THE WILD STEPPE

Ukraine was soon distracted from its outrage over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In early March, pro-Russian protesters started taking over government buildings in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, co-opting Maidan’s narrative of righteous occupation and demanding referenda like the one in Crimea.

In early April, protesters occupying the Donetsk Regional State Administration Building proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic, asking Russia to send “peacekeepers” to protect them from Kiev. The protesters went on to seize the Ministry of Internal Affairs and to take control of buildings in a number of other cities in the Donetsk region. Protesters in Luhansk occupied the local security service building, calling for a “people’s government”: federalization within Ukraine, or incorporation into Russia. They went on to declare the Luhansk People’s Republic. As in Crimea, many local officials and police in Donetsk and Luhansk went over to the separatist side. Others were beaten, taken captive, or killed.

LIKE CRIMEA, DONBAS, the area that includes Donetsk and Luhansk, is a place with a potent myth. In the Russian and Ukrainian imagination, Donbas signifies both freedom and the threat of foreign invasion, a place where coexistence explodes easily into violence.

Donbas, whose name comes from “Donets River Basin,” is located on the vast steppe that stretches from Moldova to Kazakhstan. The medieval Slavs stayed away from this “wild field,” which had few freshwater lakes or trees. The only people who felt at home on the steppe were non-Slavic nomads, whom the Christian chroniclers of Kievan Rus considered harbingers of the apocalypse, barbarians who slept with their stepmothers and ate carrion and prairie dogs.

Too flat and wide to be defended, the steppe made good on its apocalyptic potential in the thirteenth century, serving as a highway for the Mongol-Tatar invaders who sacked Kiev. The Slavs eventually regrouped and began to expand their areas of control, but much of the steppe remained beyond their reach. Early Slavic steppe dwellers were fugitives: criminals, victims of religious persecution, escaped peasants or serfs. The Orthodox Christian Cossacks, masters of mounted warfare, fought endless battles with the non-Christian steppe nomads. Sometimes the Cossacks fought on behalf of the Russians or Poles; sometimes they simply robbed and looted as they saw fit.

In the eighteenth century, as the Russian Empire became more powerful and more Westernized, its rulers worked to bring the steppe under control. Catherine the Great renamed the region north of the Black Sea—now southern and eastern Ukraine—Novorossiya, “New Russia.” Like the annexation of Crimea, the colonization of Novorossiya was part of Russia’s imperial glory and “civilizing task.” In 1786 Prince Potemkin wrote to Catherine, “This country, with your care, has been turned from a place of uninhabited steppes into a garden of abundance, from a lair of beasts to a pleasing refuge for peoples from all countries.” As usual, Potemkin was indulging Catherine’s fantasies. New Russia wasn’t uninhabited, and it was no “garden of abundance.” Many of the settlers Catherine sent soon died, while others led hardscrabble lives, on the brink of starvation.

In the nineteenth century, industrialization brought a new kind of misery to Donbas. Wealth was discovered beneath the steppe, in the form of coal and steel, and foreign industrialists arrived to exploit these natural resources. The most famous was the Welshman John Hughes, who built a steel plant and several coal mines in Donbas in the late nineteenth century. He gave his name to Yuzovka, the city that is now Donetsk.

Donbas coal miners worked in miserable, dangerous conditions and looked forward to summer work aboveground, in the sunny fields. But seasonal labor was bad for industry, so Hughes held workers’ passports in order to prevent them from leaving. Workers were flogged, sometimes to death. There were periodic uprisings, riots, and looting, often fueled by vodka. The coal miners did their best to drink away their misery; sometimes they were simply paid in alcohol. The lack of clean drinking water led to epidemics of cholera, which soon spread to other regions. Donbas became not only the gateway for the Mongol Horde, but a source of infection.

According to Marxist logic, Donbas workers should have been ripe for revolutionary mobilization. They were certainly angry. One Russian engineer compared armed workers in Donbas in December 1905 to insurrectionary Cossacks, “a large crowd of people armed with the most incredible weapons—home-made pikes, shotguns, even scythes.” But it proved difficult to organize the largely illiterate Donbas coal miners, who were more inclined to drunken riots and Cossack-style spontaneous self-government than to political campaigns and lessons in class consciousness. After the revolution of February 1917, the coal miners demanded an eight-hour workday and attacked or arrested many higher-level mine employees.

The region was taken and retaken during the Russian Civil War, with each new army slaughtering its enemies en masse. Charismatic leaders rose out of nowhere, amassed followers, then were killed or driven out. The region’s Cossacks were among the fiercest opponents of the Bolsheviks and were nearly exterminated as a result. Later, Donbas’s rebellious residents fought bitterly against Stalin’s agricultural collectivization, which brought mass starvation and violence.

