When Volodymyr Matias was a teen-ager, he got a camera and started taking pictures of the trolley buses and trams around Kharkiv. He posted his photos to forums where he met transport freaks from around the world. During his last year of high school, a tram driver he knew (he knew all the tram drivers) suggested that he get a job as a ticket seller; they rode the trams, with special black bags for money and ticket rolls. It was a good gig. By the time Volodymyr was in his first year of university, where he studied to be an architect, he was supporting himself. Several years later, as he was completing his thesis project, he also enrolled in a driving course. He got his architect’s and tram-driver licenses in quick succession.
Before the war, Volodymyr, who is thirty-two, was an accomplished architect with a private practice, and the leader of the Union of Architects, which oversees the work of architects in Kharkiv and the surrounding region. There was a lot of work in Kharkiv: residential construction, in part spurred by the influx of displaced people from the nearby Russian-occupied Donbas, and ambitious urban improvements funded both by the city and by private business. Volodymyr also continued to pick up a couple of tram shifts a week. Driving through the city helped him rest his eyes and clear his head. He especially liked early mornings, when Kharkiv was just waking up. He thought he might be the mayor one day.
It took Volodymyr a while to believe that the war would affect ordinary civilians. Rockets hit residential buildings in Kharkiv almost as soon as the war began. On February 26, 2022, a munition hit an intersection in broad daylight and a friend, who happened to be there, sent Volodymyr a video of people bleeding and dying. Still, Volodymyr did not believe that the Russians were targeting civilians intentionally. Around the same time, the Ukrainian military had brought down a Russian plane and captured the pilots. One of them claimed that they were following orders. Maybe the authorities were wrong to turn off street lights and direct people to drape their windows, Volodymyr thought. Maybe, if the Russians could see, they wouldn’t kill civilians. This was nearly a month before the world learned about Russian atrocities in Bucha, which was when Volodymyr finally realized he’d been wrong the whole time.
Volodymyr and his city quickly got used to the shelling and bombardments. After a few days, a large supermarket reopened not far from his home. People had run out of food and nothing else was open, so they had to line up outside the store for hours. While Volodymyr was inside, a munition hit somewhere nearby. The building, and everything in it, shook. People kept shopping, or standing in line. They’d learned that they couldn’t run from the attacks. They learned a lot of things, like not to close their windows, so the glass wouldn’t shatter from explosions, and to place large plastic bottles filled with water on the sills, to cushion the windows when they swung open during assaults.
Volodymyr made sure to go out every day. Now he wasn’t taking pictures—everyone was on the lookout for spies—but he took everything in. By the middle of March, Russian troops had built fortifications at the northeastern boundary of the city, across the highway from the neighborhood of Saltivka. This neighborhood seemed to be hit most frequently and most heavily, but rockets were reaching the center of the city as well. Volodymyr and his friends formed a group to track the strikes. They learned to distinguish artillery by ear. They developed a system for locating them by ranking proximity on a ten-point scale—for example, “seven” was a strike close enough to set off car alarms on one’s street. A bomb landed in a square some six hundred yards from Volodymyr’s apartment. He had never seen his mother so scared. She sat down on the floor, her head in her hands, and waited to die.
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, he 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.
Volodymyr knows what every building is, or used to be. Here is one that housed a printing company and offices. All the windows are gone. Here is the Palace of Labor, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century masterpiece destroyed by shelling. Here is a building of the trade school, also a landmark, also several direct hits. Here is the building where Volodymyr’s ex-girlfriend lived. An explosion nearby destroyed the building. Here is the Konniy Market, where volunteers ran a soup kitchen for military personnel, which was damaged by a missile. The market was almost always functioning, even during the heaviest shelling, so there were usually a lot of people there. Here is a store where a man was killed by a piece of shrapnel that happened to fly in. Here is an old tram depot, built in 1929, and the dorm its workers built right over the hangar. One day, two missiles in a row struck this depot. The child of one of the tram drivers died.
On one of Volodymyr’s routes, most of the passengers are women in their sixties and seventies. They ride the lines in search of places where they can pick up humanitarian-aid packages. Some organizations bring packages to specific residential addresses. Some, like a United Nations relief agency, require registration: a Google form opens at noon once a week, for only a few minutes, so that even people with tech-savvy, nimble-fingered grandchildren often can’t register. (Volodymyr has been trying to register his grandfather for weeks.) And some just set up shop around the city. Because street lights are off, people’s workdays have shifted: those who work try to finish by two or three in the afternoon to make it home before dark. The women who go around looking for aid usually wrap up by three or four.
Trams run almost until curfew, at 11 P.M. To avoid the risk of many trams being damaged at once by a strike to the depot, Volodymyr, Andriy, and their colleagues now park trams throughout the city. It’s a fascinating logistical problem, parking dozens of trams in a city. Volodymyr has caught himself thinking that, while architecture is more global, working on public transport is also very interesting. Plus, there is no architecture anymore. No one is going to invest in building in a city under bombardment. Some architects have left the city. One friend works in a restaurant, another as a cabbie. Volodymyr is now a tram driver. ♦
