by Tim Judah
Stalino was liberated in September 1943 and reconstruction, including the draining of flooded mines, began all over again. And then, yet again, famine hit the region in 1946–47. Men came home from the war, but for years women vastly outnumbered them and so many were sent into the mines to work. Gradually, a new city was born and the layout of the center and suburbs we have today was laid down in this period. These were years of hope, and older people have fond memories of them. I met Galina Konstantinivna, an economist and academic, who was born in 1937 and lived as a child in a village near the city. Her background was typical. Her mother was Russian but her family had originally come from Latvia and her father was from the ancient Greek community which once thrived on the Black Sea coast.
Among Galina’s earliest memories are “not having enough to eat” but being “surrounded by love.” She recalled being loaded into a freight truck in 1941 and evacuated to Saratov, a town in Russia on the Volga River. The family came back in 1943 immediately after the Germans were expelled. She did not see white bread until years after the war was over. As a child, she had to chip in like everyone else to help with work, and so “we managed to reconstruct the destroyed city in five or seven years.” When I asked her which were the best periods of the city’s history after this, she replied that one of them was at the beginning of the 1960s when the city and region were dominated by communist boss Vladimir Degtyarov (1920–93). “He was very authoritarian,” she recalled. If he walked through the city, renamed Donetsk in 1961, and saw some rubbish, woe betide the person responsible. Degtyarov stamped his mark on the city. After a visit to Versailles he is said to have sent Donetsk’s gardeners to France to learn about landscape design, which was then to be applied on their return. In this way the town acquired the name of the “City of a Million Roses.”
Galina Konstantinivna, economist and academic. Donetsk, March 2015.
As for the second period of hope and optimism in the city, Konstantinivna said: “You will be surprised!” It started in 1997 when Viktor Yanukovych, who came from nearby Yenakievo, became governor. “At first I laughed when he became governor,” she said. After all, he had spent time in jail for assault and robbery, “but after two years I saw a different economy emerging. Yes, there was stealing but also development. The corruption was corrosive and we did not like it and we tried to change things, but greed trumped fairness.” Still, “we could never have imagined that that period would be followed by this one.” It is worth noting that Ukraine as a whole began to see economic growth in 2001 after its decade of post-communist collapse.
We sat in Konstantinivna’s kitchen, where she had packets of food aid with stickers showing that they had been donated by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, who had once backed Yanukovych. He was born in 1966, his father was a miner and his mother a shop assistant. How he became the new John Hughes is another story, but one that sits well within the Donetsk tradition of being the hard city of Ukraine’s wild east. Now his Donbass Arena stadium, the home of Shakhtar Donetsk, was being used as a base to distribute his aid. In exchange perhaps for his help in feeding so many people, the rebels left his property alone, despite earlier threats to nationalize it.
In writing and speaking about the war many people talk about geopolitics, about propaganda and about Vladimir Putin. That is all fine. What is less well understood abroad are some of the social and demographic aspects that underpin the conflict. Some years ago a group of European academic institutions came together to study a series of “shrinking cities,” that is to say, places whose populations had been dropping dramatically over the last few decades. The Shrink Smart project included Liverpool, the Italian port of Genoa, Timisoara, famous as the birthplace of the Romanian revolution in 1989, Leipzig and Halle in the former East Germany and Donetsk and neighboring Makiivka.
The population of Ukraine as a whole has suffered a dramatic decline since independence. In 1993 it peaked at 52.18 million, but by 2013 it was estimated to have fallen back to 45.49 million. So, although it is a general phenomenon, the specifics of what has happened in Donetsk and Donbass do help explain some of the anger that the ideologists of separatism or of joining Russia were able to capitalize on when the war began. The work done on Donetsk in the Shrink Smart project, undertaken by Ukrainian researchers and published in 2010, also provides answers to one of the biggest pan-Ukrainian gripes. People in Donbass often say that they are fed up with subsidizing the rest of Ukraine, while those in the west and center say they are fed up with their taxes subsidizing the smokestack, rust-belt industries of Donbass. Inevitably, perhaps, the truth comes in shades of gray rather than black and white.
Donetsk, and much of the rest of Donbass, is surrounded by slag heaps from the mines. Locally they call them terrikons, which might be better transliterated as “terricones.” Some are perfect pyramids, some are hills covered in trees and shrubs and some of them rise to become strange, otherworldly plateaus. On one of Donetsk’s largest, a network of garages was built in the 1970s to anchor it down. From here, the men who frequent them and who have long used them for all manner of secretive businesses such as illegal brewing or, more recently, to hide cars in concealed garages to keep them out of the clutches of armed robbers, can watch the shelling of Donetsk from one side or look down on the neighboring city of Makiivka from the other.
Terricone slag heaps, Lysychansk, near Lugansk. May 2014.
