In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  The “Kilometer Zero” monument, at the point where the Ukrainian branch of the Danube runs out to the Black Sea. December 2014.

  Vladimir Vygonnyi is a wiry seventy-something. Even though there was no war on the morning we met, he was wearing a khaki uniform including a military-style cap and badge. Later I found an article from 2005 which described him as wearing the same thing. Vygonnyi wanted to show me something. We drove on a churned-up road until we got to a massive gash in the landscape. It was an illegal open-pit coal mine. Vygonnyi said he had been an activist of one sort or another since 1964. In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union, he, like many others in communist countries, tested the political water by creating an ecological action group. He has been fighting ever since, and Zuivka, an hour’s drive due east of Donetsk, is about as hard a place to be an ecologist and activist as any in Europe.

  Vladimir Vygonnyi at an illegal coal mine. Zuivka, April 2014.

  At first many thought him an eccentric but, in 2001, he spearheaded a successful campaign to stop the construction of two factories, which would have spewed high levels of pollution over the area. Now the issue is, or at least was before the war, kopanki, or small illegal mines. In difficult times, he explained, locals had always taken to a bit of DIY cottage mining to make ends meet or simply to heat their homes. With coal so close to the surface it is not hard to do. But the last fifteen years or so have seen a complete transformation of this into a multimillion-dollar criminal industry. In 2012 Ukraine produced 61.1 million metric tons of thermal coal, which is the type usually used in power plants. But examinations of the amount of coal moved by Ukraine’s railways showed that much more than that was being shifted. Estimates varied, but between 5.8 and 7 million metric tons of coal were believed to have been mined and sold illegally. Almost all of that was in Donetsk and Lugansk, and Zuivka was one of the most important centers of the business.

  On the day we visited there was heavy machinery in the pit but there were no miners. Still, in this and other illegal mines, explained Vygonnyi, miners got salaries which were far smaller than even in state-owned mines and “there are no social guarantees if you are injured or killed. They just dump bodies somewhere. Five were found like that last year in this region alone.” Once the land here is dug for coal it means, of course, that it is lost for agriculture. Like elsewhere in Ukraine, locals received land when the collective farms were broken up. As the law stands, they cannot sell it but only pass it on to their heirs or rent it. Everywhere else people rent their land to agro-industry companies, who thus consolidate large areas for commercial farming. Here, with coal just under the surface, mining companies had moved in. Ordinary people might want to use their land to raise cattle or grow something, but with so much money to be made in illegal mining this is becoming more difficult in places like Zuivka. “People are afraid,” said Vygonnyi. If they refused a demand to use their land for mining: “They would be threatened or killed. Only in Zuivka they want to take 10,000 hectares.” So far they had taken only 1,000, but he pointed out “there are thousands of villages like this.”

  Nikolai Ponomarenko, the mayor of Zuivka, tried to stand up for people and stop the illegal mines. Allegedly he refused the illegal miners’ bribes. Then, said Vygonni, “they planted $10,000 in his car and the police arrested him. He was killed in jail, in pretrial detention in August 2011.” Officially he died of a heart attack.

  The illegal mining industry began to grow in the 1990s as fifty-two of the most unprofitable mines were shut down. Profitable mines were privatized and many of them now belong to Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man and once most powerful oligarch. Up to now state-owned mines have continued to be heavily subsidized though. And this is where the great criminal opportunity opened up. Companies could buy, or illegally mine, coal cheaply and feed this into the state mining system, which gave them a handsome profit paid for by the taxpayer. A detailed study conducted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a well-known and reputable investigative organization that concentrates on the former communist countries of Europe, calculated that some $678 million had been stolen in 2012 in this way. The government coal subsidy, it said, “is in effect siphoned from state mines into private pockets, as the mines claim to be producing more coal than they actually do produce.” It cited the example of one mine which exceeded its planned monthly output by 20 to 30 percent, when coal extraction in 2012 rose by less than 5 percent. It also noted a second scam, to create companies to sell mining equipment to state-owned mines. The crucial issue was who was at the heart of all this. According to Vygonnyi it was a pyramid which led all the way to the top, that is to say, to local boy made good, President Yanukovych. Vygonnyi said he had been writing to the local prosecutor to do something about illegal mining but unsurprisingly nothing had happened. People said to him: “How come you are still alive?”

