Manufacturing Proletarian Memory in the City of Har'kov from 1905 to 1917, 1918 and 1927
by Martin Kraemer Liehn, PhD

ul. Shaumjana 8-2
UKR-04111 Kiev
Ukraine
Tel.. landline +38 044 449 07 01
Email:
proletarianHarkov (at) riseup.net
draft for friends in Har'kov, April 2009 Granada (Spain)


Abstract

Manufacturing memory is not in all cases a process of manipulating for the sake of continuing class hegemony. In the case of Har'kov factory workers, 1905-1927, manufacturing jointly to make a living curiously coincided with them assembling a highly combative set of active memory in class conflict within and around their factories. Instead of following the successive attempts by different parties to high-jack this militant legacy, the essay rather aims at retracing the development of material conditions allowing for the autonomous reproduction of proletarian memory in the townscape of Har'kov throughout an all-encompassing series of dramatic defeats and unexpected victories during the 22 years under scrutiny.

In the course of inquiry, collective memory reveals to be redetectable only on a higher and thus much more risky level of generic abstraction compared to more materialist analytic categories, such as
- class-specific conditioning for communication and discontinuity in communication,
- materially industrial production in social relations of unequal dependence
- and subsequent class-segregated urban reproduction. The specific arrangements culminating in the agency of working-class street corner society prove thus vital for the formation and reproduction of active social memory. They were taken up by various institutional experiments created either by or for working class communication, such as
- factory and workers? club canteens, in some cases constituting a veritable greenhouse of mutiny,
- workers? self-governing assemblies and committees exerting a higher degree of control on parliamentarist oblivion than simple recalling of their delegates foresaw,
- and finally the dramatic oral testimonies of an oppositional steel worker and a Jewish working class writer in the moment of a first and decisive defeat of Soviet Har?kov on 25th of March 1918.

âThe past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. âThe truth will not run away from us:â in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.â
5th thesis âOn the Concept of Historyâ by Walter Benjamin, written down just before fleeing from besieged Paris 19401.


Contribution

Producing memory is a process of life work implying highly complex social faculties. Such faculties are meaningless if they are not shared. As long as a society defines its productive capacities by division of class, the process of manufacturing memory will tend to reproduce a herd of independent minds.2 But as free association of free memories becomes a material possibility, it is bound to happen sooner or later. No authoritative demeanour of any whatever professional historian can preclude such a process of uncontrollable social creativity. Just as the process of manufacturing consent3 in general, memory that matters under class rule is earmarked by unequal access to resources in the first place. Throughout the process, we can discern a hierarchical division of work. The mass communication of its outcome undergoes a sharp control âfor essential benchmarks of Academic qualityâ. What happens when some of these limits are reversed? What becomes of a city's east-side4 memory when the west-side suddenly leaves its urban strongholds to be retaken only later by a dubious lot of self-made men pretending to be the successors of privilege historically done away with a century ago?

Characteristically enough, the role of historians in modern Bourgeois societies has hardly moved beyond its artisan egg-shells. Quite humiliatingly, it has evolved surprisingly little since its early renaissance sponsors once hewed out a niche for it.5 They needed a sting among the monstrous glacier of theologically deterministic memory reproduction confirming the old order of oppression. They rather got it from commerce and firearms. Clio remained a minor muse. Today as in the times of Machiavelli, even the most cutting-edge Bourgeois historian still works in a somewhat archaic isolation. She and he cultivate a set of atavistically individualistic research rituals. Their socially isolated memory work has to poker for doubtful favours on a saturated vanity fair. If their alchemist charlatanry does not sell, they are to return into the service of mere scholastic reproduction. To put it mildly, such an unappetising role model suggests that our work might actually be little short of superfluous for the essential reproduction of memory to keep class society going forward. Looking backward might have become our work-related obsession. But living memory, memory that matters, is made to help looking forward. It is not bound to remain as plump and petty-bourgeois with the help of imported polyester as we encounter it today on Ukrainian market places. The capricious artefact of popular memorising happens to change daily in the dialectical bonfire of material interest clashing in public spaces. Socially relevant public memory has been witnessed to change by the hour in times of historical progress when the commodity trap suddenly fails to capture the fulminate faculties of modern minds. Upper-class manufacturing of public memory can never reach the potential power of popular amalgamation based on real material needs.6 The ultimate check of modern popular memory is the gunpoint. And it remains one of the few privileges of historians to know how limited such a check might prove once the contradictions between subversive and rebellious memory strings have ripened to change the course of events.

So do we really have to fill our modest niche with elegies problematising memory itself to retain at least one last problem we can muse about freely? Currently, for every published combination of the analytic terms "historical memory" and "class society" google is able to detect a tenfold quantity combining the idea of "historical memory" with the clumsy and analytically insincere notion of "ethnic identity". Even if you set out otherwise, your material interest might by now be vested thoroughly among the nine out of ten. "Where do you think you are?" ask the protagonists in Georgi Derluguian's narration on class war in social memory in the Northern Caucasus highlands, "...in a folk dance competition?"7 Derluguian's critical faculties amalgamate a rare combination: trained in glasnost Soviet privilege, he combines a taste for empiric contradictions derived from African field-studies with some methodological achievements British Academic Marxism and a posh reverence for bold French perspective vested in the âAnnalesâ school. The outcome proves sellable as ordinary US-American fast-food, supplying e.g. the right-wing fox channel with commodity expertism on Caucasian memory during those notorious 7-seconds intervals you are allowed to talk on US TV-formats before being cut.

Leaving the realm of the anecdotic in contemporary East-West-Marxism we are well advised to mind the actual place of empirically well-informed memory in the spaces defined by transcontinental class conflict. Akram Fouad Khater does this with remarkable accuracy for the case of women migrants from Libanon to the Americas and back during the very years surveyed by this essay.8 In the course of conflictuous events, the female protagonists of his manifold narrative eventually become a part of the Western Christian middle classes and thus they have their part in shaping the outcome of the 20th century.9 This however, had been by no means predetermined, as the author points out slyly. Quite to the contrary, her evidence puts material working conditions and their biography-forming effects on memory first. Notions of class-bound reproduction of individual memory for agency in the social sphere come in to take us a step further. Looking back on the secondary checks on memory, we perceive competing concepts of nation, sexualised role models, religiosity in a secularised context of exploitation and the related monstrous collective pronoun "ethnicity" melt down curiously. They seem downsize to what they have actually been for the lives of the protagonists under scrutiny: mere matrixes of almost ludicrous transparency, adaptable to whatever the material course of class and gender struggle forced upon their life choices. Whether a woman can or cannot sustain homosocial ties of friendship outside her house is of crucial importance for the class-model she is likely to assimilate. In a similar motion towards the actual field of conflict and memory-consolidation, a Denver-based team of anthropologically informed Archaeologists has taken to excavate the material remains of the Ludlow battles in South Colorado class wars of the years 1913 and 1914. Curiously enough, deep in the US-American mid-west, digging up the bones and bullets of a long-ago working-class forming battle is not only a tax-financed pioneer research activity. Simultaneously, it has served as a learning ground for already several generations of history teachers graduating in Denver. What is state of the arts in the once Wild West is an outright no-go area within the Wild East newly recreated on the Third-World ruins of a once "Second" civilisation. Actually, the shooting on the goldfields at the banks of the Russian river Lena, far-east of Siberia, preceeded the Rockefeller murders in Colorado by some crucial months in a very similar setting. In 1917 memories of Harâkov working-class activists, this âLenâski obstrelâ was a most suggestive short-cut to their autumn 1905 experience. To be precise, the conflict in Colorado helped to check the deterioration of US-Mid West manual workers' wages during some years following their legalised shooting in 1914. On quite another scale, the violent industrial conflict of 1912 in the parallel tent towns of the Russian Far East spurred an almagamation of public memory in Harâkov and similar hot-spots of Russian industrial cosmopolitism that changed the course of world history in the 20th century. So, maybe the inquiry into memories contrary to current class rule is feasible only in cases of marginal importance? Let us probe the limits of a contrary motion, not just claim a bigger part of the cake but go for the whole damned bakery instead.


