Evolution of an identity

A shot-out war memorial in Donbas. Photo (CC) https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-xzzio

Soviet policies

The east of Ukraine was shaped in a special way. Its cities grew purely based on industrial principles. Donetsk was built in the middle of the steppe, on the site of existing small settlements. The impulse for its creation did not come from the needs of the local culture, but the economic needs and interests of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. The population that arrived to these settlements consisted of very diverse people. However before the outbreak of the Second World War they were in large part Ukrainian-speakers who identified themselves as Ukrainian. This was true both in rural and urban areas.

When after the Second World War there was no one to repair the destroyed mines and factories in Donbas various specialists, miners, metallurgists, scientists and ordinary workers with their families moved to Donbas to fill this need. They came here from all over the USSR. Most of them settled in the big cities, where the mines and metallurgical and chemical enterprises were located. They needed to be renovated and sometimes completely overhauled. This is when the cities of Donbas started to become Russian-speaking, while the surrounding towns and villages continued to speak Ukrainian.

Evidently, the Soviet ideologically-driven policies were aimed at destroying national identification. The so-called “Soviet man” and “Soviet nation” were carefully and unceasingly constructed. To put it simply, Soviet citizens were to become people with no memory or roots, those who could be easily managed by the authorities and whose efforts could be directed in the right direction. In Donbas, particular attention was paid to the formation of the “Soviet consciousness”. The Kremlin needed an industrial region that would work as an apparatus and did not want to have any complications that come with national identification.

Obviously, the huge efforts to destroy the Ukrainian consciousness in the region had borne some fruit. The Soviets succeeded in taking Donbas away from the purely Ukrainian context, making it a kind of industrial reserve where the preservation of national memory, even at the family level, was regarded a crime against official ideology. Yet attempts to convert the residents of Donbas ultimately failed. Although my parents spoke only Russian with me, both my grandmothers remembered that their mother tongue was Ukrainian. Thus, until today I keep in my memory those Ukrainian fairy tales that my grandmother would tell me on the long winter evenings.

Ukrainian, not Russian

At the moment when Ukraine became independent in 1991, the residents of Donbas formed a very peculiar form of self-identity. Let me here point out that in no way is this a form of Russian identity. The people who lived in Donbas, even if they never used Ukrainian in everyday life did not consider themselves Russian. The only exception was maybe those who recently came from Russia and for whom it was natural to identify as ethnic Russians. I would say that having lived in Donetsk my whole life I have known only one such person. I am sure there are more of them, but I personally knew only one.

Territorially and culturally, we all felt Ukrainian. This is mainly because of the cultural symbols that pervaded this historically Ukrainian territory. At holiday tables we sang Ukrainian songs, celebrating Christmas and Easter as they are celebrated only in Ukraine. Russian folk traditions have always seemed too extravagant to us. Women’s head-dresses, known as kokoshnik, and the circle dances and chorus singing khorovod were never considered organic here. This fact is very meaningful. If we sang Ukrainian songs during our home feasts, these were usually folk songs that were passed down from generations and were known and loved by everyone. If Russian songs were sung, they were purely literary texts, that is, verses of famous Russian poets over music. Russian folk songs were not sung and no one knew or understood them.

Political nation

Undeniably the policy of de-Ukrainianisation has also borne fruit. First, a difficult fate befell us during the 20th century when regional identity prevailed over Ukrainian identity. While remaining completely alien to the Russian context, Donbas also felt somewhat detached from the Ukrainian one. Even during Ukraine’s independence, the card of “regional individuality” was very well used by the local elite in their political games with the national authorities in Kyiv.

The formation of a political nation is never simple nor swift. Ukraine is a very young state and naturally needs a long time for that to happen. However I have also witnessed that the processes to consolidate our long-suffering country into one single organism has already begun. An increasing number of people identify themselves as Ukrainians, turning to their roots and cultural tradition. It already became quite clear in the late 1990s when the process, despite its complexity, started to take a positive form and Ukraine entered the path to renew itself and to finally become a fully independent state.

