The east of Ukraine, where the creeping Russian invasion began in 2014 and was followed by a full-scale war in 2022, in the political plane, has become a de facto administrative stumbling block underlying the armed conflict. They claim that Donbas has always been if not Russian, then Russian-speaking. And everything that is Russian-speaking, according to the Kremlin propaganda, is Russian. But in fact, the geographical concept of eastern Ukraine is not at all monolithic, as Russian propaganda has been trying to show. Eastern geographic areas include the territories of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions. But it is only an administrative division. The historical-ethnographic one is somewhat different. And conditionally, the east of Ukraine is divided into Slobozhanshchyna, Donbas (as such) and Pryazovia and these three parts have each had their own separate historical development.
Russian propaganda, both in 2014 and today, keeps insisting that the east of Ukraine is an inherently Russian territory. And here, unfortunately, our enemy has a better chance for a propaganda victory. This is because they use seemingly ironclad arguments that these territories were not Ukrainian until the collapse of the Russian Empire, when Lenin, according to Putin, “created Ukraine” from parts of the then Russian territories.
The fact that millions of today’s Ukrainians were taught the Soviet version of Ukrainian history is the reason why the enemy propaganda is so successful. But let’s repeat: the administrative east of Ukraine is not a monolith, given the socio-historical processes that took place there. That’s why the problem of Russification of the Ukrainian East should be considered in three parallel dimensions.
“Donbas does not make empty trips”
Probably, all Ukrainians over the age of 30 know this aphorism of fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych.
We won’t delve into exploring this aphorism, its etymology and semantics. We are currently interested in something else. Namely, what do ordinary modern Ukrainians, who are not from Donbas, know about Donbas? What stereotypes do people from Podillia, Volyn, or Halychyna have when they hear the word “Donbas”? Mines, slag heaps, oligarchs’ factories, FC Shakhtar, 100% Russian-speaking population and fugitive Yanukovych? And what are the conditional geographical borders of this Donbas?
These questions didn’t arise out of nowhere. In 2014, it was a true discovery for many Ukrainians that the Luhansk region is also Donbas. Bakhmut, Volnovakha… And Mariupol, which is located on the picturesque coast of the Sea of Azov, is also Donbas!
And an even bigger discovery for many was or will be that the famous, legendary Ukrainian Wild Field is not only the steppes of Zaporizhzhia or the Kherson region, but also the steppes of the present-day Donbas. And they were called the Wild Field not only by Ukrainians – it was a fixed geographical name of these territories.
This is how these territories were marked on Guillaume de Beauplan’s map in 1648. It’s worth noting that those lands were allegedly uninhabited when the map was drawn, and therefore the cartographers did not consider it necessary to detail something or scale those territories more carefully.
However, de Beauplan lied a bit. Yes, indeed, those territories were sparsely populated at that time, but there was something there. And this “something” became the basis of the development of the entire region. And not just development, but also bloody wars and deliberate conquest of the territories first by Muscovy, and then by the Russian Empire. And if someone thinks that it was for coal and some metallurgical resources, they are badly mistaken.
In fact, the first settlements and even fortresses of the Wild Field appeared around salt lakes.
Later, Bakhmut and Solevansk (now Sloviansk) arose, followed by a number of towns along the cascade of Donbas salt lakes. And the first strategically important product that gave impetus to the region’s settlement and development was salt.
Salt was an unrivaled resource at the time. Salt was used everywhere. And with the development of military affairs, agriculture and fur fashion in Europe, salt became a strategic industrial product. Salted meat, which does not spoil, was what the army used to eat during long campaigns. And the saline solution helps preserve the skins of fur-bearing animals in summer. And this makes it possible to collect more such skins in different seasons, store them longer or ship them over longer distances.
The first people to start commercial salt extraction in the mid-17th century from the lakes in what is now Donbas were the Ukrainian Cossacks and people fleeing from landlords or the gentry.
We have to clarify here. Ukrainian Cossacks were mostly a purely military phenomenon in the mid-17th century. But free people of the Wild Field were called “Cherkasy” (not to be confused with Circassians) in those days, and all free people could unite under that name.
