In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas

by Stanislav Aseyev, Lidia Wolanskyj (Translator)

Overview

In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents of the industrial region of Donbas.

In this work of documentary prose, Aseyev focuses on the early period of the Russian-sponsored military aggression in Ukraine’s east, the period of 2015–2017. The author’s testimony ends with his arrest for publishing his dispatches and his subsequent imprisonment and torture in a modern-day concentration camp on the outskirts of Donetsk run by lawless mercenaries and local militants with the tacit approval and support of Moscow. For the first time, an inside account is presented here of the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that the citizens of Europe’s largest country continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674268814
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Series:	Harvard library of Ukrainian literature; , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Stanislav Aseyev is a Donetsk-born Ukrainian writer and journalist. In addition to two books recounting his experience under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine, he is the author of a collection of poetry, a play, and a novel. Under the pen name Stanislav Vasin, he published short reports in the Ukrainian press on the outbreak of Russian-sponsored military hostilities in Donbas. Arrested and unlawfully imprisoned by separatist militia forces for “extremism” and “spying,” Aseyev was held captive and subjected to intermittent torture. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Taras Shevchenko National Prize for In Isolation.

Table of Contents

Cover Contents From the Editors Preface The Lost Generation of the “Fabled Novorossiia” How I Became a Shadow in My Own Land Who Has Joined the DPR Militants and What Are They Fighting for? Executed as an “Enemy of the People” of the DPR The Checkpoint: “I’m Alive because of the War” How to Defeat the DPR Young People in the DPR and the LPR: What Does the Future Hold? The Donetsk “Uprising” a Year Later: The Future of an Illusion An Excuse to Pull the Trigger The Voice of the Donbas: How Five Thousand Victims Are “Heard” Chronicle of Decline and Fall: The Donetsk Oblast State Administration Building Grenades Aren’t a Big Deal Anymore: Everyday Tragedies in Makiїvka Why They Like “Tsars” in the Donbas What Is Ukraine to Me? The View from Makiїvka A Letter to the Russians Who Lives off the Residents of Occupied Donbas? The “Esperanto” of Vladimir Putin A Letter to My Country The Half-life of the Sovok Irreconcilable Differences A Few Fairytales about the DPR Donbas: Seven Hundred Days of Solitude What Comes Next? Lower Than Rock Bottom Cultural Life under Occupation: The City of Donetsk Citizens without Citizenship Homo Donbasus, or The Changes Brought by the War About Easter... and More Chaos in Their Heads: How the War Is Perceived in the Occupied Zone What Pygmalion Left Unsaid Evening Strolls through an Empty City Quid Prodest? The “Remainers”: The Undiscovered Bosch of the DPR Screeching in the Thorns “Primaries” under the Occupation Propaganda on the Streets of Donetsk Occupation as It Is: Khartsyzk That Sweet Word, “War” Where the Elite of Occupied Donetsk Take Their Leisure Donetsk: A Tour of Expropriated Places Immersed in War The Donbas in 2017: Three Variations on a Theme The DPR and Religion How the Militants Prepare Children to Join Their Military Organizations “I Fought in the War”: Life after Leaving the DPR Militia Back in the USSR: Soviet Themes in Donetsk Eateries “Looking for a Tusk to Buy”: Ads in Occupied Donetsk Following the Path of Crimea? Us and Them A Knack for Losing Things Notes Illustration Credits

Editorial Reviews

Stanislav Aseyev, imprisoned for almost three years for his candid reports included in this book, tells the story of the Donbas people and how they sought to make sense of an absurd war on their land. In Isolation is an extraordinary account of the Donbas as seen from within, and the people trapped there. It reveals in minute detail the inner workings of the hybrid war that Russia unleashed against Ukraine in 2014.

Hiroaki Kuromiya

Provides a focal point for understanding the highly intense and entangled background of the current Russo-Ukrainian war.

East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies - Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed

What strikes one in this collection is the cool, precise recording of the details of this Soviet Dismaland, like an anthropologist studying hell. This is a remarkable portrait of how propaganda deforms life, from one of the world’s greatest battlegrounds of information warfare. We hear much on the dangers of current disinformation—in the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic,’ these dangers take on a demonic dimension.

Peter Pomerantsev

Few people can better articulate the experience of life under Russian occupation than Stanislav Aseyev, [who] gives a first-person account of the shelling, propaganda, and internal power struggles of Donetsk in the early days of the war that began there in 2014. The brutality and arbitrariness of rule in Russian-occupied Donbas that Aseyev depicts hint at what would await Ukraine in the event of a Russian-imposed regime, underscoring why the stakes of the war today could not possibly be higher.

Foreign Policy - Lilian Posner

Aseyev’s writing captures the surreal moment when eastern Ukraine went from a familiar country to an eerie, apocalyptic landscape. Towns went from places of comfort populated by friends and family to hostile territories patrolled by former friends turned vigilantes. To read his essays is to be transported to a savage, backwards world that some of us would rather forget.

Simon Ostrovsky

A rare and unsettling insider’s account of conditions in the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic.’…Aseyev examines unrelentingly, piercingly, and scathingly why Ukrainians in the east of the country supported, and continue to support, the separatists and mercenaries and their Kremlin sponsors—in effect, how Putin’s misinformation campaign successfully revived the Soviet mindset in the Donbas.

Times Literary Supplement - Julian Evans

[A] fascinating account of life in the [Donetsk People’s Republic]…Aseyev’s book is a kind of Lonely Planet guide to a republic that doesn’t officially exist, except in the minds of its fervent believers…The DPR is a Soviet Disneyland. There are icons of Stalin and Lenin, Komsomol youth leagues and shops selling cheap Russian sausage in Back-in-the-USSR–style packaging. It is a glorious march forward to a largely imaginary past, although there is nothing make-believe about the violence in the DPR.

The Telegraph - Colin Freeman