  The OCCRP report was more specific about who was making money and how. It followed the paper trails via the British Virgin Islands and Switzerland and proved what many locals believed but could never prove themselves—that the heart of the business was actually controlled by Oleksandr Yanukovych, the president’s son, and various presidential cronies. As we walked around the deserted mine, which might have stopped work because of the highly unstable situation in the east, Vygonnyi talked about the demonstrations by anti-Maidan pro-Russians in Donetsk. The people organizing them, he said, “are hoping for Russian support, so they will not be punished for their crimes…Donbass is a bandit region, and for local people things have become worse and worse since the 1990s.” The local political-cum-mafia classes were not just stealing money, they were “carrying it out in suitcases. They are stealing our land too and our air, which is very polluted with methane gas which is everywhere and destroying our ecology. People are dying early because of the ecological situation.”

  In the muddy center of the village, Vygonnyi laid out a large map to explain where the mines were and showed us a monument he had built with his own hands and money to honor local miners. The centerpiece was a small pyramid in the middle of which was a kind of shrine containing a miner’s hammer, helmet and lamp.

  A few hours later, when we got back to Donetsk, we found that the local Berkut, the riot police, many of whom had fought the revolutionaries in Kiev, had just seized the regional police headquarters. It was April 12, 2014. The war was beginning. Within months many of the region’s mines were flooded. The rebels raided them for explosives and detonators. Some miners joined the rebels but many did not. They were trapped. If Ukraine wins the war, many mines will close as subsidies come to an end, and more will lose their jobs. If the rebels win, the area will remain what it had already become a year later, an economic twilight zone with virtually no economic future whatsoever.

  Donetsk is the epicenter of the conflict. It has always had a reputation as a rough and ready kind of place, though before the war, during the 2012 UEFA European Championship soccer matches, for example, there would be no reason for a foreigner at least to know this. It has a superb, even beautiful modern soccer stadium, the home of Shakhtar Donetsk, the team owned, like so much else of value here, by Rinat Akhmetov. (Shakhtar means “miner.” Since the beginning of the war the team has gone into exile, playing their “home” matches in Lviv.) The town center is pleasant and families and friends like to stroll and bike along its lakeshore. In fact, said Liliia Ivaschenko, aged twenty-six, when she worked for the brewers Carlsberg, looking after its guests during the five Euro 2012 matches played in Donetsk, she really felt that her city had made it, that its difficult two decades of transition from communism were over, and that even if its politics and business verged on the thuggish, somehow Donetsk was not such a bad place to live in after all.

  Before the war the city was home to some 900,000 people. But, as in Lviv, though for completely different reasons, almost nobody here can trace their ancestry back more than a couple of generations. Until 1870, there was nothing here except f
or the nearby village of Alexandrovskaya. This was windblown steppe and sparsely populated as a result of three centuries of Tatar slave raiding. The region was taken by Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century and became part of her dominion of New Russia, or Novorossiya. Not much happened here on the steppe until Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856 and its leaders realized they needed to modernize, industrialize and build railways to connect the expanding but disparate parts of the empire. What happened next was perhaps serendipity. Two Russian envoys dispatched to London to discuss modern steel fortifications for the Kronstadt fort near St. Petersburg met a Welshman called John Hughes, who ran a factory which could make them in Millwall in east London. Hughes could barely read or write but he was a smart man, which was why he was running the factory. They discussed the fact that there was coal and iron ore in the Donbas region. As Hughes came from south Wales, his background was steeped in these industries, so he decided to explore the possibilities there.

