Bicycle Mobility in Ukraine (1890-1990)
Research Project | 2 Project Members
Cycling has played an essential role in daily life, commute, and material culture of Ukraine. In many of its areas, this has been the only affordable means of mechanical transport throughout the XX century. With a bike, people traveled to work, transported goods, and made new contacts in distant areas. The state managed the distribution of bicycles and used it at war. Nevertheless, the visions of modernizing the country focused on motorized vehicles. Despite its ubiquity, the bicycle got often discarded as a childish toy. First of all, my book project aims at making visible diverse historical experiences of using the bike for transport. From the time when bicycles appeared on the streets of Eastern Europe, the social profile of cycling and its intended use had changed dramatically. In my book, I would like to show how cycling originated as an act of conspicuous consumption by the Imperial elites in the Habsburg Monarchy and Russian Empire, and then gradually turned into a tool to make ends meet in the Socialist economy of peasants and workers. The book will be sensitive to gender, age, and ethnic aspects of cycling, trying to answer the critical questions of who cycled and for what purposes. Second, I would like to present cycling as a social construction . State authorities and political activists, traders, and consumers engaged in the process of debating aspects of cycling far before the local society learned to produce it. Although the first bicycles were imported together with new ideas of bodily conduct and culture of leisure, the local community appropriated the new commodity in its own ways. The state regulated traffic, taxed the cyclists, and regulated activities of the cycling associations. In turn, the users of the bicycles lobbied their own solutions for the set-up of public space. Using examples from the wartime and interwar period, I will show how the bicycle was put into the service by the Soviet State. In particular, I will show how the bicycle was regarded to be a public good, not a means for use in private purposes. Signed by Stalin's top-managers, Molotov and Kuybyshev, the state plans for production and distribution of bicycles reflected the idea that the bicycle should have been used primarily by party activists, administrative officials, military, customs control, doctors, mail carriers, and athletes. Moreover, the meager offer of bicycles for sale was open primarily to industrial regions and big cities, discriminating republics like Belarus or Tadzhikistan. Meant for the state, the bikes were mobilized to the Red Army twice in 1919 and 1939. Limiting cycling mobility has also been one of the aspects of Nazi terror in the occupied territories. The Nazi administration issued own rules about registration of bicycles and traffic, and eventually confiscated the bikes in most areas of today's Ukraine. At the same time, the bicycle appeared as a propagandist image for potential Ostarbeiters. The latter were encouraged to go to Germany, learn to cycle, and use the bike for everyday life together with the rest of Germans. After the end of World War II, the Soviet Union turned the production of bicycles to over 1 million per year. That meant that workers and peasants could finally afford the tool. Despite the ubiquity of the bicycle 1950-1980s, the official press did not cover the phenomenon of cycling in small cities and villages very much. Instead, the media focused on providing public transport, developing new models of motorized vehicles, etc. The local communities in areas outside large urban centers developed their own scenarios of cycling. The bicycle was a tool to broaden their mobility patterns so that one could reach neighboring settlements for business and private purposes, deliver deficit goods, attend a dance club, or find a spouse. Using the tools of oral history, I plan to describe the everyday practices and conceptions of cycling in areas with sparse connections of public transport. Last, but not least, I plan to present cycling in Ukraine as part of global phenomena . Several cases would exemplify connections between cycling cultures internationally. I will use an example of Columbia bicycles, manufactured in the late XIX century in Connecticut, USA, to show how the producers, agents, and consumers engaged in promoting a new practice of cycling. I will compare the numbers of production and distribution of bicycles in the Soviet Union to those in the USA, Western Europe, and China. I will show how the German equipment for bicycle production, paid as war reparations in 1947, stimulated new turn in Soviet bicycle production and use. In terms of cycling, Ukraine historically has had similarities to other parts of the world. Therefore I see this research as a way to produce a better understanding of micromobility worldwide.
