Editor’s Note: This is the 13th story in the Kyiv Post’s Honest History series, which aims to debunk myths about Ukrainian history. The series is supported by the Black Sea Trust, a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Black Sea Trust, the German Marshall Fund or its partners.
Saving the Russian people of Donbas – this is how the Kremlin justifies its military invasion in eastern Ukraine, a war that is more than four years old with more than 10,000 people killed.
The Kremlin’s propaganda aggressively presents this region as a breakaway enclave of predominantly ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking population who are waging a righteous and defensive war against the oppression within post-EuroMaidan Revolution Ukraine.
Also, it persistently proclaims the Donbas, as well as wide swathes of Ukraine’s southeast (tagged as “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia”), to be a part of the so-called “Russian world,” claiming it to have deeply ingrained civilizational ties with greater Russia.
This propagandistic narrative of Donbas being “a natively Russian land” ensured the popular support of the Kremlin’s unrecognized involvement in the region and also mobilized tens of thousands of militants from all across the former Soviet Union for the hateful war against Ukraine as such.
Nonetheless, an honest study of the history of Donbas shows that ethnic Russians were never a majority there. This region was also settled and developed mostly by Ukrainians, along with dozens of other ethnicities who had colonized it over the past centuries.
Moreover, it also shows that true causes of the Donbas war have little to do with cultural and ethnic issues, but rather with unresolved economic problems that the Kremlin exploited to ignite its another undeclared war.
Newly found
Ukraine’s Donbas is a highly urbanized and densely populated region comprising of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts bordering Russia to the east.
It is the country’s industrial heart, distinguished for its coal mining, metalworks, machine building and chemical production. The wider notion of Donbas also includes southern agrarian districts near the Azov Sea port city of Mariupol, also a giant industrial center of nearly 500,000 people located 838 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
Until the second half of the 18th century, however, this rousing land was nearly uninhabited.
For hundreds of years of the ancient age, numerous nomadic tribes roamed these steppes. In the time of the medieval Kyivan Rus and long after, this territory belonged to what was then called “The Wild Fields,” stretching from the present-day city of Cherkasy to the coastline of the Black and the Azov seas.
Only in the 17th century, the Ukrainian Cossacks started to establish small trade settlements and watch posts. In such a way, many of the future key cities of Donbas were established, particularly Slovyansk (originally known as Tor, founded in 1645), or Bakhmut (built as a salt industry town in 1680s), or Kramatorsk (settled in 1650s-1700s).
In those wastelands, the Ukrainians sporadically encountered the Russian Don Cossacks and Tatars in trade and frontier clashes.
A Ukrainian military off-roader drives by an old mine gob pile in the near-frontline area of the Donetsk Oblast on Sept. 19, 2015. (UNIAN)
During the large-scale rebellion led by Bohdan Khmelnytskiy against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648-1657, scores of peasants from the central Ukraine moved east to escape the devastation and atrocities of war.
This was the beginning of the mass colonization of the future Donbas, and from the very start, it was reclaimed by ethnically diverse immigrants.
In search of a new life in those barely populated though fertile lands, the settlers arriving primarily from the present-time Kharkiv and Poltava oblasts established many of the villages and towns of today’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Some of the colonists, however, were arriving from the Muscovy Tsardom.
By the late 18th century, Russia, after a number of victorious wars against the Ottoman Empire, managed to defeat and annex the Crimean Khanate and to ultimately seize swathes of present-time southwestern Ukraine.
With the coming of the Russian Empire, the colonization intensified, and even more ethnicities set up their new national communities. In 1780, the Orthodox Christian Greeks from Crimea were allowed to settle down in an Azov Sea coast town that was later titled Mariupol.
The Azov Greeks managed to established dozens of new towns and villages in southern Donetsk Oblast – such as Sartana, Urzuf, Chermalyk or Mangush – in which they preserved their traditions and national color.
Moreover, in 1753, the emerging Donbas became a home for some 1,500 Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Greeks who had fled the Ottoman Empire and eventually found the colony of Slavo-Serbia on the southern bank of the Siverskiy Donets River.
Today, the city of Slovyanoserbsk, currently occupied by the Russian-backed forces in the Luhansk Oblast, still bears the memento of the old autonomy of the Balkan immigrants.
Melting pot
In the 19th century, the Donbas started gaining its famous industrial image as the rise of the coal mining greatly boosted the regional progress.
It all started with local peasants extracting minor portions of coal from first makeshift pits near their villages. But as early as by 1820s, the region had been given its well-known name after the recently-discovered Donets Black Coal Basin (“DonBas”) that spreads over 500 kilometers through Ukraine and Russia.
Thanks to the rich mineral depositories, expansion of railroads, and private investments from Great Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium, the industrialization of Donbas was given full throttle.
New iron and steel plants and mining enterprises were emerging rapidly, boosting the establishment of numerous new workers’ settlements.
As far back as in 1795, a Scottish merchant Charles Gascoigne established an ironworks factory on the banks of the Luhan River that would eventually evolve into the city of Luhansk. Another steel plant built by a Welsh manufacturer John Hughes on the Kalmius River gave rise to the little town of Hughesovka (commonly known as Yuzovka), which later became the informal capital of Donbas, the city of Donetsk.
A view of the early workers’ settlemets of Hughesovka (Yuzovka) at the location of present-time city of Donetsk, pictured circa 1880.
