Archives at War
Researchers inside and outside Ukraine have spent years putting together the shattered pieces of its history; now they are putting together an archive in real time, as a document of resistance.
Ivanhrad gypsum mine, Ukraine. Copyright Mykhailo Kulishov (@donmining.info).
My work on the east of Ukraine began with the discovery of an archive in Wales. The name of the collection is the Hughesovka Research Archive, and it is a repository of historical materials relating to nineteenth-century Welsh labour migration to Hughesovka (a mining settlement that took its name from its Welsh capitalist founder, John Hughes), later renamed Stalino and then, from 1961, Donetsk. The Hughesovka Research Archive was a revelation for me. I had had no idea before that of the historical connection between Wales and Ukraine, despite being born and raised in Wales, and having worked on the so-called post-Soviet space most of my professional life.
There are many things that are intriguing about this archive, but what struck me first when I began working with it was the fact that it was a result of women’s labour. The archive contains around thirty sets of family papers, hundreds of letters and postcards, written mostly by British women settlers living in Donbas to family back in Wales. Women are most often responsible for maintaining social networks at distance, for doing the communicative work that reinforces cultural identity in moments of change and crisis. I mention this because I want to sketch out an idea of archive-making as a feminist expression of care, but also as a form of self-definition and even cultural defiance.
Of course, not all archives are archives of care. Many are expressions of colonial violence and hierarchical exclusion. As the Cameroonian philosopher of colonialism, Achille Mbembe, has underlined, the archive contains the power to ‘despoil’ and ‘dispossess’ the author, and also to convey near sacred status onto the selective historical trace that it contains. As Mbembe writes:
Over and above the ritual of making secret, it seems clear that the archive is primarily the product of a judgement, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority, which involves placing certain documents in an archive at the same time as others are discarded. The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’. The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status.
Mbembe is certainly right that the archive is a status rather than a place. I think for many western academics the archive becomes a kind of church that they believe can deliver unto them a cultural transfiguration. But I would also agree with Carole Steedman, who points out in her meditation on archival lust, Dust, that historians are both compelled by a voracious desire to consume the archive, to exhaust its contents in their search for truth, and at the same time aware of its actuality as a mere nothingness, a trace, historical shadow play. As Steedman puts it:
You know perfectly well that despite the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, it is in fact, practically nothing at all… There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are working in.
Putting the Pieces Back Together
Working in the Ukrainian East, I have been struck by the many grassroots archiving initiatives that emerged after 2014. One of the archives that I’ve been working with closely is Mykhailo Kulishov’s Shakhty i rudniki Donbassa, an online repository of books, maps, articles, and geological materials, which together form one of the most comprehensive repositories of resources relating to the industrial history of the East. When I first encountered the project, I assumed it must be the work of a dedicated research team, but it turned out to be the brainchild of one incredibly knowledgeable local historian: Mykhailo Kulishov.
I was lucky enough to travel around Donbas with Mykhailo in the summer of 2021 and get to know more about him and his work. He told me that his passion for industrial geologies has begun as a teenager in Horlivka where he had explored the city’s abandoned mines with his friends. When the war started in 2014, Mykhailo was separated from the industrial sites he researched and from his co-explorers, some of whom stayed behind on the non-government-controlled territory. His archiving project began at this time as a kind of prosthetic exploration of a territory part of which was no longer accessible because of war. Talking to Mykhailo, I understood how important this archiving work was for combatting the violence inflicted on the region, for asserting the multiple identities and cultures of Donbas beyond the war, of its rich biodiversity and geological complexities. Archiving, for Mykhailo, was a means of resisting the deadening impact of conflict, pushing back against the tide of cultural erasure that war and all-encompassing discourses of war bring to a place.
Another archive I’ve been following is Oleksandr Kuchynskyi’s IndustrialHeaven Instagram and associated social media accounts. I first met Oleksandr at a summer school in Sieverodonetsk, which I helped to coordinate together with Darya Tsymbalyuk and Dmytro Chepurnyi, then cultural manager of the Donbas Studies programme at IZOLYATSIA: Platform for Cultural Initiatives.
IndustrialHeaven is a repository of visual media relating to the industrial history of the Donbas region. As Sasha explained in an interview with us for YourArt in 2021, he began it in 2014 at the beginning of the war, when his artistic studies had been disrupted and he was at a loss as to what to do. Like Shakhty i rudniki Donbassa, the project is remarkable for its archival professionalism. Materials are thoroughly referenced, their derivation cited, and hashtags are used in a sophisticated system of archival cross-referencing so that it is easy to pull up entire collections of visual materials on industrial themes, specific places, or topographies. Like other Donbas collectors and curators, Oleksandr also visited and collected from abandoned industrial sites and derelict buildings in Donbas and, until recently, was working on an ‘Archive of Deindustrialization’ with partners in Sieverodonetsk. In an interview with Dmytro Chepurnyi he described this work: ‘These abandoned sites and what we find in them is like putting a puzzle together, and with each piece you become more and more clear why, in fact, our region is the way it is.’ In this comment, Sasha presents archiving as a putting back together, ‘like a puzzle’ of the pieces that have been torn apart.
