Kherson

Kherson (, ) is a port city of Ukraine that serves as the administrative centre of Kherson Oblast. Located on the Black Sea and on the Dnieper River, Kherson is the home of a major ship-building industry and is a regional economic centre. In 2021, the city had an estimated population of 283,649.

From March to November 2022, the city was occupied by Russian forces during their invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces recaptured the city on 11 November 2022.

Etymology

As the first new settlement in the "Greek project" of Empress Catherine and her favorite Grigory Potemkin, it was named after the ancient Greek city-colony of Chersonesus in Crimea. In Greek, () means 'peninsular shore'.

History

Russian Empire era (1783–1917)

The city was founded by decree of Catherine the Great on 18 June 1778 on the high bank of the Dnieper as a central fortress of the Black Sea Fleet after the Russian annexation of the territory in 1774. The city was established in place of the Russian-built fort or sconce "Saint Alexander" which existed at least since 1737 and also served as one of administrative centers of the Zaporizhian Sich and run by local Cossacks. The fort was built during the Russo-Turkish War and improved some 30 years later. Before 1737 in place of Kherson and Fort St.Alexandre, older maps show a settlement of Bilschowisce which carries Ukrainian-like transliteration.

1783 saw the city granted the rights of a district town and the opening of a local shipyard where the hulls of the Russian Black Sea fleet were laid. Within a year the Kherson Shipping Company began operations. By the end of the 18th century, the port had established trade with France, Italy, Spain and other European countries. Between 1783–1793 Poland's maritime trade via the Black Sea was conducted through Kherson by the '' Kompania Handlowa Polska''. In 1791, Potemkin was buried in the newly built St. Catherine's Cathedral. In 1803 the city became the capital of the Kherson Governorate."Херсон", Большая Советская Энциклопедия, том 46 (''The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. 46''), Б. А. Введенский 2-е изд.(B. A. Vvedensky ed.. 2nd Edition). . М., Государственное научное издательство «Большая Советская энциклопедия» (State Scientific Publishing House), 1957, pp. 121–122

Industry, beginning with breweries, tanneries and other food and agricultural processing, developed from the 1850s.

In 1897 the population of the city was 59,076 of which, on the basis of their first language, almost half were recorded as Great Russian, 30% as Jewish, and 20% Ukrainian.

During the revolution of 1905 there were workers' strikes and an army mutiny (an armed demonstration by soldiers of the 10th Disciplinary Battalion) in the city.Херсон // Советская историческая энциклопедия / редколл., гл. ред. Е. М. Жуков. том 15. М., государственное научное издательство «Советская энциклопедия», 1974. ("Kherson", ''Soviet Historical Encyclopedia''. Vol. 15, E. M. Zhukov. ed., State Scientific Publishing House), 1974. pp 504–506, 571–573

Soviet era (1917–1991)

Early Bolshevik period

In the Russian Constituent Assembly election held in November 1917—the first and last free election in Kherson for 70 years—Bolsheviks who had seized power in Petrograd and Moscow received just 13.2 percent of the vote in the Governorate. The largest electoral bloc in the district, with 43 percent of the vote, was an alliance of Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Russian Socialist Revolutionaries and the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party.

The Bolsheviks dissolved SR-dominated Assembly after its first sitting,Orlando Figes, ''A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924'', London: Pimlico (1997), p. 516. and proceeded to force from Kiev the Central Council of Ukraine (Tsentralna Rada) whose response to the Leninist coup had been to proclaim the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). But, before the Bolsheviks could secure Kherson, they were obliged to cede the region under the terms of the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the German and Austrian controlled Ukrainian State. After the withdrawal of German and Austrian forces in November 1918, the efforts of the UPR (the Petluirites) to assert authority were frustrated by a French-led Allied intervention which occupied Kherson in January 1919.

In March 1919, the Green Army of local warlord Otaman Nykyfor Hryhoriv ousted the French and Greek garrison and precipitated the Allied evacuation from Odesa. In July, the Bolsheviks defeated Hryhoriv who had called upon the Ukrainian people to rise against the "Communist imposters" and their "Jewish commissars," and had perpetrated pogroms, including in the Kherson region. Kherson itself was occupied by the counter-revolutionary Whites before finally falling to the Bolshevik Red Army in February 1920. In 1922 the city and region was formally incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR a constituent republic of the Soviet Union.

The population was radically reduced from 75,000 to 41,000 by the famine of 1921–3, but then rose steadily, reaching 97,200 in 1939. In 1940, the city was one of the sites of executions of Polish officers and intelligentsia committed by the Soviets as part of the Katyn massacre.

World War II and post-War period

Further devastation and population loss resulted from the German occupation during the Second World War. The German occupation, which lasted from August 1941 to March 1944, contended with both Soviet and Ukrainian nationalist ( OUN) underground cells. The Kherson district leadership of the OUN was headed by Bogdan Bandera (brother of OUN leader Stepan Bandera). The Germans operated a Nazi prison and the Stalag 370 prisoner-of-war camp in the city.

In the post-war decades, which saw substantial industrial growth, the population more than doubled, reaching 261,000 by 1970. The new factories, including the Comintern Shipbuilding and Repairs Complex, the Kuibyshev Ship Repair Complex, and the Kherson Cotton Textile Manufacturing Complex (one of the largest textile plants in the Soviet Union), and Kherson's growing grain-exporting port, drew in labour from the Ukrainian countryside. This changed the city's ethnic composition, increasing the Ukrainian share from 36% in 1926 to 63% in 1959, while reducing the Russian share from 36 to 29%. The Jewish population never recovered from the Holocaust visited by the Germans: accounting for 26% of residents in 1926, their number had fallen to just 6% in 1959.

In independent Ukraine

With a turnout of 83.4% of eligible voters, 90.1% of the votes cast in Kherson Oblast affirmed Ukrainian independence in the national referendum of 1 December 1991. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kherson and its industries experienced severe dislocation. Over the following three decades, the population of both the city and the region declined, reflecting both a significant excess of deaths over live births and persistent net-emigration from the area.

The 2014 pro-Russian unrest in eastern and southern Ukraine was marked in Kherson by a small demonstration of some 400 persons. Following Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, Kherson housed the office of the Ukrainian President's representative in Crimea.

In July 2020, as part of the general administrative reform of Ukraine, the Kherson Municipality was merged as an urban hromada into newly established Kherson Raion, one of five raions in the Kherson Oblast of which the city remained the administrative centre.

A "City Profile", part of the SCORE (Social Cohesion and Reconciliation) ''Ukraine 2021'' project funded by USAID, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the European Union, concluded that "more than 80% of citizens in Kherson city feel their locality is a good place to live, work, and raise a family". This was despite a low level of trust in the local authorities in whom corruption was perceived to be high. It also found that, while more inclined to express support for co-operation with Russia than for membership of the EU, "citizens in Kherson feel attached to their Ukrainian identity".

2020 local election

In the last free elections before the 2022 Russian invasion, the Ukrainian local elections held on 25 October 2020, the results of Kherson City Council elections were as follows'':''

The parties widely perceived as pro-Russian, and Euro-skeptic, Opposition Platform, Volodymyr Saldo Bloc, and Party of Shariy

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