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Abstract
This paper compares politics in two cities, Mariupol and Kramatorsk, located near the frontline between Ukraine-controlled Donetsk Oblast and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The DPR controlled these cities in the spring of 2014, but Ukraine recaptured them. Both cities are company towns, in which owners/managers of dominant factories, nicknamed job-givers, have a decisive voice in the city’s decision-making. This paper compares how leaders of the two cities reacted to the expansion of Rinat Akhmetov’s business empire before the Donbas War, and to DPR paramilitaries during the war. The two cities diverged decisively in the post-war reconstruction because Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko succeeded in splitting two major companies and making one of them pro-presidential in Kramatorsk. As a result, electoral politics in Kramatorsk became highly competitive, while one-party dominance of the Opposition Bloc (former Party of Regions) continues in Mariupol.
Notes
1. The ranking of city populations in Donetsk Oblast before the Donbas War was: Donetsk with about a 950,000 population, Mariupol with 459,000, Makeevka with 351,000, Gorlovka with 254,000, and Kramatorsk with 163,000, but today, Donetsk, Makeevka, and Gorlovka comprise the DPR.
2. My understanding of the geography of the Donbas War is confirmed by territorial division of the conflict area created by Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation. Accessed 8 March 2018. https://www.depo.ua/static/files/gallery_uploads/images/%D0%9C%D1%96%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%8C%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8.jpg. The Ukrainian troops are divided into five zones: Raion M defending Mariupol; Sector B targeting Donetsk and other central parts of the DPR; Sector C defending Kramatorsk and northern Donetsk Oblast; and Sector A targeting Luhansk. The mysterious Sector D covers the internal territory of the DPR, perhaps, intending diversionary operations within this territory.
3. This term “national-patriots” is not endogenous since Ukrainian national-patriots call themselves just patriots. In Ukrainian central politics, this term is becoming obsolete since the national-patriotic camp has tangibly differentiated. Supporters of Petro Poroshenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, Arsen Avakov, and Oleh Liashko harshly criticize each other. Yet, at the local level in Eastern Ukraine, these groups still continue to perceive themselves as belonging to the same camp, countered against pro-Russians, separatists, or oligarchs.
4. Based on my talk with women activists of Pillar (Oplot) at its Central Office in Donetsk City, 14 August 2017. Pillar was a military organization during the peak of the civil war, but transformed into a political organization. Aleksandr Zakharchenko had become famous as the leader of Pillar. Since the organization Donetsk Republic is becoming an ordinary party of power, losing dynamism and often accompanied by intra-party struggles, DPR leaders need a political organization more devoted to the Novorussian cause and to Zakharchenko himself. Pillar plays this role.
5. During my fieldwork in the DPR on 9–17 August 2017, I visited one ruined and two destroyed but restored schools in the western suburbs of Donetsk City. Unfortunately, I could not talk with the pupils and teachers of these schools because it was during the summer vacation.
6. The surname of Khotlubei comes from the word khutlu, meaning “happy” in the Urum language.
7. “Gorod ischezaiushchikh liudei;” “Valerii Karpenko.” It is difficult to reveal the truth of this kind of criminal case, but what is relevant for this essay is that Kramatorsk leaders believe that Karpenko’s sons were killed by Akhmetov’s band.
8. In the 2010 presidential election, Yanukovych gained “only” 70.87% of vote in Kramatorsk, which was almost the worst result in Donetsk Oblast (“Za kogo golosuiut kramatorchane”). In 2012, there were about 600 Fatherland members in Kramatorsk (Filichenko Citation2017).
9. The City Council’s official website: http://marsovet.org.ua/articles/show/article/384.
10. It is indeed difficult to breathe in the industrial seaside of Mariupol. The landscape of rusted ironworks built in the 1970s and the hanging mists of smog around them look like hell. Sea pollution is no less serious and it is difficult to imagine today that the Sea of Azov used to be one of the marine areas richest in sea products in the world (Solov'ev Citation1993).
11. Ukraine’s Law on Local Self-Government requests that the mayor chair and manage the City Council in concurrence. Since this is physically impossible, the mayor appoints the City Council Secretary to manage the Council’s business and negotiate with Council fractions. A striking variance among local self-governments emerges from how and to what extent the mayor authorized his secretary to run the Council.
12. Born in Cherkassy Oblast in 1960. He served in the police from the 1980s to the 2000s in Mariupol, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. He retired when Yanukovych won the presidential election, yet, as a civilian pensioner, participated in the anti-Novorussian movement in Mariupol. Having noticed his activities, Avakov called him back to police service (PR, 6 May 2014).
13. Unfortunately, this took place after 2014. Before 2014, Russian corporations ordered rocket carriers and launchers from factories in Kramatorsk to save the remnants of the Soviet space industry in this city from extinction. After 2014, for understandable reasons, production of wind generators has become a booming industry in Ukraine. A German company is building wind generators on the Azov Sea shore, but this company orders power generators from a Polish factory, while ordering cylindrical bodies and windmills (products with less additional value) from a Kramatorsk factory, and assembles them on the spot. Kramatorsk engineers protest against German investors, arguing that making wind power generators is not at all a difficult task for them, but Germans do not believe it. Observation from my tour to the Kramatorsk Factory of Heavy Machine-Tool Building on 4 August 2017.
14. In the two single-member districts of Mariupol, the former governor Taruta and an OB candidate won.
15. The City Council’s official website: http://marsovet.org.ua/articles/show/article/2363; PR, 4 December, 2015.
16. I counted these numbers by comparing KP, 4 October 2014 and “Spysok deputativ Kramators’koi rady VII sklykannia.” Accessed November 6, 2017. http://www.krm.gov.ua/person/viewall/page/.
17. The NKMF’s Youth Organization was transformed from the Komsomol of the factory in 1991 and continues to play a vital role in Kramatorsk’s regime of job-givers by, for example, organizing international conferences abroad and organizing contests of excellent workers.
18. During my fieldwork in the DPR in August 2017, I heard not a mention of the Kyiv government’s pro-NATO orientation when Donetsk citizens accused it. All spoke of victims among their relatives and friends and of damage to their properties. When they accused the West, they remarked on its cynicism in closing its eyes to Ukraine’s shelling of civilian facilities and houses in Donbas.
19. This attack took place two days after the Ukrainian Army shelled the Bosse settlement of Donetsk City with the result that eight citizens were killed. This was a violation of the silent gentlemen’s agreement between Ukraine and the DPR that Ukraine would not shell the central districts of Donetsk City, which made the DPR extremely vindictive.