Difficult heritage or historical trash? ‘Critical care’ for industrial legacies in eastern Ukraine, 2014–2022

Abstract

This article takes up the notion of ‘difficult heritage’ to explore the management of industrial legacies in eastern Ukraine, with a focus on developments between 2014 and 2022. While acknowledging that industrial heritage is not ‘difficult’ in the same way as inherited sites of genocide or internment, I contend that it too was ‘contested and awkward’, unsettling attempts to rebrand and reimagine the region in line with shifts in national memory politics. As the environmentally damaging infrastructural inheritance of empire, which nevertheless also played a community-shaping role in the local context, industrial legacies were present in the landscape in ‘disruptive ways’, opening up social divisions and exposing cultural fractures. In this article, I explore how local artists and activists responded to the condition of state abandonment of this heritage, developing the analytical category of ‘critical care’ to describe processes of community-led preservation and creative repurposing at this time.

In December 2020, as part of their work tracking the way in which archival photographs digitized as part of the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project¹ were being repurposed by local communities of historical enthusiasts in Mariupol, the museum collective at the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore screenshotted a Facebook post. The post featured an image of the open-hearth furnaces at the Azovstal Metallurgy Works by the Mariupol photographer and journalist Pavlo Kashkel from 1960.² A striking example of the industrial sublime, the low angle shot showed industrial chimneys ascending like cathedral spires, their outline hazy in the smoke-filled sky, and was clearly intended to inspire a sense of awe and reverence in the viewer. The reason for taking the screenshot, however, was not so much the image as the comments that the post had generated. Responses to Kashkel’s image had varied widely, demonstrating the range of opinions about the value of the city’s industrial legacies. While one commentator had stated simply: ‘This is hell on earth’, another had offered a more nuanced assessment of the scene. ‘I look at this photo pragmatically’, they wrote. ‘This could only have been created by builders with “golden” hands and balls of “steel”. The workers made all of this. Yet for some it is just a BIOmass.’³

The comments on the Facebook post reflected the status of Soviet industrial heritage in Mariupol, and more broadly in the Ukrainian east, as ‘difficult’ or ‘dissonant heritage’. The inheritance of Russian imperial and Soviet projects to realize industrial modernity on the southern steppe, the legacies of industry resonated, often discordantly, in the cultural and social landscapes of eastern Ukraine. ‘Difficult heritage’ is a term that has tended to be used to refer to the processing of traumatic memory. For William Logan and Keir Reeves, in their Places of Pain and Shame, ‘difficult heritage’ thus refers to the inheritor-sites of atrocities or tragedies, the memorialization of which can allow communities to dwell on the past but also to imagine alternative futures through reconciliation.⁴ Sharon MacDonald, scholar of Nazi memorialization, has likewise defined ‘difficult heritage’ as pasts that are ‘recognised as meaningful in the present but that [are] also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity’. Far from benevolent, she explains, these pasts, ‘threaten…to break through into the present in disruptive ways, opening up social divisions, perhaps by playing into imagined, even nightmarish, futures’.⁵

In this article, I take up this notion of ‘difficult heritage’ to explore the management and processing of industrial heritage in the Ukrainian east, with a particular focus on developments during the eight years of war that preceded Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. While acknowledging that industrial heritage is not ‘difficult’ in the same way as inherited sites of genocide or internment, I contend that it too was ‘contested and awkward’, unsettling attempts to rebrand and reimagine the region in line with shifts in national memory politics. As the environmentally damaging infrastructural inheritance of empire, which nevertheless also played a community-shaping and value-forming role in the local context, industrial legacies were present in the landscape in ‘disruptive ways’, opening up social divisions and exposing cultural fractures. In this article, I explore how communities of artists and local activists responded to the condition of state abandonment of this heritage, developing the analytical category of ‘critical care’ to describe the multi-modal processes of community-led preservation and creative repurposing that emerged at this time.

The notion of ‘critical care’ draws on decolonial thinking to describe a kind of subversive engagement with industrial heritage that recovers value in a past that was compromised by its association with celebratory narratives of Soviet industrial modernity, and later discarded by the Ukrainian state as ‘historical trash’. The concept draws inspiration from Madina Tlostanova’s writing, and the idea of post-Soviet ‘re-existence’ in particular, which the post-colonial feminist develops in response to the writing of Adolfo Albám Achinte. For Tlostanova, ‘re-existence’ is ‘an effective decolonial strategy, (re-)creating the positive life models, sensations, and worlds that help to overcome the injustice and imperfection of the present world’.⁶ As she explains, ‘re-existence’ is not ‘a primordialist call to return to some essentialized and constructed authenticity’, but rather ‘a complication and an enrichment of our perspective, a constant balancing on the verge – neither here nor there or simultaneously here, there, and elsewhere’.⁷ Thinking with Tlostanova, I understand ‘critical care’ for industrial heritage as a form of ‘re-existence’, that likewise ‘balances on the verge, between Soviet nostalgia and a narrow Ukrainian national idea, between identification and rejection. I analyse the work of local activist communities to preserve, protect and infuse new meaning into this heritage, as a process of de-linking with centrally enforced cultural hierarchies (both in the Soviet past, when it was celebrated by the socialist state, and in the 2014–22 period when it was deprioritized in line with shifts in Ukrainian national memory politics) and the assertion of new, locally rooted knowledge and meanings for these legacies.

