Kharkiv

Kharkiv is a city in northeastern Ukraine, where the Lopan and Kharkiv rivers meet in the steppe of Sloboda Ukraine. It was the first capital of Soviet Ukraine and kept that role until the 1930s.

Turboatom, based in Kharkiv, makes steam and hydroelectric turbines for power stations in Ukraine and abroad. The Kharkiv Tractor Plant has built farm tractors on the eastern side of the city since the Soviet period. Electrotyazhmash makes large generators and electric motors for power plants and railways.

A wooden fort was built by Cossacks on the hill between the rivers in 1654, and the town grew into a trading center of the region with large fairs. Vasily Karazin founded the university in 1805, one of the first in the Russian Empire, and it gave the city a name for science and medicine. Railways linking Moscow with the Black Sea and the Donbas passed through Kharkiv in the late 19th century and turned it into a city of factories. At the physics institute of the city the lithium nucleus was split in the early 1930s, the first such experiment in the Soviet Union, and the physicist Lev Landau led its theory department.

Derzhprom, a constructivist complex of concrete towers linked by bridges, was finished in the late 1920s as one of the first high-rise buildings of the Soviet Union. Freedom Square, laid out in the same decade, joins a round and a rectangular part into one long open space. The Annunciation Cathedral, with its striped brick bell tower, was built at the turn of the 20th century in a Byzantine style. Shevchenko Garden, the central park, holds a bronze monument to the poet Taras Shevchenko with figures of characters from his poems around its base.