Kharkiv, also known as Kharkov, is the second-largest city in Ukraine. Located in the northeast of the country, it is the largest city of the historic region of Sloboda Ukraine. Kharkiv is the administrative center of Kharkiv Oblast and Kharkiv Raion. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, it had an estimated population of 1,421,125.
Founded in 1654 as a Cossack fortress, by the late 19th century Kharkiv had developed within the Russian Empire as a major commercial and industrial center. From December 1919 to January 1934, Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. During this period, migration from the distressed countryside and the relaxation of restrictions on Ukrainian cultural expression changed the city's ethnic complexion: Ukrainian replaced Russian as the largest recorded nationality, however Russian remained the dominant spoken language. The city was the focus of major battles in World War II, and under German occupation witnessed the systematic destruction of its substantial Jewish population. In the last decades of the Soviet Union, it reemerged as a major cultural, scientific, educational, transport, and industrial center.
Among the city's principal landmarks are the Annunciation and Dormition cathedrals, the Derzhprom building in Freedom Square, the Kharkiv Railway Station, the National University of Kharkiv, and the Kharkiv Tractor Factory (HTZ). Machinery, electronics and military hardware have been the leading industries.
In March and April 2014, the city saw both pro-Russia and pro-Ukrainian demonstrations, and an aborted attempt by Russian-backed separatists to seize control of the city and regional administration. Launching their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russians reached the outskirts of Kharkiv but after several weeks of fighting were forced back toward the international border. By February 2026, four years of continued Russian shelling, drone and missile attacks had reportedly destroyed a quarter of the city and driven much of public life underground.
Etymology
- English: KAR-kiv, KH-, H-; KAR-kov; KAR-kawf;
- Ukrainian: Харків, pronounced [ˈxɑrkiu̯] ⓘ
- Russian: Харьков, pronounced [ˈxarʲkəf] ⓘ
The city's name can be originated from its namesake river, Kharkiv. 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 Greek name Chariton, Ukrainian: Харитон, romanized: Kharyton, or Zechariah, Ukrainian: Захарій, romanized: Zakharii). But the river's name is attested earlier than the foundation of the fortress.
Kharkov, the transliteration of the name from Russian, was the traditional standard English spelling of the city's name favored prior to Ukraine's independence in 1991 (similar to the spelling of Kiev versus Kyiv).
Like all other cities across the country, Kharkiv became the internationally standardized Latin-alphabet transliteration of the Ukrainian name according to the Ukrainian National romanization system, which was adopted for official use by Ukraine's cabinet in 2010, approved by the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names in 2012, and adopted by the BGN/PCGN in 2019. This spelling appears in Encyclopædia Britannica and in dictionaries as the spelling for the Ukrainian city. The spelling Kharkiv has also been adopted as the Library of Congress Name Authority Heading. As noted by the Christian Science Monitor, many in the English-language media outlets historically spelled the city Kharkov, even after changing the spelling of Kiev to Kyiv, but since the beginning of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine more outlets and style guides have been shifting away from Russian transliterations.
History
Timeline of Kharkiv
- Russian Tsardom/Empire ( as part of Kharkiv Regiment) 1654–1765
- Russian Empire 1765–1917
-
- Russian Provisional Government Mar–Nov 1917
- Ukrainian People's Republic Nov–Dec 1917
- UPRS Dec 1917 – Apr 1918
- UPR/Ukrainian State Apr 1918 – Jan 1919
- UkrSSR Jan–Jun 1919
- AFSR Jun–Dec 1919
- PWPGU/UkrSSR Dec 1919 – Dec 1922
- Soviet Union 1922–1941
-
- Nazi Germany 1941–1943
- Soviet Union Feb–Mar 1943
- Nazi Germany Mar–Sep 1943
- Soviet Union 1943–1991
- Ukraine 1991–present
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 25 miles (40 km) 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 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, 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.
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. Defense rested with a local Sloboda Cossack regiment under the jurisdiction of the Razryad Prikaz, a military agency commanded from Belgorod.
The original walls of Kharkiv enclosed today's streets: Kvitky-Osnovianenko Street, Constitution Square, Pavlivskyi Square, Serhiivskyi Square, and Sobornyi Descent. There were 10 towers of which the tallest, Vestovska, was some 16 metres (52 ft) high. In 1689 the fortress was expanded to include the Intercession Cathedral and Monastery, which became a seat of a local church hierarch, the Protopope.
Russian Empire
Administrative reforms led to Kharkiv being governed from 1708 from Kyiv, 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. Alexander Mickiewicz, brother of the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, was a professor of law in the university, while another celebrity, Goethe, searched for instructors for the school. One of its later graduates was the Ukrainian poet and writer Ivan Franko, to whom it awarded a doctorate in Russian linguistics in 1906.
The streets were first cobbled in the city center in 1830. In 1844 the 90 metres (300 ft) 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.
In the course of the 19th century, although predominantly Russian speaking, Kharkiv became a center of Ukrainian culture. 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, and reputedly were the first to employ the slogan "Glory to Ukraine!" and its response "Glory on all of earth!".
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.
Revolution and war of independence
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.
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 Ukrainian and Russian Socialist Revolutionaries. Commanding worker, rather than peasant, votes, within the city itself the Bolsheviks won a plurality.
When in January 1918, Lenin's Council of People's Commissars disbanded the Constituent Assembly after its first sitting in Petrograd, 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.
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. On 6 March 1918, the city briefly became the seat a newly established zemlia of the Ukrainian People's Republic. On 29 April 1918 it was disbanded by Pavlo Skoropadsky, Hetman of the German-backed Ukrainian State.
Soviet era
Capital of Soviet Ukraine
After the German withdrawal in November 1918, the Red Army returned but, in June 1919, withdrew again before the advancing forces of Anton Denikin's White movement Volunteer Army. 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. As new buildings were going up, many of city's historic architectural monuments were being torn down. These included most of the baroque churches: Saint Nicholas's Cathedral of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church, the Church of the Myrrhophores, Saint Demetrius's Church, and the Cossack fortified Church of the Nativity.
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.
Since the turn of the century, the influx of new workers from the countryside changed the ethnic composition of Kharkiv. According to census returns, by 1939, the Russian share of the population had fallen from almost two-thirds to one third, while the Ukrainian share rose from a quarter to almost half. The Jewish population rose from under six percent of the total, to over 15 percent (sustaining a Hebrew secondary school, a popular Jewish university and extensive publication in Yiddish and Hebrew).
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 Oblast's 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.