June 6, 2025

Review by BEARR Trustee Sam Thorne – 13 May 2025

Life in Spite of Everything is a thoughtful and elegiac book dedicated to the people and places of the ‘Donbas’ region in eastern Ukraine. The author, Professor Victoria Donovan, interweaves analysis of the region’s colonial and industrial histories with personal memoir and lyrical descriptions of field trips with local historians and activists. Through her travels and archival research, she explores the diverse landscapes and rich culture that lie behind a surface image of Donbas as a blighted land of heavy industry and, since 2014, war. The Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov, quoted on the front cover, describes the book as a ‘requiem’, an act of remembrance, and it carries that weight of loss and mourning.

To tell the story of Donbas at this moment in time is a ‘political act’, in Donovan’s view. The name itself, ‘Donbas’, is freighted with colonial history and political connotations. It derives from an abbreviation of ‘Donets Coal Basin’, a term apparently coined by a French engineer in the 1830s. Under Stalin a century later, Donbas then became a byword for ‘mechanised hyper-productivity and communist values’. Since 2014, the name has been tainted by association with pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

Donovan chooses to use the term because people from the region use it, despite the negative baggage, as a way to ‘assert community and a sense of place’. Certainly, in analysing the diverse and complicated history of Donbas, she provides a powerful rebuttal to the ahistorical ‘Russian World’ narrative espoused by the Putin regime today. She also exposes the propaganda and lies at the centre of previous campaigns of ‘cultural erasure’, launched by the Russian Empress Catherine II in the eighteenth century and by the Communists in the early Soviet period.

In a preface, Professor Donovan explains how her interest in Donbas evolved from thinking about the ‘strange parallels’ between her home country of Wales and Ukraine: ‘the regionalised industrialisation, language politics, and culturally dominant eastern neighbour’. This interest crystallised into an idea for the book when she came across the Hughesovka Research Archive in Cardiff in 2015. The archive contained an intriguing tale about the migration of hundreds of Welsh miners, engineers and chemists to Donbas in the late nineteenth century – their destination an industrial settlement called Hughesovka (or Yuzivka), founded in 1869 by John Hughes, an entrepreneur from Merthyr Tydfil, who built a metal works and several coal mines there. Yuzivka later became Stalino, after the Russian Revolution, and in 1961 was given the name it still carries today: Donetsk.

Donovan carried out much of her field research for the book between 2019 and 2021, when Donetsk was already under Russian occupation and thus off-limits. At that stage, she envisioned writing an academic style of book, based on her research interests in colonialism and extractivist politics. Her academic background, as a Professor in Ukrainian and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews, is evident and lends a theoretical heft to her readings of the region. On the other hand, the book is also deeply personal and reflects a change of heart that came over her after the full-scale war broke out in February 2022. Since then, she writes, ‘I haven’t been able to access that detached academic voice… Instead, the anger and sadness has poured over onto the pages of my writing’.

Anger and sadness permeate the book, undoubtedly. Another word that springs to mind is empathy. Donovan characterises her approach as ‘care-full’ writing: ‘writing for rather than about the people for whom this story matters most’. She achieves this by giving voice to and showcasing the work of the local people who help and support her. The seven chapters of the book each open with a short reflection by Donbas natives on what the region means to them. They are also front and centre of her accounts of field trips and social interactions.   

The chapters are organised thematically, covering a range of topics, including history, geology, the ecology of natural and post-industrial landscapes, activist culture and the impacts of war. The text is interspersed with photographs of places and people: around 60 black-and-white photographs embedded in the chapters and a central plate section of about 25 colour photographs, including an old ‘petrographic map’ of the region, showing some of the earliest geological discoveries in Donbas between 1823 and 1827.

At the time the map was created, in the 1820s, the Donbas region – an area then known in Ukrainian as dike pole, Wild Field – had already been absorbed into the Russian Empire. Donovan observes that ‘frontier’ regions of empire were often evoked by the Russians as ‘empty’ to justify their colonisation. She cites an eighteen-century Dictionary of the Russian Academy definition of the word ‘steppe’ as ‘an empty, unpopulated, and treeless space of great expanse’. The Cossacks, Tatars, Nogais and other peoples who lived on these steppes clearly did not count, in the eyes of Russians, as indigenous populations. In another move imitated by Putinist Russia’s neo-imperialists, Catherine II rebranded the region as Novorossiia and encouraged settlers to move there with inducements such as grants to buy land, provision of farm equipment and exemption from military service.

