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Without understanding the history of Donbass in the early XX century, it is impossible to understand the civil war that is taking place in Ukraine now. We have raised this topic in a 2016 article “Short History of Creation of Ukraine and Donetsk-Krivorog Republics after the 1917 Revolution in Russia”. However, that article was not as systematic as the one you are about to read now – “The first reunification of Donbass and Russia”. It was published in Regnum on June 17, 2017.

After reading this article, we will have a solid foundation for understanding the topic of forced ukrainisation, which was taking place in 1920s, a topic which we wil return to in a later publication.

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The problem of Donbass is not new to Russia. Few people know, but in the early twenties of the last century, Russia and Ukraine were already in a very serious conflict over this region. Moreover, the tensions around that territorial dispute were very high. It almost came to a direct military confrontation. It worked out that time. Russia won then. However, the conflict itself was hushed up for a very long time, for obvious reasons. But as they say, there are never permanently resolved conflicts, especially if these conflicts are linguistic and regional in nature. And perhaps, having read the history of the territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia over the Eastern Donbass, it will be easier to understand the processes taking place now in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

The signing of the Brest Peace by the Ukrainian Central Rada on February 9, 1918, according to which the territory of Ukraine (including Donbass) was to be occupied by German troops can be considered as a kind of a start to that conflict. In response, on February 12, 1918, the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic (DKR) was proclaimed in Harkov at the regional congress of Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, which declared its independence and, accordingly, did not recognise the Brest Peace. The government of the new republic included representatives of the all—Russian left-wing parties, while the DKR was headed by the Bolshevik comrade Artyom (Fyodor Sergeev). After the proclamation of the republic, he sent a telegram to the leader of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin:

“The Regional Congress of Soviets adopted a resolution on the creation of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog basin as part of the All-Russian Federation of Soviets.”

According to the leadership of the new republic, it was created primarily based on the territorial and economic principle and was supposed to include the territories of three basins: coal, iron ore and salt. The coal basin (Donbass), divided in the imperial period of Russian history between several administrative units (Yekaterinoslav and Harkov provinces, as well as the Donskoy Army Region, also known as Don Host Region), according to the republican leadership, was supposed to become a single entity within one administrative unit. Therefore, not only Yekaterinoslav province (on the territory of which the Central or, as it was also called, Old Donbass was located) was included in the DKR, but also, as “comrade Artyom” wrote in a note to the heads of foreign states, describing the eastern borders of the DKR: “The Sea of Azov to Taganrog and the borders of the Soviet coal districts of the Don region along the railway line Rostov — Voronezh to Lihaya station.” And in the future, it is these “coal Soviet districts” that will become a stumbling block in the border dispute between the two Soviet republics.

However, the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic could not cope with the German offensive, and by the end of May 1918, the Germans had occupied all of Ukraine (including Donbass) and part of the territory of the Donskoy Army Region. The Government of the DKR was forced to evacuate.

After the revolution in Germany, in the autumn of 1918, the Bolsheviks began the liberation of Ukraine from the German occupiers. At the end of January 1919, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) of Ukraine was established in liberated Harkov under the leadership of Christian Rakovsky. The Government of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic has also returned to Harkov. However, the Soviet leadership in Moscow decided that strategically, the existence of Soviet Ukraine is now more important than the existence of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic. Therefore, the Central Committee (CC) of the Bolshevik Party decided to annex the territory of the DKR to the territory of Ukraine (which at that time was understood by the majority of the population of the former Russian Empire as the Middle Dnieper and the Right Bank of the Dnieper). On February 17, 1919, Vladimir Lenin signed a decree: “Ask comrade Stalin, through the Bureau of the Central Committee, to carry out the decommissioning of Krivdonbass”. The leadership of the DKR, dominated by the Bolsheviks, albeit with a heavy heart, but obeyed the decision of the party. In March 1919, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) was proclaimed in Harkov. And since the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic became part of the Ukrainian SSR, the eastern border of the DKR automatically became the eastern border of Soviet Ukraine. To a certain extent, this came as a surprise to many residents of both Taganrog and Eastern Donbass (Alexandro-Hrushevsky (Shakhtinsky) and Yekaterinenskoe-Kamensky districts), who began to write mass appeals to the central authorities, opposing their annexation to the Ukrainian SSR. Because joining the Soviet Donbass was one thing, but joining Ukraine was quite another. After all, at that moment the Soviet Union had not yet been established. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Ukraine were de jure considered independent states, even if they entered into a military and economic alliance with each other.