In the first section of this article, I outline the evolution of Ukraine’s industrial legacy from privileged memory in the Soviet twentieth century to ‘historical trash’ after socialism. Tracing this trajectory, I draw on archival and bibliographical research conducted at archives and libraries across Ukraine, as well as participant observation and interviews with heritage practitioners in eastern Ukraine, including excursions around a number of industrial museums attached to factories and plants in Sievierodonetsk, Mariupol, Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk. The arguments presented in this section also derive from collaborative work conducted by a team of researchers at the Center for Urban History in Lviv and the University of St Andrews in Scotland on the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project, an initiative to digitize industrial heritage collections and publicly reassess the value of these cultural archives. This project, which resulted in a unique digital repository of multi-media sources relating to the history of industrialization in Ukraine, offers the first comprehensive overview of the shifting representational priorities in this visual canon across the Soviet twentieth century.

In the second section of the article, I consider how communities of local artists and activists responded to the condition of state abandonment of industrial heritage and developed the concept of ‘critical care’, in dialogue with Tlostanova’s notion of ‘re-existence’, to analyse their engagement with industrial archives and their interventions at derelict industrial sites. Here, I draw primarily on participant observation work with cultural practitioners, artists and professionals in Donbas to discuss three different kinds of ‘re-existence’ or ‘critical care’ work involving industrial heritage. The first is ‘re-existence as re-collection’, and addresses community-archiving practices in Kostiantynivka and Sievierodonetsk; the second is ‘re-existence as re-presentation’ and considers the ways artists critically reframed and repurposed industrial heritage materials, releasing new meaning from these legacies; and the third is ‘re-existence as re-possession’ and considers the ways that communities physically occupied derelict industrial heritage spaces, charging them with new cultural significance.

Industrial heritage: from privileged memory to historical trash

Celebratory imaginings of industry in Ukraine date back much earlier than the Soviet period. Already in the late nineteenth century, the foreign managers of the ‘company towns’ that would become industrial cities in today’s Donbas were producing corporate advertising for their enterprises in the form of postcard photography.⁸ The Mariupol Museum of Local Lore held a large collection of industrial postcards from this time that commemorated the city’s industrial transformation and soaring productivity.⁹ The postcard images featured what were perceived to be the factory’s most impressive achievements: smoking chimney stacks evidencing the factory’s ceaseless productivity; wagons filled to the brim with black coal shale; and railway lines travelling diagonally along the frame towards a ‘bright future’ of industrial modernity. Another genre of image showed the factory rising like an industrial Atlantis from the mythologized steppe emptiness. The implied meaning of this genre of image was categorically colonial: the steppe was being civilized through industrialization, its emptiness replaced with presence and its silence with the hum of mechanized production (Figure 1).

Figure 1. ‘Mariupol. Providence Factory’ produced by N.M. Nerofidi’s tobacco and stationery shop, 1910s.

Industrial achievements continued to be celebrated following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Having ejected foreign capitalists from the territory and seized their industrial assets, the socialist state continued to propagandize the region’s industries and their ‘civilizing’ mission on the steppe. In 1921, a poster was produced depicting ‘Donbas’ as the beating heart of ‘Russia’, pumping life blood in the form of coal around the arterial railway routes of the emerging Soviet state.¹⁰ In the decades that followed, Donbas became a flagship region of Soviet hyper-productivity and its labourers the poster boys and girls of communist propaganda. Its industrial achievements were commemorated in documentary films and monumental murals, displayed at exhibitions of technological prowess, and commemorated in the national press.¹¹ Worker cults, some of which reached levels comparable to global celebrity today, were an important part of the Soviet mythologization of the region. By the end of the 1930s, everyone was familiar with the Horlivka miner, Mikita Izotov, who hewed 240 tonnes of coal in one shift, 30 times his allocated quota, and Oleksii Stakhanov, from the Central-Irmino mine in Kadiivka, who smashed Izotov’s record in 1935.¹²

The mythologization of Donbas’ industrial achievements endured into the late socialist era. The Central State Film, Photo and Sound Archive named after H.S. Pshenychnyi houses dozens of boxes of industrial photographs from Donbas, containing thousands of worker portraits and factory panoramas produced throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many of which were published in all-Soviet albums, journals and newspapers. By this time, a new visual iconography of proletarian labour had emerged. Donbas miners were often featured emerging from below the ground with coal-streaked faces, being presented with flowers in a ritualistic gesture of gratitude for their feats of labour and engaging in cultured pursuits in their free time such as reading newspapers in Houses of Culture or drinking tea in parks in front of fountains.¹³ The transnational celebration of the region’s industrial workforce was mirrored in the emergence of local cults that were commemorated in factory museums and local newspapers. One such example was the myth of Makar Mazai, the primo Stakhanovite of Mariupol’s Ilych Metallurgy Works. Mazai’s posthumous cult continued to be celebrated up to the end of socialism. At the Ilych Metallurgy Works Museum, a stand dedicated to Mazai’s ‘disciples’ featured photographs of acclaimed heroes of labour through to 1991 (Figure 2).¹⁴

Figure 2. Bust of Makar Mazai at the Ilych Iron and Steelworks Factory Museum, November 2021.

