Donbas/Donbass

Donbas/Donbass. A literary, artistic, and political bimonthly journal published in Donetske since 1968 by the Writers' Union of Ukraine. The journal appears in both Ukrainian and Russian. Its first editor in chief was Viktor Sokolov; since 1974 it has been edited by A. Kravchenko. The current journal was preceded by Zaboi (1923–32), renamed Literaturnyi Donbas in 1932 and published in Russian (1933–9). After an interruption of six years (1940–5) a literary and artistic almanac entitled Literaturnyi Donbass was published in 1946–57 (34 vols). In 1958 the name was changed to Donbas/Donbass, and in 1968 the almanac once more became a journal. The journal publishes mostly works by writers of the Donbas region, who devote special attention to the life of miners and steelworkers in their writings. It also contains literary criticism and a survey of local cultural events. Over the years contributors have included such authors as Pavlo Baidebura, Kost Herasymenko, Mykola Rud, D. Semeniuk, P. Chebalin, A. Klochchia, Dmytro Tkach, and a number of writers who were executed (Hryhorii Bahliuk and Borys Pavlivsky) or repressed (V. Ivaniv-Kramatorsky, M. Sobolenko, F. Kovalevsky, Yu. Zapadynsky, and Ivan Tkachenko) during the Stalinist campaign against Ukrainian culture in the 1930s. In 1980 the journal's circulation was over 20,000.