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”.

Below is the same poster as above, but unprocessed, with some of the information visible around the edges.

So, yes, Donbass is the heart of Russia, much like Kosovo is the heart of Serbia. And both were temporarily torn away from their bodies…