Genociding The Deplorables Of Donbass?
Here's a great find from someone on Twitter:
a 2014 London Review of Books report by the reporter Keith Gessen, about the genocidal views he heard among Kyiv liberals after the Maidan protests. Gessen begins with the story of Mikhail Mishin, a young, relatively poor Russian speaking city worker in Donetsk, in the Donbass region:
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When the Maidan protests started in Kiev late last year, Mishin followed them with increasing anxiety. He watched as young men in masks and the insignia of old Ukrainian fascist movements attacked riot police some of them from the Donetsk area with Molotov cocktails. He saw governors in the western provinces pulled out of their offices and roughed up by furious crowds. It seemed that the country was descending into chaos. When he heard a rumour that some of the young men from Maidan were headed for Donetsk, he believed it. After work he started taking the bus to the centre of Donetsk to stand with the protesters who called themselves 'anti-Maidan'. Some of them waved Russian flags; others held up posters of Stalin. But they all wanted to express their disagreement with what was happening in Kiev. Mishin supported this. He was worried that he might get into trouble he was a city official, after all but he figured that he was doing it in his own time, and it was something he believed in. But he concealed his new political activity from his parents, who would have worried.
Things quickly went very bad in the city, as anti-Ukraine separatists took over. Later, Gessen writes:
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In Donetsk I had expected to find a totalitarian proto-state, and I did. The Kremlin liked calling the government in Kiev a 'junta', but here you had a real one. Professional mercenaries in fatigues called the shots and even ministers of state felt compelled to cross the street at the sight of armed men, lest a misunderstanding occur. What I didn't expect to find were so many people who believed in all of it with such certainty, and with such hope.
Horrible. But then, the story takes a turn:
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For Mishin and Bik, the signal events of the past year looked very different from the way they looked to my friends in Kiev or Moscow. When liberals in those places had seen young men on Maidan attacking the riot police, they thought, 'people power'; and when they saw men in Donetsk beating pro-Ukraine protesters, they thought, 'fascists'. But that wasn't how it looked from Donetsk. From Donetsk they saw fascists on Maidan and, on the streets of Donetsk, people power. Whether the actual fascists on Maidan made them more or less certain of this, I don't know, but hearing it gave body to something the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko had said to me in Kiev: 'It was the liberals' tolerance of the nationalists on Maidan that led to this. If they had rejected them right away, things might have turned out differently. It might have led to the collapse of Maidan. It might even have meant that Yanukovych remained president. But at least there would have been peace.'
Mishin and Bik were what the sociologists call the 'losers' of the post-Soviet transition. In Soviet times Bik had been a coal miner with aspirations to join the KGB. 'They didn't take Party bosses' sons, you know,' he said (wrongly). 'They took working people like me.' And Mishin was a mighty athlete. He recalled playing in a tournament in Leningrad and being promised a trip to the United States. 'The USA!' he recalled thinking. And then the whole world collapsed. Industrial regions like Donbass were hardest hit by the changes: it was the region's industrial output that plummeted furthest in the 1990s; it was industrial plants over which the bloodiest turf wars revolved. And it was in these places that the loss of status was most extreme. Industrial work was championed by the Soviets, both in word and in deed: coal miners in Donbass earned on average two or three times what a software engineer like my father earned in Moscow. (In the early 1980s, Bik had been working as a miner for just a few months when he bought a motorbike. The girls went crazy for it.) When the Soviet Union ended, the entire country experienced what Nietzsche might have recognised as a transvaluation of all values: what had been good was now bad, and what had been bad was now good. Some people liked it and grew rich; other people were left behind. With the victory of protests that were still referred to by some of their supporters as Euromaidan, the people of this industrial region were being asked to endure yet another round of deindustrialisation of austerity, unemployment and social death. They had balked at this and, what was more, they had an out. Deindustrialisation had gone hand in hand, the first time, with the collapse of the empire. But what if the empire could be restored? Maybe the jobs would come back? If the Russians felt they had 'lost' something in Ukraine, many people in Eastern Ukraine felt as if they'd been stranded from their motherland. 'They call us traitors and separatists,' Bik said. 'But I don't feel like a traitor. I felt like a traitor before, when I had to call myself Ukrainian. I don't feel like a traitor now.'
Basically, then, the people of the Donbass are the Deplorables of Ukraine. And that's how the liberals of Kyiv saw them:
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And so imagine if for two decades you have been trying to pull your country, bit by bit, into Europe. Imagine that it's been a bumpy road everything you accomplish seems to get sabotaged by the political forces from the east. Imagine that finally the contradictions within your country have come to a breaking point. Imagine that all the people who opposed your politics for twenty years all the most backward, poorest, least successful people in the country got together in one place, declared an independent republic, and took up arms? What would you do? You could let them go. But then you'd lose all that land and its industrial capacity and also what kind of country just lets chunks of itself fall off? Perhaps you could think of it as an opportunity. Something similar happened when the old Stalinists and nationalists took over the Supreme Soviet in Moscow in 1993. All the enemies of progress in one place, all the losers and has-beens: wouldn't it be better just to solve the problem once and for all? Wouldn't it be a better long-term solution just to kill as many as you could and scare the **** out of the rest of them, for ever? This is what I heard from respectable people in Kiev. Not from the nationalists, but from liberals, from professionals and journalists. All the bad people were in one place why not kill them all?
Read the whole thing. It's a remarkable document, the kind of thing you just don't see these days. Gessen published it eight years before the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, when it was still possible to see the emerging conflict as something complicated and tragic, with both sides having legitimate concerns and grievances. The Donbass is basically the Rust Belt and West Virginia, sounds like. Imagine if those people took up arms against the Boston-Washington corridor.
The nuanced and complex analysis we see in Gessen's piece is gone now. We in the West are 100 percent sure we understand this terrible war who the good guys are (and they are 100 percent good) and who the bad guys are (basically, they marched out of Mordor). To remind you: Russia, in my view, should not have invaded. The war is mostly Russia's fault. But not entirely. My view is that we in the West are in way over our heads, involved in somebody else's civil war, and stumbling quite possibly towards nuclear armageddon.