2021

Everyone is tired of the war. So much so the tourists who wanted to see peaceful parts of the Ukrainian east (“before it was not too late”), had plenty of time to go and come back. Without its capitals Donetsk and Luhansk regions dispersed into a dozen towns, each busy producing their own fairy-tales and superhero stories. Like the medieval Hanseatic League, they established their own self-sufficient images, trying to avoid an exhausting necessity to fight for regional leadership. They trade between themselves in ideas and forms: when the town of Kramatorsk gets a new skatepark, a nearby Pokrovsk makes it a matter of pride to build a better one, and the chain reaction starts. It’s not something new. Since Soviet times life in Donbas has been feeding off envy and jealousy. Or, one might say, healthy competition.

We are driving through what they used to call “the wild field,” hundreds of miles of pristine grasslands turned sunflower fields. Under the mid-summer sun the car shows 36°C (96.8°F) on the tarmac outside. The first 200km the road feels so suspiciously smooth, looking at a patchwork of green meadows and wheat oceans our little international group agrees this could be any place in Europe. And it is only somewhere after Kramatorsk, when we get on this one road remaining from Soviet times, that all the contents of the car begins to jump into the air. We realize with relief, “we must be entering the true tough Donbas now – the proverbial Donetsk Coal Basin,” a place that was instrumentalized by the Russian and later Soviet empires as a mineral resource base, where the cost of human life was very low and the cost of local ecosystems even lower.

Terricones of Myrnohrad, a typical coal mining town, embrace the horizon, as we are ready to embrace the primordial darkness of the coal-infused air. But very soon the terricones disappear again, and the car drives into a very flat and very green little town. No industrial ruins against the skyline, no poisonous smog coming out of the terricones, the coal mountains. Instead, construction workers in clean orange uniforms roam like moles digging labyrinths of old water-pipes out, replacing the water system of the town for a new one. The miniature heaps of earth along the sidewalks is the only thing that reminds us of terricones. They rise up and disappear between morning and night, leaving traces of compacted earth where the new pipes were installed. Pokrovsk is unique because its mine was discovered after Ukrainian independence. It is new, private, profitable, and situated outside of town. Our guide Serhii who lives in a nearby “real miner’s town of Myrnohrad” speaks of this new face of Pokrovsk with a scornful smile.

“A miner’s town?” — he mocks, — “miner’s towns are like beautiful women in that they are seen from afar. Does a beautiful woman need a paper to prove she is beautiful? No, you see her and just know. Now look around  Pokrovsk —  do you see a terricone? Anyone in working clothes covered in black soot with eyes lined black? No. Pokrovsk is 140 years old, most of which it has been a big railway hub and nothing else. Some 30 years ago coal was found nearby, so what? It is not the same as a town that’s 90 years old and whose mine is also 90 years old. Do you see what I mean?”

On the first day after a sweltering ride I really don’t. Coming from a Hobbit-like rural world of fields and rivers of the nearby Kharkiv region, I myself feel less knowledgeable in mining landscapes than my fellow British scholars who had at least seen and climbed Scottish oil bings.

Serhii is right in his own way. This place has too many layers to be a mining monotown, i.e., a place whose life revolves around a single mine. Pokrovsk ruins stereotypes. It has pretty 19th-century houses of Jewish merchants, white columns showing all the glory of provincial neoclassicism. The story of their owners ends abruptly in WW2 in front of a German firing squad in the field behind the station.

On the other side of the railway is a 1930s factory that used to produce a mysterious dinas rock, a heat-resistant material first discovered in the forests of Wales. The name dinas comes from a legend about Welsh giants waiting to wake up and rule the world. Our British colleagues are particularly interested in the story, but their enthusiasm crashes against the perfect indifference of local people. For them, magical materials and their extraction from the depths of the enchanted dungeons feels ordinary and mundane.

The mining enterprise is ever only present fleetingly, in company buses whooshing by, or a slap-new museum in a company-restored house of culture. The exhibition brings a lot of debate among the artists and historians I accompany. Its power over townsfolk and local decision-making seems suspicious, which is reasonable to a certain degree, given that even the name Pokrovsk was chosen by the overwhelming vote of the mine’s employees convinced that Pokrova — the Protection of the Mother of God — is saving their lives deep underground. It’s their lobby that won over the historical name Hryshine and other creative options when the question was raised about changing the old Soviet name of Chervonoarmijsk (The Red Army Town).

Walking through the contemporary mine museum, I wonder about the newly found religious vigor of the industry traditionally seen through the screen of communist nostalgia. But to think about it, like many other highly dangerous professions, coal miners have always come hand-in-hand with the need to believe in higher powers. Superstitions are common in mining across the globe. The most famous spirit of the Donbas is Shubin (“a man in a fur coat”). Like many supernatural apparitions, Shubin is ambiguous — not good and not evil, so that you never know if he will help or hurt.

