Separatism on the Donbas: Memory Aberration and Identity Search

Author

VIKHROV MAKSYM

a sociologist, a journalist at The Ukrainian Week periodical

Separatism on the Donbas: Memory Aberration and Identity Search

Abstract

Donbas separatism as the political, social and cultural phenomenon is the object of the further analysis. The article is dedicated to the study of the special features of Donbas separatists collective memory. The author is trying to distinguish the specificity and mechanisms of the collective memory, which have motivated people to support the separatist movement.

The first mechanism is based on the reminiscences on The Donbas Golden Epoch. The region has the privileged status in the USSR in the 1970s. Donbas has the first-class supply and the generous financing from the state budget. It is the only period of peace and prosperity in Donbas history. The economic collapse of the 1990s has turned the Donetsk Coal basin into the depressing region. It has provoked the revanchism, intensified with the defeat of the Donbas representatives after the two Maidans.

The second mechanism has stimulated the political legalization of the separatist ideology and movement. It is connected with the misrepresentation of the reminiscences of The World War II during the last 10–15 years. The ideological accent has been removed from the antiwar pathos to the militaristic mobilization. This militarism has been turned not to historical Nazi movement, but to contemporary Ukrainian fascism. The last one is accused of the crimes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and contemporary political and economic failures of Donbas.

At the present time Donbas separatists are trying to constitute certain republican identity. However, such ideological constructs are considered to be absolutely artificial ones and the real separatists identity is a very complicated, contradictory and unstable phenomenon. They appear as the fragment of the Soviet nation, trying to reconstruct their lost Soviet motherland on the territory of the self-proclaimed republics.

Keywords

Donbas, separatism, collective memory, identity.

References

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