In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

by Tim Judah

After that the action moves to Moscow where western Ukraine and Belarus are graciously accepted into the USSR on November 1, 1939.

In other words, obscure to us in the West, but in the Kremlin simply standard operating procedure, there in the textbooks to be looked at again, dusted off and tweaked for modern times. When the Soviets marched into Lviv in 1939, an act that Soviet history commemorated as the “Golden September,” some Jews welcomed them, as did some Ukrainians, especially the poorer among them. For the Jews, Poland had been anti-Semitic and the Soviets were clearly better than the Nazis.

Andreas Umland, a German academic who teaches in Kiev and is an expert on the far right in the post-Soviet space, says most Ukrainians regard it simply as a flag of freedom. They don’t know that the red and black stand for the concept of Blut und Boden—“blood and soil”—adopted by the Nazis.

What is significant, though, is that while this was definitely the trend in the 1990s and especially between 2005 and 2010 during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, the position changed when Viktor Yanukovych became president in 2010. He began putting the brakes on this interpretation of history because—being Russian-oriented and from the east—none of this sat well with his constituents or worldview. Yushchenko’s awards of posthumous honors to Shukhevych and Bandera were revoked and the place of the Holodomor in Ukrainian history and outlook was downgraded, which is to say it was not denied but placed in the context of a famine that stretched well beyond the borders of modern-day Ukraine.

A signal that the policy had changed was Ruslan’s arrest by the SBU in September 2010, which under Yushchenko had opened its archives to him. He was interrogated for fourteen and a half hours and a case against him was instituted, he told me, “for collecting information that was a state secret with the aim of passing it on to third parties. So, I was accused of spying.” The case was closed in 2012 for “lack of a crime.”

According to him, colleagues were threatened and scared. The fact that a historian investigating Soviet crimes first had the archives opened to him and, when the policy changed, was arrested, only goes t...

Indeed, now the pendulum has swung again. In May 2015 President Poroshenko signed into law two acts passed in April by the Verkhovna Rada. One banned communist and Nazi propaganda, meaning it would be illegal to deny, “including in the media, the criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917–91 in Ukraine.” The second criminalized denying the legitimacy of “the struggle for the independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century,” including the role of the OUN and UPA. Before signing the law some seventy scholars of Ukraine, mostly but not only in the West, signed an open letter to Poroshenko asking him to veto the acts. They had been passed with little or no debate. “The potential consequences of both these laws are disturbing,” they argued: Not only would it be a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization [UPA] that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine, but also it would exempt from criticism the OUN, one of the most extreme political groups in western...

The scholars went on to argue that over the past fifteen years Vladimir Putin’s Russia had invested “enormous resources in the politicization of history,” and it would b...

They will alienate many Ukrainians who now find themselves under de facto occupation. They will divide and dishearten Ukraine’s friends. In short they will damage Ukraine’s national security, and for this reason above all, we urge you to reject them. As soon as the laws were passed, pro-Russians were able to say that this was yet further proof that Ukraine was now run by neo-Nazis who had come to power as a result of an American- and European-sponsored coup. Headlines appeared in Western publications usually sympathetic to Ukraine reporting, for example, in the words of Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View columnist, that it was “goodbye Lenin, hello Nazi collaborators in Ukraine these days.” It was a baffling own goal by the president and the Verkhovna

Bessarabia has nothing to do with Arabs, as its name might lead one to conclude. Its name derives from that of the Basarabs, the medieval Moldovan princes who once held sway here. Historically, the region that is now Ukrainian, most of which also has the alternative name of Budjak, was the core of Bessarabia. Once the Russians took it from the Ottomans and consolidated their control with the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, it became a part of what they called New Russia or Novorossiya. The Russians then used the name Bessarabia to describe both this southern part, what is now Moldova, and some lands to its north, which are also now in Ukraine. Today, says Anton Kisse, an ethnic Bulgarian politician and local big shot, it is hardly surprising that people are worried. After all, war and change come here every generation or two.

