Along Ukraine's River: A Social and Environmental History of the Dnipro 9789633862056

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A LO NG U K R A I N E ’ S R I V E R

A LONG U K R A I N E ’ S R I V E R A SOCIAL A N D E N V I RON M E N TA L H I S TORY OF THE DNIPRO

ROM A N A DR I A N C Y B R I W S K Y

Central European University Press Budapest–New York

Copyright © by Roman Adrian Cybriwsky, 2018 Published in 2018 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-732-763-8816 E-mail: [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 978-963-386-204-9 cloth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cybriwsky, Roman A., author. Title: Along Ukraine’s river : a social and environmental history of the Dnipro / Roman Adrian Cybriwsky. Description: Budapest ; New York : Central European University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017024436 (print) | LCCN 2017028891 (ebook) | ISBN 9789633862056 | ISBN 9789633862049 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Dnieper River--History. | Dnieper River Region--History. | Dnieper River--Environmental conditions. | Dnieper River Region--Environmental conditions. | Ukraine--History. | Ukraine--Social life and customs. | Natural resources--Ukraine--History. | Ukraine--Environmental conditions. Classification: LCC DK500.D65 (ebook) | LCC DK500.D65 C93 2017 (print) | DDC 947.7--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024436 Printed in Hungary

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface chapter 1: A National River  1.1 Rivers and Nations 1.2 The Heart of Ukraine 1.3 A Note about Decommunization 

viii 1 7 7 10 17

chapter 2:

19 19 21 24 28

A Work of Nature and the Works of Men  2.1 Introduction 2.2 The River in Russia 2.3 The River in Belarus 2.4 Ukrainian Territory

chapter 3: A Winding Course through History  39 3.1 The Borysthenes 39 3.2 Kyivan Rus’ 42 3.3 Ukrainian Cossacks 50 3.4 Russia’s Ukraine  59 chapter 4: Soviet River: From DniproHES to Chornobyl  69 4.1 Introduction 69 4.2 Soviet Stroika71 4.3 Battle Lines 77

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4.4 Chornobyl 4.5 Enjoying the River

82 87

chapter 5:

The River’s Health  5.1 Pollution Inherited and Imported 5.2 Radioactive River 5.3 Other Pollution

91 91 94 97

chapter 6:

Kyiv—Whose Ukraine? 6.1 National Capital 6.2 Landmarks of Religion 6.3 Soviet Landmarks 6.4 The Holodomor Monument 6.5 Landscapes of Corruption 6.6 A Green Zone

103 103 106 110 112 112 115

chapter 7:

Around the Kremenchuk Sea  7.1 A Drowned Land 7.2 Nostalgia 7.3 Cities and Towns 7.4 Orbita

123 123 133 137 143

chapter 8:

At the Great Bend of the Dnipro  8.1 Introduction 8.2 Rapids and Steppes 8.3 Industrial Heartland 8.4 Iconography and Toponymy

147 147 148 156 162

chapter 9:

Zaporizhia and Dnipro (City)—Ukraine Reclaimed  9.1 Introduction 9.2 Meeting DniproHES 9.3 Exploring Khortytsia 9.4 Zaporizhia 9.5 Dnipro (City)

165 165 168 170 174 181

Cont ents

vii

chapter 10: Down the Lower Course  10.1 Introduction 10.2 The Upper Kakhovka Reservoir 10.3 The Lower Kakhovka Reservoir 10.4 Below the Last Dam

193 193 197 206 213

chapter 11: Some Thoughts About Ukraine 

219

Bibliography Index

229 233

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1: Outline map of Ukraine with the iconic course of the Dnipro 11 Figure 1.2: The Dnipro as seen from the hilltop burial place of Taras Shevchenko in Kaniv 15 Figure 2.1: Map of the Dnipro watershed 20 Figure 2.2: Map of the Dnipro in Russia and Belarus 23 Figure 2.3: Map of the river’s meanders and trapped territories at the Ukraine-Belarus border 27 Figure 2.4: Photo of the access path to the beach at the Kyiv Sea between the walls surrounding expensive private houses 29 Figure 2.5: Map of the Dnipro in Ukraine and the Dnipro Cascade 33 Figure 2.6: Map of the Northern Crimea Canal 37 Figure 2.7: Photo of happy Ukrainian at the spot where Crimea’s water has been turned off 37 Figure 3.1: Map of Kyivan Rus’ at the peak of its influence 44 Figure 3.2: Map of Sich Locations 52 Figure 3.3: Photo of a Sich reconstruction on Khortytsia Island as seen from DniproHES 54 Figure 3.4: Photo reproduction of Aivazovsky’s painting “Chumaky at Rest” 55 Figure 4.1: Reproduction of a poster from 1932 calling Soviet citizens to work on the construction of DniproHES  74 Figure 4.2: Reproduction of Soviet postage stamp showing the Kakhovka Dam and southern canals 76

L i s t o f Ill u s t r at i o n s

Figure 4.3: Photo of DniproHES after the 1941 dynamiting Figure 4.4: Photo of the “Russian Woodpecker” radar installation Figure 4.5: Cover of a Soviet-era guidebook for cruises on the Dnipro Figure 5.1: Photo of a brownfields district at the former site of the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant Figure 5.2: Photograph of fishermen on the Dnipro Figure 6.1: Photograph of the Dnipro and Pecherska Lavra Figure 6.2: Photo of a statue of St. Volodymyr the Great and a pedestrian bridge to public beaches Figure 6.3: Photo of replica pirate ship for parties at Mezhihirya Figure 6.4: Photo of bodybuilding at Kachalka Figure 6.5: Photo of Kyiv beach and high-rise buildings above Figure 6.6: Photo of gentrification in a riverside dacha zone Figure 7.1: Map of the Kremenchuk Reservoir and surroundings Figure 7.2: Photo of sad evictees on the move Figure 7.3: Reproduction of “Landscape in Ukraine” (1883) by Volodymyr Orlovsky Figure 7.4: Soviet-style street landscape in Kremenchuk Figure 7.5: Camping today along the river on Zelenyi Ostriv Figure 7.6: Photo of Orbita Figure 7.7: Photo of grain elevators along the river near the Kremenchuk Dam Figure 8.1: Map of the Dnipro rapids Figure 8.2: A group of friends relaxing beside the rapids of the Dnipro in the 1920s Figure 8.3: Photo of the view down Prospekt Svobody in Kamianske Figure 8.4: Map of the industrial heartland of Ukraine Figure 9.1: Photo of DniproHES Figure 9.2: Photo of Cossack cannons and the dam Figure 9.3: Photo of Zaporizhia beach upriver from DniproHES and factories on opposite bank Figure 9.4: Photo of the Menorah Center Figure 9.5: Photo of church on Monastery Island Figure 9.6: Photo of Dnipropetrovsk rising Figure 9.7: Photo of the Dnipro at Dnipro (City) and the Parus building 

ix

79 85 88 97 100 107 109 115 117 121 121 125 127 136 140 142 145 146 150 151 160 161 167 172 172 179 183 188 188

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Figure 10.1: Map of the lower Dnipro Figure 10.2: Photo of the Vasylivka bus station and the flying saucer police post Figure 10.3: Photograph of new church in the sands of Enerhodar and city in the background Figure 10.4: Trucks weaving to navigate the hazardous road on a levee south of Nikopol Figure 10.5: Photo of Lutheran church and field in Zmiivka Figure 10.6: Photograph of ruins from the monastery in Chervonyi Mayak Figure 10.7: Photograph of the approach to the Kakhovka Dam Figure 10.8: Photograph of the beach in Kherson Figure 10.9: Photograph of young swimmers at Hola Prystan Figure 11.1: Photo of river zone in the heart of Kyiv Figure 11.2: Photo of young people enjoying themselves in the sun on a Kyiv beach

196 200 203 207 211 213 214 217 218 226 226

List of Tables Table 2.1: Dnipro Cascade Dams and Reservoirs Table 3.1: Key Cities in Historic Novorossiya 

32 63

Preface

The Dnipro, formerly the Dnieper River, is with its 2,285 kilometers the thirdlongest river in Europe and the central geographical feature of Ukraine, the largest country that is entirely within the European continent. The river has a long, both glorious and immensely tragic history, that has been important in the development of European and Slavic civilization, and is shared by three countries: Russia, where it rises; Belarus, where it flows through the eastern provinces and forms part of the border; and Ukraine, where it marks part of the border with Belarus and flows generally southward to empty, via a broad estuary, into the Black Sea. Despite belonging to three countries, I call the Dnipro “Ukraine’s river” because it cuts through the heart of the country for more than one-half of its length, including Ukraine’s historic capital city Kyiv and a number of other prominent cities in the country and important historical sites. It is intimately tied to the culture and soul of the Ukrainian nation, and figures prominently in the history of the country and its arts and literature. For Ukraine, it is also a main source of water and electrical power, an important avenue of transportation, a popular destination for rest and recreation, and a place to dump nasty waste material. The Dnipro has also been a Russian river, when Imperial Russia colonized Ukraine and developed many of its southern cities and farming regions, and a Soviet river, when the Soviet Union put it to work for the development of heavy industry. In Russian, the river is called the Dnepr, or Dnieper. But even then, the Dnipro was also Ukraine’s river. Now that Ukraine has gained independence, the Dnieper is firmly the Dnipro, the Ukrainian word for the river, and only the Dnipro.

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It has also been called the Dnipr in Ukrainian, as opposed to the Russian Dnepr, but this usage is disappearing. Besides, Russia has a storied river of its own, the Volga, which it shares with the Tatars of Tatarstan. Ironically, this substantially longer river (3,692 kilometers) rises in the same highlands of western Russia as the Dnipro, but flows in a different direction and terminates not like the Dnipro in the Black Sea, where it eventually mixes with the waters of the world, but in Russia’s end of the receding, isolated, and grossly polluted sink that is the Caspian Sea. This book is part regional cultural geography, and part history, sociology, and travelogue. It is based on travel and on personal experiences at various locations along the Dnipro, as well as on readings in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. My home base was Kyiv, where I have been living on and off over several years for months at a time, and from which I travelled by automobile up and down the river and along one bank and then the other to visit selected destinations for a close look. For the benefit of my readers, the bibliography relies heavily on English-language sources. Despite the river’s prominence, it is not generally well known outside its region and, for much of the world, remains terra incognita. Therefore, one of the goals of this book is to plug a hole in the literature. No book on this subject exists in Russian or Ukrainian (or in any other language) that strives to pull together a wide-ranging story about the many interactions between this particular river and its nation, and I expect that also locals will be interested in what I write. As far as I know, this is the only book in any language that attempts a comprehensive social, historical, and environmental portrait of the Dnipro from source to mouth. It also appears to be the only book in any language that addresses this wide range of topics for just the Ukrainian portion of the river. I can think of only one book that is similar in scope, covering society, history, and ecology along the river, but that work is based on a research expedition that was undertaken more than a century and a half ago (in 1856–1860), and covered only the lower stretch of the river in Ukraine, from what was then the city of Katerynoslav (later named Dnipropetrovsk; today it is “Dnipro”) to the end of the Dnipro estuary on the Black Sea. Nevertheless, Narysy Dnipra (Sketches of the Dnipro) is good reading and a valuable resource, although there are actually no “sketches” other than those in text. The author is Oleksandr Afanasyev-Chuzhbynskyi (1816–1875), a noted writer and ethnographer who traveled widely in Ukraine to study local cultures and natural geography.

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Although he is also known for an authoritative dictionary of the Ukrainian language, he wrote Narysy Dnipra in Russian, as that was the norm in his time. I have a Ukrainian translation of the book by Ilko Lemko that was published in 2016 on the occasion of the 200-year anniversary of Afanasyev-Chuzhbynskyi’s birth (Afanasyev-Chuzhbynsky, 2016). I admit to a life-long fascination with rivers and respect for their roles in history and their contribution to the cultures and economies of the peoples who live near. In America, I live within a short walk of the historic Delaware River and I visit it often; and when in Kyiv, every one of my many apartments and hotels over the years has been, by design, within a short walk of the Dnipro. For months, I even lived on the Dnipro in the very comfortable Art Hotel Baccara, a ship that is moored near the beaches in the heart of Kyiv, as well as in a small hotel that is part of a yacht club named Fregat (Frigate). Over a period of three or four years that continues today, I have spent innumerable days (and evenings) enjoying myself at a favorite café-restaurant on one of the Dnipro’s beaches, and sitting with my laptop at a riverside table to think, write, and brood. The establishment is named Ocheretyanyi Kit, which they translate as Jungle Cat, and is situated directly across the main channel of the river from Pecherska Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, a centuries-old UNESCO World Heritage Site. I am told that when I was two years old, I wandered away from my family and crossed a bridge over the Danube to explore another part of Vienna, and was gone for two days until the police reunited me with my anguished parents. Many years later, my mother said that this incident was the start of my career as a geographer. As we began our life in the United States, I swam at age five in the Ohio River in Louisville, and remember vividly that the river was very wide, that there were flood walls on the opposite bank in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and that to get there we needed to cross the imposing George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge. As I reflect back on those early years in Louisville, I seem to remember that only our little community of new immigrants from Ukraine bathed in the Ohio, and that established Americans preferred public pools and must have thought that we were dumb. I cried when I first saw the Mississippi River on a foggy night in New Orleans as a college student, because the sight and sounds were overwhelming; and I cried again as an adult when I first encountered the Dnipro in Kyiv in 1992, because it was the river that my parents had spoken so much about when

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reminding me that I was Ukrainian. When I lived in Tokyo and wrote about the city, I was captivated by the history of old Edo and its historic commoner districts in the “low city” beside the Sumida River. In addition to the Dnipro, I have journeyed up some prominent rivers (e.g., the Mekong; a part of the Volga) and down others (e.g., the Rhine; the lower Río de la Plata), and my constantly expanding personal library has many “river books,” ranging from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi first published in 1883 and a modern edition of Joseph Conrad’s 1902 classic Heart of Darkness, to Milton Osborne’s account of the Mekong (The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future), Simon Winchester’s The River at the Center of the World (the Yangtze), Andrew Beattie’s wonderful The Danube: A Cultural History, Blake Gumprecht’s The Los Angeles River, Robert Sullivan’s 1999 The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City, Roger D. Stone’s recent The Mightier Hudson: The Spirited Revival of a Treasured Landscape, and James R. Penn’s 2001 reference volume Rivers of the World: A Social, Geographical, and Environmental Sourcebook. As will be shown in Chapter 1, the “river book” by Tricia Cusack, Riverscapes and National Identities, was especially inspiring in terms of my Dnipro project. All of the books cited above are by excellent writers. I, too, try to write in an engaging manner, although I cannot pretend to be in the same league as the luminaries I have named. Nevertheless, I strive to be straightforward, legible, and interesting as I organize my thoughts and choose my words. I believe that readers want to be informed about an author’s arguments without expending herculean efforts at reading, and that many enjoy passages that might be entertaining. I strongly dislike the pretentious style of writing that characterizes so much of academic literature, especially its unending infusions of postmodern poop and made-up pseudo-words, and blame it for my decision to cancel subscriptions to scholarly periodicals that were once central to my career. Instead, I am confident that the English language is more than sufficiently rich to be able to convey any and all thoughts that I might want to express. Also, I do not mind attempting to be funny now and then, thinking that a bit of levity might be appreciated by my readers. Life is short and sometimes harsh, and even if the topic is serious, we should have some fun. I am fully responsible for any shortcomings and errors in this book. There is, however, a considerable amount of accurate and interesting information about the Dnipro in the pages ahead, for which I am thankful to my sources,

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which are acknowledged in the text and in the bibliography, and to a handful of close friends in Ukraine who gave me things to read and showed me various stretches of the river that they know well. I begin my acknowledgements by thanking the editors I worked with at Central European University Press, most notably acquisitions editor Krisztina Kós, editor Linda Kúnos, and sharp-eyed copy editor Ilse Lazaroms. They were friendly, responsive, and thoroughly professional as they carried out their respective tasks. I also thank the anonymous expert reviewers who evaluated the manuscript for publication by Central European University Press. They praised the manuscript and recommended that it be published, for which I am truly thankful, but also caught countless errors of all kinds that I had missed. Their comments were enormously helpful, and showed that they are true experts on Ukraine past and present. Five historical photographs that are reproduced in this book required written permission from copyright holders. For that, I am thankful to the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, Minsk, for permission to reproduce I. K. Aivazovskyi’s 1885 painting “Chumaks at Rest” (Figure 3.4); to the Zaporizhia Oblast Local History Museum and M. M. Mordovskoy for access to Figure 4.3; to Iryna Volodymyrnivna Salo for Figure 7.2; and to N. I. Kapustina and the Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum named in honor of D. I. Yavornytskyi for allowing me to use the photo that is Figure 8.2. The fifth photograph, the poster that appears as Figure 4.1, is reproduced with rights purchased from Alamy Stock Photo. The map that is Figure 3.2 is from a source in the public domain in Ukraine because the original was published before 1951. However, we traced from a cleaner copy that was published in Magocsi, 1985, and thank Professor Paul Robert Magocsi for permission to do so. Next, I express profound thanks to Vladyslava Osmak, a close friend who is an expert on Kyiv and who provided me with many pertinent readings, including a large collection of Soviet-era guidebooks for tourists to the Dnipro, the cover of one of which is Figure 4.5. Vlada helped me in the past with my Kyiv book (see the bibliography), and has always been extraordinarily supportive. I am thankful, too, to my friends Yulia Mosyakina and Anna Pushkarenko for their support and advice, and especially for an introduction to the Dnipro near Cherkasy and visits to places like Chyhyryn and Orbita. At Jungle Cat, I thank Vitalyi Olegovich and Laryssa for their hospitality, and especially Halyna Baidenko for excellent service, friendship, and ever-smiling

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support. My former student Alexandra Baklanova graciously allowed me to use her photograph of the Dnipro from near Kozyn (Kyiv Oblast) for the cover of this book. She posted it on Facebook and I immediately liked it more than any of the hundreds of photos of my own of the river. Another former student Maria Anchyshkina drafted the maps for this book. Maria has also been helpful and supportive in many other ways. We spent a lot of time together at the Dnipro in Kyiv, but also to the north at the Kyiv Sea (Kyiv Reservoir), as well as downriver in the big city that is now named Dnipro (formerly Dnipopetrovsk), and in southern Ukraine, where we toured the river from a base in Kherson, visited Hola Prystan and Zmiivka, and followed the course of the river’s canals across the southern steppes to see the point where the water was blocked to keep it out of Russian-occupied Crimea. Maria assisted me as well with the Kyiv book, and has been working with me on the book about Ukraine that will follow after this one. Finally, I want to thank my younger brother Zenon Cybriwsky for reading what I write as I write it, and offering his many intelligent comments. He, too, has been an invaluable supporter and friend, even though I tortured him when we were young. Our parents would be proud that their firstborn has written a book about the Dnipro and happy that all four of their offspring and their families are close friends.

CHAPTER 1

A National River

1.1 Rivers and Nations The River Dnipro rises in the Russian Federation at an elevation of 220 meters, in a geomorphological zone called the turf swamps of the Valdai Hills, and flows through a corner of Belarus before entering Ukrainian territory and wending its way to its estuarine mouth at sea level in the Black Sea. The Valdai Hills are also the source of the Volga River, which flows through Russia to the north end of Caspian Sea, as well as the Daugava (Western Dvina), which flows from Russia through another corner of Belarus into Latvia, where it empties into the Gulf of Riga and the Baltic Sea. Several other rivers originate in the low highlands, most of which also flow to the Baltic or empty into the northern Russian lakes. I call the Dnipro “Ukraine’s river” because, as we will see, it is much more closely identified in history, literature, and art with Ukraine than with either Belarus or Russia, and because the lower course of the river, where the Dnipro is especially wide and mighty, is entirely in Ukraine. From a total length of 2,285 kilometers, almost exactly one-half is in Russia and Belarus combined, and the other half in Ukraine. About 115 kilometers are part of the Ukrainian-Belarus border. The Dnipro is the third-longest river in Europe, after Russia’s Volga (De Villiers 1992; Zeisler-Vralsted 2014), and the Danube, which is greatly multi-national (Beattie 2011). Much of the world knows the Dnipro only as the Dnieper, a name based on the Russian-language Dnepr and widely used before Ukraine achieved its independence in 1991, in concert with the fall of the Soviet Union. “Dnipro” is the Ukrainian-language word for the river, and is now its official name for international usage. I use “Dnipro” in the title of this book and in the text that

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follows, and write “Dnieper” only when the word appears in quotations or bibliographic entries. Our usage of Ukrainian toponymy also applies to the nation’s capital, Kyiv, which is the largest city on the river and no longer to be spelled in the Russian way, as Kiev, as well as many other places in the country. I prefer to write “the River Dnipro” instead of “the Dnipro River” because it accords with the word sequence in Ukrainian (Rika Dnipro, but never Dnipro Rika; pronunciation accent on the ka syllable), and because it fits the way that some of the world’s other notable rivers are commonly referred to, especially among English-speakers in Europe: e.g., the River Nile, the River Danube, the River Thames, and the River Jordan. Other important rivers are world famous and identified with their respective countries, as in the case with not just the Volga and Russia, but also with the Amazon and Brazil, the Mississippi and the United States heartland, the Nile and Egypt, the Ganges and India, and the Yangtze and China. Or they are identified with the great cities on their banks, as in the case of London and the Thames, Paris and the Seine, St. Petersburg and the Neva, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Memphis and the Mississippi, Cairo and a much older Memphis on the Nile, and Shanghai, the city at the mouth of the great dragon-shaped river of China, the Yangtze-Chang Jiang. But the Dnipro is unknown territory in much of the world, and Kyiv has only recently started to garner international attention. In fact, the city, spelled “Kiev,” is the answer to a frequent medium-hard crossword puzzle clue: “capital on the Dnieper.” Ukraine is now a hot topic in global politics, as the Euromaidan Revolution of the winter of 2013–2014 and the aggression by Russia that followed have captured wide media attention, and it is time to get better acquainted with Ukraine and meet the river that flows through it heart. I focus on the river specifically because rivers have the curious quality of not simply conveying in their flow the waters and loose soils of a country, as well as unfortunate amounts of waste and pollutants of all kinds, but their courses can serve to tell the story of a nation’s history and people’s experiences. This is particularly so for rivers such as the Dnipro that are associated with the soul of a country and that are immortalized in national art, literature, poetry, and song. These depictions can be positive and nostalgic, as in paintings of the Hudson River School in the United States and old folk songs about beloved rivers in the American South; or they can tell stories about misery such as floods and famines along the Huang He (Yellow River), a river that has been

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referred to as “China’s Sorrow” and the “Scourge of the Sons of Han,” while it is also known as “the cradle of Chinese civilization;” the inhumane conditions of labor for Russia’s serfs as depicted in oil by the Russian realist painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930) in his “Barge Haulers on the Volga”; and the miserable lot of indigenous Africans along the Congo River at the time of Belgium’s King Leopold II as described in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Ukraine is a country of great beauty and rich culture, as well as a land that has suffered much more than its share of tragedy and pain over the centuries. As I will show in this book, the Dnipro reflects both aspects of the country, in other words, those that are uplifting and joyous and those that reflect a plentitude of national sorrow. The relationship between riverscapes and national identity is explored in detail in a very fine recent book by Tricia Cusack (2010), in which she writes that: “Rivers seem to encourage the telling of imaginative stories, whether about water-spirits or nations” (4). She also writes that the nature of flowing water provides an appropriate “metaphor for time passing, for life, and for death,” and that “rivers therefore have presented a potent metaphor for the passage of time, for life, and for renewal in a way that solid landscapes cannot do so easily” (2). The specific case studies in her book are the Hudson River, the Thames, the Seine, the Volga, and the Shannon, but could also have included the Dnipro, as there are many parallels between her five national rivers and Ukraine’s river. The Dnipro is certainly a river of life, but it is also one along which unspeakable horrors have taken place over the centuries up to the present, and thus it is also a river of death. The continuity of flow can be seen as metaphor for the continuity of Ukrainian identity over the course of history despite the obstacles, and for a yearning that tomorrow will be better. The Dnipro is among those rivers that have special religious significance and that are associated with birth, life, motherly nurture, and renewal. Indeed, the river is intimately entwined with the embryonic stages of Ukrainian history and pre-history, as well as with the historic baptism of the nation to Christianity in 988 during the rule of Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great that is much popularized in Ukrainian history texts. It is also the subject of considerable art, as for centuries painters have produced images in various styles and with varying degrees of artistic proficiency of the sainted Volodymyr at the river and priests baptizing his immersed subjects en masse. A colorful favorite of mine, whose authorship I do not know, shows the wooden idols that

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were previously worshiped in Ukraine floating away from the baptismal ceremony like old logs in a flood. As noted by Cusack, other rivers that faithfully reflect geographies of religion are the Nile of ancient Egypt, which was associated with the god Osiris and the myth of resurrection; the Ganges, that is still referred to in India as “Mother Ganga” and considered to have descended from heaven, where it still flows; and the River Jordan, which is sacred to both Christians and Jews, as Christian believers venerate it as the baptismal place of Jesus of Nazareth and Jews venerate it as the place where they crossed to the Promised Land (Cusack 2010, 4–7). Just as devout Hindus make pilgrimages to bathe in the Ganges, Ukrainian Christians, although only a minority, come to the Dnipro for baptism ceremonies and to bathe in the icy waters on the Feast of the Epiphany.

1.2 The Heart of Ukraine Ukrainians cherish the Dnipro not just as the baptismal place of their nation, but also as the centerpiece of the geography of their country. They are proud and thankful that nature has blessed their lands with a great variety of resources, and view the river as perhaps the greatest gift of all. We see this in the first words of a marvelous book that was published in Ukraine in the dire Stalinist year 1928 by the eminent Ukrainian scientist Dmytro Ivanovych Yavornytskyi, called Dniprovi Porohy (The Rapids of the Dnipro). He led a study team to the river and its celebrated rapids before the Soviets built the huge dam that would drown the landscape, and published a richly illustrated book of history, ethnography, and geology that documented what would soon be lost.* Yavornytskyi started his report as follows (9): Дніпро, могутний, широкий, повноводий, багатий на рибу, Дніпро, з його розкішними зеленими долинами, несходимими плавнями, повними всякого птаства, звіру та лісу; такий Дніпро не міг не звернути на себе уваги первісної людини.

*  Yavornytskyi’s book has been reprinted recently as part of a volume with the same title

published in Kharkiv by O. O. Savchuk. The full title of Yavornytskyi’s book is Dniprovi Porohy: Albom Fotohrafii z Heohrafichno-Istorychnym Naryson [The rapids of the Dnipro: An album of photographs with geographical-historical sketches]. The text is in Ukrainian.

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The Dnipro, mighty, wide, full-flowing, rich in fish, the Dnipro, with its lush green bottomlands, waters teaming with life, bountiful with great varieties of birds, animal life, and forests; such a Dnipro could not have failed to catch the rapt attention of the first human to see it.

[Figure 1.1: Ukraine with the course of the Dnipro]

The Dnipro runs from north to south through the approximate center (or east-center) of Ukraine, in the course of which it bends in a wide arc that opens to the west and more than doubles the length of its journey through Ukrainian territory to the Black Sea. Outline maps of Ukraine often show the tortuous course of this river through the country as another iconic feature that signifies “Ukraine” (Figure 1.1). The bend is based on hard-rock geological strata that the river’s course encountered, giving rise to a series of fast-moving rapids and, in modern history, to the emergence of the heavy-industrial cities of Dni­propetrovsk (renamed “Dnipro” in 2016) and Zaporizhia. In ancient times, the Dnipro was the highway for trade and the expansion of Rus’ (pronounced in a way that almost rhymes with douche), the once powerful principality that was the precursor of the Ukrainian state, while in modern times it served as the water source for large cities along and near the banks of

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the river and for much of Ukraine’s famously fertile farmland, as well as a major source of electrical power and stimulus for industrialization. The river has been important in other ways as well, both during and since these developments, as we will see in the pages ahead. The river is the heart of Ukraine and not, as some would claim, the dividing line in a divided country. While there is a Ukrainian-speaking West that looks to Europe for support and affiliations, and a Russian-speaking East that includes a population that identifies more closely with Russia, the reality is that the ethnic-linguistic and political situation in Ukraine is much more complicated than simply a “divide,” and it certainly does not include a social or political fault line along the course of the river. Reports in the media that state otherwise can generally be traced to naïve writers who have become “instant experts” about the country as Euromaidan heated up, because experts were in short supply, as well as to Russia’s concurrent aggressive disinformation campaign about Ukrainian history, politics, and social make-up. Russia increased anti-Ukrainian propaganda when pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was chased from office on February 22, 2014, by the voices of protestors on Kyiv’s Independence Square, and when the closing ceremonies of the Sochi winter Olympics concluded and Russia moved to snatch Crimea and incite separatism in Ukraine’s southern and eastern provinces. The Kremlin publically justified the aggression by citing a supposed need to protect Russian residents in Ukraine from the fascist junta supported by the United States that had seized the Ukrainian capital. The truth is that there were no credible threats against Russians of any consequence during that critical period, and that Euromaidan was neither a fascist movement nor the work of Western powers. In fact, the number of ethnic Russians in the Ukrainian population is much smaller than Moscow would have the world believe. Only one of 24 oblasts (provinces) in the country, Crimea, has an ethnic-Russian majority (58.3 percent of the total according to the most recent (2001) census), and only two others exceed a 30 percent Russian-ethnic population. The overall Russian percentage in Ukraine, including persons originating from outside Ukraine and native residents, is only 17.3 percent according to the same census. While this is a significant number and Russians constitute the largest ethnic minority in Ukraine, it does not mean that the country is divided, and especially not in regard to the configuration of the river.

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The Dnipro is “Ukraine’s River” through and through. It is part of the geographical lexicon of Ukraine, as in common references to Naddnipryanshchyna (the land on either side of the Dnipro) and to both “Left Bank” and “Right Bank” Ukraine (east and west of the river, respectively). The historical designation Velyka Ukraina (“Great Ukraine”) that was popular in the nineteenth century was also referred to as Dnipryanshcyna (“Dnipro Ukraine”), conflating Ukrainian national-ethnic territory with the river at its center. The river is also mentioned in a prominent version of the lyrics to Ukraine’s national anthem, the somewhat pessimistically titled Shche ne vmerla Ukraina (“Ukraine has not yet died”). The lyrics originated in a poem by Pavlo Chubynsky* that was first published in 1863, and have since been tweaked to say that it is the glory and freedom of Ukraine that have not yet died instead of the country itself. The stanza that refers to the Dnipro is near the middle of the poem, and places the river in the center of historically Ukrainian ethnographic territory, midway between two other rivers at the eastern and western borders, respectively, and refers to the river in patronymic terms: Станем браття, в бій кровавий, We will stand, dear brothers in bloody battles, від Сяну до Дону from the Syan to the Don, В ріднім краю панувати не дамо нікому. And not allow others to rule our native land. Чорне море ще всміхнется, The Black Sea will yet put on a smile, Дід Дніпро зрадіє, And our Grandfather Dnipro will yet rejoice. Ще на нашій Україні доленька наспіє. Fortune will once again bless our dear Ukraine.

The inseparable bond between the country and the river at its heart is also reflected clearly in what are perhaps the best-known lines of Ukrainian poetry beside the national anthem, the famous Zapovit (“Testament”) written in 1845 by the country’s beloved bard Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), a central *  Pavlo Platonovych Chubynsky (1839–1884) was born near Kyiv and lived in the city for most of his life. In addition to writing poetry, he was a learned geographer-ethnographer who specialized in the study of all things Ukrainian in the Russian Empire.

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figure in the development of Ukrainian as a modern literary language and a leading proponent of advancing Ukrainian national consciousness during the key time in the nineteenth century, when nationalism emerged as a transformative social and political force across the map of Europe. More than any other individual, through poetry and art, Shevchenko helped to fuse the Dnipro riverscape with Ukrainian national identity. In the opening stanza of Zapovit he gives instructions for his burial: Як умру, то поховайте When I have died, then bury me Мене на могилі, In a high-mound mohyla, Серед степу широкого, In the wide steppes of Ukraine, На Вкраїні милій: The country I love so much. Щоб лани широкополі Bury me where the boundless fields, І Дніпро, і кручі And the mighty Dnipro, Було видно, -- було чути, Can be seen from atop a steep bluff, Як реве ревучий! And I can hear the waters roar!

In the next stanza, Shevchenko expands his love for Ukraine into a yearning for national self-determination. The “enemies” that he refers to are the contemporaneous forces of Imperial Russia. Як понесе з України У синеє море Кров ворожу, отоді я І лани, і гори – Все покину і полину До самого Бога Молитися. А до того Я не знаю Бога!

When at last the river delivers to the sea The spilled blood of Ukraine’s enemies, It is only then that I will leave The fields and my hilltop perch, Bidding farewell forever, And humbly make my way to God himself And begin to pray. But until such time, I don’t know God!

Insofar as the first stanza goes, Taras Shevchenko got his wish. He died in St. Petersburg the day after his 47 th birthday from poor health that resulted from years of difficult exile, and was first buried in the Russian capital. But in accordance to his “Zapovit,” friends soon took his remains by train to Moscow and from there by horse-drawn wagon to Kyiv, where his countrymen paid respects as his coffin lay in a small Orthodox church near the Dnipro.

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On May 8, 1861, two months after he passed away, he was reburied atop Cher­ necha Hora (literally: Monk’s Hill) on the grounds of the Holy Dormitian Monastery near the small city of Kaniv in Cherkasy Oblast on the right bank of the Dnipro. The location is near the precise geographical center of Ukraine. The burial hill is now called Taras’s Hill and the grounds are the Shevchenko National Preserve, a nature park. And indeed, the river is wide and in plain view below, and directly across is an unbroken vista of Shevchenko’s beloved plains that stretches to the eastern horizon (Figure 1.2). The burial place is a hallowed national monument, and immediately adjacent is a beautifully restored and much updated museum that honors Shevchenko’s life and work. In 1914, on the 100th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth, the tsarist government sent troops to Kaniv to prevent the burial site from becoming a place of Uk­rainian pilgrimage. In contrast, by 2014, 200 years after Shevchenko’s birth, Kaniv was a place of Ukrainian pilgrimage and patriotism, as Ukraine was independent by then.

[Figure 1.2: The Dnipro as seen from the burial place of Taras Shevchenko in Kaniv. The view is to the east. There are tour buses in the parking lot.]

There were once powerful cataracts on the Dnipro above Zaporizhia, but they no longer exist because during the early Soviet era, dam construction drowned them in a reservoir. These rapids, however, or porohy as they are known in

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Ukrainian, had been a metaphor for Ukraine’s relentless quest for self-determination during centuries of foreign rule, and for the fighting spirit of Ukrainians against oppressors as represented by the Zaporozhian (“of Za­ porizhia” or “from beyond the rapids”), Cossacks who rebelled against foreign rulers from their stronghold at Sich (the pronunciation rhymes with “teach” and “beseech”), a haven that was protected by the rapids. In 1910, some two decades before the rapids were submerged, the Ukrainian geographer Stepan Rudnytsky equated Ukrainians’ determination in their cause for self-rule with the determination of the Dnipro to overcome the granitic obstacles in its way and to finally arrive at the Black Sea: “How many thoughts arise about the glorious, and yet so unspeakably sad past of the Ukraine, about its miserable present and the great future toward which the nation tends, amid great difficulties, as does the Dnieper toward the Black Sea over the porohs [cataracts]” (Omolesky 2014, 28).* That “great future” is to be built both on self-rule and political-cultural alliances with the West. In another geographical insight borrowed from the same source as the quotation above, the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych “denounced the ‘quarantine line that divides one Europe from the other,’” and is further quoted to have told the European Parliament during the high drama about Ukraine’s East versus West future in the Orange Revolution in 2004 that “in Ukraine there is not a single drop of water that does not belong to the Atlantic Basin. This means that with all its arteries and capillaries, it [the nation] is stitched right to Europe” (29). His observation is accurate. The same logic would apply to Belarus and the three Baltic States Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which should have a Western geographical destiny as indicated by the directional flow of rivers. While the many rivers of the Russian Federation have Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific destinations, the national river of Russia, the Volga, originates not far from several Atlantic-destined rivers, including the Dnipro, but flows in an opposite direction and terminates in the isolated Caspian Sea.

*  I am indebted to Matthew Omolesky for this insight, as well as for his translation.

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1.3 A Note about Decommunization As a result of legislation that was passed by the Ukrainian National Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) and signed into law by President Petro Poroshenko in April 2015, Ukraine has embarked on an energetic campaign to remove all names that honor the Soviet Communist past from the map. As a result, countless villages, towns, and cities, as well streets, parks, public squares, schools, etc., now have new names. I mention this here because a number of places that are quite prominent in this book either have new names or have reverted to names from the past, and readers who are not familiar with this history might be confused. Even Ukrainians are not quite used to the changes and have difficulty keeping track of what has been renamed; some have even subscribed to applications for their phones that keep track of updates in toponymy. The majority of Soviet names in the country were in the east, including in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where the war between Ukraine and the combined forces of Russia-backed separatists and Russian troops has waged since spring 2014, as well as in the country’s south, including along the lower reaches of the Dnipro and nearby. As we move forward with the text, it will be necessary to remind readers from time to time what the previous name of a given city or oblast (province) was, as they might know that place only by its former name, and to repeat from time to time that a given name for a place is new, so that readers unfamiliar with Ukraine will have a chance to assimilate it. This might result in a bit of repetition here and there, but I ask for your understanding: official announcements of new place names were coming in as I wrote about those places, and this has been more than a little inconvenient. The reason for renaming is to help Ukraine break more fully from its colonial past, and to honor people, events, and ideals that align better with Ukraine as a truly independent nation. The decommunization legislation also forbids the public display of communist symbols, such as the Soviet hammer and sickle, and statues and images of V.I. Lenin and other leading dignitaries of the Soviet state. Communist parties are banned in Ukraine. Lawmakers justified such censorship on the grounds that today’s Ukrainian government officially regards the Soviet Union as having been “criminal” and that it enacted a “policy of state terror.” Places were being renamed and Lenin statues were toppled in Ukraine even before its independence in 1991, but public

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enthusiasm for such changes was heightened by the Euromaidan events of 2013–2014. The April 2015 legislation simply codifies what local governments and crowds of protesting citizens had been doing on their own.* Other countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, or Soviet satellite states in what was once referred to as East Europe (the area that is now more accurately considered a part of Central Europe), such as Lithuania and Poland, have also enacted decommunization campaigns. The purpose here is not to dwell on Ukrainian geopolitics regarding relations with Russia or the former Soviet Union, but to instead alert readers to the very recent adoption of some new names for key places along or near the Dnipro. The three main examples that readers need to be aware of are summarized in bullet points below. • The important city on the Dnipro, Dnipropetrovsk, is now simply named “Dnipro.” The petrovsk part of the former name was in honor of the Communist leader Grigory Petrovskyi (1878–1958), a major architect of the great famine that was imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s. • The nearby industrial city of Dniprodzerzhynsk, also on the Dnipro, is now named Kamianske, meaning “stony place.” It had this name before the Soviet period. The dzerzhynsk part of the former name was in memory of Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), an early Communist who served as the unforgivably bloody-handed first director of the first Soviet secret police. • Ordzhonikidze, a city of heavy industry near the Dnipro, is now named Pokrova, a religious name that honors the Christian Virgin Mary. The former name honored Grigol (Sergo) Ordzhonikidze (1886–1937), a Bolshevik leader and close associate of a fellow co-ethnic Georgian, Josef Stalin.

*  It is worth pointing out that Ukraine’s anti-Communist campaign safeguards the me-

morialization of the Soviet Union’s heroism in World War II, and that place names such as Victory Square or Victory Boulevard are allowed. In addition, I note that the same April 2015 legislation also bans symbols and place names, etc., that would glorify Nazism, as has Germany. However, Nazi symbols and place names have never been numerous in Ukraine, especially in comparison to those from the Soviet-Communist past.

CHAPTER 2

A Work of Nature and the Works of Men

2.1 Introduction The Dnipro is Ukraine’s river, but its upper reaches belong to Russia and Belarus, where the river is called the Dnieper (Figure 2.1). The Belarusian word “Dniapro” is also used in that country.* In this chapter, I will trace the river’s course from beginning to end, treating it as both a work of nature that existed before there were countries, ethnic groups, and languages, as well as a work of modern-day builders and engineers with aims to alter the river so that it would better serve human needs as it makes its way to the sea. There are few truly natural rivers left in the world’s populated areas, and we will see that the Dnipro is, for better or for worse, among those that have been most strongly transformed. This puts Ukraine’s River in the same category as, say, the Colorado, Columbia, and Tennessee Rivers in the United States, and the many rivers in China and India that have been greatly transformed by hydroelectric installations, flood control, irrigation projects, and/or enhancements to navigation. They have all been grossly reshaped into little more than chains of elongated reservoirs behind high walls of concrete. Such transformations were also the work of Soviet engineers, who applied the instructions implicit in Lenin’s often-quoted maxim, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” not just to the Dnipro, but also to the Volga, the Don, and countless other rivers in European Russia, Siberia, the Central Asian

*  In Cyrillic script the river is Днепр (Russian: Dnepr); Дняпро (Belarussian: Dniapro); and Дніпро (Ukrainian: Dnipro).

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Soviet Republics, the Caucasus Mountains, and elsewhere. It is such work that has killed the Aral Sea* and that is now choking the Caspian.

[Figure 2.1: The Dnipro watershed]

Furthermore, the course of the Dnipro has for centuries been the scene of bloodshed and tragedy, and the twentieth century was particularly horrific. This is also what I mean with the title of this chapter: “the works of [literally] men.” It must be remembered that as a river running through Ukraine, *  The Aral Sea straddles the boundary between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two Central Asian countries that were once part of the U.S.S.R.

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Be­larus, and Russia, the Dnipro was a Soviet river for nearly seven decades, and that during this time there were decades of terror and mass killing. There was also a two- to three-year period of occupation by the invading Nazis in the early 1940s, when good people of all ages, men, women, and children, who had loved and lived along the river, became victims of the Holocaust, while others perished in battle. Indeed, one could construct a World War II tour along the Dnipro and tell tragic stories endlessly. Selections from this dark past are presented in this chapter and on pages further ahead. An analogy with Joseph Conrad’s Congo River in Heart of Darkness is probably not appropriate, but as we will see, the killings in World War II in cities and towns along the Dnipro were no less grisly than what took place in Leopold’s African empire, and no smaller in the numbers of victims.

2.2 The River in Russia Great rivers begin small, and the Dnipro starts so small that its precise source can hardly be identified. The river simply appears among the forests and mosquito-infested bogs of a zone of low hills of glacial debris in the far north of Smolensk Oblast, in the Sychevskiy district very near the boundary with Tver Oblast. Russian hydrologists have managed to pinpoint the river’s start at 55.858979ᵒN, 33.744490ᵒE, at the eastern end of a nondescript small bog that is off a dirt road connecting the villages of Bocharovo and Dudkino. The spot is labelled on Google maps as “Istok Dnepra,” the source of the Dnieper. The source of the Volga River is some distance to the north, in Tver Oblast, but it is said that ground waters mix in this wet environment so that these two great national rivers might actually share waters or have a common source. From its almost imperceptible beginning, the trickle that becomes the Dnipro at first winds its way south and west, picking up waters along the way as it makes its way to the Black Sea. In fact, over its entire course the Dnipro can be said to initially flow mostly west, then south, then east, then south again, and then again mostly west as it arrives at the Black Sea. The changes in course are reminiscent of the fact that Ukraine, too, has changed directions. The official length of the Dnipro is recorded at 2,285 kilometers, but this is just a general or approximate number, as the distance changes with shifts in the river’s course in the upper reaches where there are countless tight meanders

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and a maze of new channels, old channels, and abandoned waters in former channels that are held in newly-formed U-shaped lakes, called oxbow lakes because of their shape. These changes are natural and result when water levels rise during wet periods. For the Dnipro, the critical time is the spring snowmelt. Following the course of the Dnipro through Smolensk Oblast is a dizzying task, as the river turns every which way again and again over very short distances, so much so that it often turns on itself and forms loops as it lazes its way over unchallenging terrain. Downriver, by contrast, changes to the river’s length tend to be the result of engineering works such as retaining walls that straighten the river to accommodate urban needs, and the construction of dams behind which previous bends are erased by the reservoirs that are superimposed by backed-up waters. As we will see, the Dnipro has no shortage of these (Figure 2.2). The first town of any consequence on the Dnipro is Dorogobuzh, with a population of 10,710 (according to the 2010 census). This town is hardly worth mentioning, except to say that it is the first place along the river that is bigger than a tiny village. It straddles the river and enjoys two bridges, but it is a sleepy place of declining population and unsightly Soviet-era apartment blocks. Disproportionately, it is a town of elderly women, as many of the men died early and young people have left for bigger cities. The main street is Karl Marx Street. All these details correspond to rural Russia in general. The settle­ ment was founded in the twelfth century as a fortress town, and was once fairly prominent. Before the Soviet period, the riverbank was graced with a gathering of domed churches, but they are no longer there. A more important city is Smolensk, about 125 kilometers downstream to the west. It is the Russian city that is most closely identified with the Dnipro. It, too, is declining in population, but it still has 326,861 residents and a mix of industries that includes food processing, textiles, electronics, agricultural machinery, and diamond faceting. The city has three bridges, and it might have been named for the smola or resin that is given off by local pine trees and, as the story goes, was supposedly used to patch boats that had been dragged along the shallow waters of the Dnipro. Smolensk was a mighty fortress town, in fact a walled city, with a history that goes back to the ninth century and the founding of Kyivan Rus. It was and still is to some extent a city of beautiful historic churches, as well as the site of great battles in the wars between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early and mid-seventeenth

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[Figure 2.2: The Dnipro in Russia and Belarus]

century. Smolensk witnessed the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 and the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II. It is near Smolensk that the Dnipro runs alongside an elongated glacial upland that provides firm ground for the road through the city that connects Moscow and Minsk, the Belarusian capital, and that invaders from the west found convenient to use for their armies. It is also in Smolensk that for the first time we begin to see a larger-scale use of the Dnipro for recreation. There is no way to tell, of course, how far upstream bathing, fishing, and picnicking along the

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river banks begin, but Smolensk is a city with riverside parks and open access to the Dnipro, and its residents do enjoy the river in these and in other ways. The same is true for river cities downstream. About 20 kilometers downriver from Smolensk, near where the small Katynka River becomes a right-bank tributary of the Dnipro, is the small village of Katyn’, with a population of only 1,737 (according to the 2002 census) and declining. It is a local station on the important railway line that connects Berlin-Warsaw-Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow, and is not far off the main highway. The settlement is famous as the site of two enormous tragedies. The first was the execution in April and May 1940 by Soviet NKVD secret police of about 22,000 Polish nationals, mostly intellectuals, political leaders, and military officers, in a forest outside the settlement. The apparent aim was to eliminate the Polish leadership. At first the Soviet government attributed the grisly evidence found in mass graves to the bloody hands of German Nazis, but in 1990–1991, during a time of thaw and confession, the Soviet government and then the post-Soviet government of Russia acknowledged that the massacre had indeed been approved by the Soviet Politburo and Stalin himself. The second tragedy took place on April 10, 2010, exactly 70 years later: the crash of a Polish Air Force plane while approaching the nearest airport, Smolensk North Airport. All 96 people on board were killed, including Poland’s President at the time, Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and numerous high-ranking Polish government officials and senior military officers. They were travelling to Katyn’ to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre, and they encountered bad weather during the landing. There are also conspiracy theories that point an accusing finger at Russia’s then Prime Minister, and current President, Vladimir Putin and a second Kremlin-based attempt at destabilizing the government of Poland.