The population of Donetsk peaked at 1.1 million in 1992 and dropped to 974,598 by 2009, a decline of 13.1 percent. Makiivka’s population plummeted by almost 21 percent, though the region as a whole did even worse, losing almost a third of its inhabitants by 2007. The main reason for this was a collapse in the birth rate coupled with high death rates. While male life expectancy had been 63.87 years in 1991, by 2008 it had dropped to 60.35 years. What this meant was that the Donetsk-Makiivka conurbation’s residents were among the oldest in Europe but paradoxically those with “the shortest lifespan on average.” The region was becoming older because fewer babies were born, the young, especially the educated, were choosing to leave and the old were dying younger.
Between 2001 and 2007 all of Ukraine went through a period of economic recovery, but it was patchy. While the economies of Donetsk and Mariupol on the coast started to strengthen, Makiivka began to be left behind. According to the report:
As late as 2007, the overall level of economic activity has not yet recovered to its 1990 level. Even after almost a decade of revival, the area remains a lower-middle income economy. Donetsk region’s gross domestic product per capita stands at only €2,000. In August 2007, the average monthly wage in the Donetsk region was €230. The protracted neglect and lack of public investment into housing, heating, transport, and environmental protection infrastructure has resulted in the degradation of urban landscape (outside the city centers) and natural environment, and the overall retrogression of the urban quality of life. Combined with seriously under-financed healthcare and educational systems, the negative consequences of economic transition only exacerbate the demographic crisis faced by Greater Donetsk and the Donbass.
In Donetsk, while mining and metallurgy remained important, their share of the economy dropped. Donetsk modernized and began to create white-collar jobs (unlike Makiivka), but as the report noted, new jobs “were in market consumer or producer services, which required from applicants…a different skill set from the traditional coal and steel vocations. Manual industrial workers and, most prominently, the unskilled and low-skilled personnel have been the main losers of the urban economic reconstruction.” In Makiivka 6,000 steel workers lost their jobs in 2008 when the Kirov Iron and Steel Works had to close because of the drop in demand due to the world financial crisis. Meanwhile, in Donetsk new apartment blocks and houses were shooting up to accommodate the new middle class while old Soviet blocks increasingly became the homes of the elderly and the poor. Drugs, AIDS and crime were big issues. Growth was driven in Donetsk by two of the biggest companies in Ukraine, one being Rinat
Akhmetov’s System Capital Management, and the other being the Industrial Union of Donbas, dominated by Sergei Taruta, another fabulously rich albeit comparatively minor oligarch.
Now look at how people identify themselves. According to the 2001 census, 77.8 percent of the population in Ukraine saw themselves as Ukrainian and 17.3 percent as Russian. For the oblast or province of Donetsk those figures were 56.9 percent and 38.2 percent respectively, but for the city of Donetsk it was 46.7 percent Ukrainian and 48.2 percent Russian. With regard to the wider Donbass, however, and if you gave people the option of a regional identity, the report noted that 41 percent identified themselves as Ukrainian, 11 percent described themselves as being “Soviet” and 48 percent opted for a regional or local identity of “Donbas,” “Donetsk,” etc. Ukrainian was the mother tongue of 11.1 percent in Donetsk and similar figures prevailed in the rest of Donbass, though the number of children being educated in Ukrainian was shooting up. But these ethnic-cum-nationality issues when reflected in percentages should not be interpreted as rigid and inflexible, in the sense of people being either Ukrainian or Russian or Ukrainians speaking Russian. Simply because there were more Russians here meant that there was more intermarriage too. A survey from 1991 found that almost three-quarters of Russians here said they had close Ukrainian relatives, and in 1992 some 47.7 percent of children were born to parents of different backgrounds though their own parents were just as likely to be of mixed identities. Bearing all this in mind, and that this part of Ukraine, being Russian-speaking, watched more Russian TV and fell more within Russia’s cultural and media sphere than Ukraine’s, it is not surprising that when Putin says that Ukrainians and Russians are practically the same, here at least his words have resonance. Also, noted the Shrink Smart report, which, we should remember, was written well before the war:
The Donbas’s absence of cultural and ethno-linguistic affinity with the Ukrainian nationalist project, combined with the depth of the economic depression suffered by the region and its large industrially oriented cities in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR on 26 December 1991, have led to a creeping sense of alienation in the region…Ukrainian identity politics have eventually added to unhappiness, depression and psychological stress in the Donbas, exacerbating out-migration pressures and adding to mental health problems among most of the urban dwellers.
As to the question of where money was going and who was subsidizing whom in Ukraine, the answers begin to become clear. Ukraine has twenty-seven regions. Before the war Kiev was the richest, Donetsk was the fifth richest. Seven regions of Ukraine contributed more to the central budget than they gained. Crimea and Lugansk were net gainers. But within Donetsk oblast some areas were much better off than others, so the picture was complicated not least because much of the mining industry was subsidized by the state, i.e., by the taxes of all Ukrainians. Nevertheless one can see how, when the time came, there was dry tinder in Donbass. Many here had been part of the Soviet working-class elite, that is to say, well-paid and well-regarded miners and industrial workers. The end of the Soviet Union stripped them of status, and in many cases jobs and comparatively their standards of living, including in the provision of health care, declined. At the same time individuals such as Akhmetov came to own the most profitable assets of the region and, while local politicians such as Yanukovych could boost local pride and help the employment of those close to his party, in reality and despite monikers such as “pro-Russian” he and they were not. They were pro themselves.
