Early history statue collection of the
Dmytro Yavornytsky National Historical Museum of Dnipro Human settlements in current
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast date from the
Paleolithic era. A
Neolithic stonecrafter's house has been excavated in one of Dnipro's city parks. Traces of
Cimmerian settlements during the Bronze Age have been found near today's
Taras Shevchenko Park. During the
Migration Period (300–800) nomadic tribes of the
Huns,
Avars,
Bulgarians, and
Magyars passed through the lands of the
Dnieper region, they came into contact with local agricultural
East Slavs. The region witnessed fighting between the armies of Kievan Rus' and
Khazars,
Pechenegs,
Tork people and
Cumans. In the 15th century the area became part of the
Kiev Voivodeship (1471–1565) of the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rebuilt in 1645, In the mid-1730s, the fortress and Russians returned, living in an uneasy cohabitation with local cossacks. In the
Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the Zaporozhian cossacks allied with
Empress Catherine II. No sooner had they assisted the Russians to victory than they faced an imperial ultimatum to disband their confederation. The
liquidation of the Sich destroyed their political autonomy and saw the incorporation of their lands into the new governates of
Novorossiya. In 1784, Catherine ordered the foundation of new city, commonly referred to at the time as Katerynoslav. The territory of modern Dnipro, despite the modern-day city's size, still has not expanded to encompass the territory of (Chertkov's) Yekaterinoslav of 1776. Potemkin's grandiose plans for a third Russian imperial capital alongside Moscow and Saint Petersburg included a viceregal palace, a university (Potemkin envisioned Yekaterinoslav as the '
Athens of southern Russia' were frustrated by a renewal of the
Russo-Turkish war in 1787, by bureaucratic procrastination, defective workmanship, and theft, Potemkin's death in 1791 and that of his imperial patroness five years later. In 1815 a government official described the town as "more like some Russian Mennonites|Dutch [Mennonite] colony then a provincial administrative centre". The cathedral, much reduced in size, was completed in 1835. Following Ukrainian independence, local historians began to promote the idea of a town emerging in the 17th century from Cossack settlements, an approach aimed at promoting the city's Ukrainian identity. They cited the chronicler of the
Zaporozhian Cossacks,
Dmytro Yavornytsky, whose
History of the City of Ekaterinoslav completed in 1940 was authorised for publication only in 1989, the era of
Glasnost. Rail construction responded to the enterprise of two men:
John Hughes, a
Welsh businessman who built an iron works at
Yuzovka in 1869–72, and developed the Donbas coal deposits; It proved a spur to further industrial development Within twenty years the population had more than tripled, reaching 157,000 in 1904. The immigrants flowing into the city were mainly
ethnic or cultural Russians and
Jews, with the
Ukrainian population remaining rural in
this stage of the
Industrial Revolution.
The Jewish community and the 1905 pogrom From 1792 Yekaterinoslav was within the
Pale of Settlement, the former Polish-Lithuanian territories in which Catherine and her successors enforced no limitation on the movement and residency of their Jewish subjects. Within less than a century, a largely
Yiddish-speaking Jewish community of 40,000 constituted more than a third of the city's population, and contributed a considerable share of its business capital and industrial workforce. Such apparent strength did not protect the community—members of whom had had the unpopular task of collecting government taxes and recruiting young men for the army— from communal violence. In 1883, three days of rioting destroyed Jewish business, and persuaded many to temporarily leave the city. There was a return of anti–Semitic incitement among the Christian public in 1904, but attacks on community were, at that time, suppressed on the order of a liberal governor. There was a wave of anti-Semitic attacks. With the army intervening against Jewish defense groups, about 100 Jews were killed and two hundred wounded.
The Soviet era War and revolution that was built by the workers of
Yekaterinoslav's Bryansk plant in 1918, which was employed by the
Red Army in its conquest of Ukraine and the
Volga region. Directly following the Russian
February Revolution, in the night of 3 March
O.S (16 March
N.S) to 4 March 1917 a provisional government was organised in Yekaterinoslav headed by the (since 1913) chairman of the provincial land administration . Also on 4 March a Council of Workers' Deputies was formed. Two week before the all-Russian elections, there had been a military parade organized by the Yekaterinoslav Ukrainian Military Council in support of the
proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic (in a still-to-be-determined union with Russia) by the
Ukrainian Central Rada. and the Bolsheviks, who reorganised as the Red Army, finally secured the city on 30 December 1919.