At the same time, it is necessary to understand what processes were taking place inside Ukraine itself in order to understand why the residents of Eastern Donbass were far from enthusiastic about the prospect of becoming “Ukrainians”.

First. The lands of Eastern Donbass have never, even hypothetically, been included in any of the Ukrainian states that existed in 1917-1920. Both the Ukrainian Central Rada (Grushevsky), and the Ukrainian State (Skoropadsky), and the Ukrainian Directory (Petlyura) saw the former administrative border of Yekaterinoslav province, which ran along the Kalmius River, much to the west of Taganrog, as the eastern border of Ukraine. The paradox of history is that this very border now largely repeats the front line between Ukraine and the rebel republics of Donbass.

Second. In 1919-21, representatives of other leftist Ukrainian parties began to join en masse the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (CP(b)U). There were Ukrainian left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, “borotbist”-communists, and representatives of many “Marxist”, “communist” and “social democratic” groups. Those, who quietly sat through the entire Civil War, and now rushed to take up positions in the “independent socialist Ukraine”. As a result, an incredibly powerful nationalist bias was formed in the CP(b)U, demanding forced Ukrainisation on the territory of Soviet Ukraine. This is despite the fact that many still had fresh memories of the violent Ukrainisation carried out by the authorities of the Ukrainian bourgeois governments in the territory under their control.

Third. Life in Soviet Russia was slightly better than in the Ukrainian SSR. This was explained by the fact that in the RSFSR there were quite a lot of old pre-revolutionary personnel at the grassroots and middle management levels, who understood what was going on in, for example, the economic sphere. Meanwhile, in the Ukrainian SSR, there were many managers among the cadres who got into their places based solely on their ideological merit and revolutionary expediency, but who poorly understood the essence of the processes in the areas of work entrusted to them. As a result, there was more basic order in Soviet Russia, and the financial well-being of the residents was a little better.

In late 1919 and early 1920, there was an intensive administrative redrawing of the territory of the former Russian Empire, when the borders of new administrative units were designated. The Donetsk province was created on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR (uniting the territories of the present Donetsk and Lugansk regions) with its center in Lugansk. While in the RSFSR, the Don region was formed with the center in Rostov-on-Don, the borders largely coincided with the borders of the present Rostov region of Russia. However, the leadership of the Don region believed that its western border coincided with the western border of the Donskoy Army Region. At the same time as the leadership of Donetsk province considered the former border of the DKR as its eastern border. As a result, in April 1920, authorised representatives of both the Donetsk Governorate and the Don region simultaneously arrived in a number of settlements in Eastern Donbass. This lead to a state of dual power, which paralysed the work of local authorities. All this could be considered as a funny incident, if not for one “but”. The creation of the Soviet Union was still more than a year and a half away. Nominally, both the Ukrainian SSR and the RSFSR were considered independent states. The Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars, based in Harkov (then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR), had its own armed forces under its command. Which it promised to use to support its representatives in the disputed areas. A serious conflict was brewing. In those days, the party organs of the disputed territories frantically telegraphed to Moscow, Harkov, Rostov-on-Don and Lugansk with a desperate request to figure out who should obey whom. The situation was “defused” only by the beginning of the Polish offensive on Kiev at the end of April 1920. As a result, the dispute was put to an end by letters from the All-Russian Emergency Commission (CHEKA), sent to all parties to the conflict, in which the Chekists indicated that all disputed territories were ceding to Ukraine.