2.3 The River in Belarus As we return to the river, by the time the Dnipro bisects Smolensk it has moreor-less straightened itself out, with only the occasional exaggerated meander. It is wider, too, and therefore more properly a river, as opposed to the headwaters with uncertain direction. Shortly after passing the small town of Khlystova on the right bank, for a distance of about ten kilometers the river

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marks the boundary between Russia and Belarus, and then, after the even smaller town of Klimenki, it leaves Russia altogether and becomes the Belarusian Dnipro (Figure 2.3). Here the river’s course is much more southward than to the west, and also more direct. The first town of consequence is Dubrovno, a Russian-language word, now named Dubroŭna, a Belarusian word that means oak grove. The town is in the far east of Belarus near the Russian border, and has barely more than 9,000 residents. Every year, its citizens hold a festival of ethnic song and dance that is called the Dnipro Voices of Dubroŭna. It is also worth noting that Dubroŭna was once a thriving Jewish center, the home of many prominent Jewish émigrés to the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. Those who did not leave were annihilated by German forces on July 17–20, 1941. This tragic history is repeated again and again as we continue moving downriver in eastern Belarus, where town after town once had sizable Jewish populations that were systematically murdered in the Holocaust. In geographical order, there is Orsha, a small city of some 117,000 inhabitants that is now officially known as Orša, where the Arshytsa River joins the Dnipro from the right bank; followed by the larger industrial city of Mogilev (now Mahilioŭ), the third most populous city in Belarus with 360,918 inhabitants (according to the 2011 census) and reportedly the birthplace (in 1888) of the celebrated Jewish-American composer and lyricist Irving Berlin; and then Bykhaw, Rahochow, Žlobin, and finally Rechytsya (now Rečyca), a town of some 65,000 inhabitants. In his authoritative book Bloodlands about the unspeakable violence that fell upon those European lands that were caught between the conflicting ambitions of Hitler and Stalin in 1939-1945, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder reported that “in October 1941, Mahileu (an alternative spelling of Mogilev/ Mahilioŭ) became the first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed.” A total of 2,273 Jewish men, women, and children were shot by the Nazis on October 2 and 3, and another 3,726 were massacred on October 19 (Snyder, 2010, 205–206). All of these places and many others in the region have histories that are centuries old, and they are all mentioned in Jewish histories and encyclopedias, as eastern Belarus was within the Pale of Settlement, created by Catherine the Great’s Imperial Russia in 1791 as a zone in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed. Remnants of the distant past still stand in most of these towns, but Jewish history has been essentially obliterated, except perhaps for the oc-

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casional synagogue that had been converted decades ago to secular uses and neglected Jewish cemeteries overgrown with weeds and encroaching new trees. After World War II, the Soviets repaired wartime destruction by “Sovietizing” these towns with industrial investment and construction of those dreary apartment blocks for which the workers’ paradise unfortunately came to be known. The southward course on the Dnipro through eastern Belarus passes rolling terrain with fields of grain and other crops, and stands of forest. Lumbering is a local industry, if only for firewood, but there are also sawmills and furniture factories. Near the many bridges we see one or more parked cars or bicycles, and fishermen at the river’s banks. Near Rahochow, the river’s channel becomes less direct and turns into one tight meander after another, one south of the other, and the floodplain is marked with previous channels and trapped waters. The Berezina River joins the Dnipro from the north between Žlobin and Rechytsya, creating a wider and wetter floodplain below. History enthusiasts know the Berezina as the site of a disastrous battle for Napoleon’s forces in November 1812. Afterwards, the word bérézina was added to the French language as a synonym for disaster. On the whole, eastern Belarus is a charming countryside, but not especially prosperous and somewhat stuck in time. The paved roads that span the river or that run nearby are generally potholed and poorly marked, and many others are covered with coarse gravel or are simply dirt roads that turn to rutted mud in periods or rain or melting snow. Local bridges are sometimes shaky and rusty, and would never pass inspection in a wealthier country. But Belarus, like Russia and Ukraine, is not known for rural infrastructure, and has a ruralscape and many small towns that are in disrepair. And like Russia and Ukraine, the rural oblasts have a population that is disproportionately elderly, as young people prefer to live in the cities. Tragically, the picturesque countryside where the Dnipro makes its way through eastern Belarus is also the area that was most effected by the 1986 explosion and fire at the Chornobyl (“Chernobyl” is from the Russian language) nuclear power plant in Ukraine, just south of the border with Belarus. The radioactive fallout that resulted covered a wide territory, but Belarus and the towns along the river were the most severely contaminated, except perhaps for the Chornobyl site itself. There were large-scale evacuations and the resettlement of populations afterwards, as well as continuing concerns about radioactivity in the soils and groundwater, and long-term health effects. The

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[Figure 2.3: Meanders of the Dnipro and trapped national territories at the Ukraine-Belarus border]

local economy took a direct hit as food products from the region became suspect and were no longer sellable, and more and more people left. From eastern Belarus southwards, i.e. all the way through Ukraine, the waters of the Dnipro became suspect. I have more to say about Chornobyl in Chapter 4. Near the tiny town of Loyew (formerly Loev), with a population of 7,500, the River Sozh joins the Dnipro from the left bank, and the Dnipro meets Ukraine for the first time. At this point, the river is more than a football field wide. Loyew is remembered as the scene of a pivotal battle in 1649 in which Cossacks, under the command of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, allied with

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Crimean Tatars and local peasants, engaged troops of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in an uprising to liberate Ukraine from foreign rule. The Cossacks, however, were defeated despite superior numbers. The lowest reaches of the Sozh mark the international boundary between Belarus and Ukraine, and then, after the Dnipro has added the waters of the Sozh, it is the Dnipro that marks the border. A little more than 100 kilometers southward, just beyond the Belarusian town of Kamaryn, the river enters Ukraine and becomes Ukraine’s River. Pity the poor cartographers charged with drawing the border as a line down the center of the river equidistant between the two banks. Course changes for both the lower Sozh and this stretch of the Dnipro are frequent and convoluted, as both waterways occupy flat floodplains that are water worlds of meanders and crazy loops, elongated arcs of trapped water that were once part of the main channel, and lakes and marshes. Every new flood changes the configuration. A detailed look at maps of the area reveals features on one side of the Dnipro that are labelled Staryi Dnipro (Old Dnipro), and land areas of one country that have become detached from the rest of their respective national territory because of floodwaters and now find themselves on the wrong side of the rearranged river, with no bridge to cross to get “home.” Recently, the governments of Ukraine and Belarus have been engaged in surveys of this tricky border region and negotiations about the mutual exchange of the trapped territories.

2.4 Ukrainian Territory As the Dnipro becomes Ukraine’s River only, it ceases to look like a work of nature and is instead what men have wrought. Not only is the Chornobyl nuclear power plant nearby, on the Pripyat River just upstream from where it winds slowly into the Dnipro from the west just below the international border, but also is the Dnipro no longer a free-flowing river but one man-made reservoir after another. The first reservoir that we encounter has its northern reaches just inside Ukraine and measures 922 square kilometers. It is 110 kilometers in length and approximately 12 kilometers wide, and is called the Kyiv Reservoir, after the Ukrainian capital city just beyond its southern terminus. Locally it is called the Kyiv Sea (Kyivske More), as it is just wide enough

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[Figure 2.4: Access path to a public beach on the Kyiv Sea between walls that surround expensive private houses]

to make opposite banks invisible to the naked eye, and just big enough to cause effects on the local weather (Figure 2.4). In the north, where the river ceases to flow freely and slows so it can enter the lowland that became the man-made sea, there is a large zone of marshes, islands, channels, mudflats, and swamps that attracts both birds and fishermen. There are just enough hints of a dendritic shape to the boundaries between dry land, such as it is, and water in this area to remind us that this body of water was made by dammed waters that backed up to flood the lowland by the river and the lowlands upstream in various directions along the banks of small creeks and streams. There is a similar wetland at the mouth of the Pripyat, which also slows as it arrives at the Kyiv Sea, becomes backed up with reservoir water, and floods the surroundings. Indeed, the entire area is a world for boats, birds, and fish, with not a road or bridge in sight. The northernmost human artifact in this part of the Ukrainian territory is an anchored ship, the Neptune. It has a steel hull in need of paint and two wooden decks in which food and drink are served to fishermen and others who arrive by boat. It is also a place to weather storms and, in winter, to warm up when fishing through ice. The Pripyat is the largest tributary of the Dnipro up to this point. It rises in northwestern Ukraine near the border with Poland, enters Belarus, which has

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the much larger share of the river’s 775 kilometers, and flows eastward through a flat, swampy basin called the Pripyat Marshes. At the small oil-refining city of Mazyr, with a population of 111,770 (according to the 2004 census), the river turns southward and re-enters Ukraine, where it flows southeastward to the Dnipro. The city is built on the high ground of a glacial moraine that keeps it dry amidst the marshes and that accounts for the turn in the Pripyat’s direction. Mazyr is another historic city in the Pale that lost its Jews in the Holocaust. Before the river reaches Ukraine, it winds through the ominous-sounding Polesky State Radio-Ecological Reserve, a territory that was demarcated to keep people out after the Chornobyl disaster, because it was most dangerously affected with radioactive fallout. The adjacent part of Ukraine is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The town of Pripyat, just inside Ukrainian territory, is the site of the calamitous power plant, while the larger town of Chornobyl (which had 14,000 residents before the evacuation; 625 now), also part of the Exclusion Zone, is just downriver. This larger town has an especially tragic history. Despite being surrounded by fertile farmland, many of its Ukrainian and Polish residents perished due to famine during Stalin’s collectivization campaigns in 1929–1933; the remaining Poles were deported to Kazakhstan during an ethnic cleansing campaign that Stalin had ordered; and after this, the Jewish population was massacred during the Nazi occupation of 1941–1944. Now the town is poisonous and the river was once polluted with radionuclides, with especially high levels of Caesium-137 concentrated in the river’s sediments. All this becomes part of the Kyiv Sea and the Dnipro below it. There is one more notable river that feeds the Kyiv Sea, the Irpin’. Its source is in the small village of Yaropovychi in Zhytomyr Oblast, and the mouth is on the western shore of the Kyiv Sea beyond the small city of Irpin’, one of Kyiv’s many industrial satellite cities. The river flows for 162 kilometers through the heart of Ukraine’s farming regions and is an important source of irrigation water. I single this river out from among other tributaries because the Irpin’, like the Dnipro itself, has become the work of men. After passing the town of Irpin’, the river is no longer able to empty into the Dnipro on its own, because the natural Dnipro is gone and the artificially raised waters of the Kyiv Sea are there instead. As a result, in order to prevent the river’s waters from backing up, engineers have devised a pumping system to make the river flow upward to the level of the reservoir. The total increase in elevation that was needed is about seven meters.

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Another river joins the Dnipro in this area above Kyiv, the Desna. Like the Dnipro, it rises in the forested hills of Smolensk Oblast, only further to the south, and unlike the Pripyat and the Irpin’, the Desna enters the Dnipro from the left bank, not into the reservoir but into the released waters directly below the dam. It is a picturesque river both in Russia and northern Ukraine, and is popular for fishing and as a gathering spot for townsfolk and villagers. For much of its 1,130 kilometers, the Desna also twists into tight U-shapes, leaving behind old channels and trapped waters. Along its course in Ukrainian territory is the ancient city of Chernihiv, almost as old as Kyiv itself and once a vital entity of Kyivans Rus’. The mouth of the Desna is a wetland like that at the end of the Pripyat, and is also rich in fish, frogs, birds, and insects, among other wildlife. Like the wetlands at the northern end of the Kyiv Sea, the ecological zone at the confluence of the Desna with the Dnipro is a critical factor in the health of Ukraine’s River downstream. The dam that formed the Kyiv Sea is at small city to the north of Kyiv, called Vyshhorod, meaning “the town upstream.” The dam is called the Kyiv Hydroelectric Station and was completed in 1964 to regulate the flow of the Dnipro’s waters and use them for the production of hydroelectric power. A road across the top of the dam connects Left Bank with Right Bank Ukraine, although other bridges below the dam in Kyiv carry more traffic and are more important. Vyshhorod is now a locally important industrial center and transportation hub, as well as a growing bedroom community at the northern margins of Kyiv. It is also increasingly successful in developing a recreation economy based on the Kyiv Sea. In the past, however, Vyshhorod was important as a second residence for the rulers of Kyivan Rus, and it is where Volodymyr the Great, the sainted prince who, in 988, had the population of Rus baptized into Christianity, kept his many concubines. Just to the north of Vyshhorod, in the settlement of Nova Petrivka on the western bank of the Kyiv Sea, are the grounds of an ancient monastery called Mezhihirya. The site gained notoriety in recent years, as this is where Ukraine’s corrupt fourth President (or would it be better to say “fourth corrupt President?”), Viktor Yanukovych, lived in a lavish home, until he was chased from office in early 2014. I will say more about this place in Chapter 6. The Vyshhorod Dam is the first in north-to-south geographical order of a series of six dams with seven hydroelectric stations built by the Soviets, often referred to as the Dnipro Cascade (Figure 2.5; Table 2.1). The others are also

Table 2.1: Dnipro Cascade Dams and Reservoirs DAM

YEAR

DIMENSIONS

RESERVOIR NAME

CITIES

Vyshhorod

1964

l: 288m

Kyiv

Kyiv Vyshhorod

Kaniv

1972

h: 39.5m l: 343 m

Kaniv

Kaniv Ukrainka

Kremenchuk

1959

l: 10,500 m

Kremenchuk

Kremenchuk Cherkasy Svitlovodsk

Dniprodzerzhynsk

1963

h: 15.5 m l: 7,490 m

Dniprodzerzhynsk

Kamianske

Dnipro (Dnieper) DniproHES

1932

h: 61 m l: 800 m

Dnieper Zaporizhia

Zaporizhia Dnipro

1956

h: 30m l: 3,273 m

Kakhovka

Kakhovka Nova Kakhovka Nikopol Enerhodar

Kakhovka

DAM

SURFACE ELEVATION

DIMENSIONS

VOLUME

MEAN DEPTH

Vyshhorod

99 m

area: 922 km² length: 110 km

3.7 km³

8m

Kaniv

87 m

area: 675 km² length: 162 km

2.6 km³

5.5 m

Kremenchuk

77 m

area: 2,250 km² length: 149 km

13.5 km³

Dniprodzerzhynsk

104 m

area: 567 km² length: 114 km

2.45 km³

15 m

Dnipro (Dnieper) DniproHES

1,676 m

area: 410 km² length: 129 km

3.36 km³

8m

Kakhovka

44 m

area: 2,155 km² length: 240 km

18.2 km³

8.4 m

[Figure 2.5: The Dnipro in Ukraine and the Dnipro Cascade]

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named after the cities nearby: the Kaniv Dam, which forms the Kaniv Reservoir; the Kremenchuk Dam, which forms the 2,250 square kilometer Kremenchuk Reservoir, the Dnipro’s largest; the Dniprodzerzhynsk Dam, which forms the Dniprodzerzhynsk Reservoir*; the Zaporizhia Dam, widely referred to as DniproHES (the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station) and that forms the 420 square kilometer Dnipro Reservoir that is the river’s smallest; and the Kakhovka Dam, before which is the Kakhovka Reservoir, barely smaller than the substantial wave-filled sea that has flooded the land above Kremenchuk. I will have more to say about each of these dams and reservoirs in Chapter 4, when we look in detail at the work of Soviet engineers to harness the Dnipro, and elsewhere, when I will discuss the industrial cities that these dams created. Insofar as the dam at Kaniv is concerned, it is located up-river from the Taras Shevchenko gravesite, so the patriotic bard does look at a river, as he had wished, and not at a reservoir. However, the Soviets reined in the river, and the Dnipro roars, as in the sounds Shevchenko had wanted to hear, only when the valves at the Kaniv Dam are turned fully open. The loudest roars of the Dnipro had been where the river cut for some 90 kilometers through the Ukrainian crystalline shield between the cities of Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk) and Zaporizhia. It had flowed through a narrow, V-shaped chiseled valley with granite walls, and the river narrowed in width from 1,200 meters in Cherkasy upstream to between 300 and 800 meters. The hardness of the rock gathered the waters into a channel that was only about 175 meters wide, speeding the flow over an unyielding granite foundation and creating nine rapids in succession, plus about 50 to 60 smaller rapids. Near the village of Kichkas on the right bank, just before Zaporizhia on the left bank, the river split into two branches that enveloped a steeply-sloped granitic island called Khortytsia, which was a principal location of Cossack Sich. Downstream, the valley widened to about 20 kilometer and was a localized bio-geographical area of deciduous forests, meadows, lakes, and swamps on sandy terrain before the construction of the Kakhovka Dam in 1956. The rapids above Zaporizhya were drowned with the construction of the first DniproHES Dam in 1932, and again when the dam was reconstructed after the destruction of World War II. Kichkas was assigned to a watery grave. *  Because of the recent renaming, I suspect that the new terminology will be Kamianske Dam and Kamianske Reservoir in place of of the old name Dniprodzerzhynsk.

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I will discuss other aspects of the Dnipro’s course through Ukraine in the chapters ahead, including details about the river in the Kyiv metropolis, in the industrial heartland at the city named Dnipro, in Dniprodzerzhynsk, Zaporiz­ hia, and the smaller cities of Cherkasy and Kherson, as well as the wide estuary of the Dnipro, the lyman,* as it is known in Ukrainian, before it reaches the Black Sea. For now, I would like to conclude with one other insight into the Dnipro as Ukraine’s River, namely the canals that take water from the Dnipro and distribute it to farms, towns, and industries from one bank to the other. The river does not simply have tributaries that feed it with waters that empty collectively into the Black Sea, but water is taken out along the way. This is not just to supply riverbank cities with their needs, but also to reach cities some distance away from the river and to irrigate wide areas of agricultural land. Almost all of this water remains in the Dnipro basin, and eventually returns to the river one way or another. There are five main canals that distribute the Dnipro’s water to more distant places. Arranged in upriver-to-down­river order, they are as follows: • The Dnipro-Inhulets Canal. It takes water from near the town of Svitlovodsk on the Kremenchuk Reservoir to the Inhulets River in Kirovohrad Oblast, was constructed in 1988, and is 45 kilometers long. It is used primarily to irrigate farmlands. • The Dnipro-Donbas Canal. It takes water from the Dniprodzerzhynsk (Kamianske) Reservoir, was constructed in 1970–1981, and is 260 kilometers long. It supplies the important city of Kharkiv with much of its water, as well as a number of industrial cities in eastern Ukraine. Near the city of Izium, the Dnipro-Donbas Canal connects with the Northern Donets-Donbas Canal. The Krasnopavlivske Reservoir is an important reservoir to the south of Kharkiv. • The Dnipro-Krivyi Rih Canal. This canal runs south from near the village of Marianske on the Kakhovka Reservoir to near the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. It was built in 1957–1961 and again in 1975–1979, is 40 kilometers long, and supplies water for both industry and agriculture. • The Kakhovskyi Canal. This is a trunk canal with many branches that supply agricultural lands in the southern steppes with irrigation water. *  The “y” in lyman is pronounced like the “i” in “big” and “dig,” and the “a” is pronounced as the “a” in “car.”

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It begins near the city of Kakhovka at the lower reaches of the Kakhovka Reservoir and extends eastward through the agricultural lands to near the estuary of the Molochna River. It was constructed in 1980, and is 130 kilometers long. • The North Crimea Canal. This canal takes water from near the city of Nova Kakhovka on the Kakhovka Reservoir and runs for some 400 kilometers across Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine into Crimea. It dates back to 1957, soon after Crimea was annexed to Ukraine, and provided water to Simferopol, Sevastopol, Kerch, and other populated places on the peninsula, as well as to farmlands. The Black Sea Lowland of southern Ukraine is a dry and sunny steppe that is productive in agriculture largely because of irrigation works from the Kakhovskyi and Northern Crimean Canals. There are many canals that carry the Dnipro’s waters through Mykolaiv and Kherson Oblasts on the right bank. The main canals can be quite wide, say 50 meters, like moderate-sized rivers, and generally run straight and true across the flat terrain, like the California Aqueduct through the farmlands of the Central Valley. Farmlands receive their rations from branch canals that are controlled by strategically placed valves. The main trunk of the Northern Crimea Canal (Figure 2.6) distributes water through southern Kherson Oblast, and continues through the narrow Isthmus of Perekop into Crimea, an even drier place that faces water crises with and without contributions from the Dnipro. Soon after Crimea was taken by Russia and unilaterally annexed as of March 18, 2014, the Ukrainians turned off the valves. I visited the site in summer 2014, and stood on the small earthen dam in question. The Ukrainian soldiers who were guarding the installation said that photography was not allowed, but agreed to look away in unison in one direction and then in the other as I took the photos (Figure 2.7). In the direction of the Dnipro, I saw a channel rich with water. It would have overflowed except that excess water had been diverted into branch canals up-channel. By contrast, in the direction of the stolen peninsula, the view was of a chain of shrinking puddles evaporating in the sun. Yes, Ukraine’s River was to be used by Ukraine, and the new leadership in Kyiv had ordered that its waters were not to be shared with aggressors.

[Figure 2.6: The Northern Crimea Canal]

[Figure 2.7: A happy Ukrainian at the spot where Dnipro water in a canal to occupied Crimea has been turned off]

CHAPTER 3

A Winding Course through History 3.1: The Borysthenes The oldest name on record for the Dnipro is the Borysthenes, a Greek word that is based on Scythian, the dead language of the Scythian people, an offshoot from eastern Iran. The word is thought to mean “wide land,” apparently in reference to the vast spaces in the steppes north of the Black Sea that the Scythians inhabited from about the ninth century BC into the fifth century AD. They were a nomadic people, rode horses, and excelled at archery in mounted warfare. They are reported to have enjoyed drinking the blood of their enemies from hollowed-out skulls and to have used the scalps of those unfortunates as napkins. They favored very fine gold jewelry, as can be seen in the treasures that have been unearthed over two-plus centuries from Scythian kurhany, or burial mounds. The artwork is known for its rich detail, executed with painstaking craftsmanship, and for influences that may have come from as far as India, Greece, and China. A remarkable collection of some 170 gold objects went on an international tour in the early 2000s, called “Gold of the Nomads: Scythian Treasures from Ancient Ukraine.” I saw this exhibition in the United States and then again at the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine on the grounds of the ancient Monastery of the Caves (Pecherska Lavra) in Kyiv, where it is part of a much larger permanent collection. The centerpiece is an impeccable pectoral of solid gold that was unearthed in 1971 by the archaeologist Borys Mozolevsky (1936–1993) in the Tovsta Mohyla tumulus in the Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk) Oblast on the right bank of the river. It may have been crafted by Scythian talent or by the Greeks, and has been described, with no exaggeration, as “a symphony and a story in gold.” A Scythian king apparently wore it.

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Some of what we know about the Scythians and the lands they inhabited is attributed to Herodotus, arguably the first ever historian. He may or may not have visited Scythian territory personally, but his accounts, written in the fifth century BC, describe the people, their temperament, their lands, and the great river with apparent authority. It is he who first recorded the name Borysthenes. The people, he reported, included nomads, cattle breeders, and tillers of the soil, depending on where exactly they found themselves in the broad Eurasian plains. About the Dnipro he wrote that it was second in the world only to the Nile; that its waters were sweet to drink and rich with fleshy fish; and that the river nourished tall grasses that provided excellent pasture. The steppes also were also home to the Sarmatians, another group of Iranian origin. They had migrated to the region between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, and eventually succeeded the Scythians across Ukrainian territory. Their women are said to have been particularly adept at warfare, giving rise to stories in Greek mythology and classical antiquity about a land of invincible Amazons. We have Herodotus to thank for placing them in Ukraine. At this time, there were also Greek settlements in Ukraine, particularly along the shores of the Black Sea, at the mouths of rivers, and on the Crimean Peninsula. Prominent examples include the Crimean colony of Chersonesus, a UNESCO world heritage site since 2013, established in the sixth century BC; Taurica, later called Panticapaeum, founded about the same time at the eastern tip of Crimea, in what is today the city of Kerch; and Tyras, located near the mouth of the Tyrus River, now called the Dniester, in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi in Odesa Oblast. The chief Greek settlements associated with the Borysthenes-Dnipro were Pontic Olbia, on the estuary of the Southern Buh River near its confluence with the Dnipro estuary, and a somewhat older but short-lived colony on the nearby island of Berezan in the combined estuary that may have been called Borysthenes. It is here that Herodotus may have travelled to learn about the eponymous river. Many other groups also inhabited Ukrainian lands in the distant past, even earlier than the ones mentioned above. I single out the Trypillian culture, which inhabited Right Bank Ukraine and Moldova from about 4800 to 3000 BC, and whose people are known to have inhabited the valley of the River Dnipro. The Trypillians were given their name because the first excavations in Ukraine took place in the village of Trypillia, meaning “three fields,” in the mid-1890s (there is some controversy as to the exact year). The site is in Kyiv

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Oblast on the right bank of the Dnipro about 50 kilometer south of Ukraine’s capital, and the chief archaeologist was Kyiv-based scientist Vikentiy Khvoyka. At about the same time as the Trypillia excavations, the Trypillian culture was being discovered in what is now Moldova and Romania. There, they are known as the Cucuteni, after the Romanian village that was the prime digging site. It has since been established that Trypillians-Cucuteni, as they are now often referred to, had an egalitarian, matriarchal society, were tillers of the soil and pastoralists, and lived in large, planned settlements that were circular in shape and that had as many as 2,000 houses. Therefore, these settlements are counted among the world’s earliest cities or proto-cities. The Trypillians were also early practitioners of urban renewal, as approximately every 60 to 80 years they would burn their settlements and then rebuild them, usually at the same site along the same plats. At one site, in Moldova, this has been done a total of 13 times over many centuries. A total of about 2,440 Trypillian-Cucuteni settlements have been found so far in Ukraine and Moldova. Digs typically unearth large quantities of clay and bone, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines, as well as pottery with distinctive designs and color patterns that are popular motifs in contemporary Ukrainian ceramics. Recently, it was announced that a 6,000-year old temple of large proportions had been unearthed near the village of Nebelivka in Kirovohrad Oblast, spawning much excitement about new clues that will shed light on Trypillian life. The Trypillian settlement along the Dnipro that started it all dates back to about 4300-4000 BC, and is classified as a mega-settlement. Artifacts taken from there are exhibited in the Ukrainian National History Museum on a hilltop overlooking the Dnipro in Kyiv as well as in far-off Saint Petersburg. There is also a local museum in what is left of the modern town of Trypillia, which also shows ancient material culture: the Kyiv Regional Archaeological Museum, located on a high point in the town that overlooks the Dnipro. There is a mini-story here that is worth telling. First of all, there is the fact that the archaeological site in Trypillia is no longer with us, as it was taken in 1972 by the rising waters behind the Kaniv Dam. Much of the village also “sleeps with the fish,” and what remains is on higher ground. The museum was originally a Soviet institution: the Museum of Komsomol Glory, with “Komsomol” being the youth wing of the Communist Party. After the Soviet demise, independent Ukraine repurposed the museum to teach Try­pillian glory, and opened it in 1996 to coincide with the 100 years

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since Khvoyka’s groundbreaking discovery. The Soviet-era structure is still intact, but it was purposefully made invisible in the building’s redesign by being completely encased behind new exterior walls made of steel panels, giving the structure somewhat of a modern, “big box” look. I recently visited the town and its museum, and was awed. Many Ukrainians take pride in the earliest history of their lands and show an extra measure of interest in the findings of archaeologists. There are countless archaeological sites across the country, a great number of which have hardly been studied, and several, like the drowned Trypillia, that have become famous among specialists because of what they reveal about the distant past. Because the river has long been a resource that attracted settlement, the valley of the Dnipro is especially heavily dotted with points of archaeological interest. It is unfortunate that many of these sites were drowned in Soviet reservoirs, but if there is ever a day in the future when dams will be decommissioned and river waters set free, those sites and their lessons and treasures might still be intact for consideration by future generations. In fact, in a strange sort of way, it might be better that for the time being archaeological treasures are secured under water: there are many more archaeology thieves and grave-robbers in today’s Ukraine than professional archaeologists, and a flourishing profession that digs up Neolithic sites, even with a bulldozer, for artefacts to be sold on the international black market. Typically, illegal diggers have more political support and better funding from the people’s funds than do honest archaeologists, because one of the chief drivers behind “black archaeology” are the private collections of corrupt politicians, who beam that their ancient possessions reflect Ukrainian patriotism and a refined taste for rare art. We have yet to visit the Dnipro-side mansion of former President Viktor Yanukovych; the topic of stolen national heritage will be treated in Chapter 6.

3.2 Kyivan Rus’ More than four millennia after the Trypillians and several centuries after the hegemony of the Scythians and the Sarmatians, and long after the arrival of the first Greek colonists in Ukraine, the Dnipro became the river of Kyivan Rus’. For this story, we turn first to the far north of Europe, to the Varangians, the word that Greeks and East Slavic tribes used to refer to the Vikings

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of Scandinavia. Much of the Western world, especially North America, knows these seafaring people for their exploits in the North Atlantic, but at roughly the same time that Viking ships reached Greenland and North America, their raiders used the Baltic Sea to conduct forays into Central and Eastern Europe. A Varangian tribe called the Rus’ (also written as “Rus”) under the leadership of Rurik founded the settlement of Holmgård, thought by some to be the precursor of the historic Russian city Novgorod in about 859. In 882, a relative of Rurik named Oleh (Oleg) conquered Kyiv from the Varangians Askold and Dir, and founded the powerful principality of Kyivan Rus’. The Kyivan state lasted until 1240, by which time it had begun to fragment because of internecine rivalries between rulers, and Kyiv itself was destroyed by Mongol invaders. At its peak in the eleventh century, Kyivan Rus’ controlled a vast territory, from the north of Russia on the Baltic Sea coast southward to Novgorod, Smolensk, and eventually the Black Sea (Figure 3.1). It was the largest political entity in Europe. The main avenue through this territory was the Dnipro, which was referred to as the “Slavuta” or “Slavutych” in the Old East Slavonic of Kyivan Rus, and the capital Kyiv was in the south-center. Ukrainian history teaches that the founding of Kyivan Rus’ was the beginning of the Ukrainian state and the start of Kyiv’s rise to power. However, there is a competing Russian version of history that argues that Kyivan Rus’ was the beginning of the Russian state, and that Ukrainians are not a real nationality and Ukraine is not a real country. This is a road that I will not go down, as it is a long and complex trip along which are many unpleasantries, and my main concern here is with the river. However, it is worth saying that Ukrainians typically consider Russian claims of descent from Kyivan Rus’ as a hijacking of their proud history, and point out that it was not until the fifteenth century that Ivan III, ruler of Muscovy (the Grand Duchy of Moscow), annexed the northern parts of Kyivan Rus’ under his jurisdiction and proclaimed himself to be the “Grand Duke of All Rus’.” Kyiv and Ukrainian lands were not part of his domain, and Moscow did not exist until the middle of the twelfth century, by which time Kyiv had already had a “Golden Age.” It is in the fifteenth century and with Ivan that “Muscovy” fell out of usage and “Russia,” based on the word Rus’, was put in its place. The key geographical component for the rise of Kyivan Rus’ was the trade route that connected the Varangian world with that of the Greeks. Called the

[Figure 3.1: Kyivan Rus’ at its peak of influence (after Magocsi, 1985)]

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Varangian Trade Route, written with capital letters as in “Silk Road,” it was mostly a water route, and the Dnipro was perhaps the single most important link. The route began in ports on the north shores of the Baltic Sea, crossed the Baltic and entered the Gulf of Finland, from where it followed the Neva River to Lake Ladoga, from which followed the navigable Volhkov River to Lake Ilmen. There were some smaller rivers and portage points, and a continuation of the route along the aforementioned Katynka River into the Dnipro. Greek Constantinople was reached by sailing along the western shore of the Black Sea from the mouth of the Dnipro. The Byzantine Empire shipped wines, spices, jewels, glass, fine fabrics, religious icons, and books along the Dnipro, while Kyiv and other lands in Ukraine exported bread, silver coins, spinning wheels, and other items. Northern Rus’ (today’s Russia) provided honey, wax, furs, and timber; the Baltic zone offered amber; and the Scandinavian ports shipped weaponry and various handicrafts. The Varangians also devised a mostly water-borne trade route to the basin of the Caspian Sea and Muslim countries to the south using the Volga as the key link, but this route was never as prominent as the one through Ukraine. When, after the middle of the twelfth century, the Crusades opened other trade routes between Europe and the Orient, the route through Ukraine lost its significance. It is worth mentioning that modern scholarship casts some doubt on the overall significance of the Baltic-to-Black Sea route, arguing that it may not have been as important commercially as historians have thought (Plokhy, 2015, 26). The rapids of the Dnipro presented a danger zone for traders, not just because of the churning waters, but also because the lands nearby were the domain of the Pechenihy (Pechenegs), a tribe of semi-nomadic Turkic people who had migrated from the Central Asian steppes and who liked to attack the traders for the goods they carried. The aforementioned island of Khortytsia, just below the rapids, provided some refuge for the beleaguered ships and a place for crews to rest. The Greeks knew the island as St. George Island. There is an old rune stone that is now on display in a museum in Gotland, Sweden, which tells of dangers of the river’s rapids. The stone is referred to as G280 and is dated to the latter half of the tenth century. It was found near the small settlement of Pilgårds north of Gotland, where it was raised in the memory of the men who were led by Vífil to brave the treacherous waters, and of Rafn who was among them and was killed at Rvanyj Kamin’, apparently an especially dangerous point that translates as “torn rock,” or perhaps “jutting rock.”

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Kyiv occupied a strategic point, distance-wise, along the Varangian Trade Route, as well as a site on a high promontory that was ostensibly easier to defend and a riverbank area that was well suited for a harbor and trading houses. The city also benefitted from an offshoot of the Varangian Trade Route that, with portages, connected Kyiv with Western Europe via the Pripyat and Buh (Bug) Rivers and Poland’s Vistula River. These advantages for economic geography were multiplied by the personal ambitions of the Varangian princes, who ruled Kyivan Rus’ and enlarged its territories. I cannot tell too many stories about these rulers and their exploits, because these details are already available in other histories. However, to whet readers’ appetites for these books, we offer some peeks as to the blood and gore that they contain. Prince Oleh ruled from 882 until his death in 912, and is credited for moving the capital of the Rus’ tribe from Novgorod to Kyiv. He is also remembered for at least one military assault on Constantinople itself. Oleh was succeeded by Rurik’s son Ihor (Igor), who ruled until 945. Ihor’s death came at the hands of the tribe called the Drevliany (Drevlianians in English), a word meaning “people who dwell among the trees.” It is reported that the prince had become too greedy in exacting tribute from his subjects, and was repaid by having each of his legs tied to a birch tree that had been bent to the ground, and then letting the trees spring upright and tear Ihor’s body in two. Ihor was succeeded by his three year-old son Svyatoslav the Brave, who grew up to become an aggressive leader of military campaigns. For a time, he brought even the lands along the Volga River and the north shore of the Caspian Sea under his control, as well as what is today Bulgaria. His rule was from 945 until an untimely death in 972, but from 945 until about 963, his mother Olha (Olga) was regent. During that time, she converted to Christianity and worked to propagate the faith throughout Rus’. As a result, she was canonized after her death and was proclaimed to be a saint “equal to the apostles.” Olha is also remembered for some unsaintly deeds, but who are we to judge — her or those who canonized her? She extracted four acts of revenge against the Drevliany for the murder of her husband that seem worthy of Hollywood. It seems that the Drevliany wanted the widow Olha to marry their Prince Mal, so that he would become the ruler of Rus’. They sent a retinue of twenty diplomats to offer their best deal, and she buried them alive. Next she sent word to Mal that she would marry him, and asked that he send a second delegation of distinguished men who would accompany her to their capital. When they arrived, she welcomed

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them and suggested that the tired travelers should relax in the bathhouse. After they entered, she locked the doors and burned them alive. Third, she invited the Drevliany to her husband’s funeral feast, got them drunk, and had her soldiers massacre them. The number of dead is reported at 5,000. Finally, when the remaining Drevliany begged for mercy and offered her furs and honey by way of atonement, she asked for only three sparrows and three pigeons from each house, a smaller sum. The birds were sabotaged with measures of sulfur bound with small pieces of cloth. When Olha’s men released the birds, they flew at once to where they came from and set fire to every house. People were killed as they fled, or taken as slaves. We need to get back to the river. Sviatoslav’s son by his housekeeper Malusha was Volodymyr, the aforementioned Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great who presided over Kyivan Rus’ from 980 to 1015, and who in 988 had his subjects baptized into the Christian faith. This mass baptism took place in the Dnipro in Kyiv, and was conducted by Greek priests from the Chersonesus (Korsun’ in Old East Slavic) in Crimea, where Volodymyr himself was baptized earlier that year and took on the baptismal name Vasyl (Basil). After he decided to abandon pagan worship, he considered each of the major faiths of the world but rejected Judaism for himself and his subjects, because he thought that the Jews’ loss of Jerusalem was evidence that they had been abandoned by God, and said no thanks to Islam because he shuddered at the thought of circumcision and at a life without pork and alcohol. However, his emissaries who had been to Constantinople reported about the beauty of the Hagia Sophia and the magical richness of the Greek liturgy, and Volodymyr became a believer. The site in Crimea where his baptism is said to have taken place, is marked by the nineteenth-century Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral. The precise spot of the mass baptism in Kyiv is not known, but it may have been at the mouth of a small tributary called the Pochaina that entered the river below the hilltop city, in what is now the riverside Podil (Podol in Russian) neighborhood. A recently published booklet with many illustrations includes a chapter about where the baptism of Volodyrmr’s subjects may have taken place in Kyiv (Stepanets 2015, 42–51). Near this place is a large statue of Volodymyr holding aloft a cross. It stands on a high hill overlooking the River Dnipro near the center of the city, and commemorates the baptism. This statue is also a nineteenth-century work, and is one of the capital city’s most popular monuments. That same hill, now called Volodymyrska Hora (“Volodymyr’s Hill”) might

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have been the place from which the holy ruler’s subjects threw the idols they had previously worshipped into the river, and from which a large wooden carving of the chief pagan god Perun was sent on a permanent swim. Volodymyr began to make Kyiv into a city of churches. His namesake church, St. Basil’s, was built on a hill with a view of the river at a site where the city’s inhabitants had previously worshiped their pagan idols. Nearby, he built the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin, which came to be called Desiatynna Tserkva, the Church of the Tithes, named thus because the Grand Prince had given a ten percent share of his wealth for its construction. It was the first stone church in Kyivan Rus’ and it also had a hilltop view of the river. Volodymyr’s grandmother, Olha, was reburied in the church from her original burial site in the future dam city of Vyshhorod, and after their deaths Volodymyr himself and his wife Anna of Byzantium might have had their final resting places in the church as well. This detail about Volodymyr is uncertain, however, as another version says that his remains were divided into numerous parts and distributed as relics. Even a Roman pope, Clement I, who presided over the Church from 92 to 99 and died in Crimea, is said to eventually have been buried there. This particular church building, however, had a history of miserable luck, and some details are worth telling. Desiatynna was badly damaged in a fire in 1017 and was rebuilt and rededicated in 1039 by Yaroslav the Wise, one of Volodymyr’s sons and ruler of Kyivan Rus’ from 1019 to 1054. Later, in 1240, the church was a last refuge of Kyivans during the storming of the city by the Mongols of Batu Khan and collapsed from fire, killing everyone inside. A new Desiatynna was built on the site in the early nineteenth century, but its design was Russian revival and had nothing in common with the original church. In 1935, Soviet Commu­nist authorities destroyed the structure during Stalin’s heightened assault against religion. The site remains vacant, although there is considerable speculation in Kyiv that a museum about Kyivan Rus’ might be built on the spot, with views of old foundations at the deepest depths. The site, however, is mired in great controversy, because control of it and any decisions as to how it should be used are seen as critical for the ownership of the history of Kyivan Rus,’ which as we have already seen is contested between Ukrainian and Russian interpretations. At the front line of the controversy are the different flavors of Ukrainian and Russian Orthodoxy and their grandly-bearded religious leaders, while behind them stand oligarchs and political leaders from the two countries, re-

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gardless of whether they have religious leanings or not. As a beachhead, the Russian Orthodox Church that is headquartered in Moscow under the leadership of Patriarch Kirill, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and himself a former KGB agent, has built a small church on a plot beside the Desiatynna site from which it hopes to expand. The construction had the support of Russia-leaning Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and was heavily opposed by many Ukrainian citizens. Their protests at the site were always very heated. Yaroslav the Wise led Kyivan Rus’ through its Golden Age. He greatly enlarged Volodymyr’s city on a hill, built new ramparts and gates as well as many new churches. He also modernized Kyivan Rus’ by instituting a uniform code of laws called Russkaya Pravda, “Rus’ Truth.” During his rule, the city was much respected in Constantinople, Rome, and Jerusalem, becoming something of a “global city” of the time. In fact, it came to be referred to as a “New Jerusalem,” because the historic city in the Holy Land had been taken by Muslims and Kyiv had so many beautiful churches, their domes punctuating the view of the city. From the riverbank, the city of churches must have looked positively heavenly. There were churches, too, at the river elevation in Podil, the bustling trading neighborhood where ships could berth, and elsewhere around Kyiv. Other cities, too, such as Chernihiv on the Desna, became marked by churches. The centerpiece of Yaroslav’s Kyiv was the Cathedral of St. Sophia and the complex of monasteries and other structures on its grounds, while on the slopes that ascended from the river just to the south of the walled city, the famous Monastery of the Caves, the Pecherska Lavra, began to take shape. Both places, St. Sophia and Lavra, are still there, although they, too, have seen more than their share of turmoil over the centuries; they are Kyiv’s only two UNESCO world heritage sites. I write about the various rulers of Kyivan Rus’ and their accomplishments because it was during their watch that the Dnipro became the center of an advanced civilization, like the Nile was the heart of Egypt and the TigrisEuphra­tes defined the kingdoms of Mesopotamia, which in turn led to the river becoming Ukraine’s River. At the same time, the Dnipro became the River of Kyiv, much like the Thames is the river of London and the Seine is the river of Paris, with iconic landmarks and vistas that combine scenes of the respective rivers with extraordinary structures by mankind. However, the greatness of Rus’ would not last, as internal rivalries and the bloody assault in 1240 by Mongol horsemen would destroy Kyiv and reduce the city to local importance only. For

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centuries afterwards, Ukrainian lands would be ruled by other powers, and were divided in various ways and at various times between ever-changing combinations of powerful neighbors. We pick up the story of Ukraine’s River in the sixteenth century, some three centuries after the fall of Kyiv, by going downriver, to where the forests of the north yield to the endless grasslands in the south, and getting to know the world of the Ukrainian Cossacks.

3.3: Ukrainian Cossacks In Ukrainian, these much-storied and greatly romanticized bands of horseborne raiders and warriors with the baggy trousers and a single lock of hair (called a chupryna or an oseledets) sprouting from a closely-shaved head, are called kozaky in the plural and kozak in the singular,* but I use “Cossacks,” with a capital C, in this book because this has come to be the convention in English. The word comes from the Turkic Cuman word qazaq, and is often translated as “free man.” Cossacks first emerged in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Ukraine in response to the Polish takeover of peasant lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and because of a need for protection against frequent raids against Ukrainian villages and towns by Tatars from Crimea. In addition to plunder, Tatar raiders took men, women, and children as slaves, a practice that they called “harvesting the steppes.” Victims were often taken to Constantinople and elsewhere across the Black Sea. The Cossacks organized themselves into military-like bands and became adept horsemen on the wide expanses of prairie in southern Ukraine. The Dnipro became an important part of their geography, as the rapids and islands in the river provided bases for defensive fortifications, as well as for raids of their own to fight both Tatars and Poles. Some Cossacks became adept boatmen and built ships that took them down the Dnipro and onto the Black Sea. In 1616, they burned down the Crimean Khanate stronghold of Kaffa and freed its slaves, and in subsequent years they launched several raids against Constantinople, once even managing to overrun Topkapi Palace. Because they were so strongly associated with the cataracts on the Dnipro, many Ukrainian Cossacks came to be known as Zaporozhian (“beyond the rapids”) Cossacks *  For both words, the accent falls on the final syllable.

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or the Zaporozhian Host. Later, there were other “free men” elsewhere in the region, such as in the Don River Valley; they were the Cossacks of Kuban or the Don Cossacks. The Zaporozhian Cossacks had several capitals along the Dnipro. They were called sich and established one after the other as previous fortifications fell in battle. The twisting geography is as follows. The oldest sich was es­ tablished in 1552 by Hetman (a title of high military leadership) Dmytro Vysh­ny­vetskyi, near the southern-most cataract on the small island called Mala (“small”) Khortytsia, and was followed soon thereafter by another encampment on the larger island, Khortytsia, just downstream. A defeat by the Tatars in 1558 caused this sich to be re-established about 25 kilometers further south, on a now-flooded island called Tomakivka, where it was the main Cossack base from 1564 to 1593. The site is near the modern-day (established in 1938) industrial town of Marhanets, on the Dnipro, a no-nonsense Soviet place name that means “manganese.” Tomakivka Sich was followed by a sich at Bazavlyk from 1593 to 1630, and then at Mykytyn Rih from 1638 to 1652. Later, during the zenith of the Cossack state, the Ukrainian Cossacks were based from 1652 to 1709 in what they called Stara Sich (“Old Sich”) or Chortomlyk. From Tomakivka through Stara Sich, the locations of sich were near one another in the wetlands along the lower Dnipro. When troops from Muscovy destroyed Stara Sich, the Cossacks fled southward into the Crimean Khanate, with which they were then allied, and re-established their headquarters at Oleshky near the mouth of the Dnipro, opposite today’s port city of Kherson. It functioned from 1711 to 1734. The Cossacks then returned to their previous area of concentration, but as Russian subjects, and founded Nova Sich (“New Sich”) where they remained on an ever-shorter string until 1775, when Empress Catherine the Great ordered Nova Sich to be destroyed. After that, the Cossacks left the Dnipro altogether (Subtelny, 2009). Whichever sich we talk about, it was typically an all-male world behind gates and a wooden stockade. The center had an open space (maidan) for ceremonies and meetings, and a small church. The Cossack hierarchy was elected and resided near the center. Elsewhere were the barracks of the rank and file, as well as stables, workshops, dining halls, armories, and other facilities (Figure 3.3). Cossacks who were married resided with their wives and children in villages outside the stockade, and supported their families by fishing or farming. The villages had trading centers, where goods from both

[Figure 3.2: Zaporozhian Sich locations over time]

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north and south could be bought. The distinctive society of sich and the bravery of the “free men Cossacks” are much romanticized in Ukrainian and Russian literature and film, somewhat akin to the stories of good cowboys in the American West and honorable samurai in Japan. The famous 1835 short story “Taras Bulba” by Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol) about a father and his two sons who enlist in the Zaporozhian Host to fight the Poles is but one example.* There are also many poems and songs that romanticize the Cossack world. For example, Taras Shevchenko’s epic poem “Haidamaky” tells a long tale of Cossack heroism and rebellion against Polish rule in Ukraine,** and near the beginning uses the Dnipro as a literary device for describing the woes of the Ukrainian nation. A small portion of this long Ukrainian text and my translation, without the richness of Shevchenko’s alliterative rhythms and rhyming words, appears below: … а пороги Beyond the reeds beside the river Меж очеретами The Dnipro’s rapids Ревуть, стогнуть — розсердились, Roar and groan with anger Щось страшне співають. A tale of woe they tell. Послухаю, пожурюся, With worried heart I listen to hear У старих спитаю: The words that elders say to me. “Чого, батьки, сумуєте?” “Why, dear fathers, are you so sad?” I ask. “Невесело, сину! “All around are troubles, my son,” they say Дніпро на нас розсердився, “There is no cause for cheer. Плаче Україна...” The Dnipro is angry with us, and all Ukraine is weeping.”

Shevchenko’s intended implication with these words is that Ukrainians need to rise up against their oppressors.

*  Gogol was an ethnic Ukrainian. Ukrainians write his name as Hohol. I use Hohol here because Ukrainian spelling is used throughout in this book. Interestingly, the first version of his story was criticized as being “too Ukrainian,” which resulted in a reworking of the manuscript and publication of a more Russia-friendly version in 1842. **  This is not the place for a full review of the history of Ukraine’s Cossacks and how their deeds have been recorded in history. Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I did not mention, if only in a footnote, that at least some Cossack bands engaged in the murder of Polish and Jewish civilians, ostensibly in the Ukrainian cause. Therefore, not all Cossacks should be remembered fondly.

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[Figure 3.3: A reconstruction of Sich on Khortytsia Island as seen from DniproHES]

A landmark Cossack victory was against a prominent Polish fortification on the Dnipro named Kodak. It was located at the start of the Dnipro rapids in today’s Dnipro Oblast, and was built in 1635 to guard the southeastern flank of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from raids by Tatars. An added purpose was to keep the Cossacks in check. As the Poles saw that more and more angry Ukrainian peasants were joining the Cossack movement and were willing to fight equally against Tatar raiders and Polish landowners, they came to view these “free men” as threats to their dominion over Ukrainian lands. Kodak was built on the right bank of the Dnipro at the northern-most cataract, just below where the tributary Samara River entered the Dnipro from the left bank. The fortress gave birth to the town of Staryi Kodak, which would later become the important city of Dnipropetrovsk, to be renamed Dnipro. It was designed according to the expertise of the French military cartographer and engineer William le Vasseur de Beauplan, builder of a number of forts and castles on Poland’s Ukrainian frontier. As soon as the construction of Kodak was finished in July of 1635, it was attacked by surprise on the night of August 11–12, 1635, by Cossack raiders led by Ivan Sulyma. The entire garrison of 200 German mercenaries was slaughtered in the assault and the fortress was levelled. A second Kodak was erected in 1639 and was made three times larger,

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this time under the direction of a German engineer, Friedrich Getkant. The garrison was also three times larger, at 600 men. The Cossacks defeated Kodak 2 as well, but this time it took a seven-month siege to accomplish the task. They massacred or drowned the defenders in the river and sold their commander and other officers to Tatars as slaves. The Cossacks retained this second Kodak, and it served as a stronghold until 1711, when Peter I (Peter the Great of Russia) had it razed.