Stalin-era industrialisation . In late May 1920 the food supply to Yekaterinoslav deteriorated, resulting in a wave of strikes. In 1922 and 1923 the factories were renamed, as well as dozens of streets, alleys, driveways, squares and parks. The city figured prominently in
Stalin's
Five-Year Plans for industrialisation. In 1932, Dnipropetrovsk's regional metallurgical plants produced 20 percent of the entire cast iron and 25 percent of the steel manufactured in the Ukrainian SSR. By the end of the thirties the Dnipropetrovsk region became the most urbanised of Soviet Ukraine with more than 2,273,000 people living in the region and over half a million in the city proper. Dnipropetrovsk became an important cultural and educational centre with ten colleges and a State University. The surrounding countryside, which had only begun to recover from the
civil war, was devastated by the policy of
forced collectivisation and grain seizures. Peasants had died en masse during the
Holodomor of 1932–33. Estimates of the losses in
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in the years 1932–33 range from 3.5 to 9.8 million people, making it one of the most affected areas of the famine. At the end of the 1930s Dnipropetrovsk had 10 higher and 19 special educational institutions. Dnipropetrovsk was under
Nazi German occupation from
26 August 1941 to
25 October 1943. The city was administered as part of the
Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The
Holocaust in Dnipropetrovsk reduced the city's remaining Jewish population, estimates for which range from 55,000 to 30,000, to just 702. In just two days, 13–14 October 1941, the Germans killed 15,000. Germany operated three
prisoner-of-war camps in the city, chiefly Stalag 348 with several subcamps in the region from October 1941 to February 1943, after its relocation from
Rzeszów in German-occupied Poland, at which the occupiers are estimated to have killed upwards of 30,000 Soviet POWs, and briefly also the Stalag 310 and Stalag 387 camps. In November 1941 Dnipropetrovsk's population was 233,000. In March 1942 this number had fallen to 178,000. The high-security project was joined by hundreds of physicists, engineers and machine designers from Moscow and other large Soviet cities. In 1965, the secret Plant No. 586 was transferred to the USSR
Ministry of General Machine-Building which renamed it "the Southern Machine-building Factory" (Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel'nyi zavod) or in abbreviated Russian, simply
Yuzhmash. Yuzhmash became a significant factor in the arms race of the Cold War (
Nikita Khrushchev boasted in 1960 that it was producing rockets "like sausages"). No foreign citizen, even of a socialist state, was allowed to visit the city or district. Its citizens were held by Communist authorities to a higher standard of ideological purity than the rest of the population, and their freedom of movement was severely restricted. It was not until 1987, during
perestroika, that Dnipropetrovsk was opened to international visitors and civil restrictions were lifted. The population of Dnipropetrovsk increased from 259,000 people in 1945 to 845,200 in 1965. Labour militancy returned in the late 1980s, a period in which promises of
Perestrioka and
Glasnost raised popular expectations. In 1990 two thousand inmates rioted in the women's remand prison in a further of sign of growing unrest.
Dissent and youth rebellion , 1972. In 1959 17.4% of Dnipropetrovsk school pupils were taught in Ukrainian language schools and 82.6% in Russian language schools. 58% of the city's inhabitants, whose numbers continued to grow with rural immigration, self-identified as Ukrainians. According to
KGB reports, in the 1960s "
Samizdat" and
Ukrainian diaspora publications began to circulate via
Western Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk. These fed into underground student circles where they promoted interest in the "
Ukrainian Sixtiers", in
Ukrainian history, especially of
Ukrainian Cossacks, and in the revival of the
Ukrainian language. Occasionally the
blue and yellow flag of independent Ukraine was unfurled in protest. The authorities responded with repression: arresting and jailing members of underground discussion groups for "nationalistic propaganda". The growing evidence of dissent in the city coincided from the late 1960s with what the KGB referred to as "radio hooliganism". Thousands of high-school and college students had become
ham radio enthusiasts, recording and rebroadcasting
western popular music. Annual KGB reports regularly drew a connection between enthusiasm for western pop culture and anti-Soviet behaviour. In the 1980s, by which time the KGB had conceded that their raids against "hippies" had failed suppress the youth rebellion, such behaviour was reportedly found in an admixture of Anglo-American"
heavy metal,
punk rock and
Banderism—the veneration of
Stepan Bandera, and of other Ukrainian nationalists, who in the Soviet narrative were denounced and discredited as
Nazi collaborators. In an attempt to provide Dnipropetrovsk youth with an ideologically safe alternative, beginning in 1976 the local
Komsomol set up approved
discotheques. Some of the activists involved in this "disco movement" went on in the 1980s to engage in their own illicit tourist and music enterprises, and several later became influential figures in Ukrainian national politics, among them
Yulia Tymoshenko,
Victor Pinchuk,
Serhiy Tihipko,
Ihor Kolomoyskyi and
Oleksandr Turchynov.
The "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" Reflecting Dnipropetrovsk's special strategic importance for the entire Soviet Union, party
cadres from the "rocket city" played an outsized role not only in republican leadership in Kyiv, but also in the Union leadership in Moscow. During Stalin's
Great Purge,
Leonid Brezhnev rose rapidly within the ranks of the local
nomenklatura, from director of the
Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1936 to regional (
Obkom) Party Secretary in charge of the city's defence industries in 1939. Here, he took the first steps toward building a network of supporters which came to be known as the "
Dnipropetrovsk Mafia". They spearheaded the internal party coup that in 1964 saw Brezhnev replace
Nikita Khrushchev as
General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union and call a halt to further reform. Amidst the economic dislocation and soaring inflation that accompanied the
collapse of the Soviet Union, output declined. Although its economic contraction was at a rate below the national average, the Dnipropetrovsk city and oblast witnessed one of the
largest population declines of all the
regions of Ukraine. By 2021, the city's population, which had stood at over 1.2 million in 1991, had been reduced to 981,000. The continuation into the new century of the chaotic fallout from the
collapse of the Soviet Union was symbolized for many in Dnipropetrovsk by two violent episodes. In June and July 2007, Dnipropetrovsk experienced a wave of random video-recorded
serial killings that were dubbed by the media as the work of the "
Dnipropetrovsk maniacs". In February 2009, three youths were sentenced for their part in 21 murders, and numerous other attacks and robberies. On 27 April 2012, four bombs
exploded near four tram stations in Dnipropetrovsk, injuring 27 people. No one was convicted. Opposition politicians claimed to see the hand of President
Viktor Yanukovych intent on disrupting the October
2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election and installing a presidential regime.
