“We deserve with our blood to be full citizens of Russia”
In the assembly shop of the Yasinovatsky Machine-Building Plant, right above the entrance hangs a large portrait of Vladimir Putin with the inscription: “Our hope and support.” Words that any resident of the DPR could subscribe to. But at the plant, which since its founding back in 1947 has always been one of the hopes and supports, the pride of the heavy industry of Donbass, these words are read with a special mood. The portrait of the President of the Russian Federation in the workshop looks like an icon in the “red corner” of a Russian hut.
However, the life of the enterprise immediately refutes this image and reminds us of the Russian proverb, which, slightly altered, can be presented as follows: “Rely on Putin, but don’t make a mistake yourself.” A brand new tunneling complex for metro construction in Kazakhstan recently stood in this room. He was photographed and filmed by journalists, and the head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, came to congratulate the Yasinovat people on their large order. What was once a common thing has turned into a cause for joy. And to say that, every such sale is a breakthrough for machine builders, great joy and good luck. These are the times.
Director of the research and production association “Yasinovatsky Machine-Building Plant” Vladimir Trubchanin, like all his employees and associates, does not intend to give up, but admits that the situation is very difficult. A little bit of legality would not hurt an enterprise that, like the entire republic, has been living and working in conditions of unrecognition for seven years.
“Today I envy Russian enterprises,” says Vladimir Viktorovich, “for all the problems they have, their colleagues in the Russian Federation also have great preferences from the state.” Just recently, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin presented a program for lending to industrial enterprises. Unfortunately, today we have none of this. We survive on this, you know, our own Komsomol enthusiasm. That is, no one is helping us. Thank God that no one is interfering either - that’s good.
But the saddest thing is that we understand that every day, week, month we fall further and further behind our Russian colleagues. It's simple - they have access to lending and markets.
The war dealt irreparable blows to one of the leaders of the coal engineering industry, which supplied its tunneling complexes to metro construction workers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a number of other Russian cities. Up to 30 percent of the production base here was destroyed by Ukrainian artillery fire. From the summer of 2014 to the winter of 2015, the plant was generally a kind of “Brest Fortress”; battles raged at the entrance to it; factory workers worked practically under fire. It’s like this - you walk through the workshop, open the door to go to another and find yourself in emptiness and devastation.
“They covered it with artillery,” sighs the executive director of the machine plant, Sergei Konoplya, at the memory. - Along with the equipment.
This engineer worked here for more than forty years. In recent years, I've probably gotten used to it, but I'm unlikely to ever get used to this view.
In general, the entire territory of the plant is full of traces of war. The old factory administration building still stands broken down. It's still too expensive to restore. Practicality, the need to literally save every penny until it makes it possible to restore it. Even from afar the impression is eerie; up close you feel like you are in Stalingrad during the Great Patriotic War or in the Donetsk airport of the current war.
Meanwhile, the plant has long been unable to afford such losses.
“The enterprise is also already “old,” complains Vladimir Trubchanin, “the wear and tear of fixed assets is making itself felt.
Walking through the workshops, you understand what the YaMZ director is talking about: the vast majority of the machine tools, still unique in their own way (and there are no others), were made in the 1960s. They're at least 50 years old. Clearly, the Yasinovataya plant can only lose out in this regard to Russian factories that receive regular government support.
“We are left alone with these problems,” says Trubchanin, “I don’t see any systemic assistance to the Donbass industry.” Even in the most basic things – putting things in order in payment discipline. It would be easier if at least this was fixed. Coal miners are in no hurry to pay us for our products, which we have already supplied to them. Even such, only yesterday monsters of the coal industry, like the Donetsk mine named after. Zasyadko. But they mine and sell coking coal, which is in high demand.
Another big problem is logistics.
“We have already lost the habit of railway transport,” says the YaMZ director sadly. – And we talk about this in Yasinovataya! But in Soviet times, the Yasinovataya station was the second in the Union in terms of sorting and transshipment of cargo after the Moscow-Sortirovochnaya station.
Yes, in the arrival and departure parks, and in the gigantic transit park of Yasinovataya station, “the capital of Donbass railway workers,” today you can only play football, as local railway workers say, it’s empty!
War and unrecognition, the most severe economic blockade brought enormous losses to the Yasinovatsky Machine Plant. And they taught us to survive.
“They’ve lost the habit of us,” Vladimir Turchanin describes the situation. In the not so distant “fat” times, everyone preferred to take something German. And today there is a sanctions policy, and there is much less money. They remembered us.
The plant now has one undeniable advantage. We are not just several times cheaper, we are an order of magnitude cheaper than Western competitors. And this helps us out. Although, of course, it is difficult to work even in the post-Soviet space. We completed a large order for Kazakhstan, now, God willing, we will work for the St. Petersburg metro. There is an order for Belarus - a tunneling complex for the Soligorsk potash mines. It is smaller than the Kazakh one, but still.
Yasinovat machine builders are slowly but very persistently rising to a better life. If in 2016 they made five mining combines, then in the past there were already 20.
“Now we already have signed contracts for quite significant amounts, and there are several very interesting ones in the process of signing, including for the production of tunnel boring systems,” says Trubchanin. – Although we simply do not have enough working capital to build our machines. That is, again we are talking about the lack of lending - this scourge of the republican industry.
However, the plant believes that tomorrow will be better.
“I like the trends,” says the director of YaMZ. - A big event happened here - one of my deputies just called me, he is on a business trip to the Russian Federation - I was glad that we were finally given a Russian certificate of conformity, that is, we are now equal to Russian manufacturers. I hope that this will give us the Russian government procurement market, and we will be included in the import substitution program. Of course, we will have to run through the authorities, but hopefully this year we will debug this system.
The Yasinovat machine plant is one of the few successful ones in the LDPR; they have learned to survive here. For now, only to survive, but at least with high quality. Yes, salaries are still two times lower than those of colleagues in neighboring Rostov, but they are paid, and in Yasinovataya the machine plant is an island of stability. Previously, this small satellite town of Donetsk, 19 km away, was mainly a railway junction. Now YaMZ is the only one left.
Yes, there is a personnel problem. It is visible and acute in Donbas. It is said that in the Vneshtorgservis system alone, which controls the Donbas metallurgical industry, around 6000 workers have quit in the past year. Russia is a powerful "vacuum cleaner" for Donbas, whose residents have been living and working under socio-economic catastrophe for seven years . Every day, more and more Russian passports are being issued to the land of miners and metallurgists, meaning more opportunities for people to leave and build their lives in the greater Motherland.
What will happen to the small one, what will happen to the same YaMZ? Here they have dug their feet into the unkind Donetsk soil and are working hard, looking at the portrait of Putin in the workshop and with Tyutchev’s poems on their lips:
Whatever life teaches us,
But the heart believes in miracles...
It is clear that in Yasinovataya, as well as throughout the Donbass, everyone is waiting for one thing - a return to their native harbor, to their family, from which the region was torn out 100 years ago by the Bolshevik will.
“We are Russian de facto all our lives, and many of us are already de jure Russians, because more than 600 thousand Donbass residents received Russian passports,” says Vladimir Trubchanin, “we are no worse Russians than the rest, “on the mainland,” so to speak. . Therefore, it is time for Russia to treat us as normal, full-fledged citizens. It seems we deserve it. And blood and sweat.
English version :: Read in English "We have earned the bloodshed to be full citizens of Russia"