Beyond Identities: Disintegration of Public Transport Activists' Community in the Donetsk Region after 2014

• In Event: Donbas: Memory of the Region and Regions of Memory

Abstract

Contestation of Donbas was often analyzed via identitarian lens: as crisis of identity (Polishchuk 2018), identity shift (Mitchik 2019), creation of the 'Donbas people' (Abibok 2018), and identity transformation (Masnenko et al. 2021). In this work author wants to move focus from identity to infrastructure as a factor defining co-existance and connectedness beyond and against identitarian choices. For this, I‘ll revisit my fieldwork in the cities of Donetsk region, years 2010-2013, as well as collaborations with activists throughout the 2010s, in order to trace the gradual disintegration of the community. In the 2000s, cities of the Donetsk region of Ukraine saw an activity of local grassroot initiatives aiming at preservation of tramway and trolleybus transportation. Coming from different educational, class, and regional backgrounds, public transport enthusiasts built their solidarity on infrastructural basis and volunteering practice.
The start of the Donbas war in 2014 became a blow to this network. Using my longue duree ethnography, I demonstrate that the opposing identity choices
of community members after Maidan did not automatically lead to disruption
of their joint activities in support of public transport. However, the following years, which brought heightened attention of both Ukrainian and Russian states to the region’s cities, made
non-identitarian cooperation both harder and ever less relevant.

Author

• Andrei Vazyanau, European Humanities U (Lithuania)