Voices of Ukraine

By Katerina Mola 
04.13.2014 Kolonker.com
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine
Source: http://www.kolonker.com/articles/?id=120
Image source: Oleksandr Chekhmenyov

My relationship with my native homeland of Donbas is complicated. I never thought about love when I thought about home.

Donbas is a strange place populated by miserable people who cannot smile. People who are not able to work, but manage to get tired. They don’t know how to earn money, they can only bully or beg for it. A passive-aggressive biomass that quivers and bubbles while half asleep, dreaming about a mythical heroic past.

We are all mad at them. For Yanukovych, for their Sovok behavior, for their thuggish nature barely concealed behind an ephemeral layer of civilization. But there is one but…or BTOB, as Misha the Rat from Textile would say.

The problem is you cannot get out of Donbas, no matter how far you go. It settles like the coal dust in your lungs, it is almost a chemical dependency that has a strange side-effect, like any mind-altering substance. It is as if you can see and understand what others can’t. And I know something about Donbas that you probably don’t. That black of the Donbas flag that you laughed so hard at – that’s not coal, that’s desperation. It’s an existential place. There are deep layers, upon layers of pain on that flag. People have brought a lot of grief to Donbas [in order] to bury it in the ground. All of these Stakhanovite feats – they are not about digging something from under the ground, they are about people trying to escape their despair, their fear and their humiliation.

Every family in Donbas has a story like that. A story about how a Great-grandfather was a priest and had to flee into hiding [in Donbas]; a story about how a Great-grandmother was the only survivor, from a dispossessed “kulak” family, who came to prove to the Soviet people that they had not spared her life in vain; a story about how the whole family fled from Crimea to Donbas because they were Greek, and they were killing people for that in Crimea; stories about how people fled from hunger, from the NKVD, how they came to Donbas to avoid exile to Siberia, and the countless majority of the people settled here – these people are like dust. But you have no idea what they had to live through and what type of fear they have passed on to their descendants.

I wouldn’t want for us to start comparing our sufferings (it would take decades in our country), but I would like to see at least a modicum of solidarity from those Ukrainians who have already become free with those who are just coming to the realization of their own dignity and their own right to choose.

There is no such thing as a proud hard-working Donbas. This is a land of people who have been living under a dome of sweeping depression for almost a century. And in reality, when they say, “We want Ukraine to hear Donbas,” what they really mean is not, “We want you to bring back Yanukovych” – it means: “Have sympathy with us. Recognize us. We are yours, too.”

All of us, the whole country have been so miserable for so long that it is not at all surprising that people are deaf to the pain of others. Even though, it would seem that now we have finally learned to hear each other and understand that we are all that we have in this world, and that nobody else is going to help us, and Gandalf’s eagles are not going to come in their blue [Ukrainian jet] fighter planes to our rescue, but Sauron’s orcs are already here, among us. And they thirst for blood. Now you can turn back and look in that direction to see, finally, that Donbas is not only hundreds of masked people waving the tricolor flag [of Russia], who shit in the offices of regional state administrations – that all of this is not the real Donbas at all. Donbas is valleys, getting increasingly deserted year after year, that everyone has been turning their backs on for so long, that now they don’t even have the slightest idea of who populates these territories. Who are these strange creatures who have dug themselves into these burrows? What do they want? Who do they think they are? Why?

Is Donbas Ukraine? Without a doubt. Only we – only our culture could beget such a strange, uncertain and depressive spawn. Confused and miserable, but ours.

I am tired of explaining that all the countryside in Donbas is Ukrainian-speaking. I am tired of reiterating that for many years all expressions of ethnicity in Donbas were being exterminated, unless they were Russian. Not only Ukrainian – but Greek, Tatar, Jewish, anything. It is surprising that some self-awareness survived under these circumstances, however little, and that the majority still think of themselves as Ukrainian and do not want to be part of Russia at all.

I think that this is the moment when the fate of Donbas is being decided, but, alas, it is not decided in Donbas. It is decided in Ukraine “proper,” and it all depends on whether you believe us to be your brothers and whether you will come to our aid. At least this once. Now.