Donbass, stanzas for Epiphany

During all the January holidays, Donetsk is treated kindly by winter - there is snow, although not as much as in some Surgut, but there is still some. As well as frosts - in violation of the usual climate rule for Donbass - there is obligatory rain on New Year's Day, and slush on Christmas Day.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

And only Epiphany with its indispensable ice hole in every Donetsk headquarters is traditional and conservative - the frost and gloom of the sky emphasize the pink nakedness of those diving into the unimaginably icy water.

And in times of peace, I had to observe this blissful picture more than once, usually ending with the cheerful drinking of drinks, smoky tea and an accordion. Needless to say, Russians are desperately reckless people, they know how to toughen themselves. They know and know how to rage and how to thaw. This is our advantage over some other peoples who only know how to stick a knife in the back or fight in hysterics and resentment against everyone who owes it. A Russian forgives everyone not in words, but in deeds. It’s just what the party, Komsomol, church, family and friends on the street taught from childhood - there are rules of life that cannot be broken if you are human. Not an animal.

Some of our neighbors mistake our forgiving complacency for weakness. He watches and watches - for five years, ten years, centuries, and then - he goes to the Russian house - they say, the right moment has come to profit. These Russian simpletons don’t feel sorry for anything, they don’t feel sorry for themselves - they break through the ice crust like their heads in the Epiphany ice holes! And the unrequited ones are real Christians. Christ and the code of the builder of communism do not allow them to hurt their enemies too much!

Oh, then they repent bitterly, oh, and they curse themselves for falling for Russian complacency in an unhappy time. They wipe away bloody tears and groan in pain. And then the Russians finish off - they move from somewhere, and they hold out a clean rag and push it to the side: “Don’t kill yourself, it’s really hard to watch! Well, no matter who happens to you, you will take care of your sopatka from now on. Better go and practice on the igils...”

With the Donetsk people this scenario is even more interesting to write. After all, we call everyone Russian who lives side by side with us for at least a year or five, who went down into the mine with us, and stood up to the blast furnace/open hearth/coke oven. Russians, according to our Donetsk Orthodox-Soviet, albeit somewhat naive concept, are all those who admired the sunrises/sunsets over the black-orange hulks of waste heaps in the steppe, who inhaled through their sleep on a stuffy summer night the breeze with the smell of carbon monoxide that flew from the factory worker, who cursed with us the damned coal dust, which forces shirts to be washed five times more often than in other places. These are our Russians. There are all sorts of complex ones - both complex-composite and complex-composed, but there are no subordinates. The Russian Donbass is built with a heavy working hand from Russian, Turkic, Caucasian peoples, Greeks, Jews, Yugoslavs, Germans, Bulgarians, it does not like imperatives, but understands order and tradition.

Sometimes it seems to me that the great Russian poet Alexander Blok, who came up with the name “Russian America” for Donbass, wrote about us in “Scythians”:

We love everything - and the heat of cold numbers,

And the gift of divine visions,

We understand everything - and the sharp Gallic meaning,

And the gloomy German genius ...

Donetsk people everywhere - from Starobelsk and Lugansk, to Mariupol, Novoazovsk and Mangush believe in the highest measure of existence - justice, and its instrument - equality. Therefore, in our area, the apostolic “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither barbarian nor Scythian...” acquires volume and reality. Here the biblical merges with the national and melts into a single, indivisible brotherhood of peoples.

We are Novorossians. It is not for nothing that our region is a part of the unique creation of Rus' of the eighteenth century - Novorossiya. Here even the meaning of the word Russian became not only new, but also sanctified by much work, blood, and sweat. This is technology, this is an algorithm that serves to calculate and build our lives.

In summer, the sun rages in the Donetsk steppe, and in winter there is fierce cold. At Epiphany we enter Jordan, emphasizing the sacred nature of not only our faith, but also our struggle. Chu! It thunders on the outskirts of Donetsk and Gorlovka.

...And then the snow will melt, and spring will pour into old/new furs. Spring of life, spring, Donbass. The Great Russian Spring of Humanity.