Most of the issues that afflicted Donetsk and Donbass were not unique to them, but the low level of identification with Ukraine, the fact that the most pro-Ukrainian part of the population was the comparatively small but educated middle class, who mostly fled as the war began, meant that there remained plenty of angry people here ready to believe that this was the moment to take action to better their lives when the flags of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were raised. If they had known that supporting them would spark war and the now probable economic death of their region, history would have been very different.
In terms of population the war has been a catastrophe, especially bearing in mind that the region had lost almost a third of its inhabitants well before the conflict began. By spring 2015, from the wider Donbass region afflicted by the conflict, some 45 percent were believed to have fled, either west into Ukrainian-controlled territory or to Russia. The educated middle class tended to flee west and, as the fighting dragged on and people began new lives elsewhere, it was clear that fewer and fewer would ever return, whatever peace eventually looked like.
Ballot box in Sloviansk for the Donetsk People’s Republic referendum, May 11, 2014. The sign says “Referendum.”
On May 11, 2014, the rebel authorities held a referendum in which people were asked: “Do you support the act of state self-rule of the Donetsk People’s Republic?” Since pro-Ukrainians boycotted it or had fled and anyway the referendum was a chaotic affair, it is quite possible that 89.7 percent of those who voted—and no one knows for sure how many did—actually said “yes.” In the DNR the rebels claimed a 74.87 percent voter turnout, but the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior claimed the figure was 32 percent. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian presidential election was due to be held on May 25 and posters for a couple of candidates had gone up in Donetsk, though the DNR authorities would prevent this from happening in the territory they controlled and it was far too dangerous for anyone to campaign here.
A week before the Ukrainian poll I went to a cigarette kiosk in Donetsk and asked the woman inside how business was. As the war was beginning, all those I had previously asked unsurprisingly said business was terrible. Well, she said, as everyone was stressed, they were smoking more and so it was pretty good in fact. But she added angrily, “I am so tired…I just want peace and quiet.” While we talked a stream of people came and went buying cigarettes. Everyone agreed with her. When I asked her about the presidential elections she said that she supported Ukrainian unity but not the current government in Kiev, “which took power by force.” One of the election posters was for the new leader of Yanukovych’s old party, which used to have overwhelming support in Donetsk. About the two candidates whose posters could be seen in the city, one woman, picking up her cigarettes, snapped that they were “werewolves.” I asked a disheveled old lady what she thought of Denis Pushilin, one of the main separatist leaders, and she said shrilly: “What did he do? My pension has not increased!”
Two girls came by and a middle-aged female Jehovah’s Witness who opined that everything that was happening was God’s will. The girls, who were both seventeen, said their parents wanted to vote but did not know whom for. The Jehovah’s Witness gave them some leaflets, the only ones being handed out in this election in the east, and wandered off. Then one of the girls said that her parents had voted in Donetsk’s referendum. Whatever happened, said Nastia, they just wanted there to be “no war.” The woman in the kiosk was getting hot and bothered. She excused herself and slammed shut the tiny window to preserve the cool air from her air-conditioning inside.
I could have interviewed as many analysts and political scientists as I wanted but would never have gotten as concise a snapshot of what people in the east were thinking as that. Not only did they not feel represented by any politician but, when it came to what the DNR was about, there was utter confusion. Some had thought they were voting for independence in its referendum, but others for autonomy within Ukraine and hence they could still vote for the country’s president. The reason it was so unclear in the DNR was because the term “state self-rule” could be interpreted in different ways, and presumably this was done intentionally to lure voters who were against independence but in favor of a federal structure for Ukraine, which had been discussed over the years. (The Lugansk question was much clearer and asked about “state independence.”)
What was also clear, if you look at the past, is that people here, as in the rest of Ukraine, are always “for” something, because they want th
eir future to be better than their past. In recent history too, supporters of one side or another always point to a referendum in which people have voted for something they approved of, and then ignore the ones where they have voted for something they do not want.
On March 17, 1991, for example, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, held a referendum in which people were asked whether they wanted to preserve the USSR “as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics.” The Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova did not take part, and a boycott was called for in western Ukraine. Still, 71.48 percent of those who voted in Ukraine did so for a renewed USSR and, although this was the lowest “yes” figure in the Soviet Union among all those who voted, it was still overwhelming. However, in Ukraine, people were asked some separate questions as well. Did they want Ukraine to be “part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States on the basis of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine”? The meaning of this was extremely opaque, at least to ordinary people. In fact this had been adopted in the Verkhovna Rada the year before and amounted to a virtual declaration of independence. It established that Ukrainian law, not Soviet law, was supreme, that the republic had the right to its own army and so on. The answer to that was “yes” too with 81.7 percent, and it meant that a majority had been voting “yes” simultaneously to ideas which in reality could never be reconciled. At the same time people in the west, in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, were asked if they wanted complete independence, to which the answer was again “yes” by 88.3 percent.