The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Trapped in Soviet Disneyland
This brave reporter was tortured in separatist Donetsk for being a ‘Remainer’
IN ISOLATION by Stanislav Aseyev, tr Lidia Wolanskyj
400pp, Harvard, T £25 (0844 871 1514), RRP £31.95, ebook £11.49
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As a pro-Ukrainian in the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic, journalist Stanislav Aseyev is not so much a rare beast as an endangered species. When separatist militias seized control of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk and its surrounding territory in 2014, he found himself rapidly losing friends and making enemies.
Countless pals he had grown up with were killed while fighting on behalf of the “DPR”, as it is known. Countless others vowed never to speak to him again after learning that he is a “Remainer” – one of the dwindling minority who would rather remain part of Ukraine than become part of Russia.
Like Brexit Britain, this issue divided not just the nation but families, including Aseyev’s own. Unlike Brexit, however, Remainers in Donetsk risked much more than rows over the dinner table. As Aseyev reveals in this fascinating account of life in the DPR – Aseyev’s collected journalism from 2015 to 2017, newly translated into English – anyone who publicly challenged the pro-Kremlin line could end up “buried in plastic bags in the local woods”. And contrary to what we in the West might think, the law was not just laid down by the thuggish Kremlin stoolies in the DPR’s leadership. Equally fanatical, he says, were “the People” themselves, who, after generations of peaceful coexistence, seemed all too happy to kill their fellow Ukrainians.
Interspersed with handy timelines and glossaries, Aseyev’s book is a kind of Lonely Planet guide to a republic that doesn’t officially exist, except in the minds of its fervent believers. Anti-Kyiv sentiment is everywhere: on street signs describing Ukrainians as Nazis, in lurid myths about Ukrainian forces crucifying children, and even in how folk decorate their drinks cabinets. “The father of a good friend who is a DPR ‘Cossack’ keeps two grenades in the liquor bar in his apartment,” Aseyev writes. They weren’t just there as war souvenirs. The father vowed that if Ukrainian forces ever invaded, he would “go out into the street and blow myself up in the middle of them”.
Eventually, this tide of hatred caught up with Aseyev himself, who was jailed by DPR officials in 2017 after writing anonymous exposés of life in the breakaway republic. He spent the next two and half years being tortured in a DPRrun jail, although the title of this collection – In Isolation – refers to the loneliness he has always felt as one of Donetsk’s few “Remainers”.
Why, then, are so many in the DPR so keen to be part of “Novorossiya”, as Putin calls it? According to Aseyev, it’s not just because Donetsk is mainly Russianspeaking. As Ukraine’s industrial heartland, full of coalminers and steelworkers, Donetsk is also home to a particular breed of “orthodox proletarian”, whose outlook has changed little since Soviet times. They “think the same way they work, accustomed to hard labour and a strong hand, and not feeling the pull of civil liberties”.
For these hard-toiling, harddrinking “sovoks” (Soviet slang for those who uncritically backed the ideology), Ukraine’s pro-European revolution in 2014 held little interest. The separatists’ talk of a return to Mother Russia, however, tapped into a welcome nostalgia at a time of uncertainty, reminding them of a “warm May rally with their dads in 1979”.
As such, the DPR is a Soviet Disneyland. There are icons of Stalin and Lenin, Komsomol youth leagues and shops selling cheap Russian sausage in Back-inthe-USSR-style packaging. It is a glorious march forward to a largely imaginary past, although there is nothing make-believe about the violence in the DPR.
As well as losing almost 6,000 volunteers in fighting with Ukrainian government forces since 2014, the separatist militias scrap constantly with each other. Many are run by local gangsters, who casually execute people in broad daylight. As Aseyev puts it: “Donetsk today resembles more Chechnya, with its traditional tribal mentality and respect for the use of force, than it does the more-pretentious Moscow or StPetersburg.”
Indeed, even if Ukraine could reclaim the DPR and its sister breakaway republic in Luhansk by force, it seems doubtful whether it would succeed. Regaining territories where people have been taught “systematically” to hate Ukrainians, Aseyev fears, may just start another war. And despite his first-hand insights into the separatist psyche, at times even he despairs of understanding it all. “This is Donetsk in Europe,” he laments. “That we should be dreaming of slitting the throats of those who, not that long ago, stood with us in the soccer stadium… I will probably never find an answer.” This book is perhaps as close as we will get.