Why Harâkov, can there be a critical mass of cosmopolitan working-class memory in a forlorn provincial town among Ukrainian backwaters?

In 1912 just as in 2009, returning back to Europe from the Russian Far East, we can choose between two main destinations in the neat railway station of Vladivostok: either you go North in Europe, ie. take the train to Moscow, or you go South, ie. take the train to Har'kov. Choosing Har'kov 6 years ago, I was confident to be able to relate my reading of working-class records with that of other cityscapes in the periphery of the October Revolution throughout the 20th century: Prague and Havana.

The city of Har'kov in 1905 is the capital of a minor southern province. But it witnesses a literally breathless and discontinued industrial growth. This remarkable dynamic and the legacy of a strong class-based stance in the Civil Wars following 1905-1927 enabled the cityscape to fulfil the function of a thriving avant-garde capital for the whole of Soviet Ukraine until 1934. Already with the first upsurge of labour unrest around 1899, the civil industrial complex of Harâkov makes up a significant knot in the transcontinental network of Russian metropolis streching from Lodz throughout Siberia right to the Pacific coast, the location of a spectacular defeat of Harâkov conscripts and Harâkov weaponry during the Russan-Japanese War. Following the Crimean invasion of the 1850s, the state-sponsored artificial greenhouse conditions for fostering most advanced techniques of capitalist production on a global scale constitute an important metropolitan advantage for the town in a key position to the Southern periphery. But it is never Harâkov alone, it is its modest role in an unprecedented metropolitan network of communication preying on Russian backwaters that constitutes the making of its militant working class memory. Linked by intense railway communication of goods and people, these cities reinforce their industrialist grip on the vast rural backwaters stretching in-between them. The ruling establishment had chosen to nourish a violent industrial revolution to contain social revolution. As social unrest continued in the countryside with a distinct patriarchal pattern, the urban workforce increasingly learnt to see their task in associating to combine both social and industrial revolution. Ironically enough, the administrative measures to eliminate such visionary agency from the strategic townscapes of the boom and its long drawn-out crash from 1905-1917 actually contributed substantially to implant a social knowledge about the possible dividend of such combination within Harâkov working-class realities. Factory inspectors were installed following the British blue-print to contain unrest and accord the factory regime with state paternalism. But soon, the makers of the tools learnt to use this public institution as a pretext to make their production realities an issue of public argument. Categorical death threats and their long-drown out execution by transporting to Siberia were meant to shut down the toiling folk in their traditional ghetto within feudal society. But heeding to similar dialectics, the nationwide transportation/deportation regime supply chain needed Har'kov as an important transitory post before further forced resettlement to Siberia. Ironically enough, several generations of working-class organising drives were thus brought in by repressive measures from industrial hotspots in the West and the industrial capitals of Petersburg and Moscow, where discussions and organisational memory were in a notably higher state of alertness than in Harâkov, the South-western edge of the âRussian depth (glub Rossij)â.

