Kharkiv, also known as Kharkov, is the second-largest city in Ukraine.Kharkiv "never had eastern-western conflicts" , Euronews (23 October 2014) 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: ; ; ; , ,
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 KharkoIvan Katchanovski et al. (eds.), Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (2013), p. 253 (a diminutive form of the Greek name Chariton, , or Zechariah, ). But the river's name is attested earlier than the foundation of the fortress.Slavs in Canada, vol. 2, Inter-university Committee on Canadian Slavs (1968), p. 255.
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
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 east of the modern city, near Staryi Saltiv.Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (2006), p. 34 . 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 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 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 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.Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (Historical Dictionaries of Europe) by Ivan Katchanovski, Scarecrow Press (Publication date: 11 July 2013), (page 713)Literary Politics in Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 . Durham and London: Duke University Press. (page 7) By February 1918 their forces had captured much of Ukraine.World War I: A Student Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO. p. 1195.
The Bolsheviks made Kharkiv the capital of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.Ukraine: The Phony War? , The New York Review of Books (27 April 2014) 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.Borderlands into Bordered Lands: Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Vol. 98) (Volume 98) , Ibidem Verlag, 2010, (page 24) 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.The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression , Harvard University Press, 858 pages, , page 97 By December 1919, Soviet authority was restored.The A to Z of the Russo-Japanese War . Scarecrow Press Inc. (page 101) 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.