From Kharkiv With Love

Kharkiv, also known as Kharkov (Russian), is the second-largest city and municipality in Ukraine. Located in the northeast of the country, it is the largest city of the historic Slobozhanshchyna region.

Kharkiv is the administrative centre of Kharkiv Oblast and of the surrounding Kharkiv Raion. The latest population is 1,433,886 (2021 est.).

Kharkiv was founded in 1654 as Kharkiv fortress, and after these humble beginnings, it grew to be a major centre of industry, trade and Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. At the beginning of the 20th century, the city was predominantly Russian in population, but as industrial expansion drew in further labor from the distressed countryside, and as the Soviet regime moderated previous restrictions on Ukrainian cultural expression, by the eve of World War II the greater part of the population was officially identified as Ukrainian. From December 1919 to January 1934, Kharkiv was the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1654, in the midst of this period of turmoil for Right-bank Ukraine, groups of people came onto the banks of Lopan and Kharkiv rivers where they resurrected and fortified an abandoned settlement. There is a folk etymology that connects the name of both the settlement and the river to a legendary cossack founder named Kharko (a diminutive form of the name Chariton, Ukrainian: Харитон, romanized: Khariton, or Zechariah, Ukrainian: Захарій, romanized: Zakharii). But the river's name is attested earlier than the foundation of the fortress.

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, the refused 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 Assumption Cathedral and parish churches of Annunciation and Trinity) to establish a local market.

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. Defence rested with a local sloboda cossack regiment under the jurisdiction of the Razryad Prikaz, a military agency commanded from Belgorod.

The Derzhprom building in the late 1920s. 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 Russian and Ukrainian 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.

They 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.

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 Oblasts 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.

In 1932 and '33, the combination of grain seizures and the forced collectivisation 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 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.

A memorial to 23 August 1943, the end of German occupation during World War II On the eve of the occupation, Kharkiv's prewar 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 killed and buried an estimated 15,000 Jews in a ravine outside of town named Drobytsky Yar. Over their 22 months occupation they 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). (Among these was Boris Romanchenko. The 96-year old survivor of forced labor at the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen Belsen concentration camps was killed when Russian fire hit his apartment bloc on 18 March 2022).

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.

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 (particularly, producing the T-34 tank earlier designed in Kharkiv). These enterprises returned to Kharkiv after the war, and became central elements of the post-war Soviet military industrial complex.[61] Houses and factories were rebuilt, and much of the city's center was reconstructed in the style of Stalinist Classicism.

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.

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.

The collapse of the Soviet Union disrupted, but did not sever, the ties that bound Kharkiv heavy's 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 emphasising 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.

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 Square, were similarly small.

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 umber 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.

Main article: Battle of Kharkiv (2022) During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv was the site of heavy fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian forces.[108] On 27 February, the governor of Kharkiv Oblast Oleh Synyehubov 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 Moskovskyi 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.

On Tuesday, the 13th of September Ukraine consolidated its control of the Kharkiv region on Tuesday, raising flags on towns and villages occupied by Russian troops for six months, and reclaiming areas seized by Moscow on the first day of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The state border service in Kyiv said it had liberated the city of Vovchansk, a couple of kilometres from the international border. Russian soldiers left on Sunday, it added, after the stunning Ukrainian counter-offensive.

In the space of a few days Ukraine has pushed the Russians out from more than 6,000 sq km of territory, including zones in the south of the country where a separate counter-offensive is ongoing to recapture the city of Kherson.