[Figure 3.4: “Chumaky at Rest” by Ivan Aivazovaky (1885)]

In addition to the Cossacks, Ukrainian literature, film, and song have romanticized contemporaneous itinerant traders called chumaky (singular chumak, often rendered “chumak” and “chumaks” in English), who plied overland routes from Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea to the north and west of Ukraine. They travelled alongside the Dnipro and traded with Cossacks. The chumaky are known for their wooden wagons with high wooden wheels that were pulled by pairs of oxen, and for the loads of salt that they conveyed to northern markets. On the journeys back, they carried forest products and alcoholic spirits. The principal crossing place of the Dnipro along their “Salt Highway” was at the historic “city of victory,” Nikopol, that had been founded by the Greeks not far where Stara Sich would later be erected. A landscape

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painting by the prolific Crimean-Armenian painter Ivan Konstantynovych Aivazovsky (1817–1900) called “Chumaky at Rest” (1885) shows a scene of the traders and their high-wheeled wagons on a hilltop at dusk above the distant Dnipro (Figure 3.4). Now let us meet Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the founder and first leader (hetman) of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate (the Ukrainian Cossack State). At the time he was born, in 1595, most Ukrainian lands were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and fell under control of the Kingdom of Poland. This included today’s Cherkasy Oblast, where Khmelnytsky was born, probably in the village of Subotiv near the small town of Chyhyryn, not far from the Dnipro, where many Poles had settled. Khmelnytsky himself was born into a relatively well-off family with connections to the local Polish szlachta (Polish for nobility), and as a young man he enlisted, along with his father, into a Cossack division to fight alongside the forces of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth against the Ottoman Turks. He was captured and apparently spent some time in a Constantinople prison. Eventually, after returning to Ukraine and seeing the discontent among his people because of Polish rule, but also because of his own case against the Polish government with respect to his family’s lands, he led a Cossack uprising. It is referred to in history texts as the Khmelnytsky Uprising and is dated 1648–1657. It began in Myktyn Rih as a local struggle, but it quickly grew into a full-scale rebellion by Ukrainians against Poland. The conflict had dimensions of class (Ukrainian peasants versus Polish landowners); ethnicity (the Ukrainian language versus the enforced use of Polish); religion (Orthodox Ukrainians versus Catholic Poles); and attracted a considerable grass roots following in Ukraine. Crimean Tatars allied with Khmelnytsky’s forces because they, too, had issues with the Poles. The conflict also turned Ukrainians against Jews, who were massacred in great numbers because they were seen as working in service of the Polish nobility to the detriment of the Ukrainian peasantry. It was a terrible time. Many Ukrainians regard Khmelnytsky as a national liberator, but his reputation among Ukrainians more widely and in history books is besmirched. Khmelnytsky had some notable battlefield victories against the Poles and was able to drive them from the Ukrainian lands east of the Dnipro. How­ever, his forces suffered a costly defeat in western Ukraine in 1651, in the Battle of Berestechko, the largest land battle of the entire seventeenth century, and his

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dream of an independent Ukrainian state evaporated. At this time, the Crimean Tatars abandoned the cause of the Cossacks. Rather than continuing under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Khmelnytsky persuaded his troops to ally with the Muscovites. In 1654, a fateful treaty was signed in the town of Pereyaslav, in which the Cossacks swore allegiance to Muscovy in exchange for support against the Poles and the establishment of a Cossack Hetmanate in Left Bank Ukraine as a protectorate of Muscovy, which later became the Russian Empire. Russia considers the Treaty of Pereyaslav as the formal union of Ukraine with Russia, while most Ukrainians have long preferred to look at what took place as a military alliance at a time when it was needed. It was a fateful treaty, because afterwards Russia became a dominant force in Ukraine, first in the territories of the Left Bank and then in southern Ukraine and in the west. Khmelnytsky, therefore, is a controversial figure in Ukraine, as he is blamed for a treaty that replaced one foreign ruler with another, which, in many respects, turned out to be worse. Taras Shevchenko, whose verses we see for a third time, had some choice words about the Pereyaslav Treaty in his 1843 poem “Rozryta mohyla,” “The Plundered Grave.” Written in the voice of “Mother Ukraine,” the poem has these lines about midway through: Ой Богдане! Нерозумний сину! Подивись тепер на матір, На свою Вкраїну, Що, колишучи, співала Про свою недолю, Що, співаючи, ридала, Виглядала волю. Ой Богдане, Богданочку, Якби була знала, У колисці б задушила, Під серцем приспала.

Oh, Bohdan! You foolish son! Look now at your motherland, At your dear Ukraine, That cradled you, and sang About her life of woe, She cried as she sang, For you she wished freedom. Oh Bohdan, my dear little Bohdan, If I had only known, I would have smothered you in your cradle, Pressing you to my heart, to your final sleep.

Shevchenko continues to say that Mother Ukraine’s steppes have all been sold and are now in the hands of Jews and Germans; that her sons have left Ukraine to labor for foreigners; and that her own brother, the River Dnipro, has run

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dry and has deserted her. Even the graves of Ukraine are being plundered by Muscovites. The bottom line, for Shevchenko, seems to be that as a result of the Treaty of Pereyaslav, nothing in Ukraine is Ukrainian any more, and that even Ukrainians themselves have been reduced to the downtrodden subjects of others. But I got ahead of myself, as Shevchenko’s famous lament was written nearly 200 years after the fateful treaty, and I have a number of other historical topics to touch upon before the Dnipro in Ukraine is turned into a Russian river. Pereyaslav, the city where Russia’s hold on Ukraine began, is a small, historic town in Left Bank Ukraine about 95 kilometers south of Kyiv. During the height of Kyivan Rus’, its fortress defended the southern approaches to the capital from nomadic raiders. It was destroyed by the Mongol Horde a year before the destruction of Kyiv. It became a Cossack garrison town, like Kodak, which is how it came to be the site for the fateful treaty. It is located at the confluence of two small rivers, the Alta and the Trubizh, before their combined waters enter the Dnipro as a left-bank tributary. The Kaniv Dam, however, has changed the configuration of land and water in the area, and the town, now named Pereyaslav-Khmelnytsky, with a population of about 28,000, is on a flooded inlet of the Kaniv Reservoir, upriver and on the opposite bank from Shevchenko’s final resting place. Khmelnytsky’s grave is on a hill overlooking the river, too, although a lower one, and it is found downriver from Shevchenko on the same right-bank side, beside a small church in the village where he was born, Subotiv. To be precise, it is actually no longer the river that is seen from Subotiv, but the width of the Kremenchuk Reservoir. This burial site is not as popular a destination for historical pilgrimages by Ukrainians as Shevchenko’s hill in Kaniv, but there are visitors nonetheless. Near Subotiv, further from the river in the larger settlement of Chyhyryn, is a much higher hill with a spectacular view and a beautiful historic park in which there is reconstruction of Khmelnytsky’s residence and a fortress that once protected the town below. From 1648 to 1676, Chyhyryn was the capital of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate that Khmelnytsky had founded. The boundaries of this nascent Ukrainian state were neither fixed nor formally mapped, but Ukrainian historians show that at the time of the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Cossack territory occupied an area that was somewhere been onethird and one-half the size of present-day Ukraine (including Crimea), and included both Left Bank and Right Bank lands from the below the rapids

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northward. The Dnipro was very prominently at the center, as if it were the territory’s spine. Southern Ukraine, including Crimea, was Tatar territory, the fearsome Crimean Khanate. I will return to Chyhyryn in Chapter 7, but now I will discuss the Dnipro and Russian expansion.

3.4: Russia’s Ukraine Much of the latter half of the seventeenth century is referred to as the “ruin” (ruina) in Ukrainian history. It is sometimes dated to the death of Khmelnytsky, in 1657, a period when Ukrainian territories were being divided between Poland and Russia, generally along the line of the Dnipro, while Tatars ruled the south. The Cossack Hetmanate was split along the river as well, with the Zaporozhian Host being allied for a time with Russia against the Poles. Eventually Russia gained control of both banks of the river, and what was left of Polish Ukraine was in the west of the country. The idea of an independent Ukrainian state slipped ever further away. Then, over the course of the eighteenth century, Russia gained control of southern Ukraine as a result of a series victories in the Russo-Turkish Wars and the peace agreements with the Ottoman Empire. Ukrainian territories on both sides of the Dnipro and all along the coast of the Black Sea became primed for expansion by the Russian Empire. It had previously expanded from its small nucleus in Muscovy to encompass Kazan on the Volga to the east, to the north of Muscovy into Finnish-Karelian and Baltic territory, the Astrakhan Khanate north of the Caspian Sea, the Urals, and across the breadth of Siberia. The newly acquired Ukrainian frontier came to be known as No­vorossiya, “New Russia,” a name that affirmed the single-minded acquisitiveness of an imperial state. Ukrainian territory had special significance for the Russian state because it (1) enabled Russia to devise a link (or “re-link”) to the legacy and geographic territory of Rus’; (2) provided the empire with ice-free ports on the Black Sea; and (3) placed the Russian Empire on a parallel footing with other European empires that had established “New Spain,” “New Netherlands,” “New France,” and “New England” in colonies across the seas. The relocation of Russia’s capital to the purposefully built Saint Petersburg in 1703 was also a manifestation of Russia’s ambitions to be more European.

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While Novorossiya was the formal name assigned to Russia’s Ukrainian lands, Russians referred to the steppes as dyke pole, the “Wild Field.” The term had actually originated under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but stuck because much of the land to the north of the Black Sea was sparsely populated and somewhat “wild” with respects to dangers from raiders that included Tatars, Cossacks, and other dwellers of the steppes. It was, in fact, convenient for Imperial Russia to refer to these lands as wild and unsettled, because a blank slate in the region would justify the introduction of new settlers and legitimize the empire’s territorial claims. In the same way, Russian usage of “dyke pole” also applied to eastern steppes, such as those along the Don and Volga River valleys, the North Caspian Plain, and perhaps also grasslands in Central Asia (Sunderland 2004). “Taming the Wild Fields” was Russia’s challenge in the region, somewhat akin to France’s historic mission civilsatrice and Portugal’s misso civilzadora in those countries’ respective foreign colonies. It required, among other things, many thousands of colonists to cultivate farmlands and build new cities; a military presence to subdue locals and keep the peace; bureaucrats to administer the region and its sub-areas; and the spread of the colonial power’s language and religion as tools for social unification. In the case of “wild” Ukraine, this meant the Russian language and the Orthodox faith. There were also official map-makers and town planners, record keepers about land grants and land rights, births, deaths, and other vital information, the conjuring of new place names for previous settlements, and new monuments and landmarks that glorified the Russian Empire and its leaders. Russia’s colonization of Ukrainian lands began in earnest in the mid-eighteenth century, and was at first defense-oriented to secure lands against the Tatars. Starting in 1731, a heavily fortified “Ukrainian Line” was constructed in eastern Ukraine to protect against the Crimean Khanate. Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants, who labored under duress in harsh conditions and with great losses of life, built these fortifications. This was particularly the case in the early years of the project. The line ran between the Oril River, a left bank tributary of the Dnipro, and the Donets River, a right bank tributary of the River Don, and consisted of 16 larger forts and 49 smaller earthwork fortifications. After peace was achieved in 1739 between the combined forces of the Russian and Hapsburg Empires and the Ottoman Empire, the Ukrainian Line lost its significance, and the geography of frontier colonization switched to one

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of cultivating farmlands and building administrative cities in the heart of Novorossiya. Lands were assigned to Russian noblemen (dvoryanstvo), as well as to Cossacks and to Russian and Ukrainian peasants, but there were also many foreigners who were invited onto Ukrainian lands, specifically from the Hapsburg Austrian Empire. Thus, in 1751, an administrative district named Novoserbiya (“New Serbia”) was established in Right Bank Ukraine in the area of today’s Kirovohrad Oblast. Ukrainians were moved out of this “unsettled” Wild Field, and replaced by new settlers. A majority of the pioneers came from Austria’s Romania and today’s Moldova, but there were transplants as well from Hapsburg Serbia, although not in sufficient fraction to justify the assigned name for the territory. The capital of Novoserbiya was Novomyrhorod, a settlement on the River Velyka, Vys, never grew to prominence, while the principal fortification was named Fort St. Elizabeth in honor of both the Russian empress and her patron saint. This town was later renamed Yelisavethrad (in Russian) and eventually, in Soviet times, Kirovohrad, a city that is today one of Ukraine’s more important regional administrative and industrial centers. Initially, New Serbia faced the Dnipro at its eastern boundary, but in 1765, after Empress Catherine the Great abolished the province, administration of the region shifted to Kremenchuk, an old Cossack town, founded as early as 1571, just across the river. Catherine the Great ruled from 1762 to 1796 and was especially ambitious with regard to civilizing the Wild Field. In 1764, she formally established the guberniya (governorate) of Novorossiya, and designated Kremenchuk as its first capital. The fortress occupied a strategic site near the southern terminus of navigation on the Dnipro from the north, well before the start of the rapids. It was also a good location for defense of the area. Soon thereafter, in 1775, Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed, and in 1776, the old Polish-turned-Cossack fortification at Kodak 2 was developed into another key administrative center, initially for the Russian Governorate of Azov. It was named Katerynoslav (in Russian: Yekaterinoslav or Ekaterinoslav), “the glory of Catherine,” then Novorossiysk, and then Katerynoslav again when it replaced Kremenchuk as the capital of a much-enlarged Novorossiya. This is the city that became Dnipropetrovsk and later Dnipro. A first version of Katerynoslav had been established a short distance upriver from the present urban core, where the River Samara flows into the Dnipro, but this site proved too marshy with springtime melt waters, so the city was re-founded near the Kodak 2 site at a Zaporozhian vil-

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lage named Polovytsia. The settlement that was left behind was re-christened Novomoskovsk (“New Moscow”). In 1775, Catherine appointed Grigori Potemkin, a prominent statesman and military leader in the Russian court and also her favorite lover, to oversee the development of Novorossiya. He proved to be extraordinarily ambitious with respect to the task. For Katerynoslav, he not only chose a politically correct name, but also drew up a grand city plan that pleased the empress greatly. The centerpiece was to be an enormous cathedral, the Savior’s Transfiguration Cathedral (In Ukrainian: Spaso-preobrazhanskyi kafedralnyi sobor), which was supposed to be the largest in the world and a major new focus for the Russian Orthodox faith. Catherine herself laid the cornerstone in 1787 when she stopped in the city during her journey to Crimea. The city was also to have a “magnificent university,” a grand palace, botanical gardens, and streets that were straight and wide. Only hints of these features were ever accomplished, as the war with the Turks and, reportedly, the old bugaboo of Russia, corruption and theft of materials, hampered construction until the end of Catherine’s life. The cathedral of the same name that now stands in Dnipropetrovsk was completed later and is a much-scaled-down version. It was in the course of Catherine’s southward journey on the Dnipro from the emerging city that was her namesake that Potemkin allegedly had fake villages erected along the banks of the river, so that the empress would see that her subjects were indeed settling in southern Ukraine, as the governor had informed her. Historians cannot seem to agree as to whether or not these “Potemkin Villages” actually existed, and the whole story might be no more than a steppe equivalent of an urban legend. Potemkin is also credited with the founding, in 1778, of the port city of Kherson, as well as the city of Mykolaiv, in 1789, at the confluence of the Ingul and Buh Rivers near the mouth of the Dnipro, and Odesa (formerly Odessa), in 1794, a port city on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. An old Tatar town named Khadjibey * and a town named Moldovanka, which Moldovian settlers had established some three decades before Potemkin’s arrival, predated Odesa. All three of these new cities became prominent, just like Katerynoslav*  There is a bewildering variety of ways to spell the name of this town. In addition to

Khadjibey, I have encountered Khadzhibey, Khadjibei, Hajibey, Kacdjibei, Hacibey, Hocabey, Gadzhibei, Chadžėibus, Hacibey, and Codjabey. Learn them all.

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Dnipropetrovsk-Dnipro, with Odesa growing into one of the largest and most prosperous cities of the Russian Empire. Kherson was designed by Ivan Gannibal, an Afro-Russian general to whom Potemkin had assigned the task, and had as its centerpiece the Church of St. Catherine, where Potemkin was eventually buried. Mykolaiv was designed as a shipbuilding center, which it still is, and was named after Saint Nicholas (Mykolai in Ukrainian; Nikolai in Russian), the patron saint of seafarers. Table 3.1 summarizes the founding dates and name-changes of the key cities of historic Novorossiya. Table 3.1: Key Cities in Historic Novorossiya

Date founded

Name during Russian Empire

Name today

Location on Dnipro?

1754

Elizavetgrad

Kropyvnytskyi

No

1770

Aleksandrovsk

Zaporizhia

Yes

1776

Ekaterinoslav

Dnipro

Yes

1778

Kherson

Kherson

Yes

1778

Mariupol

Mariupol

No

1789

Nikolaev

Mykolaiv

No

1794

Odessa

Odesa

No

Upriver from the steppes of Novorissiya was Kyiv, incorporated into the Russian Empire even though it was a Right Bank city, and up to 1793 the eastern boundary along the upper Dnipro of the Rzeczpospolita, the Polish state. Even though Kyiv had been a Russian ruled city since 1686, there was a substantial Polish population and a disproportionate Polish engagement in the intellectual and business life of the city. Ukraine’s farm and forest products were among the main business concerns, and the Dnipro emerged as a critical avenue of commerce, especially in conjunction with its east-flowing tributary, the Prypiat. In the eighteenth century, when river transport was critical to trade within Europe, a number of canals were built that connected the upper Dnipro to various parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: in 1767–1783, the Ogiński Canal linked the river with the Neman River in what is today Belarus and Lithuania; in 1775, the Dnipro-Buh Canal linked Ukraine’s River with Poland’s Vistula River via the Mukhavets and Puna Rivers; while in Belarus, the Biarezina Canal was built between 1797 and 1805 to connect

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the Dnipro with the Daugava River. As a rule, these projects were private business ventures. They lost their significance in the nineteenth century, when railroads replaced canals and lands that had been Polish were integrated into the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, in the nineteenth century, the cities that Potemkin had built in southern Ukraine as well as other cities in the south and east, even Kyiv itself, were transformed into critically important industrial centers. One line of business concerned the processing and export of Ukraine’s ample agricultural products. Kyiv, for example, became a major center of flour milling and sugar refining, and returned to prosperity after centuries of post-Mongol invasion mediocrity on the strength of a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sugar boom, led by industrialist Lazar Brodksy, a prominent Jewish resident. At the same time, Odesa benefited from farm exports to Europe through its port and the business acumen of its Jewish residents. Two successive governors who fled the French Revolution and entered into service for the Russian Empire, the Duc de Richelieu and Count Andrault de Langeran, are credited with developing the infrastructure in Odesa that enabled commercial prosperity. A second line of business was heavy industry. The Russian Empire had long known that Ukraine’s farm lands were fertile and could feed the north, but the industrial revolution was something that crept up on Russia, and the Empire was simply lucky that the “Wild Field” of Ukraine turned out to be unexpectedly rich in coal, iron ore, and other minerals that could also “feed the north.” Here, foreign expertise was also critical. Starting in 1869, a Welsh businessman, John Hughes, developed several coalmines in the Donets River Basin of eastern Ukraine (the Donbas), and built the first steel mill in a settlement named Oleksandrivka (also “Aleksandovka”). The city that followed was named after him, Yuzivka (In Russian: Yuzovka), a variant spelling of Hughesivka/Hughesovka. In Soviet times, the city became Stalino, and during the post-Stalinist thaw it was renamed Donetsk, after the local river, still the name of this gritty industrial city. Later, after the discoveries of Ukraine’s massive coal deposits, a German-Ukrainian archeologist-geologist-ethnographer by the name of Oleksandr Pol (also written as Alexander Paul) made a surreptitious find of enormous iron ore deposits at a place in Right Bank Ukraine, not far from the Dnipro, called Krivyi Rih (In Russian: Krivoy Rog), which were transported to the Donbas to be made into iron, steel, and related products. The opening, in 1884, of a railway between the two resources centers, the

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Yekaterinskaya Railway, named after the connecting city, Ekaterynoslav (later Dnipropetrovsk and today Dnipro), was the critical link that propelled southeastern Ukraine to become an industrial powerhouse. The Dnipro also played a key role here, but it was up to the twentieth century and engineers of the Soviet Union to truly to put the river to work. Even though Russia introduced new cities, industry, and technological innovations, there was a great lament among Ukrainians about being colonial subjects. Among the many voices that expressed this feeling was Taras Shevchenko, whose anti-colonial stanzas we have already sampled, as well as other literary figures, including the Poltava-born Ivan Kotlarevskyi (1769– 1838), who is considered the pioneer of modern Ukrainian literature. His ribald burlesque of Virgil’s classic Aeneid, written in the people’s vernacular in 1798 and called Eneida, transmuted Aeneas and the defeated Trojans into dispossessed Cossacks after the 1775 destruction of Zaporozhian Sich by Catherine the Great. The great poet and writer Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvita (1871–1913), who wrote under the name Lesya Ukrainka, a surname that literally means “Ukrainian woman,” was an activist for feminism and Ukrainian nationhood, and an opponent of the Russian Imperial regime. Her first poem, written at the age of eight, was called Nadiya (“Hope”) and was written in response to the exile of her aunt for anti-tsarist activism, and expressed her aunt’s wishes to be allowed to return to Ukraine. Two of the poem’s short stanzas plus my translation are as follows (Ukrainka, 2011, 23): Надія вернутись ще раз на ВкраЇну, Поглянути ще раз на рідну країну,

I hope to return once again to Ukraine, To see once more my native land,

Поглянути ще раз на синій Дніпро, -- Там жити чи вмерти, мені все одно;

To see once more the blue River Dnipro, -To live there or to die, it matters not at all;

Still another writer to speak out against the tsarist system was Panas Myrny, the nom de plume for Panas Rudchenko, who was born in Poltava Oblast in 1849 (he died in 1920). His best-known work, written with his brother Ivan Rudchenko, who wrote under the name Ivan Bilyk, was a novel called Propashcha syla (“Lost Strength”), with the subtitle Khiba revut’ voly, yak yasla povni? (“Do Oxen Bellow when their Mangers are Full?”). Set in a village named Pisky (“sands”), it portrayed the social conditions and railed against the injus-

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tices of serfdom, the autocratic actions of government officials and police, and conflicts between various social and occupational groups. A takeaway from the book is that Pisky would be much better off without the Russian Empire. Likewise, the laments of a colonized Ukraine are expressed in many folk songs that, pointedly, are still sung because they are still considered relevant. One such song, found in the public realm as historic folk music from the nineteenth century, is called De Dnipro nash kotyt’ khvyli (“Where the Waves of Our Dnipro Roll”). Its stanzas go like this: Де Дніпро наш котить хвилі рве Where the waves of our Dnipro roll, swift стрімкі пороги rapids roar Там Вкраїна вся зелена славний It is there where Ukraine’s green bounty край розлогий (2x) unfolds (2x) Там Козацтво виростало слави волі And there too was born the fight for freedom добувало by the Cossacks of Ukraine. Україно Україно славний край козачий Oh Ukraine, dear Ukraine, glorious land of Cossacks (2x) І не стало Запоріжжя вже нема Гетьманів Над степами України чути брязк кайданів

The Zaporzhian Host is no more, there is no hetman Across the steppes of Ukraine now clang the chains of slaves (2x)

І мов сонця птичка в полі воскресіння жде And like the sun over the field, a bird awaits і волі resurrection and freedom Україна Україна славний край розлогий Ukraine, dear Ukraine, my glorious land so wide (2x)

I conclude this chapter with the thought that even before there was a Ukraine, the River Dnipro was important to the earliest settlers on the lands, and that the river has continually shaped local history and livelihoods since ancient times. It was the central geographical feature of Rus’, the precursor to the Ukrainian state, as well as for Ukrainian Cossacks and the foreign powers that

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colonized Ukrainian lands in more recent centuries, particularly Poland and Imperial Russia. As exemplified in an ample literature, for many Ukrainians the river was a metaphor for the independence they longed for. The next chapter concerns the twentieth century and the time of the Soviet Union when Ukraine and its river were remade to serve a new ideology and an even stronger colonial power.

CHAPTER 4

Soviet River: From DniproHES to Chornobyl 4.1: Introduction Ukraine had its own government for a short while after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It was named the Ukrainian National Republic and lasted from 1917 to 1921. Its first “president” (formally: Chairman of the Central Rada) was the eminent historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi. During those fleeting years of independence, the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine flew over the capital in Kyiv. But by 1922, the larger fraction of Ukraine’s territory had become part of the emerging Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with a capital in Moscow, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established as a founding member of the union. Ukraine’s capital was assigned to Kharkiv (in Russian: Kharkov) in order for the Soviets to oversee the republic from a base where Ukrainian nationalistic feelings were thought to be less of a threat. Kharkiv remained the capital until 1934, when it was reassigned to Kyiv. From the earliest years of Soviet rule, the Dnipro was a Soviet river. By “Soviet river,” I mean a river whose primary function was to serve the needs of the Soviet state. This was also the function of other rivers, bodies of water, forests, mountains, veins of ore and deposits of coal and gas in Soviet territory. Indeed, all nature was Sovietized, as were the people of countless nationalities and ethnicities. Rivers were to further the industrialization of the Soviet Union by providing water, power, and routes for transportation of industrial commodities, as well as a place where workers could gather strength during days of rest. Rivers also provided water to irrigate lands that would feed the laboring masses, permitting new agricultural frontiers to be opened and supplying new industrial cities and mining regions. Not only was the Dnipro put to the Soviet

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task, but also the Volga and many of the rivers of Siberia and Soviet Central Asia, such as the Angara, Yenisey, Kama, Amu Darya, and Syr Darya Rivers. There were grand plans to turn north-flowing rivers around so that they would not flow “uselessly” into the Arctic Ocean, but instead head south to quench parched lands. The objects of these plans included the Pechora and Northern Dvina Rivers in European Russia and the Ob and Irtysh in Siberia. New canals carried river waters to new places, so that ships could go where no ships had gone before, such as the 1952 Lenin Volga-Don Canal to the east of Ukraine. Ideas for harnessing the Dnipro actually predate the Soviet period and were first voiced as early as the time of Peter the Great (Rassweiler 1988, 5), who reigned in Moscow and Saint Petersburg from 1682 to 1721, long before Russia colonized Ukraine. A special interest was to develop a seamless water route between the Black and Baltic Seas by constructing a canal that would connect the Dnipro with rivers in the Baltic basin. The immense scale of the project, together with insurmountable expenses and technical challenges, kept the idea on a back burner until it was revived around the turn of the twentieth century by a Belgian engineer named Gustav Dufosse. He proposed a scheme to the Russian Imperial government to link Kherson in southern Ukraine with Riga in Latvia via a canal that would divert water from the Northern Dvina River into the Dnipro. A Russian engineer named Rukteshel’ proposed a similar project (Rassweiler 1988, 22). High costs and technical difficulties also killed these ideas, although it was acknowledged by Russian officials that they offered great military merit. At the same time, more specific proposals were put forward to tame the cataracts on the Dnipro between Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk/Dnipro) and Zaporizhia, the city downriver whose name means “beyond the rapids.” The primary purpose was to enhance river-borne transportation, as Ukraine’s farm products were feeding Russia’s growing cities, both directly and indirectly, via the foreign exchange that was earned by their export to Europe. Another goal was to enhance the transportation of industrial resources and products of Ukrainian steel mills. Ukraine was proving to be a very profitable colony, and investing in infrastructure that would make it even more profitable was plainly a smart move. A 1905 proposal by engineers G. O. Graftio and S. P. Maksimov got the most attention. It called for establishing three pools along the rapids section of the Dnipro in order for the waterway to be navigable, as well as the generation of 80 to 90,000 kw of electrical power as an added benefit sparked by new technology (Baksheev, Dotsenko, and Kadomskii 1967, 406).

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4.2: Soviet Stroika The tsarist regime never managed to get beyond the talking stage, but the Bolsheviks who followed after the 1917 Revolution picked up where Imperial Russia left off and turned words and schemes drawn on paper into reality. Lenin’s words, that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” made it certain that there would be concrete action. The First Five Year Plan of the Soviet Union, implemented between 1928 and 1932, emphasized rapid industrialization at all costs, for which the mining resources, steel mills, and heavy-industrial establishments in southeastern Ukraine would be indispensable. For this, the Dnipro needed to be harnessed for transportation and the generation of truly huge quantities of electrical power. Thus, it was decided to build the “Dnieper River Hydroelectric Station” as quickly and as grandly as possible. The project was based on a proposal by a certain Prof. I. G. Alexandrov to construct a high dam near Zaporizhia, from which water would back up to Dnipropetrovsk (the name dates from 1926; in 2016 it was changed to Dnipro), covering the rapids. The design of the hyd­rostation by constructivist architects Viktor Vesnin and Nikoloai Kolli was completed in 1923, and the go-ahead for construction came in 1925. In 1926, the then-still influential Communist revolutionary and Soviet political figure Leon Trotsky urged construction onward: In the south, the Dnieper runs its course through the wealthiest industrial lands; and it is wasting the prodigious weight of its pressure, playing over age-old rapids and waiting until we harness its stream, curb it with dams, and compel it to give lights to cities, to drive factories, and to enrich plough land. We shall compel it! (Quoted in Deutscher 1959, 211)

Likewise, the preface to the wonderful book from 1928 about the rapids of the Dnipro by Yavornytskyi (2016), introduced in Chapter 1, had the following words attributed to the original publisher, the Government Publishing of Ukraine: We are building the Dnipro Electric Station. After only a few years, the course of the Dnipro will be lifted by a mighty dam. An industrial metropolis will grow in the place of the Zaporozhian Sich, and the powers of the roaring currents will turn the

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gigantic turbines of the Dnipro Hydroelectric Plant, transforming their energy into electrical current for the glory of socialist industry and agriculture.

The project was called Dneprostroi, a Russian language contraction of “Dnipro Construction (Project)” or simply the stroika (“the construction” or “the project”) (in Ukrainian “Dneprostroi” is “Dniprobud”). Today, the dam is most commonly referred to in Russian as DneproGES and, as I will call it henceforth, in Ukrainian as DniproHES. Both terms mean Dnipro Hydroelectric Station. By 1932, the V.I. Lenin Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Station was completed. It was the largest and most powerful in Europe, with a capacity of 560MW, and the source of enormous Soviet pride and propaganda. Tens of thousands of workers came to the construction site for jobs, and took up picks and shovels, put up workers’ quarters, carried construction supplies, laid railroad tracks, built a temporary dam for the right side of the river and another for the left side, poured more concrete than could be imagined, and installed enormous generators, the first four from nine of which were made by the American company General Electric. The workers’ exploits were hailed widely across the Soviet Union in song, story, and film, along with the equally large accomplishments of still more masses of workers who labored on other in­ dustrialization projects in other parts of the workers’ state: the great new industrial city of Magnitogorsk; the new industrial complex in Siberia’s Kuznets Basin; industrial Stalingrad; and others. They were all part of a great social transformation and the making of a new type of person, “Soviet man” (and Soviet woman). The Soviet poster that is illustrated as Figure 4.1 recruits workers for the job of constructing the dam. Dneprostroi was talked about in the West as well. It was the first of the great Soviet projects, and the leaders of the Soviet Union were especially anxious to spread the word about the accomplishments of Socialism and the rising strength of the country that they were building. For example, the giant dam in Zaporizhia was a feature of the Soviet pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City and the subject of a prominent photo essay in the popular American magazine Life. As the project was nearing completion, the chief engineer, Aleksandr Vinter, was happy to proclaim during the May Day celebrations of 1932 that: “the Dnepr is bridled, the Dnepr is conquered, the Dnepr must henceforth serve the people building a new life.” At the opening ceremony for the dam on October 11 of that year, the deputy chief, V. M. Mikhailov, remarked:

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Today the homeland of Soviets celebrates the victory over the Dnepr. Here a structure has been created, never before seen in history. Dneprostroi is the mighty foundation of socialist construction. Only the October Revolution made possible the construction of such a giant. The proletariat of the USSR through the Dneprostoievtsi [the workers on the project] has shown what the Bolsheviks can do! (Quoted from Rassweiler 1988, 3 and 190, respectively.)

The dam’s specifics are indeed impressive. It was 61 meters high, with a head that was 35.4 meters, and measured approximately 800 meters wide. At the top was a road for motorized vehicles and trolley transit. The water that was backed up stretched for about 90 kilometers upstream to the city named Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk), and covered the rapids with deep water to spare. The total volume of water that was held back is about 33.3 cubic kilome­ ter. The 560 MW of energy that were created propelled Dnipro, Zapo­rizhia, Krivyi Rih into becoming giant industrial centers, and created other industrial cities in the region as well, such as the aforementioned wet-site village of Novomoskovsk and the city of Kamianske (formerly Dniprodzerzhynsk), just upriver. The energy that was generated made it possible to manufacture aluminum in the region, always an electricity-expensive undertaking, with the result that the Dnipro (city) area was able to become a leading center of the Soviet aerospace industry. A suburb near the airport just outside the city has the Soviet-fashioned name Aviatorske, while Dnipro itself became the Soviet Union’s secretive “Rocket City” (Zhuk 2010). The hard-working men and women who built the dam had labored under extremely difficult conditions that were also a state secret at the time and for decades thereafter, and were awarded with ribbons, medals, and printed citations with official stamps and bold signatures for their efforts. On September 17, 1932, six American engineers who were indispensable for their expertise, most prominently the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Colonel Hugh Lincoln Cooper and General Electric Company engineer G. Thompson, were awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. At the same time as the completion of DniproHES was being celebrated, a famine that was also a manufactured product of the Soviet authority raged across much of Ukraine, causing enormous losses of life, but this is another story (Conquest 1986). The “Holodomor,” as it is called, was deliberately created by Stalin, and was implemented by the Ukrainian-born Communist leader Grigory Petrovskyi, to whom Stalin assigned the heartless

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[Figure 4.1: A vintage Soviet poster recruiting workers for construction of DniproHES]

task of enforcing the collectivization of Ukrainian farmlands. Ironically, if this is the right word, instead of “cruelly,” Petrovskyi is the person after whom the city of Dnipropetrovsk was named.* *  As mentioned in Chapter 1, the “decommunization” legislation that was enacted in

Ukraine on May 15, 2015, required the removal of all communist monuments in Ukraine (other than World War II monuments), and the renaming of public places with communist names, specifically cities, towns, villages, streets, parks, squares, schools, etc. This led to the renaming of Dnipropetrovsk to “Dnipro” and Dniprodzerzhynsk, named after Felix Dzer-

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While DniproHES was transforming from idea to reality, Soviet authorities considered other proposals for dams on the Dnipro, some inherited from before the revolution and some newer ones. Eventually the idea of a “Great Dnipro” took shape, with a goal of maximizing economic benefits from the Ukrainian course of the river by improving transportation, the construction of canals to nearby waterways, the generation of hydroelectric power for industry, agriculture, and settlements, and the provision of irrigation water for parts of the county that were often parched during growing seasons. There was even a serious proposal to drain the swamps of Polisia in the Ukrainian north and Belarus to provide firmer ground for agriculture, and to send its waters southward to quench the thirsty steppes. This specific vision for the Dnipro called for a continuous deep-water channel along the length of the river in Ukraine, and a series of hydroelectric stations along the river’s course that produced power from the slope of running water. Of these, DniproHES was the first, as well as the obliterator, of the infamous rapids. In this way, the Dnipro was turned into a chain of elongated reservoirs in between which would be short stretches of river in river-like channels. As we saw in our travels in Chapter 2, when we visited them in geographical order from north to south, six dams in total were built, behind which were six reservoirs. I repeat myself a little here, but this time listing the dams in chronological order: (1) DniproHES, the fifth in the north-to-south geography, built between 1927–1932; (2) the Kakhovka Dam is the southernmost one and was built between 1950–1956; (3) the Kremenchuk Dam, third in geographical order, built between 1954–1960; (4) the Dniprodzerzhynsk (Kamianske) Dam, fourth in geographical order, built between 1956–1964; (5) the Kyiv Dam at Vyshhorod is the northern-most dam, built between 1960– 1964; and (6) the Kaniv Dam, second in the north-to-south order, the most recent dam and built between 1963–1975 (Figure 4.2). The Great Dnipro scheme also included plans for as many as eight additional dams to be built upriver from Ukraine in the Belarussian and Russian republics, to harness the zhynsky, an early leader of the Soviet secret police, to “Kamianske” (“stony place”), the name that the city had before 1936. The renaming of both cities took effect on May 19, 2016, at which time this manuscript was nearly completed. I have updated the text by using both names for the two cities up to this page, and will use only the new names on the pages that follow. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is now Dnipro Oblast; this change is reflected henceforth in this book as well.

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Dnipro from beginning to end, but these dams never materialized (Didkovskyi 1961, 14–15).* The entire complex of dams and reservoirs is often referred to as the “Dnipro Cascade.” Of the six dams, DniproHES is the highest and generates the most energy, now 1,1569 MW, while the smallest is the Dniprodzerzhynsk Dam, 15.5 meters high and generating 352 MW. The longest dam is the Kremenchuk Dam, which is more than 10 kilometers wide. The largest reservoir is the Kremenchuk Reservoir behind the Kremenchuk Dam. It has a surface area of 2,250 square kilometers, and is seen plainly on all maps of Ukraine as a large lake just to the east of the geographical center of the country. This reservoir and its shores will be the focus of Chapter 7, as this is where we will go to assess the relationship between the Dnipro and the Ukrainian heartland. The Kakhovka Reservoir is only marginally smaller, 2,155 square kilometers. All told, the reservoirs of the Dnipro Cascade cover about two percent of Ukraine’s land area with water.

[Figure 4.2: Reproduction of a 1951 Soviet Union postage stamp showing the Kakhovka Dam and canals in southern Ukraine. The text across the top reads “Great Construction Projects of Communism.”]

*  From the Ukrainian border northward they were to have been at Lyubech, Rechytsya, Zhlobyn, Vilyakhivka, Mahilioŭ, and Orša in the Belarusian SSR, and at Smolensk and Dorogobuzh in the Russian republic.

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4.3: Battle Lines The story of the dams is not yet finished, however, as there is still the remarkable history of DniproHES in World War II that needs to be told. The German invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, began on June 22, 1941, and initially swept quite rapidly across Soviet-occupied parts of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russian territory. The objective of the Eastern Front was voiced by Hitler and his top propagandists: the complete annihilation of the Soviet Union, the liquidation its population, and the enslavement of survivors. The German “Hunger Plan” that was laid out in Hermann Göring’s notorious Green Folder, among other documents, called for the forced starvation of the residents of Soviet cities and towns, so that the food could be shipped to Germany and their residences taken over by resettled Germans. The farm products and industrial resources of the conquered lands were also to become German. In the face of such unspeakable peril, the Soviets defended themselves as valiantly as they could by calling every civilian to the fight and every resource to a great patriotic struggle. They suffered enormous losses, but within four years they were able to take Berlin, on May 2, 1945, and win the war, along with the allied powers, who fought the Nazis on other fronts. The casualties on the Eastern Front totaled some 26 million. The German advance across Ukraine reached the vicinity of Zaporizhia and the DniproHES installation in mid-August 1941, and when the Soviet high command realized that their forces could not hold the line at the Dnipro, they ordered a retreat. Following Stalin’s orders, the dam was to be blown up as soon as the Germans reached the river. Accordingly, the destruction was carried during the night of August 18, with 20 tons of explosives, under the direction Colonel Boris Epov of the Soviet engineering corps, following orders that he had received four days earlier from his commanding general. The timing coincided with the start of German shelling across the Dnipro at retreating Soviet troops. The sudden explosion blew a 100-meter wide opening in the dam and caused an enormous wave of water to pour through, completely flooding Khorytisa Island and heavily populated settlements on both sides of the river below. The destruction reached as far south as the industrial cities of Marhanets (“manganese”) and Nikopol, about 60 and 90 kilometers downriver, respectively, on the right bank of the Dnipro. Afterwards, the Soviets reported that their strategic act of sabotage killed only Nazis, because the

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population downriver had been forewarned and told to evacuate, but it was plain to everyone in the area that the losses of life among civilians were enormous and that most people had received no advance information about the imminent danger. Very quickly, this part of history entered the Soviet “we do not talk about it” realm. However, the subject has become more public, even though we still do not know the details about how many people were killed that night, and we probably never will. Estimates of the death toll range from about 20,000 to 100,000, while another estimate claims that 80,000 civilians were killed that night, along with about 20,000 Soviet soldiers who had not yet retreated from the waters’ reach.* An American journalist wrote the following assessment in his book that was published soon after the first destruction of DniproHES: The Russians have proved now by their destruction of the great dam at Dnipropet­ rovsk [sic] that they mean to truly scorch the earth before Hitler even if it means the destruction of their most precious possessions […] Dnieprostroy was an object almost of worship to the Soviet people. Its destruction demonstrates a will to resist which surpasses anything we had imagined. I know what the dam meant to the Bolsheviks […] It was the largest, most spectacular, and most popular of all the immense projects of the First Five-Year Plan […] The Dnieper dam when it was built was the biggest on earth and so it occupies a place in the imagination and affection of the Soviet people difficult for us to realize […] Stalin’s order to destroy it meant more to the Russians [sic] emotionally than it would mean to us for Roosevelt to order the destruction of the Panama Canal (Knickerbocker 1941, 107–108).

*  Something similar took place at about the same time in Kyiv. As the Germans took to

the city in the late summer of 1941, the retreating Soviets remotely set off a series of explosions in the center of the city that killed many Nazi soldiers and officers. The center of Kyiv, most notably the main street Khreshchatyk, was in ruins. However, what the Soviet reports did not say at the time was that they had sacrificed the lives of a great many of their own citizens in this action. In addition to the innocents who died in the explosions, there were many other citizens who were subsequently rounded up by the furious Germans, including as many Jews as could be found, and summarily executed at the notorious Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) killing site.

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[Figure 4.3: DniproHES after dynamiting in 1941]

What happened on August 18, 1941, was only the first destruction of the dam. The Germans, still expecting to win the war and wanting DniproHES to serve the expanded fatherland in Ukraine, repaired the structure and put it back into use. The work was done under slave conditions by local civilians and prisoners of war. But the Eastern Front soon turned against the Nazis with defeats at Kursk and Stalingrad in 1943, and they began a humiliating retreat. They tried to hold a line at the Dnipro, but were defeated there, too, and as they left Zaporizhia, they dynamited the dam themselves. The Soviets then rebuilt DniproHES yet again over the period 1944–1949, using German prisoners of war as laborers, and by 1950 had restored it to a generator of electrical power. Later, in 1969–1980, the power potential of the dam was greatly enlarged with the installation of a second power plant. This is why I mentioned earlier that there is a total of seven power plants at the six dams in the Ukrainian portion of the Dnipro. The Battle of the Dnipro—in which the retreating German forces tried to establish a defensive line along the Dnipro against the Soviet army that was chasing them homeward—was one of the largest operations of World War II. It was fought over approximately four months, beginning in summer 1943, along a front that was some 1,400 kilometers long, roughly from above Smolensk, where we started our journey, down the river all the way south to

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the Black Sea. The second demolition of DniproHES, as big an event as that was, was but a small part of this monumental conflict. The combatants numbered some four million soldiers on both sides, about 1.7 to 2.7 million of whom were killed in the fighting. It was clear that the army that won this battle would win the war, and so it was that the Soviet forces, who were better supplied from within their own territory and who kept calling up more recruits for the fight, were victorious, eventually killing off or imprisoning most of what was left of what, three years earlier, had seemed like an invincible fighting force. On the ground, the key to Soviet victory in the Battle of the Dnipro was the incredible bravery of Soviet soldiers as they crossed the river from east to west on anything that floated, carrying armaments and attacking the dug-in German positions on the west bank at close range. Such combat took place at a great many specific sites along the length of the river. There are many images of this operation, reminiscent of the images of Allied soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy nearly a year later, as well as life-like displays and dioramas in history museums and at war monuments in many cities of the former Soviet Union. There is a wonderful “Battle of the Dnipro” diorama at the National History Museum in Dnipro, and another memorable display at the enormous Bat’kivschyna Maty (“Motherland”; in Russian: Rodina Mat’) World War II Monument and Museum in Kyiv, high on a hill overlooking the Dnipro. For their role in this conflict, both Kyiv and Smolensk were awarded the honor of “Hero Cities of the Soviet Union.” Kyiv also has a specific monument on the banks of the river dedicated to the heroes of the Battle of Dnipro, and a Metro station, Heroiv Dnipra, named in their honor. There are also heroic songs. One, in a genre that we can call the “Soviet Red Army Chorus,” is called simply called “The Song about the Dnipro.” The lyrics are in Russian and were written by Yevhen Dolmatovskyi, while the music is by Mark Fradkin. The piece was written in 1941 in the city of Tsyurupynsk on the left bank of the river just across from Kherson, just after the Germans had crossed the river and continued their push across Ukraine. I first heard the song on YouTube as it was performed, with characteristic stiff formality, in the Kremlin in 1993 by Leonid Kharitonov (born in 1933), People’s Artist of Russia and Honored Artist of Russia, at the 50th anniversary of the libera-

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tion of Kyiv from the Nazis.* It is a standard piece at military concerts and war memorial ceremonies, although not necessarily something that the general public is familiar with. In Ukraine, it is performed sometimes in Russian and sometimes in a more elegant Ukrainian translation crafted by Mykola Tereshchenko. His abbreviated lyrics and my translation are as follows: Біля буйних лоз та високих круч На своїй росли ми землі. Ой, Дніпро, Дніпро, серед темних туч Над тобою мчать журавлі.

Beside the lush greenery of your banks, on the high bluffs We prospered on our own lands. Oh, Dnipro, Dnipro, in these darkest times The cranes fly above you in a rush.

Ти дививсь на бій, мов прибій ріки, Ми в атаку йшли в перегін. Хто в Дніпро поліг, буде жить віки, Якщо сміливо бився він.

You witnessed the battle, waves of men in the waters We went on the attack, pushing on and on. Those who perished in the waters, will live on forever, If they fought with singular bravery.

Ворог ліз до нас, ятрив біль без меж, Смертний бій гримів, як гроза. Ой, Дніпро, Дніпро, ти у даль течеш, І вода твоя - мов сльоза.

The enemy kept coming, inflicting unmeasurable pain, A deadly battled thundered, like a storm. Oh, Dnipro, Dnipro, your flow is now distant, And your waters are like tears.

Кров фашистських псів, мов ріка,тече, The blood of fascist dogs flows like a river, І для них настав час негод. It is now their turn to face misfortune. Мов Дніпро у скрес, ворогів січе The Dnipro will vanquish these enemies Наша армія, наш народ! As will our army, as will our people.

*  Online at: http://www.lkharitonov.com/video/ensemble/songdnieperriver/

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The original Russian text has two additional stanzas, in which the singing soldiers express an angry lament that the enemy is drinking the river’s water and promise to return from the east to retake the Dnipro. The second line of the last stanza above is entirely different, although the sentiments are the same. Instead of “It is now their turn to face misfortune,” the original line is “Враг советский край не возьмёт,” which I translated as “The enemy will never take the Soviet land.”

4.4: Chornobyl As promised in the patriotic song, the Soviet army and its people did indeed drive the Nazis from their land, and the Soviet Union continued on, albeit only for about four-and-a-half decades. The vast country broke apart on its own accord in 1991 and Ukraine became one of 14 former Soviet republics that celebrated an unexpected independence (the 15th republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, did not). But before the Dnipro became the river of an independent Ukraine, there is one more important chapter in its life as a Soviet river. This began about five years before the Soviet break-up, in 1986, on April 26, at 1:23 in the morning, when an explosion took place at a nuclear power plant in the town of Chornobyl (in Russian: “Chernobyl”), on the Pripyat River in the Ukrainian S.S.R., only 15 kilometers upstream from where it flows into the Dnipro. The administrative border with the Belarusian S.S.R. was about 25 kilometers further upstream. Along the river, between the power plant and the border between the two republics, was the town of Pripyat, founded in 1970 to serve the power plant and that had grown to a population of nearly 50,000. Because the power plant was a Soviet installation and reported directly to officials in Moscow rather than in Ukraine, many Ukrainians have since been quick to say that the Chornobyl disaster was one last gift for them from the Kremlin. It is also said that the disaster hastened the demise of the Soviet Union, because the initial cover-ups and lies by Soviet authorities about what took place broke the patience of Soviet citizens who were panic-stricken about the dangers that radiation posed to their health, and lead to the period of glasnost in which all sorts of Soviet secrets were unveiled, undermining the state.

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There is no need to retell the full story of the Chornobyl disaster as the details are available from many sources (e.g., Alexievich and Gessen 2006; Mycio 2005; Yaroshinskaya 2011), and I can offer no new information. Let me just say that the explosion was the result of both operator error and faulty design, and it was the worst nuclear accident in history. It resulted in the release of about 400 times more radioactive material than the bombing of Hiroshima, about 60 percent of which fell on Belarusian territory and most of the rest in Ukraine and Russia, although alarmingly high levels of radioactive material were detected as well in all of northern and eastern Europe save for the Iberian Peninsula. The immediate death toll at the accident site was 31, but thousands of others have died since from various cancers and other illnesses. Countless more will die as well. The casualties included residents from contaminated zones and workers who were sent to the power plant after the accident to contain the damage and construct a giant steel and concrete sarcophagus over the deadly nuclear reactor #4 building. The formal Ukrainian word for that structure is ob’yekt ukryttya, “the thing that covers.” Together with waste removal workers and others, the number of people who have been sent into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), exceeds 600,000. This is to minimize the risk and to shorten the tour of duty for any one worker, but the rate of illness and death among Chernobyl “volunteers” is very high nonetheless. At first the workers came from the Soviet republics, but now, after 1991, the problem is Ukrainian. There is a special anger in Ukraine—especially in Kyiv, which is only about 130 kilometers away, and in Belarus, which was directly downwind from the spreading plume of radioactive dust—that Soviet authorities were not immediately forthcoming about the grave health risks to the public and were slow in organizing evacuation and providing assistance. In fact, there is evidence that in Kyiv, families that were somehow connected to Communist Party officials knew much earlier than the rest of the public that they needed to take precautions and, at minimum, evacuate their children. There are a number of points to make here that relate to the River Dnipro. First is that the upper drainage basin of the river was most severely affected by the disaster. This means that the productive farmlands along the river in Belarus that I described in our journey down the Dnipro from its source in Chapter 2, were most heavily covered with iodine-131, cesium-137, two isotopes of strontium, and other poisons; and that the people of cities and towns such as Katyn’,

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Dubroŭna, Orša, and Mahilioŭ, all of which have the most painful memories of World War II and which we visited as we moved downriver, suffered the greatest costs to health from these same poisons. Second is that the radioactive dust found its way into the Dnipro, both directly and through tributaries, and for a time poisoned the drinking water for millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians. Much of the radioactive material that entered the waters is now said to have settled at the bottoms of the Kyiv Sea and the other reservoirs along the river, where they are said to be safely contained by the river’s sediments until their half-lives render them harmless. Third is that the Soviet nuclear power industry suffered an enormous setback in prestige as a result, and that even now, more than a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of the post-Soviet public lacks confidence in the power plants they inherited. And fourth is the fact that there now exists in the northernmost districts of Kyiv and Zhytomyr Oblasts an eerie dead zone that people left behind in a rush to save their lives: the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, 30 kilometers in diameter, and except for workers, who commute in to clean up the mess, and others with special permissions it is closed to the public. A comprehensive technical summary about the impact of the Chornobyl disaster on the drainage basin of the Dnipro is International Atomic Eneregy Agency, 2006. I managed to visit the CEZ as part of a specially arranged excursion in the spring of 2016, almost exactly on the 30-year anniversary of the tragedy, and toured the depopulated town after which the power plant was named, as well as the eerie ruins of Pripyat, the town nearest to the plant. No one lives there now, and dense vegetation has overtaken its abandoned buildings and once-attractive broad streets. During the tour I came to understand that probably one of the key reasons why Soviet authorities were slow to confess what had happened at the plant was that nearby, there was one more town, a place whose very existence was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the secret state. This town was named Chornobyl-2, it was not on the map, and the road that led to it was said to lead to an abandoned summer camp for children. However, more than 1,000 people lived there in apartment blocks that still stand among encroaching wild greenery, and who knew not to discuss their whereabouts. These were the workers at what is said to have been the world’s largest radar installation, the over-the-horizon Duga radar system that constituted the Soviet Union’s ABM early-warning network. Its partner installation was in faraway eastern Siberia. Because of the sounds it

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transmitted, radio sleuths around the globe referred to the mysterious source as the Russian Woodpecker. Residents of Chornobyl-2 were never told more than that it was an advanced communication facility that loomed over their town. The structure still stands and rises high above the surrounding forest. It is nearly 150 meters tall, almost 2 kilometers long, and has a bizarre latticelike shape that suggests something from the world of science fiction movies or distant planets. I saw this structure on the tour and walked around it (Figure 4.4). I also saw the derelict building that once housed what may have been the world’s largest computer of the 1970s and walked through tracts of forest and high weeds where its electronic parts lay scattered like discarded litter. I think that is fair to say that while the world knows Chornobyl, Chornobyl-2 is hardly a household word, even though the Soviet Union no longer exists and the secrecy about the site has been lifted. Young daredevils are known to occasionally sneak into the CEZ to climb the structure and shoot photos of their exploits.