Going through the more than 1000 life histories of workers from the late 19th century collected in Harâkov archives, we find that a major fraction of the initially rural all-Russian exodus reached Harâkov after suffering hunger and homelessness in other related towns monopolising the profits of the giant railway spider net, which Nekrassov precisely recorded to have one major entrepreneur: âTsar golodâ â socially engineered hunger. It was characteristically heavy industry, iron reprocessing and machine building, which constituted the crystallisation of Harâkovâs workforce and its precarious access to giant short-term concentrations of purchasing power. Before getting intrigued by the words of memoirs, which come always belated, we have to mind the payrolls of the Harâkov industrial estates. They are more eloquent about kinship ties, installing cousins and fellow-villagers in a work gang. There, we find the neatly arithmetic memorials of the general top-down stoppage on wages for a regime of arbitrary chicane. Each rouble less a week has a direct set-back on the bread-ration, the fragile back-bone of the derelict rural family economies stapled on top of one another in the dirty gold rush shanty townships on the Har?kov east-side along the Moscow prospectus. Deficiencies in complex carbohydrates are made up by sugar infusion. Living in post-perestroika working-class districts for this research, I have been able to witness the nauseatingly functional re-emergence of a quick deal of sugary water a day instead of any substantial food. Before reaching the mess of middle-class administered words, working-class memory is a system of knowing how to survive with dignity where middle-class socialisation ultimately fails. Quite characteristically, an older boom of sugar industrialization in the region, benefiting from the infamously concentrated property structure of fertile land, had enforced a first urban segregation spurred by Harâkovski Saharny Zavod. Soon afterwards, manufacturing of locomotives (HPZ â after socialisation called âInternationalâ), agricultural machinery (Gelferich-Sade â after the revolution âhammer and sickle, Sierp i Molotâ) and adjacent branches (Printing, Chemical industry) had settled into the same area. Thus Petrinski rajon and its adjacent Zuravlevski favelas became the hotspots of proletarian life in town for everyone who could not afford to move elsewhere. But being poor and being miserable is a matter of considerable difference in working class culture. So, when the Petrinski share in purchasing power within the cities economy rises following the crucial strike waves of 1916 the mode of living like the mode of production changes only by nuances until 1927. The material culture of these heavily policed townships within a town would remain pretty constant from 1905 to 1927. Going through the minute statistics of working class homes, preserved down to the laborious detail recorded by thousands of pages of accurate pencil notes compiled in the townâs statistical institutes, we can encounter precious bits of working class memory. In contrast to the collection of written working-class memory, these dry notes appear minimally streamlined to fit into written Russian. Reconstructing memory, we have to keep in mind that actually until 1917 written Russian was a definite middle-class and upper class domain. And the following decade saw more heroic effort than tangible achievement to shift this imbalance. From these minute and dry numerical notes though, we know, that Petrinski working class homes around 1927 were equipped in a definitely more than rural notion of simplicity. The number of bedsteads for example, suggests that the townshipâs working class was sleeping at average with more than three persons in one bed. The beds themselves were often bought some 20 years back with the present owners notoriously remembering their precise purchase value and the price they would fetch for them two decades later on a home sale. Although we encounter some books, sometimes of a religious character, icons of some value in some homes, the most central item of a working class household actually seems to be the equipment with spoons. Far from having always one spoon for one eater, some happen to be of iron, very rarely we find a more expensive extravagancy, silver spoons pop out of the accounts as something truly exceptional. Still in the year 1927 some working-class families in the heart of Harâkov eat exclusively with self-made wooden spoons, not failing to detail the potential resale value of each one of them. We are lucky to have this data memory associated to a much larger interest in Harâkov working people conditions and priorities. Early Soviet statistics were not the kind of backward museum memory our 2009 senses curiously reveal to be trained suppose in the spoon counting business. Statistics were the avant-garde of economic planning, the experimental battlefield of subjective and objective needs. Harâkov proletarians had few new books at home, because they were using a quickly expanding library system on a time-scale unparalleled by current reading statistics. By 1927, Harâkov workers tended to devoted more time and attention than to their domestic spoon collection to the live on the street corner10 and its fashionable extension in thriving workersâ clubs, playing amateur theatre, eating out in canteens, reading newspapers and journals and reacting to their interactive proposals. The later had the notable effect of constituting the all-Soviet fame of Harâkov?s writing workersâ community which convinced Majakovski to pay a prominent visit to the scene. Though, this former higher-class domain is being taken by storm as a result of successive alphabetisation campaigns sweeping over Petrinski back-yards, there are other memories necessary before words begin to take a meaning of material interest. Actually, the most expensive and long-living article besides the bedsteads are the fur winter dressings to support the peaks of hefty Harâkov winter frosts lowering temperatures down to a minimum of 35,6 degrees minus with a climatic January average of ?5,7. In some homes we find investment sums related to home industry, such as a sewing machine. Both are also a means of prolonging the scope of street corner life throughout the year. But this is a rare case. When we speak about manufacturing proletarian memory in this contribution, we have quite a distinct notion of material culture linked with proletarian life. Harâkov proletarians on the eve of communism are expropriated peasants, subsisting in almost empty, crowded flats in comparatively small families. They have a record mortality in relation to European average. They spend their austere life working and â no matter whether the little borrowed fortune of a sewing machine locates this work at home or not â they have to sell their labour for filling their stomachs and dressing their children against the winter cold. They have to earn on a daily basis, otherwise, they suffering is beyond words. To be precise, the fact, that they have a family background in the countryside does not alleviate the bitter economic relation of being by fact expropriated from a share in the most basic and most necessary, i.e. agricultural productivity. As statistics sum it up neatly, there is hardly ever more than a monthâs wage in a working-class household. So, migration, starting anew with minimal money and preferably during summer months starting with no shelter at all is constitutive part proletarian life memory. The fact that the majority of the 30000 Harâkov industrial workers do not leave the town despite 5 changes of frontline during Civil War, forced deindustrialization and industrialisation in adjacent parts of the country plus new prospects in small-holder agriculture reinforced by compromises of urban workersâ power with rural patriarchal subsistence is indicative of an integrative power beyond middle-class household strategy. Combined with pulling factors is a prolonged crisis of war-related heavy industry 1905-1927. Resisting on such a scale to push and pull factors is a strong indication that something else kept Harâkov workers in Harâkov. This something can obviously not be found in their homes, as in middle-class districts of the rapidly transforming townscape. Minding that every average working-class bed has more than 3 interested bodies, actually any cemetery of the town seems more attractive eg. for having sex given the strongly normative prohibitionism of a secularized, newly atheist orthodox culture, teaching socialising to be centered around mono-hetero-sexuality founding no matter how contradictory nucleus families. As cemeteries helped out in some cases, but certainly not in all, Harâkov working class social life plunged itself on the street-corners, on adjacent steppe or park landscapes, river-banks, improvised garden plots whenever the seasons temperatures would allow to socialise somehow more freely. In the long winters, the street-corner society of summertime would recreate street-corners under shabby roofs. One option were the notorious pubs, who were until the onslaught of revolutionary abolitionism strictly organized to exercise the Tsarâs business of cultivating popular alcoholism with industrial brutality for easy imperial revenue. All other alternatives were highly precarious. In the works, every movement was supervised, a police detachment was present on every factory site, militarily supervising e.g. access to telephones and the strategic acoustic factory alarm system. We have a painstaking description of the former Lithuanian-Byelorussian peasant Pokko11 at work on a metal rotary workplace in wartime Harâkov. During the whole of his long workday, he would suffer sweat and panic attacks for carrying a bunch of anti-war-leaflets under his work coat to be dealt out secretively in unwatched moments on the toilet or in moments of confusion going through the collective dressing-room. At his workplace, however, he was constantly aware to be watched, acutely fearing that one could discern the paper moving suspiciously in front of his stomach. Additionally, he was most embarrassed for the treacherous movements of his hand to his stomach to adjust the bunch once in a while. So, free association of free individuals, an essential precondition for creating communist agency, Marx had formulated before the Crimean Wars, was possible at the factory only after a commonly shared breakthrough, such as in October 1905, spring 1915 until April 1918, November 1918-June 1919, January 1920 and the following months. The violence of state repression deployed in Harâkov factories 1905 taught that such association of freed will at the workplace would have to be hidden again after each new defeat of workplace empowerment. Under autocracy and its direct heirs, the German-Ukrainian occupants of 1918 and the white terror regime in the town of 1919 (the only firing squats to extend executions to proletarian children suspected of working for the other side in Civil War), workplace association was ended with an aprupt forced entrance of military brutality. Characteristically, autonomous moving around and socializing at the factories started gradually, tentatively and was interrupted with a violent blow. In the Gelferikh-Sade works, workers took the courage to occupy the factory in the canteen, a place of comparatively freer movement fought for in longstanding hidden battles with management before. This move was counteracted12 not with rifle but with artillery fire some hours later. Execution characteristically started on the place before the factory on those workers who had resigned from the confrontation with armed capital after the first call to surrender back the production site. The photograph of the factory portal of Gelferikh-Sade played a key role in workers memory and its remanufacturing during two decades to come: a neoconservative work of imperial architecture symbolically subduing the workforce to the force of organizing will of the propertied class â destroyed by the very artillery of this class interest. The message of this photo was stronger than hundreds of leaflets who â though elaborated and distributed risking death or its Siberian derivates â could be understood by only a few. Even the later literal shooting star, the only one of 1050 working class activists who, inspired by Maksim Gorkyâs initiative to compile the history of factories (IFZ) could write an eloquent autobiography of 180 instead of the Harâkov average of bring one and a half pages of comprehensive exercise for the party archive â had enormous trouble with radical leaflets. Though, he could divine somehow that when the students used the wording autocrat (samoderzhaviec) they meant the Tsar,13 he was completely lost with the remaining content and only pretended to have read the stuff when asked by the fellow-worker who had supplied him. The photo of 1905 instead instructed everyone, analphabetic, half-literate or advanced learner, that the pretension by the moneyed class to possess the absolute monopoly to organize the progress of metropolitan industrialism was broken by their own grip to power. Those who had paid for the factory portal to stamp on every workers mind, that entering â as formerly entering a church â they are no longer free to associate and exercise their bodies and minds as they could were the same who had inspired the destruction of this symbol of their will-power.

