Dnipro - WikiHQ

Dnipro is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the eastern part of Ukraine, southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnipro River, from which it takes its name. Dnipro is the administrative centre of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. It hosts the administration of Dnipro urban hromada. Dnipro has a population of

Archeological evidence suggests the site of the present city was settled by Cossack communities from at least 1524. Yekaterinoslav ("glory of Catherine")

Name

Current names

Former names

Novyi Kodak 1645–1784
Yekaterinoslav (also spelled Ekaterinoslav; ; ) 1784–1796
Novorossiysk ( ; ) 1796–1802, briefly renamed during the reign of Catherine II's son, tsar Paul I; however, the previous name was restored by tsar Alexander I after his father's assassination
Sicheslav ( ) 1918–1921 (unofficial name)
Yekaterinoslav/Katerynoslav 1918–1926
Dnipropetrovsk ( ; ), also Dnipropetrovske () according to the Kharkiv orthography 1926–2016. The word originates from ("Dnieper River") + , after Soviet revolutionary Grigory Petrovsky.

Name history

The original name of a Ukrainian Cossack city on the territory of modern Dnipro was Novyi Kodak ( , New Kodak). Also on the territory of Modern Dnipro, the Russian Empire founded Yekaterinoslav (the glory of Catherine). This name was first mentioned in a report to Azov Governor Vasily Chertkov to Grigory Potemkin on 23 April 1776. He wrote "The provincial city called Yekaterinoslav should be the best convenience on the right side of the Dnieper River near Kaydak..." (Which referred to ). The construction was officially transferred to the right bank in a decree of Empress of Russia Catherine II of 23 January 1784.

In 1918, the Central Council of Ukraine of the Ukrainian People's Republic proposed to change the name of the city to Sicheslav; however, this was never finalised.

In 1926 the city was renamed after communist leader Grigory Petrovsky.

The 2015 law on decommunization required the city to be renamed. thus making the name consistent with the law without actually changing the name itself.

On 3 February 2016 a draft law was registered in the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) to change the name of the city to Dnipro. On 19 May 2016 the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill to officially rename the city (to Dnipro). The resolution was approved by 247 out of the 344 MPs, with 16 opposing the measure.

Following the renaming of the city the reference to Petrovsky has been removed from institutions named after the city. A notable exception is the name of the surrounding province, which is listed in the territorial structure of Ukraine in the Constitution. Thus until a lengthy and complicated process of amending is carried out, it officially retains the name Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

History

Early history

thumb|A part of the [[Cumans|Cuman 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

thumb|Monument in Dnipro of an [[armored train 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

thumb|The boy on the left murdered an 8-year-old for his 4 pounds of bread in Yekaterinoslav in 1922, during the [[1921–1923 famine in Ukraine|local 1921–1923 famine.]]

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

thumb|Dnipropetrovsk's [[Dnipro Polytechnic|Mining Institute, 1972.]]

thumb|Bridge to Monastery Island (then known as [[Komsomol Island) during the 1980s]]

thumb|200px|A 1949 photo portrait of Leonid Brezhnev, a native of Dnipropetrovsk region, who would serve as de-facto head of the Soviet Union between 1964 and 1982

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, 26 more streets were renamed in Dnipro on 22 February 2023. Also on this day the Dnipro City Council renamed a part of Dnipro's central avenue, Akademik Yavornitskyi Prospekt, in honor of commander of the 1st Mechanized Battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Hero of Ukraine Dmytro Kotsiubailo (who had perished on 7 March 2023 in battle near Bakhmut). On 31 January 2024 92 other toponyms were renamed by the Dnipro City Council, including the avenue named after (Soviet cosmonaut and first human in space) Yuri Gagarin.

File:Istorichnii myzei Dnipropetrovs'ka.JPG|The Yavornytsky Historical Museum

File:Passage, Dnepropetrovsk.jpg|Stalinist architecture blends with the post-modernism of Dnipro's 'Passage' shopping and entertainment centre

File:Будинок Громадського зібрання 1.jpg|The Dnipro Philharmonic

File:Головпоштамт Дніпро 2019.jpg|Main post office

File:Dnipro, st. D.Yavornytskogo 47 Mis'ka Uprava 02 (YDS 6845).jpg|Historic city government building from imperial times

File:Будинок Театру на Воскресенській.jpg|Taras Shevchenko Dnipro Academic Ukrainian Music and Drama Theatre

File:01 Серов 1645.jpg|Historical revenue house

File:Загальний вигляд будівлі 2024.jpg|Stalinist residential building in Robocha street

File:Центральні вікна "палацу Ілліча".jpg|Constructivist Palace of Labour in Nigoyan Avenue after recent reconstruction

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