  By 1869 the New Russia Company was formed, investors were committed, permissions, leases and titles negotiated and the following year Hughes, plus a group of some 150 mainly Welsh specialists, set sail for the Sea of Azov. From Taganrog, now in Russia, their equipment was hauled up by ox-train to where Hughes had decided to mine and work. And so Donetsk, or Hughesovka as it was called until after the Russian Revolution, was born. The coal was good quality and Hughes concentrated on producing rails for the rapidly expanding Russian railway network. At first it was hard to find enough workers, but he made sure their conditions were better than in other places, even if not great, and Hughes’s city began to grow. In 1871 it had a population of 480. By 1884 this number had grown to 5,500, by 1901 to 36,000 and by 1916 to 70,000. A 1917 census found that Russians were the largest single group in the city, followed by Jews and a third were Ukrainians.

  According to Roderick Heather, who wrote a biography of Hughes published in 2010: “The industrialisation of the Donbass started by Hughes initiated a wave of migration in the latter part of the nineteenth century.” As a whole, “Ukrainians showed much less enthusiasm for migration to the new Donbass mining settlements and factory towns with only a third of new settlers coming from the neighboring Ukrainian regions.” There was a reason for this. Because relatively few lived on the steppe, those who did had comparatively large farms and hence there was less pressure on them to move for work in a period of rapid population growth. Thus, they tended to remain in the countryside, Russians became industrial workers and Jews worked in trade and were craftsmen. So, as Heather writes, the region “proved an attractive destination for people from the Russian provinces of Kursk, Orel, Voronezh, Tula, Smolensk, Samara and Belorussia as well as Greeks and Tatars from the Crimea, Croats from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Serbs and Bulgarians from the Ottoman Empire, Germans, Austrians, Poles and Jews.” The result of this was the emergence in the Donbass of largely Russified towns set “against a Ukrainian rural backdrop.” Thus, he says:

  it became increasingly rare to hear Ukrainian spoken in the towns like Hughesovka. Inevitably this ethnic melting pot led to friction and recurring clashes. The relations between Russians and Ukrainians were particularly strained in both towns and workers’ settlements, leading to confrontations and frequent knife fights. The Tatars and Muslims were often the victims of violence by Slavs and almost every strike or labor protest in the Donbass ended in violent riots and large scale anti-Jewish pogroms.

  Today, oddly, the large and grand redbrick house in which Hughes lived with his family is a ruin. It is surrounded by a fence of wire and hedge. A stone’s throw away is the huge industrial complex which has descended from Hughes’s original mines and foundry. A local man I found working as a security guard nearby as I hunted for people who knew something about the building told me that, as long as he could remember—and he was a child after the Second World War—the building had been a ruin. Before the war, he thought it had been used as offices for the directors of the complex. In 1991 descendants of the Hughes family returned to visit the town and house and were told of plans to turn it into a museum.

  In 1908 the fourteen-year-old Nikita Khrushchev, who was born in the village of Kalinovka in Russia, close to the modern border with Ukraine, joined his parents who had already moved here. William Taubman, his biographer, quotes Khrushchev as writing in 1958 that it seemed to him “that Karl Marx had actually been at the mines” and that “he had based his laws on what he had observed of our lives.” The British and other foreigners lived in what was called the “English colony,” which had, according to Taubman, “neat houses, treelined streets, electricity, and a central water system.” But ordinary miners and factory workers lived in settlements “known as Shanghais and Dogsvilles.” One of them was called “Bitch” and another “Croak.” In 1910, says Taubman, “residents hauled water from twenty-seven hand pumps scattered around town; the only pump house served the foreigners. Teeming barracks housed fifty to sixty men in each dormitory room.”

  Cholera, typhoid and dysentery were frequent visitors to town. Using an alternative spelling for Hughesovka, Taubman notes that many of its residents “took refuge in drink and crime”:

  In 1908 the town boasted no fewer than thirty-three wine and liquor shops. From these it was a short step to mayhem. The writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who spent a year in Yuzovka, witnessed fights that spread until “the whole street joined in. Men came out with leaded whips and knuckle dusters, noses were broken and blood flowed.” In 1912 a visiting journalist described Yuzovka this way: “All the dregs of mining industry life gather here. Everything is dark, evil and criminal-thieves, hooligans, all such are drawn here.”

