Kharkiv, symbolic metropolis of Soviet Ukraine | EUROtoday
Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
Din his final work, The future is at stake in Kyiv (Gallimard, 2024), political-historical exploration of the primary cities of Ukraine, the German historian Karl Schlögel devotes a protracted and luminous chapter to Kharkiv. His title ? “Look, admire this city.” Its 40 pages clarify, past strategic causes, why Putin has made this his subsequent main goal. Once once more, on this battle between Russia and Ukraine, historical past performs a necessary position.
The former capital of Soviet Ukraine
We don't perceive something about Kharkiv if we ignore that after the communist USSR took management of Ukraine in 1920, it was exactly this metropolis that Moscow had chosen to make its new capital within the intervening interval. -wars, versus conventional kyiv. With its virtually thousand-year-old cathedrals, kyiv too blatantly embodied a protracted historical past of Ukraine that was cumbersome, embarrassing, as a result of unimaginable to refute. The communists subsequently guess the whole lot on Kharkiv, a way more modest metropolis, much less prestigious, however extra malleable. Founded by the Cossacks within the seventeenthe century, it had already been retained by the Russian authorities, on the finish of the nineteenthe century, to put in its authorities of Ukraine there. This alternative was, for the USSR, a manner of exhibiting the Ukrainians that any further the way forward for Ukraine was Soviet and that the seat of command could be the place that they had determined.
Showcase of communism
They additionally determined to make it a laboratory of modernity. When fellow vacationers – together with Henri Barbusse – or heads of state – together with Édouard Herriot – have been visiting, they have been despatched to Kharkiv to admire the Soviet paradise and deny rumors of famine. Kharkiv discovered itself on the entrance web page, with its tractor and turbine factories, the most important on the earth, and have become the showcase of the collectivization and industrialization of the five-year plans. Giant monuments and the masterpiece of Soviet constructivism, now listed by UNESCO, Gosprom, have been erected there. On Freedom Square – which as soon as bore the symbolic identify of Dzerzhinsky, the scary founding father of the Cheka – its six interconnected blocks of glass and strengthened concrete housed all of the ministries of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic: dozens 1000’s of workplaces which survived the German bombings as a result of they have been fabricated from strengthened concrete!
Tanks and tractors
Kharkiv was additionally the cradle of the legendary Soviet T-34 tank, with engineer Mikhail Kochkin, and the headquarters of the Physico-Technical Institute, the place the genius Lev Landau developed, within the Thirties, what would change into the world's first atomic reactor. When the filmmaker Eisenstein wished to make his blockbuster on collectivization, The Meadow of Béjine (1937), it was in Kharkiv, in entrance of the tractor factories, that he got here to arrange his cameras. This can be all that Putin desires to take again symbolically. But when Vassili Grossman devoted his final work, Anything goes, to the ravages of the identical collectivization, additionally it is in Kharkiv that he positioned his intrigue. This metropolis the place he had been a chemistry scholar in the course of the horrible years 1932-1934 was acquainted to him.
Another land of blood
Kharkiv, underlines Schlögel, presents the identical litany of tragedies as Ukraine: civil battle, collectivization, Holodomor, Great Terror, German occupation, Shoah… The flagship of collectivism was recycled by the Nazis into an operational web site of the Shoah: it’s within the immense tractor manufacturing facility that someday in November 1941 have been herded 16,000 Jews from Kharkiv earlier than being taken to Drobytsky Yar, the place the second largest bloodbath of Jews was perpetrated, a lot much less identified than the bloodbath at Babi Yar in kyiv. Just liberated in the summertime of 1943, Kharkiv additionally noticed the primary trial in historical past towards German battle criminals happen in December of the identical yr. The metropolis of 1.5 million inhabitants then had fewer than 200,000. In the previous Jewish cemetery have been buried the victims of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which continued the combat towards the USSR after 1945, and several other thousand of “liquidators” despatched to Chernobyl after the catastrophe. In this respect, Kharkiv can be the right mirror of the Ukrainian land of blood, to make use of the title of Timothy Snyder's work. But we are able to guess that this a part of History pursuits Vladimir Putin a lot much less.
After the beginning of the battle in Donbass in 2022, it had already served as a refuge for 130,000 refugees coming primarily from Donetsk and Luhansk. She nonetheless appeared to have the ability to look in the direction of Europe, mild years away from the missile strikes. But Schlögel tells how, within the blink of an eye fixed, she was overtaken by the inevitability of the gutted buildings. Accustomed to disasters, Kharkiv has seen its inhabitants lower by a 3rd since 2022. And it's not over.
The future is at stake in Kyiv, by Karl Schlögel. Translated from German by Thomas Serrier (Gallimard, 432 p., €25).
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/kharkiv-ville-symbole-de-l-ukraine-sovietique-12-05-2024-2559969_24.php