What happened to the reproduction of proletarian memory was preceded by a similar conversion in the Communist party structures as soon as spring 1924. The drive to join the party, monopolist of social initiative in around Harâkov factories as secret police reports which were to report disturbances in the first place, document. Workers parties fostering bourgeois class interest were defeated in Har?kov discussions epitomized by the arena of the cityâs workers council. On the matters of socializing houses, banks and industry in early spring 1918 the initiative of class interest were victorious. This political hegemony continued whenever the two interventionist armies and their military policing were kicked out of the city. Hegemony means collaboration of the subdued. It is different from domination. Hegemony structures memory according to a leading tune, does not exclude polyphonic understanding. Domination works with not on memory but against memory, it induces pain and counter-memories which pretend for a completely new arrangement in the future. The post-Civil War society of Harâkov was a society of working class hegemony, though the workers took minority parts in Bolshevik party life. There were Menshevik leaflets here and there, but not the dynamics of an explosion repressed as following August 1915. The recently hyped protocols of the Upolnomochenny movement are a dubious counter indication. None of the freshly conversed bourgeois Russian historians featuring these papers can determined how their convergence in 1918 was financed, why they were so curiously lacking in social dynamic except for promoting some well-known Menâshevik front-men and why even ordinary street marches could exclude their sloganism with such an experienced and informed hostility. The Upelnomochenny debate14 of recent years is a purposefully sponsored effort of agenda setting, occupying the memory space of escalating class conflict with Social Democrat representations â an enterprise which collapsed in reality in Menshevik Georgia and its anti-revolutionary outlets co-opting workers voices to office lobbying work for a re-entry of Menshevik cadres into Soviet decision making after their triple defeat in fact, supporting the first World War mobilization and its follow-up in the misfortunate K?rensky offensive (ÐлекÑа?Ð½Ð´Ñ Ð¤ÑдоÑÐ¾Ð²Ð¸Ñ Ðе?ÑенÑкий), opposing the Brest peace treaty (interestingly enough, Trotsky continued his Mozhfrakcja stance at the very negociation table proposing neither war nor peace, later he would purposeful confuse the SR-term maximalist with his own fraction trouble in his memories from October to Brest Litovsk). Cross reading party and working-class memories we come to a crucial question which has considerable significance for the conditions of elaborating, sorting and preserving these documents in the following. Was the Russian Revolution in all its depth carried out by a party, several parties or a movement. The answer could actually be, that it was made by all three opposing forces: one party, a lot of parties and a movement. With such an elusive answer in sight, the question might well be worth more analysis than its response. So we try to subdivide it. The question of locating the political initiative in one party or several parties marks a dialectical field of hilarious tension. But labels in political strive occult the dynamics of individual interest and group interest messed up (often purposefully) by representative politics. The notion of movement seems more adequate to account for the material structures and flows needed to turn a class relation upside down. In the crucial moths starting with the breaking of silence ignited by spectacular defeats on the Polish frontline in August 1915, worker communication tends to bring forward grievances and organizational initiative which lead in the ultimate consequence to a new culture of factory assembly. These assemblies acquire hegemony over factory dynamics until at last the very front line is tied to the breath of industrial conflicts. At first strikes oscillate between economic and political demands. There is other trouble giving pretext to assemble and debate. To make workers pay for health insurance (Bolnichnykh kas) there has to be some representation, at least symbolically. So the authocraty has to allow a certain process, which is painstakingly followed by selective arrests. Arrests cannot finish a culture of workers meeting, but they can cripple the efficiency of committee work. This is a central part of workers taking power and the point where party politics enter, even if the party is following Anarchist lines of organization as the Anarcho-Communists, a formation which retained its legality until 1923 and could amalgamate many SR activists who would not want to follow the officialist left wing merging into the Bolshevik party. So, the very essence of movement, i.e. factory, living quarter and garrison committee work is permeated by party dealings. When we read accounts of working class activists, the idea of party seems very diffuse to say the least. There are affinity groups forged both in living quarters and at work. These affinity groups comprise Mensheviks in a majority of Bolsheviks and vice-versa when both fractions are already ferociously split on a national level of representation as in the post 1912 duma. Characteristically, the later Bolshevik Pokko, first Secretary of the Communist party in the strategic Petrinski working class rayon cannot even make up for many years of his autobiography whether he was in the Social Revolutionary (SR) or Social Democrat (SD) party. He was politically active within the possibilities of his increasingly self-educated consciousness. But his affinity groups (3-20), the best and still vulnerable form to protect against Police infiltration, worked much more as circles of local friends than as a party machinery. There were some elements adopted from party incursions, i.e. The exchange of comrades who got under police pressure from one town to another, contacting similar circles in different locations. But the genuine mechanics of party works are absent from working class shop floor politics. Exclusion for strategic division is unthinkable. The only reason to exclude a comrade from sharing confidence is evidently her or his compromises with the existing class rule and its policing techniques. There is a different rationale of exclusion active in working class activistsâ memories. Accounting for 30 years of his life, Pokko e.g. mentions only once that he has a wife (when comrades help her destroy papers on health insurance after an arrest in the factory, he later bemoans the loss of documentation when it turns out that inner-factory policing is unwilling to extend the accusation to civil prosecution). It is this kind of organizational history, reducing political understanding to a social mechanics strangely akin to the factory processes, which marks most of the dreariness, boredom and limitations which are so characteristic of later Soviet historical compilations allowed for public use. There is no life, no sex, no pet-keeping, no pissing on your neighbours flowers in these accounts. They are a lie. Every account of our memory is potentially a lie. The only certainty we have is death, so the obsession for body count in the revisionist retreat battles of social thought during the last two decades are but a trueist exaggeration hiding the utter confusion after the unfriendly take-over of Soviet acquisitions by Capitalist liquidators. So the truism of self-righteous body count is the formula of blurring popular memory to absurdity. In a purposeful economic crash reducing what was once second world to third world misery, there is only one last repressive measure able to create further sensation. Where all measures of economic class warfare are well known only to rob you of your life can yet make a difference. So the defamation of historic Socialism in Harâkov does not dwell upon the notorious shortcomings in material empowerment, but quite to the contrary in the out-rage, that Soviet policing took over some of the techniques of their opponents on the fronts of the most bloody Civil War ever set up in European history. No doubt, the almost tsarist conservatism of post-1923 Soviet political policing had deplorable effects on working-class empowerment, but it is certainly not the key feature to characterise the epoch. The reductionist body count business has become the bread-winning service of many former historians. Failing to become organic intellectuals in the recovery process of popular memory, they sought to join the ranks of officialdom (chinovnictvo) to administer state memory preaching. Since the deception of the so-called âorange revolutionâ, their main campaign has hooked on the topic of discontinued changes in Ukrainian agriculture (âholodomorâ).15

Quite interestingly, after the memory ventures of 1927 this picture disappeared. Now, the new management who had managed to slip into the authoritarian roles of the old, though working for a different profit redistribution scheme (which e.g. Victor Serge was to respect as revolutionary in essence even after the 1936 Moscow trials). Having marked the beginning of our time focus, we can delimit its end, 22 years later. Before diving into the bulk of memory generating social changes in-between, we are well advised to set the accounts straight for the show-down of proletarian hegemony around 1927. The 10th anniversary of the October uprising 1917, a joint Bolshevik, Anarchist and SR-maximalist effort of the time, is but an arbitrary date. The spectacular level of workers power in Harâkov collapsed in March 1918 already anticipating the advancement of the German invasion onto the townscape. This was even before Moscow directives could hamper the power exercised by the factory councils and its federation with the soldier councils at city level. In fact as soon as December 1917 this hot-spot of class-based activity with its 500 delegates mandated and possibly recalled at any time by workshops and garrisons maintained a new type of two-power situation parallel to the previous two-power system in Harâkov with the K?rensky government and Soviet empowerment, the Petrograd Conversions of factory committees, Soviet delegates, trade unions and the pretension of the Kiev rada to settle separately with the attacking German-Austrian forces. By 1927, the factory committees persisting as an organ of cooperationist mobilization were little less than a caricature of their assumption to reorganize social relations in 1917, 1918 into a Communist form of production and distribution. Yet the memory of working class victories was alive and active in memory as never before. In his half-official journal Lef (novy lef_) Majakovski remembers his 10 year odyssey fighting the old academism in the new republic in transition towards communism. He includes a memory piece from the Pacific coast and cultural work for workersâ hegemony in Vladivostok. He, as many more communist activists going in the millions, do their best for this 10th anniversary. Their written language has evolved to reflect the spoken language of 20 years of revolt and alternative organization. In Harâkov, hilarious evening meetings are organized to record stenographically the positively uncensored debates of Petrin?ski street-corner society about their own empowerment fought out prominently in the city centre now. The protocols of these meeting display a hilarious taste for contradictions and the dialectics akin to class strive. In 1927, a more impressive and more inclusive factory portal was built in Harâkov for the tractor works. The tractor works were a direct product of the 5-year-plan. But they could not be realized without mobilizing the entire proletarian work-skill and working memory of the cityscape. It was the tractor works of the then Ukrainian capital which was to ignite the phantasmagorical dream of industrializing the countryside. This dream had been failing already with hardly less sacrifice under bourgeois auspices, with the sugar boom, and was failing again. Simultaneously, to the Ukrainean steppes, the steppes of the American Mid-West were cleared of petty patriarchal small-holders, by the help of new-scale machinery.16 The hunger marches to Harâkov later on and simultaneously from the Mid-West to California were of a global making. The difference is a product of manufacturing memory from above. In Ukraine the projected âÐолодомо?Ñâ (a supposedly planned mass hunger death) gets quite a different accent when telling the story of hunger marchers from the Midwest to California. Under communism agricultural restructuring is planned hunger, under Capitalism technically the same move, yet with a worse social situation of the workforce operating the new bigger farm units, is the beginning of new hopes for the tormented families in California. The issue of structural mortality is much more complex than simple body count can capture, especially in a general setting where life-expectancy is on the rise such as in the USA and SU of the 1930s. This is no apology for any individual death due to agricultural change. There cannot be any sense made out of death as a result of structural violence. Harâkov though, was in a certain sense though the California of the Ukrainian Mid-West. But this meant, that another time, the cityscapes working-class memory, the ferment of social progress â most of it only promised not fulfilled yet, was deluded with the raw material of a last big wave of rural immigration to the town. In this remixing and settling of emigrational unrest into social unrest, a decisive coup could be made against the sense of industrial workersâ autonomy which had made the town big and important, the Ukrainian capital and the focus of industrializing rural work relations as well. By 1934, the capital function was transferred to Kiev. The extraordinary memory achievements produced in the Gorki-IFZ initiative during the same year were buried in a remake of the 1924 and 1927ff anti-Trotskyite cleansings, getting clumsier and more schematic every time. What had happened to proletarian memory then? In a remarkable dialectical text on observation compiled in these years Bert Brecht had juxtaposed two ways of driving a car.17 Not the car was a novelty at the end of our time-span under scrutiny but traffic jams. There are drivers who are anxious about their own progressing. They try to find loop-holes to pass and are set back by every misfortune to their individual progress. But this mode of driving could be alternated by another perspective, because there are drivers who manage to develop an empathy with the whole of the movement. They enjoy the flowing of traffic and see themselves as just a part of it. Harâkov proletarians had been true to their fighting memory of 1905 in the serious clashed 1915 to 1927 for social control of production and a society based on working class social qualities. They proved able stakeholders for their urban working class interests. In his book on the Russian revolution scandalizing bourgeois Poland for its daring stance on working class interests but leaving Soviet readers rather disappointed as used to other qualities of literary memory on their revolution, ?eromski18 depicts a dynamic image of Harâkov working class activists during the first years of Soviet rule in the determination of workersâ delegates, driving through the cityscape. Yet this drive was motivated by a much larger understanding. It was empathically anticipating a worldwide movement. When as a result of more systematic planning the rural working biographies of a later generation took again majority in the cityscape, those, whose urban socialization as industrial workers had begun some 50 years before and was thus replied (nasyshcheny) with memory of industrial conflict, displayed to a much greater extent than they could allow themselves take to the attitude of the second driver in Brecht?s portrait. They went on with the general move towards an egalitarian society with unprecedented affluence, letting rural subordination rituals imported to the town from freshly liquidated patriarchal relations take advantage, fill the open space, created by their fights. In a certain way, they had invited their relatives to the urban spaces they had fought to open. The two types of memory co-existed. Complementary, they form the dialectical legacy contained in the memory of Harâkov working class empowerment.

