History of Kyiv

[4] Legend recorded in later writings such as the Primary Chronicle has it that Saint Andrew (d. AD 60/70) visited the hilly shores of the Dnieper River and prophesied that a great city would emerge there.

[9][better source needed] In the following centuries, the city was a provincial capital of marginal importance on the outskirts of territories controlled by powerful neighbors: the Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its successor the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Tsardom of Russia, which later became the Russian Empire.

Omeljan Pritsak writes that archaeologists have proven "beyond any doubt that Kyiv as a town did not exist before the last quarter of the ninth to the first half of the tenth century.

[14] The Primary Chronicle, an important source of information on the early history of the area, says that Slavic Kyivans told Askold and Dir that they had no local ruler and paid tribute to the Khazars - an event attributed to the 9th century.

In the seventh or eighth century the Dnipro came to be the standard route between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire, while the Desna gave the area water access via portages to the Don and Oka-Volga basins.

[citation needed] From Oleg's seizure of the city until 1169, Kyiv functioned as the capital of Kievan Rus', which was ruled by the Varangian Rurikid dynasty which gradually became Slavicized.

The city reached the height of its position – its political and cultural Golden Age – in the middle of the 11th century under Volodymyr's son Yaroslav the Wise (Grand Prince from 1019 to 1054).

Subsequent years saw rivalries of the competing princes of the dynasty and the weakening of Kyiv's political influence,[20] although the city temporarily prevailed after the defeat of Polotsk at the Battle on the river Nemiga (1067) that also led to the burning of Minsk.

Led by one of his sons, it consisted of the forces of eleven other princes, representing three of the main branches of the Rurikid dynasty against the fourth, the Iziaslavichi of Volynia.

[21] They left the old town and the prince's hall in ruins,[22][23] and took many pieces of religious artwork - including the Theotokos of Vladimir icon – from nearby Vyshhorod.

[citation needed] More certain is that there was a Battle of Blue Waters in 1362 or 1363, in which the Lithuanians under Algirdas (Olgerd) were able to defeat a Horde army, and assert dominance over Central Ukraine, including Kiev.

The precise circumstances are still somewhat vague and contested, due to the paucity of information in surviving sources, but for the Kievans, the period of Lithuanian and Polish hegemony had begun.

Starting in 1494, however, the city's local autonomy (Magdeburg rights) gradually increased in a series of acts of Lithuanian Grand Dukes and Polish Kings, finalized by a charter granted by Sigismund I the Old in 1516.

The tolerant Sigismund II Augustus granted equal rights to Jews in the city, on the grounds that they paid the same taxes as Podil's burghers.

[41] On 31 January 1667 the Truce of Andrusovo was concluded, in which the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ceded Smolensk, Severia and Chernigov, and, on paper only for a period of two years, the city of Kyiv to the Tsardom of Russia.

In the winter 1845–1846, the historian Mykola Kostomarov founded a secret political society, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, whose members put forward the idea of a federation of free Slavic people with Ukrainians as a distinct group among them rather than a part of the Russian nation.

[47] Following the gradual loss of Ukraine's autonomy and suppression of the local Ukrainian and Polish cultures, Kyiv experienced growing Russification in the 19th century by means of Russian migration, administrative actions (such as the Valuev Circular of 1863), and social modernization.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the city was dominated by Russian-speaking population, while the lower classes retained Ukrainian folk culture to a significant extent.

Landmarks of that period include the railway infrastructure, the foundation of numerous educational and cultural facilities as well as notable architectural monuments (mostly merchant-oriented, i.e. Brodsky Choral Synagogue).

The city's architecture was made over, but a much greater impact on the population was Soviet social policy, which involved large-scale purges, coercion, and rapid movement toward totalitarianism in which dissent and non-communist organizations were not tolerated.

The migration changed the ethnic demographics of the city from the previous Russian-Ukrainian parity to predominantly Ukrainian, although Russian remained the dominant language.

Recurring political trials were organized in the city to purge "Ukrainian nationalists", "Western spies" and opponents of Joseph Stalin inside the Bolshevik party.

Thousands of city residents (mostly intellectuals and party activists) were arrested in the night, hurriedly court-martialed, shot and buried in mass graves.

The delay also allowed the evacuation of all significant industrial enterprises from Kyiv to the central and eastern parts of the Soviet Union, away from the hostilities, where they played a major role in arming the Red Army fighting the Nazis (see, for example, the Arsenal Factory).

The arms race of the Cold War caused the establishment of a powerful technological complex in the city (both research and development and production), specializing in aerospace, microelectronics and precision optics.

Systematic oppression of pro-Ukrainian intellectuals, dubbed as "nationalists", was carried under the propaganda campaign against Ukrainian nationalism threatening the Soviet way of life.

Every attempt to dispute Soviet rule was harshly oppressed, especially concerning democracy, Ukrainian SSR's self-government, and ethnic-religious problems.

Due to limited career prospects in Kyiv, Moscow became a preferable life destination for many Kyivans (and Ukrainians as a whole), especially for artists and other creative intellectuals.

Moreover, on 1 May 1986 (a few days after the accident), local CPSU leaders ordered Kyivans (including hundreds of children) to take part in a mass civil parade in the city's center—"to prevent panic".

The city was the site of mass protests over the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election by supporters of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko beginning on 22 November 2004 at Independence Square.