History of Kyiv

History of the capital city of Ukraine

The history of Kyiv (Kiev), officially begins when it was founded in 482, but the city may date back at least 2,000 years. Archaeologists have dated the oldest known settlement in the area to 25,000 BC. Initially a 6th century Slavic settlement, it gradually acquired eminence as the center of East Slavic civilization. Kyiv's Golden Age as the capital of medieval Kievan Rus' came from 879 to 1240. Legend says that three brothers, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, founded the city with their sister Lybid, and named it for Kyi, the eldest brother. The century of this founding has not been determined. Legend has it that Saint Andrew (d. AD 60/70), was fascinated by the spectacular location on the hilly shores of the Dnieper River and prophesied that a great city would emerge there. Its political, but not cultural, importance declined drastically in 1169, when the troops of Andrey Bogolyubsky pillaged it; the old town was destroyed, and the capital moved to Vladimir. Numerous sackings of Kyiv by Rus' princes followed and it was completely destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1240. In the following centuries, the city was a provincial capital of marginal importance on the outskirts of territories controlled by powerful neighbors: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its successor the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Tsardom of Russia, which later became the Russian Empire. Kyiv was also a major political and cultural center for Ukrainian nation, especially during the Cossack Hetmanate in the 17–18 centuries. A Christian city since 988, it helped preserve the traditions of Orthodox Christianity, especially under Catholic Poland, and the atheist Soviet Union. Kyiv prospered in the Russian industrial revolution of the late 19th century. In the conflicts and turbulence that followed the October Revolution of 1917, it became the capital of several short lived Ukrainian states. From 1921 on. it was part of the Soviet Union, and from 1934 the capital of Soviet Ukraine. In World War II the city was again destroyed, almost completely, but quickly recovered post war, to become the third most important Soviet city and the capital of the second most populous Soviet republic. It remains the capital of Ukraine, independent since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In the period between 1241 and 1362, the princes of Kyiv were forced to accept Mongol/Tatar overlordship. In 1245, Peter Akerovich, the Archbishop of Ruthenia, participated in the First Council of Lyon, where he informed Catholic Europe of the Mongol/Tatar threat. In 1299, Maximus (of Greek origin), the Metropolitan of Kyiv, eventually moved the seat of the Metropolitanate from Kyiv to Vladimir on Kliazma, keeping the title. Since 1320, the city was the site of a new Catholic bishopric, when Henry, a Dominican friar, was appointed the first missionary Bishop of Kyiv. In the early 1320s, a Lithuanian army led by Gediminas defeated a Slavic army led by Stanislav of Kyiv at the Battle on the Irpin River, and conquered the city. The Tatars, who also claimed Kyiv, retaliated in 1324–1325, so while the city was ruled by a Lithuanian prince, it had to pay a tribute to the Golden Horde.

Kyiv became a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after the Battle at Blue Waters in 1362, when Algirdas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, beat a Golden Horde army. During the period between 1362 and 1471, the city was ruled by Lithuanian princes from different families. By order of Casimir Jagiellon, the Principality of Kyiv was abolished and the Kyiv Voivodeship was established in 1471. Lithuanian statesman Martynas Goštautas was appointed as the first voivode of Kyiv the same year; his appointment was met by hostility from locals. At the time of the Lithuanian rule, the core of the city was located in Podil and there was a Lithuanian Київський замок with 18 towers on the Zamkova Hora. The city was frequently attacked by Crimean Tatars and in 1482 was destroyed again by Crimean Khan Meñli I Giray. Despite its diminished political significance, the city still played an important role as seat of the local Orthodox metropolitan. Starting in 1494, however, the city's local autonomy (Magdeburg rights) gradually increased in a series of acts of Lithuanian Grand Dukes and Polish Kings, finalized by a charter granted by Sigismund I the Old in 1516. Kyiv had a Jewish community of some significance in the early sixteenth century. The tolerant Sigismund II Augustus granted equal rights to Jews in the city, on the grounds that they paid the same taxes as Podil's burghers. Polish sponsorship of Jewish settlement in the city added fuel to the conflict that already existed between the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

