Was the Donbas historically a Russian region?

The Donbas had been part of the Russian Empire, but this in itself is no argument for its “Russianness,” as the empire also included present-day Finland and Uzbekistan, for example, not to mention Alaska.

The term itself—“Donbas" in Ukrainian or “Donbass" in Russian—is an abbreviation for “the Donets [River] Coal Basin" and refers to an economic or geographic region, rather than an adminis­trative entity. In Soviet times, the Donbas was divided into Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, both named after their capital cities; this division persists in independent Ukraine.

The territory now constituting Donbas did not belong to the me­dieval East Slavic state of Kyivan Rus, and thus neither Ukraine nor Russia can possibly claim it as part of their ancient historical patri­mony. Rus called these immense steppes to the east the “wild field," as it was controlled by powerful and frequently changing nomadic masters. Only in the seventeenth century did the Russian tsars feel strong enough to establish the first outposts staffed by Don Cossacks from the Russian frontier settlements immediately to the east. Serbs escaping from Ottoman rule became the first permanent settlers in the eighteenth century; then came the Greeks, who two centuries later still constitute the third largest ethnic group in Donetsk prov­ince (a very distant third behind Ukrainians and Russians at only 1.6 percent, or 77,500 people, in 2001) and are especially noticeable in the southern coastal districts. Yet, even from the earliest stages of the region's mass settlement in the 1790s, Ukrainian peasants predominated in the Donbas overall, except in the cities and in some pockets of Russian settlement in the east.

In this multinational imperial society, foreigners often showed leadership in developing new regions.

The Donbas as it is known today was truly born in the 1870s, when the industrial boom in the Russian Empire began. The rich coal fields of the Donbas were discovered in the 1720s, but only after a century and a half did the railroad connect them to iron ore deposits in Kryvyi Rih, located 300 kilometers west; new factories opening in the region provided demand. Significant foreign in­vestment transformed the barren Donbas steppe into a landscape of mine-waste tailings and smokestacks. Factory settlements also sprang up all around. Factory managers, in a hurry to recruit large numbers of workers, often looked to older industrial regions, es­pecially in Russia. In 1892, 80 percent of workers in Yuzivka were newcomers from Moscow province.⁶ Mass migration of Russian workers made factory towns into enclaves of Russian culture, where even Ukrainian peasant trainees adopted the Russian language in order to fit in. The proportion of ethnic Russians in the Donbas also increased, although they were still a minority in the Donbas by the time of the revolution if one factors in the predominantly Ukrainian countryside.⁷