Given the status of industrial history as privileged memory in the Soviet era, its devaluation in the post-independence period proved to be controversial. The symbolic transformation was due in part to the decline of industry more generally in these years. The imposition of neoliberal economic policies in Ukraine after 1991 devastated industrial communities in the east. In these years of wild capitalism, when everything was suddenly for sale, self-serving Soviet industrial managers made their fortunes buying and selling factories while local communities were plunged into destitution.¹⁵ Many local mines were liquidated at this time on the disingenuous reasoning that regional coal seams had been exhausted or that it was no longer profitable to exploit them. Meanwhile, local oligarchs, having cut their teeth in the corrupt world of Soviet industrial administration, lined their pockets with sales of assets stripped from pits and factories. Coal miners, who had been celebrated as proletarian heroes under socialism, suddenly had to buy their groceries on credit and take side jobs to survive.¹⁶

In the wake of industry’s collapse, many historic industrial buildings fell into dereliction posing difficult questions about their conservation for the Ukrainian authorities. As Iryna Sklokina and Volodymyr Kulikov have pointed out, the associations of this architectural legacy with celebratory Soviet narratives of industrial modernity and proletarian consciousness made its preservation politically awkward after 1991.¹⁷ Qualifying neither as ‘religious’ nor ‘civic’ architecture, categories that were prioritized in the preservationist legislation of the post-Soviet era, few objects of industrial architecture were designated as heritage at this time.¹⁸ With the outbreak of war in the east in 2014, it became increasingly difficult for local authorities to attract the public or private funding necessary for the adaptation of such sites as commercial spaces or cultural venues. Consequently, many industrial buildings were abandoned to their fates, being overtaken by wildlife, or dismantled by enterprising locals collecting metal and bricks for sale or their own construction projects (Figure 3).¹⁹

Figure 3. Derelict ruins of the Azovmash machine-building factory in Mariupol, November 2021.

At the same time, the celebratory Soviet narrative of industrial progress began to be replaced with hyper-bleak visions of dereliction and decay in the eastern region. Photographers who had formed part of the artistic ‘underground’ during late socialism, such as the Luhansk artist Alexandr Chekmenev, rose to prominence in the 1990s with their disturbing visions of pensioners surface mining coal from illegal pits and workers living in abject poverty.²⁰ These images must be understood as part of an effort to expose the hypocrisy of the socialist realist propaganda canon, which for decades had uncritically celebrated industry while ignoring its devastating environmental and human costs, as well as a critique of the much heralded neoliberal transition that sacrificed large segments of the Ukrainian economy to foreign capital. Yet, at the same time, these artists risked replacing one kind of exoticization for another: substituting utopia for dystopia, heaven for hell. While some, particularly younger generations, welcomed their criticism of Soviet mythologies, others felt betrayed. I experienced the intensity of feeling that people from the region had for these works when displaying Chekmenev’s ‘Donbass’ series at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Edinburgh in 2017. A visitor from Donetsk approached me at the exhibition and insisted that the photos were a gross misrepresentation of her beautiful homeland. Her frustrations were directed at the fact that eastern Ukraine was consistently depicted in this genre of post-apocalyptic ‘ruin porn’, when by contrast, she explained, it was a region rich in biodiversity and cultural life.

The second major shift in the status of industrial heritage followed the introduction of a package of decommunization laws, also known as Ukraine’s ‘memory laws’, in 2015. Following Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the launch of its hybrid military campaign in Donbas, President Petro Poroshenko adopted the furthest-reaching measures in Ukraine’s history to purge the country of its communist heritage and socialist toponymy.²¹ Disentangling the industrial infrastructure that dominated the landscapes of eastern Ukraine from the symbolism of communism, however, proved a fraught and sometimes emotionally triggering task. While Lenin monuments fell easily in most cities, the renaming of factories, streets and cultural centres proved more controversial for those who had grown up working, living and having formative social experiences in and around these places.

The centrally enforced decommunization laws elicited some subversive responses in the eastern region. Familiar communist names were smuggled back in during the renaming processes, at times with humorous effect. Artemivsk, named after the Bolshevik revolutionary and contemporary of Stalin, Feder Sergeyevich Artem, thus shed its communist chrysalis to emerge as Bakhmut in 2015, but the ghost of Artem still lingered in the ambiguously renamed champagne factory, ArtWinery.²² Likewise, as the director of the Ilych Iron and Steelworks Factory Museum in Mariupol explained when I visited in 2021, the factory’s problematic association with Lenin (whose patronymic was Ilych) had ostensibly been resolved by excavating another Ilych from the region’s past and transferring the credit for the factory’s name to them.²³ The fact that the Ilych factory was run by Metinvest, a company owned by one of the Ukraine’s foremost oligarchs, Rinat Akhmetov, could well have helped deflect public criticism in this case of disingenuous de-communization.

