KIEV.

Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian) was the ruling center of Kievan Rus, the largest political entity in medieval Europe. After Vladimir the Great, the grand prince of Kiev (980–1015), began to Christianize his realm in 988, Kiev became famous for its churches and monasteries. The Cave Monastery (Pecherska Lavra), founded in 1015, attracted thousands of pilgrims to the city each year until Soviet times. St. Sophia Cathedral, initially built between 1037 and 1100 and named for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, retains much of its original interior even in the early twenty-first century. By 1200, Kiev had become one of Europe's largest cities. Its estimated population of fifty thousand equaled that of Paris and exceeded that of London.

In 1240 the Mongols destroyed Kiev, and the city subsequently fell under Lithuanian, Polish, and ultimately Muscovite Russian control. Although it retained some importance as a religious, educational, and trade center, it had not recovered the size or significance it had enjoyed in medieval times even by the turn of the nineteenth century. Then, Kiev had only twenty thousand inhabitants and consisted of three barely connected settlements, each walled and villagelike in appearance: Podil, the trade district that lay along the Dniepr River; Pecherske, the site of the fortress and the Cave Monastery; and High City, sometimes called Old Kiev, the location of many of the town's most majestic churches. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Kiev's Contract Fair, held in January, brought together Polish landowners, Great Russian and Jewish merchants and traders, Ukrainian oxcarters and peasants, "itinerant dentists, Kazan soap boilers, Tula samovar smiths, Berdychiv booksellers, and hawkers of exotic delights from Persia, Bukhara, and the Caucasus," among others, and served as the city's most important social and commercial event.

Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) Russified Kiev, establishing St. Vladimir University in 1834 partly for this purpose. Russian became the language of governance, education, and upward mobility. Most Kiev residents spoke Russian or a blend of Russian and Ukrainian called surzhyk. From the early 1870s, when railway lines to Moscow and the Black Sea port of Odessa (Odesa) were completed, Kiev grew very rapidly. Its three settlements fused into a modern city, and the Khreshchatyk, built along a wooded ravine, became its commercial center and one of imperial Russia's most famous main streets. Major employers included the rail yard and Greter & Krivanek, which manufactured machinery, much of it for Ukraine's sugar beet industry, but light industry dominated the city's economy. In 1870 Kiev had 70,000 residents; by 1914, 626,000. By then, of the cities in the Russian Empire, only St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw were larger.

REVOLUTION, CIVIL WAR, AND NEP

After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) in March 1917 (February, Old Style), Ukrainian nationalists organized the Central Rada in Kiev, which called for a self-governing, free Ukraine linked with Russia in a democratic federation. After the Bolsheviks (Communists) seized power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in November 1917, the Rada refashioned itself into the Ukrainian National Republic, which promoted the nationalization of industry and the seizure and redistribution of land. Armed conflict over control of Kiev began in December 1917, as Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko's Soviet Russian army advanced on the city.The Bolsheviks held the city briefly in 1918, but for most of the year the hetman (cossack leader, or military commander) Pavlo Skoropadsky (1873–1945) governed it in close alliance with occupying German forces. Referring to the city's relative peace and prosperity in 1918, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky (1892–1968) remarked that "Kiev was like a banquet in the middle of a plague."

However, from 14 December 1918, when the Directory, led by Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951), took the city, violence and repression returned to Kiev. The Bolsheviks reconquered the city in February 1919 and nationalized its services and larger enterprises. Various Ukrainian forces then held the city from the late summer until the Bolsheviks took it back on 16 December. In all, Kiev changed hands five times in 1919.

May 1920 brought a brief occupation by Polish and Ukrainian troops, but in June the Bolsheviks captured Kiev for good. By then, more than eight hundred buildings had been destroyed. Kiev's population, estimated at 467,000 in September 1917 and 544,000 in early 1919, fell to 367,000 in mid-1920, as residents fled into the countryside in search of food. By 1921–1922, industrial production had virtually shut down. Inflation soared. Adult workers were expected to live on two hundred grams of bread per day and six hundred grams of sugar per month. However, in 1921 the Soviet government announced the more relaxed New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed for private entrepreneurial activity, and the economy began to rebound. By 1925, most Kiev enterprises were exceeding their prewar levels of output, and by 1926 Kiev's population had grown to five hundred thousand. The use of the Ukrainian language was encouraged during the NEP, and the number of Ukrainian speakers increased in Kiev, although Russian remained the primary language of the city. During this period of relative cultural freedom, Kiev remained an important center of artistic accomplishment, particularly for the Ukrainian and Russian avant-garde movements.

