Kyiv

• 1. Introduction

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  Kyiv has stood on the banks of the Dnieper River for at least fifteen centuries, and during that time it has been sacked, burned, rebuilt, conquered, and reclaimed more times than almost any other city on earth. Between the end of 1918 and August 1920 alone, the city changed hands sixteen times. Armies came from the north, the east, and the west. Mongols leveled it in 1240. Nazi forces occupied it for more than two years during World War II, and Russian forces attempted to seize it again in February 2022. And yet, as of January 2022, nearly three million people called it home, making it the seventh-most populous city in all of Europe.

  How does a city absorb that much violence and keep going? What made Kyiv worth fighting over, again and again, across more than a thousand years of history? And what does the city look like now, after independence, after revolution, after the latest attempt to erase it? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name and Its Argument

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  Kyi, according to the Primary Chronicle, was the eldest of three brothers who founded the city, and the name Kyiv is said to derive from his. The Old East Slavic phrase that scholars trace it to translates roughly as "Kyi's castle" or "Kyi's gord." But the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky called that explanation an "etymological myth," arguing that the legendary founders were named after the place, not the other way around. The Ukrainian-Canadian linguist Jaroslav Rudnyckyj offered a third reading, connecting the name to a Proto-Slavic root meaning "stick" or "pole," which would make the original meaning something like "palisaded settlement."

  The spelling of the name became its own political battleground. Kiev, the traditional English rendering, derives from the Russian form. After the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014, Ukraine launched the KyivNotKiev campaign to push international media toward the Ukrainian spelling. The campaign worked. Today, Kyiv is the official romanized form used in legislative and official acts, and it has largely displaced Kiev in Western publications.

  There is also a third name from history. Arabic-speaking geographers in the 10th century referred to the city as Zanbat, describing it as the chief city of the Russes. The Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote that a caravan of cargo boats assembled annually at what he called "Kioava, also called Sambatas." The etymology of Sambat has been argued by a long roster of historians including Nikolay Karamzin, Jan Potocki, and Gudbrandur Vigfusson, and it has never been settled. The name may connect to the Khazar Empire, which once held the region, though the exact link remains unclear.

• 3. The Trade Route Capital

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  By the year 1000 CE, Kyiv had a population of 45,000. That figure tells you something important: this was not a backwater but a metropolis, one that sat at the crossroads of the great trade route running between Scandinavia and Constantinople. Varangians, the Norse warriors and traders whom the eastern Slavs called by that name, captured the city in the mid-9th century. Under their rule, Kyiv became the capital of Kievan Rus', the first East Slavic state.

  Thietmar of Merseburg, who described the city in a chronicle from 1017, counted more than 400 churches and 8 markets. The scale of construction was enormous. Yaroslav the Wise ordered the building of St. Sophia Cathedral, a project that announced the city's ambitions to anyone who saw it. The city's significance made it a target: between 1146 and 1246, the city changed hands 47 times, ruled by 24 princes, and in 35 of those cases the prince's tenure lasted less than a year.

  In March 1169, Grand Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal sacked the city and stripped it of religious artwork, including the Theotokos of Vladimir icon, taken from Vyshhorod. In 1203, Prince Rurik Rostislavich and his Kipchak allies burned it. Then in 1240, Batu Khan completed the destruction during the Mongol invasion of Rus'. Historians who wrote about the city before that invasion estimated its population at between 35,000 and 50,000. Afterward, the city lost most of its influence for centuries.

• 4. Between Empires

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  In the early 1320s, a Lithuanian army under Grand Duke Gediminas defeated a Slavic force at the Battle on the Irpen' River and took the city. The Tatars, who also claimed Kyiv, retaliated in 1324-1325. By 1362, Grand Duke Algirdas settled the matter at the Battle of Blue Waters, incorporating Kyiv into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. During this period, the city's core sat in the low neighborhood of Podil, and a Lithuanian castle with 18 towers rose on Zamkova Hora, serving as the residence of Vladimir Olgerdovich and later of Vytautas.

