In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine by Tim Judah

In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine by Tim Judah

Author:Tim Judah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
Published: 2015-11-14T16:00:00+00:00


24.

The Welsh and the Wild East

Donetsk is the epicenter of the conflict. It has always had a reputation as a rough and ready kind of place, though before the war, during the 2012 UEFA European Championship soccer matches, for example, there would be no reason for a foreigner at least to know this. It has a superb, even beautiful modern soccer stadium, the home of Shakhtar Donetsk, the team owned, like so much else of value here, by Rinat Akhmetov. (Shakhtar means “miner.” Since the beginning of the war the team has gone into exile, playing their “home” matches in Lviv.) The town center is pleasant and families and friends like to stroll and bike along its lakeshore. In fact, said Liliia Ivaschenko, aged twenty-six, when she worked for the brewers Carlsberg, looking after its guests during the five Euro 2012 matches played in Donetsk, she really felt that her city had made it, that its difficult two decades of transition from communism were over, and that even if its politics and business verged on the thuggish, somehow Donetsk was not such a bad place to live in after all.

Before the war the city was home to some 900,000 people. But, as in Lviv, though for completely different reasons, almost nobody here can trace their ancestry back more than a couple of generations. Until 1870, there was nothing here except for the nearby village of Alexandrovskaya. This was windblown steppe and sparsely populated as a result of three centuries of Tatar slave raiding. The region was taken by Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century and became part of her dominion of New Russia, or Novorossiya. Not much happened here on the steppe until Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856 and its leaders realized they needed to modernize, industrialize and build railways to connect the expanding but disparate parts of the empire. What happened next was perhaps serendipity. Two Russian envoys dispatched to London to discuss modern steel fortifications for the Kronstadt fort near St. Petersburg met a Welshman called John Hughes, who ran a factory which could make them in Millwall in east London. Hughes could barely read or write but he was a smart man, which was why he was running the factory. They discussed the fact that there was coal and iron ore in the Donbas region. As Hughes came from south Wales, his background was steeped in these industries, so he decided to explore the possibilities there.

By 1869 the New Russia Company was formed, investors were committed, permissions, leases and titles negotiated and the following year Hughes, plus a group of some 150 mainly Welsh specialists, set sail for the Sea of Azov. From Taganrog, now in Russia, their equipment was hauled up by ox-train to where Hughes had decided to mine and work. And so Donetsk, or Hughesovka as it was called until after the Russian Revolution, was born. The coal was good quality and Hughes concentrated on producing rails for the rapidly expanding Russian railway network.



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