The hipster bar of Donetsk moves lock, stock and cocktails to Kyiv
Vasili’s resilience is typical of a generation of young former Donetsk residents whose flexibility and resolve to restart and rebuild themselves in another city has pitted them against an older generation of Ukrainians, whose nostalgia for the Soviet Union made them receptive to the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda blamed, in part, for the separatist uprising.
Success stories like Vasili’s are in stark contrast to those of hundreds of thousands of other eastern Ukrainians whose evacuation from the rebel-held territories has been forced by a military conflict that has destroyed the regional economy and killed more than 6,000 people. Officially, there are more than 1 million internally displaced Ukrainians, many of them living in cramped temporary housing such as summer tourist hotels.
Hundreds of thousands of Donetsk transplants never officially registered with the Ukrainian government because the do not consider themselves refugees. In their words, they simply moved from one city to another under unfortunate circumstances.
Alesya Bolot, a communications director at Izolyatsiya, a cultural center that, like Spletni, was a popular venue for Donetsk’s creative community. The center occupied space in a Soviet-era factory’s sprawling campus, where it held master classes in the arts, hosted artists in residence and organized lectures and seminars on topics such as media arts and hacking.
In June of last year, armed rebels seized the center. They kicked out the remaining employees and destroyed much of the center’s art collection. The former center is now being used as a prison and storage facility for rebel battalions.
Bolot, 27, like Vasili, packed up her things from her Donetsk apartment and moved to Kyiv. She and other employees of Izolyatsiya are re-establishing the arts center in a former shipbuilding factory on the bank of the Dniepr River in Kyiv.
“For our generation, it’s been easy to find something for ourselves in Kyiv, but of course, it’s harder for our parents,” said Bolot, whose parents still live in a small city on the border of rebel-held territory. “We weren’t as afraid to take risks as they were. It’s not as scary for us.”
Like Spletni, Izolyatsiya is a common denominator among the young Donetsk transplants, a position the center’s staff is trying to use to reconnect Kyiv’s exiled eastern Ukrainian community. Last month they hosted an event with dozens of other former Donetsk and Luhansk residents and announced the opening of a Donbass studies center at Izolyatsiya. (The Donbass is the industrial eastern region comprising Donetsk and Luhansk.)