Abstract
The Donbass, or Donets Basin, straddles south-eastern Ukraine and south-western Russia on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. It was (and still is) a peculiar place.1 It was one of the most important industrial (steel and coal) centres in the country, so important a source of energy supply for the whole country as to be called the ‘all-union stokehold [vsesoyuznaya kochegarka]’.2 Yet it was a perennial trouble spot for the economic administrators. For Moscow the Donbass remained rather unmanageable throughout much of Soviet history. The unmanageability stemmed in part from the difficulties of running the coal-mining industry (the dominant industry in the Donbass) in general. Yet the problem was caused at least as much by the fact that the Donbass remained an attractive haven for all sorts of fugitives who sought freedom in the anonymity of the dark, unreachable underground of the mines. Thus, Moscow suspected that the Donbass was a nest of hidden ‘enemies’ of the Soviet government. The Donbass case demonstrates well how in the 1930s Moscow essentially attributed economic and political difficulties to the matter of ‘human material’, a favourite expression of the Bolsheviks. This, in turn, explains the context within which one of the most momentous events of the period of the Second Five-Year plan, the Great Terror, took place. The Donbass case may be extreme, but it is a case extremely revealing of centre-local relations in the 1930s.
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Notes
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Kuromiya, H. (2002). The Donbass. In: Rees, E.A. (eds) Centre-Local Relations in the Stalinist State, 1928–1941. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932822_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932822_7
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