Did the Donbas stand out among other Ukrainian regions during the late Soviet period and the post-communist transformation?

Major battles took place in the Donbas during World War II, as both Hitler and Stalin coveted the area's coal and steel. Postwar recon­struction soon re-established the Donbas as a major Soviet industrial region, complete with the attendant mythology of heroic miners who always answered the party's call to labor and defense of the Motherland.

Ukrainian culture did not entirely disappear from the Donbas, which produced a number of prominent Ukrainian writers and pa­triotic thinkers, including the leading political dissident of the 1960s, Ivan Dziuba. But the region's identity was above all Soviet; it was a densely populated industrial heartland not firmly grounded in any ethnic culture. Precisely because the Soviet authorities promoted the image of heroic miners, the latter developed the self-r espect and solidarity that enabled them to go on strike repeatedly in 1989­1991, when the Soviet state could no longer deliver on its promises. Donbas miners could still force the state to listen during the early 1990s, already in independent Ukraine.

By the mid-1990s, the old Soviet economy was largely destroyed and the mass workers' movement died with it. The remaining mines and large factories depended on their directors' ability to obtain state subsidies, whereas unemployed miners often resorted to eking out a living in unlicensed small mines “protected” by local crim­inal syndicates. New market capitalism also arrived in the region, and a wave of large-scale privatization began in the late 1990s. Some large enterprises, especially in export-oriented metallurgical and chemical industries, were modernized, but all independent worker organizations were discouraged.

Instead, in the twenty-first century, politics has increasingly pro­vided additional income for the underemployed, who could now be hired to participate in mass rallies organized by the Party of Regions. The latter established its power base in the Donbas smoothly, with the support of both Red directors and the oligarchs.

In contrast to western Ukraine and Kyiv, in the Donbas the disin­tegration of Soviet ideological controls in the late 1980s did not result in the development of any strong democratic movement. Although the striking miners put forward some demands for democratization, they went largely ignored. Rukh, the Ukrainian popular front of the late Soviet period, never made much headway there. However, the International Movement of the Donbas, which was created in oppo­sition to Rukh, and which the present-day pro-Russian separatists lionize as their predecessor, was also very marginal. As soon as the Communist Party could operate legally again, it regained its elec­toral hold over the Donbas. In the first decade of the 2000s, the Party of Regions replaced it as a regional political machine. It also completed the ideological transformation that had been underway for some time: emphasizing the rights of Russian speakers over the previous class-based communist rhetoric. Around the time of the Orange Revolution, the Party of Regions pioneered the wide use of protestors-for-hire, who were often recruited from depressed mining towns of the Donbas and bused into the national capital when required. By the 2010s, it also used titushky (thugs for hire) to frighten its opponents. When the Party of Regions disintegrated in February 2014, its legacy of corruption and violence, long hidden by internal and external portrayals of the Donbas as a prosperous and politically significant region, was finally revealed.