The decommunization laws also contributed to a broader devaluation of industrial heritage. When we launched the project Un/Archiving Post/Industry in 2019, several museum collectives from the Ukrainian east responded to our call for collaboration. Museum directors, archivists and researchers at the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, Pokrovsk Museum of Local History and Donetsk Museum of Local History (displaced to Kramatorsk in 2014) all expressed interest in collaboration, identifying industrial photography collections that they considered to be marginalized, neglected or vulnerable heritage. Over the course of this project, funded by the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund and the European Union’s House of Europe scheme in Ukraine, over 30,000 photo-negatives and 90 hours of archival film were digitized. These materials, which might otherwise have lingered in museum archives, discredited through their association with Soviet-era socialist realistic cultural canon, were made available to broader audiences through the project, and engaged by project commissioned artists who creatively explored their status as ‘difficult heritage’.²⁴

Re-existence: a decolonial praxis of ‘critical care’

Returning, then, to the question of ‘critical care’ for industrial heritage. How did communities in eastern Ukraine care for ‘difficult’ (e.g. colonial, environmentally and socially damaging, but also community-shaping and value-forming) industrial heritage? What forms did critical-creative ‘care’ take with the state’s abandonment of responsibility for these legacies to those living within the damaged landscapes of (post-)industry? How did acts of ‘critical care’ complicate and enrich the meaning of this heritage, ‘balancing on the verge’ between nostalgia and condemnation, overidentification and rejection?

In the following section of the article, I draw on participant observation and interview work with artists and activists in eastern Ukraine, conceptualizing their practice through the decolonial lens of ‘re-existence’. Critics have sometimes dismissed the activism of this generation of young ‘creatives’ in Ukraine (a term which is itself loaded with value judgments about the neoliberal politics of this group’s formation), explaining it away as a cultural consequence of the flow of transnational capital into the country after 2014, which brought with it a Western NGO-driven discourse of civil society building and self-organization.²⁵ But while, as Emily Channell-Justice has argued, the neoliberalization of the Ukrainian state after socialism did normalize the ‘citizen-as-activist’ model,²⁶ cultural practices in the east should not be understood as external imports or as in some way ‘culturally inauthentic’. Rather than a middle-class, creative intelligentsia, educated in Kyiv, Lviv or further afield, the actors discussed in this section were almost all working-class individuals who had rarely left their region, let alone travelled abroad. Their engagement with industrial heritage – which involved practices of collection, creative upcycling and repurposing – were developed in dialogue with other regional activists over time and were a response to the particularities of life in a damaged and disenfranchised industrial periphery.

Re-existence: re-collection

When industry contracted after socialism and its cultural value declined to the point of being undeserving of conservation, the responsibility for archiving and preserving the historical remains of this past fell to local communities. Community collectors mobilized individually and in groups. Some had professional experience of ethnographic methods, while others were simply enthusiasts and activists. As Mykhailo Kulishov, one of the most prominent community archivists from the region explained in an interview in July 2022, this movement had roots in interest-specific chat groups and internet forums of the 1990s, where industrial heritage enthusiasts could exchange photos of historical materials found online or post images of materials from their private collections, soliciting responses from other users. This informal network of expertise became the basis for a number of civic archiving projects in the 2000s, including Kulishov’s own ‘Mines and pits of Donbas’, a multi-media digital archive of literature, cartography and photography, relating to the region’s industrial history.²⁷

Community-archiving initiatives emerged in many different regions of Donbas. In Kostiantynivka, a city in the northern Donetsk region of around 67,000 inhabitants before the full-scale invasion, local ethnographers Ihor Bredikhin and Mykola Serov decided to excavate the collections of the museum of the local glass-making factory, which closed following fighting in the city in 2014 and was quickly falling into dereliction. The factory was founded by the Belgian-managed Anonymous Society of Donetsk Glass Factories in the 1890s, and manufactured bottles for beer, champagne, wine and sherry as well as more exotic produce such as Tokay wine from Slovakia and Carpathian cognac.²⁸ Bredikhin and Serov collected thousands of documents and images detailing this history, including autobiographies of workers and reports of repression at the factory during the Soviet period. Among the most unique artefacts they recovered were 10 wall-newspapers dating from 1967 made of thick paper onto which photos, photocopies and typewriting had been pasted. These materials were later restored by students at the Restoration Department of the Vasily Stefanik Scientific Library as part of the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project (Figure 4).²⁹

Figure 4. Wall newspapers from the Kostiantynivka glass bottle making factory, before and after restoration. Photo by the Center for Urban History, Lviv.

In July 2020, Viktoriia Grivina, a research assistant on the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project, interviewed the Kostiantynivka collectors. In this interview, Bredikhin explained that his collecting work had been a long-term project, and that it had involved visiting several different abandoned factory sites in the city. The collector explained that he had not been the only one exploring the sites and that scavenging was commonplace: ‘mostly people grabbed stuff for themselves, sold stuff at the market, some things were stolen, some were chucked out’. He also emphasized the hyper-precarious status of the heritage and the spontaneous, urgent nature of the work undertaken: ‘They all closed one after another and all those big old factories had museums. There was nothing left of them. I collected those materials from the already derelict museum [of the Pliashkovyi bottle factory]. They were just lying there on the floor, trampled and dirty, a bit torn. Basically, these were the leftover things that I grabbed.’³⁰

Mykola Serov also underlined the hyper-vulnerable status of Kostiantynivka’s heritage, explaining how the museum had ultimately been destroyed by fire following its neglect:

