Donbass is the Heart of Russia. It is not just a slogan, it is a reality that everyone was acutely aware of back in 1921, which is the year when the poster below was printed. Donbass is pumping live-giving industrial blood to all the major cities that you can recognise today – Moscow, Petrograd, Tver, Vilna (Vilnius – more on it in Lithuanian Blockade of Kaliningrad – the suicidal move by a limitrophe to please its master), Kiev, Minsk, Uralsk, Harkov…
At the dawn of the USSR, the Donetsk-Krivorozhie Republic was part of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), but on the 17th of February 1919 Lenin issued a decree that the Donetsk republic should be transferred to the Ukrainian SSR with the following formulation: “To ask comrade Stalin through the Bureaux of the Central Committee to liquidate Kriv-Donbass.”
And yet, in 1921, the poster issued in Moscow still showed that “Donbass is the Heart of Russia”.