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May Day Rally - 'A Visit to Russia'
6 May 2019
Redhills, Miners’ Hall, Flass Street, Durham, DH1 4BD
In collaboration with the Durham Miners’ Association and the City of Durham Labour Party, Durham University’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures (Open World Research Initiative; Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community project) contributed to the 2019 May Day celebrations with a programme of activities exploring historic cultural links between mining communities in Britain and Russia, Ukraine and the USSR. The event took place at the historic Redhills Miners' Hall in Durham.
Exhibition
From Wales to Ukraine: The Hughesovka Story
The exhibition, curated and introduced by Dr Victoria Donovan (University of St Andrews) and artist Stefhan Caddick, explored a little-known historical episode that links the mining communities of the South Wales Valleys with the pitmen of the Ukrainian steppe. In 1868, a Welsh mining industrialist, John Hughes, together with a team of around a hundred Welsh miners set up a metallurgical plant and railway works in the coal and iron-ore rich territories of Donbass, in what was then southern Russia. Over the next decade, the migrant workforce built eight blast furnaces, collieries, mines, brickworks and rail lines. The diasporan community established social and cultural institutions – a church, a school, and a hospital – but also more whimsical imitations of British life such as tearooms, tennis courts and amateur dramatics clubs. Over time the migrants assimilated Russian traditions and culture: they learned to read and write the language (particularly second and third generation migrants, some of whom were fluent in Welsh, English, and Russian), they celebrated Orthodox holidays, gave their children Russian names, and entered into romantic affairs and even marriage with Russian men and women. The new town bore the name of its Welsh founder – Hughesovka (or Iuzovka, as it was pronounced in Russian).
Film
Dziga Vertov, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931)
The exhibition display included the screening of the 1931 film Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass, one of the Soviet Union’s first sound films, directed by Dziga Vertov, the renowned pioneer of Soviet avant-garde documentary filmmaking. The film, produced in celebration of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan (1928-32), has been described as the director's love letter to the heavily industrialised landscapes of eastern Ukraine. The Donbass region, which is particularly rich in coal and a major mining area since the nineteenth century, was one of the focal sites of accelerated industrialisation in the early-Soviet period, hence Vertov’s choice of location and his emphasis on the imagery of coal and mining. The film’s original musical score, which incorporated the sounds of industrial machinery and labour, had received praise for its experimental originality. However, in November 2016, the Welsh musician Simon Gore was commissioned to write, record and perform a re-scoring of the film as part of a public engagement festival in the South Wales Valleys, commemorating historic labour migration from Wales to Ukraine. At the present exhibition, Vertov’s Enthusiasm was screened with this new soundtrack by Gore.
Photography
Aleksandr Chekmenev, Donbass. 1994-2015
In juxtaposition with Vertov’s celebration of the industrial enthusiasm of the Soviet 1930s, also displayed were the powerful black and white portraits of the mining communities of post-Soviet Donbass by the Ukrainian artist Aleksandr Chekmenev. Chekmenev was born in 1969 in the city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Since the late 1990s he has been working as a freelance photojournalist and his work has been published in prestigious outlets, such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, Time Lightbox, New Yorker PhotoBooth, MSNBC, Quartz, The Guardian, Vice Magazine and Libération. His photography offers a uniquely intimate insider view of post-industrial transitions experienced by the coal-mining region in which he grew up.
Poetry
Paul Summers, arise! & Andy Croft, The Sailors of Ulm
Paul Summers is a widely published Northumbrian poet and founding co-editor of the ‘leftfield’ UK magazines Billy Liar and Liar Republic, and has also written for TV, film, radio, theatre and collaborated many times with artists and musicians on mixed-media projects and public art. His latest collection of poetry is straya, published by Smokestack Books in April 2017. Other collections include: arise!, primitive cartography, union (new & selected poems), Three Men on the Metro (with Andy Croft & WN Herbert), big bella’s dirty cafe, cunawabi and the last bus. At the event Paul read from arise!, a book-length poem commissioned for the 2018 Big Meeting. See also the filmpoem Arise! (by Carol Joyce, pased on Paul's poem).