[Figure 4.4: The “Russian Woodpecker” radar installation near the Chornobyl power plant]

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At the end of the day, my tour companions and I rode a train with cleaning and construction workers from the power plant who were returning home after their shifts to Slavutych, a town that was built in 1986 on the other side of the Dnipro to house the constantly rotating cadres of workers and their families. It was a 40-minute commute that cut through a sliver of Belarussian territory, before re-entering Ukraine midway on a bridge over the river. Before boarding, all passengers, tourists and workers alike, were required to submit to screening for radiation levels. The workers were visibly tired: some napped while sprawled out across the seats, others were lost in the sounds that came through their personal headphones, and still others played a quiet game of cards that may have started in the morning on the way to their jobs. Our tour group stayed in Slavutych for four days as participants and visitors to a wonderful film festival named “86,” after the year of the Chornobyl disaster and the birth of the special-purpose dormitory town. I observed that the town had a great many amenities and considerable charm for a Soviet city. Apparently, the Soviets had decided to provide the heroes of the dangerous cleanup work with a decent place to live before becoming casualties themselves. There are multiple popular Ukrainian songs with the title “Chornobylska Zona,” “The Chornobyl Zone.” The words and haunting rhythms of one of these, by Taras Petronenko, caught my attention several years back. Four lines from the middle of the song and the last four lines appear below, again in my own translations. Ми народу сліпці, We have been a blind people, Ще й сліпий поводир And our leaders are blind has well. Сплюндрували і землі, і ріки They plundered our lands and our river Вірним курсом завжди. This was always the Soviet way. … … Чи знайдемо в собі Will we find within ourselves Щирих сліз каяття Sincere tears of remorse? Чи майбутнє у нас - Or will the future always bring us Чорнобильська зона? A Chornobyl Zone?

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4.5: Enjoying the River There is one other aspect of the Dnipro as a Soviet river that needs to be discussed: the river as a place of rest, relaxation, and tourism in the decades after the war. Bathing in the river and landscaped parks along its banks have a long history that begins before the time of Imperial Russia, but the Soviets were especially adept at developing the river into a chain of kurorty (resorts), even as they put it to industrial use. It was understood that industrial workers and their families deserved to enjoy themselves during their holidays and to breathe healthy air, so in city after city along the Dnipro (as in Belarus and Russia), they built parks, improved beaches, and installed facilities such as sports zones, children’s playgrounds, amusement parks, band shells, and assortments of cafés and restaurants. They developed facilities for sports teams to use as training grounds, as well as for workers of particular industrial enterprises or members of certain privileged professions, and summer camps for young “pioneers” (children). Soviet planners improved access to the recreation zones with enhanced public transportation, ferry services, and, in some cities, pedestrian bridges. In Kyiv, for example, there is a very heavily used pedestrian bridge that was built in 1957 to connect the center of the city with the beaches and parks on an island in the river, named Trukhaniv. In Dnipro, the historic Monastyrskyi Ostriv, Monastery Island, on which there has been a monastery since as far back as the ninth century, was remade and renamed into Komsomolskyi Ostriv, the island of the All-Union Communist Youth League, with beaches and sports clubs that would help prepare a next generation of Communist youth for leadership. It, too, can be reached by a pedestrian bridge. Tourism publications about cities along the river invariably highlighted the parks and beaches, as well as riverside monuments, and often showed photographs of healthy and happy families. In addition to intra-city recreation, the Soviets also promoted cruises along the Dnipro and inter-city travel. There are countless guide books of cruises along the river with detailed maps, texts about local histories, and countless photos of beaches, parks, monuments, and, again, healthy and happy families (Bugachevskyi and Buryakov 1974; Laponogov 1970; Myroshnychenko 1962; Savchenko 1954; Stepaniv and Smirnov 1982; and Usov 1982) (Figures 4.5a and 4.5b). There were time schedules for cruises and suggestions about what to see in cities and towns along the way. Among the attractions were the dams

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[Figure 4.5: Cover of Soviet-era guidebook: “A Cruise Along the Dnieper”]

and the sluices through which the cruise ships would maneuver, high-voltage transmission lines for electrical power, and the enormous factories in industrial cities that were moving the Soviet state forward. The cruise ships themselves were presented as sleek and modern, with comfortable cabins, good food, and great company. Photographs invariably showed happy vacationers at ease on lounge chairs on the decks or dressed-up for a sunset dinner. Most of the clientele were Soviet citizens, but there were foreigners, too, especially

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from Soviet-socialist countries in Eastern Europe, but also from the West. One of the objectives of these publications for tourists and the cruises themselves was to promote the accomplishments of the Soviet state and to demonstrate that all those dams, mines, factories, and flooded lands brought the people new prosperity (Koenker 2013). We close this chapter about the Dnipro as a Soviet River with the following thought. The Dnipro is romanticized today for its beauty and its historic role as Ukraine’s River. It was subsequently appropriated by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Empire, which transformed it. This was progress in the contemporaneous industrial world and had many benefits. Yet, in the end, what was given to independent Ukraine is a river that no longer looks like a river, dams that might be unstable and dangerous, and a zone of radioactive poison. Furthermore, much of the infrastructure that the Soviets had built for intra-city relaxation along the river and for Dnipro River vacations has fallen into disrepair, and the river is now much less a zone of resorts than the Soviets had envisioned. Ukraine needs to take ownership of Ukraine’s River and do what is practical to make it better. The next chapter deals with a range of environmental issues along the Dnipro.

CHAPTER 5

The River’s Health 5.1: Pollution Inherited and Imported Independent Ukraine did not inherit a healthy river when the Soviet Union perished; nor has it made much progress since 1991 in making the river better. In fact, we can argue that pollution worsened in the 1990s, when the Ukrainian economy and social order were in particular disarray; that there has been little improvement to the river since; and that Ukrainians today are paying the price of both Soviet and post-Soviet neglect (Khmelko 2012). Thankfully, the Dnipro is not the worst of the world’s rivers, as that dishonor probably belongs to the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia, which I have seen personally; nor is it the worst in Europe where the most polluted river is generally acknowledged to be the Sarno in Pompeii and Naples in Italy, but the Dnipro is a river in trouble nonetheless. In fact, for many people the mere mention of the word “Dnipro” or “Dnieper” brings up associations with the Chornobyl disaster and dangerous levels of radioactivity. This is certainly part of the recent history of the river and still a cause for concern, but Chernobyl is not the only cause of radioactive pollution in the Dnipro, nor is radioactivity the only pollutant. As we will see in this chapter, the Dnipro suffers from other ills, too, including organic and inorganic pollution from industrial and municipal sources, agricultural pollution (Stebelsky 1989; 1997a), pollution from tributaries as well as pollution directly into the Dnipro, and pollution that originates in all three of the countries that belong to the Dnipro drainage basin, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The Dnipro also collects polluted rainwater. I am an inveterate Dnipro swimmer, having been in the waters in countless places along the river’s length, in all seasons, and I have been warned countless times on countless beaches that the river’s waters are hazardous to one’s health.

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But many thousands of other swimmers ignore the warnings, too, and sometimes there are thousands of fun-seekers on any given day at any one of many beaches, all surviving without apparent ill effects. For us, Ukraine’s River is simply too inviting. For swimmers and non-swimmers alike, it is important to assess the health of the Dnipro and to chart paths for improvement, but it is generally known in Ukraine that the river is polluted and that swimmers are at risk. Consuming fish caught in the Dnipro is also risky, as they are known to contain dangerously high levels of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and copper, as well as long-living radionuclides such as cesium-137 and strontium-90. Furthermore, it is understood that water from the Dnipro is not fit for drinking, even after municipalities that supply the water to their populations have filtered it and undertaken other treatment such as chlorination. Ukrainians know that they need to drink either recently-tested well water or bottled water and that tap water from the Dnipro in their homes is best used for flushing toilets, although other uses do include bathing and showering, laundry, dirty dishes, and thirsty house plants. The problems that people face are not just caused by the polluted water from the river, but also by pollutants that are added to post-river processed water through old piping systems that suffer from corrosion and chemical build-ups. Unfortunately, Ukraine in general is one of the most polluted countries in Europe, and environmental hazards abound. The Dnipro watershed covers 511,000 square kilometers in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and includes many tributaries and even great numbers of second- and third-order tributaries in each of the three countries. A little less than 20 percent of the river basin is in Russian territory, 23 percent is in Belarus, and a little more than 57 percent is in Ukraine. All three countries contribute point-source pollutants such as effluent from municipal waste water systems and discharges from industrial plants, as well as diffuse-source pollutants such as fertilizers and other chemicals from agricultural lands, acid rain, and pollutants from land drainage projects and urban development. Some pollutants settle at the bottom of the river, particularly in the reservoirs, where they accumulate to levels that would be catastrophically dangerous if they were stirred up or if dams should break. The upper basin is in better shape than the lower basin, which suffers from increments to pollution levels that are added via every successive tributary and urban and industrial pollution point in the downriver direction, but the Dnipro is far from clean even in its headwaters

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area. Downriver, the Dnipro cuts through the heart of Ukraine’s large heavyindustrial heartland (see also Chapter 8), where it accumulates pollutants from industries and factory cities along its banks, as well as from mines, industrial plants, and gritty industrial cities on tributary rivers. Results of biological assays in the 1990s demonstrated that the lower Dnipro is endangered by toxic pollution from poorly treated or untreated effluent discharges: of 58 industrial wastewater samples taken at 31 outlets along the Dnipro and its tributaries, 69 percent contained various levels of toxic substances, and various degrees of toxicity were detected in 97 percent of 53 wastewater samples taken at 37 sites (Vasenko 1998, 457). Russia has the least direct stake in investing in the protection of the Dnipro, because the river leaves Russian territory not far below where it rises and never returns and the country withdrew from cooperation with its two neighboring countries in a critical “strategic action program” for pollution reduction (United Nations Development Programme 2008, 6–7). Yet, Russia contributes a disproportionate share of pollutants into the Dnipro. Municipal wastewater from the industrial city of Smolensk is known to have unacceptably high concentrations of toxic chemicals and organic matter, although pollution levels from the city are said to have declined because of economic recession and population loss. Smaller cities in Smolensk Oblast, such as Yarstevo, Vyazma, and Roslavl, are known to discharge their wastewater into the Dnipro drainage system with no treatment whatsoever. The Desna River, which also rises in Russia and empties into the Dnipro near Kyiv, is also badly polluted, with the Russian city of Bryansk (with a population of 460,000), a significant industrial center, being a major offender. Belarus adds to upper basin pollution levels as well, most notably by way of effluents from the capital city Minsk (with a population of 2 million), a city on the Svislach River, a second-order tributary of the Dnipro, and from Belarusian agriculture. Sewage treatment at Belarusian livestock farms is notoriously inadequate, such that surface waters and groundwater are polluted with the compounds of manure.

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5.2: Radioactive River Even though Ukraine “inherits” pollution from the two countries upriver, it creates far more pollution than Russia and Belarus combined and is much more greatly responsible for the poor state of the river overall. The heavy industrial zone mentioned above is one of the key problem areas, but there are other cities and industries along the river, too, as well as Ukraine’s vast agricultural lands from which fertilizers and other chemicals enter the river system. Furthermore, it was a Ukrainian, albeit Soviet Ukrainian, nuclear power plant in Chornobyl that created such havoc when it exploded in 1986 and spread radioactive poisons over a wide territory in multiple nations. The river is still contaminated as a result, although to progressively small degrees, as pollutants disperse, are buried in sediments, and decline in radioactive potency via half-lives. The most dangerous materials that remain active are cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, and strontium-90, which has a half-life of 29.1 years. They are found mostly at the bottom of the Kyiv Reservoir, where they are said to be safe unless they are disturbed. There is always a worry that a dam can somehow fail or be destroyed by anything such as earthquake, meteor, terrorists, or warfare, and there are special worries about Kyiv’s dam at Vyshhorod because (1) it was never built to be stronger than normal standards for dams; and (2) it holds back more radioactive material than anyone had ever imagined would happen. If the dam should break, the results would be catastrophic: not only would Kyiv and other cities nearby be poisoned with radioactivity by the floodwaters, but rushing water could overwhelm the next dam downriver, the Kaniv Dam, which would then trigger a chain reaction down the Dnipro Cascade that would be nothing short of devastating. Happily, the chances of even the first dam breaking are slim, but there are chances nonetheless, and people who worry should not be ignored.*

*  There is a sad precedent for the failure of dams in a cascade. In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam on the Ru River in Henan Province, People’s Republic of China, was overwhelmed with a once-in-2,000-year flood from Typhoon Nina, causing a catastrophic chain reaction of 62 dam failures downriver. More than 100,000 people died as a result, making this the worst flooding disaster in history.

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The Chornobyl nuclear power generating facility has been shut down, but the site continues to pose hazards. One problem is that the containment structure around the damaged reactor has proven to be inadequate and has leaked radioactivity. Likewise, the cooling pond near the power plant is highly radioactive and could contaminate the Pripyat River if the dam that separates it from this key tributary of the Dnipro is somehow compromised. Third, the floodplain of the Pripyat is itself contaminated with especially high concentrations of Strontium-90 over large areas that wash into the Pripyat during times of flood. There are potential risks as well from the 17 operating nuclear power reactors that operate in the Dnipro basin. Ten of them are at three sites in Ukraine, one in Zaporizhia Oblast at Enerhodar (see also Chapter 10), and the other two near Rovno and Khmelnytskyi in different parts of west-central Ukraine, while the other seven are at two sites in the Russian Federation, specifically in Kursk and Smolensk. In addition, there are three nuclear power reactors in southern Ukraine in the southern Buh River basin, a river that feeds into the estuary of the Dnipro. Fortunately, as analyzed by an international expert assessment team put together by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), discharge and monitoring data show that routine discharges at all of these sites “are generally well below authorized limits and do not contribute to significant contamination of the environment.” The same study also concluded that waste management facilities, including spent fuel storage, do not present a problem either, even though Ukraine is approaching capacity levels for waste storage and will need to create new facilities soon (IAEA 2006, 4). The uranium mining and processing industry in Ukraine is a different story, and does not meet pollution standards. This industry is concentrated on the right bank of the Dnipro in Dnipro Oblast, particularly in and near the small city Zhovti Vody (with a population of 47,000), where Ukraine’s largest uranium mines are and where ores are processed, and in Kamianske, a larger city (with a population of 242,000) that is directly on the Dnipro and that was the location of Ukraine’s first uranium processing complex. The Zhovti Vody hydrometallurgical plant began operations in 1959 and has produced great quantities of finely divided solid residue (tailings), with high concentrations of long-life radionuclides such as Thorium 230 (half-life 80,000 years) and Radium-226 (half-life 1,600 years). Radium is a continual source of Radon-222, a gas that is easily dispersed and that is known to have caused lung

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cancer in uranium miners. Radiation from the Zhovti Vody mining district leaches into the Zhovta (Yellow) River, a second-order tributary of the Dnipro, via the Inhulets River that ends in the Dnipro far downriver near the city of Kherson. The air in Zhovti Vody reportedly has more than double the permissible levels of Radium-226 as well as an excess of Thorium-230. The soils have concentrations of Uranium-238 that are 2.7 times higher than background concentrations, Radium-226 at two to nine times higher, Pb-210 two to 25 times higher, and Po-210 two to 17 times higher. The first processing site of uranium ore into enriched “yellow cake” in Ukraine was located in Kamianske. It opened in 1948 at the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant, a facility that became critical for the Soviet Union during the nuclear arms race with the United States and that supported the rise of nearby Dnipro into the Soviet Union’s “Rocket City” (see also Chapters 8 and 9 about the Ukrainian industrial heartland) (Figure 5.1). At first, uranium ores were imported from Eastern and Central Europe, but they were later augmented by uranium mined in Ukraine. The plant was busy for many decades but closed in 1991, when independent Ukraine dropped out of the arms race. However, its legacy is awful. The city has nine open-air dumpsites where about 36 million tons of sand-like low-radioactive residues cover a total of some 2.5 million square meters to a depth of about three meters. The dumpsites were never well constructed in the first place, and are now more-or-less abandoned and in very poor condition. They sit between workers’ residential neighborhoods to one side and the Dnipro and a short urban tributary called the Konoplyanka River on the other, and leach continually into the waters. A low dam at site D, which is a particularly large and dangerous dump, is responsible for continual radioactive seepage into flowing waters and “presents a possibility of catastrophic failure” (IAEA 2006, 5). Other scientific studies confirm that radioactive levels from Ukraine’s poorly designed uranium industry are high in both the Zhovta and Konoplyanka Rivers, as well as in the Dnipro (Voitsekhovitch, Soroka, and Lavrova 2006; Voitsekhovych and Lavrova 2009).*

*  The author’s name is spelled in English in two different ways in these two publications.

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[Figure 5.1: A brownfields site at the former Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant in Kamianske]

5.3: Other Pollution There are many other sources of pollution that originate in Kamianske as well, as uranium comprises only one part of the city’s industrial activity. The city is known first and foremost for ferrous metallurgy, which accounts for more than one-half of its industrial production, and secondly for its chemicals industry. A third branch of the industrial economy is coke production for the city’s energy and manufacturing plants. All three industrial sectors add to the river’s pollution load. In addition, there are many other cities with polluting industries on or very near the Dnipro, including the two cities beside Kamianske that are also on the “Great Bend” of the Dnipro (see also Chapter 8), Dnipro and Zaporizhia. Furthermore, each of these three major industrial centers has smaller, “satellite” industrial cities next door. My passion for beaches has taken me to lovely stretches of sand in all three of these cities and elsewhere at the Great Bend, where the views across the river, or just up- or downstream, are of belching smokestacks, mountains of stored coal, and

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mountains of spent slag, and where the sounds on the beach are not of waves lapping at the shore, but the clanging of moving trains loaded with industrial products, industrial wastes, or fuels for industrial production. You do not need to be a scientist to know that there must be better places to swim, even if the water has been nicely warmed for you. If your home is in the Great Bend, you live with pollution anyway, you breathe it all your life, and these are your beaches. Examples of other industrial centers that feed pollution into the Dnipro are Marhanets, the manganese city that is downriver from the Great Bend, the industrial city of Nikopol nearby, and Krivyi Rih, the greatly elongated city at the confluence of the Saksahanska and Inhulets Rivers (the latter a tributary of the Dnipro) in western Dnipro Oblast, shaped by the linear distribution of iron mines in an enormous mining district called Krivbas, short for the Krivyi Rih basin. At the end of the Soviet period, Krivyi Rih produced more than 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s iron ore and more than 80 percent of that of Ukraine. Other evidence that the Dnipro is seriously polluted is detailed in a book from 1998 about social and economic change in Eastern Ukraine during the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, put together from secondary sources by Hans van Zon, Andre Batako, and Anna Kreslavska, scholars at the University of Sunderland in England. It focuses on Zaporizhia and is now a bit dated, but is still authoritative and a good source for information. A chapter entitled “An Ecological Crisis Zone” (113–115) presents a dismal portrait of the river and concludes that the Dnipro is in danger of becoming a “dead river” because it has less than half the oxygen that is needed for self-purification. The authors report that enterprises in Zaporizhia Oblast “dispose of their wastes by throwing all pollutants untreated in the Dnepr,” and that “from 1991 to 1993 the quantity of zinc, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, cadmium, nickel and lead increased by 50 percent” in the river near Zaporizhia. Furthermore, it is here that the Dnipro has the highest concentration of heavy metals. The authors also report that an increase in chorine levels used to purify water has led to an increase in carcinogens in the river’s waters. What is more, other tests revealed higher than normal levels of salmonella and cholera contamination. According to a report published in 1991, waters just above the city “contained 2.4 times the norm for nitrates, four to five times the norm for faecal material, 4.4 to 4.8 times the norm for oil products, and six to seven times the norm for pesticides,” while in waters just below the city “these ac-

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ceptable rates have been exceeded even more” (Van Zon, Batako, and Kreslavska 1998, 115). In addition to heavy industry, agriculture also contributes to water pollution in the Dnipro basin and is generally considered to be the second-biggest polluter after factories and mines. Nearly 70 percent of Ukraine’s land is farmed, and much of it is treated with herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers that contaminate groundwater and wash into streams and rivers in the Dnipro watershed. Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous enter the waters from the application of fertilizers and from animal feed lots, depleting oxygen levels and creating unsightly blooms of algae that kill fish and other animal and plant life. Eutrophication is exacerbated by sewage dumping into the waters as well. In cases where data show recent declines in water pollution from agricultural sources, the explanation is sometimes the unhappy news that the agricultural sector uses fewer chemicals “due to a lack of funds to invest in agricultural production” (Nazarov, Cook, and Woodgate 2004, 211). In the warm summer months, it is not unusual to see extensive areas of bright green phytoplankton completely covering water surfaces where the flow is slow or stagnant, and to see globs of loosely consolidated algae in flowing waters. I have observed Ukrainians comparing notes about eutrophication levels in the Dnipro at different latitudes along the river as if there were an advancing south-to-north front of bloom outbreaks to watch out for. Other categories of pollution of river waters are increased salinization resulting from the irrigation of farmlands, saltwater intrusion into the Dnipro and Buh estuaries because the dammed river has less force as it empties into the Black Sea, and increases in sediments loads caused by soil erosion. The Dnipro has historically been rich in fish and once contributed more than 80 percent of the river catch in Ukraine. However, the numbers and varieties of fish species have been reduced as a result of pollution and dam construction, especially because pollutants tend to concentrate in reservoirs and there are fish kills at water intake points behind dams and at power plants. Some species have disappeared altogether from the Dnipro, while lake species have taken hold in reservoirs (Schevchuk 2005, 22). From time to time, there are massive fish kills along the Dnipro because of catastrophic pollution episodes that are not always fully explained. For example, an estimated 100 tons of fish died mysteriously in July 2008 and beaches were closed near Nova Kakhovka from a toxic pollution crisis that went as quickly as it came. Fishing

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has declined markedly as a commercial activity up and down the river, although there are still many fishing enthusiasts or hobbyists that line the river’s banks or fish from small boats at given seasons to catch fish for their own consumption or small-scale distribution (Figure 5.2). Their numbers have been estimated to be in the millions (Vyshnevs’kyi 2011, 172–175), although I cannot help but think that such a guess must be way too generous. Ice fishing is also a popular activity on the Dnipro, although also without the bountiful results that fishing enthusiasts once enjoyed.

[Figure 5.2: Father and son fishermen on the Dnipro]

This short chapter would not be complete without mentioning the negative impact on the environment of the Dnipro caused by the direct actions of many Ukrainian citizens themselves. This problem infuriates me, and I cannot resist giving it a presence in this book. For many people, it seems that the river or its tributaries is a place where roads end for the convenience of dumping household trash or waste from construction or home remodeling projects. Such piles are found all too frequently. Likewise, many citizens seem to think nothing at all of throwing empty beer or liquor bottles into the river, or leaving them

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behind in parks and on beaches at the river’s banks. Furthermore, it seems that some people consider it perfectly normal to break the glass bottles before disposing them, either not thinking or not caring about the bare feet that use the river’s side. Other injuries come from wire or scraps of metal in or near the water, and from rusted nails attached to odd scraps of lumber. Plastic bags abound and often float by as accompaniment to the swimmers. And then there is the problem of cigarette butts. They are so common on public beaches that sands are infused with them. There is no shortage as well of pull-tabs from plastic cans, ice cream sticks, plastic drink straws, and those indestructible plastic screw caps from water bottles. My own beach research has shown that early in the summer season, the beaches have been washed fairly clean by previous storms and spring flooding, but as summer wears on, the amount of petty litter accumulates to what I call “infusion” levels. I have also observed that if you dig in the sand in one spot, you never get to a clean horizon: the cigarette butts and other trash are there, deep down, too. Thankfully, only some citizens are bad litterers, and there are many other citizens who spend some time away from their own rest and relaxation at water’s edge to clean up a mess that had been left before they came. Without this help, and without the occasional organized subotnyk (Saturday work details) to clean up a stretch of beach or a riverside park,* the conditions would be totally intolerable. There are no doubts that the Dnipro is a troubled river in dire need of restoration. The mad rush by the Soviet Union to industrialize and build capabilities in the arms race and the space race is a major cause of the river’s ills, as well as the faulty nuclear power plant that the Soviets built in Chornobyl. For sure, a wiser and more cautious approach to economic development would have left a different legacy. But Ukraine has not done very much to improve the conditions of the river in the quarter century-plus since independence, and is itself at fault for pollution and mismanagement. There is considerable criticism of the country from both within and without for not moving aggressively enough to reduce pollution, including from countries that share the Black Sea basin with Ukraine, and from the European Union, which points to the polluted Dnipro as yet another bit of evidence that Ukraine is not measuring up *  The word comes from subota, meaning Saturday, and refers to cooperative work projects by neighbors or co-workers to accomplish some task needed for the public good on a day off. Such days were especially common during Soviet times. Often, the “volunteers” had little choice about volunteering.

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to European standards. There seem to be plenty of studies that document pollution problems and consultants’ reports that spell out what needs to be accomplished, but still there has been little improvement. One can excuse Ukraine for prioritizing the Chornobyl clean up over other environmental projects, but there has been time and opportunity to do more with the river than has been done. Ukraine has suffered from bad government and endemic corruption since the start of independence, and many people in power have taken care of their own financial desires and those of their cronies at the expense of the public. One can also argue that at least one presidential administration, that of the discredited Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, was actually working “for the other side” to deliberately weaken and impoverish Ukraine. Meanwhile, the current administration, that of President Petro Poroshenko, has a war to fight and is preoccupied with the survival of the country and its territorial integrity. These are not conditions that favor a heightened focus on environmental health. The financial costs for restoring the river will be enormous. Ukraine already depends heavily on foreign assistance to implement improvements of any kind: e.g. better voting machines and secure ballot counting; new police cars for the capital city; improvements to airports, etc. It uses foreign aid to pay for environmental studies and consultants’ reports, too, and struggles to find the funds to accomplish what the studies say needs to get done. In this way, Kyiv is finally getting an emergency upgrade of its only sewage treatment plant, the hopelessly outmoded and overworked facility from the 1960s that is located in the east-bank district of Bortnychi. Were it not for a loan of more than $1 billon from the government of Japan to undertake this task, as well as a promise of greater transparency and accountability about how the money is spent, the Dnipro and all the people who live downriver from the capital would continue to live under threat of being flooded by the foulest sludge. At least Kyiv processes its toilet wastes and is likely to do so in better ways in years to come; wastes from more than half of the Ukrainian population still receive no treatment whatsoever before being released into the environment. That, plus the industrial effluents and toxic brownfields along the river and its tributaries, as well as chemicals from Ukraine’s farmlands, add up to an enormous burden for a country with no money.

CHAPTER 6

Kyiv—Whose Ukraine?

6.1: National Capital We leave Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Dnipro behind and move forward in time to independent Ukraine and the river as Ukraine inherited it. Experts who followed the country’s society and politics closely may have expected the slow break-up of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, but it was nevertheless shocking when it happened, as was the independence that befell Ukraine and other Soviet republics in 1991. Ukraine was not prepared for self-government, and as a result it entered a period of political chaos and corruption that seems to have no end. The Euromaidan people’s revolution of 2013–2014 chased a highly corrupt government from power, but it was immediately followed by the hijacking of Crimea by Russia and a war against Russian-backed separatists and paid soldiers from Russia in the eastern part of the country. Ukraine’s future was far from settled when it became independent, and it remains unsettled today, even though it seems clear that one outcome of Russia’s post-Euromaidan aggressions in Ukraine is that more Ukrainians than ever want to break with the Russian-Soviet past and become European. As the capital city, Kyiv is where the debates and conflicts about Ukraine’s future are played out most vividly. Not only was the city the main site of Euromaidan and, in the winter of 2004–2005, the Orange Revolution, it is also the home of the notorious “Ukrainian Fight Club,” i.e. the national parliament that is famous for debates between elected nardeps (“narodni deputaty,” Members of Parliament) spiked with foul language, multi-nardep fistfights, and the throwing of furniture. Often, the fights are about matters of public policy such as which language they should be speaking—Ukrainian or Rus-

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sian—but more often they are sparked by matters of money and the parliamentarians’ personal business interests (Cybriwsky 2014, 82–86). The conflicts in Kyiv, then, are not just about the course of the nation and where it belongs in the scheme of global political alignments, but also about who gets to own what, now that everything is no longer owned by the Soviet state. Examples of Ukraine’s unrest make daily news. We can summarize the subject by a tour of the Dnipro in the Kyiv metropolis. The river’s form in Kyiv is widely known in Ukraine. The city was built on the river’s right bank, on high promontories with advantages for defense that allowed for views of traffic on the river and approaches to the city on the flatlands to the east. Right Bank Kyiv is, therefore, the historic city (as well as the location of newer developments at increasing distance from the original nucleus) and is hilly, while the Left Bank is flat and belongs geographically to Ukraine’s flatland belt of forests and farmlands. It was developed much later in the city’s history, during Soviet times and especially beginning in the 1960s. It is mostly a district of residential apartment complexes along subway and bus lines. The Right Bank side of Kyiv is bigger in area than the Left Bank side and houses about two-thirds of the city’s population, although the newer areas across the river from the urban core continue to grow quickly. The Dnipro divides the two terrains of Kyiv, although not neatly with a single well-defined channel, but by a main channel, smaller channels, and multiple islands, inlets, and peninsulas. The distance between the two banks is quite long, more than a full kilometer in many places, which is something that inspired one of the most famous lines in Ukrainian literature. In his collection of short stories that reminisce about his Ukrainian childhood, Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol) wrote in Russian:* В середину же Днепра они не смеют глянуть: никто, кроме солнца и голубого неба, не глядит в него. Редкая птица долетит до середины Днепра. It is only the sun and the blue sky that can see across the breadth of the Dnipro. It is only a rare bird that can fly to the center of the Dnipro.

*  The collection of essays is called Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, and the essay from which the quotation originates is called “A Terrible Vengeance.”

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Within this wide river and along the banks on either side is a vast green zone, with large stands of dense forest, numerous wetlands, and meadows with wildflowers. There are sandy beaches, some wide, easily accessible from populated areas and crowded on hot days with bathers and sun-seekers, while others are fetchingly secluded. And in the middle of the widest channel, near the structurally innovative bridge that was designed by engineer Yevhen Oskarovych Paton (1870–1953), is a nicely executed sculpture of, ahem, a rare bird. Probably no other city in the world as large as Kyiv has such an enormous undeveloped territory and so many beaches in its center, nor such an opportunity for creative urban development based on environmental amenities. But first let us consider how the historic bank of Kyiv looks from within this zone. A city is almost always a palimpsest of history and architectures from the past, and the bluffs of Kyiv are an especially good example. They are green, as the slopes and their crests are mostly officially-designated parklands with many trees, and as we view these slopes from across the river below, we see that for a distance of six or seven kilometers, they are dotted with an eclectic assortment of landmarks and landmark buildings from different periods of history. Mostly, these landmarks are on the crests of the bluffs, from which visitors have a panoramic view of the landscape, but there are landmarks and landmark buildings as well on some of the slopes. Despite differences in architectural style and the original purposes for which they were built, we see that these structures have one critical thing in common: they were built to be seen from afar. About 20 or so are particularly prominent and can be identified by name by Kyivans with a good knowledge of the city. As a group, they reflect the changes in the sources of power and influence over the city during the course of history, and tell stories about how the Ukraine of today views the symbols of authority from the past. There are cruise boats of all sizes and shapes that take passengers past these monuments and back. On some of these boats, there is detailed information given by qualified city guides about what can be seen, while on other vessels the atmosphere is more about partying and passengers dancing to loud music that reaches the shores and climbs the heights. During the peak of the summer season, the tour boats pass another constantly. The commentary is in Ukrainian or Russian, depending on the tour operator, or in various other European languages by prior arrangement. Visitors enjoy the sights and take a great many photos. For tourists from other parts of Ukraine (or Russia), a boat ride on the

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Dnipro is often a special joy, particularly if they had not previously been to Kyiv or seen the Dnipro. They all know something about the city’s history and layout, sometimes even from their school days, as well as something about some of the important landmarks they are seeing for the first time. Seeing Ukrainians (and Russians) connect with the storied Dnipro is a great pleasure.

6.2: Landmarks of Religion Three landscape complexes stand out: those of religion, those of Communism, and those of a post-Soviet variant of capitalism. There are others, too, but these three landmarks are much more prominent. The landmarks of ancient Rus’ and Kyiv as the “New Jerusalem” used to be there as well, on the promontories of the old walled city, but most are long gone, having been destroyed in the thirteenth century by the Mongols, as well as in other attacks on Kyiv, most dramatically by the dynamite of Stalin’s war against religion in the 1930s. The Cathedral of St. Sophia, which dates to the first half of the eleventh century and is a UNESCO world heritage site, is a prominent survivor of architectural vandalism, but it is set back from the bluffs in the high city and is not visible from either the river or the left bank.* However, Kyiv’s other UNESCO landmark, Pecherska Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, dates to later in the eleventh century and stands front and center on the slopes of the river’s bluffs, and positively glistens with the spectacular golden domes of multiple churches and other buildings in the sprawling complex (Figure 6.1). It continues to be a place of Orthodox worship and is an especially prominent reminder in the landscape that, once, religion ruled the city. The “caves” have to do with a maze of underground passages and chambers, where the wrapped-up bodies of Orthodox holy men from centuries past are kept and can still be visited. Whether it is seen from the hilltop above or from the river below, and no matter which season, the combination of the architectural glory of Pecherska Lavra and the glorious natural landscapes of the Dnipro has long been an especially common subject of paintings of Kyiv and photography. The view is iconic. One of the best-known works is a detailed watercolor attributed only *  St. Sophia survived the Stalinist destruction of churches only barely, and was decommis-

sioned as a religious complex and made into a museum of history and historical architecture.

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to the “nineteenth-century Russian School,” showing Pecherska Lavra and boats on the river from the east bank that is labelled “La Ville de Kieff” on the mount. Other painted scenes of the Dnipro and the landmark monastery are by talented contemporary artists such as Evelina Beketova and Anna Sokol, and are sold in the city’s art galleries and where tourists gather, while still other painted renderings of the city, its church domes, and its river, are reproduced in a very handsome book Kyiv Zhyvopysnyi/Kyiv Pictorial that was published recently in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko (Oslamovsky 2013).

[Figure 6.1: The Dnipro as seen from Pecherska Lavra in Kyiv]

There are other churches, too, that can be seen from across the river and that collectively speak about the central role of the Orthodox faith in Kyiv’s history.* One is St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Church and Monastery, as it is named, which dates to the recent year 1999. It is a reconstruction that was executed after Ukrainian independence of a very beautiful historic church from the early twelfth century, which was looted and then dynamited by *  Of course, there are prominent places of worship of other faiths in Kyiv, too, such as Jewish synagogues, Polish Roman Catholic churches, and Eastern Rite Ukrainian Catholic churches, but history has never placed them at the crests of the iconic bluffs.

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Stalin’s henchmen in the mid-1930s. The city had just been designated the new capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (taking over from Kharkiv), and in order to demonstrate to the public that there was a new authority over Kyiv, the site was to be given a (monstrously) large statue of Lenin, the largest anywhere in the world. However, construction never materialized, in part because designers could not solve the problem of which way Lenin should face, and ultimately because the Germans arrived in 1941, and destruction replaced construction.* The new St. Michael’s is very beautiful, as was the original, and is popular among worshipers and tourists alike. Wedding parties like it as a backdrop for photographs. Not far away, at the upriver edge of the highlands, is St. Andrew’s Church. It is a mid-eighteenth century baroque structure that was funded by prominent Kyivans and designed by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli. There are other, smaller churches that are visible along the bluffs as well, along with a smattering of monuments with religious themes. The most prominent and famous among the latter is the aforementioned statue of Volodymyr the Great, the sainted ruler of Kyivan Rus’ who made his subjects into Christians via a mass baptism in 988 in a small stream off the Dnipro (Figure 6.2). The statue dates back to the tsarist 1840s and is a Kyiv icon, seen in countless paintings and photographs of him and the cross that he holds against a backdrop of the Dnipro. An especially popular view is from “over his shoulder” and shows him facing the river below and a very popular pedestrian bridge to the beaches and parks. This combination, in tandem with the cross, makes it appear that St. Volodymyr is showing his subjects “The Way.”

*  The Lenin dilemma is actually very funny. The original idea was that a large and archi-

tecturally imposing complex of Soviet government buildings would be built on either side of a large open space – slash – parade ground on the hilltop site of the historic city, and that Lenin would face this district and be its centerpiece. However, doing that would mean that Lenin’s back would be to the river, and, perhaps even more importantly, butt-pointing in the general direction of Moscow.

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[Figure 6.2: The famous statue of Volodymyr the Great overlooking the Dnipro in Kyiv and the pedestrian bridge to beaches and parks on Trukhaniv Island]

Other churches had also occupied the “New Jerusalem” promontory, but they too were destroyed in the Mongol assault on Kyiv or by Stalin’s henchmen almost 700 years later. Most prominent among the missing churches is the aforementioned Desiatynna Church, the historic stone church that Volodymyr the Great had built with one-tenth of his wealth. As we have seen, its site is a locus of heated conflict between different flavors of Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox faiths and their various leaders, because control of Desiatynna Hill signifies ownership of the history of Rus’ and affirms that today’s nation is a direct descendant. This is why the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church has erected the small church next to the Desiatynna site as a beachhead. A parallel dispute concerns ownership of Pecherska Lavra. This historic site belongs to the Ukrainian state, but its churches answer to the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Moscow. Many Ukrainians view this as an extension of Russian colonialism in their country. It is partly because of such disputes that the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which has an especially strong following in the Ukrainian-nationalistic west of the country and that was previously based in Rome and in the western Ukrainian city of L’viv, has recently moved its main

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cathedral to a site in Kyiv. But the new headquarters church is not simply in the capital; it is in Left Bank Kyiv, signifying a desire for a greater presence by the Church from Ukraine’s west in Ukraine’s east. This new church building, the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, is at river elevation on the Dnipro, on Rusanivskyi Inet directly opposite the Venetian Inlet between Venetian Island and Trukhaniv Island. It is golden-domed and sleekly modern, plainly visible from the heights on the opposite bank as well as from the city’s most popular beaches, those on either site of the Venetian Inlet. The church faces west, perhaps in the direction of Rome and L’viv, while behind it rise the left bank massifs (high-rise apartment developments) of middle-class Kyiv. I suppose that it is fair to say that this new cathedral is a beachhead for expansion of the Catholic faith. The dispute about space and church building between religious confessions is ugly, and is but one of the many fronts in the wider conflict between Ukrainians and Russia about Ukrainian nationhood.

6.3: Soviet Landmarks The landmarks of our second landscape complex, those that reflect the power of Soviet authority, are interspersed among the various religious landmarks. They signify that a new leadership had arrived. The giant Lenin statue was never built, but just beside the reconstructed St. Michael of the (gleaming) Golden Domes is the imposing façade of the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. The building dates back to Stalin’s 1936–1938 period and now houses the Foreign Ministry of (independent) Ukraine. The Ukrainian trident symbol has replaced the Soviet hammer and sickle at the building’s roofline, but the pompous neo-classical shape of the building is quintessentially the architecture of Soviet authority. On another promontory just downstream is the People’s Friendship Monument, a giant titanium arch or rainbow that symbolizes the “eternal friendship between Ukraine and Russia.” To the side are granite sculptures of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi and other solemn principals of the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav that that created the international alliance. The arch is lit at night and can be seen for some distance. The brass lettering in Russian and Ukrainian, saying that the two countries are forever united, was removed in 1991 at a time of “no more Russia” euphoria, but they have left marks on the stone and the message

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is still perfectly readable. Now, at a time of war, officials in Ukraine are considering what to do with the monument, and its future seems tied to the results of a competition among architects for plans to remake and clean up the entire central area of Kyiv in the wake of the Euromaidan revolution. In the meantime, since Ukrainian independence the grounds of this huge titanium white elephant have been given over to a kiddie rides concession with bumper cars and brightly painted mechanical contraptions that flash lights, make noise, and carry screaming passengers on two-minute rides up and down, or this way and that, in looping circles and other configurations. The site is one that I have described elsewhere under the heading “Monumental Woes” (Cybriwsky 2014, 75–78). The two Soviet monuments that seem sacrosanct are further downriver, in a part of Kyiv called Pechersk (“caves”), on either side of Pecherska Lavra. One is in Park Slavy (“Park of Glory”), a memorial park that honors the heroes of the fight against the Nazis in World War II. Its centerpiece is a stone obelisk beside which is an “eternal flame” in memory of the unknown soldiers who laid down their lives. Downriver from Pecherska Lavra, also on a high perch, is the aforementioned Bat’kivshchyna Maty (“Motherland”) World War II Monument and Museum. It is as enormous and imposing as can be. The steelsheathed statue of the heroic female figure is 62 meters high and stands atop a 40-meter, three-story pedestal-museum, making this monument the 15thtallest in the world, the third highest in Europe, and the 4th-tallest non-religious statue in the world. She holds a shield in one hand and a long sword upright and aloft in the other, and looms much taller and with far greater prominence than Volodymyr the Great and his cross that overlook the river from a different hill. Furthermore, the ample grounds around the Motherland figure have oversized bronze images of heroic soldiers in action, an even larger eternal flame than at the Park of Glory, and a large display of tanks and other military vehicles from World War II. No matter what Ukrainian citizens think about the Soviet Union and its Communist Party leadership, the fight against the Nazis was everybody’s fight, so these two monuments are quite secure despite changing politics. In fact, the bronze soldier-statue that greets visitors to the war museum at Bat’kivshchyna Maty has been updated with a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag, a symbol that was outlawed in the Soviet Union because it was seen as nationalistic and anti-Union. Also, there are new displays with sympathetic presentations of the Ukrainian nationalist movement during the war.

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6.4: The Holodomor Monument Over and above “updates” to Soviet monuments, the governments of postSoviet Ukraine have added only one landmark to Kyiv’s hilltop array during the terms of the five presidents who have held office since independence. However, it is an important one, with considerable meaning. The Holodomor Monument was inaugurated on November 22, 2008, by then-President Viktor Yushchenko, a supporter of a Western orientation for Ukraine. It occupies a prominent spot in the line-up between the Park Slavy obelisk and the golden domes of Pecherska Lavra, and memorializes the Holodomor-famine that Stalin carried out in Ukraine in the early 1930s. There is a museum inside. Such a monument would never have been built in Soviet times, as the enormous tragedy that took place on some of the richest farmlands on earth was generally hushed up and would certainly not have been acknowledged as a deliberate action against Ukrainians by the Soviet government. The monument takes the shape of a high memorial candle capped with a golden flame, and is surrounded by sculptures and other details that collectively describe the hunger, although, as with some of the details that we have described above for other monuments, those parts of the memorial are not visible from across the river.

6.5: Landscapes of Corruption We now turn to the third of our three bluff-top landscape complexes, landmarks of a post-Soviet variant of corrupt capitalism. By this I mean structures that are built for private profit in a business climate that is highly corrupt. Instead of monuments, museums, or churches, these are mostly high-rise, high-rent residential structures for elite buyers and tenants, and high-rent office buildings. They are landmarks because, like the Empire State Building or the spire-topped Seven Sisters in Moscow, they stand out in the landscape. They, too, occupy prominent spots along the heights, and generally rise higher than the structures that were mentioned previously. The tallest is a residential building with the telling name Diamond Hill. Almost all of the buildings in this category, including Diamond Hill, were built in public parks, in violation of land use law and without formal approval by urban planners and city offi-

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cials. In Kyiv, they are commonly referred to as “monsters,” a term derived from the Ukrainian and Russian word monster (Ukrainian plural: monstry) that is applied to intrusive new buildings that neighbors do not welcome. From access to the development site to who is building what for whom, the entire process is characteristically secretive. Furthermore, the construction of these particular monsters is generally reckless in terms of structural integrity and environmental considerations with respect to the slopes. Kyiv’s bluffs, as high and mighty as they look, are actually fragile. They are made of loosely consolidated soils and depend on the vegetation cover to stay intact. This is one reason that over the centuries, from the time of ancient Kyiv onward, when basic rules about building with the environment were already known, the slopes and their crests remained generally undeveloped. St. Andrew’s Church, discussed above, has recently required extraordinary shoring up, and the 1840s statue of Volodymyr the Great nearby took many years to install because much time was spent in stabilizing the site. But now, fast-buck urban development encroaches on parkland, ignores the fragile nature of the slopes, and puts up enormous, heavy buildings on sites where the experts scream “no!” In fact, it is reported that the reason St. Andrew’s became structurally unstable is because of corruption-driven illegal construction that had cut into the slope below. For many Kyivans, the greatest affront to the fragile slopes and the postcard-like view of the heights of Kyiv from below was committed by the previous president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was driven from office in early 2014. What he built on the bluffs during his abbreviated term is not high and widely visible from below, but it occupies a strategically central tract of land near the Ukrainian national government district he took control of by pulling rank on officials of Kyiv government. The trees were cut down and what was under construction was never explained until after it became clear to onlookers that the structure was a landing space for helicopters. There was also a private new road and a connecting bridge between the helipad and the presidential office building. The reason was that for the time being, Yanukovych had decided that he would commute by helicopter instead of by motorcade. He reportedly changed his mind when he was advised that a helicopter could be shot down easily from all that greenery below. Therefore, no whirlybirds fly to and fro. We never learned what use the floors below this “helipad from hell” were supposed to have had, as Yanukovych left Ukraine in a great hurry on

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February 22, 2014. Even though this intrusive structure is not particularly visible from the river below, it does dominate the view from what had been one of the most popular spots in Kyiv to enjoy a panorama of the river and is parks. I visited the viewpoint above the construction site often as work on the secretive helipad proceeded, and encountered Kyivans in a state of shock about what was being done to their beloved vista (Cybriwsky, 2014, 96–100).* Yanukovych also made his mark upriver from Kyiv, where he lived. There is probably no better place from which to consider the mess that has befallen Ukraine and that Yanukovych made worse than to visit the village of Nova Petrivka, about 22 kilometers north of Kyiv’s center on the west shore of the Kyiv Sea, and purchase a ticket to tour Mezhihirya, Ukraine’s premier “museum of corruption.” It is here, on a 138-hectare site amidst a glorious forest on hills that rise from the banks of the reservoir, that former President Viktor Yanukovych built his personal mansion and lived with his young girlfriend. The land had once belonged to a monastery that dated to the sixteenth century but that was destroyed in 1921 by the Communists, who turned the site into a retreat for top Communist Party officials. For a time, former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev lived there. Yanukovych got hold of the territory for himself by hook and crook, and moved there in 2002 from his native Donetsk when he began his tour as Prime Minister of Ukraine. Over the years, until his ouster in 2014, he personalized the place to his own tastes—if “tastes” is the correct word, because a great many people deride Yanukovych for a demonstrated deficiency of good taste—and built for himself not just the mansion, but also an elaborate assortment of playthings: a golf course, tennis courts, private zoo, horse stables and equestrian club, a garage for 70 vintage and luxury automobiles, a yacht club and harbor, and a pirate ship party boat. Gaudy fountains and (mostly) tasteless statues were everywhere, while inside the house had lots more (mostly) tasteless art, tasteless furniture, gold toilet fixtures, and some of the rarest and most precious books and religious icons that had been purloined from Ukrainian libraries and museums. Critics later said that Yanukovych was personally robbing Ukraine of its history and heritage. Mezhihirya is now a tourism destination, where visitors can ponder the *  There are still no helicopters alighting from the helipad, but the mysterious new build-

ing on which it sits has been developed into a nightclub, as if that were an appropriate use for an environmentally fragile slope immediately adjacent to the national parliament building and Ukraine’s central government district.

