Nothing made me tired like Donbass. Perhaps the reader’s first association is with war, explosions, airstrikes, missiles, building rubble, and sometimes night evacuations, because “they’re on the move,” they’re coming, “ours may not hold.” However, in truth, you can get used to all aspects of warfare. Until recently, in Kherson, under the Antonevsky Bridge, an ordinary city bus drove, although from time to time a Russian tank fired on this section of the road from the other side of the river, in Sloviansk – in July there was the greatest shelling – there was no There is still a pizzeria, although the owner covered the windows with fiberboard, so that a potential cluster missile would not kill customers with his missiles.
Sure, you get used to the bangs, but a free man brought up in Polish culture can never get used to the people of post-Soviet Donbass. Western journalists who drive from one separate village to another village of zduns are painfully annoying, all these passive, stagnant and heroic residents of Donbass are driven by Russian slogans, so these European and American, sometimes even Polish, journalists lament the misery of this or that old man His house near Kramatorsk or Syuersk was destroyed by a missile.
Donbass, agitated by radicals and separatists
Meanwhile, the Donbass is strangled, no, not only from people who support Russia, but from a purebred working-peasant class drawn from the postulates of Alexander Zinoviev’s “Soviet man”. The writer assumed that the Soviet intelligentsia was crooked, but if that was the case, This and the poor can be distorted, not only by a communist upbringing, but also by the grumbling of Donbass for three decades, how this community in eastern Ukraine supported the whole country with its industry (not true), and how it is impossible to live without trade with Russia (not true), How this “was better under communism” (pity to comment).
But if someone thinks – and Russian propaganda is trying to shape the media message in this way – that these people are “pro-Russian”, then they are deeply mistaken. They are against everything—the present government, the former power, and the future power, against the factory director who told me to come to work sober, the shopkeeper who wouldn’t let me buy on a notebook, and the neighbor who didn’t give for free. PV panels “although he had too many.” They learned their helplessness and waiting for “someone will come and give,” submitting to fatalism, “what will be, will be,” They let their children and grandchildren play in the ruins of the houses where the brains of an elderly tenant who was murdered several hours ago are being cleaned.
disgust? Yes
I’ve seen their sticky behaviour. They get free humanitarian aid, food, clothes, and electronics (stop it, volunteers, take it straight to the people in Donbass!), sometimes resell it, live happily under Russian bombs, content that war makes other people feel bad. I’ve seen them sell free train tickets to evacuate civilians, I’ve seen them quarrel about free lunches (I loved it, I’m a customer of Krakow restaurants, but the guys from the moldy flats found them undercooked), I’ve heard their crap about Jews, Americans, mean Poles (unless They give gifts), about their supposedly wonderful life and unjust fate.
Protestant congregations and Greek Catholic churches are lovely exceptions, but those who have abandoned Christian values have long since become the gray mass of humanity and, unfortunately, there are the majority of them.
That is why it is better to transfer local aid to local Christian organizations than to deliver products to people who will later cash them or thanks to whom they will be able to continue to wait for the Russians..
We publish a report
That’s why it’s so hard to pretend you don’t feel good because after spending 12 weeks there, I don’t know, maybe we’ve been able to record their behavior and immortalize their sayings, which they’d normally be ashamed of. They sit in a Ukrainian city and say that the Ukrainians are bombing them, they sit near Bakhmut and shout that “Russia is invincible,” or they talk about how good it is in Soviet paradise, and then the Americans came and dried up. Over the lake (in Liman). We are impatient, we are carried away by this shameless folly, these allegations against the whole world, this philosophy of life of Sołowiow and Skabiejewa, who have been spewing their lines of hate here for years.
We may have bore us too much, after all, We cursed them sometimes in video, We raised our voices, We argued that they were nearly beaten twice, We recorded them without their knowledge or consent, We dragged them out of the basements to talk Because they didn’t want to get in, Let us in, Yeah, We didn’t avoid disdain for any Something, but … In all this, in these human feelings, which we can boldly admit with our photographer Vladislav Karpovich, We have one radical satisfaction: we show our viewers a difficult and inconspicuous truth hidden in the basements of the houses of eastern Ukraine: the mentality of modern Soviet man, people waiting for Russia, ready even to plunder and kill, as long as others suffer more than they do.
It should also be said briefly: the people from Donbass, who have not left there for a decade of hostilities, are very different from the rest of the Ukrainians. See for yourself by listening to incredible dialogues with Soviet people:
Check out the shocking report on the people of Donbass:
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