The infamous basements of occupied Luhansk and Donetsk… everyone has heard about them. They became prisons for the “enemies of the republic” and the opponents of the “Russian Spring”. The best known such place in Luhansk is undoubtedly the basement of the Luhansk Oblast Administration building that was seized by separatist militias. Civil society organizations such as Vostok SOS retain their own statistics of those who have been detained there. Ukrainian law enforcement has taken up a number of criminal investigations connected to these basements. Thousands of people have gone through them. For instance, one time, when I was detained in the basement of the Luhansk Oblast Administration building, there were no less than 200 people detained along with me… and hardly anything could characterize Stanytsya Luhanska better than the fact that out of the entire town, there was only one prisoner there – me.
Detention
On August 1, 2014 around 10 in the morning, my mother’s house was raided by armed people in uniforms and with Saint George ribbons on their chests (the black and orange badge adopted by separatist fighters). To my mother’s yelling “who are you and what do you want here?” one of them produced a confirmation letter issued by the Stanytsya commander of the forces of “Luhansk People’s Republic”. I was thrown to the ground and my hands were tied on my back with a plastic zip tie. They fastened it so tight that my wrists started bleeding. The visitors started to turn the entire house upside down. What they were looking for was unclear but they took a laptop, a computer case (when they couldn’t separate the computer from the screen they just kicked the cable free), they also took my phone and books. The representatives of the “People’s Republic” didn’t spurn a block of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka from my mother’s room that stood there as a gift for a handyman, who should have come to fix the water heater that day. The commander dragged me out into the courtyard, made me kneel down and yelled at me:
- “How do you communicate with them?!?”
My mother tried to talk to them but was punched in her chest and flew into the raspberry bushes. I yelled at them that they should not touch my mother, who started to panic. They understood how pointless such an “interrogation” would be and dragged me out of the courtyard. Outside were the two cars in which the militiamen had arrived (a dirty white Zhiguli and a white Volga with a flash light). A much posher car stopped and from it emerged, as if he was the president of the world, Kolya Khustochkin, a local 1990s crime boss, who managed to stay out of prison and who unexpectedly emerged from the annals of history to become the commander of the border guard. Without waiting for the culmination of the scene, Kolya drove off, while I was led to the Volga. They put me into the car and in the trunk they loaded everything they managed to steal.
What was engraved deepest in my memory of that day were the faces of our neighbors. They came out of their courtyards and amusedly observed the unfolding scene. They could hardly stop grinning.
Later that same day, while I was already lying in the cooling chamber in the basement of the Luhansk Oblast Administration building, the same neighbors paid a visit to my mother. As often, they were drunk. They smashed every single window in our house with the bottles that they had emptied there on the spot. One of them was wielding a knife for slaughtering pigs and kept shouting:
- “Where are you, banderist beast?!!”
My mother, from her hiding place in the raspberry bushes, observed how she was searched for by the people, whom she had lived with side by side for her entire life.
"Different" Stanytsya
In the preceding parts of this blog, I have described in detail some episodes of the recent history of Stanytsya Luhanska, which in my view could have had an influence on the specific worldviews that dominated here. Having reread this, I understood that these events do not shed much light on local particularities and that I have probably just started from the wrong end.
Stanitsya Luhanskaya is considered the oldest Cossack settlement in what is now Luhansk Oblast.
The settlement lies on the banks of the river Severskiy Donets. On its fringes, antique workshops for the processing of stone from the 6th to the 4th millennium B.C. have been discovered. There are also leftovers from a settlement in the bronze age and graves from the 8th to 10th century B.C.
In the second half of the 17th century in a wooded area near the river Luhan, Don Cossacks founded the town of Luhanskiy. It was enclosed with a ridge and a ditch that led to the banks of the river Severskiy Donets. Above the town, there was an old burial mound on which a guard station was installed. In 1684 the town was ransacked by Tatars but soon after was rebuilt as Stanytsya Luhanska. This is why the year of 1688 is officially considered the date of foundation. Intensive settlement of the Donets basin downstream from Stanytsya Luhanska began in the 1830s and 1840s.
This scant description is offered by Wikipedia. It hardly can transport the essence of this place, let alone the particularities of the local mentality, that is so closely tied to Russia.
I think through the above description of events, you received a more realistic picture. Clearly, not all the inhabitants of Stanytsya are such Barbarians. But the war, as is its nature, brought the worst kind of the local population to the surface. It is hard to describe the film-worthy scenes that I have become an involuntary participant of, from the perspective of an eye-witness. It is also hard to describe what happens if the people, with which I have lived all my live, with whom I have grown up and gone to school and with whom I have worked, turn against you. I believed that I knew these people. The events in far-away Kyiv during the Maidan protests seemed to me to be something that could never change how these people would behave. Actually, that was true for a long time. In the capital, tires were burning, while in Stanytsya everyone went to work and learned about what was going on in Kyiv only from the evening news.
However, already in spring, the notion that what was happening on Maidan had nothing to do with Stanytsya was proven wrong. The town turned into a horror scenario. It was as if people had caught some kind of virus that was dispersed not only by Russian propaganda but also by them themselves. Horror stories started to spread about the cruelties of the “Right Sector” that was expected to arrive in Luhansk soon. I personally never had more than an ironic smile for these tales. But there were enough people who were more than eager to believe them. Slogans about the defense of our fatherland started to circulate and they attracted simple-minded people who happily joined the units of local self-defense, such as the “Luhansk Guard”. As a result, people seemed to have been replaced. Everything that was only remotely Ukrainian caused fury and hatred and many started to remember that allegedly Donbas was a part of Russia and that, just like Crimea, it had to return into its fold.
Years will pass by and Ukraine’s brightest historians, as well as their foreign colleagues, will puzzle over what that was, this craze that seemingly appeared out of nowhere or that was sleeping within these people awaiting its time. Telling my own story is no claim to explain this phenomenon. My story only retraces the fate of one family that did not accept the “People’s republic” and eventually paid a high price.
On October 2 at 16:00 in Poltava Art Museum human rights defenders presented the publication "City, where the war had started" about...
On October 2 at 16:00 in Poltava Art Museum human rights defenders will present the publication "City, where the war had started" ab...
Interactive exhibition of testimonies "On the Rift" about the violation of rights of civilians during the war in Donbas was presente...
The Secretariat of the Coalition «Justice for Peace in Donbas»
04060, Kyiv, Ryzhska str., 73 G