In February 2023, the Make Tattoo Not War (MTNW) campaign supported the activities of the Assembly project in Kharkiv, Ukraine with the amount of 15,000 CZK. It may seem like a relatively small amount, but as the following information shows, for some working people in Ukraine it is equal to several months’salary.
Since the beginning of the war, the Assembly project has participated in actions of solidarity and grassroots resistance in bombed locations under dramatic circumstances. The money obtained from the beneficial tattoo was mainly used to support the community heating chamber.
„As for the community heating, it is a large hallthat can accommodate about 30 to 50 people. Although nature was kind to us this winter, some people still used our services and were comingin order towarm up,“say the project coordinators and add at the same time: „Fortunately, the Ukrainian energy system was not completely destroyed and the remaining energy networks were able to adapt to the new conditions. Electricity consumption in the economical systemalso fell sharply due to the shutdown of large industrial enterprises. If in the autumn they had tried to restart after each outage, now it seems that they have stopped completely. So it turns out that the need for a community firechamberis not as big as we thought. Nevertheless, your kind support helped us incredibly, and we tried to spend all the funds as economically as possible, so that part of them would remain for other areas of activity.“
Just a few days after this report, we received an up-to-date message from Kharkiv. „Kharkov again fell into a complete blackout. Around 2 to 3 o’clock last night 11 guided missiles hit the civilian infrastructure of the city again. It was the first time in over a month. A few hours ago, the light began to slowly return. Fortunately, spring is already coming and today it was already +12°C, so no one felt the lack of heat too much.“
Assembly maintains a critical attitude towards the Ukrainian state and its governing bodies. It also provides information to the workers and criticizes the local bosses who use the war situation to further exploit the workers. Assembly describes the current social situation as follows: „The average age of the population here is about 50 years old, if not more. There are only a few schools but no other educational facilities. But even in the less depressive areas of Kharkiv, people now largely survive on humanitarian aid, remittances from abroad and small spontaneous trade. Therefore, we cannot yet talk too much about the class struggle of the working class in the city. However, Kharkiv, the adjacent district of Osnova and other surroundings have a rich history of workers’struggles, which we reported on in our article.
Working conditions are not much better now compared to 1919. For example, Osnova is still the site of a railway depot, where working conditions are as terrible as in World War I (at best, the salary is 12,000 hryvnias per month (300Euros), you have to live on the roadin a trailer and eat terrible porridge, you work 12 hours a day, you never get a day off, they give yougloves twice a month, although according to the standards they must be available every day. If you work directly in Kharkiv, the salary will not be more than 7500 hryvnias (187 Euros), but for this money you will be hammering and crowbarringall day long). Interviews with locals who come to us to warm up and have to face harassment from the authorities are also interesting. Policemen and soldiers regularly stop buses and distribute summonses to conscripts. Sometimes the men are simply taken away. We have repeatedly reported on our website how people resist these practices.“
In Czech such information is provided, for example, by the Chronicle of Resistance website and the Antimilitarist Initiative [AMI]. The Kharkiv Assembly project is also a portal for informal journalism and various autonomous initiatives in Kharkiv. It works on the creation of original content about events in different parts of the city, about which the local media do not report. The project also organizes a campaign to restore the local community in the shelled districts of Kharkiv. You can also support this activity through fundraising.
We would like to thank to all those who got a beneficial tattoo as part of the MTNW campaign and who thus supported the people affected by the war in Kharkiv. The Make Tattoo Not War campaign is still in motion.