How does one write the history of a city with many names? A city’s name is always more than a description separating one town from another. Whoever writes and speaks, reads and hears a name evokes references to a mythological past, a political present, and future utopias. This holds especially true for city names given in the eighteenth century, when the Russian Empire extended to the Baltic and Black Sea shores. In his book, Andrii Portnov tells the story of one many-named city: Dnipro. Its name today is a seemingly neutral geographical reference to one of Ukraine’s largest rivers, but it was known as the city praising the glory of Empress Catherine II (Ekaterinoslav/Katerynoslav); an urban center of Russia’s imperial dreams for a “New Russia” (Novorossiisk); and a site extolling the Soviet party functionary Petrovskii (Dnipropetrovsk).

One way to address this rich and complex history in a book-length study might be to force it into a coherent story, using a teleological perspective to explain why the city’s past happened in the way it did and not differently. Andrii Portnov chooses a different approach. He encounters the multidimensional, complex past with deliberately indeterminate narration. While following a chronological structure, he refuses to overwrite the openness of historical processes. His model of city history could best be characterized as assemblage, an art technique that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. By carefully arranging the different layers of Dnipro’s history, Portnov emphasizes its complex relief with mountains and valleys, caesurae and continuities. This relief eludes swift comprehension. Due to the lack of an overarching thesis, reading the book forces one to engage with ever-new approaches and perspectives. Portnov allows the reader to experience the openness of the city’s history, the “complexity of human experiences” (p. 10) and, in this way, attempts to do justice to Dnipro’s convoluted development.

One outstanding feature of the book is its ability to bring different strands of Ukrainian historiography into dialogue. Because the author was trained as a historian in Ukraine and now holds a professorship in Germany, the footnotes are a priceless treasure trove of source material, secondary literature in Western languages, Russian, and, most importantly, Ukrainian and Polish. The book is written in straightforward, relatable English and is easily accessible to readers possessing no prior knowledge of Ukrainian or Russian history.

The book follows Dnipro over six chapters. Chapter 1 traces the city’s origins and stresses the region’s multifaceted history before Catherine II set eyes on it . Along with the current research trend to debunk the myth of Catherine II’s creation of “New Russia” in a “place where history allegedly broke off shortly after the dusk of antiquity,” Portnov introduces Zaporozhian Cossacks, Tatars and Poles who were all acquainted with the region before Catherine II and her viceroy Potemkin tried to “create a completely new reality” (p. 31). After two attempts to site the city on favorable terrain, urban construction almost stopped when Katerynoslav lost favor compared with Kherson and Odesa in economic and political terms. Ultimately, however, the city became a prime site for the politics of memory, with the Transfiguration Cathedral finished in the 1830s and a huge statue of Catherine II erected in front of the church in 1846.

With Katerynoslav turning into a “Manchester on the Dnipro” and “one of the biggest industrial centers of the Russian Empire” (p. 59), chapter 2 analyzes the metamorphosis of the city in the nineteenth century. Its connection to the imperial railroad system and the Donets River’s coal basin transformed Katerynoslav into “a management center of mining as well as iron and steel industries” (p. 69), and smoking chimneys dominated the landscape. Not only did the population increase tenfold between 1865 and 1917, but Katerynoslav also experienced an influx of multiethnic immigrants, many of them Jews and ethnic Russians. The city started to stratify ethnically and socially. The terrible corollaries to this, as everywhere in the empire, were pogroms, which the state willingly met with inaction. This chapter includes a detailed study of the Ukrainian national movement, tracing the emergence of Ukrainophilism among urban academics, many of them organized in the educational society Prosvita, including Dmytro Doroshenko, who would go on to become Ukraine’s foreign minister in 1918. Unlike in other Ukrainian cities, the local Ukrainian activists had “good relations” with the imperial administration.

Between 1917 and 1919, Katerynoslav experienced a “kaleidoscope of powers”, with over twenty regime changes (p. 164). The third chapter explores the city’s revolutionary era, particularly emphasizing Nestor Makhno’s peasant insurgency as well as anti-Jewish pogroms unleashed by White Cossack units. What stands out in this chapter is the richness of the sources testifying to the daily lives of Katerynoslav’s inhabitants.

After becoming a Soviet city known as Dnipropetrovsk, the city had a different outlook. Chapter 4 follows the city’s history after it became one of the new state’s industrial centers. Soviet rule led to an assault on the church and religious life. Repressions and the forced Great Famine had catastrophic impacts on the city and region, and the Soviet hubris of creation and destruction also brought forth a new city plan, fashioning Dnipropetrovsk into a “model socialist city” (p. 207). These developments are also reflected in Viktor Petrov’s novel Without Foundation (Bez gruntu), a “multi-layered” narration set in Dnipropetrovsk in the early 1930s. As Portnov convincingly shows, this novel depicts a city that “escapes clear definitions and remains unfinished” – both incomplete and full of possibilities (p. 214).