Donbas maintained its reputation as a wild, half-barbarian place. Under the Soviets, Donbas workers continued to be exploited and abused, but they found little sympathy from Soviet dissidents. In the 1970s mounting efforts at labor activism in Donbas were always crushed, the leaders sent to psychiatric hospitals, the standard treatment of political dissidents at the time. The Soviet dissident intelligentsia, however, had little interest in labor organizing, which demanded better pay and working conditions rather than a wholesale political transformation or democratic liberalization. Donbas labor organizers were second-class dissidents.

In 1991 Donbas workers voted overwhelmingly in favor of Ukrainian independence, hoping that it would bring economic prosperity. They were soon disillusioned. Not only did they find themselves exploited by post-Soviet oligarchs; Ukrainians in other regions continued to see them as unlettered, materialist barbarians. In Donbas, Russian was the primary language of the cities and of many villages. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Donbas had rejected Rukh, a party that promoted a Ukrainian identity based largely in the Ukrainian language and called the choice of Russian over Ukrainian “cowardly and mistaken.” One Rukh leader called the Donbas miners “sausage people” after a miner announced, “It’s all the same to us what language we speak, as long as there’s sausage.” For nationally minded Ukrainians, Donbas’s focus on material needs seemed petty, the concern of people who had stomachs where their souls should have been.

In public health work in Ukraine in the twenty-first century, I heard a lot about the former regions of Novorossiya, southern and eastern Ukraine, which became the center of Ukraine’s HIV epidemic as unhappy residents sought comfort in hard drugs. In 2007 a study found that a staggering 88 percent of injecting drug users in Kryvyi Rih, a mining town in the Dnipropetrovsk region, were HIV positive. In 2011, 3 percent of the town’s total population was registered as HIV positive, a rate comparable to that in West African countries. A Ukrainian colleague told me that the pollution from the mines in Kryvyi Rih was so bad that a white shirt was stained red by the end of the day. A Canadian colleague who did a workshop there felt certain that it was the worst place on earth.

ORIGINALLY FROM NORTHWESTERN UKRAINE, Natalia Yurchyshyn, a student at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, was active in the Maidan protests. When things went wrong in Crimea and then in eastern Ukraine, she told me, she started thinking about how little contact she and people in her social circles ever had with people who lived in Crimea or, especially, in Donetsk and Luhansk, places that most Ukrainians went out of their way to avoid. In April 2014 Natalia decided to go and visit these regions: better late than never, she thought.

Natalia may have been one of the only tourists ever to visit the polluted, decrepit post-Soviet industrial city of Sloviansk, which had recently been taken by separatists. As she stood in the center of the city, taking a picture of a blue garbage can near a blue door, a man wagged his finger at her. She assumed that he thought she’d been photographing him, so she came over and showed him he wasn’t in the frame.

He took her iPhone and tried to delete her photos, but he didn’t know how. Giving up on the unfamiliar technology, he asked, “Why are you photographing that?”

“It’s an interesting color combination,” she replied. She was telling the truth.

The man summoned two armed, masked separatists, who took her to a police station they’d seized.

“No,” she answered.

“Then why are you talking like that?”

“I probably have a different accent than you have in Sloviansk,” she replied. Though her interrogators were Ukrainian, they didn’t recognize her western Ukrainian accent.

They called a nurse to check her eyes for signs of drug intoxication, but the nurse confirmed that Natalia was sober.

“Why do you want to be in Russia?” she asked them.

“Because in Russia the pay is higher,” they answered, like good sausage people.

Natalia talked about Yanukovych’s palace, about the way he had stolen from Ukrainians. She explained that people in Kiev were against the current government, too, and were demanding new elections. “Let’s work on this together!” she said, optim- istically.

But the separatists just shook their heads. By then they’d taken off their balaclavas and were speaking frankly. “It’s hopeless,” one said. “The politicians will just steal everything, like they always do.”

They gave Natalia lunch and told her she was free to go.

AFTER FAILED ATTEMPTS to reach a peaceful political solution, Ukraine’s prosecutor general declared the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk to be terrorist organizations; the fight against them was dubbed the “anti-terrorist operation,” or ATO. But the Ukrainian government was unable to quash the rebellion, in part because Ukraine’s army, hollowed out by years of corruption, didn’t have enough equipment or supplies, or enough competent soldiers and officers. Ukraine resorted to crowdfunding. Patriots made donations through the electronic kiosks that took payments for cell phones, Internet service, and the popular World of Tanks video game. Bands held fund-raising concerts, and cafes and restaurants had jars for donations. “Volunteer battalions” were raised, many of them based on Maidan’s regiments (the “hundreds”), many of them funded by oligarchs. The nonprofessional “fighters” in these battalions were often the fiercest combatants and the first on the front lines. Some came from far-right movements, from Svoboda and Right Sector and paramilitary groups that had long been hoping for a chance to fight.

