25 Years of Donbas Separatism. Part 5

One may see that the complaints of the young people from the Donbas are not only economical ones which are easy to explain. They are ideological ones: the evil comes from the West; we do not need any freedom of speech; there were repressions in the USSR, but there was a great goal, etc. In other words, as that Valeriy Filippov wrote, “It’s a tradition to blame youth immaturity and absence of life goals, but who should give them these goals?”

For sure, the Party of Regions. And they tried to do their best.

“Monument to OUN-UPA victims”
 
In 2010, there was a pompous ceremony of opening “the monument to victims of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Rebel Army” which was attended by the local elite and “guests” from Russia. Deputy head of the regional council said, “The war is not over; the war continues, cruel and dirty; the war for our children and grandchildren whose fathers and grandfathers are in graves”.
This language of war has never been silenced in the Donbas, and local MM that supported the administration were generously “pouring water to the mill” of widening and deepening confrontation between the regions of Ukraine. In 2011, an anti-fascist forum was held in Luhansk at which the speakers competed in exposing “Ukrainian fascism”.

“Monument to OUN-UPA victims”

“Ghettoization” of Donbas electors continued in the 2000-2010s, and the huge mechanism of regionalists’ (the Party of Regions members’) propaganda worked for it.

Political analyst Vladimir Kornilov said, “It is possible to say that the former territory of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic is the electoral area of the Party of Regions, and before 2014 – of communists.

However, it is Kornilov’s wishful thinking:  undivided power of the Party of Regions existed only in the Donbas (the same way as the power of Artem in 1918). The results of the 2012 parliamentary election, characterized by the pressure of regionalists on opposition in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, were the following: all-Ukrainian opposition (Batkivshchina, Udar, Svoboda) got 10%; the Party of regions 67% in the Donetsk region and 57% in the Luhansk one (a considerable part of the PR electorate in the Luhansk region supported communists who were even more reactionary). In neighbouring Kharkiv region, the Party of Regions was supported by 40.9% and opposition – 31.8%. In “South-East” it occurred to be a myth – in Kherson region the opposition won the election.

Kostyantyn Skorkin for RN

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