Repair Together. Revival of the Toloka

Oleksandra Daruga
author

June 2023, a village in northern Ukraine, the ruins of the House of Culture. Only the "skeleton" of the building survived the shelling, but it is enough to understand: The House of Culture looked like a cake in the style of Soviet neoclassicism. Stalin adored such "architectural excesses", so in his time, lavishly decorated public institutions were built in cities and on the periphery, despite the absurd contrast with authentic rural buildings.

The remains of the House of Culture in the village of Yagidne (Chernihiv region) © Polina Polikarpova

Young people scattered among the rubble, sorting through the debris, dismantling the remains of the walls, and throwing the garbage away. A group of people with hammers are cleaning the surviving bricks from glue residue. Recid and Vitalii Shevchenko, famous Ukrainian DJs, are playing b2b on vinyl 20 metres away. The hammerers are trying to beat the clots of mortar to the rhythm of the set.

The young people are dressed appropriately for the situation: sweatpants, yoga uniforms, or torn and washed clothes that are no longer a pity. But the details - glitter on their cheeks and eyelids, neon bananas and carbines, leopard scarves on their heads - indicate that this team of communal workers has arrived in the village across the street from the backyard K41, the capital's most famous techno club.

Yagidne village (Chernihiv region) © Polina Polikarpova

Suddenly, locals come out onto Druzhby Street, which leads to the cinema. About 20 residents of Yahidne village head towards the ruins, some of them carrying pitchforks and shovels. Several cleaners notice the delegation and come out to meet them, anticipating a conflict.

The villagers stop a few metres from the BC yard and watch the work on the ruins. They lean on pitchforks and shovels to stand comfortably. After about 10 minutes, one of the women breaks the silence. "Well, have you seen it?" she says to her husband, "Let the children work, we have to go. Following the couple, the rest of the delegation begins to leave. The cleaners breath out a sigh of relief.

How I first came to the Repair Together toloka

The scene is too artistic to be true, but I can assure you that I saw it with my own eyes. The village of Yahidne is a place where the russian military behaved particularly cruelly. It was here that 350 Ukrainians were locked in a 197 m² school basement for three weeks; the elderly were dying of suffocation, the names of the dead were written on the wall, and a calendar was kept there.

School basement, Yagidne village © Pavlo Yuz

The glitter-covered dancers are volunteers who have been working to rebuild Chernihiv Oblast for over a year. Almost every weekend they come here from Kyiv to clear the destroyed facilities (cleaning) or build new houses on the site of fires (construction). This format of free group assistance in Ukraine is called "toloka". The Repair Together social organisation provides the volunteers with a two-way transfer and meals, coordinates their work and arranges a tent camp for the night.

Tent town on Kupala toloka © Mykyta Abramov

Volunteers' leisure time is a separate concern of the organisers. The cultural programme is mainly built around music, but it is not limited to this: they organise excursions, master classes, yoga practices, and quests.

I had been planning to join Repair Together for more than six months. The organisers of the event I finally came to had a "lounge" theme. I didn't understand what kind of leisure time awaited me, and to be honest, I wasn't interested. I was going to the Toloka with the thought that I was finally going to help someone, and it would definitely help me.

The healing effect of a shovel on the mental health

Doing something with your own hands, if not with the russian military, then at least with the consequences of their atrocities, is the dream of many civilian Ukrainians. At the end of May this year, I registered for the toloka in a chatbot, and at 8am on Saturday morning I arrived at the collection point, from where several buses were taking volunteers to Chernihiv region. Over the weekend, they planned to clean up several sites in the village of Baklanova Muraviyka, and construction was underway at three locations in the village of Lukashivka. The toloka participants were divided into groups, each of which was responsible for a separate task and had to disembark at a separate bus stop.

I disembarked at the moment of rising at 7 am on a Saturday morning, and I didn't even try to figure out what exactly I was supposed to do now. I decided to just follow the lead of the nice girl in the next seat.

We were the last ones to get off the bus in the middle of a quiet country road. It was 11 am, it was hot, and road dust was settling around us. At the same time as the mosquitoes, I was being bitten by midges, which had become unprecedentedly abundant this year due to the high water on the Desna. They surrounded me in a continuous buzzing cloud, so I literally ran to the nearest house.

Inside, other volunteers were changing into their work clothes. I noticed a table generously laid out with a strange menu: pancakes, green onions and garlic, boiled potatoes, finely chopped bacon, jam and sour cream, and homemade liqueur. "Are you thirsty, daughter?" a woman who was obviously the hostess asked me. That's how I met Granny Nadia.

Our object was a courtyard, in the centre of which four brand new walls made of gas blocks shone white. My first day in Toloka was at the Velyke Divnytstvo (Big Girlhood). This special project is designed to combat gender stereotypes by visually refuting them on a construction site. Only women do any work here.

