In my childhood in the early 1990s, I spent many days on the tram that my aunt drove in Mariupol. My uncle too was a trolleybus driver and would sometimes take me with him to work. These trips would often take place early in the morning or late in the evening. At home, I played “trolleybuses and tramways“ with different things that I had to hand: colourful children‘s mosaic beads would become passengers in a vehicle made from a domino box. I would draw plans of tram routes for imagined cities. In real life, I commuted a lot: my family didn‘t have a car. I remember the rattling, overcrowded and worn-out vehicles of the late 1990s, when the public transport system faced a severe crisis. The number of trams and trolleybuses was decreasing, they became unreliable, and by the early 2000s many passengers had switched to using marshrutki – small-capacity buses operated by private companies that ran on fixed routes.
Mobility was the prism through which I first understood how a city works. It was also what got me interested in electric urban transport and, later, urban anthropology. When I first got access to the internet, I learned by heart lists of European cities that had tram and trolleybus networks. In 2003, I was delighted to discover that I was not alone in my hobby. I came across a personal website where travellers uploaded their photos. Later, fora like Tr.ru became a space to discuss transport news; finally, users flocked to the platform Transphoto, now the largest online repository of photos, databases of rolling stock, maps, historical notes, and news about trams. For the increasingly international Transphoto community, electric vehicles were a key part of the urban landscape: trams transformed a place into a city (something I‘d been convinced of since childhood). Along with photography, users collected and organised information about their local tramway and trolleybus transportation (UET, urban electric transport) systems.
Later I began to study these communities in my academic work. In my PhD dissertation I traced the media- and social history of the community of UET enthusiasts. From the early 2000s, the Donetsk oblast became a hub of UET enthusiasts‘ initiatives. The region had everything going for it in terms of becoming a place of special interest for UET enthusiasts. On the one hand, it was full of picturesque landscapes of urbanity that looked exotic for non-locals: tram cars could be found in post-industrial or rural environments like gob piles, slag heaps, chimneys, blast furnaces, or abandoned next to gardens, old single-storey cottages, and cattle. The aesthetic of the ‘tram in the village’ is quite popular in transport photography and well represented in photo competitions on Transphoto. So UET-enthusiasts started referring to Donbas as a ‘tram paradise’. On the other hand, the scale of the infrastructure, the distances trams had to travel, and structural conditions meant that grassroots initiatives could be realised with tangible results. From 2013, trams were functioning in seven cities in the Donetsk region, while trolleybus networks operated in nine. It was possible to commute both ways in a day between almost any two cities with UET and, particularly in the Yenakiieve – Horlivka and Kostiantynivka – Druzhkivka urban agglomerations. Many enthusiasts commuted between cities to watch UET, to take photos, and to discuss relevant news on the platforms. Meanwhile, the ‘tram paradise’ had come to the attention of the wider, international community of transport fans. Questions and ideas about ways to support the decaying infrastructure began to circulate within this community.
In the late 2000s UET enthusiasts in Donbas came up with a number of new initiatives. For instance, in Horlivka at the end of 2008, a crowdfunding project was organised: the local tramway-trolleybus company (TTU) offered ‘charity tickets’ at the price of 25 kopecks in addition to the usual 75 kopecks ones, under the condition that these additional payments would be used exclusively for the repair of old vehicles. The charity tickets were promoted with leaflets that featured poetic verses about trolleybuses awaiting repair. Volunteers also occasionally promoted these tickets among passengers on the trolleybuses. The figures for charity ticket sales in Horlivka were regularly presented on the TTU’s website, and a detailed account of how donations were spent was provided. A free day pass was sponsored by a local bread manufacturer; a campaign was set up to promote the sale of charity tickets jointly with a local radio station; a contest of children’s drawings was held; open days at and excursions to the depot were organised; an invitation was issued to local student painters to decorate the trams; the city administration was involved in the sale of charity tickets at their premises; dissemination of the information about the functioning of the transport network was organised, and timetables were placed at the stops and handed out to passengers.
In Mariupol, the condition of the UET network was less precarious than in some other cities, with a few dozen trams and trolleybuses still intact, and some material support provided by the steelworks. Tram enthusiasts took photos of rolling stock and documented its condition, managed galleries of rare archival photos, disseminated information about schedules and designed route schemes.
Most of these initiatives took place between 2008 and 2013, a period when the Internet was already widely available, and the military conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk had not yet begun. In 2011-2013 I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Donetsk region (in Mariupol, Horlivka, and Kostyantynivka) for my MA dissertation about the mobility of senior people and the role of public transport in their lives. My interlocutors were not sure how much longer trams and trolleybuses would operate in their cities: due to a lack of resources, services had been reduced, and some lines had closed down. The enthusiast community aimed to “prolong the life of the UET systems until better days”.
Importantly, this community was not part of the usual infrastructure of institutionalised activism with regard to grants or competitions, and registered NGOs. Professionals and staff at transportation companies were reluctant to acknowledge the community’s contributions, except when in crisis, even though they themselves, along with NGOs, increasingly relied on the Transphoto platform. Such volunteer efforts became especially vulnerable in the context of the Russia-backed military aggression that started in Donbas in 2014. The hitherto most active cluster of grassroots initiatives was divided both physically and politically: some enthusiasts had to leave the conflict zone, and connections between political opponents were broken. No grassroots initiatives continued in the self-proclaimed republics.
