This is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev

Author:Peter Pomerantsev [Peter Pomerantsev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571338658
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

How to Fight a War That May Not Exist

Dzerzhinsk is a mining town at the very edge of the territory held by Ukrainian forces. Separatist positions are a couple of kilometres away. There was a summer storm brewing when I arrived, thunder mixing with the sound of heavy artillery. A few days earlier a shell had hit the local lake. Fish had flown out onto the cracked paths or floated dead to the surface. The people of Dzerzhinsk ate the fish, but there were still a few drying on the paths and many more were floating belly-up in the lake. The smell was strong.

I travelled with a small crew from an Internet TV station in Kiev, one of the few Ukrainian media organisations not in the pocket of an oligarch. Driving through town we passed along roads with coffin-sized craters, saw empty factories with their walls ripped out; a young boy leading his drunk mother down the lanes; local men with scabs on their faces. I stopped to photograph a concrete coal store with a gaping hole in its walls. I assumed it had been shelled, but it turned out it had been taken apart long before the war by locals looking for scrap metal.

Dzerzhinsk is named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the man responsible for the first Soviet secret police force, the notorious Cheka. When I asked a local teenage girl whether she knew who he was, she told me she’d ‘heard of him at school but couldn’t remember’. This wasn’t unusual: a few weeks earlier a TV channel had done a joke report about how young people in Dzerzhinsk had no idea whom the town was named after. Later that year it was renamed Toretsk, in accordance with the laws against Soviet names. There were no great protests.

The mineshafts were dark against the thundery skyline. Some of the mines were now disused. Others were rusty, but functional.

The local administration of Dzerzhinsk has weathered every revolution. In April 2014 it welcomed the separatists with open arms. The two newspapers under its control supported the Donetsk People’s Republic. When the Ukrainian army retook the town a few months later, they shelled the town hall. The administration quickly cut a deal with them. But though the town is now officially in Ukrainian territory, you still can’t get Ukrainian TV unless you had a cable package. Russian and DPR TV stations are still available everywhere. Dzerzhinsk may be in Ukrainian territory, but it is still under the Kremlin’s informational sovereignty.

The pro-Ukrainian activists were jumpy. There was Oleg, an older man with a grey moustache and a cap. He had been one of the miners who helped bring down the Soviet Union in the great strike of 1989, blocking the roads with broken glass to stop the Kremlin’s tanks. Volodya was younger, with big arms and a boyband fringe. He was a miner too but had worked in Sweden for several years. He knew things didn’t have to be this way.

Volodya and Oleg were sure the administration wanted the activists, with their annoying anti-corruption rallies, out of town.

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