Here I would like to quote historian Larysa Yakubova who, in her book The Ethno-National History of Donbas, stated the following: “According to the All-Ukrainian Census, as of December 5th 2001 the permanent population of Donetsk region was 4,825,600 (about 10 per cent of Ukrainian citizens). As many as 90 per cent of the region’s total population were residents of 51 cities in the region and only 10 per cent resided in rural areas. They were representatives of more than 130 nationalities, with the Ukrainian majority of 56.9 per cent (2,744,100 people). The first decade of independence was a time of many changes in the ethno-demographic situation, the most notable among which were the following. Compared to 1989, Ukrainians have strengthened their quantitative position (community growth, apparently due to changes in ethnic self-identification, amounted to 1.9 per cent). The proportion of Russians has decreased by 20.4 per cent.”

I am convinced that the decrease in the proportion of Russians was primarily caused by the fact that most of Donbas’s residents began to feel and identify themselves as Ukrainian. And it is justified to say that things would have definitely continued according to this trend. But what happened is what happened. The Russian aggression and the war descended on Donbas in 2014, destroying everything that had just formed, which was just starting to grow.

I also have to mention another interesting thing. It was this war, namely, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine that has led to the awakening of the self-identification of many Ukrainians. The threat to the country’s independence became a powerful catalyst for the formation of a civic society and the formation of a political nation.

The new elite  

The war has destroyed and continues to devastate Donbas. A majority of the region’s residents have no place to work or ways to make a living. Those who can afford it, abandon the region. To the best of my knowledge, there is no reliable data that would illustrate what is happening in Donbas in terms of movement. Of course there are official figures indicating that nearly 1.5 million people have left Crimea and Donbas in 2019, and that only 15-18 per cent of them plan to return in the event of a ceasefire and security guarantees. But it is also true that, during wartime, statistics are rather conditional.

Personally, I am convinced there are many more people who have forsaken their homes forever. They have left everything they and their families had acquired over the years and have gone to seek a different destiny somewhere else in Ukraine or abroad. No one will give any security guarantees to anyone, even in the event of a conditional cessation of hostilities. And that means we have a pretty sad picture. Almost all of the pro-Ukrainian minded people, if health and family circumstances allowed, have left the region; this process continues. In general, there is a feeling that Donbas has returned to the times of the Soviet Union in the worst sense of the term. All the negative features of the late USSR period are now present both in terms of the economy and domestic politics.

Yet I know that even now there are many people in Donbas who consider themselves Ukrainian. Unfortunately they cannot openly express their beliefs; they cannot afford to stand against the official ideology when raising children, and this is perhaps the worst thing that is happening. People send their children to schools where they are brainwashed and configured in line with official ideological discourse. What is worse is the fact that people are afraid to tell their children the truth, fearing they will reveal their real beliefs and thus bring great problems upon themselves and their families.

Today, people in Donetsk do not trust each other. There are no discussions about politics, the future of the city and the region, or Russia’s role in what is happening, not even among those who have known each other for years. The denunciations are no longer a prerogative of Stalin’s time. In present-day Donetsk, denunciations are a matter of daily functioning. Clearly all of this cannot but affect the self-identity of the people who are still forced to live and survive in these harsh conditions.

We should add the fact that the Russians are actively buying homes and apartments in Donetsk. And not just because they are cheap. In fact, the local government appoints ethnic Russians for key positions in the city’s most important enterprises. They come here from Russia specifically to take these jobs. In this way, the new elite of the city is being formed. Obviously they usually move here permanently with their families, hence the overall demography is rapidly changing.

Being generally critical of all sorts of positive forecasts, I am absolutely confident the main factor in the self-identification of the residents of Donbas that can change everything, and for the better, are the borders of Ukraine. If the borders with Russia are finally controlled, Donbas will soon become Ukrainian once again. It may even be to a greater extent than before the war.

Translated by Margarita Novikova

Volodymyr Rafeenko is a Ukrainian writer, poet, and translator. He is the member of the Ukrainian PEN Club.

Donbas, identity, Ukraine, War