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enormous scale of theft and corruption that took place during the Yanukovych regime as they stroll through the beautiful grounds or walk along his private frontage on the Kyiv Sea.

[Figure 6.3: Former President Viktor Yanukovych’s pirate galleon for parties docked at his former estate in Mezhihirya north of Kyiv]

6.6: A Green Zone We now turn our gaze away from authority, good and bad, past and present, on and above the river in Kyiv, to the enormous green zone that Kyivans so happily enjoy. It is large indeed, measuring a great many square kilometers* and having river frontage that, because of all the bends, branches, bays, channels, coves, and crooked courses between the islands and peninsulas, measures as much as 187.08 kilometers. A count I once undertook from on-site field work and a study of detailed maps and aerial photographs suggests that about 162.73 kilometers of the water frontage is mostly undeveloped (87.0 percent), *  How great a number of square miles is impossible to assess because of seasonal shifts in

the river and the fact that some green zone territory extends so far back from the water that it hardly seems fair to associate it with the Dnipro.

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within which a remarkable total of about 16.40 kilometers are stretches of sandy beaches. Some beaches are quite wide and easily accessible from the city’s residential districts, and are therefore typically crowded on hot days, while others are small and secluded. There is relaxation in the sun and bathing for everyone, including at least one large beach where few people wear anything at all, as well as beaches that are identified by signage from the Soviet period as Children’s Beach, Beach for Invalids (it has handrails into the water), and Young People’s Beach. A popular café-bar on the sands has the new and timely name YuBK (ЮБК), which comes from Южный Берег Крыма, Russian for the Southern Shore of Crimea. In this case, ЮБК refers to the Southern Shore of Kyiv, with the Cyrillic letter “К” being the start letter for both “Crimea” and “Kyiv.” The point is that now that vacations on the southern peninsula are no longer practicable, this place of business in Kyiv can offer some of the same fun. Where other access to remote hideaways is not possible, rowboat and canoe ferries convey beachgoers across the channels. One of the reasons that Kyiv has so much space for recreation in its center is because the residential areas that were there before were destroyed in World War II, and not rebuilt. The city had other priorities at the time, as well as a need to add to Kyiv’s parkland. One of the most famous chapters in this history is about a fisherman’s village on Trukhaniv Island that the Germans burned as they fled homeward and abandoned the city. This settlement had been called Trukhaniv, and the homes were on stilts because of springtime floods. Kyivans know this story because the residents of Trukhaniv used to get around on boats; which is why there are place names on the map of the Dnipro in Kyiv, such as Venetian Island and Venetian Inlet. A place named Hidropark (also written “Hydropark”) is an especially popular locus of activity. It is also the name of the subway-rail stop that serves it. The area closest to the station is a zone of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, while nearby are various beaches served by cafés and kiosks, a children’s amusement park, and golden-domed chapel from beneath which springs forth delicious and cold spring water, and facilities for various sports such as tennis, volleyball, and more (mostly warped) ping pong tables than I had ever seen in once place. For many people, the gem in this zone is an outdoor gym called Kachalka, which a recent popular-interest book about Kyiv calls “the most hardcore [gym] in Europe” (Kopylova and Pavlychko 2015, 73). It dates to the 1960s and began as an informal place for fitness buffs to work out on an iron

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bar between two trees, and evolved informally and incrementally into a large zone with ingenious devices for building muscles and burning calories that are made of scrap metal, truck and automobile parts, old tires, and other materials. It is a fascinating place not just as a gym that sculpts human bodies, but also as a unique collection of original kinetic sculpture covered in gobbed-on layers of rustproofing paint. There are some wonderful photographs of Hidropark soon after it opened in 1968 in a nostalgic photo book about Kyiv by Serhiy Tsalyk (2012, 213–219). A recent photo of my own is Figure 6.5.

[Figure 6.4: Body-building at Kachalka on Venetian Island in Kyiv]

The discussion above has a summer and beach bias, because it is easier to begin there. However, there are many other activities that take place in the center of Kyiv along the river, so that we can say that there is something for every season and for more-or-less every taste. There is boating of all kinds, bicycling, and places for dirt bikes, off-road motorbikes, horseback riding, and camping. Some people even seem to live as secretive squatters in hidden forests and on private beaches, perhaps year-round. Fishing is extremely popular, from the shore, from bridges, and from boats. There are wildflowers, berries, and mushrooms to harvest, and well as other plants. Autumn colors are beautiful, and

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so are the blossoms of spring. In winter there is cross-country skiing, ice fishing, and bathing in icy waters by hearty people who call themselves “walruses.” In mid-January, on the Feast of the Epiphany, lots of Kyivans become religious walruses. Some of the islands have sports camps, summer camps for children, cottages for recreation, and private marinas. During the Euro 2012 football tournament, which Ukraine and Poland hosted jointly, the fans from Sweden drew Kyiv as their “home town” for the matches. Most of them stayed in tents in “Camp Sweden” at the far end of a pedestrian bridge from the center of the city, where they had privileged access to one of the city’s most popular beaches. Kyivans fell in love with the well-behaved Swedes, and they with Kyiv. After the Swedes left, Kyivans put up a monument to them at their campsite: a football (soccer ball) with Viking horns. In addition to the parkland along the river in the city’s center, many thousands of Kyivans have second homes along the river that are called dachas (singular: dacha). They are typically small and somewhat rustic dwellings that were developed in the exurbs of Soviet cities for the enjoyment of urban residents. Typically, each dacha zone included hundreds of dwellings that were laid out along a grid pattern of unpaved and sequentially numbered streets. The individual allotments were small, usually about 600 square meters (0.15 acres), and were separated by fences that the residents themselves had erected. Dachas provided people with an opportunity to break out of the confinement of life in crowded apartments, and escape for relaxation to an area with clean air and ample greenery. The lifestyles of dachnyky (dacha people) typically included gardening and the growing of vegetables and fruit crops on their small allotments, and home improvement projects. Many dachnyky erected outbuildings for the storage of tools and other necessities, as well as saunas. Other outbuildings were used for toilet needs. Where there was not a great river to enjoy, like the Dnipro, there were streams or ponds nearby where people could swim and enjoy life in the sun. In the Kyiv area, there are dacha zones both upstream and downstream along the Dnipro, on the banks of the Kyiv Sea, and along the lower reaches of nearby tributaries such as the Desna. Unlike most other Soviet cities, Kyiv also had dacha zones within city limits. One that is particularly large is named Osokorky (“poplar trees”). It is in the southern part of the city, along the Dnipro on the left bank, and has its own stretch of sandy beachfront. It would be a crime if Kyivans were to ever lose such a wonderful resource. In some ways it is hard to imagine that this could happen, because the space

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by the river is huge, with room seemingly for everyone, and because the people are strongly entrenched at the riverfront and feel a sense of ownership. On the other hand, Kyivans, as well as citizens elsewhere in Ukraine, know very well that corruption is a national scourge, and that all sorts of violations happen because of it. There are already unwelcome land use encroachments in this green zone, just like across the river in the parks at the tops of bluffs, although not as many so far. However, they could be a portent of the future. My own notes include occasional mansions behind high walls, a private marina with expensive yachts, and some floating restaurants and hotels on water frontage that had once been public. Furthermore, private concessions spring up from time to time on popular beaches without information for the public about how their owners got access or permissions. But these are small concerns in the scheme of so many other problems in Kyiv, and most Kyivans are not especially worried. To my mind, they need to be on the lookout nonetheless, because on the most crowded beaches, they now sun themselves and bathe not with the domes of the churches looming above them on the slopes or the architectural reminders that they are or were Soviet subjects, but with expensive, illegally-built high-rise residential towers looming over them like lords and masters. At least that is how I read my photograph in Figure 6.5. There is also a gentrification of dacha zones, especially along the choicest sites nearest the river (Figure 6.6). There, wealthy people buy up multiple adjacent tracts, tear down old cottages, and build oversized private homes behind high walls and other security. In many cases, they manage to claim stretches of the riverfront for themselves, which they mark off with high walls that extend into the water and signs that warn about mean dogs. Such worries about diminishing public access to Ukraine’s River in Kyiv are echoed by other researchers. For example, at about the same time as I was carrying out my fieldwork and land use analyses along the banks of Kyiv’s Dnipro (which I published in my 2014 book about Kyiv and then updated and amplified in a journal article: Cybriwsky 2014 and 2016), a parallel survey that was unbeknownst to me at the time was being conducted by three Kyiv citizen-activists, Oleksandr Oksymets, Roman Kulchynskyi, and Yaryna Myk­haylyshyn (2013). Their work was supported with funding from both the International Renaissance Fund “Vidrodzhennya” (“rebirth’) and NED, and was published online under a descriptive title that reveals its conclusion: “Vkradenyi Dnipro: Yak Kyiany poz bavyly dostupu do riky” (“Stolen Dnipro:

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How Kyivans Lost Access to the River”). Both studies, mine and theirs, examined land use from field tallies along the river’s banks along the shore, and from the water. Both calculated percentages of river frontage that were given to various categories of land use such as “beach,” “forest,” “industry,” “roadway,” etc. The biggest difference was that their work focused exclusively on the left and right outer banks of the Dnipro, while mine examined these banks plus the river frontage along the river’s islands and along various inlets and channels. With that in mind, the authors concluded that: “in Kyiv only 15 percent of the banks of the Dnipro are accessible to urban residents for passage or swimming in the river.” They write that: “all the rest is dense shrubbery, fences, roads, and commercial-industrial districts” (Oksymets, Kulchynskyi, and Mykhaylyshyn, 2013, 3). Had I calculated a bottom-line figure for public access, it would have been higher, because most of the beaches and other recreational zones along the Dnipro in Kyiv are on the islands that the other study did not yet consider, and because I may have been tempted to treat areas of dense foliage near the river as available public spaces, albeit with difficulties for access or thoroughfare. But even though we approached the same topic differently, we were left with the same worry: that the citizens of Kyiv face the distressing prospect that one of the great resources of the city—ample green space and beaches in the heart of the metropolis—could be taken from them for the benefit of those with more money, better connections, and greater power. The photograph that the authors chose to insert to make a final point in their very richly illustrated study is a particularly apt and fine complement to Figures 6.5 and 6.6. It shows an official-looking warning sign affixed to a post embedded in plain sand along the river and reads: “Private Property: Pedestrian and Vehicular Passage is Not Allowed.” We know from experience in the unjust world of land development in Kyiv and in Ukraine more generally that this indicates that tomorrow this area of barren sand will probably be enclosed by a wall or a high fence, guarded by cameras and dogs as well as by hired security personnel, and be given to elite housing, a yacht club, or a nightclub or restaurant that caters to a privileged, narrow market.

[Figure 6.5: One of the many popular beaches in Kyiv. This one has illegally-built luxury high-rises on parkland as a neighbor across the river’s main channel]

[Figure 6.7: Gentrification of a riverside dacha zone on the left bank of the Dnipro in southern Kyiv]

CHAPTER 7

Around the Kremenchuk Sea

7.1: A Drowned Land From Kyiv, we move downriver to the Kremenchuk Reservoir and the lands around it. This brings us to Cherkasy and Poltava Oblasts as well as to Kirovohrad Oblast,* which also bounds this body of water, and into the very heart of Ukraine. It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, that we encounter natural landscapes, built environments, and economic activities that are quintessentially “Ukrainian”; where the ethnic mix of the people reflects that of the country as a whole; and where we hear both Ukrainian and Russian spoken freely, often in the same conversation and even by the same person. The accent of Ukrainian is all heartland: not too western and not heavily infused with borrowings from Poland and the German of the AustroHungarian Empire; and not too eastern or southern, where the spoken Ukrainian is a strongly “Russified” dialect. Likewise, this part of central Ukraine seems to have political leanings and a diversity of religions that also seem to represent the country as a whole. Therefore, the region is fertile ground for public opinion pollsters who want to know what the country is thinking.

*  Kirovohrad Oblast is slated to be renamed soon as part of Ukraine’s current decommunization campaign. The word means “City of Kirov,” with “Kirov” being Sergei Kirov (1886–1934), a prominent early Communist. The renaming is late because of disagreements as to what the new name should be. Two leading possibilities are Inulsk, after the local river, the Inhulets, and a name that would honor Marko Kropyvnytskyi (1840–1910), a talented Ukrainian writer and actor who was born in the capital city of the oblast, a place that was officially renamed Kropyvnystyi on July 14, 2016 in place of the earlier “Kirovohrad.”

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Furthermore, every Ukrainian knows that it is here, in Cherkasy Oblast, in a village named Moryntsi, that Taras Shevchenko was born, and that the love for Ukraine and her people in his poetry and sketches is based on this heartland. Likewise, every Ukrainian knows, too, that Bohdan Khmelnytskyi hails from Subotiv, a village in Cherkasy Oblast that is much closer to the Dnipro than Shevchenko’s birthplace. Also, although we are some distance upstream from the Dnipro’s rapids (or where they used to be), this is still the part of Ukraine that is identified most closely with Cossack history, and is therefore deeply imbued with the cultures of a fiercely independent people and an independent Ukraine. A popular guidebook to Ukraine for readers of English calls its chapter about the region “The Cossack Land” (Lylio 2009, 327). Therefore, the region of the Kremenchuk Sea is a greatly appropriate place to study Ukraine today. Kaniv is within our region, too: the small, west bank city on the Dnipro south of Kyiv in Cherkasy Oblast where Shevchenko has his final resting place. It is only about 60 kilometers northeast of where he was born. As he had requested in his famous “Testament,” the beloved poet wanted to be buried beside the Dnipro in view of the lands he had loved so much, so that his remains could be in sight of the boundless fields of Ukraine and where the river’s waters roared. I said that he had gotten his wish because Taras’s Hill, as it is now named, fulfills these requirements. However, to be correct, I should point out that one cannot actually hear a roar from the river at the grave site any longer, because it is not actually the natural river that flows below but the waters from the Kaniv Dam about seven kilometers upstream. The river is slowed as its waters enter the northern reaches of the Kremenchuk Reservoir, a short distance downstream. Thus, the sound along the banks is not a roar, but a lapping of gentle waves against the shore. Shevchenko would probably have been disappointed with the changes. The Dnipro’s width is mighty indeed at Kaniv, about a full kilometer across, but this is because of waters that had backed up behind the Kremenchuk Dam and flooded the valley upstream. It is a good thing that the bard had the foresight to reserve a hilltop site for himself rather than one directly beside the waters. If Shevchenko were to see what Soviet dam building has done to the Dnipro, he would doubtlessly have taken a pen in hand and write. He would have found the words to say, unequivocally and tersely, that with their reservoirs, the Soviets drowned his beloved Ukraine. Not the whole country, of course,

[Figure 7.1: The Kremenchuk Reservoir and surroundings]

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but he would right that, squarely in the center, where the Ukrainian spirit was particularly strong and where the fields stretched from horizon to horizon, there is now only foreign water. Because the Kremenchuk Reservoir measures 2,250 square kilometers in area and, at its widest, is 28 kilometers across, he would almost certainly have referred to it as a sea, just as people today refer to it not as a river but as the Kremenchuk Sea. He would describe it cuttingly as an affront to Ukrainian life, the happiest villages, the richest land, and a river that once flowed freely. He would say something as well about the poisons from Chornobyl that lie beneath in potentially lethal quantities, much like they have accumulated in the sands beneath the Kyiv Sea and other reservoirs. Shevchenko would also write about what was drowned, finding exactly the right words in brilliant economy. He would say that along the banks of the Dnipro, there were once towns, villages, schools, churches, and cemeteries; that there were once people, along with their neighbors, family members, and memories; and that church bells under water no longer toll, that grave sites no longer have visitors bringing flowers and prayers, and that the history of Uk­ rainians and the peoples who preceded them on these lands is forevermore committed to darkness.* And for sure he would add that not once were the people in these towns and villages consulted by the “dam powers” about whether they wanted a dam in the first place, whether they wanted their most intimate worlds to be flooded. At least that is how I understand Taras Shevchenko, the man and the Ukrainian patriot. The time when the Kremenchuk Dam was built (1954–1960) was still a dark period in Soviet life, although Stalin had already died, in 1953, and Soviet citizens had been taught to accept their fate and submit to the interests of the state. Most of them did just that, although we know from informal oral histories that some villagers spoke out and had tried to prevent the demolition of their homes by chaining themselves to their properties. Details about how people were informed that their towns and villages would soon be under water and how they responded are rapidly being lost, as the few remaining eyewitnesses die, one after the other, every passing year. Yet, enough accounts have been gathered from now-elderly evictees to confirm what we would have expected: despite being told about better days to come, *  Archaeological treasures from ancient cultures on Ukrainian lands were submerged before they could be studied, and their artifacts are probably lost forever.

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with electricity and industry, the eviction process was painful and people were not happy to be forced out of their homes. In each village, people were called to a general meeting and informed that the dam being built just upriver from Kremenchuk would soon bring floodwaters to their lands, and that by a particular date some weeks ahead, they would have to gather their things and be ready for an en masse transport to their new homes. There was compensation from the state for their material losses, but it was minimal. There were tearful questions about churches, cemeteries, and orchards, and villagers did have the opportunity to disinter loved ones for reburial elsewhere, although in most cases this was impractical because every villager had large numbers of family members that were buried in family plots. The tasks of packing and moving fell disproportionately on the women, as husbands, fathers, and brothers had been killed in the war. The only talk about a better day came from compliant villagers, to whom local Communist Party officials had entrusted the task of rallying support for the transition and answering questions. That everyone else was sad is confirmed by the faces in rare photos of evictees and moving trucks.

[Figure 7.2: Evictees on the move from a village about to be drowned by the Kremenchuk Reservoir]

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Exactly what was drowned in what numbers was unspoken for a long time, as if the details were state secrets (Salo and Stek 2012). There probably exist precise details in some lonely archive of Soviet ledger books that will be uncovered someday. However, it is known from inquiries by journalists and researchers in local museums that the total number of people who were displaced by the Kremenchuk Reservoir was about 133,000, and that a total of 212 settlements of various sizes and some 39,600 residences were flooded.* In order to clear a way for the construction of the dam itself, 25 settlements were evacuated before the others, the largest of which was a small town named Novoheorhiivsk. It had stood on the left bank of the Dnipro at the mouth of the Tyasmin River since 1615, and was once named Kryliv. Photos from the turn of the twentieth century show a prosperous-looking main street with shops made of brick, at least four school buildings, and a public library on a street named after Rosa Luxemburg, a Marxist theorist and revolutionary activist from early in the twentieth century. The town is also known to have had a furniture factory, a busy shop that manufactured horse-drawn carriages and wagons, and a brick works, and is reported to have made an unusually rapid recovery in economy and reconstruction after World War II. Residents were especially proud of the many fruit trees they had planted so that the town would have another, sustainable source of income, as well as a war memorial that they had constructed with photographic images of local residents who had died in the fighting. Just before Doomsday, in 1959, Novoheorhiivsk had a population of 9,343. Most of the residents of Novoheorhiivsk were resettled in a planned new town that was built specifically to house them. They were joined by people from the 24 other dam-site settlements nearby and by dam workers who were brought in from elsewhere. At first, the new town was named Khrushchev, after the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, and then, from 1962 to 1969, it was renamed Kremhes (or “KremHES” as in Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Station). It was eventually given the name it still has, Svitlovodsk, a made-up word in “Sovietese” that combines “light” and “water” and that implies the generating of electricity from water. It is located in Kirovohrad Oblast at the right bank of the Kremenchuk Dam, and is only 13 *  Online at: http://pres-centr.ck.ua/print/news-9100.html [last accessed: February 10, 2017].

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kilometers from the center of Kremenchuk, a larger city across the river in Poltava Oblast. The population of Svitlovodsk is currently about 50,000. It is a pretty town as far as Soviet city planning goes, with wide streets bordered by rows of trees and nice parks and public squares, but a dominant element in the landscape is a smelter that prepared metals for use by the Soviet defense industry. It was a notorious polluter of both air and water, but the industry was vital and it was a place of work, so it was not wise to complain. Since the time of Ukrainian independence, the Museum of Local History and Culture in Svitlovodsk has devoted special attention as to how and why the city was founded, adding as one of its key attractions the image of a large Christian cross on which are written the names of the 25 villages and towns that were lost in the construction of the dam. In addition to people from Novoheorhiivsk, other refugees from the rising waters of the Kremenchuk Sea found new lives in Kremenchuk or Cherkasy, the two biggest cities in the region, or made their way to more distant cities, such as Kyiv. Likewise, it was common for displaced people to move to wherever in Ukraine (or Russia) they had relatives. However, most people did not want to go far, and in quite a few instances new villages with the same names as before were built on higher ground and populated by the people who had been forced out of the previous village. There may also have been evictees who left the area altogether, jumping at an opportunity to work far, far away on some other oversized Soviet project, perhaps even one that flooded a valley elsewhere. With time, most of the resettled refugees adapted to their new environment and a new mix of neighbors, but there is ample evidence that for many people, the transition was difficult. A fine article in an issue of the highly respected Ukrain’ska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth) includes insights based on interviews from surviving transplants in Svitlovodsk (Salo and Stek 2012). They report that about 15,000 people who were uprooted in the late 1950s still live in the city, but that their numbers are plummeting each year because of age, and that therefore it is necessary to have them share their memories as soon as possible. A woman who was 88 in 2012, Liubov Dmytrivna Shchukina, spoke nostalgically about her childhood near Novoheorhiivsk, even though she came from deep poverty in a small family house that got so cold in winter that the water bucket routinely froze over during the pre-dawn hours. It was not much of a house, she said, but it was built by the men in her

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family, and the garden and orchards were everyone’s work, keeping the family alive. Residents were ordered to demolish their homes and other buildings by a given date and to cut down all trees. Presumably, this was to reduce hazards to navigation, because the Kremenchuk Sea was not going to be particularly deep (the average depth is six meters). Such a directive was very painful, because in Ukraine rural people are strongly attached to their land and the improvements they make to it. For them, a tract of rich chornozem (Ukraine’s fertile black soil; also chernozem) is an insurance against starvation, because the harder one works the land, the more it yields. To tear down one’s house and destroy living things means the onset of death. Stalin understood this very well, and in orchestrating the Holodomor of the early 1930s, he tried to break the spirit of the nation by taking away lands and food supplies (Conquest 2001). Liubov Dmytrivna Shchukina reported that her grandmother was unwilling to demolish her farmstead, so officials bulldozed it before her eyes. She also said that people were especially pained by the fact that the cutting of trees was ordered for the summer, when everything was in bloom. Residents of Novoheorhiivsk did not want to destroy their beloved orchards that were just coming into production, nor the twin rows of birch trees that grew so thick on either side of the town’s streets, so that they formed, in her words, a “natural green tunnel.” “This could have been done in the spring or in winter, but not in summer when everything was in bloom and pleasant fragrances were everywhere,” she continued. “For many people this was an unforgettable incident that left them with the deepest of wounds.” In fact, so strong was people’s hurt that she reported that in about ten (unverifiable) instances, people who had been ordered to cut down their trees threw their axes to the ground and climbed the trees to hang themselves. So soon after the traumas of World War II, people had had enough and felt broken. The great Soviet Ukrainian writer and social activist, Oles Honchar (1918–1995), understood the unusual grief that villagers were experiencing. In response to similar directives about cutting trees for the benefit of the Kakhovka Reservoir, which reportedly displaced a population of 50,000, he wrote the following: I could not have imagined a situation so cruel—to take down people’s homes and to destroy the fruits of nature before their time in the midst of Ukraine’s bountiful summer.

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Liubov added that moving to Svitlovodsk was no solution for village people, even if they wound up in a roomier apartment. Her mother, she said, did not have much use for the piped water in her new residence, and complained until her death that she was living without the river. Indeed, many people who were displaced from Novoheorhiivsk and other small settlements reportedly took the first opportunity to leave the Soviet-built apartments and moved to other parts of the new city, where single homes were permitted. Upriver from the Kremenchuk Sea is the Kaniv Reservoir, the newest of the six dam-reservoir complexes on the Dnipro in Ukraine, dating from 1963– 1975. There are similar stories here. Among the villages that were covered by rising waters was Rudiakiv, located in the Boryspil district of Kyiv Oblast. Its evicted residents had “scattered across Ukraine in search of a better fate,” but came back with high attendance for a reunion more than 40 year later. Their conversations at the water’s edge in summer 2011 were covered by a reporter from an online source called Nezboryma natsiya, “Invincible Nation.” As far as I know, this was an unusual event, and I am glad that it got coverage by a member of the media.* The reporter’s preamble also makes a point to emphasize the strong connection of the Ukrainian people to their lands, and speaks specifically about the Ukrainian heartland and the flooded villages along the Dnipro. My free translation of the hyper-nostalgic and politically charged text is as follows: The ancient villages along the Dnipro—they are the cradles of the Ukrainian national spirit. It was above all in these villages that native traditions and customs were passed down from generation to generation, in legends and tales, and in memories and song. The waters of the Dnipro gave life and strength to the people who had lived for ages in harmony with nature along its shores.

*  I do not know this publication except for this article, which is well written and rings true. It is on-line at http://nezboryma-naciya.org.ua/show.php?id=648 [last accessed: February 10, 2017]. Other articles cover interesting aspects of Ukraine’s nationhood too. However, the banner of the website is a bit troubling in that it is very strongly nationalistic with the slogan Ukrainska derzhava ponad use (“An independent Ukraine above all else”) and a logo that looks somewhat fascistic. The title of the publication, “Invincible Nation,” can also be interpreted as being strongly (and perhaps discomfortingly) nationalistic.

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The area of the Dnipro had survived many tragic periods of war and other horrible events. Had there ever been more terrible methods of evil destruction than those carried out by the Soviet government? At first they suffocated the nation with famine and repressions. They sent people to prison for wearing Ukrainian embroidery, singing a patriotic song, honoring the soldiers who had defended the national cause… Furthermore, it is in these Ukrainian villages that Ukrainian Cossacks were born and raised, as well as chumaky (storied traders in salt), wheat farmers, and other good people who believed that Ukraine has both a history and a future, and that there is no power that can eradicate their people from the face of this planet. However, an evil force destroyed tens of villages in Left Bank Ukraine, in Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyiv, and Chernihiv Oblasts… How many such villages were drowned? Did anyone even count them? Like the people of Novoheorhiivsk, the villagers of Rudiakiv lived according to the rhythms of nature. They reminisced at the reunion that each year, they awaited the spring floods, because the Dnipro’s waters nourished their lands, and that every family had a small boat that was used for visiting neighbors, taking children to school, and even transporting livestock to pasture. The waters of the river were clean and tasty, people said, and they did their laundry in the river. Furthermore, they described the village as being so picturesque that more than once it was used as a film set: white-washed houses with thatched roofs, vines on the fences, sunflowers, poppies, strong willow trees, bountiful fruit orchards, and other beautiful arrangements of nature— all of this was a decorative background for moviemakers. What is more, villagers were hired as actors to play themselves. It was like this for decades, they said with sadness, until it was all taken away. The main exodus from Rudiakiv was in 1968, and the last resident left in 1972. And like in Novoheorhiivsk, the villagers were told to leave their plots levelled: to take apart their homes, remove the building materials, and cut town and burn their fruit trees. They had to take down their church, too, although long ago the Soviets had demolished its domes and converted the structure into a barn. In this way, the government deliberately ordered people to destroy with their own hands that which they had built themselves, had improved and maintained over the years, and which they had planted. People with enough strength dug up the graves of their family members for reinternment elsewhere or for burial in communal graves. There were three cemeteries in the village, and in the end,

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a bulldozer leveled each one. The older residents cried especially hard and did not want to leave. For them, eviction and the destruction of the village was a massive trauma, and they preferred to die then and there. “The Soviet government was bent on drowning the Ukrainian spirit. Of this the villagers who gathered in reunion near the site of Rudiakiv are totally convinced,” concluded the article in “Invincible Nation.”

7.2: Nostalgia The great writer Mykola Hohol (1809–1852) is also from this region, although not from lands that became seas. He was born in the Cossack village of Sorochyntsi in Poltava Oblast, and spent the first 19 years of his life in Left Bank Ukraine. He wrote in Russian, as was expected of the literati of his time, about many topics and many settings, including Russia’s beautiful capital city, Saint Petersburg. He is more widely known by his Russian name, Nikolai Gogol. Among his well-known works are the collection of short stories called Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, depicting the land of his childhood with affection, and the book Myrhorod, named after a small town near his birthplace, in which he continues his colorful story-telling. This book is also famous for nostalgic descriptions of Ukrainian landscapes, village life, and city life (Kyiv), and for new sets of interesting characters. With the wry sense of humor and the insider insights that pervade these writings, he introduces Myrhorod (the town) with an invented quotation from an invented textbook titled Geo­ graphy by the invented scholar “Zyablovsky”. The two passages below are from a recent translation of Hohol into Ukrainian (Hohol, 2015, 217), beside which are my own translations: Миргород вельми невелике При річці Хоролі місто. Має 1 канатну фабрику, 1 цегельню, 4 водяні та 45 вітряних млинів

Myrhorod is a somewhat smallish town on the river Khorol. It has one rope factory, one brickyard, four waterwheels and forty-five windmills.

He adds “flavor” to the town by quoting a passage from a made-up Notes of a Traveler:

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Хоч у Миргороді печуть бублики з чорного тіста, але напрочуд смачні.

Even though in Myrhorod they bake bublyky from black dough, they are actually quite tasty.*

The Ukrainian heartland also attracted the attention of landscape painters. Common themes were picturesque villages, endless fields and steppes, and views of the Dnipro. Often, the rural scenes showed farmers working in the fields, livestock, or pretty women drawing water or doing other chores, while views of the open steppes sometimes showed Cossacks on horseback or encamped for the night. Some of this art is attributed to painters of the Russian peredvizniki school (Russian for “wanderers” or “itinerants”), who created moving portraits of social inequality and injustice (e.g., Ilya Repin’s “Barge Haulers on the Volga” (1870–1873) and “Religious Procession in Kursk Province” (1880–1883)), and beautiful landscape scenes from across the Russian Empire (e.g., Isaak Levitan’s “The Vladimirka (Road)” from 1892, “Over Eternal Peace” from 1894, and “Golden Autumn” from 1895). The member of this group who is most associated with scenes from Ukraine’s heartland and the River Dnipro was Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842–1910). Born in Mariupol (Ukraine) and fond of landscapes in the darkness, his best known works include “Evening in Ukraine” (1878–1901), “Moonlight Night on the Dnipro” (1880), “The Dnipro in the Morning” (1881), and “Red Sunset on the Dnipro,” as well as scenes from Russia (“Lake Ladoga”) and Armenia (“Elbrus in the Evening”). As with other wanderers, Kuindzhi’s work emphasized nature’s majesty. Another notable painter of the Ukrainian landscape was Kyiv-born Volodymyr Orlovsky (1842–1914), whom none other than Taras Shevchenko recommended for art school in Saint Petersburg and who is regarded as one of the founders of Ukrainian realist landscape painting. Among his many works are “Midday,” “Summer Day in Ukraine,” “Kislovodsk” (the name of a village), “Farm House,” “Landscape,” “Ukrainian Landscape,” and “Landscape with Swamp.” In most of his paintings, the grandeur of the bucolic scenery is emphasized by the insertion of a lone human being (or two) who appears (or appear) insignificant in size in comparison to the surroundings. His “Outskirts of Kyiv” (1884) presents the spectacular majesty of the Dnipro from a *  Bublyky are bread rolls that are similar in shape to bagels, but with a larger hole in the center.

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hill so high that it has to be the result of artistic liberties. Just as prolific, if not more so, was Serhii Vasylkivskyi (1854–1917), a native of Izium near Kharkiv. His works also have telling titles: “Cossack Meadow” (1893), “A Quiet Evening in Poltava,” “Washing Day in Ukraine,” “A Ukrainian Landscape,” “Springtime in Ukraine” (1883), “A Herd outside the Village” (1890s), “Windmill,” “Windmills,” “Rural Landscape,” “Cossack Picket” (1888), and “Cossacks in the Steppe.” There are also Petro Levchenko (“In Ukraine” from 1907), Mykola Pymonenko (“At the River” from the 1900s), and Mykola Murashko, (“A View of the Dnipro” from the 1890s).* One of the highest points along the Dnipro is a hill made of glacial debris named Pyvykha. It is 168 meters high and located in the small town of Hradzyk, on the Left Bank of the Kremenchuk Sea just upriver from the Kremenchuk Dam. The hill is also reportedly the highest point in all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro. The view from there is spectacular. This high point charmed another noted artist (and philosopher, naturalist, archaeologist, writer, hypnotist, and world traveler), Mykola (Nikolai) Konstantynovych Rerikh, who was born in Saint Petersburg in 1874 and died in India in 1947. He was a student of Arkhip Kuindzi. He lived a very full life that is worth reading about (Drayer 2005), including several years in the United States, where he was first a guest of the Chicago Art Institute and then a resident of New York City. In the United States he was known as Nicholas Roerich. His former brownstone on West 107th Street is a museum with more than 100 of his paintings. I know of two paintings by him with views of the Dnipro. One, painted in 1901, is called “Guest from Overseas,” and shows a Varangian (Viking) ship in Rus’, with what might be the hills of Kyiv in the background, while the other is a view atop Pyvykha. Painted in 1914, it is called “Prokyp Pravednyi (Prokyp the Righteous) Prays for Unknown Boatmen” and shows a holy man, the fictitious Prokyp, immersed in prayer on the mountain top, while far below sailing ships safely navigate the Dnipro. It is a beautiful piece of work that, along with a number of other works by this aficionado of the occult and hypnotism, has hypnotic qualities.

*  Many of these paintings are reproduced in the beautiful commemorative book Kobzar i Ukraina that was put together in 2013 by the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko in L’viv.

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[Figure 7.3: “Landscape in Ukraine” by Volodymyr Orlovsky (1883)]

The picturesque heartland of Ukraine is still very much present in the oblasts near the Kremenchuk Sea, and it is easy for us to wax nostalgic, too, as did the many writers and painters of the Ukrainian landscape we have mentioned and the aging Ukrainians who once lived in Novoheorhiivsk, Rudiakiv, and other settlements that had been taken from them by the rising waters. Harsh winters aside, the lands are truly charming, rich, and productive. In today’s time, we see gently rolling hills on both banks of the sea, with expansive fields of wheat, corn, soybeans, or sunflowers, as well as untilled meadows with high grasses and wildflowers that stretch to the horizon. There are stands of forests, too, and along streams and on the banks of ponds and other wetlands there are willows, poplars, and birch trees. Everywhere there is life: birds, butterflies, and insects, as well as noisy frogs among the lily pads in still waters. We are never far from a village. Since the end of Communist rule, each village built its own church with golden domes that gleam in the distance. Every village has rows of neat little farmhouses that stretch along the main street, while in some villages there are also larger, new homes with today’s amenities that have been built by more prosperous residents or by urbanites as second homes. Every house has its own plot of ground that is fenced in and intensively cultivated. The private plots are narrow along the street frontage and extend far back to form grossly elongated rectangles. Flowers grow along the fences and beside the gates in front of each house, while fruit trees overhang property lines and drop apples, apricots, or cherries below. Barking dogs greet us as we pass. Chickens, goats, and cows enjoy meals beside the road, while other cows graze on a hill slope nearby. There is a small shop in every village and a com-

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munity center building from Soviet days, and perhaps a school as well. In some places there is still a statue of Lenin in front of one or the other building, but these and other symbols of the past are rapidly disappearing. The people are friendly and greet strangers, because in these parts everybody knows everybody, and no one should feel unwelcome. The population is disproportionately elderly, and it is often older women in what used to be called “house dresses” who we see digging up weeds or tending to the flowerbeds. Young people have gone to the cities or, in ever-greater numbers, to work abroad. The population totals in every village are smaller as a result, and there are more and more empty houses with plots of land that are no longer being tended to. Electric and gas lines are ubiquitous, as are satellite dishes affixed to people’s roofs. Occasional villages still do not have piped water and depend on hand pumps and buckets, and wooden outhouses with pits as toilets, but such arrangements are now increasingly rare. I wax nostalgic, because “village Ukraine” recalls a happy past in a rich land. I am aware, of course, that these same villages are also places of great misery and terror, as Ukraine has seen more than its share of warfare, ethnic and religious strife, and the unspeakable inhumanity of both the Shoah and the Holodomor. Details about these events in local areas are passed down from generation to generation, and for Ukraine as a whole they are now (after independence) mandated lessons in schools across the entire country. I am aware that many villages are poor and in danger of disappearing because of the aging population and rural to urban migration. Even so, all in all life in Ukraine’s heartland is generally good, even if there is not much money for extras of any kind. Even the most citified Ukrainians celebrate the countryside and associate it with warm people, fresh air, healthy foods, and the keeping of time-old traditions.

7.3: Cities and Towns The cities and small towns in the area of the Kremenchuk Sea are heartland, too, and also reflect the history, cultures, and economic activities of Ukraine today and yesterday. Among the smaller towns that we have already visited is Kaniv, where Taras Shevchenko is buried on a high hill and where there is a monument to him and a very fine museum. The city’s history is even richer, as

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it was founded by Prince Yaroslav the Wise in the eleventh century and was once one of the largest cities in Kyivan Rus’. Today Kaniv has only a little more than 25,000 residents and lives off tourism and Ukraine’s heartland staple, food processing from the agricultural hinterland: chickens, eggs, milk, cheese, vegetables and fruits, and a candy factory. Furthermore, Kaniv has its own dam across the river, above which is the Kaniv Reservoir. We have also visited Chyhyryn, an even smaller city (with a population of 11,960) on the lower reaches of the Tyasmyn River, a tributary of the Dnipro. The town is associated with Bohdan Khmelnytskyi and the Ukrainian Cossacks. It, too, has a high hill that is a tourist attraction: Khmelnytskyi’s old house, the ruins of an old fortress, and a panoramic view of the town below, the surrounding countryside, and the much-enlarged Dnipro in the distance. The old capital of New Serbia, Novomyrhorod, is also in this heartland, on the Velyka Vys River in Kirovohrad Oblast. It has about 12,000 residents and is a local market town for a picturesque and productive farming region. It once had a large and prosperous Jewish population in a shtetl named Zlotopil (“golden field”), but its residents fell victim first to pogroms in 1918–1920, and then to the Holocaust. Smila, in Cherkasy Oblast, is a larger town with about 68,000 residents. It has a diverse industrial base that includes sugar refining, milk-candy making, and brewing, as well as electrical machinery and machines for food processing. A newer enterprise manufactures GPS navigation devices. The city’s population profile, however, reflects the economic woes of Ukraine and outmigration to places of better work, because as recently as 1989, just before the end of the Soviet era, Smila had a population of 89,000. In western Cherkasy Oblast is Uman (with a population of 86,911), still another city with an industrial and agricultural base, but one that is known more for its history of political and military conflict and for its Jewish population. In 1734, 1750, and 1768, there were Cossack uprisings against Polish rule that were called the haidamaky uprisings. The revolt of 1768, led by Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Gonta, succeeded in capturing Uman, but was followed immediately by the unspeakable massacre of some 20,000 Poles, Jews, Jesuit priests, and Uniate Catholics by the Cossack mobs. Taras Shev­ chenko’s longest poem, the epic Haidamaky, is an account of what happened. It decries the killings, but looks sympathetically at Ukraine’s struggle for self-rule. The violence spread to other cities and towns over 1768–1769, with an aim to not only free Ukraine from Poland, but also to cleanse the popula-

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tion of non-Ukrainian Orthodox minorities, and is referred to as the Koliyivshchyna Rebellion, from the Ukrainian word “to impale.” Much later, the Germans murdered 17,000 more Jews when they occupied Uman in World War II. Today, however, Uman is a bustling pilgrimage site for Hassidic Jewish followers of the charismatic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), who is buried in the city. During every Rosh Hashana since 1811 there has been a pilgrimage by Hasidic Jews to his burial place, but since Ukrainian independence, what was a trickle of faithful before has turned into big numbers. In 2009, some 25,000 Hassidic pilgrims arrived for the holiday from Israel on chartered El-Al flights. The large number of visitors has overwhelmed the city and strained infrastructure, and has led to tensions between pilgrims and the local population. There has been violence, too, some of it unfortunately a reflection of long-standing stereotypes and prejudices that are held by some Ukrainians and some Jews. There are also increasing numbers of Jews who have resettled permanently in Uman because of the town’s association with Rebbe Nachman. They form a tight community near the burial site and a rebuilt synagogue, and are engaged in the hospitality business for pilgrims and tourists. The two largest cities that are directly on the Dnipro or Kremenchuk Sea are Kremenchuk (with a population of 225,900), the second-largest city in Poltava Oblast, and Cherkasy (with a population of 286,037), the largest city and seat of government for Cherkasy Oblast. They are different from one another, but they are also quintessentially heartland Ukraine. Kremenchuk is an industrial city of much greater importance than its population total would suggest, and is noted as the home base of the KraZ truck manufacturing plant and Ukrtatnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil refinery. The city also makes railway cars, as it has done since 1869, being one of the oldest railway car manufacturers in Europe. Light industry includes tobacco products, chocolates, and milk and meat processing. A very large complex of grain elevators and conveyors for loading grain onto ships is located just outside city below the Kremenchuk Dam, reflecting the economy of the surrounding countryside and Kremenchuk’s ties to the agricultural heartland. The city was more than 90 percent destroyed during World War II, so its buildings are almost all from afterwards and in a Soviet style. Uniform apartment blocks called khrushchovky—because they were built in the 1950s and 1960s when Nikita Khrushchev directed the Soviet Union—dominate the urban landscape. Locals describe

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their city almost apologetically as being radianskyi (Soviet in appearance), without much historical fabric (although the city dates to 1571) and without a vernacular architecture that expresses a Ukrainian soul. It is, however, a fine city with wide streets lined with trees and many parks (Figure 7.4). Quite a large number of public buildings sport colorful mosaics with Soviet themes about heroism in war, togetherness in labor, and the people’s happiness as Soviet citizens. The statue of Lenin in front of the city hall, however, has been pulled down for the cause of post-Euromaidan Ukrainian patriotism, and his pedestal is empty except for graffiti. There is a wide beach along the Dnipro within minutes walking distance from the very center of town. When the weather is nice, it is crowded with bathers and sun seekers, volleyball enthusiasts, and others townsfolk. On holidays and weekends, cafés and nightclubs at the beach stay busy till dawn.

[Figure 7.4: Soviet-style street landscape in the city of Kremenchuk]

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During the cold war, Kremenchuk was an important base for Soviet military operations and intercontinental missiles pointed at the United States. The city was, therefore, not fully accessible to all Soviet citizens, and was mostly closed to visits by foreigners. However, there was a place just outside the city called Nimetskyi Plazh (“German Beach”), where East Germans and other foreigners from the former Soviet bloc were able to relax on the shores of the Dnipro. This was at Zelenyi Ostriv (“Green Island”), a long island in the river upstream from Kremenchuk and within sight of the city, just minutes below the sluice of the Kremenchuk Dam and a popular stop on Kyiv-toBlack Sea (Odesa or Crimea) river cruises that allowed tourists some hours, or even days, of beach time before continuing southward. However, they did not visit Kremenchuk itself, nor did they interact with local residents. During the Soviet period, the Zelenyi Ostriv rest stop was tightly controlled, and passengers did not venture far from where their vessel was docked. After the Soviet period, residents of Kremenchuk and other settlements nearby began to visit the undeveloped island for private beaches and camping, making use of informal ferry services. Many people built small huts or other shelters and claimed informal squatters’ rights. They wrote their telephone numbers on a signboard attached to a tree, and in the age of mobile phones expected to be called for permission by visitors who wanted to make use of their improvements in their absence. Visitors were to leave the grounds clean and make additional improvements if staying for a while. On a recent tour I saw dozens of rudimentary shelters along the waters’ edge, and many signs with telephone numbers (Figure 7.5). However, there were also shacks and other improvements that had been taken down, apparently by authorities trying to curtail squatting and unauthorized construction. Articles in the local media confirmed this.* I also saw that part of the riverfront near the island has recently been developed with large, modern single homes, suggesting that gentrification is a possibility for the future of Zelenyi Ostriv.

*  For example, http://www.telegraf.in.ua/kremenchug/10021887-na-ostrove-zelenyysnosyat-poslednie-postroyki-dlya-otdyha-foto.html [last accessed: February 10, 2017].

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[Figure 7.5: Camping today along the river on Zeleny Ostriv near Kremenchuk]

The largest city in the area is Cherkasy, the government seat for Cherkasy Oblast. It is located on the Right Bank and has a long history as a Cossack city. It was a center of both the Khmelnytsky and Koliyivshchyna Rebellions, and suffered great damage and losses of life during the anti-Polish actions of 1768. After the 1793 Second Partition of Poland, the city became part of the Russian Empire and was redesigned according to a rigid grid plan of streets and square blocks by the Russian architect and city planner of Scottish descent, William Heste. The grid is aligned with the river and characterizes the central part of the city even today. The city’s prosperity during the sugar booms of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is in evidence in the center in surviving ornate, neoclassical architectural gems: the former Slovyanskyi Hotel that is now a bank building, a lavish private residence that the Soviets made into a children’s center and that since 1983 has been a wedding palace, and the Kobzar Museum about Shevchenko and his works. During Soviet times, Cherkasy became a major center of the chemical industry. The largest factory was Azot, a maker of nitrogen fertilizers, while others were Himvolokno, a manufacturer of artificial fibers, and Himreaktyv,

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a maker of chemicals for military uses.* The city is a major cultural center, with a number of museums, theaters, and concert halls, as well as universities and technical colleges. Its main statue of Lenin came down in 2008 and the square where it stood was renamed Soborna Square (Cathedral Square) instead of Lenin Square. The waterfront on the Kremenchuk Sea is 17 kilometers long and lined with beaches, parks, pine forests, and scenic views. In good summer weather, like in Kremenchuk, much of the city’s population can be found at the water’s edge. There are also zones of dachas both up- and downriver with easy access to the “sea,” and beaches that stretch for kilometer after kilometer. One of my fondest memories of Cherkasy is a day spent picnicking with friends at a wooded spot along the sands some kilometers upriver from the city. Drivers pull off the local road and drive along trails among the trees, until they find a place that has not yet been taken by others and that has just the right combination of sun, shade, privacy, and secluded access to sands along the water, as well as a place to park. On this beautiful summer day, there were families and groups of friends camped out for the day every few meters along the water, enjoying themselves with food and drink, games, music, song, and, of course, dips in the Kremenchuk Sea. Almost everywhere, a culinary staple was shashlyk, skewered meat and vegetables prepared over a wood fire or coals for barbequing. Sunset comes late in this northern latitude and light lingers long, so people stay well into the evening. So do mosquitos. In the distance, to the south, are the twinkling lights of Cherkasy.

7.4: Orbita My stay in Cherkasy was highlighted by another drive downriver, instead of upriver. Not only to see Chyhyryn and Bohdan’s (Khmelnytskyi) Hill and Subotiv, where Khmelnytskyi was born and buried and where there is the hydrological curiosity of three adjacent wells whose spring waters are all different to the taste; there were two places on the shores of the sea that left a lasting (and contrasting) impression. I think of one as a last look at the end of the Soviet impact on Ukraine, and the other as perhaps a herald of Ukraine’s *  In both the latter examples, the “Him” comes from the root for “chemical.”

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future. The first is near the village of Vitove, which is at the Dnipro near Chyhyryn and found in a heavily wooded area off a lonely paved road that leads from the local highway toward the sea. The road is in poor repair, with weeds sprouting from cracks in the pavement. It leads to Orbita, as in “orbit” or “space age,” a place that few people know or remember except for locals. Ukrainians refer to it as a misto pryvyd, a ghost town (Figure 7.6). It was built in the 1970s to house workers who had been recruited to build an electrical power plant that was, at first, to be based on hydroelectric energy but that planners in Moscow decided should be a nuclear power plant instead. A small city of high-rise apartment towers and supporting services was constructed, although never completed, as well as the beginnings of the Soviet Union’s newest and most advanced nuclear power plant, the Chyhyryn Atomic Energy Station. The town was supposed to have housed several thousand inhabitants: first the construction workers and then the employees of the power plant, and, according to a 1972 issue of the Community Party organ Pravda Ukrainy (“Ukrainian Truth”), it was to have its own schools, palace of culture, shopping center, movie theater, medical clinic … and youth (“pioneer”) center, as well as a beautiful beach (Burlakova 2012). However, in 1986 the entire project was called off because of the disaster upriver at Chornobyl. Residents of nearby towns and villages protested that a similar fate might await them, and were eventually heard: construction work stopped and the workers and their families left. Only some 80–100 people are left in a building across a stretch of forest from the main part of old Orbita, where they reportedly live as squatters without any services. It is hard to tell what was what in the town, except for the tall apartment buildings, as subsequent visitors have picked through what was left behind and have taken whatever was in any way portable. Not a pane of glass is intact; there are graffiti and litter everywhere; and broken staircases, missing floorboards, and gaping holes through the outer brick walls that make exploring the higher floors even more of an adventure. Winds blow through the buildings and weeds and new trees encroach from all sides, and grow even on upper floors and on rooftops, such that it is possible to envision that one day, nature will consume the supposed model city in its entirety. Orbita is almost always silent, as if to emphasize that the Soviet’s dream is over, but the main body of visitors, now that there is nothing left to steal, come for the experience of seeing a thrown-away place and for thrills: bungee jumping, paintball warfare, and high altitude encounters with beer and vodka.

