derived from a word for borderland, and that
was true most of all in what is now the coun-
try’s east. It was the steppe frontier between
the czars and the Ottoman sultans. It was
also underlaid by vast seams of coal, whose
extraction was industrialized in the 19th cen-
tury by European engineers.
During the Russian Revolution and civil war,
the mines and metalworks of Donbas were cov-
eted by the Red and White Russians alike. In
1918, the Bolsheviks created a puppet Soviet
republic in Donbas. (It lasted only a few months,
but the D.P.R. would invoke it a century later.)
The region was devastated by the German and
Soviet armies in World War II, in which seven
million people died in Ukraine. After the war,
Moscow repopulated and rebuilt Donbas. Its
miners were held up as the beau idéal of Soviet
manhood, and it became a kind of set piece for
the worker’s utopia. Because of Donbas’s impor-
tance to the economy, life there was better than
in much of the U.S.S.R. At the same time, Stalin,
like the czars, put down the Ukrainian nation-
alist cause and suppressed Ukrainian culture.
No one knows how many of his victims lay in
the mineshafts.
Some days before Yaroslav Semenyaka was
killed, I was in what was once a prosperous
town, Zolote, built around a complex of mines
in the Red Zone, just outside the L.P.R. Only a
few of the mines are still open. The rest were
abandoned before the current war or wrecked
in it. Looming over Zolote were a deserted head-
frame and hoist house and the grown-over culm
bank, reminders to the villagers of the life they
once had.
A Ukrainian Army company from Lviv sta-
tioned in Zolote had been taking heavy artillery
fi re all summer. From the ground around the
command post protruded the fi ns of unexplod-
ed ordnance. The post was in what had been
the mine’s administrative building, which still
exhibited the expense and artistic fl air the Soviet
Union put toward its mining sector. The stairwell
was decorated with glass-tile mosaics. Anti-Putin
literature and patriotic artwork sent by Ukrainian
schoolchildren were now tacked on the walls. A
smiling marker child stood next to three smil-
ing marker soldiers. A green crayon tank fi red a
perforated line into a stick building containing
a stick fi gure lying on its side. The caption read
Come back alive, our defenders!
The company commander told me that the
day before, he counted 70 120-milimeter rounds
falling onto and around the village. It was the
most artillery he had ever seen, and precise.
‘‘It was like jeweler’s work,’’ he said. ‘‘When 70
shells arrive on top of you like that, you don’t
lift your head. You just lay down on the fl oor of
the trench.’’
There may have been some point to all of it,
but he suspected it was for show. Not only was
there the extra shelling in
In Shyrokyne,
the site of a
battle between
Ukrainian
forces and
Russia-backed
secessionists.36 1.23.22
(Continued on Page 44)