In 1569, under the Union of Lublin that formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Kyiv with other Ukrainian territories was transferred to the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, and it became a capital of the Kyiv Voivodeship. Its role of Orthodox center strengthened due to expansion of Roman Catholicism under Polish rule. In 1632, Peter Mogila, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kyiv and Galicia established the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, an educational institution aimed to preserve and develop Ukrainian culture and Orthodox faith despite Polish Catholic oppression. Although ruled by the church, the academy provided students with educational standards close to universities of Western Europe (including multilingual training) and became the foremost educational center, both religious and secular. In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks triumphantly entered the city in the course of their uprising establishing the rule of their Cossack Hetmanate in the city. The Zaporizhian Host had a special status within the newly formed political entity. The complete sovereignty of Hetmanate did not last long as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth refused to recognize it and resumed hostilities. In January 1654, Khmelnytsky decided to sign the Treaty of Pereyaslav with Tsardom of Russia to obtain a military support against the Polish Crown. However, in November 1656 the Muscovites concluded the Truce of Vilna with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was approved by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. After his death, in the atmosphere of sharp conflicts his successor became Ivan Vyhovsky who signed the Treaty of Hadiach. It was ratified by the Crown in a limited version. According to Vyhovsky original intention, Kyiv was to become the capital of the Grand Duchy of Ruthenia on the limited federate rights within the Polish–Lithuanian–Ruthenian Commonwealth. However, this part of the Treaty was removed during the ratification.

On 31 January 1667 the Truce of Andrusovo was concluded, in which the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ceded Smolensk, Severia and Chernigov, and, on paper only for a period of two years, the city of Kyiv to the Tsardom of Russia. The Eternal Peace of 1686 acknowledged the status quo and put the city under the control of Russia for the centuries to come. Kyiv slowly lost its autonomy, which was finally abolished in 1775 by the Empress Catherine the Great. None of the Polish Russian treaties concerning the city have ever been ratified. In 1834, St. Vladimir University was established in the city (now known as National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv). The Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko cooperated with its geography department as a field researcher and editor. However, the Magdeburg Law existed in Kyiv till that year, when it was abolished by the Decree of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia on 23 December 1834. Even after Kyiv and the surrounding region ceased being a part of Poland, Poles continued to play an important role. In 1812 there were over 43,000 Polish noblemen in Kyiv province, compared to only approximately 1,000 Russian nobles. Typically the nobles spent their winters in the city, where they held Polish balls and fairs. Until the mid 18th century Kyiv was Polish in culture. although Poles made up no more than ten percent of the city's population and 25% of its voters. During the 1830s Polish was the language of Kyiv's educational system, and until Polish enrollment in the university of St. Vladimir was restricted in the 1860s they made up the majority of that school's student body. The Russian government's cancellation of the city's autonomy and its placement under the rule of bureaucrats appointed from St. Petersburg was largely motivated by fear of Polish insurrection in the city. Indeed, many of the poorer Polish nobles became Ukrainianized in language and culture and these Ukrainians of Polish descent constituted an important element of the growing Ukrainian national movement. Kyiv served as a meeting point where such activists came together with the pro Ukrainian descendants of Cossack officers from the left bank. Many of them would leave the city for the surrounding countryside in order to try to spread Ukrainian ideas among the peasants. From the late 18th century until the late 19th century, city life was increasingly dominated by Russian military and ecclesiastical concerns. Russian Orthodox Church institutions formed a significant part of the city's infrastructure and business activity at that time. In the winter 1845–1846, the historian Mykola Kostomarov founded a secret political society, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, whose members put forward the idea of a federation of free Slavic people with Ukrainians as a distinct group among them rather than a part of the Russian nation. The Brotherhood's ideology was a synthesis of programmes of three movements: Ukrainian autonomists, Polish democrats, and Russian Decembrists in Ukraine. The society was quickly suppressed by the Tsarist authorities in March–April 1847. Following the gradual loss of Ukraine's autonomy and suppression of the local Ukrainian and Polish cultures, Kyiv experienced growing Russification in the 19th century by means of Russian migration, administrative actions (such as the Valuev Circular of 1863), and social modernization. At the beginning of the 20th century, the city was dominated by Russian speaking population, while the lower classes retained Ukrainian folk culture to a significant extent. According to the census of 1897, of the city's approximately 240,000 people approximately 56% of the population spoke the Russian language, 23% spoke the Ukrainian language, 12.5% spoke Yiddish, 7% spoke Polish and 1% spoke the Belarusian language. On 7 November 1917, it was transformed into an independent Ukrainian People's Republic with the capital in Kyiv. During this short period of independence, the city experienced rapid growth of its cultural and political status. An Academy of Sciences and professional Ukrainian language theaters and libraries were established by the new government. Later the city became a war zone in the lasting and bloody struggle between Ukrainian, Polish and Russian Bolshevik governments in the time of the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian Soviet War, the Polish Ukrainian War and the Polish Soviet War.