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[Figure 7.6: The ghost city of Orbita]

Not far away is Point 2. As Orbita fades into the surrounding forest, about one kilometer away at what would have been part of the power plant complex is a large, gleaming new complex of grain silos and conveyors for loading Ukraine’s agricultural exports onto ships. I counted 12 cylindrical storage elevators along the water’s edge. There was no ship docked on the day I visited and everything was quiet, but my mood was lifted by the thought that here, in the heartland of Ukraine, they were indeed growing marketable crops in big quantities, and that people were making a living as a result. The complex belongs to a Ukrainian-owned private company called Nibulon, Ltd., that was founded in 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. It is headquartered in Mykoliav, a port city near the Black Sea, and is one of the leading crop producers in Ukraine, having more than 80,000 hectares of land under cultivation, and is the country’s largest exporter of agricultural commodities. In addition to the silos near Orbita, Nibulon owns crop silos at other river ports, as well as inland facilities for storage and trade of grain and oil-bearing crops and a seaport transshipment terminal on the Buh River near the Black Sea.

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Nibulon is agribusiness to be sure, and not the traditional Ukrainian family farm about which we have warm and fuzzy thoughts. But it is Ukrainian agribusiness and not a foreign company, and I take comfort in the thought that in the heartland of Ukraine there are farmers, truck drivers, freight rail workers, dock workers, and workers on ships that ply the river and sea lanes to foreign markets, among others, who are gainfully employed because Ukraine’s farm lands are so uncommonly rich.

[Figure 7.7: Grain elevators on the right bank of the Dnipro near the Kremenchuk Dam]

CHAPTER 8

At the Great Bend of the Dnipro

8.1: Introduction As we make our way downriver from the latitude of the Kremenchuk Sea, we eventually come to a part of Ukraine I call the “Great Bend.” The term refers to two sharp turns in the course of the Dnipro, both of them to the right (when facing downriver), with the result that they form a “U” or tight arc that opens to the west. It looks almost like a U-turn. The bends are plainly visible on any map of Ukraine or Europe where the outline of the river is shown and are immediately recognizable as an unusual configuration of course. The first turn is at the city of Dnipro, which is about 225 kilometers downriver from the dam that forms the Kremenchuk Sea, a decisive shift southward after previously flowing mainly east-southeast by way of the Kaniv, Kremenchuk, and Dniprodzerzhynsk (Kamianske) Reservoirs sequence; the second is a turn approximately 90–100 kilometers further downstream, not far below the city of Zaporizhia, where the river again encounters hard-rock obstacles and makes its next right-angle bend, also to the right, from due south to due west. Some distance below Zaporizhia, downriver from the city of Nikopol, the river adjusts its course and flows to the southwest, all the way to the Black Sea. A good part of the latter distance is in the form of the Kakhovka Reservoir. The overall pattern is that the Dnipro winds its way through Ukraine, rather than simply heading south to the Black Sea from the countries to the north, making the area of the Great Bend an especially prominent feature of its course. The Great Bend is an important stop for many reasons. The same underlying geology that sculpted the river’s U-turn also created the series of nine rapids in the due-south section of the river, between Dnipro (city) and Za-

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porizhia, which in turn shaped critical aspects of Ukraine’s history, economy, and settlement patters. The Great Bend also happens to be where the course of the Dnipro leaves the last of the forest zones of Ukraine’s north, i.e., the east-west trending “forest-steppe” biogeographical belt at the latitude of the Kremenchuk Sea, and enters the true steppes of Ukraine, an east-west trending belt of high, lush grasslands and wildflowers that cover the approximate southern one-third of the country. The steppes have also been a determining factor in Ukraine’s history, economy, and settlement patterns. Finally, the geological strata that underlie this southern area of Ukraine contain a truly uncommon quantity and assortment of mineral and energy resources that together created one of the world’s most important heavy industrial regions, an area centered on the major cities along the river at the Great Bend but that extends for some distance away from the river, into both Right Bank and Left Bank Ukraine. The result is that the Great Bend is the hub of a sizable industrial belt that covers a large part of southeastern Ukraine. The presence of these natural resources, coal, iron ore, manganese, and other minerals, as well as the water power potential of the rapids of the Dnipro, also had a great impact on Ukraine’s history, economy, and settlement patterns. Therefore, the Great Bend is a pivotal region that is indispensable for understanding Ukraine.

8.2: Rapids and Steppes Let us begin with the rapids and the steppes. We have already mentioned some key geographical facts in Chapter 2. There were nine major series of rapids (porohy) in succession in the Dnipro between Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro) and Zaporizhia that obstructed the full width of the river, plus some 50 to 60 smaller ones, occupying only a part of the river’s width, making this 90-kilometer stretch of the river truly unique in comparison to the rest of its course through Ukraine, which was quite benign and gentle. The rapids were created because the Dnipro had encountered strata of hard granite and gneiss from the Ukrainian crystalline shield, which is also why the river’s channel was substantially narrower in this particular stretch and its velocity greater, and why the river makes its two prominent bends. The presence of the rapids stimulated early settlement and the building of fortifications at

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both ends of this difficult stretch. River-borne traffic had to bypass the hazards via portage. Eventually, during the time of Russian appropriation of the region, two great cities were founded at the opposite ends of the rough water: Dnipro, originally named Ekaterinoslav (in Ukrainian: Katerynoslav), in 1776, at the upriver end; and Zaporizhia, meaning “beyond the rapids,” in 1770, at the downriver end where the fortress Aleksandrovskaya stood. Other towns were build in this section of river, too, and when industrial resources started to be exploited on a grand scale in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the cities prospered and the entire Great Bend region became highly urbanized. Each of the nine series of rapids had a name. The first names on record are the seven rapids that were mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (i.e., “he who was born in the purple room of the palace”), who ruled from 945 to 959, in his Administration of the Empire (Toynbee, 1973). He wrote their names in Greek, but took them from names in the ancient Norse language of the Varangians, who had christened these rapids during their trade journeys along the Dnipro to the Byzantines. Translations of some of those names are “don’t sleep,” “island-waterfall,” “wavewaterfall,” “roaring,” and “laughing.” The modern-era names for all nine or the major rapids as recorded by Imperial Russian cartographers were as follows (from north to south): 1. Kodatskyi (“near where the Kodak Fortress had stood”) 2. Surskyi (“there were rocks everywhere under the water line”) 3. Lohanskyi 4. Dzvoneskyi (“bell” or “clanging”) 5. Nenasytec (“insatiable”) or Revuchyi (“roaring”) 6. Vovnyzkyi 7. Budylo (“awakened”) 8. Lyshnyi (“superfluous,” probably because this was the least dangerous of the rapids) 9. Vil’nyi (“free”) Text and photos of these rapids are preserved in the aforementioned book from 1928 (see also Chapters 1 and 4) by the eminent Ukrainian scientist Yavornytskyi (2016).

[Figure 8.1: The Dnipro rapids (after Yavornytskyi, 2016)]

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[Figure 8.2: The historic rapids of the Dnipro]

The rapids are especially closely associated with the history of the Cossacks of Ukraine. Although there were prominent Cossack capitals and fortresses in both Left Bank and Right Bank Ukraine, both upriver and downriver near the Dnipro, the area of the rapids and the Great Bend more generally was a special focus of activity that attracted independent “free men,” who rejected life as serfs and who were willing to fight for a better existence. The rapids and islands were easier to defend and, because of relative isolation, more conducive to the forming of an alternative social world where there would be freedoms and democracy. The fortified settlements they built were convenient launching points for raids against the Polish szlachta and defending against northward forays by Tatars, who made a practice of “harvesting the steppes” by taking slaves from exposed villages. In addition to being expert horse riders, the Cossacks learned to build boats (and even sailing vessels for the Black Sea) and became expert river men, reportedly navigating the perils of the cataracts with remarkable success. They learned the intricacies of both the river and the steppes and became faster and more widely mobile than their enemies. In one overnight raid in 1645, the Cossacks sacked a fortress that the Poles had just erected at Kodak at the upstream start of the rapids, killing every one of its defenders; three years later they destroyed the replacement Kodak, three times

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larger than the first, albeit after a long siege, and took it over as their own. They occupied that site until 1711, when Russia’s Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) had it razed as a step toward securing the Russian settlement frontier in Ukraine. The town that was built nearby, Staryi Kodak, became the precursor of the city now named Dnipro.* Cossack fortifications were called sich, a word that possibly originates from a verb for the cutting of trees from which uprights were hewn for stockades. The first sich was constructed in 1552 under orders of Hetman Dmytro Vyshnevestskyi on the island of Khortytsia near the southern-most cataract. This was followed by a sequence of other sich (the Ukrainian plural is sichi with the accent on the second syllable) below the rapids, i.e., za porohamy, the Zaporozhian Sich, including for a time a sich on the distant lower reaches of the Dnipro, when the Cossacks allied with the Tatars. I enumerated these fortified settlements in Chapter 3, and said a word or two about how they looked and how they were organized. The last sich, Nova Sich or “New Sich,” was located on the right bank of the Dnipro below the rapids where the river had turned west. It functioned from 1734 until 1775, when Catherine the Great ordered its destruction to ensure that the Cossacks were brought fully under her control and would pose no threat to Russian colonization. Just like the cataracts, the steppes, too, are intimately tied to Cossack history. They are the “wild fields” where free Cossacks lived wildly, rode horses for great distances through the high grasses, slept under the bare sky, and held dominion over an expansive and thinly settled landscape. Like the Dnipro, which I have defined as a national river, the steppes are an iconic national landscape of Ukraine, and their fiercely independent human inhabitants are prominent parts of a much romanticized Ukrainian history, and considerable nostalgic Ukrainian literature, poetry, song, and art. For example, the folkloric Cossack Mamay, who is said to have roamed the steppes alone after the last Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed in 1775, is a much celebrated symbol of the perseverance of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian spirit. He has been portrayed hundreds of times in paintings, almost always alone in the his steppe habitat, either on his horse or with his horse grazing nearby, and is often playing a kobza, a traditional Ukrainian stringed instrument. Other accoutrements are a high Turkish hat, a curved tobacco pipe, a spear with a pennant, a pistol, *  I wrote about this in Chapter 3 and repeat myself a little here to refresh readers’ memories.

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a powder case, and a container of okovyta, homemade Ukrainian vodka. There are countless other paintings of Cossacks as well, either alone or in groups, in battle or at rest, on horses in the steppes or in some picturesque village by the communal well bidding goodbye to a mother, wife, or girlfriend before heading off for the fight. Probably the most famous painting of Cossacks is the 1891 “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” by the aforementioned Ilya Repin (Chapter 1), an ethnic Ukrainian who was one of the greatest of Imperial Russia’s realist painters. It shows a gathering of Cossacks at some Dnipro-side sich as they are composing a vulgar and insulting letter to Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV in reply to his letter asking them to surrender and submit to his rule. The Cossacks are shown laughing, gesticulating, having fun. At least some of them are surely inebriated, including perhaps even their scribe. A number of them sport the trademark chupryna or an oseledets (a single lock of hair sprouting from a closely-shaved head), as well as long moustaches, some of which have prominently upturned ends. Exactly what these Zaporozhians wrote to the Sultan cannot be repeated here because we are polite company, but just the salutation is enough for a flavor: “Thou Turkish Devil! Brother and companion to the accursed Devil, and Secretary to Lucifer himself, Greetings!” Daring readers are invited to study the full text for themselves by searching for it online. Interestingly, about 20 years before he completed “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,” Repin had painted another masterpiece, “Barge Haulers on the Volga.” The comparison is telling. In “Barge Haulers,” we have a decidedly sad and depressing portrait of an approximately equal number of Russian males who are trapped in impossible work as human draft animals. They are all unkempt and in rags, and some look at us with pleading eyes as they struggle with their load with every step. The boat that they are hauling upriver is quite large and has a high mast atop which flutters the flag of Russia. Literature, too, has romanticized the Cossacks. An excellent example is found in the aforementioned popular novella, Taras Bulba by Mykola Hohol. The story is part of his book Myrhorod, and tells the tale of a Cossack named Taras and his two sons Andriy and Ostap, who go to Zaporozhian Sich to join in the fight against Polish rulers. The story was set before Hohol’s time, in the eighteenth century, so the landscape that is described recalls dyke pole, the “wild fields,” before Russia colonized the region, and it was written in Russian, the language that Ukrainian writers in the Russian Empire were expected to use.

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The further they [the father and his sons] rode through the steppe, the more magnificent it was. In those days, our southern lands were untouched green wilds all the way to the Black Sea. There had never been a plough in these endless waves of rich vegetation. The steppes had been touched only by the hooves of wild horses which hid in the tall grasses as if in a forest. There is nothing in all of nature as beautiful as the steppe. The entire surface of this earth resembles a golden-green ocean dotted with millions of wildflowers of every color. And through the tall, slender stalks of grasses rise the pale-blue and lilac cornflowers; the bright broom flower reaches skyward like a yellow spear; while clover blankets the surface like so many tiny umbrellas; and a lone stalk of wheat whose seed was somehow blown in from who-knows-where stands ripening in this wild jungle. Partridges with craning necks dart among the slender roots, while the air is filled with the songs of myriad birds. In the sky are hawks, almost motionless as they spread their wings and fix their gaze on the grasses below. Likewise, they [father and sons] heard the cries of wild geese in flight from some distant lake. A gull lifts from the grasses in graceful flight and bathes in the blue waves of the sky. It rises higher and higher until, finally, it is just a tiny black speck up high. Then, suddenly, it turns it wings and flashes brilliantly in the sun. The steppes! Oh the steppes! What a magnificent world of wonder you are!

Indeed, the lushness of the steppes is legendary. Russia had acquired the “wild fields” of eastern and southern Ukraine with military victories over Cossacks, Poles, and Turks, and rechristened the area as Novorossiya, “New Russia.” The lure was the region’s extraordinarily rich chornozem soils (chernozem is based on the Russian equivalent). In 1787, when Catherine the Great made her celebrated tour of the empire’s new southern lands accompanied by Grigori Potemkin, whom she had appointed as governor-general in 1774, she gushed about Ukraine’s enormous potential for colonization and economic gain. She was impressed that soils were much more fertile than in the forest zones of Russia, and that the temperatures in Ukraine were higher and the growing seasons longer. From Kremenchuk, the city that had been designated as the first capital of the new province Ekaterinoslav (meaning “Glory to Catherine”), she wrote (in French) that “this region is in truth a paradise,” and that “here, without forcing nature, with little care and less expenditure, there is everything one could want” (quoted in Moon 2013, 45). She was pleased with what she saw while she toured and envisioned correctly that many thousands of settlers would be attracted to the region, especially once the pesky Tatars,

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who claimed the area as their own, were finally subdued. She had the foresight to invest in scientific studies and Academy of Sciences Expeditions for advice about the plusses and limitations of various lands and what crops to grow there. Before long, a settlement frontier followed for the steppes, and more and more of the once-endless fields of grass were put to the plow. Thus, southern and eastern Ukraine became a granary for feeding Russia, as well as a source of foreign currency for the Russian Empire, as agricultural products that were not shipped north were exported abroad via river ports (and later by rail) to the Black Sea and Odesa, the Russian Empire’s showcase southern port and gateway to new markets. Settlement of the steppes and incorporation of “Novorossiya” into the Russian Empire was the contemporaneous Russian equivalent of overseas colonization by European countries and the expansion of the frontier across the North American continent in Canada and the United States. The open vistas and endless seas of the natural grasslands of Ukraine were transformed into open vistas and endless seas of sowed grains, and countless new settlements dotted the landscape to serve farmers as market centers and as locations of churches where locals came on Sundays to pray and socialize afterwards. Later, in Soviet times, the farms became bigger as collective farms and state farms replaced kulak (private landowners) agriculture, and fields of wheat, sunflowers, and other crops, worked by collective teams of agricultural laborers with mechanized equipment, often seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. Also following the will of Soviet authorities, churches often became barns. The seas of uniform cropland went on and on until they disappeared at the crest of a distant rise, like the horizon on the ocean disappears behind a wave, or ended at a distant line of trees that forms a windbreak along a distant road or marks a property line. In such cases, the analogy is with landfall as sighted from a ship at sea. Yet, despite decades of settlement and cultivation, there are still open vistas and endless fields of high grass in south-central Ukraine, some perhaps in the form of fallow, and others as natural prairie that, happily, is being protected as ecological parkland. In some cases the reserves also protect archaeological sites, such as ancient burial mounds (kurhany) and the eerie anthropomorphic stone stelae that Ukrainians call kam’yani baby (stone babas), not because they look like old women (babas), but because of sound associations with the Turkic, Mongolian, and other central Asian words for these ancient statues, which mean ancestor.

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These ancient lands that were home to Scythian and Trypillian cultures millennia ago (see also Chapter 3), and then Tatars and Cossacks in more modern history, held more for the empire to the north than just the treasures of prehistoric burial mounds and the fruits of uncommonly fertile soils. They also held riches for the industrial age. When this came to be understood over the course of the nineteenth century, industrializing Russia was all the more pleased with its southern acquisitions, because minerals and coal could be shipped to the north as needed, or processed into steel and other manufactured goods in Russian Ukraine and then shipped to the north or, as in the case with a portion of the agricultural output, sold abroad for foreign exchange. It was an unexpected bonus for the Russian Empire that Ukraine’s “wild fields” turned out to be so extraordinarily rich in so many ways, and a great help to Russia in its emergence starting in the latter part of the nineteenth century from a backward feudal society to membership, more or less, in the modern world. There were other concentrations of resources for Russia’ industrialization in addition to those in Ukraine, some located conveniently within the Russian heartland and others further afield such as in the Urals and in Siberia, so no argument is being made that Russia’s rise was solely because of the bounty of Ukraine. However, there is no denying that this bounty contributed substantially and disproportionately to Russia’s economic development, and that Russia was fortunate indeed to have acquired such a rich territory.

8.3: Industrial Heartland The industrial region that is centered on the Great Bend can be referred to as the industrial heartland of Ukraine. I would have titled this chapter accordingly, except that I also wanted to emphasize that the Great Bend is a part of the agricultural heartland, too, as well as “Cossack Land,” as in the previous chapter about the latitude of the Kremenchuk Sea. Unlike, say, Cherkasy, where the industrial structure emphasizes food processing and the mechanical needs of farms, this is a heavy-industrial region and one of the world’s largest concentrations of metals-based factory production. From near Kamianske and Dnipro in the north to south of Zaporizhia, the landscape along the Dnipro is dotted with heavy industry, and the cities are known not just for the processing of Ukraine’s agricultural products, but even more for belching smokestacks,

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the refining of ores, the making of steel and other metals, and the manufacture of a great variety of durable products. The industrial heartland of Ukraine is actually quite large geographically, and covers a good portion of southern and eastern Ukraine on both the Right Bank and the Left Bank. It is elongated east-west (or northeast-southwest), and the Dnipro cuts across it from north to south. It is the heart of the heartland, and, like the human heart, is off-center, in this case more to the west than east. To the west, the region includes the industrial cities of Krivyi Rih and Zhovti Vody in western Dnipro Oblast and their associated mines, while to the east the industrial zone extends all the way through Luhansk and Dontesk Oblasts to the border with Russia and the coal country that is called Donbas or the Donets Basin after the Donets (“Little Don”) River that flows through the area to the Sea of Azov. There are dozens of industrial cities in these two oblasts alone, as well as in Dnipro and Zaporizhia Oblasts, such that this industrial heartland is densely settled and highly urbanized. A geography textbook that my professor authored and then assigned in class in my undergraduate days called it the “Donets-Dnieper Bend-Azov Heavy Industry Area” (Lydolph 1970, 101–108). There are a number of industrial harbors on its Azov Sea coast, with the industrial city of Mariupol being the largest. In Soviet times, delineation of this critical district included adjacent parts of southern Russia, particularly the port cities of Taganrog and Rostovna-Donu (Rostov-on-the Don) at the mouth of the Don River, both of which are near the Ukrainian border and had large Ukrainian populations. The German economist-sociologist Alfred Weber (1868–1958), the younger brother of Max Weber (1864–1920), the noted German economist and sociologist, is known especially for the development of classical industrial location theory, of which this industrial heartland of Ukraine is a textbook example. I was taught this twice in my student days: first in the aforementioned undergraduate course about the Geography of the U.S.S.R. by Professor Paul E. Lydolph; and then as a Ph.D. student in a graduate seminar on the economics of industrial location by Professor Allan Rodgers, who took us from Weber through the most current location models. This course included discussion of a prominent journal article about Soviet industry that Professor Rodgers was writing at the time (Rodgers 1974). Some students exhibited glassy eyes in these courses, but I was riveted by the basic principles of economic geography. Weber saw optimal industrial location as the outcome

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of calculations that weighed the costs of transportation of raw materials to factories against the costs of transportation of finished products to markets, and explained, with the aid of the geometry of “location triangles” and a bizarre table-top device with weights and pulleys that was called a Varignon frame, that industrial production that depended on heavy ores and fuel resources such as coal would choose to locate closer to the mines than to where products were sold. I am not sure why my eyes were not glassy, too, but they were not, and I learned that the heavy industrial cities of England, the industrial Great Lakes region in the U.S., the Ruhr Valley, and the Ukrainian industrial heartland were all the products of similar calculations in spatial economics. The Ukrainian case was an especially ideal textbook example, because the uniformly flat terrain across the steppes meant there would be an exceptionally strong positive correlation between transportation costs and the linear distances between points. The specific resources that laid the groundwork for the making of a powerful heavy industrial district are enormous deposits of coal in the Donbas, including considerable high-grade anthracite as well as various grades of bituminous coal, and equally substantial iron ore deposits near Kryvyi Rih, the aforementioned city in the Right Bank section of Dnipro Oblast. The ironmining region came to be called the Kryvbas, the Kryvyi Rih Basin. Later, there was the discovery of one of the world’s most significant deposits of manganese nearby. The industrial city that grew up as a result is named Marhanets, “manganese.” Its nearby river port is Nikopol, which also developed into a city of heavy industry. Later in the nineteenth century, still more iron ore deposits were discovered, near the historic city of Kerch at the elongated eastern tip of the Crimean peninsula, and in the mid-twentieth century, an unusually highgrade of iron ore was found about 25 kilometers from the Dnipro in Zaporizhia Oblast, giving rise to the industrial port city on the left bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir that the Soviets named Dniprorud (“Dnipro ore”). Only ores in certain South American deposits have a higher content of iron. Ukraine also has ample limestone, a necessary ingredient in metallurgical processes for fluxing. The aforementioned industrial city of Zhovti Vody in western Dnipro Oblast became important later than the others; its critical mine resource is uranium ore. These various iron and coal resources were shipped according to the logic of Weberian industrial location principals, with iron and steel mills and met-

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als manufacturing plants being established in both the coal-mining regions in the east and near the iron mines to the west and south, as well as in between. A special case of “in between” was at the Great Bend, where industrial development took advantage of location on the river to form the heart of the emerging industrial heartland. Dnipro on the right bank and Zaporizhia downriver on the left bank were turned into world-class industrial cities, as was a village named Kamianske (“stony place”), which evolved into an industrial powerhouse, which the Soviets renamed Dniprodzerzhynsk in 1936. The city is now again named Kamianske. It has a population of about 242,000, and is known for ferrous metallurgy and secondarily for the chemical industry. From various vantage points along the Dnipro where there used to be the rapids, there are now long foundry buildings, tall smokestacks, and cross-river bridges that carry trains laden with coal, ores, sheets of metal, and pipes and tubes of all sizes. In Kamianske, we see a telling landscape down the length of the city’s main street, Prospekt Lenina (Lenin Boulevard), one of the main avenues of the city, as it descends from higher ground in the upper city (Verkhnia Kolonia) to the riverside lower city (Nyzhnia Kolonia). The view is of a long, straight, and wide road for cars and dedicated lanes for trollies, that goes down, down, down to the level of the Dnipro, which can hardly be seen for the great grey wall of foundry buildings, smokestacks, and industrial haze (Figure 8.3). The first rail line to serve the regional needs of heavy industry was the Ekaterinskaya Railway – named after the connecting city, Ekaterynoslav (Dni­pro­ petrovsk) – was opened in 1884 and was a critical link for uniting the disparate parts of the emerging industrial district. It carried iron to the east to serve the steel mills that had sprouted amidst the coalmines, and carried coal westward in the empty cars to serve newer mills closer to the source of the iron. Before long, a loop-like rail system emerged in the region that had trains carrying coal in one direction and iron ore in the opposite direction in the vacated cars, all feeding mills and metal works located in cities such as Donetsk, Makiivka, Alchevsk, and Kramatorsk in the east of the industrial district, Krivyi Rih, Marhanets, and Nikopol in the west, and Dnipro, Kamianske, and Zaporizhia at the Great Bend middle in between the two. In the southeast, Mariupol emerged as another “in between” city, as it was close to Donbas coal to the north and Kerch iron ore across the Sea of Azov to the south. The coal was carried to the city by rail and the iron ore by freighters. Some of the coal passed through

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[Figure 8.3: View toward the Dnipro and a district of heavy industry at the foot of Prospekt Svobody (formerly Prospekt Lenina) in Kamianske]

Mariupol and continued south to Kerch in the emptied iron ore ships to supply heavy industry there, while some of the Kerch iron ore was taken from ships and loaded onto north rail cars at the port of Mariupol for a return trip to the Donbas. Mariupol itself developed into a major iron and steel-making city and became one of the key urban centers of the industrial heartland. Figure 8.4 shows the locations of these and other industrial cities in the region, as well as the main rail and shipping links between them. Finally, there was the Dnipro itself as a key resource for the making of the industrial region. As far back as the time of Peter the Great (1682–1721),

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[Figure 8.4: The industrial heartland of Ukraine (after Lydolph, 1970)]

Imperial Russia had wanted to improve transportation on the river to enhance trade and gain access to the ice-free Black Sea, and had considered ways to either do away with the rocks at the Great Bend or bypass them. However, little or nothing happened until the stimulus of the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, when a string of proposals came about harnessing the river for water power and flooding the cataracts with rising water behind a dam. It took until the Soviet Union and the 1920s for the project to get off the ground, and until 1932 for it to be completed. The stroika (construction project) was ambitious, intensive, and, as presented in Soviet publicity, a heroic effort by an army of workers who understood Lenin’s maxim that they were building communism by enhancing Soviet power and electrifying the country. We will visit the dam at the start of the next chapter, where the focus will be on today’s landscapes and the cities of Zaporizhia and Dnipro. First, however, there are two other topics to consider in closing this chapter. The first is

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to emphasize that the various industrial cities in and near the Great Bend (at least most of them) are without question very much a part of the Ukrainian agricultural heartland, as well as the mining and factory centers that were developed during the rule of Russian Empire or the Soviet Union; that is, despite the smoke and smokestacks, mountains of mined coal and slag, and an economic base rooted in heavy industry, these cities also have intimate cultural and economic ties to the countryside that existed before industrialization. Furthermore, many of these industrial centers have a history that is linked to Cossack settlement. The Cossacks may have had their sich fortresses where they lived as soldiers, but many of them also had personal homes, families, and farms in the region. Town after town in the Great Bend and beyond takes pride in having once been a Cossack town, and celebrates this in many ways. For example, local museums typically present heavy doses of Cossack history, and local municipal festivals often look like Cossack festivals with Cossack cuisine, Cossack song, and daredevil Cossack horse riding.

8.4: Iconography and Toponymy I found it interesting to look at the iconography that cities near the Great Bend have chosen for the designs of their ceremonial coats of arms. Dnipro, the largest city in the region, may have been founded as the Russian city Ekaterinoslav, but before this there was the fortress Kodak that Cossacks had wrested for themselves from the Polish frontier. The city’s coat of arms shows Cossack weaponry and stars in the night sky. Zaporizhiya, the second city at the Great Bend, is almost synonymous with Cossackdom because of the famous sich that was once there on the island of Khortytisa, and because Ukrainian Cossacks were often referred to as Zaporozhtsi, “Zaporozhian Cossacks” or the “Zaporozhian Host.” The city’s coat of arms also sports Cossacks weaponry instead of a dam or smokestacks. Kamianske, the next city in size in the Great Bend, is as industrial as they come, but prior to this Cossacks affiliated with Nova Sich populated the villages of Romankovo and Kamianske. The city’s coat of arms gives equal attention to Cossack spears and an image of industrial labor. Likewise, Marhanets, the manganese city which happens to be at the site of Tomakivka Sich, also has a coat of arms that combines industrial and Cossack imagery. The nearby industrial city of Nikopol, the local river

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port for industry that is at the site of Mykytyn Rih, has chosen to put a Cossack on horseback carrying a battle flag on its coat of arms, as well as an image of a pectoral to recall the Scythian history of the local area. A little further from the river, Zhovty Vody, the uranium city, has a coat of arms with a uranium atom icon and Cossack sabers, all in Ukraine’s official colors of blue and yellow, while Krivyi Rih, the iron mining city, has an image of a Cossack gunpowder pouch at the center of its coat of arms. My personal favorite among the coats of arms from the region comes from the small industrial town of Pidhorodne located near Dnipro. The local economy is based on agricultural processing rather than heavy industry, specifically the making of juices from locally grown fruits and vegetables, and its coat of arms is the soul of Ukraine in miniature and in many colors: the familiar Ukrainian blue and yellow in the colors of the sky and the sun with oversized rays; the Dnipro as shown by white-capped undulating waves; the land cover is green; there are stalks of golden wheat, leafy green vegetables, and the iconic Ukrainian chervona kalyna berries (red berries from the viburnum bush) that symbolize the resurgent spirit of the Ukrainian people; strips of Ukrainian embroidery in red; and finally a wooden bandura, a Ukrainian stringed instrument associated with melodies and song lyrics that reflect the Ukrainian soul. And, yes, there is the date 1778, when the town was founded, an acknowledgment of the town’s link to Catherine the Great, Potemkin, and the expansion of Russia’s colonial presence in Ukraine. Second, we have some comments about the politics of toponymy. Dnipro (city) began as Ekaterinoslav, named by Potemkin after Catherine the Great, his boss and intimate partner. In 1926, it was renamed Dnipropetrovsk after Grigory Petrovskyi (1878–1958), an ethnic Ukrainian who was an early Communist revolutionary and one of the founders of the Soviet Union. This was by decree by Soviet authorities, who wanted to honor Petrovskyi with a city name. The city was called Dnipropetrovsk until May 19, 2016, when it was named “Dnipro” in accordance with a Ukrainian legislation from 2015 banning communist names for public places. Similarly, Dniprodzerzhynsk was named after Felix Dzerzhynsky, an early Communist leader and the founding director of the Cheka, the Soviet Union’s brutal internal police and precursor to the NKVD and KGB, but prior to 1936 it was apolitically called Kamianske, “stony place.” As I have said, the city’s name is once again Kamianske. Near the newly named Dnipro is a larger industrial suburb named Novomos-

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kovsky, “New Moscow.” It dates to the time of Russia’s imperial expansion into Ukraine. It is not clear whether or not this name will survive the mood of the times. Of the main cities at the Great Bend, only Zaporizhia’s name is safe. It was once named Aleksandrovskaya and then Aleksandrovsk after General Alexander Golitsyn (1718–1783) who commanded tsarist troops against the Tatars, and got its present name from the Soviets in 1921. For them, it was an uncharacteristically apolitical choice of name for a key city.

CHAPTER 9

Zaporizhia and Dnipro (City) —Ukraine Reclaimed 9.1: Introduction Indeed, it might seem that the leaders of the early Soviet Union retagged cities, street names, and other places on the map as if they were being driven by some sort of obsessive-compulsive abnormality. Not only did they add the tonguetwisting “Dnipropetrovsk” and “Dniprodzerzhynsk” to the gazetteer of Ukraine, they also made Donetsk (previously Yuzivka/Yuzovka) into Stalino, Mariupol into Zhdanov (named after Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov, once assumed to be the successor-in-waiting to Joseph Stalin, except that Zhdanov died first), Luhansk into Voroshilovgrad (named after Kliment Voroshilov, a prominent Soviet politician and military leader), and moved the Russian capital from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, which also became the capital of the entire Soviet Union, and renamed the beautiful city on the Neva after Lenin himself, Leningrad. These and other name changes had profound purposes: everywhere across the U.S.S.R. they signaled not only the arrival of new authority in lands that had been the Russian Empire, but also the dawn of a new socialist society (Stebelsky 1997b). It is a puzzle as to why the Soviets did not rename Zaporizhia, which they turned into an especially prominent city through the construction of Dni­ proHES. They could have capitalized on a well-chosen political name because so much global attention was focused on the colossal stroika at the river and the city that was taking shape as a result. However, on reflection there is no puzzle at all and the answer as to why “Zaporizhia” remained “Zaporizhia” through the Soviet years is quite obvious. It is the same situation as with Magnitogorsk, the powerful industrial city that they constructed to the

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south and east of the Urals Mountains on the site of the small tsarist mining town Magnitnaya. Its apolitical name means Magnetic Mountain, a reference to the extraordinarily rich deposit of iron ore at the site. Like Zaporizhia, Magnitogorsk did not need to be named after some Bolshevik revolutionary or victorious Soviet general to make a political point, because the city itself, top to bottom and as a whole, was designed to represent Soviet-socialist molding of not just metals, but also Soviet man (Kotkin 1992, 1995; Scott 1989; and at least one highly recommended documentary film, “Magnitogorsk: Forging the New Man” that was produced and directed in 1996 by Pieter Jan Smit). In Zaporizhia the message that a new day had dawned was conveyed not by toponymy, but via the new dam, which was the Soviet Union’s number one colossus. By virtue of its unprecedented scale and the uses for which it was built, DniproHES embodied the industrial might that the Soviet Union wanted to achieve and the exalted position that labor was to have in the new state. This interpretation of DniproHES is supported by analysis of the classic 1932 film “Ivan” that noted Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko (1894–1956) made with his wife Yulia Solntseva (1901–1989). It was one of the earliest Ukrainian films with sound and a masterpiece of cinematography, and it tells the story of the transformation of a young man, Ivan, who leaves the countryside to work on the construction of the dam. He sees his world change before his eyes to one focused on huge machines and the principles of socialism, and learns that success comes from selfless labor for collective goals and that rewards are tied to the Communist Party (Figure 9.1). The 1932–1933 construction of the dam took place during the worst of the great famine (the Holodomor) that was deliberately created in Ukraine during the drive for agricultural collectivization, leading at least one modernday reviewer to comment on the irony that many Ukrainians were able to avoid starvation only because they were being fed while working on the dam (Celli 2013, 124). Certainly, there can be no stronger way to emphasize that a new order is in command than to bring death to where old ways might persist, and to grant life to individuals like Ivan who demonstrate that they will be faithful to the new ways and join the Communist Party. The same reviewer also observed that, because the dam flooded the rapids that had provided sanctuary in the past to the Ukrainian Cossacks, it helped to build a new Soviet Union-wide national identity by drowning sites associated with

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distinctively Ukrainian history. As Carlo Celli put it, the dam and the reservoir it formed “favored the elimination of factors that could be seen as fomenting regional identity” (Celli 2013, 124). DniproHES and all the propaganda and publicity measures that were associated with it would assure that Zaporizhia would, in step with Magnitogorsk and smack in the heartland of nationalistic Ukraine, grow into an ideal Soviet city and a model for the rest of the young society.

[Figure 9.1: Vehicular traffic across DniproHES in Zaporizhiya]

The central argument in this chapter is that the Great Bend, in which Dnipro and Zaporizhia are the leadings cities (with populations of 979,046 and 770,672, respectively), was developed by Imperial Russia as a key part of Novorossiya, and after the 1917 Revolution was made into a key part of the Soviet Union in which a new society was forged, and from which the Soviet state was being supplied with strategic products of heavy industry. Indeed, the area was a “Soviet heartland.” However, when the Soviet Union fell apart and Ukraine became independent in 1991, the socialist foundation of the region was shattered and the loyalties of its citizens were put to the test: were they Ukrainians or Russians; were they still to be Communists; would religion enter their lives? These and other questions replaced the stability that Soviet authorities had proscribed, creating a chaotic and confusing time. Clever and heartless individuals with connections to government made off with what had been the common wealth of the socialist state, while many workers and their

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families fell into poverty and unemployment. Tens of thousands of people emigrated to take up opportunities elsewhere, and population totals dropped. Over the years, however, a strong Ukrainian identity emerged in Dnipro, Zaporizhia, and the other settlements in the Great Bend, as well as much more widely throughout the former Novorossiya, and most of the region is now fully a part of Ukraine in spirit as well as administratively. I have subtitled this chapter “Ukraine Reclaimed” because before the Russian period, the region was the domain of free-spirited Ukrainian Cossacks who fought against foreign incursions in Ukraine, and because now, more than two decades after Ukrainian independence and during a time of crisis following Russian aggressions in Crimea and the Donbas, the two cities that lead the region have shown that they are Ukrainian after all.

9.2: Meeting DniproHES DniproHES is a truly impressive sight. My first view was late at night from a taxi that took me across the road at the top to my hotel near the dam’s end on the Left Bank. The entire structure was flooded in light and could be seen somewhat two-fold from a distance as we approached, because a mirror image of the illumination was reflected in the water. The exceedingly bright lights that bathed the dam and the roadway were reflected individually in the river’s waters, creating shimmering streaks of yellow and white light along the water perpendicular to the dam, as well as occasional narrow streaks of red from hazard lights that were up high. The soft curve of the dam was visible from afar, too, as was the sequence of concrete buttresses that gave the dam the strength to hold back so much water. The face of Lenin greeted us we began to travel the long curve across the crest. He was the center of large metal medallion that was affixed to a thick concrete wall and had as stern a face as I had ever seen on him. His head was turned sideways, so the image was his face in profile, and he seemed to be glowering at something upriver. The medallion also carried his name, just in case there was any question at all as to who it was with the Lenin goatee and an image of the Soviet hammer and sickle. To our left, next to the Lenin medallion, was a companion medallion of the same style and size. It had a larger hammer and sickle and a flag on which was written “CCCP,” Cyrillic for USSR. And below, on the same enormous block of con-

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crete, were huge letters, each one almost the size of the individual medallions, which read in Russian: “V.I. Lenin Dnieper Hydroelectric Station.” I was glad that the taxi had caught up to a slower trolley bus, because as this first look became a longer look, impressions sunk in. There were two gantry cranes in high superstructures for raising and lowering gates to regulate water intake; a long, brightly lit powerhouse down below on the downriver side of the dam that purred as turbines transferred energy into transformers; and power lines on both sides of the river that carry electricity to industrial cities. At the far end of the dam was a series of ship locks and a ship lift. I could not wait until morning to visit the dam on foot, and after settling in at the Platinum Hotel I walked the short distance to a park at the foot of the dam and sat on a bench in the shadows, where I could see the crest of the dam. For at least two hours, I observed vehicular traffic across the span become increasingly sparse as the night wore on. I was accompanied by the tallest Lenin statue I had ever seen, as well as dance music and happy sounds from the hotel disco and a smattering of young lovers who had come from the party to Lenin’s park to sit undisturbed. Lenin’s arm was outstretched in the direction of DniproHES, and I imagined that he was saying with satisfaction that, yes, thanks to the many Ivans who labored here this great structure builds Communism and brings power and light to the Soviet Union. I walked across DniproHES several times over the next few days, sometimes on one side of the street and sometimes on the other. The distance is about 800 meters, but the walk is a bit longer if one adds the lengths of the access ramps at either end. I walked the dam in order to study it up close and to compare what I saw with illustrations of dams and dam parts I had found on the Internet, so that I could learn what was what. I also took in the views both upriver and downriver, and I walked because on the far side of the river from my hotel was a beach. My time with the dam gave me opportunities to reflect. Here was a candidate for a select list of wonders of the modern world, and I was spending a short vacation getting to know it. I wondered about all the Ivans (and Ivannas) who labored at the site, about the phenomenon of a large city rising because the construction project, about Cossacks, hydropower, Five Year Plans, the battles of World War II at the Dnipro, and the giant holes blown on purpose in the dam to prevent it from being useful to the enemy. I imagined the rush of water downriver as result and the panic as the unannounced wall of watery doom approached; I imagined the cataracts of the

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Dnipro being seen for the last time as the dam’s reservoir took shape and waters rose. I wondered about Kichkas and the other villages that were flooded, as well as what lay beneath the five other reservoirs that the Soviets created on the Dnipro after they had built DniproHES. On the beach, I read and looked at maps.*

9.3: Exploring Khortytsia From the downriver-side walkway across the dam I had my first good look at Khortytsia, the island (also mentioned in Chapter 3) that was an early fortification of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Administratively, the island is part of the city of Zaporizhia. It is located just below the dam and, with a length of just over 12.5 kilometers and an average width of about 2.5 kilometers, is the largest island in the Dnipro. It divides the Dnipro into two channels, a wider one that is labelled “Dnipro” on maps, and another one called Stare Dnipro, “Old Dnipro.” The north end of Khortytsia faces the dam and has dramatic granite walls that are 30 meters high, while the southern end, which is not seen from the dam, is marshy and flat and merges with the river almost imperceptibly. The island is heavily forested and densely dotted with archeological and historic sites. The first sich of the Zaporozhian Cossacks was actually on a neighboring island in the Stare Dnipro about one-twentieth the size of Khortytsia that was called Mala (Small) Khortytsia, while the first sich on the larger island was active from 1552 to 1558. Mala Khortytsia is now called Bayda, after an early Cossack hetman, and is an historic park with the remains from an early stockade. Both Khortytsia and Mala Khortytsia are tied closely to the formative period of the Cossack phenomenon and to the struggles of Ukrainians against pillaging and slave raiding by the Crimean Khanate and against the takeover of Ukrainian lands by Polish gentry. Along with the rapids that were found just upriver, these two islands have a prominent place in Ukrainian history texts, as well as in Ukrainian art, poetry, novels, and folk songs. *  I have been to Zaporizhia several times. On a visit in 2016, I was interested to see that the tall statue of Lenin had been removed. De-Leninization has spread rapidly in Ukraine since the revolutionary events of 2014, and this icon among icons no longer stands. The high granite pedestal is still there, however, and has nothing but air above it.

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Both islands are known to have been inhabited for several thousands of years and have proven to be rich in archeological data. The Scythian period is particularly well represented. Furthermore, between prehistory and the history of the Cossacks, both Khortytsia and Mala Khortytsia were way stations on the trade of the Varangians between the Baltic and Black Seas (see also Chapter 3). There were particular dangers from the nomadic tribe of Pechenihy (Pechenegs), who inhabited the steppes and often raided the trading posts on the islands. In 972, the Pechenihy killed Kyivan Rus’ prince Svyatoslav I as he journeyed on the river near Khortytsia. The island is also noted for a settlement of Prussian Mennonites from Danzig (Gdansk), who arrived in 1789 and farmed on the island. They also harvested timber for sale. Khortytsia is reported to have considerable plant and animal life that is either unique to the island or not particularly common elsewhere. I spent two days exploring Khortytsia on foot. There are rugged areas with dense forests and steep rocky descents to the swift waters below. I braved the current to cool off, but was smart enough to keep myself wedged between large boulders to make sure that I did not embark on a quick trip to Constantinople. Although it was possible to connect with nature on Khortytsia, the landscape was also one with high voltage power lines on tall transmission towers, going this way and that from the massive generators of DniproHES. A highlight of the island is a reconstructed sich with wooden palisades, a small Orthodox church, a Cossack kitchen centered on a huge iron kettle (chan), dining tables, sleeping quarters, and displays of weaponry, including large iron cannon. Costumed workers played the roles of Cossacks and demonstrated skills at archery, musketry, swordsmanship, wood chopping, and horseback riding. The reconstructed sich is seen plainly from the walkway along one of the ends of DniproHES (Figure 9.2). There is also a museum that was opened in the lateSoviet year 1983, with displays and dioramas about that range from the Stone Age through the Scythians to Cossack history, and ultimately the heroic construction of socialism in Zaporizhia in the Soviet Age. Explanations are now available in Ukrainian, but once there was only Russian. There is a great view of the dam from the museum, which sits at the high north end of the island. A favorite photograph of mine shows cannon lined up behind a fortification made of upright logs with points hewn into their tops, all aimed at the dam (Figure 9.3). It is as if the designers of the museum wanted to convey a not-so-

[Figure 9.2: Cossack cannons on Khortytsia Island and DniproHES, Zaporizhiya]

[Figure 9.3: A beach and factories on opposite banks of the Dnipro in Zaporizhiya]

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subtle salute from Ukraine’s Cossacks to the Soviet authorities, who deigned to flood history, reshape the river, and remake society. Judging by the words of his song “Khortytsia,” I imagine that Oleksandr Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet and songwriter who was born in 1963 in Poltava Oblast, would agree with my interpretation of this particular landscape. A selection of the song’s lyrics and my translation are as follows:* Понуро стоячи на березі крутім, How sad it is to stand at slopes of the river’s banks, Я дивлюся в брудну дніпровську воду, And to look into the filthy Dnipro waters, І думаю про те, що є на світі цім I think about the fact that in this world Святі місця у кожного народу: Every nation has its sacred places. Для когось - Ченстохов, для когось - For some it is Czestochowa; for others Нотердам, Notre Dame, Всі знають до святинь своїх дорогу, Everyone knows the roads to their shrines, Для нас - це Київ і Тарасова гора, For us, they lead to Kyiv and to Taras’s burial hill І Хортиця велика за порогом. And to great Khortytsia beyond the rapids. Затамувавши дух, на землю цю ступаю I step onto this ground with apprehension, І п›ю повітря з димом, немов гірке вино, And inhale the smoky air as if it were bitter wine І перше, що я бачу і здивовано читаю: And the first thing I see, and read with surprise Табличка - “Отдыхать запрещено!” A notice board — “Resting is Prohibited!” І сірий ДніпроГЕС високою стіною The grey colossus DniproHES forms a high wall Мене від України відділя, That blocks me from my dear Ukraine. І тисячовольтові дроти над головою While above my head run power lines heavy with voltage Тріщать, неначе стогне ця земля! Crackling, as if the earth were groaning!

The song’s lyrics continue with more stanzas in this vein, and include the following lines: *  Online at: http://nashe.com.ua/song/11118 [last accessed: February 10, 2017].

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І пусто навкруги, ніде сліду немає, There is emptiness here, not one single sign Що звідси Україна почалась. That it is here where Ukraine had its start. … Стоїть там ресторан, що зветься There is a restaurant there named «Запорізька Січ», Zaporozhian Sich А в нім гримить музон не на Where inside thunders strange music with lyrics in козацькій мові! a language that is foreign to our Cossacks.