And what did it mean to be a “free man”” at that time? It meant working for yourself, not working for a landlord or paying taxes from your “business”, not following the gentry’s orders and not obeying ridiculous laws. In other words, they were people who fled to uninhabited territories, settled there and started doing something profitable, traded and joined the civil army, if their homes and freedoms were threatened by external danger. That was where the Cossacks came in handy, as they had combat experience and went to the salt works to earn money in between military campaigns.
But let’s go back to salt and Donbas.
As of the mid-17th century, the Wild Field salt works were, in modern terms, a fairly developed offshore zone that belonged to no one, paid no taxes, had no conditional statehood, but made a lot of money and could field a large, well-armed army if necessary.
And at this very stage, Muscovy appears. The same Muscovy that used to and still loves to come and conquer already developed territories, make everyone work for them, take profits, and turn people into slaves.
Hryhoriy Kurakin, voivode of the Moscow tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, sent to the Wild Field in 1653, reported to him that no one governed those territories, there was no protectorate, and money flew in a golden, i.e., shiny-salty river, and it all went past Moscow’s pockets.
Needless to say, Muscovy decided to seize those lands immediately.
By the way, today there are hypotheses among historians that those salt works and the desired control over them were the reason why Muscovy agreed to conclude the so-called Pereyaslav Agreements, and later the Letters Patent to the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks. The Muscovites needed the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks to drive away the remaining nomads from that territory.
Eventually, over the next hundred years, Muscovy took full control of the Wild Field. Military and economic control. However, the region was developed, settled and built by Ukrainians. Why not Russians? Well, first of all, because in the 18th and 19th centuries Russians depended on the vodka decree and had to stay at home and drink a bucketful of vodka, and if not, pay the cost of the unconsumed vodka to the treasury.
Secondly, the Russians were not able to do anything with their own hands, except, perhaps, to weave lapti (bast shoes) or a gunny. And those who could, traveled somewhere outside the empire. Actually, just like now.
That’s why the process of resettlement of Ukrainians to the lands of today’s Donbas didn’t stop in the 18th or 19th centuries. There were many reasons for this.
However, there is another important point to be made here.
Today’s Russian propaganda is based on the idea that since the time of Catherine II, Donbas has developed exclusively thanks to the Russian Empire and later the USSR. That those lands received plants and factories only thanks to imperial capabilities and ambitions. We mean the territory of the current Luhansk and northern Donetsk regions.
However, in reality, everything was exactly the opposite. Those territories developed not thanks to but in spite of being nominally owned by the Russian Empire. All attempts in the 18th and 19th centuries to make the region economically profitable failed. And only after the emperors began to invite European manufacturers and successful industrialists, the former Wild Field began to develop. And again, it was thanks to the fact that the labor force was Ukrainians who moved to those territories from other lands: some fled from Polish nobles, some from Ukrainian landowners.
Artificial Greece
The southern parts of modern Donbas are Pryazovia. The main city of the region is Mariupol. Russian propagandists and history falsifiers also emphasize that if it were not for the Russian Empire, some savages would roam those steppes to this day. Because with the arrival of the empire, Pryazovia flourished like never before.
But the same propagandists turn away and hide their eyes when asked why, if the Russian Empire created all this, were there so many ethnic Greeks there and why in the early 20th century there lived people who didn’t understand a word of Ukrainian or Russian, but spoke only Greek. And also why almost the whole Volnovakha spoke Ukrainian even in Soviet times. Not to mention the steppe villages, which are numerous in Pryazovia.
Even so-called official Russian historians won’t give answers to these questions. Not because they don’t know the history of the region perfectly, but because the answers destroy the entire Russian propaganda theory. Because if they tell the truth, they must admit that the steppes of Pryazovia were inhabited by Ukrainians, descendants of the free Cossacks, as early as the 16th century. And today’s Mariupol became Mariupol after Catherine II’s army invaded Crimea in 1783 and evicted all ethnic Greeks from there, promising to relocate them to new cities of the present Donbas near salt works and industrial centers. But, as the Russians have always done, the Greeks were fooled. Because all those cities were already inhabited by Ukrainians. And there was simply no place to settle.