KIEV UNDER STALIN

Kiev was greatly transformed under Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) and the First Five Year Plan, which began in 1928. Property was seized by the state, economic decision-making was transferred to Moscow, and industrialization proceeded with reckless rapidity. By 1932, fifty-seven machine-building enterprises were operating in Kiev, compared with only three in 1928. Greter & Krivanek, now called "Bolshevik," became a leading supplier of equipment for the Soviet chemical industry. During the First Five-Year Plan, Kiev factories also turned out barges, river boats, steel cable, farm machinery, rubber goods, construction equipment, tram wagons, and about one-quarter of Ukraine's light industrial output. Unemployment, officially 35,900 in 1929, was eliminated by 1930. The state took over all educational and cultural facilities. School tuition was outlawed in 1927, and within a year, according to Soviet sources, the percentage of children enrolled in schools jumped from 65 to 92. Dozens of technical institutes were established, reinforcing Kiev's tradition as one of the country's most important centers of learning.

During the Second Five-Year Plan, which began in 1933, wages were said to double on average and the percentage of women in Kiev's workforce continued to climb, reaching 43 percent by 1938, compared with 33 percent in 1931. In 1936, Kiev shops were printing forty-one regional newspapers and twenty-six journals, making the city one of the Soviet Union's most important publishing centers. By 1939 Kiev's population reached 850,000. However, life in the 1930s was difficult and often brutal. The extraordinary pace of urbanization, and the ongoing emphasis on industrial production, kept housing and consumer goods and services in short supply, something that would characterize the Soviet economy until its collapse. Moreover, Russians or Russified Ukrainians had begun to replace Ukrainians in Communist Party posts in 1927, and by 1929 Ukrainian intellectuals began to be arrested and charged with "national deviation." Increasingly, terror stalked the city. Kievans were murdered in the basement of the NKVD (secret police) headquarters and in Lukianivka Prison. Burial sites located just outside the city are said to contain the corpses of tens of thousands of victims from Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Kiev also suffered massive physical destruction in the 1930s. Soviet planners sought to reshape it into a model proletarian city, and in 1934 the capital of Ukraine was moved to Kiev from Kharkov (Kharkiv). Beginning in 1935, under Stalin's Ukrainian deputy Pavel Postyshev, many of Kiev's ancient churches and other cultural landmarks were demolished, probably because they were viewed as symbols of Ukrainian national pride. This destruction is documented by Titus Hewryk in The Lost Architecture of Kiev, cited in the bibliography.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Aerial bombardment of Kiev began on 22 June 1941, the very first day of Adolf Hitler's monumental assault on the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa. The Nazi armies advanced quickly. In the first three weeks of fighting alone, the Soviet Army lost two million men, 3,500 tanks, and 6,000 aircraft. On June 27 machinery and inventories began to be evacuated from Kiev's arsenal, which required 1,100 railway cars. Over the next two months, 197 enterprises were dismantled and sent eastward. Kiev's "Bolshevik" plant, for example, was reassembled near Sverdlovsk, in the Urals. In early July, some two hundred thousand Kievans began to construct antitank and anti-infantry fortifications around the city.

Stalin had initially refused Ukrainian Communist Party boss Nikita Khrushchev's recommendation to abandon Kiev, but given the hopelessness of the military situation, relented on 17 September. On 21 September, the battle for Kiev ended. The Germans captured some 665,000 Soviet troops in the encirclement of Kiev, which Hitler called "the greatest battle in world history," but in reality the victory gave the Germans no strategic advantage. By October, half of Kiev's 850,000 residents had been evacuated, mobilized into the Red Army, or killed.

The German occupation of Kiev lasted for two years. Policies designed to starve the remaining population were put into place; already in November 1941 one onlooker described Kiev "as a city of beggars." Epidemics swept the city; murder for bread became an everyday occurrence. Kievans were not allowed to enter many shops, trams, and theaters, and curfew was set at 6:00 p.m. Streets and buildings were given German names, and at least twenty-three German industrial enterprises were established in the city. By mid-1943, however, about eighty partisan and sabotage units were operating in or near the city. Perhaps twenty thousand people were involved in the Resistance, which carried out some nine hundred operations, mostly against railway lines and roadways, supply depots, and police facilities.