9.4: Zaporizhia The city of Zaporizhia also became an alien place, first during the tsarist period and again to a much greater measure after the October Revolution and into the Soviet period. Once the site of Cossack settlements, it was re-founded as a Russian frontier outpost in 1770 named Aleksandrovsk, and settled anew with Mennonite immigrants who were invited to the region by Catherine the Great. They farmed the steppes and opened mills and factories beside the Russian fortress. In 1829, a rope ferry was built across the river to transport people and goods in a train with multiple carts. That conveyance was replaced in 1904 by the Kichkas Bridge, which was designed for rail traffic. Its opening stimulated still more industrial development in Zaporizhia, alienating the city from the soil and Ukraine’s agriculture-based society. When the Soviets had their turn in Ukraine, they selected Zaporizhia as the site for the first dam of the Dnipro cascade and developed the city into a model of Soviet industrial power and society. The Mennonites emigrated, fled as refugees, or were deported to Siberia; the churches that were built during tsarist rule were demolished; and thousands of fresh young Ivans were brought from all over the Soviet Union, especially from a broad range of places in Russia and Ukraine, to build not just the dam but a new social order. They received higher wages in exchange for their labor and pre-Soviet identities, as they were forged into Soviet citizens. As part of their obligations, they attended meetings and lectures about socialism and were schooled from illiteracy into literacy in the

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Russian language only. They took great pride in building a wonder of the world. The railway brought coal from Donbas to warm the city and run its factories, and after the dam was finished, in 1932, DniproHES powered large steel factories, an aluminum plant, and a magnesium-titanium plant that were opened shortly thereafter. By 1937, Zaporizhia was supplying the Soviet Union with 60 percent of its aluminum, 100 percent of its manganese, and 20 percent of steel plates (Van Zon, Batako, and Kreslavska 1998, 9). Thus, once the Soviets took over, the city emerged almost overnight as an industrial powerhouse. When the blitzkrieging Germans drew near in 1941, Soviet forces blew a hole through the dam to prevent it from being useful for the enemy. Zaporizhia citizens worked feverishly to dismantle almost all of the industrial structure of the city, which was then reassembled in cities east of the Urals such as Magnitogorsk, Novosibirsk, and Omsk to supply the war effort from beyond the reach of the invaders. The city was destroyed in the fighting and a great many Zaporizhians gave their lives. When the Germans retreated, they destroyed even more and blew up the dam they had repaired. Two years after the war ended in 1945, both the dam and the city’s many factories were up and running again, thanks to the valiant labors of tens of thousands of the “best workers” from the whole of the Soviet Union and the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), who hailed from Dniprodzerzhynsk-Kamianske nearby and became the top leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death. Not only did the city recoup its industrial base in record time; it soon added a transformer factory, an electrical machinery factory, a large automobile manufacturing plant, a plant manufacturing aircraft engines, and many other manufactories, as well as still more steel plants (Van Zon, Batako, and Kreslavska 1998, 10). Zaporizhia became the Soviet Union’s leader in numerous industrial categories, and, both before and after the war, only Magnitogorsk was in the same league as a Soviet “muscle city.” Not only did the Soviets make Zaporizhia into a colossus of vital industries; they also designed the city to be a model of socialist urban planning. Instead of being centered on a single commercial or administrative district, they crafted Zaporizhia into a linear city in which the major government buildings, offices, shopping areas, and public spaces were aligned along one long avenue, formerly named Prospekt Lenina. Its emphatically post-Communist name is Sobornyi Prospekt, “Church Street.” This broad street runs for more than 12 kilometers from where the high Lenin statue at the end of the

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dam once stood, to near the city’s main passenger rail station where it forks into two other streets. The street is perfectly straight except for two short areas with single curves that adjust the course. The main bus and trolley lines of Zaporizhia run along Sobornyi Prospekt, with busy transfer points at key intersections. Somehow I imagine that this was social engineering designed to build a unitary society by maximizing face-to-face contact within the population. From DniproHES to the train station, major landmarks include the administration buildings for city government and the government of Zaporizhia Oblast, the Zaporizhia Oblast library for children and youth, a movie theater named after Alexander Dovzhenko, the Zaporizhia art museum, a water clock at the intersection with Taras Shevchenko Boulevard, the central post office for the city, several hotels, a Jewish synagogue, at least one Orthodox church, monuments to the noted Russian composer M. I. Glinka (1804–1857; in Ukrainian: Hlynka) and Russian writer A. S. Pushkin (1799– 1837), and a memorial to unknown soldiers who perished in war for the Soviet Union. There are many other landmarks, too. Busy intersections have ornamental Stalinist apartment buildings and corner shops such as pharmacies, florists, bakeries, or cafés. There were lots of public square and green spaces along the way where, in the middle of the day, I saw oldsters biding their time, children at play, and grandparents minding grandchildren. The neighborhood nearest to the Lenin statue was a specially designed community built between 1929 and 1932, called District 6. It was a socialistconstructivist architectural project designed by architects from the team responsible for DniproHES, and featured large, higher-quality apartments in tasteful buildings no higher than four stories, with large windows, curved facades, and decorative stone pillars, among other architectural embellishments. There were playgrounds, medical facilities, schools, a sports field, theaters, and other community facilities, as well as flowerbeds, large lawns, and many trees. The noted Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier visited the site several times in the 1930s. Such a planned neighborhood was called a sotsgorod in the Soviet Union, a Russian contraction of words for “socialist city.” In Ukrainian, it is a “sotsialistychne misto” or sotsmisto. Zaporizhia’s sotsgorod was a model for subsequent urban planning in many other Soviet cities. District 6 was destroyed in World War II, but it was rebuilt and is still very much intact. I have walked around the area and took many photographs, but for those who cannot visit personally I recommend a film about the district that I saw on

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Youtube.* The commentary is in Russian and in Ukrainian, but the camerawork alone is enough to convey a sense of the design. The main intersection in District 6 is that of Sobornyi Prospekt with Prospekt Metalugiv (Metallurgists’ Avenue). There are monumental Stalinist buildings at the corners and a prominent monument to the “Metallurgists of Zaporizhia.” One day I took a long walk along Metallurgists’ Avenue to where it ends at a monument in honor of the 30 years since the first molten steel was produced at the factory “Zaporizhstal” (Zaporizhia Steel), and continued further along “Northern Avenue” into aging apartment block neighborhoods where industrial workers lived with their families. I also passed mammoth industrial complexes and their rail and harbor facilities. There was nothing pretty at all to see, as the landscape was filled with gritty factories and neighborhoods, and almost everything was covered in rust, grime, or graffiti. This part of Zaporizhia, at least, looked tired and depressed and seemed to be in the throes of deindustrialization, while in comparison District 6 seems to have been a privileged neighborhood. I remembered reading that the good citizens of Zaporizhia had sacrificed mightily in order for their city to rise to industrial prominence, and that even though Soviet authorities boasted that the city was a model for the future, most people actually lived in quite primitive conditions. Many were housed in barracks without toilets and running water (Van Zon, Batako, and Kreslavska 1998, 11). The Cold War and the race with the West for prestige in space were a greater priority for the authorities than the needs for housing and material goods, so the residents of Zaporizhia kept making sacrifices year after year for too many years, before conditions finally improved. Perhaps this is why the avenue that inspired in me such thoughts had been renamed some years earlier: the Avenue of Metallurgists was initially named Aleya Entusiastov, Russian for Alley of Enthusiasts. This Soviet-style name was supposed to reflect the positive spirit of factory workers as they commuted to their jobs, but “Avenue of Metallurgists” was probably a more realistic choice.** *  Online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxGsJK_iWSA [last accessed: February 10, 2017]. **  In between these two names, the street was named Shevchenko Avenue, during the Nazi Occupation and Stalin Avenue after liberation. “Enthusiasts” was a fairly common street name in cities in the Soviet Union.

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Another day I walked from Sobornyi Prospekt along Shevchenko Boulevard to the Dnipro. The opposing lanes of traffic were separated by a shaded pedestrian walkway, from which I continually zigzagged to explore interesting cross-streets with constructivist apartments. This area also had plenty of trees, small squares, and benches. The street ends at a cluster of riverfront hotels. Below the bluff on which they are perched is a street named Naberezhna (Waterfront Street) and a complex of cafes, bars, and restaurants that runs along the city’s main beach. Since the weather was not great, not many people where there that day, but from the substantial infrastructure that I saw near the sands, I could see that this recreation zone would be very crowded when it was warmer. Downriver along Naberezhna Street I was interested to see a drive-in movie theater that was still in business, “KinoDrive.” Across the “Dnipro” channel was Khortytsia and its Cossack sich attractions. There was a hint of “nouveau wealth” at bluff-top along the beach, so I was reminded about my observations in Kyiv about social inequalities in access to the river and river views and the issue of gentrification at the Dnipro (see also Chapter 6) (Figure 9.3). The view was of Khortytsia and perhaps DniroHES from higher floors, but these sights were shared with views of grey industrial plants with belching smokestacks, electric power lines, and a menacing grey haze. The Soviets forged Zaporizhia into a melting pot of residents from all over the Soviet Union, and Russian became the common language. Ukrainians were the largest ethnic group, but most of them came to speak mainly Russian, as this language had become the lingua franca for the city and, indeed, for most of southern and eastern Ukraine, where the use of the Ukrainian had been discouraged by authorities as far back as the tsarist Russian empire before the Revolution. Because Zaporizhians had a special role in the building of socialism, defeating the Nazis, and making the Soviet Union into a powerful country, they became disproportionately proud and loyal Soviet citizens. For many Zaporizhians, there was little interest in the idea of a Ukrainian nation or having a Ukrainian identity. When the Soviet Union fell apart and Ukraine became an independent country, a regional identity crisis emerged and people were confused about where to direct their loyalties: to Ukraine, to Russia, or to the Soviet past. Widespread corruption in the government in Ukraine (and in Russia), coupled with increasing income gaps between rich and poor, made it harder for working people in a blue collar city with rising unemployment such as Zaporizhia to endorse any government, except perhaps to long for the

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more stable times of the past. However, since 1991, Zaporozhia has showed itself to be fully a part of Ukraine. Its citizens participated in large numbers in the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013–2014, and rejected Russian calls for a return to Novorossiya after the fall of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in late winter 2014. The blue and yellow Ukrainian flag flies over not just the government buildings and schools in Zaporizhia, but also from the balconies and windows of private residences and businesses. In fact, many Zaporizhians (as well as people from Dnipro and other “Novorossiya” cities) have volunteered to fight in the war against pro-Russian and Russia-supplied separatists in the Donbas. The return of a Ukrainian spirit in Zaporizhia is evidenced in a recent song, “Zaporizhia,” by the group Khota, where the pointed refrain goes as follows:* Це Запоріжжя, це Україна А не якась інша країна

This is Zaporizhia, this is Ukraine And not some other country.

It was in Zaporizhia where I encountered a diving center with, ahem, a deep knowledge of the Dnipro. To be sure, there are river diving enthusiasts in other cities too, especially in Kyiv, but “Diving in Zaporizhia” (Daiving v Zaporozhe) appears to be especially well informed about the river and its history, at least locally, and operates a website that promotes not only its proprietary business endeavors such as a diving school and certifications, sales and rentals of diving equipment, and the professional services of skilled divers, but also knowledge about the river and its past.** There are quite a few historical photographs and charts of the river on the site, particularly under a scroll-down tab that is marked “History of the Dnieper” (the text is in Russian), and considerable advice about underwater archaeology. Not only are there natural formations such as the rocks that once formed the famous cataracts of the Dnipro and small islands that were submerged by the waters behind dams, there is also an abundance of human artefacts to explore: wrecks of old ships and barges; armaments from World War II; and the foundations of old buildings, bridges, among other structures. A lucky diver might even come up with *  Online at: http://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/223495.html [last accessed: February 10, 2017]. **  See http://www.divingriver.com.ua.

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a treasure or two from the near or distant past to take home or share with historians or a museum. I wrote in Chapter 7 about the drowning of Ukrainian history by the rising waters of the river’s reservoirs, and until I happened upon this diving center in Zaporizhia I had not considered that bits and pieces from that history could still be viewed and retrieved. From Diving in Zaporizhia I now know that there are people who do just that—recover submerged history for fun, as a business, and as a public service. I also understand now that diving in the murky waters of the Dnipro is but one more form of enjoyment that can be had along Ukraine’s River.

9.5 Dnipro (City) It is with thoughts about the resurgence of Ukrainian identity and the finalization of a divorce with Russia after it pirated Crimea and invaded Donbas that I turn to the larger of our two cities, the newly named Dnipro. Like Zaporizhia, this city was founded to be an administrative center for Novorossiya, and rejected the separatists who had hoped to rekindle ideas of a Russian state in southern and eastern Ukraine, either as a province of Russia or as a proRussia vassal country. Instead, the people of Dnipro (city) and Dnipro Oblast showed themselves to be a part of Ukraine “and not some other country,” and have lent strong support to the Ukrainian war effort in the Donbas. Not only has the region supplied soldiers; its industries have provided them with weaponry and other supplies (although I do need to mention that soldiers had many complaints that their supplies for warfare were deficient), and its hospitals have treated the wounded. Many refugees from the war zone have resettled in Dnipro as well. However, the Soviet imprint is still apparent in the city in many ways, not only in the characteristic architecture of workers’ housing complexes and many public buildings, drab industrial zones, and countless monuments in honor of the victory in the war against the Nazis, but also in a legacy, until very recently, of Soviet toponymics: not only was there the example of the city’s own name that honored a villain from Stalin’s crimes against Ukrainians, but there were names of main streets that honored figures from the Communist past. For example, a beautiful boulevard through the center of town was named after Karl Marx; a street nearby was named after Felix Dzerzhynsky; another prominent street was named after Petrovskyi; and the section of the

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busy road that runs along the river in the center of Dnipro carried Vladimir Lenin’s name. These streets are now named Dmytra Yavo­r ytsenkoho after a Ukrainian historian and ethnographer; Akademika Vernadskoho after a Ukrainian-Soviet geochemist; Vokzalna after the rail station; and Sicheslavska Naberezhna, “shoreline road named in honor of the glory of Sich,” respectively. Also, another street named after Lenin is now named after Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist fighter from the time of World War II who is immensely popular in western Ukraine and reviled in Russia. What is more, even though the last major statue of Lenin was removed from its roots in the city’s main square in 2014, a tall statue of Petrovskyi in the square in front of the city’s central passenger rail station survived into 2016, before being removed in the current de-Communization campaign. When I made my first visit to the city, in 2012, I visited the brand new Menorah Center, which had opened just weeks earlier, on October 20. It is an amazing place that also gave me insights into the dawn of a new day in Ukraine. It is a complex of seven integrated buildings, totaling some 54,000 square meters, that is said to be the largest Jewish community center in the world. In fact, the Jerusalem Post referred to it as the “the largest Jewish complex in the world,”* a term that I suppose embraces not just community centers but also other uses. It is made of expensive materials and is an architectural wonder that is shaped like a menorah. There is a large synagogue, of course, that is decorated in black marble, and also an amphitheater, dining room, wedding hall, a vast study hall (Beit Midvash), a five-star hotel, other hotels, several kosher restaurants and cafes, shops that specialize in selling Jewish religious items and Jewish attire, ritual baths for men and women, offices for Jewish organizations and community groups, and a large, outstanding museum that was the focus of my visit. It is called the Museum of the Holocaust, but it also has extensive displays about the Jewish faith, Jewish history, and the Jewish diaspora, and after a descent, literally via a stairway, into the horrors of the Holocaust, it returns to the higher floor for displays about the continuation of Jewish life and Jewish contributions to the world at large after this murderous period and about the revival of Jewish life in Ukraine specifically. From start to finish, the displays reflected the highest professional standards *  Online at http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-Menorah-CenterLargest-Jewish-complex-in-world [last accessed: February 10, 2017].

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in museology and the application of new techniques and advanced technologies. The entire complex is an impressive accomplishment for the Jewish community of Dnipro, which is estimated to number about 35,000 individuals, but probably could not have been possible without substantial financial support and political pull by at least two of Ukraine’s richest men, Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Henadiy Boholyubov, both of whom are Jewish businessmen who were born in Dnipro.* Because of the activities of the Menorah Center, Dnipro (city) has ascended into being arguably the number one center of Jewish life in the entire former Soviet Union.

[Figure 9.4: The Menorah Center in Dnipro]

On my first visit to the museum, I was privileged to be taken on a personal tour by the museum’s program director at the time, Artem Ieromenko. We *  For a little more than a year, in 2014–2015, Kolomoyskyi was the governor of Dnipro

Oblast. He was removed from the post in a dispute with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, the man who had appointed him in the first place. Kolomoyskyi is very outspoken, highly controversial, and has many critics. It is not my role to judge him or to dissect his actions; I simply want to acknowledge that I am aware that many people consider Kolomoyskyi to be a crooked oligarch.

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were conversing in Ukrainian, and after we had passed a few of the exhibits, I asked him a question I could not ignore: “Why are all posted explanations for the exhibits in Ukrainian?” His answer was disarmingly straightforward: “Because this is Ukraine.” I told him that I was surprised, because I had been taught that Jews in this part of Ukraine spoke Russian. “That may have been the case,” he said, “but now this is Ukraine, we are Ukrainians, and we speak in Ukrainian.” I asked about allowances for visitors to the museum who did not speak Ukrainian, and he said that for them there are tour guides available in Russian, Hebrew, and English. He emphasized that Ukrainian is the official language of the entire complex, even though a great many of the foreign visitors who come, including many from Israel, do not understand Ukrainian. For me, this was an eye-opener about social diversity in Ukraine and additional proof that Ukrainian identity was indeed on the rise in this region. As we were concluding the tour, my host pointed to an unfinished area of the museum and asked me what I guessed it was going to be. I think he was disappointed that I had no idea, and so he told me: “This wing will be about the Holodomor.” I showed surprise, and he was again disarmingly straightforward: “The Shoah was not the only holocaust on Ukrainian lands. The Holodomor was a holocaust, too. A Holocaust museum in Ukraine needs to acknowledge this. Besides, plenty of Jews died in the Holodomor, too.” When I noted that the city was named after an architect of the Holodomor, Mr. Ieromenko replied that this was proof that an indoctrinated public needed to be educated in the truth about Ukrainian history and about the chronically dishonest character of Soviet propaganda. I have visited the Menorah Center twice since that first visit and can confirm that a Holodomor wing was indeed added to the Holocaust Museum, and that the Ukrainian language still rules as the main language. I also observed that the center houses refugees from the war zone, and that a new shop has opened, specializing in traditional Ukrainian crafts that do not necessary have a connection to the country’s Jewish heritage. I asked the shop clerk and she assured me that I did not need to be surprised or skeptical: “A Ukrainian spirit reigns (володіє) here,” she told me. “It is genuine and deep.” In these ways, I see the Menorah Center and its powerful museum as integral parts in the reclaiming of Ukraine from Soviet captivity, as well as engines for the rebuilding of a vibrant Jewish life in the city and in Ukraine as a whole.

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Dnipro is a much more attractive city than Zaporizhia, even though it also has considerable heavy industry, suffered from deindustrialization, and its otherwise pleasant riverfront is lined with huge factories with colossal smoke stacks that spew plumes of who knows what into the atmosphere. Because it was designated as the capital of Novorossiya, it was designed to be special from the start, beginning with the choice of a name that glorified Russia’s regent Catherine the Great, Ekaterinoslav. As I have already noted, the city was planned by Potemkin and was designed to be large, green, and monumental. The leading building was to be Transfiguration Cathedral, for which Catherine herself laid the foundation stone on May 20, 1787, along with Austrian Emperor Joseph II. It was supposed to rival Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica in size and magnificence, but in the end only a much scaled-down structure was completed. There were also plans for a grand palace that never materialized. In the tsarist era, Ekaterinoslav became an industrial city because of its location between the coal resources and iron ore and the railroad through the city that opened in 1884. The Soviets stepped up the city’s industrial development, in part on the basis of energy from DniproHES, and after World War II made Dnipro into a privileged city where the best and brightest scientists from the Soviet Union were brought in to design rockets and missiles. In doing so, the city built prestige for the USSR as a whole and increased the country’s military strength during the arms race with the West. Because of these industries, Dnipro gained the moniker “Rocket City,” and was a closed city to foreigners (even from socialist countries) from 1959, until a thaw in the Cold War in 1987. Soon after World War II, the Soviet leadership in Moscow decided that the large site of an aircraft manufacturing plant that had been destroyed in the upriver part of Dnipro should become a new automobile factory, and ordered that thousands of German prisoners of war be put to the task of constructing it. By 1954, after the Germans had been repatriated, a top-secret design office opened within the Dnipropetrovsk Automotive Factory that came to be called Yuzhnoe, Russian for “Southern.” This part of the factory grew extraordinarily rapidly and thousands of physicists, mechanical engineers, and other highly trained specialists from all over the Soviet Union moved to the city and began work in new offices and laboratories in what everyone in Dnipro knew: this was a rocket factory. The factory made other things, too, perhaps as a cover for its greater purpose, officially farm tractors and kitchen appliances. The name of the plant was changed to Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel’nyi zavod, Russian for

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Southern Machine-Building Factory, contracted to “Yuzhmash” (in Ukrainian, the name is “Pivdenmash,” although it is rarely used). From 1954 to 1971, the plant was run by Mikhail Yangel (1911–1971), a brilliant scientist who is credited with the design of the Soviet Union’s first powerful rockets. Yuzhmash employed as many as 50,000 workers and was a defining force in what came to be a privileged city. The plant supplied rockets for the Soviet Union’s successful sputnik space program, building enormous prestige for the country and swelling national pride, as well as advanced missiles that were capable of travelling great distances to create the worst kind of destruction. By the time the Soviet period ended and Yuzhmash was reconfigured, Dnipro had become a major concentration of the nation’s best and brightest scientists, with higher wages, better housing, better stores with more goods, and nicer parks than most other Soviet cities. A large fraction of the population lived (and still lives) in detached single homes, rather than in the prefabricated dreary apartment blocks that are the norm in other cities. Many of the highranking workers were able to purchase private automobiles and to fly abroad for professional conferences and holiday breaks. The city also had a good number of theaters and concert halls, good libraries, and several fine universities, especially those specializing in technical subjects. Leonid Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine after independence, worked at Yuzmash from 1975 to 1992, and was the plant’s director from 1986 to 1991. Ukraine inherited the company from the Soviet Union in 1991, and continued to make rockets and satellites, including the famous Zenit and Dnepr rockets, as well as tractors, kitchen equipment, and even windmills and trolleybuses, but it has not been doing well financially. The real payoff was not in electric toasters and washing machines, but from contracts from the Soviet and Russian space programs and the Soviet military. The loss of Russia as a customer has worsened the economic situation and threatens the company’s future (Pronskyi 2015). A fairly recent book by Sergei I. Zhuk (2010) discusses social change in Dnipro during the period 1960–1985, critical years before the big thaw in Soviet society and the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union itself, and helps us understand how this carefully monitored Soviet city became part of the reclaiming of Ukraine. Its focus is on how youth in Dnipro challenged the ideological control that the KGB and Communist Party officials exerted on their activities, and how they were influenced by Western music, movies, and literature to see the world beyond the confines of Soviet strictness. Their par-

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ents’ generation had already taken in jazz culture from the West, as well as rebellious fashions in dressing. For men, stilyagi, the stylish man, was a popular look: “narrow short pants, big shoes, long chequered jacket with bright and long ties […] with Tarzan-like long hair combed straight back and smeared generously with briolin” (Zhuk 2010, 72, quoting Troitsky 1987, 2–3). Kuchma himself had reportedly been such a youth (71). The younger generation took to rock and roll, Beatlemania, new dance crazes, and the fashions of their favorite music stars, as well as movies such Ken Annakin’s 1965 farce Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, American westerns, films about the Mafia, and French comedies. In one chapter, Zhuk details how Dnipro youth embraced two Soviet-period taboos at once, rock music and religion, in their fascination for the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. The soundtrack was heard on records bought from Polish tourists, while the biography of the production’s star was learned about by consulting grandma’s hidden Bible. According to Zhuk, all this and more laid the groundwork for formation of a post-Soviet national identity. This same youth also became interested in things Ukrainian: folk songs in a language that they hardly knew, literature by Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka, the history of the Cossacks, Ukrainian-language films from the nationalist west of their Ukrainian republic, and the writings of Soviet dissidents who presented Ukrainian history and national aspirations differently from what their schoolbooks had taught. Not only did many young people, such as college students who had never before paid much attention to their Ukrainian ethnicity, begin to feel more and more Ukrainian; there were many people who were themselves not of Ukrainian heritage, including many Russians, who became more mindful that they were living in a country with a distinctive history and culture, and took sympathetic interest in the burgeoning of Ukrainian identity in their city. A key ingredient for the ethnic awakening was the publication in early 1968 of the novel Sobor (“Cathedral”) by Ukrainian writer from Kyiv Oles’ Honchar (1918–1995), and the repressions that followed. The writer was a decorated veteran of World War II and had been highly favored by Soviet authorities for works that focused on the heroism of Soviet soldiers in the war against the Nazis, one of which earned him the Stalin Prize in 1948 and a superior apartment on Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Street in the center of Kyiv. A later work, Tronka (1963), was a sympathetic portrait of contemporaneous

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life on the Ukrainian steppes and was sharply critical of Stalin’s policies in the country. It corresponded with the Khrushchev thaw about the former dictator and earned him the Lenin Prize in 1964. Sobor, however, pushed the button too far and was highly critical of the Soviet system. It brought on trouble for the author (from which he was rescued by his earlier sterling reputation and friendly contacts in high places), and was censored to the point that authorities tried to prohibit people from even mentioning the book. Zhuk’s study devotes an entire chapter to this story (53–64). The novel is about a beautiful old cathedral in the small town of “Zachiplyanka” near Dnipro that authorities want to take down during the time of Stalin’s war on religion and rising waters in the Dnipro behind the first dam, DniproHES. The authorities were opposed by metallurgists in the industrial towns of the area, who cited the facts that this beautiful and unique church was built by Cossacks without the use of nails and that its architect was a selftaught Cossack, and who argued that the building was an historic structure that needed to be spared. Readers understood that the cathedral represented Ukrainian identity and that the struggle to save it represented the struggle to preserve Ukrainian identity, language, and culture. It was obvious to everyone in Dnipropetrovsk that the novel was based on the threatened Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in the town of Novomoskovsk, near Dnipro, and that the Communist functionary villain of the novel, Volodymyr Loboda, was in fact the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional Communist Party, Oleksii Vatchenko. Vatchenko was furious. He was a close friend of Leonid Brezhnev and tried to have Honchar arrested, but managed only to have the book banned and its translation into Russian suspended. The publicity spiked interest in the book, especially among college youth, who, according to the KGB, read the book eagerly, “even during classes” (quoted by Zhuk, 55). The more the authorities tried to suppress Sobor, the more interest it attracted and the more the Soviet state failed to suppress a rise in Ukrainian national consciousness. Honchar was a graduate of Dnipropetrovsk National University, which was founded in 1918; in 2008, the university was renamed in his honor: Oles’ Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University. As we consider Dnipro today, we see the city as a reflection of the many problems that afflict Ukraine as a whole, as well as a reflection of the great potential that the country has for the future. The downside includes a diminished industrial economy, high rates of unemployment and poverty, social

[Figure 9.5: A chapel on Monastery Island in Dnipro]

[Figure 9.6: The center of Dnipro showing the river, the circus, and some high-rise apartments]

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inequality, inefficient and corrupt government, aging urban infrastructure, and bleak, outmoded housing estates that the Soviets built hurriedly after the war for industrial laborers and their families. Moreover, the city is located near an active war zone, which discourages investment in economy and infrastructure and, at the same time, brings it more than its fair share of dispirited refugees from battle-ravaged cities. On the other hand, we can envision a bright future for Dnipro. The city has many resources from which to make progress: the power that is generated from the flow of the river; an industrial port; location near coal, iron ore, manganese, uranium and other wealth from below the ground surface; location more-or-less near the center of Ukraine; an educated population with technical and scientific skills; fine universities and technical schools; some very nice neighborhoods that are not bleak; a nucleus of wealthy individuals who have invested in the city despite its hardships and who are leaders in philanthropy; and growing social and business ties to Jewish communities in the diaspora and to prominent Jews in Israel, among other resources. The city also has close business and cultural ties with the Donbas, and has opportunities to be a leader in the re-integration of that unfortunate region into the Ukrainian mainstream once the fighting has stopped and the separatists have been quieted. Indeed, we think that Dnipro can be a model of social and economic transformation from being a Russian-imperial city and then a Soviet city on Ukrainian soil, to being a leading Ukrainian city with a global reach and a Western outlook. Our positive assessment of Dnipro is informed, in part, by what we have seen in the city’s center. Traffic streams along “Central Bridge,” between the city’s commercial and administrative hub near the river on the right bank and residential and industrial neighborhoods to the north on the left bank, as well as along the busy riverfront roadway that until very recently was named after Lenin. Downtown sidewalks are jammed with pedestrians and vendors, and bus and trolley stops at street corners are busy. There is a cluster of new office buildings, hotels, and shopping centers in the blocks near the end of the bridge, as well as the aforementioned Menorah Center. A shopping mall named Most (Russian for “bridge”) is crowded with shoppers and restaurant goers all day long, especially young people on weekends. There are plenty of theaters and nightspots in the urban core, while the central square near where Lenin once stood is a children’s amusement zone with a merry-go-round and other attractions. Street musicians, magicians, and other talents add to the

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lively atmosphere. The former Karl Marx Prospekt is a beautiful tree-lined boulevard with cultural and educational institutions, museums, and fine old homes from the time of privilege in Soviet society, while certain side streets have nice restaurants, cafes, and nightspots. There are beautiful parks off the boulevard, too, led by Soborna (church) Square (formerly October Square) within which is the scaled-down Transfiguration Cathedral and Taras Shevchenko Park that faces the riverfront in one direction from the urban core, and a large, pleasant children’s park in the other direction. The city’s distinctively shaped circus building, however, seems underused and in bad repair. It is part of a large, prime-location tract in the center near the end of the bridge that is overgrown with weeds, covered with graffiti, and littered with beer bottles and other debris, suggesting that redevelopment start soon. Other sites nearby are already being redeveloped, such that we can easily imagine that the less attractive parts of central Dnipro will soon be improved. The central part of the city’s riverfront is already nice. A lovely park stretches between the river and the riverside drive (nee Lenin) that now glorifies the Cossacks’ Sich, through which is a paved walkway that is wide enough to be shared by pedestrians, bicyclists, and skateboarders alike. On one side there are floating restaurants, cafés, and boat moorings, while on the other side is a generous strip of tree-shaded grass beside the road for picnics and outdoor parties. The area also has new public art, comfortable benches, and street musicians and other buskers, as well as public events such as concerts and fireworks shows. The walkway leads to Monastery Island (Monastyrsyi Ostiv, also translated as Monastic Island), the site of an ancient monastery that was destroyed in 1240 by Batu Khan and that has been a recreation hideaway for almost as long as Dnipro has been in existence. In 1956, the Soviets constructed a pedestrian bridge across the busy Lenin roadway connecting the island to Taras Shevchenko Park with which it is now jointly administered, and in 1999 the post-Soviets build a pretty church dedicated to the Apostle Andrew on the island’s tip. There are gardens, and one of the tallest statues of Taras Shevchenko in Ukraine. The rest of the island is a fun and relaxation destination. There is an amusement park for children, a small zoo, and training bases for sports clubs, as well as a wide popular beach. Volleyball is popular on the sands away from the water. As one continues along the island away from the pedestrian bridge, the beaches become less developed, there are no more beach-side cafés and vendors’ kiosks, the crowds thin out, and fewer and fewer

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sun bathers wear anything at all. At night, there are plenty of parties around campfires. The view is of industry and smokestacks across the river, upriver and downriver, trains carrying coal cross on a rail bridge overhead where the beach abuts the amusement park, and the water quality might be suspect, but people bathe in the Dnipro in large numbers nonetheless and have great fun.

[Figure 9.7: The center of Dnipro showing the river, the unfinished Parus building, some Soviet-style apartment blocks, and a distant landscape of smokestacks and power lines]

There is a curious landmark on the Dnipro in the downtown area at the far end of the pedestrian walk along the river from Monastery Island. This is Parus, a word in Russian and Russian-influenced Ukrainian that means “sail” (the noun), and that is the name of a more-or-less sail-shaped hotel tower that the Soviets worked on constructing for an interminable period between 1973 and 1987 and never finished. It is, therefore, what is called a “ghost building” or “ghost skyscraper,” and has been referred to as an example of failure and inefficiency in Soviet urban planning and construction. We can think of it as a monument to a failed system. It has just stood there, topped out but totally empty, since construction stopped, shaped somewhat like a sail but not really, visible for all to see, and useless except for perhaps for furtive exploration and drinking parties by young people, as in Orbita (see Chapter 7), and daredevil

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highline walks more than 16 stories above the ground. From time to time, the building has flown a Ukrainian flag, which was taken down by objectors in favor of a Russian flag, which in turn would lose its place to still another Ukrainian flag, and so on. The “flag war” was stepped up as tensions between Ukraine and Russia escalated during the Euromaidan revolution and the fall of Viktor Yanukovych from the Ukrainian presidency, and again after the taking of Crimea. On May 3, 2014, some 50-plus young Ukrainian men and women, most of them fans of the Ukrainian football club “Dnipro,” decided to win the “Battle of Parus” once and for all, and spent the day painting the building in blue and yellow colors. They worked from the hotel room balconies and gave the structure a top to bottom yellow Ukrainian trident coat of arms against a blued background. The job consumed some 200 liters of paint and was supported by the Dnipro Oblast governor at the time, Ihor Kolomoyskyi. One of the participants in this action, a young Svoboda Party member named Kyrylo Dorolenko, told a newspaper reporter that the group’s goal was to show that “Dnipropetrovsk is a Ukrainian city, and [that] it will be this way forever.” He continued: “Now, people who walk along the Dnipro embankment or cross the bridge will see the coat of arms of Ukraine. This has to have a positive impact on their consciousness and consolidate the Ukrainian identity of our city” (Ryzhkov 2014).

C H A P T E R 10

The Lower Course 10.1: Introduction As we leave Zaporizhia and round the last bend of the Great Bend, we enter the part of the river where it turns west, flowing not much like a river but as yet another sea, the Kakhovka Reservoir, the last in the chain of elongated lakes that make up the Dnipro in Ukraine. The reservoir is 240 kilometers in length and is the longest of the reservoirs in the Dnipro Cascade, and the second largest, barely smaller in surface area than the Kremenchuk Sea. It was formed behind the dam at Nova Kakhovka, a small port city on the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast, where the river has turned from its west-east orientation to flow more-or-less in a straight line to the southwest to its estuary at the Black Sea. The Kakhovka Reservoir reaches upriver from this dam almost to the next dam, DniproHES, and is the divide in its upper part between Dnipro and Zaporizhia Oblasts on the right banks and left banks, respectively. At the point where the channel turns to the southwest, we enter Kherson Oblast which spans the river for the rest of its course to its mouth. Near the mouth of the Dnipro Estuary, the lyman, the waters are divided between Kherson Oblast and a small part of Mykolaiv Oblast on the right bank. In this chapter I will divide the lower course of the Dnipro into three parts: (1) the east-to west portion of the Kakhovka Reservoir between Dnipro and Zaporizhia Oblasts; (2) the northeast-to-southwest stretch of the reservoir from where it enters Kherson Oblast to the dam at Nova Kakhovka; and (3) the river below the dam, including at Kherson and Hola Prystan, and the lyman where waters from the Buh (Russian: Bug) River join the lower Dnipro. We will see that the river continues to have important uses related to industry and, more than ever, for agriculture in this region of southern Ukraine, where summers are hot,

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sunny, and dry. We will also see that the river’s lower course and the cities, towns, and even tiny villages along it have interesting histories.

[Figure 10.1: The lower Dnipro]

10.2: The Upper Kakhovka Reservoir The Dnipro makes its turn to the west below Zaporizhia near where the Kakhovka Reservoir is at its widest, about 20 kilometers across. Except for the lower part of the Kremenchug Reservoir, which is about five kilometers wider, this part of the Kakhovka Reservoir is the widest point of the Dnipro cascade. It is even wider than the river’s mouth. The reservoir has an “L” shape, and the town nearest to the right angle is Vasylivka. It is on the left bank in Zaporizhia Oblast and has only about 14,000 inhabitants, but it serves as a local administrative center nonetheless and is one of several small towns along the reservoir that seem generic and nondescript on the one hand, but that reveal engaging biographies and sites worth seeing from close-up. I cannot discuss them all here nor go into great detail, but we can get a flavor of both past and present with brief stops in the left bank settlements of Dniprorudne, Enerhodar, and Kamianka-Dniprovska, in addition to Vasylivka, and Marhanets, Nikopol,

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and Ordzhonikidze (now Pokrova) on the right bank. Each of these places adds something different to the total picture of past and present along the reservoir. It might help the reader to begin with a preview of the towns and villages that will be profiled in this chapter by listing them in order of presentation, along with some key words about their uniqueness: Vasylivka: Dniprorudne: Enerhodar: Kamianka-Dniprovska: Marhanets and Nikopol: Pokrova: Velyka Lepetykha: Zmiivka: Chervonyi Mayak: Kakhovka: Nova Kakhovka: Kherson: Hola Prystan: Mykolaiv: Ochakiv:

Popov’s Castle and a flying saucer for the police Iron ore mining Nuclear power plant Scythian capital Manganese industry and Cossack history Manganese and Proctor & Gamble An unremarkable place? Swedes, Germans, and Boykos Monasteries Fortresses and battles Dam builders’ housing; socialist city A larger city; Jewish history, shipbuilding center and port Last town on the River Dnipro; peaceful outpost A larger city; shipbuilding center at the head of the Buh River estuary Last town on the Dnipro Estuary; scene of epic battles in past wars

Vasylivka is not actually directly on the reservoir, but about 2.5 kilometers upstream on the left bank of the Karachkorak River, a minor tributary of the Dnipro. The town had been even further from the Dnipro, but the distance narrowed as the reservoir swelled after the Kakhovka Dam was completed in 1956, bringing the river nearer and flooding the farmlands and ancient historical-archaeological sites along the way. Because of its size, the reservoir took a heavy toll, as the prairies near the river were especially advantageous for vegetable crops and fruit orchards, and the lands beneath were rich in ancient treasures and historical insights from the Scythian period some two and onehalf millennia ago (see also Chapter 3).The burial mounds (kurhany) on the steppes nearby that were not flooded have been especially fruitful with respect

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to excavation sites from ancient times. Artefacts from the history of the Zaporozhian Cossacks were also drowned by the rising waters. The history of the town Vasylivka begins after the disbanding of the Zaporozhian Cossacks by Catherine the Great in 1775 and a land grant in 1783 to Vasyl Stepanovych Popov, an official and military general of Imperial Russia with close ties to Grigori Potemkin, the man to whom Catherine had entrusted the governorship of Novorossiya. The land was formally surveyed, and in place of the Cossacks who had established farmsteads there before, Popov settled the area with serfs from his lands in other provinces. He also forced the remaining long-term inhabitants into serfdom on lands that they had once farmed freely. He became quite wealthy as a result, exporting both grains and wool from his lands to Crimea and ports beyond. In 1799, he named the town after himself. After the emancipation of serfs in the Russian empire in 1861, Popov’s descendants continued to profit by charging tenants high rents for the small portions of land that they were assigned and continued to exploit tenants’ labors on the lands that they retained. When the peasants grumbled and threatened to withhold payments to the landlord, the police and soldiers stopped them. The completion of a railroad in 1874 to Crimea made the land more profitable. The rail stop in Vasylivka was named Popov. In 1864–1884, one of Popov’s grandsons, Vasyl Vasylevych Popov, constructed an enormous private residence made of brick that came to be called Popov’s Castle. He had instructed his architect to make it “a paradise on earth.” The structure had a look that suggested both a typical European castle from the Middle Ages and the Kremlin in Moscow, and featured high, buttressed walls at the perimeter, multiple tall towers capped with peaked domes, and castlelike crenellations all around. It is reported that inside were valuable works of art by European masters and an ethnographic collection that was worthy of a museum. The park-like grounds had a large greenhouse. The entire complex was tightly patrolled, and the peasants had been told to not even come near because “they spoil the view.” Popov’s Castle is still there, near the center of the small town at #12 vul. Haharina (Gagarin Street), but only in part. The contents were looted by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and the entire structure was all but destroyed by the Germans in World War II. Apparently, many of its bricks were later recycled for construction of barns and other buildings on local collective farms. What remains of the building is not in good condition, but after restoration work

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that started in 1989, a small museum was opened in 1993, with an ethnographic hall, a hall dedicated to the Second World War, a hall for showing works by local artists, and a hall about the castle itself in which we see a handsome scale model of the entire complex in its glory. The setting is not very pretty, as the original grounds were developed before World War II, and the building is surrounded by much newer structures that have no relation to the castle. Guidebooks recommend stopping in Vasylivka to see this chapter of history, but what is more interesting in the town is the bus station. We see it first after crossing the crest of the bridge on Highway E105 over the Karachkorak River and enter town limits. It is directly in front of us as we approach, and stands out for its sheer ugliness. It is the most brutal of Soviet constructivist architecture, and centers on a concrete traffic signal with painted red, yellow, and green “lights” that is higher than the gritty three-story concrete structure of which it is part. The monstrosity is capped with a letter “A” (for the Ukrainian word for bus station) with broad wings. But even stranger as we descend into town from the bridge is the structure that stands in the foreground in the center of the traffic circle at the end of the ramp. It is a flying saucer! More accurately, it is a structure that looks like a flying saucer but is actually a base for police that is perched on iron supports 15 steps above the ground to give the occupants a panoptical view of local traffic. A photo I found on the Internet is captioned “Careful! Traffic police here stop drivers for no reason,” a reference to a common shakedown scam that underpaid and unscrupulous police officers in Ukraine have been known for since the end of Soviet rule. Thankfully, petty corruption by police is now being brought under control, as one of the priorities of post-Euromaidan Ukraine has been to reform police forces. My own photo of the flying saucer and odd bus station is Figure 10.2. The signs on the building advertise a furniture store that shares space with the bus depot.

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[Figure 10.2: The bus station and flying saucer police post in Vasylivka]

Our next stop is Dniprorudne, a town of about 21,000 inhabitants located about 20 kilometers downriver from Vasylivka. It is a much newer place, having been founded in 1961, and has a very straightforward Soviet-style name that reflects its economic role: “Dniprorudne” means “Dnipro ore” and exists because of enormously rich iron ore deposits that Soviet geologists documented in the 1950s and that started to be exploited a few years thereafter. These deposits are referred to as the Bilozerskyi ores and are located some 25 kilometers south of the town, away from the river. There is not as much quantity of ore as at Krivyi Rih across the river on the right bank, but the Bilozerskyi deposits are enormously rich, containing as much as 68 percent iron. This is the highest concentration in Europe and is rivaled only by iron ore at specific mines in Argentina and Brazil. Dniprorudne was built to be a model dormitory town in a healthy environment for the miners whose jobs some distance away were not healthy. It was laid out with wide streets and many trees, large parks, and, of course, places to rest along the new sea that had risen at the town’s edge. The main boulevard is called Enthusiasts’ Prospect, referring to happy Soviet workers on their way to work, as we also saw in Zaporizhia (Chapter 9). Housing was in planned apartment blocks arranged in neat rows and separated from each other by lines of trees. The high floors had (and still

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have, I suppose) unobstructed views of the fields outside the town or the wide reservoir and plenty of fresh air when the windows were open. Instead of a flying saucer, one traffic circle in the town has a monument to industrial workers on which are written the words “Glory to the Heroes of Labor,” while another traffic circle has a monument that commemorates August 26, 1967, as the day when the first iron ore was extracted from the newly opened mine. That monument has a clever design: it is a cross-section of the geology below ground, showing various rock strata and slips and faults between them, and a cross section of a mine tunnel about half-way down within which is a single scale-model ore car on rails. Neither monument is worth a special trip to see, but like the name of the town, both are straightforward and say exactly why the town was created. Unfortunately, the mine is now closed, the port is quiet, and Dniprorudne is a city of unemployment and out-migration. A recent visit in the spring showed that a great many residents were trying to supplement meager incomes with roadside sales of tomatoes, strawberries, and honey from their own gardens. About 30 kilometers downriver is an even newer town that also has a nononsense Soviet-style name. This is Enerhodar, founded on June 12, 1970, and given a name two years later that means “giver of energy.” It was built on a sandy peninsula that juts into the Kakhovka Reservoir as the site of the Zaporizhia (Oblast) DRES (thermal power plant). A black-and-white photograph from the 1970s in the town’s archives shows a big billboard-type sign reading Zdes’ budet gorod energetikov, Russian for “Here will be a city of energy workers,” in the distance behind which is a landscape of Soviet-type apartment blocks and construction cranes rising from the sands. The town grew quickly and reached a population of 50,000 by 1985, when it was designated officially as a city. Today, there are some 55,000 inhabitants in Enerhodar, making the city the largest of the places that we have visited so far in this chapter. The Zaporizhia DRES is now renamed Zaporizhia TES, from the Ukrainian for Zaporizhia Thermal Power Plant, and burns natural gas as the primary fuel, coal as the secondary fuel, and oil as the third. Its flue gas stack is 320 meters high, one of the tallest freestanding structures in Ukraine. It gives off an enormous plume that I think of as Soviet-scale. But this is only part of the story of Enerhodar, as in 1978 it was decided that the “giver of energy” should produce atomic energy as well. Construction of the Zaporizhia (Oblast) AES (atomic energy plant), more commonly called

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the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant in English, commenced in 1981, and the plant was commissioned in 1985, one year before the Chornobyl debacle. In terms of net electrical power rating, it is the largest nuclear energy plant in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, after one in Japan that has been shut down for the time being, one in Canada, and two in South Korea. It has 6 VVER-1000 pressurized light water reactors, each generating 1000 megawatts of electricity.* The first five reactors became operational between 1985 and 1989, and the sixth was started up in 1995. The Zaporizhia AES generates about one-half of Ukraine’s nuclear power output and more than one-fifth of the total electricity generated in the country. Thankfully, the plant is rated highly by the International Atomic Energy Commission for safety, and there have been no significant breakdowns or other incidents. However, the city’s official flag, adopted sometime after Ukrainian independence, seems to illustrate a different, dire outcome for the city. Picture this: the flag is the yellow color of the Ukrainian national flag and across it runs a Ukrainian-blue belt in waves that represent the Dnipro. This is simple enough, but then to left-center is a light-brown colored circle (maybe it is sand-colored?) with the word ЕНЕРГОДАР (ENERHODAR) in the center, and around that is a bright-red representation of a type that is found commonly in comic books of, boom! … an explosion! Perhaps I misinterpreted the artwork, but still, this is not good. Seen from some distance offshore in the Kakhovka Reservoir, Enerhodar presents a dramatic profile. There is no relief to the land that can be seen, as the steppes here are as flat as the surface of the water, so it is only the energygiving buildings that can be seen: cooling towers from the nuclear plant and their characteristic vapor plumes; six blocky reactor buildings in a row where water meets land; a tall flue stack behind each one; and then behind them, two flue stacks from the thermal power plant that are three times as high. Even a wide-angle view shows absolutely nothing else, except perhaps hazy lines of trees that front the water to one side and the other of the power plant complex. The city itself is like other Soviet-built cities, except perhaps sandier. A reporter for the Kyiv Post who visited Enerhodar in 1999 clearly did not like the city: “Stepping off the bus, one is greeted with heat, wind, dust and sand. Lots of sand. Enerhodar was built on sand 29 years ago. It is a pathetic *  VVER stands for Water-Water Energetic Reactor.

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place …”* My own assessment is not as cruel, but I agree that as important as it is to the functioning of Ukraine, Enerhodar is not particularly commendable. Its mix of housing estates, shops, parks, and monuments to Soviet victory in World War II is pretty much the same as what found in other cities where Soviet labor is more important than life. There is nothing special to recommend. I understand that residents make use of a strip of park along a canal that was dredged beside some housing estates, and Pobedy Park (Victory Park), that focuses on a Soviet fighter jet monument that pedestrians pass as they make their way to a small but untidy beach at the end of the walk. The scene from Enerhodar that I have chosen to illustrate is of the city in the sands. Figure 10.3 shows one several new churches rising from the dunes in this once very Soviet city, behind which, also on sand, is a representative housing complex.

[Figure 10.3: A new church rises from the sands of Enerhodar]

*   Online at: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/enerhodar-the-villagepowering-europe39s-biggest-n-1374.html [last accessed: February 10, 2017].

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Kamianka-Dniprovska, with a population of approximately 13,500, is such a short distance downstream that it feels like part of the same built-up area with Enerhodar. A village named Voyana connects the two communities. Kamianka-Dniprovska is much older than Enerhodar, having been founded in 1786 during the period of Russian imperial expansion, when it was the site of a fortress in a line that protected the southern flank of Novorossiya from the Ottomans. However, the history of the site is much, much older, as Kamianka-Dniprovska is purported to have been the location in the fourth century B.C. of the capital of the ancient Scythian kingdom under the ruler Ateas (c. 429 B.C.–339 B.C.), unifier of Scythian society. The neighboring community downriver of Velyka Znamianka is said to be part of the capital complex as well. Archaeological evidence shows that this center of power was protected on one side by earthen walls and deep ditches, and by the wide mouth of the Bilozerskyi River, where it flows into the Dnipro and steep cliffs, on the other. In various directions from Kamianka-Dniprovska and Velyka Znamianka are kurhany (burial mounds) from Scythian times, including Solokha and Mamay Hora that have yielded many gold treasures of exquisite craftsmanship and beauty. There is a small museum in KamiankaDniprovska that focuses on Scythian history and artefacts, but the most valuable items that were uncovered in the region are on display in Kyiv and elsewhere. Today, Kamianka-Dniprovska is distinguished by a new river port and a line of 12 shining storage silos for grains and agricultural oils from the region (plus two smaller silos behind the wall of that faces the dock), and by a monument of a large, bright red tomato on a stone pedestal onto which are affixed the words СЛАВА ПОМІДОРУ!, “Glory to the tomato!” On both sides of the Dnipro, the lands that we are traversing are pancakeflat steppes, often with views to the horizon. Lines of trees stand high as borders to expansive farmlands and serve as wind breaks that help to keep the soil in place during times of dryness. The natural steppes are amazingly beautiful, with tall grasses and seas of wildflowers swaying in delightful waves in the winds. The flowery aromas are unforgettable, too, as are the sights and sounds of a rich variety of birds, insects, and other prairie creatures. Because of long growing seasons and fertile spoils, most of this land is intensively farmed. There are boundless fields of grain and soybeans, and many hothouses made of clear plastic sheets supported by frames of bent metal rods. This agriculture is both corporate and family-farm in scale, and supplies much of the

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Ukrainian population with a wide variety of vegetables and fresh flowers, as well as glorious tomatoes. Some of the produce is sold at the roadside to passing truck drivers who bargain for the lowest prices and drive their hauls to wholesale markets in Kyiv, Dnipro, and other population centers. On the opposite bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir are two cities that I mentioned previously as being parts of the industrial heartland of Ukraine, Marhanets and Nikopol (see also Chapter 8), plus other industrial cities nearby. This is the world of manganese, one of Ukraine’s most plentiful industrial resources. The town name “Marhanets” means manganese, and is a major mining and ore processing center (with a population of about 48,500), while Nikopol, located just downriver where there was once a prominent crossing of chumak traders carting salt from Crimea, has a major industrial port as well as large metallurgical works and other heavy industry. Not far away is a city that until recently was named Ordzhonikidze. Its population is 41,000, and it is still another industrial center based on manganese. Mining in the area dates back to 1886. The city is now named Pokrova, a religious name associated with the Virgin Mary as Protectress.* The city was established officially in 1956, but the site had been settled for many centuries and was once the location of the Cossack’s Chortomlyk Sich. A nearby small industrial town is named Chortomlyk. The entire area on this bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir was once the land of Cossacks, with Marhanets being at the former location of Tomakivka Sich and Nikopol at Mykytyn Rih where Bohdan Khmelnytskyi became the first hetman and launched his war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Nikopol has a city flag that has similarities to the one for Enerhodar. It is Ukrainian blue instead of Ukrainian yellow, and the waves that roll across it are white. But instead of an explosion, this flag boasts a triumphant Ukrainian-yellow Cossack on horseback in its center. None of these industrial cities is attractive. They were built to do heavy industrial work, and workers were housed in hurriedly built apartment buildings with few amenities. There are parks, public squares, and cultural halls, as well as beaches along the reservoir, but like industrial cities elsewhere in Ukraine, these cities are “rust belt.” Populations have been declining. For ex*  The former city name Ordzhonikidze is Georgian and commemorated Grigol (Sergo)

Ordzhonikidze (1886–1937), a Bolshevik leader and close associate of his fellow co-ethnic Georgian, Josef Stalin. The new name came into effect on April 2, 2016, as part of Ukraine’s de-Communization.

