History
[edit]
See also: Timeline of Kharkiv
Main article: History of Kharkiv
Timeline of Kharkiv
Russian Tsardom/Empire ( as part of Kharkiv Regiment) 1654–1765 Russian Empire 1765–1917
Ukrainian War of Independence
Russian Provisional Government Mar–Nov 1917
Ukrainian People's Republic Nov–Dec 1917
UPRS Dec 1917 – Apr 1918
UPR/Ukrainian State Apr 1918 – Jan 1919
UkrSSR Jan–Jun 1919
AFSR Jun–Dec 1919
PWPGU/UkrSSR Dec 1919 – Dec 1922
Soviet Union 1922–1941
Second World War
Third Reich 1941–1943
Soviet Union Feb–Mar 1943
Third Reich Mar–Sep 1943
Soviet Union 1943–1991 Ukraine 1991–present
Early history[edit]
The earliest historical references to the region are to Scythian and Sarmatian settlement in the 2nd century BC. Between the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD there is evidence of Chernyakhov culture, a multiethnic mix of the Geto-Dacian, Sarmatian, and Gothic populations.
In the 8th to 10th centuries the Khazar fortress of Verkhneye Saltovo stood about 25 miles (40 km) east of the modern city, near Staryi Saltiv. During the 12th century, the area was part of the territory of the Cumans, and then from the mid 13th century of the Mongol/Tartar Golden Horde.
By the early 17th century the area was a contested frontier region with renegade populations that had begun to organize in Cossack formations and communities defined by a common determination to resist both Tatar slavery and Polish, Lithuanian and Russian serfdom. Mid-century, the Khmelnytsky uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth saw the brief establishment of an independent Cossack Hetmanate.
Kharkiv Fortress[edit]
Kharkiv's alleged founder Kharko [uk] (postcard 1890s).
During this period of turmoil in Right-bank Ukraine, groups of settlers arrived at the banks of the Lopan and Kharkiv rivers and, in 1654, rebuilt and fortified an abandoned settlement.
The settlement reluctantly accepted the protection and authority of a Russian voivode from Chuhuiv 40 kilometres (25 mi) to the east. The first appointed voivode from Moscow was Voyin Selifontov in 1656, who began to build a local ostrog (fort). In 1658, a new voivode, Ivan Ofrosimov, commanded the locals to kiss the cross in a demonstration of loyalty to Tsar Alexis. Led by their otaman Ivan Kryvoshlyk, they refused. However, with the election of a new otaman, Tymish Lavrynov, relations appear to have been repaired, the Tsar in Moscow granting the community's request (signed by the deans of the new Dormition Cathedral and parish churches of Annunciation and Trinity) to establish a local market.The Intercession Cathedral with bell tower and Ozerianska church (right) built in 1689
At that time the population of Kharkiv was just over 1000, half of whom were local Cossacks. Selifontov had brought with him a Moscow garrison of only 70 soldiers. Defense rested with a local Sloboda Cossack regiment under the jurisdiction of the Razryad Prikaz, a military agency commanded from Belgorod.
The original walls of Kharkiv enclosed today's streets: Kvitky-Osnovianenko Street, Constitution Square, Pavlivskyi Square, Serhiivskyi Square, and Sobornyi Descent. There were 10 towers of which the tallest, Vestovska, was some 16 metres (52 ft) high. In 1689 the fortress was expanded to include the Intercession Cathedral and Monastery, which became a seat of a local church hierarch, the Protopope.
Russian Empire[edit]
A 19th-century view of Kharkiv, with the belltower of the Dormition Cathedral dominating the skyline
Administrative reforms led to Kharkiv being governed from 1708 from Kyiv, and from 1727 from Belgorod. In 1765 Kharkiv was established as the seat of a separate Sloboda Ukraine Governorate.
Kharkiv University was established in 1805 in the Palace of Governorate-General. Alexander Mickiewicz, brother of the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, was a professor of law in the university, while another celebrity, Goethe, searched for instructors for the school. One of its later graduates was the Ukrainian poet and writer Ivan Franko, to whom it awarded a doctorate in Russian linguistics in 1906.