Although Hitler's goal of reducing Kiev to rubble was averted because of a shortage of bombs, by the time the Nazi occupation was broken, on 6 November 1943, eight hundred industrial enterprises and six thousand buildings (about one-sixth of the total number of structures in Kiev) had been destroyed. Soviet sources estimate that two hundred thousand Kievans were killed during the war and another hundred thousand were sent into Germany as conscript laborers. Valuable books, archives, and records had been looted from libraries, museums, and various institutes. The Khreshchatyk and the central district lay in ruins, and an estimated two hundred thousand Kievans were left without housing. Rationing of basic goods continued until December 1947. Kiev was declared a "Hero City" by the Soviet government, but the human tragedy of the battle for Kiev was not discussed openly until the Soviet political climate thawed briefly under Khrushchev (now Soviet premier) in 1962–1963. In January 1963, Leonid Volynsky published a short story in the journal Novy Mir (New World) about the battle, calling it "a vast and inexplicable tragedy."

THE FATE OF KIEV'S JEWS

With few exceptions, Jews had been forbidden to settle in Kiev until Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) liberalized residence restrictions. During the final decades of the nineteenth century Kiev's Jewish community grew rapidly, and by 1923 Kiev and Odessa, each with about 130,000 Jews, had the largest Jewish populations of any Soviet city. Pogroms against Kiev Jews had occurred in 1881, 1905, and 1919, but under NEP, Jewish councils (soviets) and law courts were established, permitting limited jurisdiction over Jewish communal affairs, possibly in an effort to reduce rabbinical authority. The use of Yiddish was permitted in both institutions. However, under Stalin this limited autonomy disappeared. All of Kiev's synagogues were closed between 1929 and 1931, though one was reopened on appeal.

During the Second World War, the Soviet press began to publish stories about Nazi extermination policies only in June 1941. In occupied Kiev, on 29 September 1941, Jews assembled at a designated corner in Lukianivka district, apparently believing they would be evacuated to the east. Instead, on 29 and 30 September, 33,771 Jews were massacred in a ravine-filled area on the city's outskirts called Babi Yar (Babyn Yar). Many were women, children, and elderly people. Perhaps one hundred thousand Jews would ultimately die at Babi Yar, as well as tens of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, and others. About 140,000 Jews had lived in Kiev on the eve of the war. On 8 November 1943, Moscow Radio reported that the Red Army had found only one remaining Jew when it liberated the city. Babi Yar remains one of the most notorious symbols of Nazi barbarity in the Second World War.

After the war, plans for a public memorial at Babi Yar were shelved, and the government decided to flood and fill in the ravines. In 1961 the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b. 1933) was allowed to publish a poem indicting anti-Semitism that reminded his readers that "No monument stands over Babi Yar." The resulting furor forced Yevtushenko to rewrite his poem, adding the lines "Here together with Russians and Ukrainians lie Jews," and "I am proud of the Russia that stood in the path of the bandits." In 1966 a petition to restore Kiev's Jewish national theater was rejected, and its supporters were arrested. Ultimately, in 1976, a monument was built at Babi Yar. The inscription on the plaque notes only that some two hundred thousand Soviet citizens were killed on the site. It does not specifically mention Jews.

LATE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET KIEV

After the war, Kiev rebuilt again. In the ensuing decade, natural gas replaced coal as the dominant energy source in the city. Trams remained the basic mode of transportation through the 1950s, but more and more buses and trolley-buses appeared each year. Planning for a subway system began in 1945, and with the opening of five stations in 1960, Kiev became the third Soviet city to operate an underground. From 1.1 million residents in 1959, Kiev grew to 1.4 million in 1967, and 2.6 million in 1989, the year of the last Soviet census. The city remained the third largest in the Soviet Union. However, Stalinist and Nazi destruction had destroyed much of the beauty of old Kiev, a city known for its churches, glittering onion-domed hilltop monasteries, wooded ravines, and spectacular vistas. The rebuilt Khreshchatyk, for example, featured dreary monolithic Stalinist architecture called "Mussolini modern" by one scholar.

By the 1970s, Kiev had joined Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) as one of the Soviet Union's showplace cities. Here the quality of life far surpassed that of virtually all other Soviet cities and even more so, that of the backward Soviet countryside. Nevertheless, the quality of life in Kiev remained well below that of comparable cities in the West. Most residents lived in large, uniform, prefabricated, and often poorly constructed apartment complexes, and shortages of consumer goods and services persisted. These problems reflected the inefficiencies of the Soviet economy and the continued emphasis on heavy industry and military-related production. Travel outside the country was virtually impossible. In 1959, only 2,200 Kievans were allowed such travel, almost all of it to other Soviet bloc countries. A small Ukrainian dissident movement surfaced in the 1960s. It was suppressed, and the KGB retained tight control over the city.