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ample, Nikopol has lost more than 40,000 residents since its peak in 1989 of 157,608. In all three cities, there are run-down buildings and neighborhoods, public spaces marred by graffiti and litter, and social problems such as substance abuse, unemployment, and a lack of opportunities for youth. In Pokrova, this is seen by scrolling through news items about drug addiction, apartment burglaries, and other crimes that have been posted on a town blog.* But there are other aspects, too, that add still another dimension to our travels. At 1a vul. Ural’ska (Ural Mountains Street) in the center of the same Ordzhonikidze/Pokrova, for example, we see a large, new, neat and modern industrial plant, which means many new jobs in the community, spin-off income for other residents, and investment in the infrastructure of the town. It is branch of an American multinational corporation based in Cincinnati, the Proctor & Gamble Company. The firm entered the Ukrainian market in 1990, opened a small office in Kyiv in 1993 and then a bigger office, and now employs 2,000 workers in the country. There is a factory outside Kyiv in the airport town Boryspil that makes feminine hygiene products, while this one in a grey town in Dnipro Oblast is newer and uses locally produced ingredients to make soaps and related products that are sold under the Gala, Camay, and Safeguard brand names. Not everyone is a fan of multinationals because they have a way of undermining local companies, but such is the world we live in and Ukraine needs the jobs. The form of the Kakhovka Reservoir is regulated by the amount of water that enters into it through DniproHES and directs tributaries such as the aforementioned Karachkorak River, and by the slopes and elevations of land along its banks. In addition, there is a prominent dike or levee that extends for a stretch along the right-bank shores not far south of Nikopol. It was erected at the time the reservoir was filling, because it was evident that there was considerable low-lying land on that bank that would be flooded without a retaining wall. The result would be the loss of many more villages and farms, increased evaporation from over a greatly enlarged reservoir, and shallower waters that would impede navigation. The levee is made of rock and earth and runs along the bank for several kilometers. Atop it is a road, part of the main “highway” between Dnipro and Kherson, two very important cities on the *  Online at: http://ordzho.com/posts/gorod_ordjonikidze.html#/page/1 [last accessed: February 10, 2017].

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lower right bank. To one side of the road is the wide Kakhovka Reservoir and waves that lap gently against jagged boulders just below, while on the landward side, there are forests and farms, and a dirt road that parallels the highway, all at an elevation several meters below the level of the Dnipro. The stretch of road atop the levee is in especially poor condition, generally much worse than the potholed highway, and drivers have to zigzag to avoid potholes and rocks, and make slow progress while kicking up a cloud of rock-dust that slows other drivers even more. I was amused to see that drivers in the know avoided this road and drove much more quickly and freely on the dirt road below. There were other experiences like this on the steppes: driving on the pavement was more difficult and slower than over a worn two-wheeled path over the grassy steppes. Frustrated drivers complained loudly that road-repair funds are routinely stolen in Ukraine, and that road repairs never get done as a result. It is easy to calculate that the implications of poor roads and corruption in transportation infrastructure bring enormous costs to the national economy and economic development efforts, and help keep the country poor. Many Ukrainians will say that this is all part of a plan by Ukraine’s enemies to prevent the country from prospering on its own. It is truly sad to see roads in such a bad condition in a part of the country where farmlands and mineral resources are among the world’s richest (Figure 10.4).

[Figure 10.4: Trucks weaving to navigate the potholes on a road on a levee south of Nikopol]

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10.3: The Lower Kakhovka Reservoir The Kakhovka Reservoir narrows to an average width of about three kilometers, below where we just visited, and begins to flow in a gently winding course to the southwest. We enter Kherson Oblast, which spans the Dnipro, and the second of our three sections of the lower course, the stretch between the turn to the southwest and the Kakhovka Dam. It is some 200 kilometers from the turn to the dam, and some 80 kilometers in the opposite direction, to DniproHES. Therefore, the dam-to-dam distance is approximately 280 kilometers, a fact worth mentioning because except for about two kilometers, this is the distance between bridges across this part of the Dnipro. As we have seen, the river is bridged in Zaporizhia over DniproHES; it is bridged again two kilometers downriver about midway across the length of Khortytsia Island. This is still in Zaporizhia. The next bridge, about 278 kilometers downriver, is the Kakhovka Dam. In between the Kakhovka and Khortytsia crossings, there are simply too few larger population centers along the Dnipro and the river is simply too wide to have made a bridge necessary. The settlements along this second stretch of the river are all small, with Velyka Lepetykha, a left bank town not quite halfway along this stretch being the largest. Its population is a whopping 8,600. As far as I can tell, the town is unremarkable except that in 1965, some students uncovered fragments of statues and items made of flint from Trypillian culture in or near the town, and in 2015, an unknown person or persons tipped over the town’s statue of Vladimir Lenin. This is a picturesque, quiet, and very rural part of Ukraine, and in general towns and villages are ordinary. Most settlements were founded in the late eighteenth century in connection with the Russian colonization of the “wild field,” and were settled with transplants from other parts of the empire, including Russian Ukraine, and with settlers recruited from other European countries. Almost every settlement’s claim to fame has something to do with archaeological finds from the Bronze Age, the Scythian kingdom, or the Trypillians, or from more recent history, with the Cossacks. Monuments are Soviet, with a Lenin statue in every settlement, at least in the past, memorials to victory in World War II, and in more and more places the monuments of an independent Ukraine: e.g., an independence monument, a monument to leading figures from Ukrainian history, or a memorial to victims of the Holodomor. More and more towns have churches now, too,

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sometimes two or more from competing confessions. Also, I observed that there is no shortage of places to buy alcoholic beverages, and that in local shops selling produkty (food products), the greatest number of choices for consumers seem to be for brands and types of beer and for brands of vodka. None of this is to say that the towns along this stretch of the Dnipro are not interesting, or that Velyka Lepetykha really is unremarkable. The only thing I know for sure is that I have no special remarks about it. For other places in the region, even smaller ones, I do have interesting stories. Take, for instance, the case of Zmiivka, a right bank village of 2,759 souls. It was founded in the same period as the other towns in the area, in 1782, but was settled first by Swedes who arrived with permission of Catherine the Great. They came from a Baltic Sea island that today is a part of Estonia. At the start of the nineteenth century, Germans arrived in the area and formed three settlements: Schlangendorf, Mülhausendorf, and Klosterdorf. In World II, the Soviets deported them to the distant east because they were volksdeutsch, German people. In their place, in 1951, the Soviets brought in some 2,500 ethnic Boyko people, who were being deported from three Carpathian Mountains villages at the shifting boundary between Ukraine and Poland, Lodyna, Dolishnyi Berih, and Naniv.* In general, they did not want to live in the Soviet Union and much preferred to have stayed put even though their corner of Ukraine was being reassigned to Poland. The ethnic cleansing program that forced them to move was called Operation Vistula (after the Polish river) in English, Operatsia Visla in Ukrainian, and Akcja Wisła in Polish. Deported Boykos were also sent to nearby right-bank villages of Havrylivka and Dudchany, although not in as many numbers as to Zmiivka. They are reported to have had difficult times adjusting to the steppe environment. Also, they were poorly received by locals who accused them of being nationalist Ukrainians as opposed to trustworthy Soviet citizens, and suffered many indignities as a consequence. There is a story about one Boyko individual named Mykhailo Beley, who was imprisoned in 1952 for organizing a traditional Ukrainian vertep pageant in Zmiivka, in which he prepared costumes for neighbors to *  The Boyko people are a sub-group of the Ukrainian people who live in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine and Poland. They speak a distinctive dialect of the Ukrainian language and have many of their own customs, ways of dress and styles of folk architecture. Their neighbors include Lemkos and Hutsuls, also ethnographic sub-groups of the Ukrainian people. All three of these groups tend to belong to the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

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play acting roles for the Bethlehem manger scene and laid out painted portraits of Taras Shevchenko, western Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, and Ukrainian Catholic religious leader Rev. Andriy Sheptytskyi. His sentence was two and one-half years because he supposedly posed a danger to Soviet society. The Boykos came to comprise more than 80 percent of the population of Zmiivka and soon adjusted to their new surroundings. The Soviets had destroyed the Swedish church in 1929, converted the German Kirche in 1951 to a club and then to a storage facility for fertilizer, and never allowed the Boykos to organize one of their own. Now, however, in independent Ukraine, the small village has three places of worship: a Protestant church, an Orthodox church affiliated with the Kyiv Patriarchate, and a Ukrainian Catholic church that the Boykos have built. The older generation of Boykos is still nostalgic for the mountains and strives to pass on Boyko dialect and traditions to their offspring. In 2001, on the 50-year anniversary of their deportation to Zmiivka, a delegation traveled to the three now-Polish villages from which they came and brought back soil to put into a new monument. Its design suggests mountains, a Boyko church, and a traditional Boyko house. In 2010, the village unveiled a monument to the heroes of Ukraine’s struggle for freedom. There are reportedly 12 ethnic groups residing in Zmiivka today, which seems like a large number given the small population of the village and the high percentage of Boyko residents. Swedes number 108 individuals. They have reportedly held on tightly to their heritage, and speak, sing, and pray in a dialect of Swedish that no longer exists in their home country. They have no priest of their own as their congregation is too small, but a priest comes every few months from Sweden to minister to their needs. On October 2, 2008, the Swedish King Carl XVI Gustav and his wife Silvia paid an official state visit to Zmiivka. The royal couple met with villagers, donated medical equipment to the local clinic, and laid flowers at a monument to German and Swedish victims of Soviet repressions. Also, they attended church services in the Orthodox Church that Swedes borrow for their own services. The church was renovated for the occasion and was given a new cupola. The village’s statue of Lenin was removed before the king’s visit, officially because it was in poor condition, and was never put back. In Havrylivka, unknown people tore down the Lenin statue on December 13, 2014. I was charmed by Zmiivka. The village is picturesque and well maintained, and on the spring day of my first visit was blooming and notably productive.

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[Figure 10.5: A church in Zmiivka. The Dnipro is seen in the background]

The mostly elderly residents were hospitable, in the best of the traditions of Carpathian Ukraine, and spoke in a pure form of Ukrainian, without the admixtures from Russian that resulted in most of Ukraine from decades of Russian and Soviet influence. When I mistakenly used a Russian word in conversation instead of a very different one in Ukrainian, a sweet elderly woman (who is younger than I am) pounced on me with a good-humored correction. I liked that a lot. There is something special in this small village in which most residents are descendants of people from the mountains and who have never seen those mountains themselves. Yet, they have kept the mountain dialects and traditions alive despite Soviet pressures to assimilate, and have built a life on flat lands beside a great river that was foreign for their parents. They live in a community with ethnic diversity, but disdain the Russian influence that is a norm throughout Ukraine, have been visited by a foreign king, and are proud to host the occasional ethnographer and foreign tourist who comes their way. A modest monument that they erected in their village boasts that theirs is a three-church village.

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Another interesting story from this stretch of the Dnipro comes from the village of Chervonyi Mayak, located about ten kilometers up-reservoir from Zmiivka. It has a population of 1,883, and got its start in 1773, about one year after the founding of Zmiivka, when the lands were surveyed by the imperial government’s frontier settlement planners for an Orthodox monastery. The first monks lived in caves that were dug into the bluffs at the river, traces of which are reported to survive, and at the start of the next century, the Bizyurkiv monastery was relocated to the site from the Smolensk region and became the Hryhoriye-Bizyurkiv monastery for men. It prospered enormously. The lands produced grains, orchard fruits, and honey for sale, as well as milk, cheese, and meat from livestock, and access to the river was rented out for fishing. The monastery grew to be huge and prosperous. Not only did it have the support of the imperial government; it earned income when monks travelled the area house to house to ask for donations, and from wealthy people who made sizable donations to be absolved of their sins. At least that is the version of history that has been passed down via the Communist-era filter. At the start of the Soviet period, the complex reportedly had 70 stone buildings, including a cathedral, two churches, a bell tower, a three-story monks’ residence with 76 rooms, the 43-room residence of the monastery’s spiritual leader, a 12-room building for the administrator of the complex, plus hotels for visitors, a medical clinic, a school, and many other buildings directly related to farm production. I have seen old photographs and a painting of the complex, and think that these data ring true. The residents of nearby villages worked for the monks. The Soviets did not like this, of course, and they closed the monastery, looted its wealth, and managed to waste no time in destroying most of what was there. Bits and pieces survived, however, and some of it has been restored. The renewed church is magnificent. Nearby, at the top of a series of stone steps overgrown with weeds, is a large, hollow arch where there was once the great door to another church. There is no longer a building attached, and the winds from across the steppes and over the Kakhovka Reservoir whistle through the opening unimpeded.

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[Figure 10.6: Ruins from a monastery in Chervonyi Mayak]

This brings us to the town of Nova Kakhovka and the dam that forms the reservoir that we have been following (Figure 10.7). It is the last stop in our travels down this middle section of the lower course of the Dnipro, but there is still a lot to say before we get to the lowest stretch of the river. Nova Kakhovka, with a population of 72,700, is but one of several towns and villages that are clustered near the dam, including Kakhovka just upstream (with a population of 38,000), Tavriisk (11,051) and Beryslav (13,457), as well as some smaller communities. By the standards of population totals in places that we have visited most recently, this cluster is a veritable mini metropolis. The area not only has the dam and its hydroelectric generation facilities, but also has the start of an elaborate canal system that carries waters from the Dnipro to dry places (see also Chapter 2). There is an expansive area of sands and sand dunes called the Oleshky Sands (Oleshkivski Pisky in Ukrainian) that covers about 1,622 square kilometers. It is named after Oleshky, the historic name of the nearest town. The sand deposits are some 300–400 meters deep and dunes reach heights of five meters. According to a study in the 1880s by a scientist named Pavel Kostychev, this desert was created because of one main reason: the overgrazing of meager grasses by sheep and cattle.

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The area was part of the German settlement frontier in Imperial Russia, and relied on the growing of livestock rather than farming because the climate was too dry for crops. One rancher in particular, Friedrich-Jacob Falz-Fein, is reported to have had more than a million head of livestock, a mind-boggling number that merits challenge. Because the sands are very fine, there are local sand storms on windy days. Ironically, a neighbor to this Ukrainian desert is Askania-Nova, a large, 333 square kilometers nature reserve that Flaz-Fein established in 1898. It is now state-run and has a zoo, a botanical garden, and an open reserve of natural grasslands, where animals such as the rare Przewalsi’s Horse graze and reproduce, and where customers who pay the price of admission can also see ostriches, bison, antelopes, llamas, and zebras munching away on the plant cover.

[Figure 10.7: The approach to the Kakhovka Dam]

Of the two larger towns near the dam, Kakhovka is (of course) older than Nova Kakhovka, having been founded as a Russian frontier fortress in 1791. The site had previously been a Tatar fortress called Islam Kermen that was built in 1492 and that Cossacks led by Ivan Mazepa destroyed in 1695. The town was again the scene of fierce fighting during the Civil War of 1917–1922, and is associated with the famous Ukrainian anarchist-communist Nestor Makhno and his personal army that waged war against every faction during those years. There is a well-executed bronze monument in Kakhovka that

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shows horses pulling a tachanka, a wheeled machine gun platform that is said to have been invented by Makhno. A Russian-language film about the Civil War named Tri tovarishcha (“Three Friends”) includes a song called “Kakhovka,” with lyrics by Mikhail Svetlov and set to music by Isaac Dunayevsky. Its refrain is a response by Red Army volunteers from Kakhovka to a call to repel the White Army forces led by Pyotr Wrangel. The words and my rhyming free translation are as follows: Под солнцем горячим, под ночью слепою Under a hot sun and in the dark of night Немало пришлось нам пройти. Many of us come to join in the fight. Мы мирные люди, но наш бронепоезд We are a people who live without the sword, Стоит на запасном пути! But the Red Army’s train awaits us to board.

Meanwhile, Nova Kakhovka, which means New Kakhovka, was founded in 1952 as a dormitory city for workers constructing the Kakhovka Dam. Like several other big-project cities of the period, it was designed to be a model socialist community with superior housing and amenities. The Palace of Culture in the city was an especially elegant building that, unfortunately, burned in 2007. In order to make the town green, the Soviets imported soil and sod to put atop the local sands, and developed an irrigation system for watering lawns and flowerbeds. They described the town as an “oasis” and referred to it as the “Pearl of the Lower Dnipro.” Nova Kakhovka got wide notice in 2014, when on September 7–9, in anticipation of an imminent Russian invasion to create a land bridge from rebel-held territories in eastern Ukraine adjacent to Russia to Crimea, residents dug a series of defensive trenches at a perimeter of three kilometers around the city to keep the enemy away.

10.4: Below the Last Dam Below Nova Kakhovka is the third of the three sections of the lower course that make up this chapter. The river changes character dramatically: there are no more dams ahead all the way to the Black Sea, but only flat expanses for a wide and lazy river and multiple channels, remnants of channels, larger islands

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and small ones, islands dotted with lakes, and lots and lots of marshes, before the head of the river’s estuary and the home stretch to the sea. I said in Chapter 2 that the Dnipro was a cartographer’s nightmare where it forms a part of the boundary between Ukraine and Belarus because of tight bends and shifting channels; here, at the river’s lower reaches, it is such a nightmare again because channels and islands come and go with changes in water level. Sometimes, channels even seem to crisscross in this low-lying, deltaic world. Also, there are separated channels marked “Dnipro” on maps that run parallel to one another for some distance, while at other times “Dnipro” is paralleled for some distance by other rivers, the River Konka and the “Riverlet” (richka) Kozak (Cossack) in particular. The main city at the lower part of the Dnipro is Kherson. Its current population is approximately 300,000. The city is located on the right bank of the river, at the site of a small fortress that was named Alexanderschatz, and was founded in 1778 by, who else, Grigori Potemkin, as one of the earliest Russian settlements at this colonization frontier. It was constructed under the supervision of General Ivan Abramovich Gannibal, the Russian naval commander whom Catherine the Great selected for the task. One of the first buildings to be erected in the city was the Church of St. Catherine where Potemkin was eventually buried. The structure still stands and is again an Orthodox church (since 1991), after having been a museum of atheism during the Soviet period, followed by duty as a storage facility for logs. From the nineteenth century until the tragedy of the Holocaust, Kherson had a large Jewish population. Prominent sons of the city include the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who was born in 1879 as Lev Davidovitch Bronstein; Moshe Sharett, the second Prime Minister of Israel, who was born in 1894 as Moshe Shertok; and Sidney Reilly, a master spy and international playboy in the first two decades of the twentieth century, who was reportedly the model for author Ian Fleming for his famous James Bond character. Not much is known for sure about the murky Reilly, but according to a biography entitled Ace of Spies by Andrew Cook (2004) he was born in Kherson in the 1870s to an unwed mother and was named Salomon (Shlomo) Rosenblum. Today, Kherson is a major port and shipbuilding center. Industrial uses cover much of the city’s waterfront, particularly in the downriver direction, where there is an island of heavy industry and dock facilities on an island between the main channel of the Dnipro and yet another river that runs parallel,

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[Figure 10.8: A beach in Kherson]

the Kosheva. A bridge over the Kosheva on vul. Ostrivska (“Island Street”) connects this industrial zone with the main part of the city. At the far end of Ostrivska is a public beach on the main channel of the Dnipro and a pedestrian bridge to a small island named Hidropark (same name as in Kyiv; see also Chapter 6), a forested park zone with another beach, and the city’s zoo. It was a hot day when I visited and the beaches were packed. I was mindful of the industry around me, but braved the waters nevertheless (Figure 10.8). There are other parks in the city, too, including the World War II memorial Park Slavy (Park of Glory) that faces the river, as well as many historical landmarks and monuments. Lenin is gone, and in his place at the front of the City Hall building is a monument to the Heroes of the Nebesnya Sotnya, the “Heavenly Hundred” who were killed during the February 2014 climax of the Euromaidan protests in central Kyiv, reportedly by snipers working for the Yanukovych government. This monument is a Ukrainian flag on a pole that rises from a pedestal decorated with Ukrainian embroidery motifs. Kherson has become a place of refuge for Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians fleeing nearby Crimea after the annexation putsch by Russia in 2014. Just upriver from Kherson is the last bridge crossing of the Dnipro. It runs from the Kherson suburb of Antonivka to the aforementioned small city of

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Oleshky * (with a population of 25,217), a pulp and paper town at the near edge of the Oleshky Sands, from which a turnoff takes us back downriver along the opposite bank past Kherson to Hola Prystan. This town of about 16,000 inhabitants is considered to be the last city on the Dnipro, even though it is actually on a parallel channel, the River Konka. It was founded in 1709 by Zaporozhian Cossacks and was originally named Holyi Pereviz, meaning “barren ford,” and was renamed Hola Prystan, “barren pier,” in 1785 during the Russian colonization period. Even though local roads continue to other settlements both along and away from the river, the site has an “end of the road” feel and does seem barren, but despite this I found the town itself to be lively and perfectly pleasant. I spent a full day walking around the small city, enjoying the busy local market, the promenade along the Konka with its various monuments and playgrounds for children, and resting on the small beach where occasionally a recreational motor boat, a small passenger ferry, or a fishing vessel passed by. There were other people on the beach, plus a lot of children and teenagers who preferred the old “barren pier” from which they jumped directly into deeper water. A monument to an historic sailing vessel provided the backdrop. It was a good feeling to see young Ukraine happy and at peace in the last town on Ukraine’s River.

[Figure 10.9: Photograph of young swimmers at Hola Prystan]

*  Oleshky was named Tsurupynsk from the Soviet period until 2016, when the historic name was restored as part of Ukraine’s decommunization campaign.

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The braided Dnipro with parallel channels, islands, and more channels ends a short distance downriver from Hola Prystan at the river’s estuary. The estuary is about 50 kilometers in length and runs from east to west to a narrowed opening that faces the major city of Odesa on the north shore of the Black Sea some 50 kilometers further west. The 64-meter high Adziogol Lighthouse (a.k.a. the Stanislav-Adzhyhol Lighthouse) stands in the waters near the head of the lyman to guide ships into navigable channels. It is a favorite of lighthouse enthusiasts around the world,* known for its “vertical lattice hyperboloid structure” painted red, and for being the 16th tallest “traditional lighthouse” in the world, as well as the tallest in Ukraine. About midway along its north shore, the Dnipro Estuary receives waters from the tributary Buh River, which has an estuary of its own at the head of which is the gritty industrial and shipbuilding Mykolaiv Oblast city of Mykolaiv (with a population of about 500,000). This city was founded in 1789 by Grigori Potemkin and was the main Black Sea base for the Russian navy for about 100 years, before this function was moved to Crimea. The last settlement on the lyman of the Dnipro is named Ochakiv, a town of about 16,000 in Mykolaiv Oblast. It is sited on a cape at the end of the river’s mouth. Founded in 1492, it was once the site of an Ottoman fortress and administrative center, and the scene of especially fierce fighting during the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792 that was described in a famous ode by Russia’s most famous poet before Alexander Pushkin, Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816). In World War II, the city was occupied by Romanian troops. About 3.6 kilometers across the mouth of the Dnipro from Cape Ochakiv on the north side is the Kinburn Sand Spit, once also the site of a defensive fortress and famous battles, but now a biologically rich nature preserve. From this point, the waters of Ukraine’s River become the Black Sea’s waters. We can continue the story of these waters, mixed with the waters of other rivers, by turning to the acclaimed book by Charles King, which we can read in our choice of languages, English (2004) or Ukrainian (2011).

*  Online at: https://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/lighthouse/ukr1.htm [last accessed: Fenruary 10, 2017].

C H A P T E R 11

Some Thoughts About Ukraine

The Dnipro is Ukraine’s River and, as we have seen, reflects the country’s experiences over many centuries of history, for better and worse. The exquisite beauty of Scythian gold; the social and architectural achievements of Kyivan Rus; the rebellions against oppression and foreign rule by Ukrainian Cossacks; and the brilliance of the bard Taras Shevchenko—Ukraine’s River has witnessed it all. The river has also seen the Mongol destruction of Kyiv and the disintegration of Rus, the destruction of Sich, and the colonization of Ukraine with bans against the Ukrainian language and marginalization of Ukrainians on Ukrainian lands. The most recent century was the most painful: there was the Nazi invasion and the bloody battles for the Dnipro, the annihilation of Ukraine’s Jews and the Jews of Belarus; the Holodomor; the many other terrors of Stalin; and the Communist state’s war against religion. The river itself was disfigured to better serve the Soviet state with power for industry, while the seas that grew behind dams drowned not just the towns, villages and farms on fertile land, but also the markers of Ukraine’s history and singular identity over centuries past. The Russian colonization of Ukraine in the eighteenth century made Ukraine’s River Russian, too, and it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union near the end of the twentieth century that the Dnieper reverted to being the Dnipro. While the River Dnipro is a metaphor for the long story of Ukraine, it is also a rich story in its own right and a river worth knowing. This third-longest river in Europe is not generally well-known around the world and has not gotten the attention from scholars and others that it deserves, given its prom-

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inence in a strategically important part of the world and in European history, and its cultural significance for Ukraine and the Slavic world. Ukraine and its river are inseparable, and as the country continues its struggles to be fully free of colonialism, to choose its own cultural and political alliances and paths for the future, and to chart its own courses towards effective government and prosperity, the River Dnipro will always have a role. Not only is the river a critical cog in the workings of the national economy and one of Ukraine’s most important natural resources; it is also a national icon and cultural symbol, and the beating heart of the “Ukrainian commons.” Whether they think about it or not, a large majority of Ukraine’s residents share the river with one another for water supply, a place to get rid of waste, a source for the power behind the light switch, and a place to relax on a beach or daydream at the thick end of a fishing pole. It is their river, and whatever it is that lies ahead for Ukrainian citizens and their uncertain country, it will be seen at the Dnipro. Indeed, Ukraine is not likely to become a prosperous country with a high standard of living for all if the Dnipro also not healthy or well cared for. It is a two-edged equation: a country that does not care for the river that flows through its heart would not be capable of moving forward; and a country with an unhealthy river at its heart (or as its spine, to shift the metaphor) will be held back by the costs of disease, lost productivity, and public dispiritedness that result. Thus, a first thought here is that Ukraine’s plans to build a better country in the future need to include specific plans for improving the conditions of the river, just as much as the country needs sound strategies for economic development, an effective war against corruption, an honest judiciary and the rule of law, and strong political leadership against avaricious neighbors, among others. Expressed differently, we can say that a country cannot be healthy, happy, and prosperous without a sound environmental policy and successful solutions for environmental shortcomings, no matter how strong it is in other policies. We, citizens of planet Earth, cannot separate ourselves from our natural surroundings, and we certainly cannot afford to neglect a great river that bisects a country and supports it with water, power, transportation, and recreation, and that is so intimately bound to national history, experience, and identity. Ukraine and the Dnipro move in tandem. Reflecting back, we see that the Soviet Union neglected the environment when it rushed to industrialize and keep pace with the arms race. It neglected Ukraine especially, which was seen as a granary to be exploited for foodstuffs

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and an almost bottomless reserve of coal, iron ore, manganese and other resources to be marshalled for the needs of industry. The country’s industrial cities and mining regions were developed without much thought about residents’ quality of life or the local environment: only production targets for the Soviet Union mattered. The river was exploited, too: it was reshaped by dams and reservoirs as Soviet needs required, without thought about people or environment; and then, by the agency of a crudely designed nuclear power plant, was poisoned with radiation, along with people downwind and downriver. The environmental carelessness of the Soviet economy had at least something to do with the fall of the Soviet Union. The extra measures of environmental destruction by the Soviet Union within the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was, arguably, more a way to thoroughly exploit Ukraine for Soviet needs outside the borders of the Ukrainian Republic, as well as a way to impoverish Ukraine and keep it down. One can also argue that during those years of the post-Soviet period, when the proRussia government of Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions ruled Ukraine (especially 2010 until early 2014), the exploitation and impoverishment of Ukraine was put into effect once again as a state policy, and was more than just a small reason behind the rebellion that ousted Yanukovych. The “Maidan” protests of 2013–2014 were about the direction of a future Ukraine, toward Europe versus a remarriage to Russia, but they are also described as a “Revolution of Dignity,” in which the integrity of Ukraine as an independent nation was the critical issue. There is no escaping the conclusion that for Ukraine to succeed, it will need to address its many environmental problems, including the deplorable conditions in industrial towns and mining districts that were developed by the tsarist Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and the polluted qualities of rivers and coastlines. The Donbas, the Kryvbas, the Sea of Azov, and the River Dnipro are especially in need of rehabilitation, and among this group, the Dnipro is the most important because it affects the largest number of Ukrainians most directly and is a symbol of the country itself. It is not practical to plan for the unmaking of dams and freeing the river’s flow – although such thoughts might be right in the future – but Ukraine needs to shift to European standards of water quality. First and foremost, Ukraine needs to find funding for the construction of sewage treatment works for the many cities and towns that have no such facilities and dump untreated wastes into local

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waters, and also to upgrade treatment facilities virtually everywhere else because the country is treatment-deficient across the map. The country also needs to reign in pollution from industrial sites and farmlands. This will require the strengthening of environmental laws and finding wherewithal for effective enforcement. There also needs to be an upgrade in environmental education, not just for young students in schools, but also for the public at large, by way of public service programming. Ukrainians need to be reminded that they are now the masters of their own country, and that they have responsibilities for protecting their lands and waters. Restoring the Dnipro should become a national crusade. I used the loaded word “crusade” deliberately. In the minds of many Ukrainians, the “magic” of the Dnipro is traced to the baptism of Kyivan Rus in 988 in a Kyiv tributary of the Dnipro under leadership of Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great, imbuing the river with religious significance forevermore. Even Ukrainians who are not religious or who profess faiths other than that of the cross are aware of the historical associations between the Dnipro and Ukrainian Christianity, and understand that there is often a religious undertone to descriptions of the Dnipro as a river that gives life to Ukraine. Therefore, it might be a good idea to couch Ukraine’s public education about river ecology with appropriate measures of religious references and terminology. The opening in 2011 of the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, directly on the left bank of the Dnipro in Kyiv, as the main church of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was almost certainly a decision that was influenced by the significance of both Kyiv and the Dnipro as symbolic elements of the Christian faith in Ukraine. The location was especially radical and symbolic in a political sense, in that the Ukrainian Catholic Church is a minority confession in Ukraine that is heavily concentrated in the west of the country, that was never especially strong in Kyiv, much less in Left Bank Ukraine, and that had previously had its “home church” in either the west Ukrainian city of L’viv or, during Soviet years, in Rome. Moving from the religious to secular concerns, I pick up the theme of the Dnipro as a “Ukrainian commons” by considering the river’s role as a public space for rest and relaxation. My earlier research in Kyiv (Cybriwsky 2014) led me to the following thoughts, to which Ukrainians have always responded with interest and nods of approval when I shared them in various lectures and book presentations. I illustrate the situation with a two-part PowerPoint slide

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as follows. First we have a “typical” situation for a city in a developed country almost anywhere in the world at the start of a good-weather holiday weekend. Arrows over a sketch map of the city show people leaving the metropolis in all directions to enjoy their days off. Some go to the mountains or to the forests; others venture to the seaside or to a lake. The point is that the people leave the city and scatter. By contrast, the other illustration shows directional arrows over a map of Kyiv that converge on the city center. As I stressed in Chapter 6, the city has at its heart an enormous green space along the river that bisects it. There are forests, meadows, and marshes, and many stretches of beaches along the multiple channels of the Dnipro, and on multiple islands. There is room for everyone and for every interest: sunbathing in private and sunbathing in crowds, boating, volleyball, power-lifting, bicycles and motor bikes, camping, cookouts, concerts, kiddie-rides, horseback riding, bird-watching and butterflies, bungee-jumping, beer, borscht, nightclubs, and more—it is all there, in the center of Kyiv, with room left over. So the arrows point inward, toward the center, as Kyivans gravitate to the green zone and the part that suits them most. There, they share space and time with other Kyivans. That is: instead of scattering, they come together in the commons, and they enjoy themselves! It is a wonderful thought about citizens being together, one that has implications for nation-building and civil society. Although it is taken from afar and you cannot actually see people, the photograph in Figure 11.1 gives a sense of scale to this. Shot from atop a bluff on the right bank of the river, the view looks across the Dnipro to residential complexes on the left bank, while the foreground shows beaches along the river’s channels, some moored ships that offer food, drink, and entertainment (including the aforementioned Art Hotel Baccara), and a just a portion of the city’s vast green zone at river level. There are not many large cities in the world with the same pattern—in fact very few, and Kyiv is probably the largest of them all. There are cities where people gravitate en masse to an edge, such as to the beaches that rim Los Angeles, Sydney, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Rio de Janeiro, and, in Ukraine, Odesa; there are cities with great parks in the center such as Manhattan; and there are river cities such as London that have a great many attractions along a central river. However, there is no city with so much open space, so much total space, and so much beach space in its heart as Kyiv. Second place goes to, drum roll, Dnipro (see Chapter 9). The Rocket City also fits this model, as residents

[Figure 11.2: The river zone in Kyiv as seen from atop a bluff on the right bank]

[Figure 11.3: A popular beach on Venetian Island in Kyiv. The difference from Figure 6.5 is that the background belongs to Kyivans: as opposed to illegal elite housing, there is a Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral facing the river and a typical residential district in the background.]

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gravitate in large numbers on good-weather days off from neighborhoods on both banks of the Dnipro to Monastery Island, Shevchenko Park nearby, and the riverside corniche. Both cities gained open space in their centers from World War II destruction that was not fully replenished, and neither city is particularly close to attractions outside that might be magnets for the masses, but still, in both Kyiv and Dnipro, as well as in other Dnipro River cities, the riverside is a commons that people share and enjoy in great numbers. About that there is no dispute. Imagine how much better it would be if, along with improving water quality, cities along the Dnipro found the funds to invest in the commons. Kyiv for sure needs to clean its beaches and parks, provide better and safer access by repairing broken pavements and stairs, improve lighting, update public toilets, and enhance security. Other Dnipro cities can also benefit from such improvements. When the green zones are made more attractive, more people will come, multiplying the fun. Now imagine the green zones as spaces that welcome international tourists as well as arrow-riding locals. This creates new funds to pay for improvements, which bring still more visitors, which brings more profits, and so on. There is no reason why riverbank sites cannot be added to the list of usual attractions in Kyiv, Dnipro, and other cities, and be resources for growing the tourism industry of Ukraine in general; and there is no reason why tourists to Kyiv, Dnipro, and other cities cannot envision time on the beach as they also visit famous churches, monuments, museums, and the opera, and other “urban” attractions. Summer-time tourists do this in Odesa, as they do in Vancouver, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro (where it is always summer), and Barcelona, and they can do it too in Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Cherkasy, Kherson, and elsewhere. What is holding things back is inadequate facilities, which can easily be improved, and good marketing. Recall the preview of what is possible at an urban waterfront, such as the success of Camp Sweden in Kyiv in 2012 (see also Chapter 6), and consider it.* Furthermore, consider the potential impact on Ukraine’s economy of marketing not just the enhancements along the river in cities such as Kyiv and Dnipro to international visitors, but also marketing the entire length of an *  I am happy to report that at the time of this writing, Kyiv is preparing for the summer

2017 beach season along the Dnipro with considerable clean-up of Hidropark and investment in capital projects such as road repairs, improved lighting, clearance of derelict structures, and landscaping.

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improved Ukraine’s River as a Ukraine experience. The river cuts right through the heart of the country, and even has a bend as if to embrace it, and is wonderfully positioned to show off the country’s scenery, history, culture, and cities. There is very little available nowadays in the way of multi-day riverlength cruises, although such excursions were popular in Soviet times (see also Chapter 4). These trips could be revived again, and take visitors on week-long excursions from Kyiv to Odesa (or the reverse), with stops along the way in Kaniv, Cherkasy, Kremenchuk, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Kherson, and other river cities, as well as in Crimea after it rejoins Ukraine.* The Soviet tours almost always stopped there. There could be special docks and dedicated hotels along the way, and even gated resorts if that is what the market wants. But Ukraine is so welcoming and Ukrainian culture so beautiful that it would be a shame for any visitor to not partake in full. There are no Rhine Valley castles, ancient Nile River civilizations, Amazon wildlife, or Yangtze River mountains of karst to see along the way, but Ukraine is beautiful and unspoiled, and visitors will enjoy riverbank orchards in blooms, steppes with wildflowers, steppes with wheat, and fields with sunflowers to the horizon, all of which are picturesque, memorable, and photogenic. There will be stops in historic cities along the way, where visitors will be greeted by hospitable Ukrainians, attend Ukrainian theatrical and musical performances, eat good food, and learn to drink like their hosts. And like the Swedish football fans in Kyiv, they can sleep it off the next day on a beach. The Soviet impact on Ukraine could be part of the package, too: great dams and riverside smokestacks, the experience of passing through canals and locks, seeing the ghosts of Orbita and the reactors of Enerhodar, and, of course, marveling at the great concrete stoplight that adorns the concrete bus station across from the flying saucer police post in Vasylivka (see Chapter 10). And, finally, we can put Ukraine’s river to work again, this time not for the benefit of a foreign power or, as often happens in today’s global world, for profits by a foreign corporation, but for Ukraine and her people directly. The river still creates power, is useful for transportation, flows past and near rich deposits of vital resources, and is home to a willing labor force. Bring corruption under control and assure that laws will be enforced and applied equally, *  At least one cruise company now offers such a holiday package. See www.ruta-cruise. com.

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and Ukraine will become ripe for investment not just by foreigners, but also by Ukrainians who have until now preferred to move their money abroad. Heavy industry can be revived, as few countries are as well endowed with resources as Ukraine, but the country can do more to support its food processing industries and exports of grains, packaged foods, and drinks. There is also room for an expansion of the information technology sector in Ukraine. Already, there are strong IT toe-holds in L’viv and Ivano-Frankivsk, but there is no reason why Kyiv, Dnipro, and other cities along the Dnipro with fine universities and a highly educated young populace could not spearhead the development of a forward-looking Ukrainian Silicon Valley. Ukraine has a lot of work ahead before it can become truly “European.” It cannot succeed without investment in its central river; without such investment, it will continue to thrash about uncertainly, causing money and talent to leave the country, and continue being victim to a much stronger neighbor that keeps chewing at its edges. Ukraine’s future is tied closely to the future of Ukraine’s River.

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Index

Adziogol Lighthouse 217 Afanasyev-Chuzbynskyi, Oleksandr 2 Antonivka 215 Arshytsa River 25 Askania-Nova 212 Askold and Dyr 43 Aviatorske 215 Battle of the Dnipro 79–80 Beketova, Evelina 107 Berezina River 26 Beryslav 211 Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi 40 Bilozerskyi River 202 Black Sea 2, 16, 22, 45, 99, 101, 155, 217 Bloodlands 25 Boholyubov, Henadiy 182 Borysthenes 39–40 Boyko people 207–208 Brodsky, Lazar 64 Bryansk, Russia 93 Buh River 193, 217 Bykhaw, Belarus 25 Byzantine Empire 45 Cape Ochakiv 219 Catherine the Great (Russian Empress) 25, 51, 61–62, 154, 163, 174, 184, 196

Cherkasy 32, 35, 129, 139, 142–143, 156 Chernihiv 31, 49 Chervonyi Mayak, 195, 210–211 Chersonesus 40 Chornobyl 26–27, 28, 30, 82–86, 91, 94, 102, 126 Chubusnky, Pavlo 13 chumak 55, 132 Chyhyryn 56, 58, 59, 138, 144 Chyhyryn Atomic Energy Station 144 Crimea 12, 36, 40, 47, 59, 103, 168, 196, 213, 215 Crimean Khanate 50, 160, 170 Crimean Tatars 28, 50, 55–56, 152, 156, 164, 215 Desiatynna (church) 48, 109 Desna River 31, 93, 118 Diamond Hill (building in Kyiv) 112– 113 District 6 (Zaporizhia) 176–177 Dnieper Reservoir 32 Dniester River 40 Dnipro (city) 2, 11, 18, 32, 34–35, 54, 61, 73, 87, 96–97, 147–148, 156– 162, 162–164, 167, 180–192, 204, 223–234

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Dnipro Cascade 31, 33, 75–76, 91, 193–194 Dnipro-Donbas Canal 35 Dniprodzyrzhynsk. See Kamianske. Dniprodzyrzhynsk Dam 32, 34 Dniprodzyrzhysnk Reservoir 32, 34 Dnipro Estuary 35, 193, 217 Dnipro Hydroelectric Station. See DniproHES. DniproHES 32, 34, 71–76, 77, 80, 161, 165–167, 168–170, 171, 175, 184, 187, 206 Dnipro-Inhulets Canal 35 Dnipro-Kryvyi Rih Canal 35 Dnipropetrovsk. See Dnipro (city). Dnipro River cruises 87–89, 141, 226 Dniprostroi. See DniproHES. Dniprorud 158 Dniprorudne 194, 195, 198–199 Dorogobuzh, Russia 22 Drevliany 46–47 Dubrovno, Belarus 25, 93–94 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 18, 180 Enerhodar 32, 95, 194, 195, 199–202 Feast of the Epiphany 10 Gannibal, Ivan 63, 214 German Beach. See Nimetskyi Plazh. Gonta, Ivan 138 Great Bend of the Dnipro 97–98, 147– 164, 167 Green Island. See Zelenyi Ostriv. Hidropark (Kherson) 213 Hidropark (Kyiv) 116–118, 225 Hohol, Mykola 53, 104, 133–134, 153– 154 Hola Prystan 193, 195, 216–217 Holocaust 21, 25, 30, 137, 138, 139, 181, 214, 219

Holodomor 73, 112, 130, 137, 166, 183, 206, 219 Holodomor Monument (Kyiv) 112 Honchar, Oles 130, 186–187 Hradzyk 135 Ihor (Prince) 46 Inhulets River 96, 98 Irpin’ 30 Jewish population 25, 30, 138, 139, 181–183, 189, 214 Kaffa 50 Kakhovka 32, 36, 195 Kakhovka Dam 32, 34, 195, 206 Kakhovka Reservoir 32, 34, 36, 130, 147, 193, 194–213 Kakhovskyyi Canal 35 Kamaryn, Belarus 28 Kamianka-Dniprovska 194, 195, 202 Kamianske 18, 32, 35, 73, 95, 96, 97, 147, 156–162 Kaniv 15, 32, 34, 124, 137–138 Kaniv Dam 32, 34, 41, 91, 124 Kaniv Reservoir 32, 34, 58, 131 Karachkorak River 195, 204 Katyn’, Russia 24, 83–84 Katynka River 24 Kharkiv 69 Kherson 35, 51, 62–63, 70, 80, 96, 193, 195, 204, 214–215 Khlystova, Russia 24 Khmelnytskyi, Bohdan 27–28, 56–58, 124, 138, 203 Khmelnytskyi Uprising 56, 138–139 Khortytsia Island 34, 45, 51, 77, 152, 170–174, 178, 206 Khvoyka, Vikentyi 41, 42 Kichkas 34 Kichkas Bridge 174 Kinburn Sandspit 217

I nde x

Klimenki, Russia 25 Kodak (fort) 54–55, 61, 151–152 Kolomoyskyi, Ihor 182 Konka River 214, 216 Konoplyanka River 96 Kosheva River 214–215 Kremenchuk 32, 61, 127, 129, 139– 141, 154 Kremenchuk Dam 32, 34, 126, 128 Kremenchuk Reservoir 32, 34, 123– 146 Kremhes 128 Kryliv 128 Kryvbas 158 Kryvyi Rih 63, 73, 98, 158, 159, 163 Kuchma, Leonid 185 Kuindzhi, Arkhip 134, 135 Kyiv 2, 3, 8, 12, 41, 43, 48, 69, 80, 102, 103–121, 222–223 Kyiv Hydroelectric Station 31 Kyiv Regional Archaeological Museum 41 Kyiv Reservoir 28–29, 30, 31, 32, 114– 115, 126 Kyivan Rus 22, 42–50, 66, 137, 222 Lenin, Vladimir 18, 108, 180–181, 206, 207–208 Levitan, Isaak 134 Loyew, Belarus 27 Makhno, Nestor 212–213 Marhanets 51, 77, 158, 159, 162, 194, 195, 203 Mazyr, Belarus 30 Mennonites 174 Menorah Center 181–183, 189 Mezhihirya 31, 114–115 Minsk, Belarus 93 Mogilev, Belarus 25, 83–84 Molochna River 36 Monastery Island 87, 190–191, 225

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Monastery of the Caves. See Pecherska Lavra. Mongol invaders 43, 49–50, 58, 109, 190, 219 Moryntsi 124 “Motherland” Monument (Kyiv) 111 Mozolevsky, Borys 39 Mykolaiv 62, 63, 195, 217 Nebelivka 41 Nikopol 32, 55, 77, 98, 158, 159, 162– 163, 194, 195, 203, 204 Nimetskyi Plazh 141 North Crimea Canal 36 Nova Kakhovka 32, 36, 99, 193, 195, 211 Nova Petrivka 31, 114 Nova Sich 51 Novoheorhiivsk 128, 129–130, 132, 136 Novomoskovsk 62, 163–164 Novorossiya 59–61, 63, 154, 168, 184, 196 Novoserbiya 61 Ochakiv 195, 217 Odesa 62–63, 64, 155, 217 Oleh (Prince) 43, 46 Olha (Princess) 46–17, 48 Oleshky 51, 211, 216 Oleshky Sands 211 Orbita 143–146, 191 Ordzonikidze. (See Pokrova) Ordzonikidze, Grigol 18 Oril River 60 Orlovsky, Volodymyr 134–135 Orsha, Belarus 25, 83–84 Osokorky (Kyiv) 118 Pale of Settlement 25, 30 Parus (building in Dnipro) 191–192 Paton, Yevhen 105

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Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ 110 Pechenihy 45, 171 Pecherska Lavra 3, 39, 49, 106–107, 109, 111 People’s Friendship Monument (Kyiv) 110–111 Pereyaslav 57–58 Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyi 58 Pereyaslav Treaty 57–58 Peter the Great (Russian tsar) 152, 160–161 Petrovskyi, Grigory 163, 180, 184 Pochaina River 47 Podil (Kyiv district) 47 Pokrova 18, 195, 203, 204 Pol, Oleksandr 64 Popov, Vasyl 196 Popov’s Castle 195, 196 Potemkin, Grigori 62, 64, 154, 163, 184, 196, 214, 217 Poroshenko, Petro 17, 102 Prypyat 30, 84 Prypyat Marshes 30 Prypyat River 28, 29, 46, 82 Putin, Vladimir 24 Pyvykha (hill) 135 Rachochow, Belarus 25, 26 Rapids of the Dnipro 10, 15, 45, 148– 152 Rechytsya, Belarus 25 Repin, Ilya 134, 153 Rerikh, Mykola 135 Revolution of Dignity 211 Rudiakiv 131, 132, 136 Russian Woodpecker 84–85 St. Andrew’s (church in Kyiv) 108, 113 St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Church and Monastery 107–108

St. Sophia (cathedral-museum in Kyiv) 49, 106 Salt Highway 55 Samara River 54 Sarmatians 40 Scythians 39–40, 156, 171, 195–196, 202 Shchukina, Liubov 129–131 Shevchenko, Oleksandr 173 Shevchenko, Taras 13–14, 34, 53, 57– 58, 65, 107, 124, 134, 137, 186, 219 Sich (Cossack strongholds) 51–53, 61, 152, 162, 178, 190, 203 Slavutych 43, 86 Smolensk, Russia 22–24 Sokol, Anna 107 Sozh River 27, 28 Stalin, Josef 18, 24, 77, 126, 180 Subotiv 56, 58, 124 Sulyma, Ivan 54 Svitlovodsk 32, 128, 129 Svytoslav the Brave (Prince) 46, 47, 171 Tavriisk 211 Trukhaniv Island 87, 110, 116 Trypillia 40–41, 42 Trypillians 40–41, 156, 206 Tsurupynsk 80 Tyasmin River 128, 138 Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate 56, 58, 59 Ukrainian Cossacks 16, 50–60, 65, 66, 132, 134, 138, 151, 152–154, 156, 162, 168, 170–174, 186, 187, 192, 203, 216 Ukrainian National History Museum (Kyiv) 41 Ukrainka 32 Ukrainka, Lesya 65, 186 Uman 138–139

I nde x

Valdai Hills (Russia) 7 Varangians 42, 44–45, 46 Varangian Trade Route 45, 46 Vasylivka 194, 195–198 Vasylkivskyi, Serhii 134 Velyka Lepetykha 195, 206, 207 Velyka Znamianka 202 Venetian Island (Kyiv) 110, 116 Vitove 144 Volga River (Russia) 2, 7, 16, 19, 21, 45, 46, 134 Volodymyr the Great (Prince) 31, 47, 108, 113, 222 Volodymyr’s Hill (Kyiv) 47 Voyana 202 Vyshhorod 31, 32, 48, 91 Vyshhorod Dam 31, 32 Vyshnyvetskyi, Dmytro 51 World War II 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 34, 77–82, 184, 196–197, 206, 219 Yangel, Mikhail 185 Yanukovych, Viktor 12, 31, 42, 49, 102, 163–165, 211

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Yaroslav the Wise (Prince) 49, 138 Yavornytskyi, Dmytro Ivanovych 10 Yuzhmash 184–188 Zalizniak, Maksym 138 Zaporizhia 11, 15, 32, 34, 35, 73, 97, 98–99, 147–148, 156–162, 164, 165–174, 175–180 Zaporizhia Dam 34. Also see DniproHES. Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant 199– 200 Zaporizhia Thermal Power Plant 199 Zaporozhian Cossacks. See Ukrainian Cossacks. Zelenyi Ostriv 141 Zhovta River 96 Zhovti Vody 95–96, 158, 163 Žlobin, Belarus 25, 26 Zlotopil 138 Zmiivka 195, 207–210

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