[LINK] "The Origins of Separatism in Donetsk"

[rfmcdonald]

Transitions Online shared an article by The Ukrainian Week's Denys Kazanskyi1 looking at separatism in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. Kazanskyi1 makes the case that separatism, and a sense of separateness from the rest of Ukraine, has been extant for quite some time.

Crimea was long considered the only potentially dangerous region in this regard. A certain degree of Donbas isolation was acknowledged, but this was initially written off as the result of machinations by oligarchic clans who sought to turn the local population against other regions of Ukraine and reaffirm the myth of Donbas as the nation’s leading breadwinner.

To be sure, these clans are still able to divide and to rule. They skillfully directed the wrath of Donbas’ depressed mining communities against similarly disenfranchised workers from western Ukraine. While average people squabbled with one another on the Internet, the clans were quietly appropriating the Donetsk region’s industries. However, the same officials from former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in Donetsk and Luhansk who convinced their electorates that Donbas is a “special region” with the right to occupy a dominant position in Ukraine were more often themselves the captives of stereotypes.

Donetsk separatism existed long before it was popularized by the Party of Regions. It is not about the “Donetsk-Kryviy Rih Soviet Republic,” whose existence was noted only by the Bolsheviks who invented it and Donetsk native Volodymyr Kornilov, who wrote a book on it. In the USSR, Donbas showed no discernible desire for independence. The first signs of separatism appeared in the mining regions at the end of the 1980s before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it was primarily economic and not national in origin.

Solidarity became the foundation of the Donetsk miners’ separatism. The popular assertion that “Donbas feeds the entire country” originated among them. The profession had been lionized in the 1920s and 1930s, with the mine worker portrayed by official propaganda as a true Atlas on whose shoulders rested the economic power of the country. And as Donbas was a major coal mining region of the Soviet Union, its residents overflowed with a sense of self-worth. It was here that the saying “miners are the guardians of labor” was coined; it was here that the legendary Soviet miner Alexey Stakhanov set his world record; it was Donbas that a famous Soviet poster named “the heart of Russia.”

Inspirational newspaper editorials about Donbas miners were common until the late 1970s, when the region achieved its peak for coal production. Coal output has been decreasing ever since. After the discovery of huge oil fields in Siberia, the Soviet fuel and energy industry began switching from coal to oil and gas. Priorities and investments changed. For the next two decades, the holdings of Donbas coal mining companies remained practically unchanged, with mines continuing to operate without renovation. In the 1980s the coal industry of the Ukrainian SSR inevitably deteriorated, hitting a crisis at the end of the decade that resulted in massive strikes.