by Tim Judah
All this voting was obviously too much for the old guard and it was clear to them that it was a factor in the dissolution of the state. But it was their own rearguard action which was to deliver the final blow to the USSR, when they launched a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. Leonid Kravchuk, the canny Ukrainian leader, was noncommittal until it was clear that the coup would be defeated and then came out against it. Then the Verkhovna Rada voted in favor of independence by 346 to 1.
On December 1 Ukrainians were voting again. They were asked if they supported the act of independence. This time 92.26 percent were in favor. Not a single region voted against, including traditionally pro-Russian Crimea, which voted 54 percent in favor. The next two regions with the lowest support were Donetsk and Lugansk, which still voted “yes” by 83.9 percent and 83.3 percent respectively. For many nothing was really clear. Many believed that independence would mean a new start, but at the same time everyone in the Soviet Union would somehow stay together under the umbrella of the new Commonwealth of Independent States—no one really knew, and indeed this is an important point. None of these referendums, which are often taken as such important benchmarks of popular will, was anything that anyone in the West would ever remotely accept for their own country. In no case were there years of erudite discussion, in the media above all, of the cases “for” and “against” as there were in Scotland in 2014 or Quebec in 1995, for example.
In Mariupol, I talked about the recent Donetsk referendum with Liubov Ivaschenko, a doctor aged sixty-one, and asked her what she had thought at the time of the 1991 independence referendum. “I was very hopeful,” she said, “but at the same time I felt nostalgia for Soviet times and for our capital Moscow.” This seemed to encapsulate something.
For many, those heady days of hope were to evaporate very quickly with the complete collapse of the economy. In Donetsk, Crimea and some other places small groups agitated for a restoration of ties with Moscow and even a restoration of the USSR. So, in 1994, concurrent with the general election a new “consultative” referendum was held in Donetsk and Lugansk. Consultative meant that it could be considered more of a glorified opinion poll rather than something with a legal status. People were asked if they wanted Russian to be a state language with equal status to Ukrainian, the language of the local administration, and whether they wanted a federal Ukraine. As usual the response was a resounding “yes.” But then nothing happened. Small groups agitated, politicians from the east such as Yanukovych came to power, lost it and regained it, and tiny groups grumbled, moaned and organized, some talking of restoring something called Novorossiya or the New Russia of Catherine the Great and some of the Donetsk Republic of 1918. Hardly anyone in the Donbass noticed these people or what they were doing on the far fringes of political life.
Sergei Baryshnikov, with a Donetsk People’s Republic flag, in his office in Donetsk University. March 2015.
When I first met Sergei Baryshnikov he was hurrying off to give aid to soldiers. A political scientist and a member of the DNR’s then unelected parliament, at the beginning of September 2014 he was a man whose time had arrived. A few weeks later the DNR authorities appointed him to take over the university. He had worked here for some twenty years but resigned in 2012, although there were allegations that he had departed under a cloud and amid rumors of bribe-taking. As the war began he was part of the small group of pro-Russians who played a role in organizing the rebellion in Donetsk and calling for Russian troops to intervene. As he left to hand out his aid, I asked him if there were any here and he replied enthusiastically, “Yes, thousands!” Then, perhaps remembering that the official Russian position was that there are no regular troops in what he was calling “the former Ukraine,” he noted that all of them were “volunteers.”
Officially the university has gone into exile in Vinnitsa in central Ukraine. Many academics and students have left and some are following courses online. But for those who remain, who either did not want to leave, could not leave or are academics not purged by Baryshnikov, he is now the boss. He is important not only because of that but because he is one of the leading ideologists of Novorossiya and the DNR. On his desk he has its flag and on the wall a portrait of Vladimir Putin. He is “our president,” he said, “de facto, our leader.”
I wanted to discuss the origins of the DNR. In the early 1990s a welter of political organizations sprang up in the east, all trying to represent the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass and Ukraine. Most were small and now forgotten. But the one Baryshnikov mentioned was set up in 1989 and was called the Inter-Movement of Donbass. It aimed to preserve the USSR and was related to similar movements in the Baltic republics. One of its leaders was Dimitry Kornilov, a man who was fascinated by, and collected information about, the 1918 Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic and, according to a declaration of the DNR parliament in 2015, was the first to resurrect its flag in 1991.
At the time, said Baryshnikov, he was not so involved politically. He had just gotten married, just had a son and was preparing his doctorate. But he was against Gorbachev, because he said it was clear he was leading the Soviet Union to destruction. The Inter-Movement idea was to “save a multinational sovereign state and stand against nationalistic ideas,” in this case the nationalistic ideas being Ukrainian of course. Baryshnikov supported the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. The problem with Donbass, though, was that unfortunately its people proved to be “apolitical, passive and apathetic.” People like him who wanted to keep the USSR together and who might be prepared to do something about it were few and far between. Baryshnikov does not believe, however, that the numbers recorded of those who voted for independence in December 1991 are real.