After the "January Uprising" on 29 January 1918 was extinguished, Bolshevik Red Guards took the city in the Battle of Kyiv, forcing the Central Rada to flee to Zhytomyr. The Bolsheviks established Kharkiv as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. By March, the city had been occupied by the Imperial German Army under the terms of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. With the withdrawal of German troops after the end of World War I, an independent Ukraine was declared in the capital city under Symon Petliura. Red Army forces once again recaptured the city in the January 1919 battle of Kyiv, taking the time to conduct a city census of Kyiv. In August 1919, the White armies recaptured the city, before losing it to the bolsheviks again in the Battle of Kyiv of December 1919. It was then briefly occupied by the White armies before the Soviets once more took control in 1920. In May 1920, during the Russo Polish War it was briefly captured by the Polish Army but they were driven out by the Red Army. After the Ukrainian SSR was formed in 1922, Kharkiv was declared its capital. Kyiv, being an important industrial center, continued to grow. In 1925, the first public buses ran on city streets, and ten years later the first trolleybuses were introduced. In 1927 the suburban areas of Darnytsia, Lanky, Chokolivka, and Mykilska Slobidka were included into the city. In 1932, the city became the administrative center of newly created Kyiv Oblast.

In the 1930s, the city suffered terribly from famine and from Stalinization. In 1932–33, the city population, like most of the other Ukrainian territories, suffered from the Holodomor. In Kyiv, bread and other food products were distributed to workers by food cards according to daily norm, but even with cards, bread was in limited supply, and citizens were standing overnight in lines to obtain it. In 1934 the capital of Ukrainian SSR was moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv. The goal was to fashion a new proletariat utopia based on Stalin's blueprints. The city's architecture was made over, but a much greater impact on the population was Soviet social policy, which involved large scale purges, coercion, and rapid movement toward totalitarianism in which dissent and non communist organizations were not tolerated. In the 1930s the process of destruction of churches and monuments, which started in the 1920s, reached the most dramatic turn. Churches and structures that were hundreds of years old, such as St. Michael's Golden Domed Cathedral and the Fountain of Samson, were demolished. Others, such as Saint Sophia Cathedral, were confiscated. The city's population continued to increase mostly by migrants. The migration changed the ethnic demographics of the city from the previous Russian Ukrainian parity to predominantly Ukrainian, although Russian remained the dominant language. In the 1930s, the city inhabitants also suffered from the controversial Soviet political policy of that time. While encouraging lower class Ukrainians to pursue careers and develop their culture (see Ukrainization), the Communist regime soon began harsh oppression of Ukraine's political freedom, autonomy and religion. Recurring political trials were organized in the city to purge "Ukrainian nationalists", "Western spies" and opponents of Joseph Stalin inside the Bolshevik party. During this time, numerous historic churches were destroyed or vandalized and the clergy repressed. In the late 1930s, clandestine mass executions began in Kyiv. Thousands of city residents (mostly intellectuals and party activists) were arrested in the night, hurriedly court martialed, shot and buried in mass graves. The main execution sites were Babi Yar and the Bykivnia forest. Tens of thousands were sentenced to GULAG camps. In the same time, the city's economy continued to grow, following Stalin's industrialization policy.

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany occupied the city on 19 September 1941 (see the Battle of Kyiv). Overall, the battle proved disastrous for the Soviet side but it significantly delayed the German advances. The delay also allowed the evacuation of all significant industrial enterprises from Kyiv to the central and eastern parts of the Soviet Union, away from the hostilities, where they played a major role in arming the Red Army fighting the Nazis (see, for example, the Arsenal Factory). Before the evacuation, the Red Army planted more than ten thousand mines throughout the city, controlled by wireless detonators. On 24 September, when the German invaders had settled into the city, the mines were detonated, causing many of the major buildings to collapse, and setting the city ablaze for five days. More than a thousand Germans were killed. Babi Yar, a location in Kyiv, became a site of one of the most infamous Nazi WWII war crimes. During two days in September 1941, at least 33,771 Jews from Kyiv and its suburbs were massacred at Babi Yar by the SS Einsatzgruppen, according to their own reports. Babi Yar was a site of additional mass murders of captured Soviet citizens over the following years, including Ukrainians, Romani, POWs and anyone suspected in aiding the resistance movement, perhaps as many as 60,000 additional people. In the "Hunger Plan" prepared ahead of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, with the aim of ensuring that Germans were given priority over food supplies at the expense of everyone else, the inhabitants of the city were defined as "superfluous eaters" who were to be "gotten rid of" by the cutting off of all food supplies to the city – the food to be diverted to feeding the Wehrmacht troops and Germany's own population. Luckily for city inhabitants, this part of the "Hunger Plan" was never fully implemented. An underground resistance quickly established by local patriots was active until the liberation from Nazi occupation. During the war, the city was heavily bombarded, especially in the beginning of the war and the city was largely destroyed including many of its architectural landmarks (only one building remained standing on the Khreschatyk, a main street). While the whole of Ukraine was a '[Third] Reich commissariat', under the Nazi Reichskommissar Erich Koch, the region surrounding Kiew (as it is spelled in German) was one of the six subordinate 'general districts', February 1942 – 1943 Generalbezirk Kiew, under Generalkommissar Waldemar Magunia (b. 1902 – d. 1974, also NSDAP)

