The hall is dim.
Metal beams are scattered throughout from floor to ceiling while the sound of factory machines roar any silence away. This, the posters suggest, is the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union: Donbass.
Organized by the State Museum of Russian Modern History, the exhibition “Donbass” opened on February 28, 2023, just shortly after the first anniversary of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine.
Visitors are treated by a grand retelling of the region’s history from Catherine the Great’s creation of “Novorossiya” - that incorporated the newly conquered territories from the Ottoman Empire - to the Soviet’s short-lived policy of korenizatsiia that “Ukrainianized” the region. The message of the exhibition was clear, even before the fall of the Soviet Union and the events of February 2022, Donbass was and will always be Russian.
The 2014 Maidan Revolution was presented as a pro-Western Ukrainian nationalist coup that empowered neo-Nazis. For this reason, the people of Eastern Ukraine, primarily ethnic Russians, refused to follow the “illegal Kyiv regime”, thus the Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics in Donbass declared independence leading to the civil war that would last for eight years.
The recounting of this history has been marked as the “Russian Spring” where Russian speakers throughout the “Novorossiya” region - from Odessa, Crimea, to Mariupol - rose up to protect their national identity. Russia’s “Special Military Operation” was, as the narrative suggests, not a waging of any war but a move to protect the Russian people in Ukraine. Russia acted in self defense.
This was the first time I returned to the Museum of Russian Modern History since the the events of February 24, 2022. Things have changed.
I am reminded of that history has far from ended. History is constantly in the making and histories, that is each nation’s treatment of it, are constantly revised retroactively. For example, I noticed that the small section dedicated to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, was replaced by a display of Soviet athletic achievements.
The Donbass Exhibition, though temporary, will certainly one day become part of the permanent gallery. How the tragic events in Ukraine and the redefinition of Russian national identity will be remembered heavily depends on how this all ends. Will there be, in the years to come, an exhibition dedicated to “peace and reconciliation” or perhaps one where the flags of the “Collective West” are strewn on the ground for warhawks to stomp over and relive their victory?
A wall is dedicated to the “Heroes of the Special Military Operation”, Russia’s new generation of martyrs after the Second World War or, as it is called in Russia, “The Great Patriotic War”. On the other side is an excerpt from President Vladimir Putin’s speech justifying Russia’s actions that end with the self-confident affirmation: “The truth is behind us!”
The hall is dim.
I see a light at the end. “Exit”, the sign reads.