Abstract
This essay is written in the genre of psychogeography, employing sources from Sovietand post-Soviet films and novels that portray the Donbass as an industrialized space ofboth collective amnesia and collective memory, conjuring up the surreal territory of the“mining-metallurgical civilization.” The modern context of the Donbass as an area ofarmed conflict comes up only when related to the industrial past of this region. Theproblem of Donbass identity in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union is discussedin terms of its integration into the new reality of an independent Ukraine. Theessay is about several Soviet films that show the Donbass as a space of labor heroism, asite in the memory of the Great Patriotic War, and contradictory first postwar years ofthe late Stalinist era. This analysis covers several important films about this space wherespy stories and the struggle to improve productivity are complemented by scenes ofbuilding a new life on the basis of “cultural” principles. Text in English. DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2018-10-1-79-94
Highlights
This essay is written in the genre of psychogeography, employing sources from Soviet and post-Soviet films and novels that portray the Donbass as an industrialized space of both collective amnesia and collective memory, conjuring up the surreal territory of the “mining-metallurgical civilization.”
World news broadcast updates from the Donbass conflict right after the news about fighting in the Middle East, which enhances the effect of an alien, sluggish third world war, which somehow includes both remote-controlled drones from American science-fiction movies of the 1980s and Soviet antitank guns from the Second World War
Savochkin’s novel unwillingly comes to mind as one is watching the events. It is about the decline of the Donbass miners’ civilization, which, it emerged as a capitalist project of the British businessman and engineer John Hughes in the nineteenth century, attained a complete and, in its own way, perfect shape during the Soviet industrial breakthrough
Summary
The famous Russian writer Aleksei Ivanov, who hails from the Ural city of Perm’ and has penned a range of popular ethnographic fantasy novels, reconceptualized the three-century history of the mining and industrial habitat of the Urals a few years ago He did this by referring to the particular way that human life is organized there, revealing the complex interactions between the surrounding space, natural environ-. Cus of literature that worked toward fusing the remains of the Donbass’s spatial mythology into psychological trips of a depressed industrial region (Highmore 2005) These games with the geographical subconscious of the Soviet project emerged from the cultural sphere and mass media, becoming an important factor in mobilizing mass consciousness. In 1989 Donbass miners launched a massive strike demanding improved living and working conditions, as well as wider economic and political reforms This strike is to this day the largest and most spectacular example of a workers’ movement in the post-Soviet space. In contrast to the countries of Eastern Europe, where the course of reforms brought about a rapid erosion of the state-owned industrial sector, this did not happen in Ukraine and the Donbass was preserved with a huge concentration of active and functioning Soviet-era industrial stock, whose specialization in coal mining, metallurgy, and heavy industry became even more pronounced in the post-Soviet era (Swain 2006; Lyakh 2007)
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