The outbreak of the Second World War and Germany’s invasion of Ukrainian lands changed the city forever. German occupation, the Shoah, Soviet reconquest and postwar antisemitism continue to dominate the debates on Ukrainian history. In Chapter 5, Portnov draws from a wealth of sources to depict quotidian wartime life, traces the religious and language politics of the German occupants, and argues against narratives overemphasizing Ukrainian “collaboration”. Regarding the infamous “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN), Portnov makes clear that the German administration had no intention to turn the OUN into an autonomous political player, and used it instead only as a willful tool. Here, Portnov could have juxtaposed his arguments with Timothy Snyder’s depiction of East Central Europe as “Bloodlands” or Dietrich Beyrau’s “Battlefield of Dictators.” His story of war-time Dnipropetrovsk fits their narratives well.1

After the war, Dnipropetrovsk became the Soviet Union’s “Rocket City”, one of “the significant places on the map of the Cold War world” (p. 270). The final, lengthy chapter investigates the meaning of living in a closed city. The city’s closedness to foreigners and the high attention paid by Moscow to Dnipropetrovsk made it a privileged place in which to live. Quoting Brezhnev’s famous policy of “developed socialism”, Portnov claims that in Dnipropetrovsk, this socialism “looked slightly more developed […] than in central Russia,” getting better food provisioning and resources than ordinary towns (p. 293). The chapter debates and questions the “Dnipropetrovsk clan” hypothesis, which states that Brezhnev promoted colleagues from Dnipropetrovsk in the Central Committee and the Politburo – an argument that Portnov sees as “exaggerated” (p. 281). Not only did Brezhnev also patronize colleagues from other regions of the Soviet Union, he was not even particularly closely attached to his birthplace after 1951.

Dnipropetrovsk, however, turned out to be a site for the Soviet form of Ukrainian nationhood, a political tendency influenced by the republic’s First Secretary Petro Shelest, whose book “Our Soviet Ukraine!” encouraged cultural national self-expression. Writer Oles Honchar tested the limits of this nationalism in 1968 in his novel A Cathedral (Sobor), praised by Ukrainian émigrés and the press in the West, which placed Honchar in a difficult position as the head of the Union of Writers of Soviet Ukraine. With Shelest’s downfall, Honchar was taken down, too. However, his removal from the position of chairman did not prevent him from writing, publishing and performing publicly; in 1982, he even received the State Prize of the USSR (p. 306). Despite the rollback of certain Ukrainization policies under Shelest’s successor Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi (Brezhnev’s man at the head of the republic) and the social degradation of the Ukrainian language, Portnov stresses the persistence of “Ukrainianness” in parts of the public sphere in Dnipropetrovsk, with Ukrainian-language regional newspapers, language-teaching in schools, and the Shevchenko Ukrainian Drama Theater (p. 308).

Looking back, Dnipropetrovsk’s closedness appeared to many former inhabitants to be the “quintessence of the Soviet system,” attributing a “non-provincial feeling” to everyday life in the Rocket City (p. 310). 2 When the world opened under Perestroika and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the city became part of independent Ukraine. Although Leonid Kuchma, the former director of Dnipropetrovsk’s rocket factory, was elected president in 1994, Dnipropetrovsk neither turned into Ukraine’s city number one nor city number two, as the epilogue’s title reveals. Memory politics during the 1990s and 2000s centered on decoupling the city’s history from imperial myths and simultaneously celebrating “its heyday in the times of Brezhnev” (p. 320). A possible echo of Brezhnev’s special status could be observed in in September 2023, when Dnipro, unlike Kyiv, decided not to revoke the former secretary general's honorary citizenship. 3 The city’s “golden age myth”, however, largely lost its power in 2014 and after the Euromaidan protests, when Dnipropetrovsk resisted Russia’s neoimperialist claims with surprising vehemence. According to Portnov, the reason for this was a high degree of local patriotism supported by Dnipropetrovsk’s governor from 2014, Ihor Kolomois’kyi. The renaming of the city as Dnipro in 2016 marked the last transformation of the city to date and was the most visible sign of its decommunization and metamorphosis into a self-proclaimed “most patriotic Ukrainian city” (p. 324).

The book is, of course, of very high political topicality, especially given Dnipro’s proximity to both the front line of the current Russo-Ukrainian War and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear station. Although Portnov’s book ends before Russia’s attempted total invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it offers very timely reading, integrating different strands of Ukraine’s history into the story of a city. Reflecting on his writing, Portnov wonders “how to tell the story that escapes narrating” (p. 333). In combining a multitude of different sources, research literature, and narrative styles (from interviews to close reading of sources to birds-eye geopolitical analyses), this book highlights the complexity and often contradictory nature of Dnipro’s history. This does not always make for easy reading, but following the different paths of this European city is worthy of the reader’s time.

Notes:
1 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York 2010; Dietrich Beyrau, Schlachtfeld der Diktatoren. Osteuropa im Schatten von Hitler und Stalin, Göttingen 2000.
2 See also Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dnipropetrovsk, 1960–1985, Washington 2010.
3https://meduza.io/news/2023/09/13/leonid-brezhnev-ostalsya-pochetnym-grazhdaninom-dnepra-ego-hoteli-lishit-takogo-statusa-no-petitsiyu-podpisal-tolko-41-chelovek (2023).