The doors were wide open, but nobody had forced their way in. The office was open, and a couple of unhoused guys had taken up residence there. But we weren’t interested in valuables. We were only interested in historical facts about the factory. That’s all. Just papers. And a week later the whole office burned down. It burned down with all that documentation inside. All the furniture, everything, burned. Some of the stuff had been donated to the museum by then. And this was just what was left. Such a shame.³¹

Both Bredikhin and Serov donated their collections to the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project in 2020, which then digitized the materials and made them available through the Center for Urban History’s Urban Media Archive. Serov’s collection comprised two large sacks of physical documents, as well as a USB drive on which he had compiled and categorized online materials (scans, photographs, internet downloads, screenshots) relating to the broader history of glass-making in the region. The USB archive also included scanned analogue and digital photographs that Serov himself had taken of the derelict and rewilding industrial complex accompanied by fieldnotes that he had written during his excursions around these sites. The notes, written in tongue-in-cheek essayistic prose, revealed the collector’s complex emotional response to this history. Ranging from pride in the former status of local industry (‘once the most revolutionary and successful…Glass Bottle Factory’) to disillusion and cynicism in the face of state-facilitated dereliction (‘even the security guards (who haven’t been paid) have run off, turning it into yet another Klondike where local foragers come to find non-ferrous and ferrous metals’), they demonstrated practices of ‘critical care’ or ‘re-existence’, a reflexive kind of caretaking for ‘difficult heritage’ at a moment of state abandonment.³²

In the summer of 2019, I met with another group of collectors in the chemical-making city of Sievierodonetsk in the Luhansk region. Like Bredikhin and Serov, this group made regular visits to abandoned industrial buildings to collect materials that they perceived to be of historical or aesthetic significance. The collection was housed at the +/- Art Residency, a volunteer-run centre for cultural events and activist work in the city housed in a former Soviet chess club. When I visited in August 2019, Kateryna Siryk, the cultural manager of the residency, showed me around. Siryk and colleagues had curated their collection, which included personal documents, photography, film, posters, pamphlets and artwork created by factory workers, and other curiosities into what they called an ‘Archive of De-Industrialization’. The archive was installed on a series of trestle tables in one of the centre’s back rooms and Siryk encouraged our group to touch and handle the objects on display (Figure 5).

Figure 5. ‘Archive of De-industrialization’ in Sieverodonetsk, 2021. Photo by Oleksandr Kuchynskyi.

In 2020, my colleague, Darya Tsymbalyuk, and I interviewed Siryk and another collector in the Sievierdonetsk community, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, about their practice. Both explained that their collection work was a response to the official rejection of this heritage as ‘trash’ and that exploring abandoned industrial sites helped them to better understand their region’s history and identity. As Kuchynskyi put it, collecting was like putting together a puzzle:

Personally, I am interested in abandoned buildings both from an aesthetic point of view and because of my interest in history. I’m interested in seeing how past generations lived, those who are now actively nostalgic for the Soviet Union. These abandoned buildings and what we find in them is like putting together a puzzle…with each piece it becomes clearer why our region is the way it is.³³

Siryk expressed similar sentiments, underlining the vulnerability of industrial legacies and the potential that they held for better understanding the region and its historical fate:

You see, you encounter such a lot of historicity, such a lot of documentary evidence in these places, that you just can’t ignore it. Scattered in the wind, for example, are the personal files of those who worked at the [Sieverodonetsk Instrument Making Factory]. I was raking out the bins in the assembly hall at the Resistor Making Factory before a rave and I found such lot of trash that was of no use to anyone anymore…And so our work also complicates that perennial question, the identity of the Donbas, that most topical of issues. This is it. This is Donbas.³⁴

Siryk’s final point here about how the group’s collecting work ‘complicates’ (pliusovat’ in Russian) the idea of what Donbas is speaks directly to the concept of ‘critical care’. Rather than reproducing externally imposed cultural hierarchies of Soviet nostalgia or revulsion for industrial legacies, this re-collection work ‘balance[es] on the verge…neither here nor there’ releasing new meaning about these places and setting free new perceptions of the world. Rather than simplistic reductions of the local reality to clichés of post-industrial dereliction or the aesthetic sublime of ‘ruin porn’, understanding emerges from the embodied practice of collecting itself. Donbas is revealed as a complicated and disperse set of meanings that has been purposefully misrepresented in official historical narratives, a difficult cultural ‘puzzle’ that actors with intimate, lived knowledge of local contexts are best placed to resolve.

Re-existence as re-presentation

Another way in which abandoned industrial legacies were engaged by local communities was through their incorporation into artistic and creative practice. Repurposing industrial archival materials in digital, video and performance artwork provided activists with an opportunity to explore the unstable cultural value of these legacies, and to make new claims on their meaning. Many of the materials engaged were objects trouvés, or found objects, that had been scavenged during excursions to abandoned industrial heritage sites. These resonant objects were reproduced in palimpsestic works that explored the multiple, intersecting lives of the region’s industrial heritage, and its transformation from the revered inheritance of the Soviet past to an unwelcome reminder of Ukraine’s entanglement with colonial legacies. This thematic work lent itself particularly well to genres of art that evoked ideas of instability, disconnection, disjointedness and disengagement such as glitch art and digital collaging.