In the ensuing few years he was involved with various organizations which militated for Russian language rights. When he was asked to teach in Ukrainian he refused. As to Yanukovych’s later Party of Regions, which, when in power, did pass language laws aiming to settle the issue of when Russian could and could not be used officially, he says the party was really just a disappointment. In 2012 Baryshnikov began to cooperate with a political activist called Andrei Purgin, who was one of the founders in 2005 of a tiny group called Donetsk Republic. It wanted to re-create the short-lived state, but, he said, they were only a handful of people, some of whom, like Purgin, are important today and some of whom are forgotten. The idea, he explained, was to create a federal state and then to separate from Ukraine. “I was for joining Russia,” Baryshnikov said. “I had always been against Ukraine, politically and ideologically,” though he stopped here to say that what he did like about Ukraine was its food and its women. Now he was warming to his theme. Donbass should be part of Russia, he argued, because historically it had been part of Russia. In fact, now the idea was to re-create a great and single Russia from the Far East to the Baltic states, which would have to become part of it. All of Ukraine should become part of this Russia except perhaps for Lviv and Galicia in the west, which had not been part of the Russian empire before the First World War. “Ukraine should not exist.” The creation of the DNR, he explained, was just the “first stage” that people like him had a “historical mission” to complete.
We have to destroy the idea of Ukrainian identity and its national idea. Who are Ukrainians? They are Russians who refuse to admit their Russian-ness…The Ukrainian idea is one which can be compared to a difficult disease, like cancer. I think we must suppress it…the easiest and shortest way to do that is by war and repression. There is another way that is longer, and that is psychologically and through evolutionary change, but we do not have time. The thing is, we want to do it fast and decisively, because we are under the threat of depopulation. If we prolong this process then there is a possibility that we will cease to exist as a national group and each year there are less and less Russians.
With disastrous demographics for Russians in general, in Donbass, not to mention Ukraine, it was unclear to me why destroying and subjugating Ukraine would change things. To Baryshnikov i
t was very clear: victory would restore Russian virility.
Russians need a triumph to give them historical inspiration. They need something to believe in for their own future and that of their grandchildren and that is the idea of greatness. My children and grandchildren must be Russians, not neutral, uncertain and pro-European. There should be no multiculturalism. French must be French, Germans German and Serbs Serb and so on.
After the demise of Ukraine, what would be next? Perhaps it could be Kazakhstan, whose ethnic Russian population was in 2009 a declining but considerable 23.7 percent of the whole, much of it concentrated in areas adjacent to the Russian border. “I believe that sooner or later the artificially divided Russian nation will be united again,” said Baryshnikov.
Everything that Baryshnikov believes is consistent with the beliefs of Alexander Dugin, the influential Russian philosopher and proponent of a Russian-dominated Eurasian empire which would not only reunite ethnic Russians but dominate the West too. Dugin has chastised Putin for being too soft on Ukraine, and is a visceral opponent of anything that smacks of Western liberalism. His philosophy has drawn elements from fascism and Stalinism and from the original proponents of Eurasianism who were White Russian exiles living in the West after the Russian Revolution. His views are often quasi-mystical and, to most Westerners and not a few Russians, deranged. But not to all. In the West he has his fans too, and in the past at least was in contact with Alain de Benoist, a French philosopher and founder of the far-right New Right movement. He foresees a Europe returning to some form of pre-Christian past in which regional identities play a far more important role than today. As for Dugin, though, Baryshnikov said, “Yes, we support his Eurasian project. He is our friend.”
A few minutes’ walk away from Baryshnikov’s office is that of Andrei Purgin. Before the war the forty-three-year-old had a small building materials business. Now he is the deputy prime minister of the DNR. On one wall of his office he has large photos of rearing sharks, but he says he inherited these from the previous occupant of the office. He has a Soviet military flag, a portrait of Putin and, on his desk, a crystal ball in which, if you look at it from a certain angle, you can see Stalin’s face. This was a gift, he laughed. “We have nothing to do with Stalinism,” but he did not want to offend the Russian communist who gave him the crystal ball by not having it on his desk. Purgin was one of the founders of Donetsk Republic, the miniature group of political activists who from 2005 had been working to re-create the state of 1918. The group was born in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004 in whose wake Viktor Yuschenko, a man with Ukrainian nationalist credentials, became president.
The Donetsk Republic was a successor to the Inter-Movement of Donbass and also the groups which helped organize the referendum of 1994 on federalism. It had a newspaper and was close to the ideas of Dmitry Kornilov, who published a history of the 1918 republic. Dmitry died in 2002 but his work was carried on by his brother Vladimir. In 2007 criminal cases were opened against Purgin. He was accused of promoting and inciting interethnic conflict. These accusations, he said with the polished skill of a man who knew the ins and outs of the Ukrainian legal code, are hard to prove and there was no evidence that he had been “arming.” Yes, he conceded, they had a flag and coat of arms, a historical foundation for their claim “and so on,” and in this the DNR was unlike Montenegro, which had become independent in 2006. “It is no secret in Europe,” he said, that the little Balkan state had “gained its independence though it had only had a week-long previous history of statehood,” an assertion which is simply wrong. He claimed the aim of the indictments was to “suppress” his group’s ideas, which “were getting more and more popular.” In fact, hardly anyone in Donetsk had ever heard of them. After 2007, he explained, the organization developed as a kind of network, without a party structure, in order to make it harder for the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, to keep track of them.