As the liberalizing reforms unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) in the late 1980s brought unprecedented freedom to Soviet citizens, Rukh, a Ukrainian organization that originally stressed the revival of the Ukrainian language, became increasingly influential in Kiev. In January 1990, following the tactics of popular front movements in the Baltic states, hundreds of thousands joined hands in a human chain that stretched for three hundred miles from Kiev to Lviv (Lvov) and Ivano-Frankivske, commemorating the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in 1918. Independence came in 1991, but Ukraine could not easily shed the institutional and cultural legacy of Soviet communism. Ukraine's GDP (gross domestic product) declined by 60 percent during the 1990s. Hyperinflation—said to be 10,000 percent in 1993—ruined many, and barter became a major means of economic transaction. The shadow economy, or black market, continued to grow, accounting for perhaps half of Ukraine's GDP by the mid-1990s. Despite its rich farmland, Ukraine became a net importer of food. An oligarchy of Soviet-era bureaucrats and managers, many of them racketeers and commodity traders, came to dominate the economy of Ukraine and Kiev, though none added value by actually producing goods. Corruption, complex tax laws and regulations, a lack of public confidence in the banking system, and the absence of enforcement of property rights discouraged foreign investment. Ukraine's per capita GDP in 2004, estimated at $1,160, was about one-fifth that of neighboring Poland. Income inequality increased; health care worsened for many; and life expectancy declined. Still, signs of progress could be found. By 1997 inflation had fallen to 10 percent. In 2000 the economy began to grow, and by then Ukraine had created a stable currency, the hryvnia.

Kiev fared considerably better than Ukraine as a whole in the post-Soviet period. Privatization of small enterprises such as taxi services, restaurants, and retail shops proceeded rapidly. Although Ukraine received less direct foreign investment than any other eastern or central European country after 1990, Kiev got about 40 percent of that investment. Censuses taken in 1994 and 2002 revealed a population of 2.6 million in Kiev. "Nontraditional" migrants—especially Afghans, Kurds, and Vietnamese—settled in the city, creating new sources of tension. In 1999, police officials maintained that foreigners committed one-quarter of the city's crimes.

In the late 1990s, under the leadership of the mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko, the Khreshchatyk and the area around the large Bessarabsky Covered Market underwent significant renovation. Many new buildings were provided with their own heating systems (Soviet planners had supplied heat and hot water by means of central plants). Shopping facilities were greatly expanded. In Soviet times, there had been few vehicles on the streets other than taxis and delivery trucks. By 2004, eight hundred thousand vehicles were plying Kiev streets each day, and traffic volume and flow had emerged as sources of concern.

Perhaps because Kiev had been heavily Russified, it was slow to remove the symbols of Soviet rule, and most Soviet statuary remains, including the enormous Mother of the Motherland, erected during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, that towers over the city. However, the city has helped finance the rebuilding of some of the splendid structures that were destroyed in the Stalinist and Nazi years, for example the baroque St. Michael of the Golden Domes, originally built in 1108–1113 and destroyed in 1935–1936, and the Cathedral of the Assumption, demolished in 1941.

Although Ukrainian has become increasingly the language of choice, Kiev remains a bilingual city. About 40 percent of the city's native inhabitants cite Russian as their native language, as do more than half of those who have moved to Kiev from other cities. However, usage of Ukrainian is likely to continue to rise, as in the mid-2000s only ten of Kiev's four hundred public schools were teaching exclusively in Russian (with the exception of Ukrainian language classes). The privately run National University of Kiev Mohyla Academy, whose origins date to 1615, was revived in 1991. It has become an important center for liberal arts learning. Students are accepted on the basis of merit, and all study in English and Ukrainian. Russian is not taught.

In November–December 2004, Ukraine had a hotly contested presidential election that highlighted the corruption and ethnic divisions that continue to plague the country. The winner, Viktor Yushchenko, pledged to move Ukraine closer to the West, end corruption, and reverse the post-Soviet drift. The fate of Kiev and its residents will largely depend on the success of such efforts in Ukraine as a whole.

See alsoBabi Yar; Russia; Soviet Union; Ukraine .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

Gol'denveizer, A. A. "Iz Kievskikh vospominanii (1917–1921 gg.)." Arhkiv Russkoi revoliutsii 6 (1922): 161–303.

Hamm, Michael F. Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917. Princeton, N.J., 1993.

Hewryk, Titus D. The Lost Architecture of Kiev. New York, 1982.

Levin, Nora. The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival. 2 vols. New York, 1988.

Sarbei, V. G., ed. Istoriia Kieva: Kiev perioda pozdnego feodalizma i kapitalizma. Vol. 2. Kiev, 1983.

Suprunenko, N. I., ed. Istoriia Kieva: Kiev sotsialisticheskii. Vol. 3. Kiev, 1986.

Michael F. Hamm