The city was liberated by the Red Army on 6 November 1943. For its role during the War the city was later awarded the title Hero City.

Despite the end of the war, on 4–7 September 1945 an antisemitic pogrom occurred around one hundred Jews were beaten, of whom thirty six were hospitalized and five died of wounds.

The postwar period in Kyiv was one of rapid socio economic growth and political pacification. The arms race of the Cold War caused the establishment of a powerful technological complex in the city (both research and development and production), specializing in aerospace, microelectronics and precision optics. Dozens of industrial companies were created employing highly skilled personnel. Sciences and technology became the main issues of the city's intellectual life. Dozens of research institutes in various fields formed the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The city also became an important military center of the Soviet Union. More than a dozen military schools and academies were established here, also specializing in high tech warfare (see also Soviet education). This created a labor force demand which caused migration from rural areas of both Ukraine and Russia. Large suburbs and an extensive transportation infrastructure were built to accommodate the growing population. However, many rural type buildings and groves have survived on the city's hills, creating Kyiv's image as one of the world's greenest cities. The city grew tremendously in the 1950s through 1980s. Some significant urban achievements of this period include establishment of the Metro, building new river bridges (connecting the old city with Left Bank suburbs), and Boryspil Airport (the city's second, and later international airport). Systematic oppression of pro Ukrainian intellectuals, dubbed as "nationalists", was carried under the propaganda campaign against Ukrainian nationalism threatening the Soviet way of life. In cultural sense it marked a new wave of Russification in the 1970s, when universities and research facilities were gradually and secretly discouraged from using Ukrainian. Switching to Russian, as well as choosing to send children to Russian schools was expedient for educational and career advancement. Thus the city underwent another cycle of gradual Russification. Every attempt to dispute Soviet rule was harshly oppressed, especially concerning democracy, Ukrainian SSR's self government, and ethnic religious problems. Campaigns against "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism" and "Western influence" in Kyiv's educational and scientific institutions were mounted repeatedly. Due to limited career prospects in Kyiv, Moscow became a preferable life destination for many Kyivans (and Ukrainians as a whole), especially for artists and other creative intellectuals. Dozens of show business celebrities in modern Russia were born in Kyiv. In the 1970s and later 1980s–1990s, given special permission from the Soviet government, a significant part of the city's Jews migrated to Israel and the West. The Chernobyl accident of 1986 affected city life tremendously, both environmentally and socio politically. Some areas of the city have been polluted by radioactive dust. However, inhabitants of Kyiv were neither informed about the actual threat of the accident, nor recognized as its victims. Moreover, on 1 May 1986 (a few days after the accident), local CPSU leaders ordered Kyivans (including hundreds of children) to take part in a mass civil parade in the city's center—"to prevent panic". Later, thousands of refugees from accident zone were resettled in Kyiv.

After 57 years as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, the city became the capital of independent Ukraine in 1991. The city was the site of mass protests over the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election by supporters of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko beginning on 22 November 2004 at Independence Square. Much smaller counter protests in favor of Viktor Yanukovych also took place. The city hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2005 on 19 and 21 May in the Palace of Sports. In February 2014, the city was the site of the Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Maidan Revolution. In 2014, Vitali Klitschko, former professional boxer, became the city's mayor.

History of Kyiv (История Киева), three volumes. Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1982–1986. F. Berlynskyi. History of Kyiv (Історія міста Києва). Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1991. History of Kyiv (Історія міста Києва). Kyiv: Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of Ukrainian SSR, 1960.