So the Greeks traveled with their whole families, all possessions and even livestock to the only place where they could engage in trade and crafts at that time – a town known for several centuries as the fortress of Domakha, founded by Ukrainian Cossacks at the mouth of the Kalmius River on the coast of the Sea of Azov. Later, the city was renamed Mariupol.
The Greeks settled around the town, developed crafts and trade. And since Ukrainians have always been able to co-exist with many nationalities in a constructive way and saw the benefits of such coexistence and cooperation, over time those territories and communities grew in close cooperation. And, as always, as soon as the region became economically successful, the Russians began to do what they do best – take away what someone else has done, taking credit for all the achievements.
Mariupol was no exception. Since the Russians were not and still are not able to create something on their own, even with all the resources at their disposal, they invited Europeans to Mariupol to build industry there.
Russian-speaking Donbas
Probably, it’s time to talk about a Russian-speaking phenomenon in Donbas and where it came from. Given all the above said, the Russian language should have been heard quite rarely in the territory of current Donbas. However, the history of Donbas Russification is much more complicated and worse than the history of southern Ukraine Russification. Because the southern regions annexed by the Russian Empire were russified mostly in the so-called peaceful, and even educational and cultural way in some places, whereas Russification of Donbas was more bloody and brutal.
During the military and political domination of the Russian Empire in the territories of the current industrial Donbas, as well as Pryazovia, the Russian language as the language of administrative management was needed for communication between European industrialists and Ukrainian workers, and therefore they had to learn it, whereas after the empire disintegrated, the situation became even worse.
After a brief existence of independent Ukraine from 1917 to 1920 and another occupation by the Russian Bolsheviks, the time of bloody terror came. The so-called “nationalization” of industry and farms, as is known, was accompanied by genocide. And mass murders on an industrial scale were perpetrated not by local commissars (although there were such), but by those who came to the occupied territories from Russia. Hobos and beggars from the Russian hinterland, having received “mandates” and revolvers, shot not only those who in one way or another were co-owners of some businesses, but also all those who worked at those enterprises, including their families. What for? To replace them with families of “proletarians” from Russia. Although there was a similar situation in their homeland – all the “bourgeois” were destroyed, there were not enough jobs for all the “proletarians.”
As a result, within a few years, all the cities and working towns of Donbas, where there was at least some industrial production, spoke mostly Russian. And of course, “proletarians” brought over from Russia did not recognize Ukrainians as equals. Despite the fact that they themselves were beggars, they felt like winners, because they came to the “liberated” territories. The language of instruction in all schools was exclusively Russian. All teachers and “technical intelligentsia” were Russians.
However, the post-revolutionary Russification was, relatively speaking, mild compared to what the region, as well as the whole of Ukraine went through in 1932-33. Whole Ukrainian villages in Donbas were wiped out by the famine; Ukrainians left for places where they could feed themselves. And later, as 10 years before, whole families of the Ivanovs, Petrovs, and Sidorovs from Ryazan, Orenburg, or some Yekaterinburg moved into the deserted houses. The Ukrainians who used to live there were simply exterminated one way or another. That was why whole Russian-speaking villages appeared in Donbas.
It is clear that for the later Soviet authorities, the issue of the region’s unification had already been removed. And at some point there was even a need to resume the study of the Ukrainian language. Because one way or another, Donbas was the administrative territory of Ukraine – one of the most important republics of the USSR. However, this process of reverse Ukrainization was only on paper and mostly in the form of demonstrative cultural and ethnographic groups. And knowing Ukrainian was something from the category of knowing a foreign language.
Russification of Donbas was so powerful that even 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, any mention of Ukrainian as the state language was perceived there as something like a compulsion to learn Chinese under the threat of torture. The so-called language issue is still perceived as destabilizing, especially in Donbas.