One last example of defiant archiving in the context of the Donbas war takes the form of the steppe nature reserve ‘Kreidova flora’, which I was lucky enough to visit in summer 2021. My guide on this visit was the park’s director and environmental preservationist, Serhii Limanskii. Kreidova flora is an incredible site of steppe biodiversity: around a third of its territory is covered by chalk pine and birch forest, and it is home to many rare and endangered ‘red book’ plants. As a strategic height on the banks of the Siverskyi Donets river, the park was the site of fierce fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed forces in 2014 and 2015.
As we walked around the reserve, Serhii pointed out the traces of this neo-colonial violence that were archived in the landscape. A smashed tank window lay on the ground surrounded by wormwood, rockets and missiles were left embedded in the earth, while trenches used by the UMA in their defence against invasion formed deep scars across the ground. Rather than tidy these objects away, Serhii explained that he preferred to preserve them: ‘let them stay as a reminder to people’, he said. This act of archiving the traces of neo-colonial violence seemed to me both empowered and empowering. By choosing to exhibit these objects as a mournful part of this place’s history, rather than removing or burying them, Serhii and his team refused to relegate this experience to the realm of unspoken trauma, seizing back control of the narrative of war.
Un-archiving the Archive
When Russia escalated its aggressions into a full-scale war on 24 February, I reached out to my friends in Ukraine, asking them what I could do to help. After relatively little time, my colleagues at the Center for Urban History got back in touch to say that they were building an archive of the war and that they would like our help to strengthen the ethical foundations of the project.
The researchers at the Centre for Urban History are extraordinary archivists. In recent years, I have worked with them on the project ‘Un/archiving Post/industry’, in which we digitised industrial heritage collections across the Ukrainian East in collaboration with institutions and individuals in Pokrovsk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol, Kostiantynivka, Sloviansk, and Lysychansk, among other cities. The project resulted in the digitisation of over 30,000 photos and ninety hours of film, including a huge corpus of postcard photography and amateur video produced around the metallurgy industries in Mariupol, thanks to the efforts of our project partner and senior archivist at the local museum, Anna Bahachenko. When we wrote the grant application for that project, we spoke about ‘vulnerable archival collections’, and I remember wondering how vulnerable these materials really were. Given this current escalation of the war against Ukraine, the coldblooded savagery of which has shocked even those who have been closely following events in Donbas since 2014, it now seems to have been grimly prescient.
This work is, however, continuing in the face of the war. It is surely the experience of working in conditions of Russian-enforced precarity and intimidation for more than eight years that now lends my colleagues in Lviv such clarity in terms of continuing these projects. Natalia Otrishchenko, our coordinator, speaks at our meetings of the empowering potential of the archive for both those who choose to contribute their stories and materials, and for those who collect and categorise such sources. She articulates the ways that storytelling, when elicited ethically and compassionately, can help people find moral justification for what they are experiencing, and even a value in it, if it is amplified correctly in the media, causing moral outrage, or if it serves later as evidence for international tribunals. This is, of course, highly risky work.
The process of archive-making is formative for researchers functioning in conditions of war, but also, to an extent, for those of us working outside of Ukraine. Working like this seems to offer the possibility for self-definition in the face of existential crisis, a way of forging forward in our fundamentally compromised field, the brokenness of which many have recognised for some time. Being in these Zoom calls with a group of such inspiring Ukrainian researchers gives me hope.
I want to end with a few final thoughts on the question of archiving as decolonial practice. When I visited Mariupol in November 2021, I met with Irina Badasen, the director of the Ilyich iron and steelworks museum, and talked to her about the history of Belgian and American investment in Mariupol’s metallurgy industries at the turn of the twentieth century. As she explained, the archival trace of this experience had been erased by the Soviets: wishing to brand industrialisation as a Stalinist achievement, they removed any evidence of the influence of foreign capital and technology on local development from the historical record.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in this lost archival story, in the recovery of what some have called the ‘European heritage’ of Donbas, partly a form of resistance to the Putinist narrative of the region as an integral part of a political and cultural ‘Russian World’. In my own work on this topic, I have cautioned against a wholly uncritical treatment of the idea ‘European Donbas’—after all, this era of foreign investment was characterised by extraction and exploitation. When I discussed these questions with a journalist in Bakhmut she laughed and told me that exploitation was all relative. Still, I think we need to be careful not to substitute one kind of archival silencing for another.
I mention this to highlight the point that, while archiving can take the form of decolonial resistance, the archive itself, as Mbembe points out, is always at risk of reproducing practices of ‘despoilment’ and ‘dispossession’, of reconstituting forms of privileged access and exclusion. For this reason, I think, we must try, at the moment of archiving, to ensure that we are simultaneously engaged in a process that my colleagues in Lviv call ‘unarchiving the archive’.
Looking around on social media, everyone seems to be archiving right now. I am sure I am not alone in being incredibly moved by public self-archiving initiatives such as Yevgeniia Belorusets’s diaries or Asya Bazdyrieva’s winter notes, and I cannot be the only one who is instinctively screenshotting things for an archive that does not yet have a name or a purpose. As some things are being destroyed and disappearing—heritage, cities, people—other things are coming into existence. In the face of neo-colonial brutality, people are busy at work: desperation archiving, anger archiving, resistance archiving. Once Ukraine prevails, the country will be rebuilt using these archives, and we will need to be more attentive than ever to Mbembe’s words and those of other decolonial thinkers.