In different places people had different beliefs ranging from monarchists to nutballs via extreme leftist groups. The idea of regionalism and of protecting regional interests was non-ideological. It meant that people with absolutely different ideologies raised the flag of the Donetsk Republic, which was the flag representing the protection of regional interests.
Small groups of young people did military training. “We organized trips to the countryside,” Purgin said, for young people with “patriotic inclinations.” Ukrainian sources say that these camps were facilitated, especially when held in Russia, by Russia’s security services. There was a lot of cooperation with people in Lugansk and also with students and academics in Rostov and Voronezh in the neighboring regions of Russia. Asked whether they also aimed to create an independent state, he said the question was wrong. “When we started our activity Ukraine was still part of the ‘Russian World’ and remained within the orbit of Russian Orthodox civilization, so the issue was only about federalization. American groups such as Freedom House, however, helped create civil society organizations in Ukraine and then the issue became pertinent.” Thus: “It was impossible to stay in a state which aimed at deindustrialization. So, as Donbass is an industrial region, we came to the conclusion that federalism was not enough for solving the issue of protecting people.”
Freedom House is a human rights NGO that has long worked closely with USAID, which distributes U.S. government money for human rights promotion as well as regular aid and which has been condemned as Russophobic by Russian officials. As far back as 2004—before the founding of Donetsk Republic—it was also accused in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. of indirectly supporting organizations working to promote the election of Viktor Yushchenko.
For now it is too early to say to what extent or not Russia’s security organizations promoted and assisted the takeover of buildings in Donetsk and elsewhere in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution. In the same way it is hard to know to what extent former Russian security officials such as Vladimir Antyufeyev and Igor Strelkov, who had prosecuted the war for the DNR from Sloviansk, were under the direct control of the Kremlin or not. Purgin said: “We are not spontaneous revolutionaries. We are conscious revolutionaries.” In the wake of the fall of Yanukovych, “people were literally seething all over Ukraine.” The way he put it, Ukraine’s political players were playing chess, “but then it turned out that one part of Ukraine continued playing chess but the other part took out a baseball bat.” In his mind, of course, that part is Ukraine, not the DNR.
Hunt on the Internet and it’s possible to find an old Donetsk Republic organization site which asks people to determine whether they are Ukrainian or Russian. This can be worked out by your answers to four questions: “Do you talk and think in the Ukrainian language?”; “Were your ancestors in the Wehrmacht or did your grandfather serve in the SS Galicia Division?”; “Are you a Catholic?”; and finally, “As a child were you brought up on the tales of Ivan Franko?” (the great Ukrainian poet). There is a map of Ukraine. It is divided and each section can be identified by its flag. Crimea is part of Russia. The east and south are the DNR, Odessa and Bessarabia are the Odessa Republic, the west is depicted with a Nazi flag and is identified as “Galician Fascists,” Transcarpathia is a separate little entity called Sub-Carpathian Rus and the remaining rump in the center is simply Ukraine.
It is interesting that the map assigns Crimea to Russia but does not do the same for the rest of the east and south. Asked about the future, Purgin was a little ambiguous. Today, “We don’t consider ourselves as part of something separated from Russia. We consider ourselves as a part of the ‘Russian World.’ Therefore, our intentions are close economic and political cooperation with the Russian Federation.” Only time will tell, he said, what form that will have, that is to say, whether “federal” or—referring to the Eurasian Union, launched by Putin in January 2015—“in such a form as Belarus and Kazakhstan.” The problem was that he could not see that far ahead. “You can see that the world is going through a very serious crisis and it is unclear w
hat the end will be.”
So, what about the other parts of the map? Again, he did not know. “We are part of the industrial Ukraine that includes all the southeast,” and here he mentioned Kharkiv to the north, Odessa, the regions of Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk and the industrial city of Krivoy Rog. “We really hope that somehow we will be united with the rest of this industrial part…Moreover, we hope that in the future we will somehow be able to help those people who are now left in Ukrainian-controlled territory and who are now persecuted by the Ukrainian authorities.” Clearly the most important target for the DNR is the port of Mariupol, but, “sadly,” so far it had proved impossible to take it. He pinned his hopes on Ukraine going bankrupt and it being very hard to keep Mariupol’s angry and then unpaid people “under the barrel of a large-caliber machine gun…I think in the end the people of Mariupol themselves will decide its fate.” We were talking a few weeks after a second ceasefire agreement had been signed in Minsk in February 2015, but Purgin did not think the war was over. “A civil war can finish only in two ways,” he opined. “Either with the interruption of a third side or when both sides run out of people ready to fight.”