Since 2015, I have collaborated with grassroots public transport activists who were living on the Kyiv-controlled territory of Donbas. This has included mediation work with Kostyantynivka activists looking for second-hand trams in the EU; writing petitions against the closure of a tramline to Aglofabrika in Mariupol; and a text for the Ukrainian media about precarious, non-paid work carried out by the UET enthusiasts. These collaborations also informed my approach to doing anthropology across sectors, reaching out to non-academic communities and operating at the intersection of applied and theoretical inquiry. In 2017, I joined the Miensk Urban Platform, Belarus, as an NGO anthropologist.
Mariupol was fervently re-inventing itself when I returned to the city in 2019, after a five-year-long break (my last visit was in March 2021). The industrial city was giving way, both discursively and economically, to its role as seaport and education hub. In the late 2010s, the Ukrainian government launched several programs for infrastructural renovation, and public transit became one of the key sectors where the state’s comeback could be showcased. Ukrainian cities saw the arrival of new trolley buses and trams. Some were second-hand vehicles from Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Mariupol received around 26 second-hand trams from Prague, as well as new and second-hand trolleybuses – about two dozen altogether; even large, low-floor buses returned on several routes, pushing out the marshrutkas. The Mariupol transportation office set up a rebranding scheme, painted all the vehicles, and made a handy website with maps, timetables for every stop, and an online GPS tracking system. A number of new trolleybus lines were introduced. On trolleybus line No. 15 that crossed the entire city from west to east, service frequency improved considerably by comparison with 2011.
By 2020, the tram and trolleybus fleet in Mariupol had been almost entirely renewed; all KTM-5 tramcars were decommissioned; most trolleybuses were now low-floor vehicles and had electronic displays showing information about their routes. It was now possible to pay for a trip via a mobile app. Marshrutkas virtually disappeared from the city’s streets. 2011 seemed far away, and it seemed like those awaited “better days” had finally arrived. In light of all this state-led improvement, UET enthusiasts in Eastern Ukraine returned to observing and documenting. After years of weak state presence, political decisions started to be made and micro-scale grassroots action gave way to institutionalised investment. The voices of the enthusiasts were rarely heard.
The full-scale Russian invasion brought public transport to a halt in Mariupol on 2 March 2022. The rolling stock in depots and on the streets suffered badly from the bombing. Trams were abandoned in the streets and, judging by photos, were still there as of July 2022. Trams and trolleybuses have ceased to function in virtually all other cities of the Donetsk region since February 2022.
With the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, photos from Mariupol have become the most viewed images on Transphoto. The website hosts photos from various sources. Often these are images that have also appeared elsewhere (Telegram channels, TV news and so on), and were taken without specific focus on wires, rails, poles, and tram stops – but aimed to capture the damage done to the city. Today, they vividly document the scale of loss that Russian troops have brought to Mariupol.
Photos from earlier decades, especially from the Soviet era and the early 1990s were also published on the forum. These included images from family archives, postcards, and screenshots from films shot in Mariupol.
People have already begun discussing the future of UET in Mariupol in the context of these posts. Rumours circulated that surviving trolleybuses were transported to Donetsk, though this has not been confirmed. Users have very different expectations about the future: some predict the end of the UET chapter in Mariupol, others hope to see trams and/or trolleybuses return within months. Some refer to official promises to rebuild the transportation system. St. Petersburg has been declared the new “partner city“ of Mariupol, and its local authorities have been assigned the responsibility of renovating the destroyed urban space, including the tram infrastructure. Others have noticed that the date for the relaunch of the tramway has been postponed several times already: to May 2022, August 2022, September 2022, and now to 2023.
So far only the diesel buses have returned. As of August 2022, according to a comment on Transphoto written by an openly pro-Russian user who survived the siege and remained in Mariupol, public transport in the city consists of 18 bus lines, which are free of charge until 1 October.
In this new reality UET enthusiasts have found themselves among passive – and sometimes loyal – observers. Back in the 2010s I was impressed by how UET enthusiasts, divided in their political views, could still communicate with each other about their common interests and undertake pro-UET efforts despite their scepticism towards local authorities. Now, however, statements that users claim to be “outside of politics“ can reveal their indifference towards the inhabitants of the former tramway paradise. Comments in the idiom of “everything will be rebuilt and will look even better“ are particularly disturbing.
Most probably Mariupol galleries on Transphoto are becoming archives of exactly that which will never be rebuilt. I keep thinking of Grozny, the Chechen capital, where trolleybus and tram networks were closed in 1994 because of damage caused by the Russian-Chechen war. Russian authorities promised repeatedly that the trolleybus system would be re-opened – in 2007, then in 2016. It never happened.
“Paradise” was not an epithet that most people would use to describe Donbas. In this regard, UET enthusiasts were rather an exception – and, in a way, they anticipated the wave of interest in the culture of the region that arrived after the start of the Russian-backed conflict in 2014. Among other irreparable losses caused by Russian missiles, the paradise of trams and trolleybuses has also been lost.