This was received with a high degree of irritation in Rostov-on-Don. At the same time, the Rostov leadership did not lose hope of taking revenge. After all, the Don region was deprived of the second largest city, Taganrog, and the lands of the Eastern Donbass, which at that time were not only a coal region, but also a very developed agricultural region. Without the seised lands, the Don region represented a very weak administrative-territorial unit in economic terms. So Rostov had something to fight for.

Moreover, the Ukrainian comrades were not immediately successful in the management of the former lands of the Donskoy Army Region, which was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR. It was here that a number of major anti-Soviet demonstrations took place in the early twenties, which were suppressed by law enforcement officers sent by Harkov, and who did not know well the area and regional specifics. In addition, the Ukrainian leadership began to change the managerial staff in the party and administrative bodies. Squeezing out old local cadres and replacing them with nationally oriented “Varangians”. Who eagerly began to pursue a policy of Ukrainisation. By opening Ukrainian schools, changing Russian-language signs to Ukrainian-language ones and renaming streets in honour of Ukrainian cultural figures and, consequently, devoting little time to real problems. Naturally, all this caused a wave of discontent among the local population.

After the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established as a single state on December 30, 1922, it was faced with the urgent issue of building a more efficient administrative structure, taking into account the new political realities. Therefore, the Union State Planning Committee, established in 1923, was instructed to draw the boundaries of administrative units in a new way. The leadership of the Don region immediately decided to take advantage of this situation, re-claiming Taganrog, Alexandro-Grushevsky (Shakhtinsky) and Yekaterinburg-Kamensky districts of Donetsk province. The essence of the claims was based on the fact that all three ports on the Sea of Azov (Taganrog, Berdyansk and Mariupol) are concentrated in the Ukrainian SSR, while there are none in the RSFSR. In addition, it was pointed out that Taganrog is necessary for the economic development of Rostov. That the RSFSR supplies the Taganrog industry with raw materials and is the main consumer of its products. For example, the Taganrog Metallurgical Plant was the largest plant in the region and supplied enterprises of Soviet Russia with cast iron and steel. As for the Eastern Donbas, the thesis was put forward that coal from this region is largely supplied to industrial enterprises in Russia.

Soviet Ukraine, for its part, refused even to discuss the possibility of transferring disputed territories to the RSFSR. The favourite thesis of the national deviationists from the CP(b)U was immediately put forward – that this is an ethnically Ukrainian territory. In support of this, data from the All-Donetsk Census of 1923 were presented, which, in particular, indicated that 77% of ethnic Ukrainians and only 18% of ethnic Russians live in Taganrog district. This caused great doubts in Moscow about the veracity of the data provided. Because they were too much at odds with the data from previous censuses. And representatives of the USSR State Planning Committee who visited Taganrog did not hear Ukrainian speech at all there, making it quite logical that even if there are a certain number of people who consider themselves Ukrainians here, they have already assimilated so much among Russians that they do not show their Ukrainianess in anything. In addition, the Ukrainian State Planning Committee in 1924, when making a report in response to Rostov’s claims, made a kind of “self-shooting” by writing in it the following lines:

“The indication that Taganrog can be conveniently administered from Rostov is arithmetically correct. Indeed, it is 68 versts from Taganrog to Rostov, and 200 versts to the Center of Donbass, i.e. to Bahmut. But if we take this point of view and, on that basis annex Taganrog to the Southeast (the so-called Southeastern Region of the RSFSR formed in 1924, which included the Don Region – author note), then the very next day after this annexation, it will be necessary to take care of the annexation of both Mariupol and Yuzovka (Donetsk — author note)”.

In addition, the Ukrainian leadership launched, as they would say now, an information campaign under the slogan “For the united Donbass”, the essence of which was that meetings were held at many enterprises, primarily mines and party organisations in Donetsk province, as a result of which resolutions were adopted against the transfer of Eastern Donbass to the RSFSR. At the same time, it was argued that Donbass is a single economic region, the locomotive of the revolution, and, as they said, it is not worth dividing it into different republics. In the same vein, a number of articles appeared in the Ukrainian republican and local press. For example, the Donetsk regional newspaper “Kochegarka” published 15 decisions of the party meetings of mines, bureaus of district committees and district committees under the general heading “For the united Donbass. Against the separation of Shahty and Taganrog districts”. Such information blackmail greatly irritated the union center, which was striving for an increasing centralisation of power. That did not add points to the Ukrainian side in the territorial dispute.