The weaponry of continued class rule in Imperial Germany, its Gajdamak folk dance competition dominated Harâkov from April-November 1918, and Imperial England, its heavily entente-sponsored Dejnekinshhina kept the working-class town in check from summer 1919 to January 1920, had incurred crucial investment failures to keep Harâkov out of Soviet rule. Facing the formation of a âSecond Worldâ, the German and British high commands of old world class rule risked and lost a lot to hew out this southern pillar of new industrial relations and make it part of their Third World, the global south, basically subsisting under their combined control until today. Astonishingly enough, they failed to yield direct profit on these investments for about 70 years. But the socially competent memory of making possible the 1917 working class hegemony of Harâkov, flattened into something reminiscent to oblivion much earlier.

As any pioneer achievement against a global back-set, its splendour of social memory shows up in its freshest decline more than in its purely symbolical triumph.

October 1927, was one of these occasions to organise public oblivion heeding to symbolical achievements. The Soviet amalgamation had subsisted for ten years while its opposing front-states, carefully pampered up by allied trust were all too noticeably drifting towards the authoritarian venture of their combined attack 1941: Finland and Hungary since 1919, Italy since 1923, Poland and coastal China1926, Germany and Japan following to take a preliminary lead in this co-ordinated ruling class effort to re-homogenise industrial relations across the two continents of the 1917 Eurasian Social Revolution. October 1927 thus was a moment of false triumph in seemingly still proletarian Harâkov. Its most sincere memory ventures were marked by this long drawn-out death of the project under the permeating pressure of a world system of persisting class rule.

