Red Donbass: No compromises with the oligarchs!

Vladimir Bogun, journalist, Kyiv

Kyiv, July 14 (Navigator, Vladimir Bogun) - “The rebellious Donbass does not have enough guns and planes to successfully resist Kyiv,” supporters of the self-proclaimed republics lament on social networks. Without in any way disputing the justice or injustice of such statements, I would like to add: no less acute is the shortage of ideology in the Donbass that can captivate the masses.

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You can often hear about the archaic nature of Ukrainian nationalism, and therefore the impossibility of building a successful developed society on the basis of this ideology. In principle, this is how it is - ritual dances to the cries of “Muscovites to knives” may be useful for rallies and ratings, but not for state building.

But bad luck - on the opposite side the degree of ideological archaism is no less... Costumed Cossacks, Orthodox banners, sometimes almost a stylist from pre-Petrine times: it seems that just a little more - and the famous imperial motto “For God, Tsar and Fatherland” will appear on the banners of the rebel Donbass " And this is by no means a joke: a militiaman who escaped from Slavyansk gives an interview on camera in which he says that he will pray for the revival of the Tsar.

Historical analogies are not always appropriate, but in our case it is worth turning to the events that raged in the vastness of the former Russian Empire almost a hundred years ago. Now it is not fashionable to appeal to the experience of the red side in that civil war. In Ukraine, the Bolsheviks are blamed for the destruction of Ukrainian independence, in Russia – for the collapse of the great empire.

Nevertheless, the experience of the red project is useful for us even today. And first of all, because class priorities dominated over national ones. The Bolsheviks, paradoxically, were both romantic utopians and tough pragmatists, for whom in that bloody confrontation there were no “Colorados” and “dills,” but only exploiters and the oppressed.

And no matter how much today the apologists of the “crunch of French bread” lament about “the Russia that we have lost,” in that grandiose and previously unparalleled struggle of meanings in history, it was the Bolsheviks who were able to offer their confused compatriots the slogans that most met their immediate needs.

The flamboyant publicist Oles Buzina, who does not hide, as he himself admits, “his sympathies either for pre-revolutionary Russia or for the white movement,” once asked the question on this occasion: is it only the presence of a more powerful repressive apparatus that explains the victory of the Reds over the Whites? And he gave a very unexpected answer: “I think the reason for the Reds’ victory is that the Soviet project was oriented towards the future. He truly transformed a person, gave him an education, a sense of freedom from social injustice, satisfied his primary material needs, and captivated him with the opportunity to participate in the creation of a new world.”

But if we pick up a document called the “Constitution of the DPR,” then almost throughout the text there is an appeal to the past, but not to “the opportunity to participate in the creation of a new world.” Here you have both the “primary and dominant Faith of the Christian Orthodox Catholic of the Eastern Confession” and the “pillars of the Russian World”.

And even social policy is made dependent on patriarchal and religious postulates. On the one hand, “creating conditions that ensure a decent life and free development of people, people’s well-being, and the availability of basic material and spiritual benefits.” But immediately, separated by a comma, a clarification follows: “... based on an understanding of traditional religious, social, cultural and moral values.”

Now let’s ask ourselves the question: are clerical postulates really so significant for the industrial Donbass that miners and metallurgists, making the sign of the cross, will suddenly enroll in friendly ranks as volunteers in the militia? Let's not forget that we are dealing with a region that, probably, like no other in Ukraine, suffered from the ruling class of owners, which at one point suddenly found itself the master of entire industries. But for some reason the Prime Minister of a seemingly PEOPLE’S republic makes very strange reservations, very similar to flirting with those who robbed the Donbass: “We have nothing to do with the communists who grab something and nationalize it, we have nothing to do.”