Although we don’t know how the situation would have turned out, but it was 1924. And at that moment, a unique in its own way situation developed in the USSR.

First. The Union State Planning Committee developed the idea of creating the Southeastern Region of the RSFSR. This would include the Don and Kuban-Black Sea regions, as well as the Stavropol and Tersk provinces. Accordingly, Rostov-on-Don was designated the capital of this vast region. And everyone was interested in the dynamic development of both the new territorial unit and its capital. And this would, of course, be easier to achieve if the port of Taganrog was part of the new territory. Therefore, the Union State Planning Committee sided with the Rostov comrades in its reports to the Politburo of the Central Committee on the issue of drawing the border.

Second. In 1924, the cities of Vitebsk, Polotsk and Mogilev with adjacent territories were transferred from the RSFSR to the Byelorussian SSR. In addition, in Central Asia, the territory of the Turkmen USSR was created out of the RSFSR, and the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand with adjacent territories were annexed to the Uzbek USSR. Therefore, the union leadership decided, apparently, to sweeten the pill a little for the Russian leadership, that is tosay, we are not only taking territories out from the RSFSR, but we can also find a compromise and add a little to the Russian lands.

Third. At that time, the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR also decided to participate as much as possible in drawing the new administrative borders of the Soviet Union. And if it was impossible to keep the problematic Taganrog and Eastern Donbass, then it was necessary to put forward territorial claims against the RSFSR. As a result, the Ukrainian side submitted to Moscow, to the Politburo of the Central Committee, its proposals for “zoning”, in which, in exchange for the “rejected” territories, it wanted (in modern geography) the entire Belgorod Region, about half of the Kursk, partly Voronezh and Bryansk regions, plus part of the Gomel region of Soviet Belarus. That is, Soviet Ukraine wanted to get a territory with a population of more than 1 million people for the territory where approximately 200 thousand people lived. So, expecting a happy exchange of territories, Ukraine reluctantly agreed, but stopped actively resisting the transfer of disputed territories in Donbass.

On July 11, 1924, in Moscow, the Politburo of the Central Committee adopted a resolution stating the desirability of joining Taganrog, Alexandro-Grushevsky and Yekaterinburg-Kamensky districts of Donetsk province to the Southeastern edge of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After that, the so-called Parity Commission of the Donetsk provincial executive Committee and the Southeastern regional executive Committee was created, which supervised the direct transfer of the territory. At the same time, the Ukrainian SSR ensured that all finished products stored in Taganrog warehouses, as well as all new equipment located in the production facilities of the transferred territories, were transferred to it.

The transfer of territories from Ukraine to Russia was completed nominally on October 1, but actually on October 3, 1924. Taganrog and Eastern Donbass returned to their native harbour. Now it is a dozen of districts in the west of the Rostov region with cities such as Taganrog, Shahty and Kamensk-Shahtinsky. The first reunification of Donbass and Russia took place.

After the information about the transfer of the territories to the RSFSR became publicly available, the union authorities were overwhelmed by a wave of appeals from people’s assemblies, primarily from the territory of the Donetsk province of the Ukrainian SSR, with a request to annex their territorial units to the RSFSR. Here is one of the typical appeals of that time. Dmitry Yakimovich Cherkasov, the commissioner of the village at the Uspenskaya station in the Amvrosimovsky district of the Stalinsk District (BATS note: see the afterword below), who was elected at the national assembly, wrote to the Taganrog district executive committee in December 1924:

“The Uspenskoye settlement society … due to the population’s attraction to the Russian language, taking into account the distance between the district cities of Ukraine — Stalino (now Donetsk — author’s note) and the South-East of Taganrog, to the latter the population of the village tends to travel both along the land and rail routes, and therefore I petition the Taganrog District Executive Committee to annex the village at the Uspenskaya station to the Matveevo-Kurgan district, i.e. to the South-East not only in land, but also administratively.”