  In 1482, Crimean Tatars sacked and burned much of the city. With the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Kyiv region passed from Lithuanian to Polish control, and Kyiv became the capital of Kyiv Voivodeship. The early 17th century brought a cultural turn: the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves, founded by Anthony of Kyiv in the 11th century, became a center of an Orthodox revival, leading eventually to the foundation of what would become the Mohyla Collegium.

  In 1649, the Cossack army of Bohdan Khmelnytsky entered the city following the success of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The local clergy framed the rebellion in religious terms, encouraging Khmelnytsky to present himself as a defender of the Orthodox faith. From 1667, with the Truce of Andrusovo, Kyiv became part of the Tsardom of Russia. In the late 1840s, the historian Mykola Kostomarov founded a secret society, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, whose members argued for a federation of free Slavic peoples with Ukrainians recognized as a distinct nation. Russian authorities suppressed the society quickly.

• 5. Revolution and the Weight of War

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  In 1892, the first electric tram line in the Russian Empire began running in Kyiv, the third such system in the world. The city was booming: by 1900, its population had reached 250,000, and it had become the third-most important city of the empire and the leading commercial center of its southwest, moving sugar and grain by rail and river.

  That prosperity evaporated in the years after 1917. German soldiers occupied the city from the 2nd of March 1918 to November 1918. The Russian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the turbulence of successive Ukrainian governments made Kyiv a city in constant flux. It changed hands sixteen times between the end of 1918 and August 1920. In 1934, Stalin made Kyiv the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and the city industrialized rapidly. But the Great Famine of 1932-1933 devastated the migrant population that lacked ration cards, and the Great Purge of 1937-1938 nearly eliminated the city's intelligentsia.

  World War II brought the worst destruction. Nazi Germany occupied Kyiv from the 19th of September 1941 to the 6th of November 1943. In the Battle of Kyiv in 1941, Axis forces killed or captured more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers; most of those captured never came back alive. Shortly after the Wehrmacht moved in, NKVD officers who had stayed behind dynamited most of the buildings on Khreshchatyk, the city's main street, which the German authorities had occupied. The buildings burned for days and left 25,000 people homeless. The Germans then rounded up nearly 34,000 Kyivan Jews and massacred them at Babi Yar on the 29th and the 30th of September 1941. In the months that followed, thousands more were taken there and shot. Estimates put the total number killed at Babi Yar at more than 100,000 people of various ethnic groups, mostly civilians.

• 6. Independence and the City Today

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  On the 24th of August 1991, the Ukrainian parliament proclaimed the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine in Kyiv. The city that emerged from the Soviet collapse was the largest and wealthiest in Ukraine, but it faced the loss of the armaments industry that had long anchored its economy. Science and technology sectors contracted. The growth of services and finance eventually funded new housing and urban infrastructure, but the transition was difficult.

  Two major public movements reshaped the city's recent history. In 2004-2005, Kyiv hosted the largest post-Soviet public demonstrations up to that point, during the Orange Revolution. From November 2013 until February 2014, the central city became the primary site of Euromaidan. When Russian forces attempted to seize Kyiv at the onset of the February 2022 invasion, Ukrainian forces repelled them on the outskirts; the city itself escaped major damage, though it has been subject to frequent air strikes since the Russian retreat from the region in April 2022.

  Kyiv today retains about 70 percent of the more than 1,000 buildings constructed during 1907-1914. St. Sophia Cathedral and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, though the UNESCO World Heritage Committee placed both on the List of World Heritage in Danger in September 2023, citing the threat posed by the ongoing war. The mayor since June 2014 has been Vitali Klitschko, who was most recently reelected in the 2020 Kyiv local election with 50.52 percent of the vote. In 2014, the city council chose its official anthem: a 1962 song titled "Yak tebe ne liubyty, Kyieve mii!" which translates roughly as "How can I not love you, Kyiv of mine!" The city's national library holds what is described as the world's foremost repository of Jewish folk music recorded on Edison wax cylinders, a collection covering 1912-1947 that was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2005.