In this section, I consider the work of two artists: Vitalyi Matukhno, a video artist and curator originally from Lysychansk, and Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, a digital artist from Sievierodonetsk. Both practitioners were actively involved in the urban exploration and community-archiving scene in Sievierodonetsk that I discuss above and were also prominent figures in their own right in the region’s subcultural arts and activism movement, curating acclaimed online and offline projects that explored the region’s industrial legacies, their cultural value and creative potential. Matukhno first came to my attention as the curator of the ‘gareleya neotodryosh’ project, an anarchic curatorial initiative that staged multi-artist exhibitions in abandoned industrial buildings around the Luhansk region.³⁵ Kuchynskyi, meanwhile, was best known as the curator of the multi-platform (Instagram and until 2014 VKontakte) visual archive, IndustrialHeaven, which hosted art and visual cultural materials connected with industry in Donbas and was catalogued using a sophisticated system of cross-referencing hashtags and hyperlinks.³⁶

In the summer of 2022, following his displacement from Lysychansk to Lviv, I interviewed Matukhno about a video project that he had been working on with the title ‘Soul’s Beautiful Impulses’. The film had been created using archival materials from the local Lysychansk TV channel ‘Aktsent’ that Matukhno had found in an abandoned industrial building and was a portrait of sorts of his home city of Lysychansk between 2001 to 2006. As Matukhno explained, he was interested in the archival materials’ misrepresentation of the reality of life in the city during these years and the ways in which ‘the frivolous narrative [of the TV reports] distorted the actual depressed situation of the city, which had been in a state of decay for some time’.³⁷ He was also intrigued by the physical distortion of the materials, the glitchy visuals and sound that had resulted from their being left on the floor of the ruined building. In his work, Matukhno explored these entangled distortions, which revealed different, but intersecting political agendas, and revealed the way that culture obscures and erases history.

‘Soul’s Beautiful Impulses’ has two interlayered visual narratives. In the film’s foreground in 4:3 aspect ratio (that of the outdated VHS tape footage) we see the frenzied celebration of cultural life in the eastern Ukrainian town. Women are presented with bouquets of flowers on International Women’s Day, high schoolers perform folk dances at the House of Culture and residents give interviews about items of local news interest. While the glitchy TV narrative of local life plays, in the background we see handheld camera footage of a landscape of abject devastation. As the artist explains, ‘this is our present, and the future that has already arrived for the city, where we see total devastation due to the war in Ukraine and the destruction of all the key enterprises in the city’. This palimpsestic narrative releases new meaning from the archival materials, transforming them from frivolous, light-hearted reports into sinister and purposefully deceiving propaganda. The sense of horror is created by the conflation of historical time, the uncanny way the film sees into Lysychansk’s future. As Matukhno explained, ‘The future has been relegated to the background because for Lysychansk documented by “Aktsent” the future had not yet come, but we can already see how the city was preparing to meet it. Finding these recordings on the floor in a pile of dust, broken glass and bricks, it seems these archival tapes too were destined for destruction’ (Figure 6).³⁸

Figure 6. Screenshot from Vitalyi Matukhno’s film ‘Soul’s Beautiful Impulses’ (2022).

Matukhno has created other works engaging found archives and releasing new meaning from these materials that refuses categorization either as nostalgia or disassociation. In a zine about ‘Neotodrosh’ published in 2021, he wrote about a photography project that he realized while still living in Lysychansk. During an exploration of an abandoned residential house near to his home, he discovered unused rolls of black-and-white SVEMA film, which had belonged to the former photographer-owner of the property. Matukhno decided to photograph his own images on the film, creating palimpsestic visions of Lysychansk that referenced both the abandoned past and the unrealized future of the city. As he explained in the zine, the work collapsed time, allowing him to speak in the visual languages of different historical moments:

My main focus in the photography was to recreate the local identity of our region and to study its post-industrial heritage, which is currently in the process of complete collapse. However, this is only what I can see with my own eyes. Photographing on the film of a person who is no longer alive, I was able to see a distorted image of the unrealizable future, which for me right now is the present. I see a different memory with someone else’s eyes.³⁹

Matukhno’s palimpsestic work corresponds closely with Tlostanova’s definition of ‘re-existence’ as ‘a constant balancing on the verge – neither here nor there or simultaneously here, there, and elsewhere’. In a similar way, Kuchynskyi’s digital collages, which ascribe new meaning to Soviet industrial photography, destabilize time, meaning and value. In 2021, Kuchynskyi attended a summer school in Pokrovsk that had been organized through the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project. The artists and researchers who attended the school were tasked with creatively engaging the industrial heritage collections that we had digitized through the project. Kuchynskyi worked with the industrial photography collection of Pavlo Kashkel, a photographer originally from Yenakieve, who was employed variously at Zhdanov Local History Museum, the regional newspaper, Azov Sea Dawn, and later, at the Azovstal’ steel-making factory in Mariupol.⁴⁰ Kuchynskyi was interested in particular by Kashkel’s worker portraits, which showed individuals in the socialist realist tradition in staged poses at their workplaces and adorned with the symbolic accoutrements of their trade.