It was this trump card that Putin used when in 2014 he secretly introduced troops under the guise of a “militia” to “protect the Russian-speaking population.” And later, propaganda put a sign of equality between Russian-speaking and Russianness as a nation. For Donbas residents, who were deceived by propaganda and had Ukrainian passports, where it was indicated that they were Ukrainians, the difference between the concepts of “Russian” as a citizen of the Russian Federation and “Russian” as a sign of nationality was erased.
There cannot be two capitals
The myth that Kharkiv is the first capital of Ukraine is a myth from the category “Ukraine was invented by Lenin.” And all propaganda statements about Kharkiv’s Russianness sound no less absurd. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of Ukraine knows that the Kharkiv region is Sloboda Ukraine (Slobozhanshchyna), which initially was not inhabited by sedentary settlers.
Active history of Kharkiv region dates back to 1654, when Moscow and later Russian tsars began to take the region under active military control. And all because of the fact that salt was mined in Donbas and transported to Muscovy.
So why is Kharkiv called the first capital of Ukraine?
Because after the collapse of the empire in 1919 and another occupation, the Russians decided to call it the capital. It was not just a strategic political move. It was a kind of revenge for the fact that Ukraine did not want to submit to the power of the Bolsheviks in general. That is why, after the declaration of the USSR in the occupied part of Ukraine, the Bolsheviks announced that Kharkiv would be its capital. And in the short time that Kharkiv was in this status, and the Bolsheviks occupied the whole of Ukraine, everything was done to deprive the great city of any Ukrainian charm and character that was there in the early 20s of the last century.
Undoubtedly, Kharkiv was actually the cultural and scientific center of Ukraine at that time. And the more intelligentsia came to Kharkiv, the more brutal the Bolsheviks’ repressions against them became. The main goal of the Russians has always been the same – the destruction of everything Ukrainian.
By the way, about putin’s thesis that Ukraine was allegedly created from pieces of different territories that belonged to the Russian Federation.
Here is a postcard “Map of Ukraine” printed by the “News from Zaporizhzhia” publishing house in 1910.
And these are maps of Ukraine of 1918-1919.
As can be seen on the maps, the territory of Ukraine within the then recognized borders also included parts that are currently the territory of the Russian Federation. And at that time, those territories were Ukrainian for one single reason: the vast majority of their residents were ethnic Ukrainians and spoke Ukrainian.
That is, not only Donbas and the Kharkiv region, but also Kuban and the Belgorod region were inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians as of the early 20th century. And during the times of the Russian Empire, there was active migration to the Kharkiv region, in particular, Ukrainians from agricultural regions traveled to the industrial region to work at factories and plants.
Therefore, if we talk about Russification of the Kharkiv region, the active industrial revolution and the migration of labor force from Russia to the large industrial regions of Ukraine in the late 19th century actually started an active process of Russification. During 1867-1897, the population of Kharkiv actually tripled as a result of labor migration from the poor non-black earth regions of the Russian Empire. And since the Bolsheviks moved the capital of Ukraine to Kharkiv, and later organized the Holodomor and started rampant repression against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, this process took hold. And even after the USSR collapsed, Ukrainians, who were the majority in Kharkiv, still spoke Russian.
Instead of an epilogue
Eastern Ukraine has always been a tasty morsel for Muscovites. The Kharkiv region, Donbas, and Pryazovia are strategically important regions. But they have never been Russian territories – neither ethnically nor geographically.
There are many documents, including those mentioned by us, confirming the absence of Muscovy’s influence on these territories. But the Russians have always acted like that: having seized some territory, they exterminate the indigenous population in the most brutal way, and resettle people from depressed regions of Russia to the new territories for the empire.
Why does this happen? Because Russians have always behaved like locusts. They take away what other peoples have created. That was the case 300 years ago, 100 years ago, and this is still the case today.
It is a pity that many Ukrainians still suffer from some kind of inferiority complex and are in awe of the imaginary greatness of the Russian Federation. Because if there is one thing the Russian Federation is good at, it is killing and plundering other people’s lands.