ZAPORIZHZHIA
In the sixteenth century, the Ukrainian Cossacks formed their centre, the Zaporozhian Sich, a unique military and political entity that played an important role in the formation of Ukrainian statehood.
The Cossacks were free people of various nationalities and social groups, including Ukrainians, Poles, and Tatars, who moved to the southern steppes in search of opportunities to prosper.
The constant struggle with the nomadic peoples of the East contributed to the emergence of their own armed forces (including a powerful intelligence and naval fleet).
The Zaporozhian Sich was the driving force behind Ukraine's struggle against its neighbours, primarily Poles, Turks, and Crimean Tatars. It was a democratic republican state, leading to the establishment of Cossack autonomy.
The Cossacks of Zaporizhzhia had already formed the leading stratum of the Ukrainian people in the seventeenth century, forming the basis of the Ukrainian state, which emerged in 1648 with the start of the Liberation War led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
The Cossack administrative and military system was extended across much of Ukraine.
The Zboriv Treaties of 1649 granted them independence and formed administrative regions within the Commonwealth's Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav regions.
The Zaporizhzhia Cossacks, fighting for their rights and liberties, established a distinct state-administrative structure, conducted diplomacy, and signed international treaties. In the eyes of Western Europe, the Zaporozhian Cossacks became an important force in opposing Turkiye's expansion in Eastern Europe.
This is demonstrated, in particular, by the numerous engravings and other images of political content that were prevalent in Europe at the time.
The new system endured on Ukrainian territory until the end of the 18th century, while Cossack military units lasted until the first half of the nineteenth century.
Today, Khortytsia Island, the site of the Zaporizhzhian Sich, is a popular tourist destination that has been integrated into the country's infrastructure. It features the Museum of the History of Zaporizhzhian Cossacks and the Historical and Cultural Complex ‘Zaporizhzhian Sich,’ which recreates Cossack life in detail.
KHARKIV
Kharkiv, the city where Ukraine's intelligentsia was concentrated, was the main centre of national revival in the early 19th century.
Kharkiv was part of the Slobozhanshchyna (historic region that included the central and southern parts of Sumy Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, the northern part of Luhansk Oblast and the north-eastern part of Donetsk Oblast, the western, eastern, and southern parts of Belgorod region, the southern part of Voronezh region, and the western part of Kursk region), which was inhabited by a variety of peoples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Slavic tribes, Alans, and others.
Kharkiv University, Eastern Ukraine's first university, was founded in 1805. As a result, Kharkiv remained a cultural and national revival centre until the late 1930s. The Ukrainian Bulletin, Ukraine's first mass newspaper, was published here between 1816 and 1819 under the motto 'to promote the comprehensive rise of science and literature'.
University professors A. Metlynskyi and L. Borovykovskyi, among others, founded the Kharkiv Romantics, a literary association that shed light on Ukraine's history.
The Kharkiv School of Romantics consisted of socially active figures such as the historian Mykola Kostomarov, who wrote The Book of the Being of the Ukrainian People, the most important programme work of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (a secret organisation aimed to create a democratic confederation of Slavic peoples led by Ukraine, based on the principles of equality and sovereignty; to destroy tsarism and abolish serfdom).
In the 1920s, a renaissance of Ukrainian culture began in Kharkiv, which went down in history as the ‘Executed Renaissance’.
A wave of repression against the Ukrainian intelligentsia began in Kharkiv at the same time that the villages of Slobozhanshchyna were suffering from collectivisation (the process of uniting individual peasant farms into collective farms, which led to the alienation of peasants from property, and eventually to repression and the Holodomor) and the artificially created famine of 1932-1933.
In the mid-1920s, the Pluh Literary Association began constructing the Slovo House for writers such as Pavlo Tychyna, Ostap Vyshnia, Volodymyr Sosiura, Mykola Khvylovyi, Mykola Kulish, Mike Johansen, and others.
In the 1930s, this building was dubbed the 'Crematorium' as a symbol of the destruction of an entire generation of artists. For example, the writers Ostap Vyshnia and Pavlo Tychyna were accused of attempting to establish a new anti-Soviet centre in Zaporizhzhya.
Ivan Bahrianyi was arrested in 1932 by the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a repressive apparatus tasked with suppressing any form of political, social, and economic opposition to the ruling regime) for 'conducting counter-revolutionary agitation.'
In 1933, the poet Mykhailo Yalovyi was sentenced to death for alleged 'espionage activities'.
The Executed Renaissance is notable for its discussion of Ukraine's cultural and political orientation: "Away from Moscow! To Europe," as well as the artist's role in social and political issues.
In contrast to the classical literature of the time, urbanism appeared in the literature of the Executed Renaissance, i.e. the predominance of images of the city as opposed to the countryside.
The year 1937 was the apogee of the massacre of Ukrainian artists. On the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, 1111 Solovetsky camp prisoners were shot by NKVD executioners in the Sandarmokh tract of Karelia, labelled as 'enemy of the people'.
In early 2024, Kharkiv, Ukraine's eastern outpost, received these definitions: "unbreakable" and "reinforced concrete".