The streets were first cobbled in the city center in 1830. In 1844 the 90 metres (300 ft) tall Alexander Bell Tower, commemorating the victory over Napoleon I in 1812, was built next to the first Dormition Cathedral (later to be transformed by the Soviet authorities into a radio tower). A system of running water was established in 1870.The first railway station in Kharkiv was built in 1869In the course of the 19th century, although predominantly Russian speaking, Kharkiv became a center of Ukrainian culture. The first Ukrainian newspaper was published in the city in 1812. Soon after the Crimean War, in 1860–61, a hromada was established in the city, one of a network of secret societies that laid the groundwork for the appearance of a Ukrainian national movement. Its most prominent member was the philosopher, linguist and pan-slavist activist Oleksandr Potebnia. Members of a student hromada in the city included the future national leaders Borys Martos and Dmytro Antonovych, and reputedly were the first to employ the slogan "Glory to Ukraine!" and its response "Glory on all of earth!".
In 1900, the student hromada founded the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), which sought to unite all Ukrainian national elements, including the growing number of socialists. Following the revolutionary events 1905 in which Kharkiv distinguished itself by avoiding a reactionary pogrom against its Jewish population, the RUP in Kharkiv, Poltava, Kyiv, Nizhyn, Lubny, and Yekaterinodar repudiated the more extreme elements of Ukrainian nationalism. Adopting the Erfurt Program of German Social Democracy, they restyled themselves as the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party (USDLP). This was to remain independent of, and opposed by, the Bolshevik faction of the Russian SDLP.
Ukrainian War of Independence[edit]
Kharkiv  Kharkiv on the mapCapitalKharkivFounded6 March 1918Abolished29 April 1918
After the February Revolution of 1917, the USDLP was the main party in the first Ukrainian government, the General Secretariat of Ukraine. The Tsentralna Rada (central council) of Ukrainian parties in Kyiv authorized the Secretariat to negotiate national autonomy with the Russian Provisional Government. In the succeeding months, as wartime conditions deteriorated, the USDLP lost support in Kharkiv and elsewhere to the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) which organized both in peasant communities and in disaffected military units.
Kharkiv was a zemlia of the Ukrainian People's Republic centered in Kharkiv. Founded on 6 March 1918 according to the Law "On the administrative-territorial division of Ukraine" approved by the Central Council of Ukraine, it was disbanded on 29 April 1918 by Hetman of Ukraine Pavlo Skoropadsky, who brought back old governorate divisions of the Russian Empire.
The administrative unit included Kharkiv povit, as well as parts of Valky and Bilhorod povits of Kharkiv and Kursk governorates.
Soviet era[edit]
Capital of Soviet Ukraine[edit]
The Derzhprom (Palace of Industry) completed in 1928.
In the Russian Constituent Assembly election held in November 1917, the Bolsheviks who had seized power in Petrograd and Moscow received just 10.5 percent of the vote in the Governorate, compared to 73 percent for a bloc of Ukrainian and Russian Socialist Revolutionaries. Commanding worker, rather than peasant, votes, within the city itself the Bolsheviks won a plurality.
When in Petrograd Lenin's Council of People's Commissars disbanded the Constituent Assembly after its first sitting, the Tsentralna Rada in Kyiv proclaimed the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). Bolsheviks withdrew from Tsentralna Rada and formed their own Rada (national council) in Kharkiv. By February 1918 their forces had captured much of Ukraine.
The Bolsheviks made Kharkiv the capital of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. Six weeks later, under the treaty terms agreed with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, they abandoned the city and ceded the territory to the German-occupied Ukrainian State.
After the German withdrawal, the Red Army returned but, in June 1919, withdrew again before the advancing forces of Anton Denikin's White movement Volunteer. By December 1919, Soviet authority was restored. The Bolsheviks established Kharkiv as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and, in 1922, this was formally incorporated as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union.Plan of Kharkiv, 1930In the 1920s and 30s, a number of prestige construction projects in new officially-approved Constructivist style were completed. Among these were the Derzhprom (Palace of Industry) then the tallest building in the Soviet Union (and the second tallest in Europe), the Red Army Building, the Ukrainian Polytechnic Institute of Distance Learning (UZPI), the Kharkiv City Council building, with its massive asymmetric tower, and the central department store that was opened on the 15th Anniversary of the October Revolution. As new buildings were going up, many of city's historic architectural monuments were being torn down. These included most of the baroque churches: Saint Nicholas's Cathedral of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church, the Church of the Myrrhophores, Saint Demetrius's Church, and the Cossack fortified Church of the Nativity.