The Prospects of world revolution which had ignited the exceptional courage of Harâkov workers 1917 had gone faint, the united workers party instead had grown very strong in quite a parallel move. now comprising major (wo)man-power of the former left Social Revolutionaries so indispensable for enforcing the 1927 Ukrainisation of Harâkov public life. Quite consistently, the Proletarian state had finished up with the ridiculous appendix study cell of the individualist bourgeois historian. If the unified workers party was to be a factory, as Antonio Negri tried to reinterpret Lenin in the early 1970s,19 its prominent party Institute of History (IstPart) was by no doubt its intellectual power plant. This Institute had a flamboyant Harâkov based journal (Letopisy Revolucji). In a decade of collective, working-class memory work, they had elaborated a technique of steno graphing evening meetings of proletarian agents on evolving historical memory. Quite characteristically for a street-corner society and its fine discursive understanding of dialectics, these talks never allowed for a traditionally historicist conclusion on âhow it really wasâ20 in Petrinsky rajon 1917. When the material need for such a further flattening of social memory into formalised oblivion arose, it was finally delivered not by stenographing proletarian discussion evenings but by implementing a âshort courseâ on the history of the Bolshevik party21 top-down in a process strangely reminiscent of pre-bourgeois manufacturing of history. In the heart of Harâkov party life in 1927, opinions and historically argued material interests were still clashing with a fervour reminiscent of 1917 street corner decision-making. So here is one of the newly-formed prejudices on the first defeat of Soviet power around the 25th of March 1918. While German and Ukrainian Nationalist Gajdamaki were quickly advancing on the town, a joint consensus forged in the Cityâs Workers Council by partisans of its Menshevik, Bolâshevik, Jewish Bund and Left Socialist Revolutionary fractions had dealt out the order to evacuate the industrial copper stocks of the town and some machines (in printing, locomotive and electrical machine construction) north into Soviet rule uncontested by Brest Litovsk peace arrangements. Comrade Balaban, a Harâkov worker admits in the discussion evening 1927 that âнекоÑоÑÑе ÑабоÑие оÑказалиÑÑ Ð¾Ñ Ð¿Ð¾Ð³ÑÑзки, заÑвили, ÑÑо же Ð²Ñ Ð²Ñе ÑвозиÑе, а как же Ð¼Ñ Ð±Ñдем ÑабоÑаÑÑ. Тогда нам пÑиÑодилоÑÑ ÑазÑÑÑнÑÑÑ Ð¸Ð¼, ÑÑо на ÑÑо Ð¸Ð´ÐµÑ ÑаÑпоÑÑжение ÑвÑÑе. (⦠some workers refused to load, they said, [if] you take away everything, how will we be able to [go on] work[ing]. At that point, it became necessary for us to explain to them, that this comes from a command from above.)â22 There is no lie contained in this memory effort. Only those workers of Harâkov in spring 1918, actually gave a damn about old-style orders from above. And about the instance stenographed in 1927 with the paternalistic condescence towards workers outside the party command lines characteristic of 1927 working class politics on the retreat, we have a stenogram of the townâs Soviet of the clashes accompanying the 1918 retreat. Actually, the cityâs workers council (Soviet) proved to be their very own working-class organ of organizing their non-party hegemony in town politically. So when all 4 party fractions subdividing their delegates on the townâs level soviet would vote against their material interest, and time did not allow recalling them in time, they would just send new delegates from their factory mass meetings to take over the proceedings of their organ of power. Certainly the leading Bolshevik figure in the council, elected by themselves, the stunning rhetorical Artem schooled in his Australian working-class emigration, backed up by the military power of the townâs Red Army populist Antonov (in fact his bitter rival) issued threats of heart-braking ridiculousness. He would order to shoot on every peaceful workersâ demonstration against evacuation at this moment. He would not want to hear the factory mass meeting delegates in the cityâs soviet. He would not release the two Mensheviks elected by the locomotive works for the townâs soviet from arrest in the night before the 25th March 1918. To be sure, in an earlier drive to enforce the socialization of banks houses and revolutionary army control the very workers of this factory had voted to sent 9 Bolshevik delegates alongside the 2 now arrested. But the majority they had created among their representatives would not stop them from exerting their factual power in the town once their delegates went beyond their direct mandate. So, on the morning of the 25th March the whole locomotive works,23 with almost 6000 workers the biggest factory in town and with their car (and most modern submarine) workshops crucial for the means of transport needed for any evacuation was unanimously on strike. As long as workers could use the party rivalries of the four competing groups in the Harâkov Soviet, they could make sure that their voice was heard beyond parliamentary customary proceedings. Both in the factory of Balbanov and in the locomotive works there were unanimous demands by the workforce put forward in resolutions. Not fulfilling the demands, the Soviet could not hope for ending their strike. As the first delegate speaker from Balbanovâs factory mass meeting points out, âÑезолÑÑÐ¸Ñ Ð½Ðµ еÑÑÑ ÑезÑлÑÑÐ°Ñ ÑабоÑой Ñой или иной паÑÑии, а мнение вÑÐµÑ ÑабоÑиÑ. (this resolution is not the result of work by one or another party, but the opinion of all workers.â24 The third speaker is actually known as a Bolshevik but his loyalty to the factory meeting is evidently more important than that: âвÑе маÑÑÑ ÑплоÑили на одном в ÑÐ²Ð¾Ð¸Ñ ÑÑебованиÑÑ. ÐолÑÑевиков не ÑоÑÑÑ ÑлÑÑаÑÑ, ÑоÑели аÑеÑÑоваÑÑ ÐаÑÑоÑа, ÐиÑкиÑа. Я пÑедлагал бÑ, не ÑазделÑÑÑÑ Ð½Ð° паÑÑии, ÑеÑиÑÑ Ð²Ð¾Ð¿ÑÐ¾Ñ Ð¾Ð± ÑдовлеÑвоÑении ÑабоÑиÑ. (All masses joined in unity for their demands. They do not want to listen to Bolsheviks, they wanted to arrest Pastor, Kirkish. I would propose, without dividing by party lines, to solve the question about the satisfaction of workers[â demands].)â25 Inspired by such a generally shared reverence and attention to this morningâs workersâ opinion, the fourth delegate speaker puts their very nightmare and dream into a nutshell: âÐÑли ÑолÑко ÑеннÑе меÑÐ°Ð»Ð»Ñ Ð±ÑдÑÑ Ð²ÑÐ²ÐµÐ·ÐµÐ½Ñ Ð² каком Ð±Ñ ÐºÐ¾Ð»Ð¸ÑеÑÑве, завод бÑÐ´ÐµÑ Ð·Ð°ÐºÑÑÑ. ÐÑÑавÑиÑÑ Ð±ÐµÐ·ÑабоÑнÑми ÑабоÑие вÑнÑÐ¶Ð´ÐµÐ½Ñ Ð±ÑдÑÑ Ð¸Ð´Ñи в кÑаÑнÑÑ Ð°ÑмиÑ. Ðод напоÑом ÑегÑлÑÑнÑÑ Ð²Ð¾Ð¹Ñк26 бÑдÑÑ Ð¾ÑÑÑÑпаÑÑ Ð½Ð° голоднÑй ÑевеÑ. РабоÑие ÑознаÑелÑно оÑноÑÑÑÑÑ Ðº ÑÑÐ¾Ð¼Ñ Ð¸ ÑвакÑаÑии не[ ]пÑизнаÑÑ. РабоÑие вÑнеÑли опÑеделенное поÑÑановление по ÑÑÐ¾Ð¼Ñ Ð¿Ð¾Ð²Ð¾Ð´Ñ (не одного голоÑа пÑоÑив ÑÑого не бÑло). ХаÑÑков должен оÑÑаваÑÑÑÑ Ð½ÐµÐ¹ÑÑалÑной зоной, ÑÑÐ¾Ð±Ñ Ð½Ðµ бÑло погÑомов и ÑазгÑомов; ÑабоÑие наÑÑаиваÑÑ, ÑÑÐ¾Ð±Ñ Ð¸Ð· ХаÑÑкова не бÑло вÑвезено ни[ ]копейки, ни одного гвоздÑ. ÐнаÑ, как поÑÑÑдно бежало ÐиколаевÑкий ÑовеÑ, ÑабоÑие наÑÑоÑÑелÑно ÑÑебÑеÑ, ÑÑÐ¾Ð±Ñ Ð²Ð¾Ð¶Ð´Ð¸, оÑобенно кÑайние левÑе, Ð´Ð¾Ð»Ð¶Ð½Ñ Ð¾ÑÑаÑÑÑÑ Ð·Ð´ÐµÑÑ: пÑÑÑÑ Ð¿ÐµÑеживаÑÑ ÑÑÐ°Ð³ÐµÐ´Ð¸Ñ Ð²Ð¼ÐµÑÑе Ñ ÑабоÑими. ([already] when only valuable metals are evacuated in whatever quantity, our plant will be closed. After being made unemployed workers will be forced to join the Red Army. Under the pressure of regular military forces they will retreat up into the hungry north. Workers consciously relate to this [scenario] and [therefore] reject evacuation. Workers carried a definite decision in regard to this (there was no not one dissenting vote on this). Kharâkov must remain a neutral zone so that there will be no pogroms and crushing defeats; so workers insist that from Kharkov it would not be exported neither a kopeck nor one nail. Knowing, how shamefully the Nikolaevskij council fled, workers imperatively require that the leaders, the especially the extreme Left once, must remain here: let them suffer the tragedy together with the workers.)