THIS IS A DRAFT PAPER From Exit to Take-Over: The Evolution of the Donbas as an Intentional Community VLAD MYKHNENKO* International Policy Fellow The Central European University & Open Society Institute E-mail:
[email protected] Paper for Workshop No 20. The Politics of Utopia: Intentional Communities as Social Science Microcosms The European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops 13-18 April 2004 Uppsala, Sweden ABSTRACT: The Donbas – a large old industrial region in the Ukrainian-Russian Cossack borderland – constitutes a particular intentional community. According to earlier positive accounts, it was a space, the open steppe, a frontier land, a fugitive’s paradise, where the notions of and desires for freedom and dignifying labour had been realised. According to its current negative associations, the Donbas is an allegedly realised utopia of an ‘anti-modern’ community, dominated by a ‘criminal-political nexus’ of terrorising mafia gangs and political clans. The purpose of this paper is to compare the Donbas community, the evolution of intentions of its founders and of the images produced in the process of its construction, in three very different points in time – under the Russian Empire, under the Bolshevik Rule and Stalin’s Great Terror, and during the post-communist transformation. * I would like to express my gratitude here to the International Policy Fellowships, affiliated with the Central European University and Open Society Institute – Budapest, for their generous help, which has allowed me, among many other things, to work on this paper. 2 In both a geographical and symbolic sense, the Donbas constitutes a particular community, just as a nation, city, or village does.