Under Stalin's First Five Year Plan, the city underwent intensified industrialization, led by a number of national projects. Chief among these were the Kharkiv Tractor Factory (HTZ), described by Stalin as "a steel bastion of the collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukraine", and the Malyshev Factory, an enlargement of the old Kharkiv Locomotive Factory, which at its height employed 60,000 workers in the production of heavy equipment. By 1937, the output of Kharkiv's industries was reported as being 35 times greater than in 1913.
Since the turn of the century, the influx of new workers from the countryside changed the ethnic composition of Kharkiv. According to census returns, by 1939, the Russian share of the population had fallen from almost two-thirds to one third, while the Ukrainian share rose from a quarter to almost half. The Jewish population rose from under 6 percent of the total, to over 15 percent (sustaining a Hebrew secondary school, a popular Jewish university and extensive publication in Yiddish and Hebrew).Starved peasants on the street during the Holodomor 1933.
In the 1920s, the Ukrainian SSR promoted the use of the Ukrainian language, mandating it for all schools. In practice the share of secondary schools teaching in the Ukrainian language remained lower than the ethnic Ukrainian share of the Kharkiv Oblast's population. The Ukrainization policy was reversed, with the prosecution in Kharkiv in 1930 of the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine. Hundreds of Ukrainian intellectuals were arrested and deported.A monument to the persecuted kobzars
In 1932 and 1933, the combination of grain seizures and the forced collectivization of peasant holdings created famine conditions, the Holodomor, driving people off the land and into Kharkiv, and other cities, in search of food. Eye-witness accounts by westerners — among them those of American Communist Fred Beal employed in the Kharkiv Tractor Factory — were cited in the international press but, until the era of Glasnost were consistently denounced in the Soviet Union as fabrications.
In 1934, hundreds of Ukrainian writers, intellectuals and cultural workers were arrested and executed in the attempt to eradicate all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. The purges continued into 1938. Blind Ukrainian street musicians Kobzars were also rounded up in Kharkiv and murdered by the NKVD. Confident in his control over Ukraine, in January 1934 Stalin had the capital of the Ukrainian SSR moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv.
During April and May 1940, about 3,900 Polish prisoners of Starobilsk camp were executed in the Kharkiv NKVD building, later secretly buried on the grounds of an NKVD pansionat in Piatykhatky forest (part of the Katyn massacre) on the outskirts of Kharkiv. The site also contains the numerous bodies of Ukrainian cultural workers who were arrested and shot in the 1937–38 Stalinist purges.
German occupation[edit]
During World War II, Kharkiv was the focus of major battles. The city was captured by Nazi Germany on 24 October 1941. A disastrous Red Army offensive failed to recover the city in May 1942. It was retaken (Operation Star) on 16 February 1943, but lost again to the Germans on 15 March 1943. 23 August 1943 saw a final liberation.
On the eve of the occupation, Kharkiv's pre-war population of 700,000 had been doubled by the influx of refugees. What remained of the pre-war Jewish population of 130,000 were slated by the Germans for "special treatment". Between December 1941 and January 1942, they massacred and buried an estimated 15,000 Jews in a ravine outside of town named Drobytsky Yar. Over their 22 months' occupation the Germans executed a further 30,000 residents, among them suspected Soviet partisans and, after a brief period of toleration, Ukrainian nationalists. 80,000 people died of hunger, cold and disease. 60,000 were forcibly transported to Germany as slave workers (Ostarbeiter).
By the time of Kharkiv's liberation in August 1943, the surviving population had been reduced to under 200,000. Seventy percent of the city had been destroyed. According to a New York Time's piece, "The city was more battered than perhaps any other in the Soviet Union save Stalingrad."
Post-World War II[edit]
Before the occupation, Kharkiv's tank industries had been evacuated to the Urals with all their equipment, and became the heart of Red Army's tank programs and in particular of the Kharkiv designed T-34. These enterprises returned to Kharkiv after the war, and became central elements of the post-war Soviet military industrial complex. Houses and factories were rebuilt, and much of the city's center was reconstructed in the style of Stalinist Classicism. Kharkiv's Jewish community revived after World War II: by 1959 there were 84,000 Jews living in the city. However, Soviet anti-Zionism restricted expressions of Jewish religion and culture, and was sustained until the final Gorbachev years. The confiscated Kharkiv Choral Synagogue reopened as a synagogue in 1990.
Mirror Stream fountain
Kharkiv in 1981
In the Brezhnev era, Kharkiv was promoted as a "model Soviet city". Propaganda made much of its "youthfulness", a designation broadly used to suggest the relative absence in the city of "material and spiritual relics" from the pre-revolutionary era, and its commitment to the new frontiers of Soviet industry and science. The city's machine-and-weapons building prowess was attributed to a forward-looking collaboration between its large-scale industrial enterprises and new research institutes and laboratories.