On the basis of Kashkel’s works, Kuchynskyi produced a series of images which he titled ‘De?industry’, a pun on the much-vaunted concept of ‘de-industrialization’ and its discontents, and on the Ukrainian word ‘de?’ meaning ‘where?’, with the possible implied question of ‘where is industry?’ or, more accusatorily in the context a city where industry was still flourishing and pollution was overwhelming in 2021, ‘where is de-industrialization?’. ‘De?industry’ reproduced Kashkel’s images but, while preserving the portraits of individuals, erased all visual references to the industrial infrastructure through the overlayering of digitized textures onto the frame. Thus, a woman at a brick-manufacturing plant is suddenly stranded against a wall of peeling blue and yellow paint superimposed from a close-up photograph Kuchynskyi made of street textures in Sierievodonetsk. Similarly, a boat sails down the Kalmius against the erased backdrop of the Azovstal’ factory. The factory outline can still be seen, but its detail has been replaced by textures of paint and rust.⁴¹

Kuchysnkyi’s series, like Matukhno’s practice, plays at the edge of meaning making, referencing the Soviet visual propaganda, but not reproducing it, gesturing at its removal, but not committing to this either. In this in-betweenness, it evokes the condition of living with Soviet industrial legacies, which are carried in the landscape, as well as in bodies and minds, but not overidentifying with this past. This is the practice of ‘critical care’ for heritage; care that preserves but does not revere, that recognizes value but does not uncritically celebrate. Both Matukhno’s and Kuchynskyi’s work explores the possibilities of this kind of engagement with local industrial heritage, reworking discarded and marginalized archival materials to raise new questions about the past, its resonances in the present and its value for new generations who continue to live with its toxic but also community-forming legacies (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Image from the ‘De?industry’ series (2021) by Oleksandr Kuchynskyi.

Re-existence as re-possession

A final instance of decolonial ‘re-existence’ or ‘critical care’ for industrial heritage that I wish to discuss in this article is the ‘re-possession’ of derelict industrial spaces. In conditions of economic collapse and state withdrawal, when entire industrial complexes closed and gradually declined into dereliction, communities of local activists began to take physical possession of abandoned spaces. This kind of activity ranged from spontaneous actions to more co-ordinated project work and revealed a collective desire, rather than to ignore and erase the industrial past, to reanimate this heritage and make it relevant to new generations. ‘Re-possession’ took a diverse range of forms, from the urban exploration projects discussed above, to curatorial initiatives such as Matukhno’s ‘gareleya neotodryosh’ project. In this section, I consider two instances of ‘re-possession’ from pre-2022 Sievierodonetsk: the Novodruzhesk ‘Day of Miners’ action in 2020 and the ‘TerraFox’ rave in 2019.

The Novodruzhesk ‘Day of Miners’ action was a spontaneous intervention carried out by the activist community at +/- Art Residency and led by Kateryna Siryk and Oleksandr Kuchynshkyi in 2020.⁴² The action was prompted by the group’s discovery of a red Soviet banner emblazoned with the words ‘Happy Day of the Miner, Dear Comrades’, and was carried out in collaboration with a group of school-age children whom the group met in Novodruzhesk. As Kuchynskyi explained in interview, on finding the banner, ‘[he’d] had a vision that it needed to be photographed against the backdrop of a destroyed mine or some building connected with the coal mining industry’. The group had decided to take the banner on an excursion to the nearby Tomashevska-Iuzhna mine in Novodruzhesk, which had closed in 1975. Having explored the abandoned site, which, as Kuchynskyi explained, was still watched over by security guards, the group stopped at the town’s derelict Palace of Culture on their way home and hung the banner there. The following day, they returned to the Palace and found a group of children who wanted to join in in their activities (‘they were curious to participate. For them it was like a game’). The activists proceeded to hang the banner in different places around the building and compose a series of images with the children (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Image of the Novodruzhesk ‘Day of Miners’ action (2020). Photo by Kateryna Siryk.

Significant here is the group’s physical presence in the derelict industrial space, which over the course of the action is transformed from an abandoned building into a site of carnival or play. Thinking with Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’, a literary mode which subverts and liberates the dominant style through comedy and chaos, we can understand the Novodruzhesk intervention as a kind of liberatory practice that claims back the meaning of the derelict site, transforming it from a depressing ruin into a place for historical contemplation and creative innovation. As Siryk explained in interview, ‘sites of destruction [mesta razrusheniia] are a kind of matter stretched out against time and have been the constant background to our lives. They’ve been part of our lives for so long, and are so familiar to us now, that we don’t even have to put it into words.’⁴³ The Novodruzhesk action emerged from this common knowledge, this intimate familiarity with the dereliction of local history and heritage. The coming together of the group in the site was thus a manifestation of this knowledge, an affirmation of community built on the derelict ruins of a difficult past.

