DONBASS

A Moscow-born “moskal,” I love Donbass. This word has a very special ring to my ear, evoking a host of warm memories. I love the people there. I used to travel all across that area many times, not as a visitor, not as a guest, but as one of their own. Few places in the world are as special to me as Donbass is, and today my heart goes out to the men and women fighting and dying there for the right to reassert their distinctive Russianness.

Why haven’t they done it before, you may ask? Why have they stayed connected to a basically alien country, whereas Russia is their natural cultural home? Well, they tried again and again, and they are trying now, and I am sure that they  would have succeeded, had the odds not been sharply against their most cherished aspirations…

Why don’t they go to Russia, if they want to be with the Russians?-- their critics are asking today.

But why should they? They have a home already. Donbass is their home.

Historically, the land they live on is their land. They have no claim to any other land. By the same token, the people living west of the Dnieper River should make no claim to the land which is not theirs. In pure and simple terms, understandable to every honest citizen of the free world, this is a question coming down to land ownership and water rights. Besides, this is the place where they have been living and working for generations. And now their whole way of life is in jeopardy…

Nearly half a century ago I was made an honorary coal miner of Donbass. Not that I had a special talent for coal mining. The reason was my heredity.

Strong men create circumstances. In my case circumstances were sort of creating me. Trying to play strong, I ventured to beat the circumstances… Well, looking at me now, one can say that I succeeded, but only to a point.

Resisting the power of the circumstances by no means implies their total rejection. I would never dream of rejecting the fact of becoming an honorary coal miner of Donbass. I liked the people there; they were all good Russian people, and they eagerly accepted me into their proud coal mining family. Making me a coal miner like themselves was the most natural way for them to prove it. We went deep down into a coal mine together, which was of course the greatest token of togetherness. Later we showered together and drank vodka together, what better testimony to acceptance one may think of?..

Heredity is a generic term, but quite obviously it has a proper name attached to it. In my case it is Comrade Artem.

The name of my grandfather Artem has been forever linked with the name of Donbass. No, he was not a coal miner himself, but he was a popular revolutionary hero, and in the cruel game of politics he was on the side of the coal miners.

In early 1918 Artem founded and headed the short-lived Donets-Krivorog Republic with the capital in the city of Kharkov and including much of the territory east of the river Dnieper. Considering that the area commonly known as “Eastern Ukraine” has been culturally and historically Russian and Cossack since the eighteenth century (previously scarcely populated and known as the Wild Field, and in early nineteenth century coming to be called Novorossia, as opposed to Malorossia), Artem quite naturally saw his Republic as an integral part of Russia, and he declared it as part of the RSFSR. The counterclaim of the Central Rada in Kiev which wanted to annex, with the help of the Germans, this industrially-developed, coal and mineral-rich area, was laughable at best, as before the 1917 Revolution no one in the Russian Tsarist Empire would seriously consider this area a part of Malorossia. As a matter of fact, the whole notion of “Ukraine” gives no indication of nationality. It is merely a geographical indicator of the “edges” of the old Russian Empire. Only after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 did the word “Ukraine” start acquiring its modern significance.

(It goes without saying that the Crimea and the port city of Odessa, plus such places in the south as Kherson, Nikolayev, etc., were steadily identified as Russian, and had nothing “Ukrainian” in them, either. All cities in this large new area of the Russian Empire were actually founded by the Russians.)

The Crimea was lucky, in the sense that Lenin was not Khrushchev, and it never entered his mind to tinker with the geographical and administrative identity of the Peninsula. But Artem’s Republic was a different matter. As I explain this in a series of entries about Artem (such as Kiev Is Russia, Of Course!, posted on my blog on August 2-3, 2013, as well as in many others), Lenin rebuked Artem for forgetting that Russia’s interest in Ukraine was centered on the city of Kiev, the first capital of the ancient Russian State, as well as the cradle of Russian Orthodox Christianity. “No Russian in his own mind would ever imagine a Russia without Kiev in it.”