Volunteers of "Velyke Divnitstvo" in the yard of grandmother Nadia © Mykyta Abramov

The life story of Nina, the owner of the house, is also an example of remarkable emancipation: she raised two sons on her own, earned money by running a small business reselling cheese and vegetables from Lukashivka in Chernihiv, bought the only grocery store in the village, and wanted to develop her business further and transport food to the city in larger quantities. Two months before the full-scale invasion began, Nina took out a loan for a minibus. However, Russian artillery adjusted this business plan: the shelling destroyed both the car and the house. Nina and her children were lucky to escape the fire unharmed.

Before the day in toloka, I was so ignorant of construction that I couldn't tell the difference between scrap and crust. To be more precise, what I thought was a crowbar turned out to be a crust; what turned out to be a crowbar I had never seen before. However, that day's task involved working with a shovel, a familiar tool even to me. I had to dismantle the remains of the porch of the old house and dig a 30 cm wide and 80 cm deep trench for the foundation.

"Velyke Divnitstvo" knits the reinforcement, preparing for the pouring of the armor belt at the facility © Mykyta Abramov

Because of the ubiquitous flys, he had to work with a mesh bag over his head. The air warmed up to 30 degrees. Calluses appeared on my palms. The phrase "I can't do it anymore" kept repeating in my head like a mantra. But the girls around me, as unaccustomed to hard physical labour as I was, were laughing and swearing and kept digging. And I continued with them.

Around 7pm, we wrapped up our work and went to Baklanova Muraviyka. The interior of the rural BC resembled the scenery of a Wes Anderson film: pastel pink panels on the walls, a pale blue ceiling, colourful lamps, embroidered towels and a large portrait of Taras Shevchenko. The design was beautiful and absurd, just like the whole previous day.

I, a pale, asthenic child brought up in the city, was in a real village for the first time, and I even did something useful for this village. I was delighted with the collective work. I learnt that sweat could not drip, but literally flow down my body like a stream.

It was getting dark, a large bonfire was being lit in the centre of the lawn in front of the cinema, and laughter was coming from everywhere. Someone began to play the ukulele melody of "Neba" by Odyn v Kanoe. I looked up and was speechless: it was the most starry sky I had ever seen in my life. That was the end of my first day at the toloka.

How toloka was invented and reinvented

For centuries, one-time group work - the "toloka" - has been used to quickly solve the problems of individual community members. Tolokas were used to build a house for a young couple, rebuild the homes of fire victims, and solve public needs, such as building schools or hanging heavy bells in a church. The work was "free, but for wages", meaning that the participants and the owner had an unwritten contract: we help you, and you will help each of us if the need arises.

Rave Toloka © Pavlo Yuz

The owner usually fed his volunteers and provided them with leisure activities. When they built clay houses, the kneading of the material was accompanied by songs and "barefoot dancing". Sometimes, musicians were hired to play at the end of the workday to "make the house cheerful".

The custom was widespread in Ukraine at least until the mid-twentieth century, and after the Second World War almost all villages were rebuilt by collective labour. However, the USSR changed the traditional culture of farming in the Ukrainian countryside, and forced collectivisation discouraged villagers from doing anything else collectively. The custom was forgotten, but since the beginning of russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has made a powerful comeback.

On 2-3 April 2022, russian troops liberated the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. The very next day, a group of friends from the capital went there to reconnoiter. Previously, all of them had been involved in various types of volunteering, but separately and haphazardly. This time, 7 "hipsters from the capital" tried to help in a quality way, and this is how the Repair Together organisation and its main tool, the "toloka", came into being.

The village of Lukashivka became the "base" of Repair Together through a combination of accidents. One of the most important was the granny Nadia. The 64-year-old woman came on her own initiative to meet the volunteers and treat them to her signature pancakes, so that she could stay in the organisation's life forever to help. Nowadays, she is considered a legendary character among the volunteers, quoted, her recipes written down and passed on.

The village of Lukashivka, where the granny Nadia lives and where Repair Together is actually based, was home to just over 500 people before the invasion. During the three weeks of Russian occupation, 12 residents were killed and countless houses were destroyed or damaged. The Church of the Ascension, an 18th-century architectural monument, now looks like it has been long forgotten, left to the will of time. In fact, until 20 March 2022, the church was still in operation, its building intact and its walls festively whitewashed.

The first few Tolokas took place in the village shortly after its liberation, and although the number of volunteers grew each time, the overall atmosphere in the village remained depressing.

A specific event changed everything. Maria Kvitka, a folklorist, singer and winner of The Voice 12, came to the Toloka as a volunteer, but after cleaning up, she decided to sing for everyone. The short impromptu concert made such an impression on the residents of Lukashivka that Repair Together decided to make every next volunteer event a cultural event as well. If Repair Together is a wall, then rebuilding Chernihiv region is a brick, and music, dancing and other leisure activities are the building glue. Of course, a pile of bricks looks like a wall even without mortar, but is it strong enough?

