Is it true that a separate republic existed in the Donbas during the revolutionary era?
Local Bolsheviks proclaimed the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic in February 1918, just days after the Ukrainian People's Republic signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers.
At the time, Soviet Russia was completing its own negotiations that would soon result in the Brest Peace in March 1918. It was already clear that the Kremlin would have to recognize the Ukrainian People's Republic in its ethnographic borders—including the Donbas—and accept the presence on its territory of German and Austro-Hungarian troops. Lenin's insistence on this controversial treaty sparked both figurative and real rebellion within the Soviet regime. Local Bolshevik cadres in the industrial centers of eastern Ukraine also opposed the treaty. They stood to lose power simply because the peasant majority in their provinces was Ukrainian, even though the political decisions were made in Russian-speaking cities and factory towns.In creating a new republic, the local Donbas Bolsheviks hoped to exclude their territory from the provisions of both Brest peace treaties, the one already signed with Ukraine and the one anticipated with Soviet Russia. They went for the widest possible territorial claim, covering not just the Donbas, but also the entire industrial southeast of present-day Ukraine. Indeed, the major city of Kharkiv, which is not in the Donbas, became the republic's first capital. No matter how spontaneous and pragmatic the decision to proclaim a republic may have been, it relied on the local Bolsheviks' longstanding refusal to engage with or even acknowledge the Ukrainian national question. The central Soviet leadership apparently took its time forming an opinion on the matter. In principle, the Donbas initiative went against the notion of self-determination in ethnographic borders, which Lenin had to endorse, at least publicly. The recently proclaimed Ukrainian Soviet Republic was the official Bolshevik administration in Ukraine, and the emergence of the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic could have jeopardized, theoretically, the former 's sovereignty.
In practice, however, Lenin preferred to keep the industrial areas of eastern Ukraine out of the Germans' reach, no matter what it was called, in the hope that the Germans would stop before reaching the borders of the new ephemeral polity.The Germans did not. Instead, they endorsed the ethnographic borders as claimed by the Ukrainian People's Republic: the nine provinces of the former tsarist empire without the Crimea. The institutions and the military of the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Republic folded as soon as German army formations started arriving. Without putting up a fight, the local Bolsheviks evacuated southward, where they were forced to make peace with a rival faction representing the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. The Kremlin merged both republics, now existing only on paper, into a single Ukrainian Soviet Republic, but the German army soon pushed its forces into Russia. When the Bolsheviks reconquered Ukraine again in 1919 and finally in 1920, they did not revive a separate Donetsk-Kryvi Rih republic.
The antagonism between the two wings of the Communist Party of Ukraine survived into the 1920s. Functionaries from the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih spearheaded resistance to the Ukrainization policy that Moscow proposed and the Kyiv-Kharkiv group endorsed. Ukrainization was aimed at building local support for Soviet power and supplying literate workers for the new industrialization drive. Stalin had supported Ukrainization as an official party line in the 1920s, but presided over its dismantling in the 1930s, claiming that it was a breeding ground for Ukrainian nationalism. Curiously, some prominent members of Stalin's inner circle came from the revolutionary Donbas. His long-serving minister of defense and later Soviet president, Kliment Voroshilov, was a leading party organizer in the Donbas during the revolution, while the future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev started his party career there in 1918 with a junior appointment as a district party secretary.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the pro-Russian movement in the Donbas revived the much-embellished memory of the Donetsk- Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic, but it truly came to the public's attention in March 2015, when the legislature of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic declared itself a legal successor of the revolution-era republic. The Luhansk People's Republic was reportedly to follow suit with a similar declaration. This surprising move was likely intended to revive the New Russia project in a different guise, but perhaps also to establish a historical predecessor dating back to the disintegration of the Russian Empire, when the modern Ukrainian state also acquired its present shape. It would legitimize Donbas irredentism if it could be presented as something accompanying modern Ukrainian statehood from its very beginnings.