The last Communist Party chief of Ukraine, Vladimir Ivashko, appointed in 1989, trained as a mining engineer and served as a party functionary in Kharkiv. He led the Communists to victory in Kharkiv and across the country in the parliamentary election held in the Ukrainian SSR in March 1990. The election was relatively free, but occurred well before organized political parties had time to form, and did not arrest the decline in the CPSU's legitimacy. This was accelerated by the intra-party coup attempt against President Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms on 18 August 1991, during which Ivashko temporarily replaced Gorbachev as CPSU General Secretary.
The National University of Kharkiv was at the forefront of democratic agitation. In October 1991, a call from Kyiv for an all-Ukrainian university strike to protest Gorbachev's new Union Treaty and to call for new multi-party elections was met with a rally at the entrance to the university attended not only by students and university teachers, but also by a range of public and cultural figures. The protests — the so-called Revolution on Granite — ended on 17 October with a resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR promising further democratic reform. In the event, the only demand fulfilled was the removal of the Communist Prime Minister.
Independent Ukraine[edit]
In the 1 December 1991 Referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence, on a turnout of 76 percent 86 percent of the Kharkiv Oblast approved separate Ukrainian statehood.
During the 1990s post-Soviet aliyah, many Jews from Kharkiv emigrated to Israel or to Western countries. The city's Jewish population, 62,800 in 1970, dropped to 50,000 by the end of the century.
New Year's decoration of Freedom Square in Kharkiv in 2018The collapse of the Soviet Union disrupted, but did not sever, the ties that bound Kharkiv's heavy industries to the integrated Soviet market and supply chains, and did not diminish dependency on Russian oil, minerals, and gas. In Kharkiv and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, the limited prospects for securing new economic partners in the West, and concern for the rights of Russian-speakers in the new national state, combined to promote the interests of political parties and candidates emphasizing understanding and cooperation with the Russian Federation. In the new century, these were represented by the Party of Regions and by the presidential ambitions of Victor Yanukovych, which in Kharkiv triumphed in the city council elections of 2006, in the parliamentary elections of 2007 and in the presidential elections of 2010.
Although never attaining the level of protest witnessed in Kyiv and in communities further west, following the disputed 2012 Parliamentary elections public opposition to President Yanukovych and his party surfaced in Kharkiv amid accusations of systematic corruption and of sabotaging prospects for new ties to the European Union.
The journalist Katya Soldak, who was born in Kharkiv, documents the city's post-Soviet development in her award-winning documentary film "The Long Breakup", tracing its path from the collapse of the Soviet Union toward independence and democratic governance.
Pro-Russian unrest and violence[edit]
Main article: 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine § Kharkiv Oblast
The Euromaidan protests in the winter of 2013–2014 against then president Viktor Yanukovych consisted of daily gatherings of about 200 protestors near the statue of Taras Shevchenko and were predominantly peaceful. Disappointed at the turnout, an activist at Kharkiv University suggested that his fellow students "proved to be as much of an inert, grey and cowed mass as Kharkiv's ‘biudzhetniki’ " (those whose income derives from the state budget, mostly public servants). But Pro-Yanukovych demonstrations, held near the statue of Lenin in Freedom (previously Dzerzhinsky) Square, were similarly small.
In the wake of Yanukovych's ouster in February, there were attempts in Kharkiv to follow the example of separatists in neighboring Donbas. On 2 March 2014, a Russian "tourist" from Moscow replaced the Ukrainian flag with a Russian flag on the Kharkiv Regional State Administration Building. On 6 April 2014 pro-Russian protesters occupied the building and unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the "Kharkiv People's Republic". Doubts arose about their local origin as they had initially targeted the city's Opera and Ballet Theatre before recognizing their mistake.
Kharkiv's mayor, Hennadiy "Gepa" Kernes, elected in 2010 as the nominee of the Party of Regions, was placed under house arrest. Claiming to have been "prisoner of Yanukovych's system", he now declared his loyalty to acting President Oleksandr Turchynov. In a televised address on 7 April, Turchynov had announced that "a second wave of the Russian Federation's special operation against Ukraine [has] started" with the "goal of destabilising the situation in the country, toppling Ukrainian authorities, disrupting the elections, and tearing our country apart". Kernes persuaded the police to storm the regional administration building and push out the separatists. He was allowed to return to his mayoral duties.