How to "legitimise" joy in times of war: A rave toloka

Repair Together's rave tolokas received the most media coverage, although the team organised this format with great caution for the first time. "It was July 2022, and Kyiv was only slowly recovering from the siege and occupation of the Kyiv region. It was not the right time to bring raves back to the city," recalls Dasha Kosiakova, Repair Together's communications manager. "We were looking for a way to combine the pleasure of live performances by our favourite DJs with a clear conscience, and that's how we came up with the idea of holding a rave-style toloka.

We understood that this format might seem unethical to some, and we were preparing for crisis communication, but it was not needed."

House of culture in the village of Ivanivka (Chernihiv district) Rave Toloka © archive Repair Together

The rave toloka became a resounding success, which resulted in articles about Repair Together by The New York Times, Dazed, Washington Post, and BBC. Events of this format have been repeated regularly since then, mostly in destroyed Houses of Culture. Since the sets are played directly during the cleaning process, only large venues with 200+ volunteers have enough work to do are suitable for rave events.

This year, the organisers have come up with a way to make the clean-up of the ruins more sustainable: volunteers do not throw away the fire-resistant bricks that have survived the fire, but set them aside for reuse. The rhythm of the pallets being filled with material for the new houses is set by famous Ukrainian DJs: Nastya Vogan, Recid, crepaque, Seba Korecky, Ready in LED.

A singing building society that not everyone likes

Music once brought the friends who created Repair Together together, so their love of music and cultivating music around them is only natural. The co-founders of the organisation, Dasha Kosyakova (Dasha Joint) and Oleksandr Kuchinsky (The Big Kuchinsky), are DJs, and they played their first sets for the volunteers. Rapper Oleksandr Chuprynsky was an ordinary volunteer at first, and eventually took over responsibility for managing all the cultural events of Repair Together. He confessed his love to the volunteer tolokas in a track, and the organisation got its own anthem. Ihor Zadorozhnyi, a d'n'b fan, vinyl-only DJ and co-founder of the Dirty Dog festival of contemporary street music, recently became the executive director of the Big Girl.

Raves are just one of the many music formats that are welcome at the toloka. The event team comes up with solutions for each, builds stages and develops set designs from pallets, trailers, buckets, shovels. And now saxophonist Andrii Barmalii is performing among fields of rye, buckwheat and pumpkins, avant-garde band DakhTrio is playing a premiere performance based on the poems of Pavlo Tychyna in a barn, among sacks of potatoes, and Ukraine's most popular rapper Alyona Alyona closes this year's Toloka season with a performance in the House of Culture in Baklanova Muraviyka (the very hall with coloured ceilings and a portrait of Shevchenko that impressed me on my first Toloka).

Musical performance by Dakh Trio "Tychyna: the phenomenon of the day" in the hangar, Lukashivka village © Mykyta Abramov

And that's what Repair Together is sometimes criticised for - the concerts, the passionate dance floor moves, the glitter and the smiles. For turning volunteering into an enjoyable experience that you want to relive again and again. There is no right way to cope with war, so I understand the Ukrainians for whom other people's joy becomes an irritant. I myself am one of those who finds opportunities for joy despite dark times. From a medical point of view, this way we have a better chance of surviving these dark times.

85% of everything that russia has destroyed or damaged in Chernihiv Oblast is housing. 1.5 years ago, the volunteers decided not to wait for centralised decisions and funding, but to take what they could with what they had. In the year since the de-occupation, the state has restored only 10% of residential properties, focusing its efforts on social and critical infrastructure. Meanwhile, the capital's hipsters have cleaned up several dozen ruins, and this month they are completing the construction of 2 buildings, with 11 more in the process of construction.

When the first tolokas took place, it was unclear who they helped more: the locals in terms of practical benefits or the toloka workers in terms of psychological benefits. Now it's clear that there is no point in opposing them, as they are parallel processes, and everyone wins. Here is the story in conclusion.

Around my 10th day of the toloka, the band Nazva played for the volunteers. The location was a cinema in Ivanivka, which had been seriously damaged but cleaned up by Repair Together. That day, I was very tired at the construction site, I knew nothing about the band, and at first I decided to wait for the concert outside. But the music was reaching me, these were Ukrainian folk songs in a modern arrangement, and around the third one I couldn't resist going inside. The duo on stage was so invested in their performance that sweat was literally dripping from their foreheads. Volunteers and residents of Ivanivka danced, some of them even barefoot.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, I have had the feeling that I was reliving the worst day of my life over and over again, and that every good experience I have is still incomplete. That evening in Ivanivka, I realised for the first time that this feeling had passed, that I hadn't even noticed how I had escaped from the groundhog day thanks to Repair Together. Against the backdrop of burnt walls and empty window openings, the BC danced in three circles, and this frantic celebration felt like the best possible revenge on those who wanted to destroy us.

P.S.

Foreigners who want to rebuild Ukraine together with Repair Together can join the international volunteer camp Inbut, a new initiative of the social organisation. In the summer and autumn of 2023, Inbut built "boxes" of future homes for 10 families. The camp will resume in spring 2024, and you can follow the news on the Repair Together’s Instagram.

Oleksii KarpovychFebruary 25, 2024Comment