By the end of the century, the Donbas was among the crucial industrial centers of czarist Russia.
Fast growth instigated an immense labor demand. So tens of thousands of new workers, particularly Russians, from all across the giant empire rushed to the Donbas in search of a better life, settling down in poor, rapidly expanding settlements.
Naturally, this economic boom featured the accelerated urbanization, amid which the Russian-speaking population affected by the imperial influence was concentrated in cities, while the rural folk in villages mostly spoke Ukrainian – a situation that is still actual today in the Donbas.
Nevertheless, Ukrainians had a distinct majority in this melting pot.
According to the 1897 census, they represented between 65 and 75 percent of the population of the empire’s counties that correspond the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, while Russians constituted only some 30 percent.
Working class heroes
The fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the subsequent multisided war on its ruins made the production assets of Donbas one of the most desired trophies for all of the combating parties.
By 1920, after the ultimate defeat of the czarist general Anton Denikin, the victorious Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin included this industrial region with the predominantly Ukrainian population to the newly-created Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to help boost the post-war reconstruction.
The Donbas preserved its status of one of the most crucial industrial centers of the Soviet Union, and under the Soviet influence, it started effectively gaining a specific mentality that in many ways would predestine its future for decades ahead.
The Soviet propaganda glorified the image of the hard-working people of Donbas and encouraged the glamor of local landscapes of gob piles, mine shafts, and factory chimneys.
In 1935, the region gave birth to the so-called Stakhanov Movement named after a local miner Olexiy Stakhanov who allegedly cracked a record of coal production and was eventually turned into an icon and a star to steer by for workers all across the union.
Furthermore, the Communist agitprop greatly focused on the history of anti-Nazi resistance in the region during World War II, particularly on a clandestine youth organization the Young Guard acting in the city of Krasnodon in the Luhansk Oblast.
“No one has even brought Donbas on its knees, and no one ever will,” this line from a 1942 anti-Nazi poem by a coal miner Pavlo Besposchadniy became an extremely popular catchphrase for decades to come.
All of this greatly instigated the pride and regional patriotism of Donbas.
A plant worker get his hands warm near a bucket of burning coal at the Avdiyivka Coke Plant on Feb. 21, 2017. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Meanwhile, the ethnic structure of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts continued to change as thousands of skilled technicians and workers from all across the Soviet Union were headed for Donbas to work at the emerging industrial complexes and live in increasingly Russian-speaking cities.
In the 1930s, along with other parts of Ukraine, the Ukrainian-speaking rural areas of Donbas suffered a devastating demographic depletion during the mass famine of Holodomor. According to Ukraine’s National Memory Institute, at least 136,500 people died by starvation in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, in 1932-1933.
The depopulated villages of Donbas were filled again by Russian settlers. Documents from the declassified KGB archives published in 2016 show that following the great famine, the Soviet authorities sent 3,500 households from Russia’s Ivanovo to the Donetsk Oblast on 44 train echelons.
Rust belt
Nonetheless, even after decades of the Soviet rule, ethnic Ukrainians still had a majority in the Donbas.
According to the 1989 census, the Ukrainian population in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts still represented 50-52 percent of the population, while Russians constituted some 43-44 percent.
In the course of time, the quota of ethnic Russians in the Donbas steadily declined. As early as in 2001, according to the year’s census, they represented only 38-39 percent of the population, while the Ukrainian share increased to 56-58 percent.
Even despite its somehow privileged status within the Soviet system, both regions voted 83 percent in favor of Ukraine’s independence at the milestone referendum of Dec. 1, 1991.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the Donbas faced the fate of many other large industrial regions of the world. A severe economic decline of the 1990s, complicated market reforms, and disruption of old production chains throughout the former Union led to mass shutdowns of unprofitable factories and coal mines.
A former spoilt child of Soviet propaganda, the Donbas quickly turned into Ukraine’s rust belt, a depressed region suffering from unemployment and organized crime.
Naturally, this provoked the accumulating unrest, as well as nostalgia for the glorified Soviet past. Needless to say that the Russian propaganda did its best to exploit the social and economic problems of the region and expand its influence.
The Russian media products, enjoying a monopolistic position in the region’s info-sphere, presented Russia as much more stable, prosperous and strong state, which, in addition to the linguistic and cultural affinity, was a much more preferable choice for the working people of Donbas, as distinct from Ukraine regularly shaken by political and economic crises.
This won a considerable popular support of the Kremlin’s invasion of 2014, but instead of a prosperous Soviet-style life in Russia promised by the TV propaganda, the Donbas faced a destructive war that still continues with no end in sight.
Notably, while the Donbas proves to have a prevailing Ukrainian population, it is nevertheless also a primarily Russian-speaking region. During the 2001 census, only 24 and 30 percent of responders in the Donetsk and the Luhansk oblasts correspondingly reported that they considered Ukrainian as their mother tongue, while the Russian language dominated with 74 and 66 percent.
And even though the Kremlin agitprop aggressively exploits this fact to substantiate the Donbas’ allegiance to the “Russian world,” this feature by no means brings about an indispensable popular loyalty to Moscow or its ruling regime.
Contrary to this propagandistic myth, the city of Dnipro, also a primarily Russian-speaking city, located just a three-hour-drive west to the war zone of Donbas, became one of the most tenacious centers of the resistance to the Kremlin’s expansion and a home for many of the Ukrainian volunteer battalions.