Andy Croft has written and edited many books, including Out of the Old Earth (autobiography of Harold Heslop), Red Letter Days, Comrade Heart, A Weapon in the Struggle, Red Sky at Night (with Adrian Mitchell) and After the Party. His books of poetry include Ghost Writer, 1948 (with Martin Rowson), Three Men on the Metro (with WN Herbert & Paul Summers), A Modern Don Juan (with NS Thompson et al.), Letters to Randall Swingler and The Sailors of Ulm. He curates the T-junction international poetry festival in Middlesbrough, runs the Ripon Poetry Festival and edits Smokestack Books. Andy read from several of his published collections as well as the forthcoming The Sailors of Ulm.
Language Taster
МИР, ТРУД, МАЙ: World, Labour, May
An introduction to the Russian language in honour of the International Workers’ Day.
In a 30-minute hands-on session, Polina Kliuchnikova from Durham University’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures introduced participants to the Russian alphabet, teaching them how to decode Russian script, enabling them to start reading Russian words and phrases, giving them a taste for the Russian language more generally. In honour of the May Day celebrations, this introduction to Russian was based on slogans used in traditional celebrations of the International Workers’ Day in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. The activities were aimed at those curious about the language and were designed for complete beginners (with no prior linguistic, cultural or historical knowledge is required).
Talk
A Durham Miner’s Wife Visits the USSR in 1926
Kath Connolly, member of the local Education 4 Action group of enthusiastic volunteers with a shared mining heritage, who work with schools and the local community to develop education programmes in the historic Durham Miners’ Hall, gave a talk about Annie Errington, a Sacriston miner’s wife and Labour activist, who was elected to represent the Durham mining community on a nineteen-strong delegation of the Miners Federation of Great Britain to the Soviet Union during the 1926 Lockout, to raise awareness of the desperate plight that mining families experienced during the months-long action, to thank the Soviets for their support, to seek further help, and to discover what life was like in post-revolutionary Russia.
Panel
Remembering Harry Heslop
In 1926, the former South Shields coal-miner and trade union activist Harold Heslop (1898-1983) became, overnight, a Soviet writer. The manuscript of his first novel, on the theme of mining in the English north, having been rejected by a British publishing house, was accepted in the USSR and published in Russian translation under the title Pod vlast’iu uglia (‘Under the Sway of Coal’). Heslop’s next two novels were similarly embraced by the Soviet literary establishment, translated and published as part of the Soviet project of developing a body of international literature that served the cause of the revolution.
In the autumn of 1930, Heslop travelled to the USSR as one of two members of the British delegation attending the conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW), which assembled in Kharkov in eastern Ukraine in what was becoming one of the USSR’s major industrial centres. After the conference, which included the celebration of the anniversary of the October Revolution and a trip to Dneprostroi (at that point a giant industrial construction site, the epitome of early-Soviet industrialisation, where Heslop experienced ‘admiration next to awe’), he went to Moscow, where, on the suggestion of the Soviet authorities, he attended the notorious Industrial Party Trial (Nov-Dec 1930) – one of the early Stalinist show trials, at which a number of Soviet scientists and economists were convicted of plotting against the government.
The panel – introduced and chaired by Professor Alastair Renfrew, Head of English at Durham University – included two talks: by Elena Ostrovskaya (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) who in her paper ‘Harold Heslop and the USSR: A Romance in Letters’ spoke about Heslop’s relationship with the USSR and the Soviet people, and his visit to the country in 1930, based on her extensive research of Heslop’s correspondence with different people and institutions in the USSR; and by Andy Croft, who in his talk titled ‘Harry Heslop: A Major Miner Writer’ spoke about meeting with Harry Heslop, editing Heslop’s autobiography Out of The Old Earth and reading Heslop’s novels in the context of other working-class writers from the 1920s and 1930s, especially those from the coalfields.