Hughesoffka - Letters from the Wild Field
Briefe aus dem Wilden FeldD 2009 · 84 min
Donetsk
In 1870, Welshman John Hughes began developing the coal deposits and building the steel industry in the Donetsk Basin with a team of 100 British engineers. In no time, the once desolate border region experienced rapid growth—people spoke of a “New America.”
For nearly 50 years, Hughes and his sons ruled unchallenged in Hughesovka (Yuzovka). After the Revolution, the traces of the British were erased. Yuzovka became Stalino.
In 1929, Dziga Vertov created his film “Donbass Symphony”: coal mines, steel production, machines—dynamically edited. The new faith is materialistic. Churches became cinemas, power pylons replaced crosses; icons were burned and church domes toppled to applause. A bust of Lenin was carved by a young woman…
Almost eighty years later, people in the Donbass flock to newly built churches—and the new mosque.
Footballers, not miners, now pose as heroes.
The Donbass Arena for FC Shakhtar Donetsk is being built right in the city center, not far from the first monument to John Hughes.
Today’s entrepreneurs are eager to reclaim Donetsk’s capitalist founding father—who, incidentally, first introduced football to the region. In Wales, it had already proven to be an effective remedy against alcoholism.
The archive in Cardiff, Wales, still preserves evidence of that “Welsh period”: Letters and photographs documenting life in the remote Russian steppe.