, to these newly conquered lands. German settlers were invited with the promise of a big Ukrainian land. At the turn of the 20th century, during the short-lived Industrial Revolution of the Russian Empire, the poorest and most reckless people from across the empire came to Donbass. en masse. The barely inhabited easternmost part of today’s Ukraine, with its rich coal deposits, seaports and emerging railway system, suddenly found itself in the center of attention. However, living and working conditions were terrible, so the population of Donbass fluctuated due to constant migration and a high death rate. The next wave of migration came after World War II, made up of those, young communists and political prisoners, sent to the region to rebuild the region’s industry which had been in tatters. And then there were the booming 1960s and 1970s, when young people from across the Soviet Union flocked to the Donbass for jobs in the coal mines, one of the most prestigious industries under Soviet rule.
My father was fourteen when he boarded the first available train to flee his home on a collective farm in southern Ukraine, near Crimea. On the train he met several teenagers who suggested he get off at Kursk and enter the military college. But in Kursk it turned out that the admission period had already ended. Someone suggested going to Donbass to learn coal mining. And so my father ended up in Donetsk.
What is typical in this story is not just a teenager fleeing a kolkhoz. After arriving in Donetsk, my father, of mixed Belarusian and Ukrainian origin, stopped speaking Ukrainian, his mother tongue. The only surest way to integrate into his new multi-ethnic but paradoxically quite chauvinistic environment, a big city with a Russian-speaking majority, was to speak the Soviet lingua franca without an accent. As a result of this process, by 1991 many of those who lived in this melting pot considered themselves only Soviets or Donbass. It meant practically nothing to be Russian or Ukrainian.
In Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian was supposed to be the majority language. But in the urbanized and predominantly Russian-speaking Donbass, it was seen as the language of backward villages or extreme Ukrainian nationalism.
In 1989, the Soviet Union was nearing economic collapse and the Soviet nomenclature was demoralized. But the new political movements had no economic agenda. The Soviet state, which proclaimed ethnic solidarity as one of its fundamental principles, took only a few years of relative freedom to become the scene of bloody ethnic conflicts. Those who, like the Donbass miners, took to the streets out of economic satisfaction, not ethnic pride, found themselves virtually alone. But for the non-ethnic population of Donbass, the state of the local economy, especially its mythologized coal mining, was also a matter of dignity.
The idea of Ukrainian independence was gaining popularity in the Donbass, but things changed drastically at the end of 1991. Instead of bringing the expected improvements, the collapse of the Soviet Union put the local industrial entities on the brink of disaster. The incredibly rapid severing of economic ties was followed by runaway inflation, the demolition of a familiar way of life and a bloody new kind of confrontation in Ukraine itself: mafia wars. For average Soviet men and women – who suddenly lost all perspective and found themselves with new political, economic and cultural freedoms that were of no practical use – it was all foreign and humiliating.
Eastern and Western Ukraine first stared each other in the face in 1991, though still mostly from afar. Neither of them liked the other’s appearance. Their mutual image remained distorted for decades, fueling stereotypes and sparking the exchange of insults and reproaches. For Ukraine, the Donbass was an unloved child, an inconvertible enfant terrible. Still, it was family.
I grew up with all that in the 1990s and 2000s. For years I shared the common centrality of Donbass. In my father’s village, I laughed at the mistakes in my cousin’s Russian exercise book. In my school, I looked with surprise at new textbooks with the greatest texts of Russian literature translated into Ukrainian. It didn’t matter that I learned Ukrainian fluently myself. In this exclusive political, economic and cultural environment of the Donbass until the 2010s, it was not obvious that there were children in Ukraine, not far from us, who did not know – and should not – know the Russian.
However, new Ukrainian textbooks were rare. Our public libraries were still full of Marx, Tolstoy and Shevchenko from the 1970s and 1980s. Ukrainian culture was seen as backward compared to Russian culture, even for many years after our country’s independence. I only discovered post-Soviet Ukrainian literature in the mid-2000s, because Internet access in my region and for people from my social class was still rare. It was a challenge to find books by Serhiy Zhadan or Yuri Andrukhovych on the shelves in Donetsk. Our right to preserve Russian, proclaimed and well defended by local politicians, meant in practice an ignorant or aggressive closure of all things Ukrainian.
Meanwhile, I visited Russia for the first time in 2018. For Moscow, keeping Ukraine in its orbit has never been about soft power. It was broadcasting state television rather than hosting open, live exchanges; funding political puppets instead of negotiating with independent politicians; take advantage of gas deliveries instead of seeking contracts that would be economically beneficial to both parties. For millions of Ukrainians, our idea of modern Russia came from the media – and now from our streets.
I wonder what Sigmar Gabriel, the former German foreign minister, meant when he recently insisted, echoing other European politicians, that Ukraine had no other way towards peace than to conform to the interests of “the Russian minority in Donbass”. Did he also have in mind the area the Russians are destroying with air raids and artillery? Who belongs to this “Russian minority” in my city if most Ukrainian patriots speak Russian and many employees have Ukrainian surnames? Did anyone ask Larisa what she wanted?
It wasn’t the booming 1960s and 1970s that Donetsk residents now remember as their city’s best days. Still overwhelmed with grief, they remember 2012, the year of the European Football Championship, which Donetsk co-hosted. This place without history left the workers’ barracks suddenly transformed into a supermodern megalopolis, the radiant city of the future. Now this future has been repeatedly tortured, raped, looted, vandalized, exiled, killed, demolished under Orwellian slogans about protecting the “Russians” of Donbass.
This article appeared in the special Ukraine supplement of IWMPost 129.