  The civil war and revolution saw the city change hands several times. The Donbass, like all of the wider region, was contested by the communists, the anti-revolutionary Whites, anarchists, supporters of Ukrainian independence and other groups. For a brief period German troops controlled the city. From December 1917 Red Guards and Whites clashed “in and around Hughesovka,” according to Heather, who notes why it was so hotly contested:

  At the end of the First World War, the region had been producing 87% of Russia’s coal output, 76% of its pig iron, 57% of its steel, more than 90% of its coke, over 60% of its soda and mercury as well as important manufactured and agricultural goods. It was with good reason that Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, then described the Donbass as not merely “an indispensable area” but “a region, without which the entire construction of socialism would just be a piece of wishful thinking.”

  In 1918 the Soviet Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic was declared in a bid to resist the German-supported Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was attempting to take control of the country in the wake of the Russian imperial collapse. In 1919, says Heather, three tanks supplied to the Whites by the British were used in action near Hughesovka. By 1921 the fighting was over, but the region afflicted by famine. The Soviets now began the reconstruction of the city which, after seeing its population drop during the civil war, saw it shoot up to 174,000 by 1926. Immediately after the war the city was renamed for Trotsky but in March 1924 it became Stalin. It is widely assumed that Hughesovka was named for the new Soviet leader, but in fact this is not true. The word stal means “steel” and the local communist leadership thought it appropriate, and in their dedication linked the name to that of Lenin and his steely attributes. Very soon after this, however, it was reported in the press that the town had been renamed for Stalin and it seemed judicious, as he consolidated his power, to let people assume that this was indeed the case and that the local leadership had been the first off the mark in the USSR to honor their new leader. In 1929 the name was slightly tweaked to become Stalino.

  As the city began to recover, running water was piped in, writes Colin Thomas, who made a three-part documentary about the town in 1991. Thousands of peasants in the countryside around Stalino were taught to read and write and material conditions began to improve for the city’s workers too. But in
1928, the secret police claimed to have discovered a “counter-revolutionary plot” and, as Thomas writes, this led “to the arrest of half of all engineers and technical workers in the area and the consequent swift promotion for those below them in hierarchy.” The town’s cathedral was torn down by the party and collectivization began. This was followed by the campaign against the kulaks, which was to see hundreds of thousands from all over the Soviet Union sent into exile or executed. The result was that, even before the Holodomor of 1932–33, which would hit the region badly, starvation began to set in around Stalino.

  One of the few Western journalists to cover the Holodomor truthfully (some infamously did not) was a Welshman called Gareth Jones. His interest in the area came via Hughesovka. His mother had been a tutor there before the revolution to some of Hughes’s grandchildren. In August 1930 he managed to get to Stalino. Ten days later he wrote to his parents: “In the Donetsk Basin conditions are unbearable. Thousands are leaving. I shall never forget the night I spent in the railway station on the way to Hughesovka. One reason why I left Hughesovka so quickly was that all I could get to eat was a roll of bread—and that is all I had up to seven o’clock. Many Russians are too weak to work.” Thomas also records that in September he had an article in the Western Mail which was headlined: “Starving Miners’ Flight from Communism, Famous Steel Centre No Longer Prosperous.”

  In October 1941 Stalino was taken by German and Italian troops. The war devastated the city and region. As the Axis forces approached, many miners and others, including Jews, fled or were evacuated, many with their companies. Thousands of those who remained behind were sent as slave laborers to the west. The Holocaust was prosecuted in this region with as much ferocity as anywhere else. In Mariupol, on the Black Sea coast, Jews were shot. In Yenakievo 555 Jews were rounded up, driven to nearby Gorlovka and thrown alive down a mine shaft. In Artyomovsk, some 3,000 Jews were herded into an alabaster mine just outside town, where they died of suffocation and starvation. In Stalino itself a ghetto was established and thousands killed, many by being shot and then disposed of down a mine which was no longer working, called 4-4 Bis. Ukrainian police collaborated in this, but as elsewhere at least some Jews were saved by their neighbors, and not only Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their helpers. Gas vans were also used in Stalino.