The Novodruzhesk action was not a unique instance of creative engagement with derelict spaces. As Dmytro Chepurnyi, former curator of the Donbas Studies programme at the IZOLYATSIA: Platform for Cultural Initiatives, notes, spaces of abandonment were popular sites for artistic interventions in Donbas before 2022. Chepurnyi references the work of Yehor Kucheruk in Kramatorsk as another example of grassroots and creative repurposing of derelict spaces. Kucheruk’s pop-up exhibition ‘Holova’, like ‘gareleya neotodryosh’, projected new meaning onto abandoned architecture, in this instance making it function as an institutionalized critique of the lack of public resources for cultural initiatives in the region.⁴⁴ Turning abandoned buildings into spaces of protest, in a similar way to the Novodruzhesk action, was a means of affirming the agency of the local community. It was a refusal on the part of a younger generation to be erased in the same ways that the region’s industrial heritage was being erased, to be silenced and ignored in the new post-‘transition’ reality.

The ‘TerraFox’ rave, which I attended while visiting Sievierodonetsk in 2019, was a similar initiative to breathe new life into the region’s derelict heritage. Organized by Levon Azizian, an activist resident in the city, it formed part of a broader programme of activist-run exhibitions, festivals and musical events that encouraged people to be physically present in, and thus re-animate, the city’s abandoned industrial spaces. Like the Novodruzhesk action discussed above, the local community’s physical presence in the abandoned site was key to its symbolic transformation. The act of partying – dancing for hours, drinking, chatting, listening to industrial electro, wandering in the grounds, exploring the atmospheric building and simply being together – charged the industrial ruin with symbolic energy, transforming it from a depressing reminder of socio-economic decline into a place of enchantment, strength and power. Talking to people who had attended the rave the next day the sense of excitement at the region’s potential to become a beacon of alternative culture in Ukraine was palpable. The organizers told me that visitors from across the country, including from the occupied territories, had travelled to the city to attend the event. The ‘re-possession’ of the industrial site had thus succeeded in re-imagining Sievierodonetsk, not as a negligible periphery, or frontline city, but as an alternative cultural centre in a gesture of ‘re-existence’.

Conclusion: from re-existence to remembrance

This article has drawn on archival and bibliographic research, combined with participant observation work and interviews carried out in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions between 2019 and 2023, to argue that a systematic, community-led reappraisal of industrial heritage was underway in Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Resisting the devaluation of the eastern region’s industrial heritage – a combined result of neoliberal transition, Russian military intervention and shifts in national memory politics – heritage professionals, artists and activists in the east were practising ‘critical care’ for abandoned legacies in the form of grassroots archiving work, artistic engagement of industrial archives and community actions at industrial heritage sites across the region. Drawing on decolonial thinking, I argue that this ‘critical care’ work was an act of ‘balancing on the verge’ between nostalgia for the Soviet past and the rejection of these legacies as ‘historical trash’. Such work opened space for the emergence of new understandings of the region, as a place of cultural value and worth, a cultural centre rather than a negligible and damaged ‘periphery’.

How, then, did this ‘critical care’ work change following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? What new practices emerged to engage and commemorate industrial legacies following the occupation of the east and the displacement of its activist communities? Russia’s invasion resulted in a further devaluation of Ukraine’s industrial heritage. Already discredited through its association with Russian and Soviet imperialisms, the perceived value of industrial legacies declined further with the growing threat to many high-profile cultural heritage sites across the country. In public discussions about post-war reconstruction, emphasis was consequently placed on civic and religious architecture, while industrial heritage featured rarely if at all. As a speaker at the ‘Heritage: Destruction, Salvage & Legacy’ panel of the ‘The Reconstruction of Ukraine’ conference noted, the finite nature of resources for reconstruction meant a reinforcement of existing hierarchies of cultural value in the country.⁴⁵ In this context, industrial legacies were inevitably deprioritized.

Faced with this reality, practitioners and activists from the east, now displaced across Ukraine, turned to practices of self-documentation in an effort to preserve their ‘critical care’ work from cultural erasure. Mariupol Memory Park, a multi-media archive of activist life in the heavily industrialized city on the Azov Sea, realized by the Freefilmers NGO, is one such example of this kind of preservationist, self-archiving work.⁴⁶ As Sashko Protyah, a founding member of the Freefilmers NGO, explained in interview in August 2023, the project was conceived as an ‘anarchive’, a project to document subcultural life in the city, including creative engagements with industrial heritage sites and environments. As Protyah noted:

the idea was that if we lost everything and didn’t manage to save any cultural artefacts or objects of works of art, if all that was destroyed by the invaders, then we could create specially for the project something that could tell our stories…it’s an archive of the people and practices that didn’t fit mainstream commemoration practices. An archive of a community, which has been created specifically to commemorate some invisible beauty of the city.⁴⁷

Many such documentation projects have emerged since 2022. Vitalyi Matukhno, for example, has published two digital zines about the curatorial work of the ‘gareleya neotodryosh’ project, creating an extensive archive of artist engagement with industrial spaces that tells the story of the region’s ‘re-existence’ by local activists before the Russian invasion.⁴⁸ Mykhailo Kulishov, a leading figure in community archiving circles, has published a book of industrial landscape photography and launched a 3D reconstruction project visually documenting the region’s salt mines.⁴⁹ These documentary initiatives are a manifestation of ‘critical care’ work in the east: the delicate balancing act between preservation and celebration, interest and nostalgia, through which new meaning of the region was formed. As claims on the region’s identity polarize once more, such careful, community-driven consideration of the region’s difficult, dissonant industrial heritage is more urgent than ever.