‘Ukrainian Sunrise’ by Kateryna Zarembo: On the destructive power of Soviet myths and Russian propaganda

There is a risk that publishing translations of books deeply rooted in the local context will not be understood, and that a reader from another country will not comprehend the depth of the raised issues. Kateryna Zarembo, a researcher, lecturer, and expert on foreign policy and civil society of Ukraine, dedicated her book “Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s,” to the regions from which the Russian-Ukrainian war began in 2014. The book is published by Academic Studies Press (Cherry Orchard Books). 

In her book, the author proves the cultural, historical, and mental affiliation of Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Ukraine, primarily being keen on preserving unity within Ukrainian society. From one perspective, you will see that “Ukrainian Sunrise” is a story about erasing the past for ideological and propaganda purposes. The Soviet government used to do this, and Russia continues the “tradition” today. Kateryna Zarembo’s book is also a story of people being unbroken and loyal to their ideals, and the struggle for freedom and democratic values. I think these concepts will be easily felt and shared by readers in any civilized country of the world. 

There’s one more important thing. Flipping through the pages of “Ukrainian Sunrise,” one understands that the author of the book joined the Hospitallers, a Ukrainian voluntary organization of paramedics, in the summer of 2024.

These are the realities of Ukraine: one day you are an expert, writer, teacher, mother of four, and the next day you are a combat medic. This fact does not require sympathy, but rather an understanding that Ukrainian intellectuals continue their work no matter what. 

Dispelling of myths

“Ukraine’s East — or, more precisely, the part of it that has come to be labeled “Donbas” — is perhaps the most mythologized and demonized Ukrainian region,” writes Kateryna Zarembo. These myths were primarily shaped by the Soviet government, which wanted the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts to become a tabula rasa and be remembered as a land of glory for miners and metallurgists. Why?

First, the eastern regions of Ukraine remembered their European past. Many cities were founded by foreigners who came to develop the industrial potential of the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1865, Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes began the mining history of Yuzivka (now Donetsk). In 1895, the Austrian Land Bank (Länderbank) and the French company Société Générale founded the Makiivka Coal Company. In 1899, Donetsk Glass and Chemical Factories, incorporated as a Belgian Société Anonyme, established an enterprise that later became the pride of Donbas — the Avtosklo factory in Kostiantynivka. In 1900, the Luhansk Steam Locomotive Factory, founded by the German industrialist Gustav Hartmann, began operating. The First World War, followed by the Bolshevik coup, forced foreigners to leave, while their property was illegally appropriated by the young Soviet government. 

Second, erasing Ukrainian local history was necessary because Ukrainians lived in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions before Europeans came there. Indeed, they were the descendants of brave Cossack warriors. While the Soviet authorities managed to impose their ideology, Russian language, and culture in the cities, they met resistance from peasants in the villages. What did they want to do to change this situation? They wanted to destroy the villages, starve the peasants to death, wipe out an entire class, and intimidate those who survived. 

Before the repressions of the 1930s and the Holodomor (genocide of Ukrainian people), the eastern region of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was Ukrainian-speaking.

On this basis, certain political forces in the already-independent Ukraine continued to reinforce myths about Donbas as a Russian-speaking, pro-Russian, criminal, weak-willed region of Ukraine. To dispel those myths, Kateryna Zarembo writes about the patriotic communities and movements in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that existed from the 2000s until 2014. The author argues that belonging to everything Ukrainian in the eastern region was a systemic phenomenon, not something accidental.

On the wave of protests

“There are too many Ukrainian movements and communities in the Ukrainian East to cover them all in one book,” notes Kateryna Zarembo. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, despite decades of the “intellectual genocide” the Soviet authorities performed in this region, people continued to fight for Ukrainian identity in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The student organization Poshtovkh, the Donetsk poetry slam, the STAN artistic association, and the Izolyatsia Foundation are some of the vivid examples of communities whose founders and participants wanted to live in a free, modern Ukrainian democratic state, not in a dictatorship.

“These communities have been the voices of the new, non-post-Soviet Donetsk and Luhansk regions embedded in the nationwide Ukrainian context. They have been the awakening of the dormant (oppressed, exterminated, and tortured) Ukrainian identity.” 

In the early 2000s, to be able to operate without hindrance and remain apolitical, pro-Ukrainian communities often went underground, and later, the Izolyatsia Foundation, for instance, had to fundraise and look for alternative sources of funding in order not to become contaminated by the support of oligarchic political forces that did not see the future of the eastern region, and the entire country, without friendship with Russia. It is important to add that the space of the Izolyatsia Foundation was once a factory in Donetsk that was revitalized and turned into an art center. In June 2014, when Donetsk was already occupied, the Russians seized Izolyatsia, destroying the artwork and turning the former factory into a torture chamber. You can read about what happened in the prisons of Izolyatsia in “The Torture Camp on Paradise Street,” a book by Stanislav Aseyev, a former prisoner of the Russians, a Ukrainian human rights activist.

The author of “Ukrainian Sunrise” pays great attention to religious groups that played a vital role in the fight against the spread of Russian propaganda, and recalls the football fans who guarded pro-European demonstrators in the squares of Donetsk during the Revolution of Dignity.

In her book, Kateryna Zarembo reminds us of the Donbas whose existence contradicts the footage of cheerful citizens happily holding the Russian flag, which was produced by Putin’s henchmen.

Hoping to go back

Kateryna Zarembo’s book is a documentary prose where the author combines scientific evidence and her own emotional perception of the topic she studied. The author’s narrative could perhaps have been more restrained, with more references to historical sources, for example. However, the core of “Ukrainian Sunrise” is made up of personal stories of people who fought and sacrificed their lives because they loved the land they grew up on and believed in a better future for the region as part of a united and non-separable Ukraine. It is difficult to remain unmoved when you read the book. 

The author concludes that “the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are acquiring new meanings and connotations both in the public consciousness and in the historical memory that is currently being formed.” The cities of Mariupol, Bakhmut, Pokrovsk… The author is convinced that it is in “this region is where a new Ukrainian heroic myth is being created.” The Russian-Ukrainian war continues, but Ukrainians oppose territorial concessions to the enemy. Many cities in the Donetsk region are left in ruins. 

“The history of the Ukrainian East demonstrates what this region has suffered from Russia every time it has tried to forge an alternative trajectory of development”, concludes Kateryna Zarembo, hoping that the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts will be liberated from the Russian occupiers. Only then will a new history of the region, which has faced so many challenges, begin.

The publication is a part of the “Chytomo Picks: Classics and New Books from Ukraine” project. The materials have been prepared with the assistance of the Ukrainian Book Institute at the expense of the state budget. The author’s opinion may not coincide with the official position of the Ukrainian Book Institute.

RELATED: ‘The Factory’ by Ihor Mysiak. A philosophical novel about the search for fickle happiness

Translation: Iryna Savyuk

Copy editing: Aalap Trivedi, Drafted Editorial Services