Russia has been deporting a generation of new Ukrainian elite - artists, researchers, and activists such as photographer Denys Kryvyi, historian Viacheslav Zaitsev, Ukrainian cuisine researcher Olha Pavlenko-Koliorevo and many other names of modern history.
DNIPRO
For more than two centuries, the image of Dnipro has evolved from 'New Athens' to 'South Manchester'. This was particularly true due to the fact the city of Dnipro's image was associated with the borderlands.
For example, the modern city of Dnipro is located on the border with Kyivan Rus. Then, Dnipro was regarded as a Greek project of the Russian Empire, a means to conquer Constantinople as an intermediate location.
In the 19th century, the Russian Empire placed Dnipro on its mental map of the far south, under the so-called 'tag' Southern Russia. When Soviet power prevailed in the 20th century, the city took on the meaning of 'Union subordination'.
As a result, the city's population is associated with neither the south nor the centre: 'We are neither the first nor the second city' (the citation refers to the two cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, which were considered centres). Today, Dnipro is the border of the hot hostilities and rear.
In the second half of the 18th century, the city, then called Katerynoslav, was affected by imperial policy. When Catherine II assumed absolute power, the Zaporozhian Sich was disbanded, and imperial cities were to be built on the lands it had acquired.
Grigoriy Potemkin, the chief architect of imperial development in the Black Sea steppes, sought to establish the empire's southern capital. One of the primary reasons for its formation was to establish a defence centre on the Russian Empire's southern borders.
The city's location on the banks of the Dnipro River made it strategically important in defending the empire against external threats, particularly the Crimean Tatars and Turks.
However, with the deaths of Catherine and Potemkin in the late 18th century, their ambitious plans remained unrealised. Until the second half of the 19th century, Katerynoslav existed as a steppe.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the era of rapid industrialisation and modernisation, the city was nicknamed ‘Manchester on the Dnipro’.
Industrialisation resulted in the explosive growth of the city around the industry; between 1865 and 1917, its population increased nearly tenfold to over 200,000 people.
Since the late 18th century, Dnipro has remained one of Ukraine's most important Jewish communities.
The massive settlement of Jews on Ukrainian ethnic lands, particularly in the Dnipro Oblast, was caused by Poland's three partitions between 1772 and 1795, which resulted in a large portion of the former Polish territories joining the Russian Empire.
When Catherine II issued a decree in 1791 forbidding Jews from registering as merchants in Russian cities and ports, they were still able to do so in Belarus and the Katerynoslav governorate of the Tavriya province (Dnipro).
The 'strip of Jewish settlement' began in these territories and lasted until 1915. This was part of the imperial policy of oppressing peoples and creating a sense of Russian superiority.
By the middle of the 19th century, Katerynoslav had developed into a powerful trade and commercial centre, with the Jewish community playing a direct role. The activities of the Hintzburgs, the Poliakovs, the owner of the Dnipro Shipping Company, Margolin, and Blioch, who helped to establish railways in Ukraine, were directly related to the economic upswing in the Russian Empire during the 1960s and 1980s. By connecting Katerynoslav to Odesa and Kherson in 1878, Jews controlled two-thirds of all wheat transported by rail in Black Sea ports.
ODESA
In 1629, Bohdan Khmelnytsky (the first hetman of the Cossack state) led a military campaign against the Ottoman Empire's Black Sea possessions, capturing the Khadzhibey fortress. In 1789, the Russian Empire took control of the Khadzhibey Fortress.
In 1794, Russian Empress Catherine II signed a decree authorising the construction of Odesa. This is something that modern Russian propaganda mentions. Historian Serhii Hutsaliuk, in turn, states: ‘The myth of the foundation of Odesa was invented by historian Apollo Skalkovsky in the 19th century to flatter the Romanov dynasty.
It ‘held on’ until the beginning of the XX century. Then this myth was forgotten. We returned to it again in the 1980s, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR.’
However, the city did not appear out of nowhere, but rather on the territory of Khadzhibey. In his book History of Europe, historian Norman Davies writes, "Catherine the Great has been rewarded with the epithet "great"... but one must question whether sheer size and brute force are the only signs of greatness.
It is easy to identify characteristics that elicit shame rather than respect”. Admiral Deribas, military engineer Franz Devolan, and Duke de Richelieu were among the first leaders of the city of Odesa, leaving a distinct European imprint on its development.
They envisioned it not only as a hub for international trade and the largest port on the Black Sea, but also as a centre for science, education, and culture. As a result, it's no surprise that Odesa's first city theatre opened in 1809, followed by the Richelieu Lyceum in the mid-20s.
Odesa's peculiar ethnic composition (Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Germans, French, Bulgarians, Poles, Moldovans, etc.) The city had a special status that granted privileges to foreign merchants and settlers, which helped to establish port trade and by the end of the 19th century, Odesa had almost half a million inhabitants.
Ukrainian cities form a multifaceted identity for Ukrainian statehood. Kharkiv and Lviv served as bridgeheads for national liberation movements, whereas Chernivtsi and Odesa are renowned for their large populations of minorities, including Jews. Dnipro exemplifies frontier mental mapping, while Kyiv represents the unification of East Slavic tribes.