Lenin argued that in order to keep Kiev well in the Russian fold, “Eastern Ukraine” was needed as part of all Ukraine, to maintain a Russia-favorable balance of power there and to keep the Ukrainian nationalists in check. Like every Russian in those turbulent times of rampant Ukrainian nationalism, going hand in hand with German occupation, Lenin believed that Ukraine would be with Russia forever and ever, and that at the end of the calamities following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, all Ukraine would be brought back “home,” because the Ukrainians would quickly realize that it was better for them to be with the Russians than by themselves or with anybody else. Still, he did not want to take any chances, and effectively condemned Eastern Ukraine to becoming a fiefdom of Kiev. It says something about Lenin’s visionary determination that in the first year of the Bolshevik Revolution, when the Russian Empire had fallen apart and even what remained under the designation RSFSR was in mortal peril, he had no doubt that in just a few years the old Russian Empire was going to be recreated as the USSR, and in practical terms Eastern Ukraine would be governed from Moscow, rather than from Kiev, and Kiev in turn, being a historically Russian city, would be also governed from Moscow… So what’s the big deal about the formalities?

Lenin’s vision obviously paid off in the short run of three quarters of a century, but in the long run, the insistence of Artem on giving Eastern Ukraine its natural Russian identification within the Russian Federation would have been far more prudent, from the point of view of the citizens’ welfare and cultural self-fulfillment.

My poor, tragic Donbass! Like Crimea, there is nothing Ukrainian about it. Yet Khrushchev’s mindless gesture of gifting Crimea to Ukraine in 1955 has now been reversed, whereas Lenin’s tactical move of diluting Ukrainian nationalism of the West with Russian great-power chauvinism of the East has not been revoked in a similar fashion. Why not? Moscow has already suffered to saturation its denunciation by the West on account of Crimea, how worse could that become had the Russian troops crossed the border with Eastern Ukraine and annexed those parts of Ukraine that want to be part of Russia, rather than bow to the West-Ukrainian nationalism bent on erasing the Russian mindset in the non-Ukrainian territories?

I say, Moscow is still governed by Lenin’s, rather than Artem’s wisdom. It has no desire to annex Eastern Ukraine, leaving the sacred Russian city of Kiev to anti-Russian nationalists and extremists. Should at some point Russian troops enter Ukraine, they will go after Kiev, and not after Donetsk, Kharkov, and Odessa. They will want to restore the status quo existing before the coup. After all, the last legally elected parliament and executive government of Ukraine showed a certain pro-Russian sentiment on the part of the majority of Ukrainian voters. As a result of the anti-Russian coup, supported by the West with billions of dollars, not only was Ukraine’s president forced to flee and the cabinet of ministers dissolved, but the Rada itself suffered a colossal purge, which brought to power people who did not earn it at the polls, but effectively usurped it at the expense of the legitimately elected delegates. Need I say loud and clear that there is no democracy today in Kiev, and it is this sham quasi-government that the West is supporting under the guise of Ukraine’s “free choice.”

Should this mess continue, I expect a genuine “freedom revolution” to overthrow the Western darlings in a matter of a few months. Only those freedom fighters will be anathema to Western values, a nightmare for Washington and Brussels. But having released the malevolent genie out of the bottle, the chances of getting it back will be no greater than in Iraq, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, or in Libya after the destruction of Muammar Qaddafi…

That’s when the West will truly want the Russians to step in. Just like many people are happy today that their persistent efforts to depose Assad have not succeeded…

My hope, though, is that the Russians step in sooner, rather than later. I see people dying today not because of a Russian interference, as the West disingenuously alleges, but precisely because of the Russian non-interference. I would welcome the Russian troops there not merely on behalf of Eastern Ukraine, but on behalf of all Ukraine, in order to prevent it from a complete collapse into a failed state in the heart of Europe.

Meanwhile, as an honorary coal miner of Donbass, my heart is not with any game-playing politicians, but with my fellow coal miners, once betrayed by Lenin, then betrayed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and now, hopefully, not being abandoned to their tragic fate by the Russian President Vladimir Putin.