Ukraine insisted that Russia was orchestrating the separatist movement, though Russia vehemently denied this; locals gave conflicting reports. It became clear that there were a number of Russian, Chechen, Serbian, and other foreigners fighting with the separatists—mercenaries, volunteers, Russian soldiers who claimed to be on holiday—but it was hard to know the precise proportion of covert Russian invasion to local rebellion. As during the civil war a century earlier, military leaders kept appearing out of nowhere, with nicknames like “Demon,” “Bogeyman,” and “Ghost.” Some were imported from Russia, but others were homegrown. Several were Cossacks who rejected both Ukrainian and Russian authority, hoping to revive the old statelessness of the steppe. The separatists resurrected the tradition of “people’s trials”: in the Luhansk People’s Republic, an accused rapist was sentenced to death after a show of hands.

ON MAY 11, 2014, the Donbas separatists held referenda. Voters answered yes or no to a simple yet ambiguous question: in Donetsk, “Do you support the declaration of state independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic?” and in Luhansk, “Do you support the declaration of state independence of the Luhansk People’s Republic?” There was little discussion of what a yes would mean in practice. There was also massive election fraud, leading many observers to dismiss the landslide votes in favor of independence. Only Russia recognized them as legitimate. But as in Crimea, many people in Donetsk and Luhansk truly did want to distance themselves from Kiev’s new government and to put themselves under Russian protection.

The Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic formed the Novorossiya confederation, which they hoped would eventually include most of southern and eastern Ukraine. Russian Orthodoxy would be the official religion, and industries would be nationalized. Like Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Novorossiya was an idea that could be traced back to Catherine the Great. But the new Novorossiya’s ideology also drew on parts of the Soviet legacy, with its rhetoric about the people’s control of the state and key industries.

Like the Maidan protesters, the Donbas separatists were history buffs. One separatist recruiting billboard announced, “The fate of the Russian people is to repeat the feats of their fathers, defending the motherland,” showing drawings of soldiers in 1918, 1941, and 2014. The new Donetsk legislature was called the Supreme Soviet, and the Soviet Victory flag flew over battle scenes. Separatists appropriated a Soviet tank that was on display at a museum. The first leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic was the former Russian intelligence officer Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, who had seized Sloviansk. Girkin’s hobby was historical military reenactments. (He had also fought in real-life Chechnya, where he was accused of disappearing Chechens, and in Bosnia, where he was accused of taking part in a massacre.) Old photos online showed him in grassy fields, dressed in a dapper olive uniform, pretending it was the Russian Civil War. He usually played a White Army officer, an enemy of the Bolsheviks. As a student, he had been an outspoken monarchist.

The Western media, which knew virtually nothing about Ukraine, spoke casually about a deep-rooted conflict between “ethnic Russians” and “ethnic Ukrainians,” evoking the Balkan wars and ignoring the fact that cultural, linguistic, and political identities in Ukraine were far too complex to be reduced to a simple pair of eternally incompatible “ethnic” groups. Meanwhile, the Western political establishment often portrayed the separatists not as a people’s uprising, but as Russian pawns. This narrative fit well with the logic of the “new Cold War,” as people had started calling it: a fight between justice-loving Westerners and barbarian tyrants from the East.

It was true that eastern Ukrainians were doused in Russian propaganda, and it became increasingly clear that Russia was supplying fighters, arms, and instructions to the separatists. But eastern Ukrainians were also culturally and economically isolated from the rest of Ukraine. They were anxious about the shift of political power away from the east and toward the west. They were worried about their economy, which was dependent largely on trade with Russia, and afraid of austerity measures that would follow the new Kiev government’s deal with the IMF. They were fearful and angry at the possibility of a “national idea” that would treat Russian speakers, or people who did not reject Soviet history wholesale, as bad Ukrainians. They were upset because they were poor and under-educated and unemployed and sick and despised by their own countrymen.

Many of the separatists I saw in pictures and videos looked familiar; these were the same sullen, sunken-eyed young men I’d encountered at harm reduction centers, partial to homemade amphetamines and opiates brewed from Ukrainian poppies. But now they had guns; now they were heroes.