In 1939 Stalin and Hitler drew their infamous line from the Baltic to the Black Sea in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Soviet Union had never recognized Romanian control over all of the old Russian province of Bessarabia after the First World War.

Yes, he agreed, it was. On May 2, 2014, some forty-two anti-Maidan, pro-Russian activists died in a fire in Odessa after running street battles with pro-Ukrainians in which some five others died. Then the declaration of rebel republics in the east did not result in the regions being snapped off cleanly like Crimea and people becoming instantly better off, but in war. In those circumstances, the wind began to change. In the center of Tatarbunary, a couple of hours’ drive south-west of Odessa, there is a classic Soviet-era memorial.

commemorates the Tatarbunary Uprising of September 1924, when a group of locals, with covert Soviet help, organization and arms, rose up against Romanian rule.

They had, she says, good Ukrainian chernozem, the fertile “black earth” that Ukraine is famous for, but not enough water.

Zhovtnevoe in Bessarabia looks pretty much the same as any village-cum-small-town in Ukraine, but it has one peculiarity. It is the Albanian village of Ukraine. In

The Albanians are all Orthodox. (Most but not all Albanians are Muslim.) When this part of Bessarabia fell under Romanian rule in 1856, some families moved to three more villages close to the Sea of Azov, which flows into the Black Sea, where their descendants remain. Albanians also lived in Odessa, but Zhovtnevoe, whose original name was Karakurt, which means “black wolf” and is still in wide use today, remained a sort of Ukrainian Albanian capital village.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, herself an Albanian born in Skopje.

I made some remark about life being tough in Soviet times and especially while Stalin was still alive. “There was a woman who stole one and a half kilos of grain from the kolkhoz,” she said, recalling that she was sent to jail. I misunderstood her gist. I thought she was citing this as an example of an unjust system and tough times. No. The point was that then you got jailed for any tiny infraction of the law, but now people “steal millions and nothing happens to them.”

He works all over the world but says he is ashamed of Ukraine “because people laugh at us and say that we are manipulated by people who have power.” Natalya added, “so that Russia and the U.S. can resolve their political issues on our territory.”

On paper, the idea of a Bessarabian People’s Republic makes sense in that with determination and a small number of well-trained men it would be technically easy to isolate the region from the rest of the country, as there are only two bridges in across the Dniester, which could be blown up. In reality, such events might well simply splinter Bessarabia into several rival centers of regional and ethnic power.

One commemorates locals who fought in the Red Army during the Second World War, and includes a Soviet flag. On the other side are panels and information on the “Communist Inquisition,” the Gulag and the Holodomor. Those who glorify and honor the Soviet past in Ukraine usually ignore or deny the dark pages of Soviet history; likewise, those on the other side of the historical barricades in Ukraine glorify those who fought the Soviets and often collaborated with the Nazis. This exhibition is a little unusual then, but actually reflects what many ordinary and unideological people think: it is possible to honor those who fought the Nazis and fascism without denying the evils wrought by communism in Ukraine.

“People said, ‘When the Russians come, they will give us gas, double our pensions and make our life better.’

It was that of Igor Babych, a Russian general who served his career here, retired here and is well known about town. If there was to be a separatist movement, then maybe he could lead it?

Conchita Wurst, the bearded Austrian drag queen and 2014 Eurovision Song Contest winner.

Roads are notorious the world over for providing an easy opportunity to skim off extra profit. You are contracted to lay asphalt with a certain thickness, which you say you do, but you do not, pocketing the cash for the materials not bought or sharing it with whoever secured you the contract. The problem for those who use the road is that the surface quickly deteriorates, as it is not thick enough—just as it has here. Then a maintenance crew can go out to resurface it once again and more money can be shared between those in on the deal.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Until 1870, there was nothing here except for 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this way the town acquired the name of the “City of a Million Roses.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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 their 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.

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.