â27 The following speakers show that the formula of workers power has indeed permeated any government over the town in an ubiquitous sense. One is from the workers within the Peoples court (âÐ¾Ñ ÑлÑжаÑÐ¸Ñ Ð½Ð°Ñ[одного] ÑÑдаâ), one from the representation of workers in trade and industrial administrative entities and one (outing himself as a party member as well, a Menshevik) from the bank workers organization. The actual result of the debate is a compromise followed by a fatal defeat of all positions voiced. So, from our newly isolated historiansâ viewpoints, we can either classify all of them as na?ve or else none. Let us try where we get if there were nothing na?ve about this Harâkov workersâ morning dream on the 25th March 1918. Their beloved town of workersâ hegemony is to remain neutral in an ongoing World War fought with its weapons and about its weapons (the lack of copper for the German army, especially their submarines, is well known in Moscow, i.e. the call from above, the only element Balbanov remembers about the development ten years later). Harâkov workers had succeeded to redistribute the added value accumulated by their highly war relevant productive activities. To produce for the frontlines in the 4th year already had saved many of them from conscription in all the deadly months before. They new precisely that resigning from this privilege, they would loose their power again. Equally, they had a distinct notion that the new political class, which had been temporarily at their service, could reconstitute its power learnt in Harâkov on a different geographical basis within revolutionary Russia. Their only vision of mobility saw them degraded to soldiers, i.e. ultimately ripped of their tools and their factory context which had constituted their material basis of empowerment during the preceding months. In the end, they lost their power differently. The little fraction of loyal Bolshevik party soldiers in the workforce evakuated tiny parts of their factories with no more than 3 per cent of the workforce in desperate transport trains under German army fire, ultimately returning to Harâkov beaten up and with nothing left in their hands. History is a treasure of possibilities. The dream of Harâkov remaining as neutral and polydiscursive as it has been from October 1917 to March 1918 and thus realizing the socialization of industry, banks and flats plus heaviest taxation of the rich could have become a reality in a slightly different context or with slightly different dynamics arising within the town. But who can memorise the full scope of such maybe utterly non-na?ve dream with social memory distorted by so many defeats in the following? Reading thousands and thousands of such stenograms more than 90 years afterwards, I retain most memorisable, the words spoken in the Soviet assembly by speakers oppositional to the red-Army backed Bolshevik block but sharing their radical class perspective in highly critical solidarity. Zhivov, is a worker from Gelferikh-Sade, the factory shelled to surrender in the revolution of 1905.28 He is recorded by his Bolshevik party enemies as a Socialist Revolutionary and Maksimalist. On 25th of March, he correctly points out that the night arrests, violating the previously agreed immunity of Menshevik delegates are in fact a âвопиÑÑим наÑÑÑением пÑав ÑовеÑа. ÐолÑÑевики Ñ Ð¿ÐµÑвÑÑ Ð´Ð½ÐµÐ¹, когда ÑÑали заÑиÑаÑÑ Ð²Ð»Ð°ÑÑÑ ÑовеÑов, на пÑакÑике оÑÑÑеÑÑвлÑÑÑ Ð²Ð»Ð°ÑÑÑ Ð»Ð¸ÑноÑÑи. (blatant violation of the rights of the Soviet. From the first days onwards, Bolsheviks when protect[ionsing real] Soviet power, practically promoted the power of [charismatic] personality.)â29 He sharply analyses among his own workmates that âв данном ÑлÑÑае ÑабоÑим клаÑÑом овладел низменнÑй инÑÑÐ¸Ð½ÐºÑ â голод [-] и ÑабоÑие ÑÑали не на клаÑÑовÑÑ ÑоÑÐºÑ Ð·ÑÐµÐ½Ð¸Ñ Ð° на ÑоÑÐºÑ Ð·ÑÐµÐ½Ð¸Ñ ÑегоднÑÑнего[ ]днÑ. (In this [specific] case working class was submitted to a low [and] unchangeable instinct - hunger [-] and workers stood not down the class point of view but on the [shortsighted] viewpoint of today's day.30â He then continues to ask, what the class-based workersâ soviet is to do when the founders leave their larger sense of class-consciousness apart on a certain day. And he draws from collective memories of past conflict solution: âÐ´Ð¾Ð»Ð¶Ð½Ñ Ð¿ÑинÑÑÑ Ð¼ÐµÑÑ Ðº ÑомÑ, ÑÑо наÑÑÑоенÑ, оÑваÑивÑее ÑабоÑÐ¸Ñ Ð¸Ð·Ð¼ÐµÐ½Ð¸Ð»Ð¾ÑÑ. (we must take measures that dispose that the mood of workers changes).31â His own party comrade, the Socialist Revolutionary Bukreev calls Zhivov back, protesting that (to his memory) the working class (he knows) cannot be bought over.
But Zhivov specifies correctly âÑ Ð½Ðµ говоÑÑ Ð¿Ñо ÑабоÑем клаÑÑе, а о паÑовозоÑÑÑоиÑелÑнÑм заводе (I do not make statements about the working class [in general], but I speak about the [specific case] of the locomotive factory)â32. And in a truly Maximalist manner, he reasons that workers power has to: âÐ´Ð°Ñ Ð²Ñе Ñо ÑÑо ÑÑебÑÐµÑ ÑабоÑий. РеÑли Ð½ÐµÑ ÑÑедÑÑва â взÑÑÑ Ð¸Ñ Ñ Ð±ÑÑжÑазии. ÐоÑом ÑабоÑие поймÑÑ ÑÐ²Ð¾Ñ ÐºÐ»Ð°ÑÑовÑÑ Ð¾ÑибкÑ. (concede all that workers demand. And if there are not sufficient means [for that] - to take them from the bourgeoisie. Then workers will understand their error in terms of class.)â33 As if to prove the fatal truth of Zhivovâs analysis that Personal cult hollows out real Soviet power, the Bolshevik frontman Artem takes up this oppositional hint in another session at that same day and promises against the right side of the workersâ council and to the manifest enthusiasm of its left that the double of the workersâ demand for advance wages will be expropriated from burgers still populating the city by force of arms. So, it is the Jewish writing worker Shtern, member of the Bund fraction in the Harâkov Soviet, who puts the most prophetic thoughts of that day into spoken Russian. He reminds about the very making of the workersâ revolution in Harâkov during the preceding six months: âÐеÑжели Ð±Ñ Ñами забÑли о наÑÑÑоениÑÑ, коÑоÑÑе бÑли на заводаÑ. Ðедавно еÑе в ÑÑÐ¾Ñ ÑÐ¾Ð²ÐµÑ ÑабоÑие поÑлали двÑÑ Ð¼ÐµÐ½ÑÑевиков и деÑÑÑÑ Ð±Ð¾Ð»ÑÑевиков. Ðде же ÑабоÑие[?] полиÑика аванÑÑÑ Ð¾ÑÑолкнÑла маÑÑÑ. ÐдеÑÑ Ð¿ÑоизоÑло недоÑазÑмение. ÐÑ Ð¾ÑибаеÑеÑÑ. ÐаÑÑÑ Ð¸Ð´ÑÑ Ð½Ðµ за менÑÑевиками. ÐаÑа ÑезолÑÑÐ¸Ñ Ð±Ñла оÑвеÑгнÑÑа. ÐаÑÑÑ Ð¸Ð´ÑÑ Ð½Ðµ за нами. ÐÑжно не закÑÑваÑÑ Ð³Ð»Ð°Ð·Ð° â они идÑÑ Ð½Ðµ за кем-Ñо ÑÑеÑÑм. ÐÑ ÑйдеÑе, но оÑÑавлÑеÑе нам наÑледÑÑво, по коÑоÑом Ð¼Ð¾Ð¶ÐµÑ Ð²ÑÑаÑÑи ÑеÑноÑоÑеннÑй ÑвеÑок. ÐÑ ÑакÑиÑеÑки ÑейÑÐ°Ñ Ð²ÐµÐ´ÐµÑе к гибели ÑеволÑÑÐ¸Ñ Ð¸ Ð¼Ñ Ð´Ð¾Ð»Ð¶Ð½Ñ Ð¿ÑедÑпÑедиÑÑ.â (Have you really forgotten yourselves about the mood, which was in the factories? Only recently, workers have sent two Mensheviks and ten Bolsheviks to this soviet council. Where are the workers [now?] The policy of adventures repelled the masses. A misunderstanding occurred here. You are wrong. The masses do not go with the Mensheviks. Our [own] resolution was rejected [as well]. The masses do not go with us [either]. It is necessary not to shut our eyes - they do not go with any third [party]. You will go away, but you leave to us the inheritance, on which a black-hundred flower [antirevolutionary fascism] might grow [as after the revolution of 1905]. Actually, you now lead the revolution to failure and it is our duty to issue a [strong] warning.â The Jewish writer Shtern warns from a point of view which was later co-opted as the Bund influx into the Unitarian Communist party. His testimony may be seen as a spark or a ferment of genuinely class-conscious memory from the rich and manifold history of working-class Harâkov. Such insight expressed in spoken words, foreboding the defeat of 1927, 1936, 1941 and 1991 with almost somnambular clairvoyance, normally do not survive changes of class hegemony. Yet, these words spoken into the panic of the first in a row of defeat lingering over the young Soviet town actually did happen to survive within a pile of stenographic pencil notes. In the hush of birthday preparations for October 1927, these notes were belatedly contracted to be finally transcribed with public money. Ironically enough, it needed the isolated digging work of a late bourgeois historian to actually put them into the public domain, 82 years later. Is there any living memory left, any memory that matters, which could relate to such hidden transcripts34?
1 Here in the rather free and slightly simplifying 2006 translation by Khazar Danm, the earlier 2001 translation by Dennis Redmond, is closer to the German wording âThe true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognisability, is the past to be held fast. âThe truth will not run away from usâ â this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicismâs picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. The true picture of the past flits by.â The German source text (âDas wahre Bild der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei. Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten. ?Die Wahrheit wird uns nicht davonlaufen? - dieses Wort, das von Gottfried Keller stammt, bezeichnet im Geschichtsbild des Historismus genau die Stelle, an der es vom historischen Materialismus durchschlagen wird. Denn es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit, das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich nicht als in ihm gemeint erkannte.â) was first published after the suicide of the author in Mimeographie, Walter Benjamin zum Ged?chtnis, Los Angeles (Institut fuer Sozialforschung) 1942, pages 1-6 in the collected works as Walter Benjamin, â?ber den Begriff der Geschichteâ, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1-2, Frankfurt/M. (Surkamp) 1991, page 695.