Euromaidan Square in Dnipropetrovsk on 22 February 2014 with the
demolished monuments to Vladimir Lenin. On 26 January 2014, 3,000 anti-
Viktor Yanukovych (Ukrainian President) and pro-
Euromaidan activists attempted but failed to capture the
Regional State Administration building. There were street disturbances and Euromaidan protesters were reported to be beaten up by paid pro-Yanukovych supporters (the so-called
Titushky). Dnipropetrovsk Governor Kolesnikov called them "extreme radical thugs from other regions". Two days later about 2,000 public sector employees called an indefinite rally in support of the Yanukovych government. Meanwhile, the government building was reinforced with barbed wire. On 19 February 2014 there was an anti-Yanukovych picket near the Regional State Administration. On 22 February 2014, after a further anti-Yanukovych demonstration, Dnipropetrovsk Mayor
Ivan Kulichenko, for the sake of "peace in the city" left Yanukovych's
Party of Regions. Simultaneously the
Dnipropetrovsk City Council vowed to support "the preservation of Ukraine as a single and indivisible state", although some members had called for
separatism and for
federalization of Ukraine.
2014 to 2022 Vladimir Lenin on Dnipro's
Kalinin Avenue (now Prospekt
Serhiy Nigoyan) in October 2014. Dnipropetrovsk remained relatively quiet during the
2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, with pro-Russian Federation protestors outnumbered by those opposing outside intervention. In March 2014 the city's Lenin Square was renamed "Heroes of Independence Square" in honor of
the people killed during
Euromaidan. The
statue of Lenin on the square was removed. In June 2014 another Lenin monument was removed and replaced by a monument to the
Ukrainian military fighting the
Russo-Ukrainian War (2014 – ongoing). (
ATO zone) in Dnipro's city centre in 2018. To comply with the
2015 decommunization law the city was renamed
Dnipro in May 2016, after the river that flows through the city. This was 12 per cent of all of the city's
toponymies.
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine " displayed on a bus stop in Dnipro in February 2022. In the wake of the full-scale
Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and with developing military fronts near
Kyiv and to the
north,
east and
south, Dnipro has become a logistical hub for humanitarian aid and a reception point for people fleeing the war. Roughly equidistant from the war's major theatres in the
east and the
south, the city's location is proving critical for supplying the Ukrainian defence effort. At the same time, its control of a
Dnieper River crossing and the opportunity it would provide to cut off Ukrainian forces in the
Donbas makes the city a high-value target for the Russians. Dnipro is reported as the only city in Ukraine where a volunteer formation has been created under direct control of the
Dnipro City Council. It is called the "Dnieper Guard" (Варти Дніпра, Varty Dnipra). The mayor of Dnipro,
Borys Filatov has dismissed suggestions that the group remained
Ihor Kolomoyskyi's "private army". Kolomoyskyi has helped with some equipment purchases, but the force performs defence and law and order functions under the leadership of the
national police. The Russians first hit Dnipro on 11 March 2022. Three air strikes close to a kindergarten and an apartment building killed at least one person. On 15 March, Russian missiles hit
Dnipro International Airport, destroying the runway and damaging the terminal. In the early hours of 6 April, an air strike destroyed an oil depot. On 10 April, a Ukrainian government spokesperson said that the airport in Dnipro had been "completely destroyed" as the result of a Russian attack. On 15 July, a Russian missile attack killed four people and injured sixteen others in Dnipro. As part of the
derussification campaign that swept through Ukraine following the February 2022 invasion 110 toponyms in the city were "de-Russified" from February to September 2022. Between April 2022 and February 2023 a total of 98 streets and alleyways were renamed. and anti-Soviet partisan
Stepan Bandera. In December 2022 Dnipro removed from the city all monuments to figures of
Russian culture and
history. On 22 February 2023, 26 more streets were renamed. Dnipro
was hit during the
autumn 2022 Russian missile strikes on critical infrastructure. On 10 October three civilians were killed. On 18 October 2022 Russian missile strikes targeted the energy infrastructure of Dnipro. On 17 November 2022 23 people were injured.
The attacks continued in 2023. The most deadly of these attacks being the
14 January 2023 missile strike on an apartment building that killed 40 people, injured 75 and with 46 people reported missing. == Government and politics ==