Police action against the separatists was reinforced by a special forces unit from Vinnytsia directed by Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Stepan Poltorak the acting commander of the Ukrainian Internal Forces. On 13 April, some pro-Russian protesters again made it inside the Kharkiv regional state administration building, but were quickly evicted. Violent clashes resulted in the severe beating of at least 50 pro-Ukrainian protesters in attacks by pro-Russian protesters.
On 28 April, Kernes was shot by a sniper, a victim, commentators suggested, of his former pro-Russian allies. Following recovery from his wounds, he was twice been re-elected, but in December 2020 died of COVID-19 related complications. Kernes was succeeded as mayor by Ihor Terekhov of the "Kernes Bloc — Successful Kharkiv".
Relatively peaceful demonstrations continued to be held, with "pro-Russian" rallies gradually diminishing and "pro-Ukrainian unity" demonstrations growing in numbers. On 28 September 2014, activists dismantled Ukraine's largest monument to Lenin at a pro-Ukrainian rally in the central square. Polls conducted from September to December 2014 found little support in Kharkiv for joining Russia.
From early November until mid-December, Kharkiv was struck by seven non-lethal bomb blasts. Targets of these attacks included a rock pub known for raising money for Ukrainian forces, a hospital for Ukrainian forces, a military recruiting center, and a National Guard base. According to SBU investigator Vasyliy Vovk, Russian covert forces were behind the attacks, and had intended to destabilize the otherwise calm city of Kharkiv. Attacks continued into 2015, including a bombing that killed four people during a march commemorating the Euromaidan victims.
After the Euromaidan events and Russian actions in the Crimea and Donbas ruptured relations with Moscow, the Kharkiv region experienced a sharp fall in output and employment. Once a hub of cross border trade, Kharkiv was turned into a border fortress. A reorientation to new international markets, increased defense contracts (after Kyiv, the region contains the second-largest number of military-related enterprises) and export growth in the economy's services sector helped fuel a recovery, but people's incomes did not return to pre-2014 levels.
By 2018 Kharkiv officially has the lowest unemployment rate in Ukraine, 6 percent. But in part this reflected labor shortages caused by the steady outflow of young and skilled workers to Poland and other European countries.
Until 18 July 2020, Kharkiv was incorporated as a city of oblast significance and served as the administrative center of Kharkiv Raion though it did not belong to the raion. In July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Kharkiv Oblast to seven, the city of Kharkiv was merged into Kharkiv Raion.
2022 Russian invasion[edit]
Main articles: Battle of Kharkiv (2022) and Kharkiv strikes (2022–present)
During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv was the site of heavy fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian forces. On 27 February, the governor of Kharkiv Oblast Oleh Syniehubov claimed that Russian troops were repelled from Kharkiv.
According to a 28 February 2022, report from Agroportal 24h, the Kharkiv Tractor Plant (KhTZ), in the south east of the city, was destroyed and "engulfed in fire" by "massive shelling" from Russian forces. Video purported to record explosions and fire at the plant on 25 and 27 February 2022. UNESCO has confirmed that in the first three weeks of bombardment the city experienced the loss or damage of at least 27 major historical buildings.
On 4 March 2022, Human Rights Watch reported that on the fourth day of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, 28 February 2022, Federation forces used cluster munitions in the KhTZ, the Saltivskyi and Shevchenkivskyi districts of the city. The rights group — which noted the "inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and their foreseeable effects on civilians" — based its assessment on interviews and an analysis of 40 videos and photographs. In March 2022, during the Battle of Kharkiv, the city was designated as a Hero City of Ukraine.
In May 2022, Ukrainian forces began a counter-offensive to drive Russian forces away from the city and towards the international border. By 12 May, the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence reported that Russia had withdrawn units from the Kharkiv area. Russian artillery and rockets remain within range of the city, and it continues to suffer shelling and missile strikes.
Main article: Northern Kharkiv Oblast front of the Russo-Ukrainian war
In May 2024, after two weeks intensive fighting, and the loss of a number of border villages, Ukrainian forces halted a renewed Russian advance toward Kharkiv. The Ukrainian defense was assisted by American-supplied HIMARS missiles, and by US permission to fire these across the border at military targets within Russian territory. The Russians retaliated with missile strikes, including a glide-bomb attack that hit and destroyed an Epicenter K hypermarket killing 18 civilians.
