How a Young Architect Became a Tram Driver in Kharkiv

Three weeks into the war, about forty people who worked on trams and trolley buses started clearing the debris in the streets. Other city workers soon joined and, from that point on, Kharkiv didn’t let ruins linger. A few buildings—a sixteen-story apartment tower in North Saltivka that had been ripped open by a bomb, a once-grand school building that Russian paratroopers barricaded themselves in on the first week of the invasion and which the Ukrainian military ultimately destroyed—have been left to stand as instant monuments. Elsewhere, broken windows were boarded up, rubble was hauled away. Volodymyr helped evacuate trams from the Saltivka depot, which had been hit more than once. Dozens of trams were damaged, many beyond repair. The ones that could be fixed had to be transported to the other big depot, Oktyabrskoye, with the help of tractors that could haul them over portions of track that didn’t have electricity.

The Oktyabrskoye depot, built in the nineteen-sixties, was named for the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviets attempted to build a bomb shelter large enough to accommodate the entire staff, because a tram depot is a key element of civilian infrastructure—Russian strikes have targeted tram depots in this war presumably for the same reason. The shelter, a shallow underground bunker, had not been well maintained—it had repeatedly flooded and was filled with broken furniture. But the director of the depot, Andriy Kucherenko, a short, muscular thirty-six-year-old man with a round smiling face, devoted himself to making it livable. He wired the bunker for electricity, provided heat and Internet, and brought in rows of chairs from the depot auditorium, to give people places to sit and sleep. The burgundy crushed-velvet curtain from the auditorium stage was hung across the entrance to the bunker, to help keep the heat in. In the auditorium, Andriy set up a laundry: he brought a washing machine from his apartment, and strung lines across the hall for drying clothes and sheets. Wood-burning cooking stoves were set up outside the bunker. For weeks, the would start at 11 P.M. By this time, Andriy would say, everyone—more than two hundred people living in the bunker—had to be washed, fed, and tucked in for the night. A year into the war, the bunker has no full-time residents anymore, but about ten people at a time—mostly those who work late-night and early-morning shifts—sleep there.

Once the Russian forces were pushed back from the northeast, in early May, people at Oktyabrskoye depot started talking about getting the trams running again. On May 20th, a sunny day, Volodymyr rode his bike to the depot, and drove a tram out. He drove through empty streets, eerie and beautiful. When people in the street saw the tram, they reacted as though they were seeing a ghost, and then started cheering and clapping. Volodymyr felt like driving the tram heralded the rebirth of the city. Through the summer, people continued coming back to Kharkiv, even as the shelling barely abated. It typically began at four in the morning, right when tram drivers left their houses to get to the depot before service started. All drivers wear bulletproof vests.

The city put more trams on the roads, as fast as workers at Oktyabrskoye could repair them. Eventually, the city of Prague donated twenty decommissioned trams, and these were retrofitted for the Kharkiv tracks and put into service, too. Several years ago, Volodymyr rode these trams as a tourist in Prague; he never imagined he’d sit at the controls in one, much less in Kharkiv. He drives past buildings with boarded-up windows, some that were destroyed partially or completely. There is hardly a block in Kharkiv that hasn’t been affected, and yet stores and cafés are open, whether or not they have window panes. One route goes down what used to be Moscow Prospect, now renamed Kharkiv Heroes, though when I was there, the signs had changed on only one side of the street.

How a Young Architect Became a Tram Driver in Kharkiv
Source: Super Trending News PH