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Early history The earliest historical references to the region are to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 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 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 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. 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. The streets were first cobbled in the city center in 1830. In 1844 the 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 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, 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. 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. 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). 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.In 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. 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. 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. |270x270px 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 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).
Post-World War II 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. fountain|left 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 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, 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 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. But Pro-Yanukovych demonstrations, held near the
statue of Lenin in
Freedom (previously Dzerzhinsky) Square, were similarly small. 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. 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. a victim, commentators suggested, of his former pro-Russian allies. Kernes was succeeded as mayor by
Ihor Terekhov of the "
Kernes Bloc — Successful Kharkiv". 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. 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.
2022 Russian invasion 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. 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. ==Geography==