The colonial settlement of Donbas was from the outset a multicultural affair. Donovan writes that Catherine II preferred to attract ‘civilised’ Europeans to move there, such as German Mennonites, with greater experience of agricultural settlement than Russian or Ukrainian peasants. French, Dutch and English communities, and later Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and other nationalities followed. The later industrialisation of the region was also fuelled largely by European immigrants. Alongside the afore-mentioned Welsh, the French and Belgians became the dominant foreign investors in Donbas – to the extent that the region was nicknamed by some industrialists as ‘the tenth Belgian province’.

The era of multicultural industrial colonialism ended abruptly after the Russian Revolution. The Communists kicked out the foreign capitalists and quickly set about erasing the cultural memory of them by renaming towns and factories and removing archives to Moscow and Leningrad. They promoted new mythologies: the cult of the hero worker, the most famous of whom was Oleksii Stakhanov, reported to have mined 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift.

Donovan juxtaposes these Soviet narratives with more recent efforts to ‘decommunise’ the region by removing Soviet names and cultural artefacts from public spaces: a means of fighting back against Russian cultural influence after 2014. A wave of ‘monument-toppling’ became known, she writes, as ‘Leninopad’, or ‘Leninfall’. Even so, Soviet influences remain strong. A taxi driver she meets tells her that ‘he doesn’t know anyone from the area who doesn’t think the region was founded in the 1930s by the Soviets’.

Donovan evokes a region littered with the decaying remnants of its Soviet past. She writes poetically about the derelict mines and factories she visits, and the zabroshki – abandoned buildings – prevalent in every town. As nature reinfiltrates the ruins, many have evolved into sites of exploration for cultural historians, ecotourists, young artists and others. Donovan joins them in climbing slag heaps and descending old salt mines, finding beauty in unexpected places: mini-pyramids formed from the rubble of collapsed sink-holes; the shadows cast by clumps of samphire on salt-pans; a pink sunset over the steppe, viewed from the roof of a crumbling zabroshka.

Not everything is so rosy. One chapter is set in Mariupol, where two giant steelworks – Azovstal and Ilych – pump foul air over the city, ‘like a noxious blanket being spread over a bed’. The Azov Sea – once rich with plankton, fish and birds, later heavily polluted by Soviet industry – is now contaminated with ‘hundreds of unexploded shells and mines’. The two steelworks are, of course, closed, perhaps forever, with the Azovstal works now best known as the site of the Ukrainian forces’ last stand in Mariupol in 2022. ‘We all wanted to live in a de-industrialised Mariupol,’ a local activist tells Donovan when they catch up in 2023, ‘but not like this, not with such terrible costs.’

The spectre of war hangs over everything. As she writes up the book, Donovan finds out that many of the places she visits have been subsequently destroyed: an Ice Palace of Sport decorated with Soviet mosaics, now ‘horribly charred’; the Ilych Iron and Steelmaking Museum bombed to the ground. In Bakhmut, Wagner fighters release social media videos of themselves ransacking Ukrainian wine stores in an old gypsum mine. ‘Colonial wars like Russia’s do not just occupy physical territory,’ she writes, ‘they also occupy the territory of memory, turning reminiscences into ashes, nostalgia into nightmares.’

The sense of loss is all the more tragic and infuriating because of the vibrant cultural scene that Donovan encounters in Donbas. The energy and enthusiasm of the people she meets, their sense of agency and independence, shine through on every page. So much great work is now being erased, as the Russians consolidate their occupation and the local museum workers, cultural historians, activists and artists are exiled and dispersed. ‘All the places that we saw are gone now,’ says Misha Kulishov, her main guide to the region, when they meet later in Lviv. ‘Victoria had an exclusive tour.’ Donovan describes her mixed feelings about the language of ‘resilience’ that is often used to praise the stoical resistance of the Ukrainian people. She perceives a danger of such terms being used to romanticise a capacity to withstand violence and injustice that should not be normalised or accepted. Nevertheless, she expresses hope that a brighter future will come from their resilient commitment to conserving culture and memory, their enduring love of community and place, and their endless ingenuity in finding ways to continue ‘life in spite of everything’. A final dedication, to her friends from the Ukrainian east, encapsulates this hope elegantly: ‘I dearly wish you a speedy return to your de-occupied homelands, to once more feel the feather grass passing through your fingers and the steppe sun upon your backs’.