2 The two juxtapositions of quality within collective amalgamation of memory are described by Ludwik Fleck âCognitive Collectivesâ as opposed to Chomsky?s critique of manufactured consent. For a bibliography and introductory materials on Fleck?s philosophy, see Robert S. Cohen, Thomas Schnelle (Hrsg.): Cognition and fact - Materials on Ludwik Fleck, Dordrecht (D.-Reidel-Verlag) 1986, pages 445â457.
3 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky identify 3 major filters at the command of owners of the means of production in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York (Pantheon Books)
1988.
4 Of course the association of working class districts and the east side of a town (where the gas emissions of coal powered industrialisation reduced the life span of its poorer inhabitants) is out for commoditisation in post-orange Har?kov just as in the classic case documented by Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City, Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press) 2000.
5 Riccardo Fubini, L' umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici. Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna, Roma, Milano (FrancoAngeli) 2001 reed. 2005.
6 For the close tie between amalgamation and workers?controll compare David Montgomery. âThe Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925, New York (Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge) 1987.
7 The humorous quote on âfolk dance competitionâ is contextualised with the longue-dur?e of regional class conflict in the third chapter of Georgi M. Derluguian,
Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus
A World-System Biography, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2005.
8 Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home, Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London (University of California Press) 2001.
9 Analysing the historical filters of a âmiddle classâ hegemony in the making, Chad Bryant, âWhose Nation?: Czech Dissidents and History Writing from a Post-1989 Perspectiveâ, in: History & Memory - Volume 12, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2000, pages 30-64.
10 The notion is key sociological classic of participatory observation: William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, Chicago (University Press) 1943.
11 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 445.
12 Discussing the showdown at Gelferikh-Sade with a different priority Michael F. Hamm, âOn the perimeter of revolution: Kharkiv's academic community, 1905â, in: Revolutionary Russia, Volume 15, Issue 1 June 2002 , pages 45 â 68, here 54-60.
13 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 445: list 13.
14 ÐмиÑÑий ÐоÑиÑÐ¾Ð²Ð¸Ñ Ðавлов. РабоÑее оппозиÑионное движение в болÑÑевиÑÑÑкой РоÑÑии. 1918 г. СобÑÐ°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÑполномоÑеннÑÑ ÑабÑик и заводов. ÐокÑменÑÑ Ð¸ маÑеÑиалÑ, ÐоÑква (ÐздаÑелÑÑÑво РоÑÑийÑÐºÐ°Ñ Ð¿Ð¾Ð»Ð¸ÑиÑеÑÐºÐ°Ñ ÑнÑиклопедиÑ) 2006.
15 On 24th September 2008, the United Nations? Human Rights Council witnessed the official withdrawal of resolution A/HRC/9/L.4 âRemembrance of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraineâ by the governmental representative of Ukraine and the one and only Western supporter of the aborted resolution, the present-day monarchical feudatory of Monaco.
16 The non-fiction accounts by Steinbeck from the 1930s in the United States have much of the materials produced by two decades of official state research into âDeath by Hungerâ in Har?kov. âThe county hospital has no room for measles, mumps, whooping cough; and yet these are often deadly to hunger-weakened children. And although we hear much about the free clinics for the poor, these people do not know how to get the aid and they do not get it. Also, since most of their dealings with authority are painful to them, they prefer not to take the chance. This is the squatters' camp. Some are a little better, some much worse. I have described some typical families.â cited from Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J Benson (editors). From Of Men and Their Making: The Non-Fiction Of John Steinbeck, London (Penguin) 2002; compare James N.Gregory "Dust Bowl Legacies: the Okie Impact on California, 1939-1989." California History 1989 68(3), pages 74-85.
17 âTwo Drivers Mr. K, asked about the approach of two theatre directors, compared them as follows: ?I know a driver who has the traffic regulations in his fingertips, obeys them, and is able to use them to his own benefit. He is skilful at racing forward and then maintaining a normal speed again, going easy on the engine, and thus he makes his way carefully and boldly between the other vehicles. Another driver I know proceeds differently. Even more than in his own route he is interested in the traffic as a whole and he regards himself as a mere particle of the latter. He does not take advantage of his rights and does not make himself especially conspicuous. In spirit he is driving with the car in front of him and the car behind him, with constant pleasure in the progress of every vehicle and the pedestrians as well.?â in: Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner [Translated by Martin Chalmers] San Francisco (City Lights Books) 2001, page 55.
18 Stefan ?eromski, Przedwio?nie, Warszawa, Krak?w (Wydawnictwo Mortkowicza), 1925.
19 Antonio Negri, Trentatr? lezioni su Lenin. Roma (Editore Manifestolibri) 2008. The Spanish edition curiously cites the Lenin quotes essential to the argument in the Italian edition of some selected (not the collected) works. Facilitating at least access to Lenin?s original writings, though the editor does not care for too much to refer to tham beyond the evident label value involved: Lenin, V. I. and Slavoj Zizek (Afterword, Editor, Introduction). Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917. New York (Verso) 2004.
20 The founding doctrine of historicism as included in the polemic "You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." From âZur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber (critique of modern historical writing)â, in: Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen V?lker von 1494 bis 1514. Berlin 1824.
21 Effective only 10 years later as ÐоÑÐ¸Ñ ÐиÑÑаÑÐ¸Ð¾Ð½Ð¾Ð²Ð¸Ñ Ð¡Ñалин, ÐÑÑоÑÐ¸Ñ ÐÑеÑоÑзной коммÑниÑÑиÑеÑкой паÑÑии (болÑÑевиков). ÐÑаÑкий кÑÑÑ, Moskva 1938.
22 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 23, 1ist 37. 1927 âÑÑеногÑамма заÑÐµÐ´Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ â веÑÐµÑ Ð²Ð¾Ñпоминаний гÑÑÐ¿Ð¿Ñ ÑÑаÑÑников пеÑевоÑоÑе {окÑÑбÑÑÑкой ÑеволÑÑии} и ÑвакÑаÑии из ÑаÑÑкова б 1917 и 1918 г.г. (Stenograpraphic record of the memory evening with participants in the turning over of government {overwritten with : October Revolution} and evacuation from Harâkov in the years 1917 and 1918.â
23 Producing about 20% of the entire Imperial Russian locomotive machinery.
24 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, 1ist 188. Stenograpic record of 25th March 1918.
25 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 189.
26 Tkachenko still sees the Red Army_ as an irregular army.
27 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 189.
28 Donald J. Raleigh has been able to researched the fate of the 10% independent-minded Har?kov âBolsheviksâ who accompanied the factory to its evacuation destiny in Saratov. Summarising their Saratov stance, he relates with an indicative disinterest to detail for this case, that they ârefused to subordinate themselves to the soviet, and instead established their own ?republic? a term that had become a metaphor for the voluntary nature of all power relationships⦠discord between Bolsheviks from Ukraine and their local comrades resulted in Moscowâs intervention in Saratov affairsâ, cited from Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922, Princeton (University Press) 2002, pages 189, 190, quote from page 190. .
29 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 157.
30 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 158.
31 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 158.
32 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 158.
33 DAHO (Harâkov) fond Part. 10, opis 1- delo 240, list 158.
34 Compare the extensively subjectivist stance opening the debate on âhidden transcripts in James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Newhaven (Yale University Press) 1990.
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