This popular appeal was not taken into account by the then leadership of the country. The Uspenskaya station was divided by the administrative border in half. In 1991, the administrative border between the Soviet republics became a state border. And at the end of August 2014, active fighting took place here between the militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the troops of Ukraine.

The further indecision of the union leadership in the subsequent transfer of the territories of Donbass to Russia was largely due to the fact that, having withdrawn Taganrog and Eastern Donbass from Ukraine, it turned out to be very difficult to transfer something commensurate to the Ukrainian SSR. Since active resistance began to the plans of the leadership of Soviet Ukraine to increase its territory at the expense of the Russian Chernozem (Balck Earth) region. The leadership of Voronezh, Bryansk and Kursk as provincial centers did not want to lose their lands. Moreover, the Ukrainian SSR claimed the most economically developed regions of the Black Earth region. The county congresses of the soviets of the “disputed territories” voted against joining the Ukrainian SSR. The Union Center found itself in a very delicate situation. Ukraine had already given Taganrog, but received nothing in return, however, bak then it was also impossible to ignore the opinion of local authorities. Finally, Moscow assigned the issue to the joint “Border Settlement Commission”. As a result, it was decided to align the borders according to the economic principle, that is, settlements were attributed to the republic by the presence of roads and connections with regional centers. Thus, at the end of 1925, the Ukrainian SSR agreed in exchange for Taganrog and Eastern Donbass to receive the city of Putivl with thirteen surrounding villages, and also in 1926, when levelling the republican border, to receive nine more Russian villages. For three years after that, the issue of the Russian-Ukrainian border was discussed at various levels, but this did not lead to any administrative changes. And the residents of Donbass kept writing and writing letters and requests to include their region in Russia.

These massive requests frightened the leadership of Soviet Ukraine, and it made certain concessions to the Russian residents of the republic. In April 1927, in a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party(b) of Ukraine “On the consequences of Ukrainisation”, Russians in the Ukrainian SSR were recognised as a national minority, which has equal rights with others to ensure their linguistic and cultural needs. This created the basis for the creation of Russian national administrative units. Eight Russian national districts, 379 Russian rural and nine village councils were established in Ukraine, 1,539 Russian schools operated in these areas, and a significant part of the administrative work was conducted in Russian. It is clear that the lion’s share of these Russian national administrative units was in the border regions of Ukraine. And their goal was to reduce the desire of the local population to join the RSFSR.

So the desire of the residents of Donbass to reunite with Russia has a long historical tradition that must always be remembered.

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As an afterword…

On June 3, 1938, the Donetsk region was divided into Stalinsk and Voroshilovgradsk oblasts.

◽️The Donetsk region was created in 1932 from parts of the Don Host (Army) Region, Yekaterinoslav and Kharkov provinces of the Russian Empire.

◽️Then they wanted to make the oldest city in Donbass, Artemovsk (former Bakhmut), its center.

◽️Artemovsk remained in this status, but only on paper, for two weeks, after which it was decided to make the city of Stalino (former Yuzovka, present Donetsk) the regional center.

◽️Since 1937, the USSR began to disaggregate regions. For example, Kharkov was divided into Kharkov proper, Poltava, and Sumy.

◽️And from Donetsk they made Stalinsk and Voroshilovgradsk regions.

◽️The first was renamed Donetsk in 1961, and the second, after a series of renamings, became Lugansk on May 4, 1990.

◽️If this had not happened, today we would have the Stalinsk People’s Republic and the Voroshilovgradsk People’s Republic as part of Russia. But history does not know the conditional mood.

Source: Donbass Decides, translated by Beorn And The Shiledmaiden

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👉 Read also: Donbass is the Heart of Russia and Bahmut or Artyomovsk? A historical look at the name of the city.