The dawn of the Soviet state witnessed the all-state refusal of religion and persecution of the church. But the need to believe didn’t disappear. The faith had to be channeled someplace else. In the 1920-1930s, Shubin was very literally replaced by the Soviet chief Vladimir Lenin. The book The Legends of Donbas, published in 1987 as Шахтерские сказы [Miners’ Tales], recites a set of familiar stories about a spirit guiding an exhausted miner through the darkness, or helping to prevent a mass tragedy, or else taking revenge on a disrespectful worker. Only now it wasn’t a mysterious gnome but Vladimir Lenin working overtime as an all-powerful spirit of the mines (while also being alive working in his office in the Kremlin).

In some stories Lenin was the same old Shubin, the old miner’s idol disguised from an inquisitive eye of the Soviet censure under the hammer and sickle fig leaf. Other tales responded to realities of the time by showing the record-breaking Stakhanov movement, where the Soviet chief protected the wide-eyed ideologized workers from their less enthusiastic survivalist colleagues, who preferred standardized working hours and regular lunch breaks to the 400 tons of poor quality coal records supported by the communist fervor.

Pokrovsk embraces the miners’ belief system, presenting the Mother of God as an official symbol of the town that tries in every which way to make a clean break from its Soviet past. The effort is visible on the official emblem too. The black swallow against the blue sky refers, surprisingly, to what the rest of the world knows as the well-known Christmas song “Carol of the Bells.”

It is said that Mykola Leontovych wrote the melody for the Ukrainian folk song “Shchedryk” (also known for its first lines, “a swallow flew to the door and started singing”) in Pokrovsk when he worked as the choir director for a local railway technical school. The plate with a swallow pattern that belonged to Leontovych’s family is stored in the Pokrovsk History Museum as one of the town’s major treasures. The composer died under suspicious circumstances, while being persecuted by the Soviet state, and his legacy was erased, only to be re-discovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the hot summer of 2021 as I walk past the famous overgrown apricot gardens of Donbas, I see this newly excavated face of the town in banners and street art: swallows on the walls of the dilapidated House of Culture. The new sports grounds and a shopping mall and for the first time in many years the opening of a new cinema. Local youths come to watch American blockbusters in their oldish brightly re-painted cars looking like extras in a small-town American film about teenagers.

Staying in Pokrovsk, a true researcher of Donbas needs to get out to find the “real” Donbas, cities of Myrnohrad, Kramatorsk, etc. Pokrovsk seems too tidy and neat for the notorious image we the seekers of “the true life” want so desperately to see and show to the world. However, as I learn and read more, the exceptions like Pokrovsk prove to be the rule. An old Cossack fortress of Bakhmut was considered an exception. Sloviansk wasn’t built as a miner’s settlement either. Lysychansk, Svatove, and Donetsk itself have enjoyed fame as clean and tidy capitals of roses and apricots and sunflower fields—all exceptions to the other “real” Donbas that probably once existed but does not exist any more.

2023

Like the bad roads that we so desperately lacked in the beginning of the journey, the towns of Donbas start to look for their special faces. It is hard to believe but even faced with the threat of complete erasure by the russian artillery, the towns of Donbas continue, obstinately, to build their uncharacteristic reputations. In May 2023 as I am working as an interpreter at a British-Ukrainian workshop in Durham, UK, directors of Sloviansk and Pokrovsk museums present their ambitious projects of urban renovation. Rather than screaming about the consequences of the invasion and horrifying mass bombings, these plans address the need to get rid of the aggressive street advertisements and the necessity of renovating the 19th-century banks that “could attract international tourism.” The full-scale war is seen as a temporary calamity, like a flood or a volcano eruption that, despite the horrendous ruination it continues to bring, cannot break the plans of the obstinate local people, the “skhidnyaki,” or “easterners”. Perhaps it is this hard-willed character and not the mines or bad roads that truly defines the mythical land of Donbas with its spirits, guardian angels, magical rocks, and villains. Despite all this, the perfect little town dwellers are stubbornly shaping the region’s future.

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Viktoriia Grivina is a writer and cultural researcher from Kharkiv, Ukraine. At the moment she is working on Fury Tales, a series of short scripts and stories that make use of the genres of sci-fi, magical realism, and absurdist comedy to reflect on the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine. Fury Tales are part of Khastoria series. Her current PhD study at St. Andrews University (UK) is dedicated to the mythological and aesthetic transformations of the cities in the times of war.